October 3, 1999
The Fall of Man Men, Susan Faludi says, can now be men only by pretending to be men. This is hard to do. Related Links Audio Special: An Interview With Susan Faludi (Taped Sept. 28, 1999) Michiko Kakutani Reviews 'Stiffed' (Sept. 28, 1999) Ellen Goodman Reviews 'Backlash' (Oct. 27, 1991) By JUDITH SHULEVITZ
he big news about Susan Faludi's second book is supposed to be the change in sexual orientation -- from the problems of women to those of men. The more important news is the change in tone. Her first book, ''Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,'' was a polemic, a point-bypoint (and often hilarious) refutation of sexist half-truths about women, mostly STIFFED The Betrayal of the American those propagated by lazy journalists, Man. though Faludi saw the workings of a larger misogyny behind individual acts By Susan Faludi. Illustrated. 662 pp. New York: of carelessness. ''Stiffed: The Betrayal William Morrow & Company. of the American Man'' is, by contrast, $27.50. elegiac. It's a lament for the lost and distinctly unfeminist characters who stumble through its pages: downsized aerospace engineers; suburban teenage sexual predators; football fans whose teams have skipped town; male porn stars whose livelihood depends on their waning sexual powers; cadets at the Citadel who jeer at all hints of femininity during the day and sneak out to drag bars at night; a gun nut; an ex-astronaut; gang members; Promise Keepers. What these men and boys have in common, Faludi says, is that they have been pushed by forces they don't understand into roles in which their masculinity has nothing to do but roil and fester. Their plight awakens in her a tender sympathy for a sex she now suspects is in greater need of liberation than her own. ''Stiffed,'' which you could see as the American literary equivalent of the British hit movie ''The Full Monty'' -- the story of how the working guy, denied his livelihood, was reduced to a sexual object -is the product of six years of aggressive reporting and an admirable knack for bringing the results to life. No one will ever put this book down for lack of vivid scene setting or compassionate observation. But Faludi is up to much more here than profiling the down and out. She wants to know what's wrong with men in general. Her answer, surprising from a feminist, is that they've become soft: the modern man is more obsessed with his image than his job, which changes too frequently to be a firm basis of identity, and demeans its holder to boot. In the past, Faludi says, men had communities -- churches, unions, political and civic groups, veterans' associations -- to help them find their way as men. These ties were strong. They gave men something to belong to and a way to prove themselves. But now, good work having become scarce and real communities having been replaced by virtual ones, a man can be a man only by pretending to be like one. For lack of anything substantive to define themselves against, men get caught up in what Faludi calls ''ornamental culture,'' which packages images of men as a manhood substitute and markets them through movies, music, advertising, television and celebrities: ''The ordinary man is no fool: he knows he can't be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Nonetheless, the culture reshapes his most basic sense of manhood by telling him as much as it tells the celebrity that masculinity is something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources; that it is personal, not societal; that manhood is displayed, not demonstrated.'' If men are being turned inside out by an expensive, soul-destroying myth, why aren't they at least protesting? According to Faludi, it's partly because, as with the discontented housewives in Betty Friedan's ''Feminine Mystique,'' their problem has not yet been named. (Faludi's naming it.) And it's because their very masculinity gets in the way of their being able to see what's happening to them. A man is programmed to believe that he must be in control at all times, that he must master his universe. Since men ''are mythologized as the ones who make things happen,'' Faludi asks, ''how can they begin to analyze what is happening to them?'' By reading ''Stiffed'' is the short answer. Faludi's ambition for her book is clearly for it to serve as something like ''The Feminine Mystique'' for men. Will it? She has written a big book with a big thesis, but whether men will welcome it as the agent of their personal emancipation is questionable. For one thing, men don't like being pitied (women don't either), and the millions of men in happier circumstances than the colorful losers Faludi has chosen William Morrow to represent the male condition might sense condescension in her choices, to say "That the bedrock concepts of having . . . had a patrimony, nothing of her mournful tone. having had something
For another thing, the problems Faludi is handed down that you build writing about don't only affect men. Much on, having a sense of public service . . . this is what's been of what she says about American masculinity she acknowledges to be true lost and it has not been reclaimed in an internet world of American femininity as well: that it's sold to women and used to sell things to . . . So much of the so-called them, that it's put on as a show rather than information explosion . . . is existing as an innate quality, that it stifles simply about selling stuff. . . . This is not a way in which women's better aspirations. Diagnosing men, she would seem to have discovered men are going to reclaim lost utility or any kind of feeling what ails all of us. So what is it? In a word, consumerism, or, as she says, ''the that they're supporting or shiny flat surface of a commercial culture, building a society." -- Susan a looking glass before which men could Faludi, in an interview, Sept. 28, 1999. only act out a crude semblance of masculinity.'' Faludi contrasts this ''crude semblance'' to the more genuine manliness of what she calls ''utility men.'' The really useful people, to her mind, work with their hands. She illustrates her point with a visit to a group of shipbuilders at a southern California shipyard that has just been shut down. This is a tragedy for them, of course, but also for us, since the men she meets there furnish her with almost the only positive image of masculinity -- or frankly, humanity -- she is able to find. ''The shipyard represented a particular vintage of American masculinity, monumental in its pooled effort, indefatigable in its industry, and built on a sense of useful productivity, of work tied to service,'' she writes. This choice of words is not accidental. The ''particular vintage of American masculinity'' Faludi is talking about dates back to circa 1935; her monumental workers could have stepped right out of a W.P.A. poster. She is unabashedly nostalgic for that era of blue-collar solidarity. In a brief historical section that introduces ''Stiffed,'' she explains why. The last time Americans cared about the little guy was during the New Deal, she says. Consider the New Deal's final days, just after World War II. The war correspondent Ernie Pyle had transformed ordinary grunts into emblems of stoic manhood. Henry Wallace, who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President and was, more important, the last of the great New Deal progressives, had given voice to their political interests. Faludi makes much of a speech Wallace delivered in 1942 extolling ''The Century of the Common Man,'' in which he called on America to celebrate its likely triumph in the war by uplifting workingmen everywhere and providing education, housing and jobs for all. Wallace was responding to a more militaristic view of America's role in the world, expressed in Henry Luce's article ''The American Century,'' in which the founder of Time and Life called for Americans to ''play their part as a world power.'' These ''two visions of postwar America vied for attention on the national stage in a battle over the nation's future that has long since been forgotten,'' Faludi writes. With the advent of the cold war, Wallace lost out to Luce, the cult of the common man gave way to American imperialism, and everything went downhill from there. (Faludi doesn't mention that Wallace's credibility was undermined through his association with the then-Stalinist Communist Party.) The 1950's were the era of the corporation and the company man. This was the first of the betrayals alluded to in her subtitle: what looked like a New Deal for veterans -jobs for everyone! -- turned out to be mass babbittry. White-collar work wasn't real work; it was paper-pushing, and it emasculated. And though corporations made an implicit promise of lifetime employment, they would withdraw it within a generation. Betrayal in the workplace went along with spiritual betrayal, in which the space program, oddly enough, played an important role. NASA, Faludi says, seemed to be offering ''a mirror into which any American man could look and see himself reflected in enlarged form.'' But the astronauts, the supposed conquerors of space, later turned out to have been little more than NASA's public relations men -- Spam in a can,'' as they called themselves. As betrayals go, this one seems pretty trivial, but Faludi grants it enormous symbolic weight, profiling a now-ignored Buzz Aldrin to drive the point home. To her, NASA's hype heralded the great betrayal to come: the rise of celebrity culture, which replaced respect for common men with obsession for individual stars. This isn't history, of course. Faludi's account of the past 50 years sounds a little like one of those network specials on ''The Century,'' complete with portentous voice-over and movie clips, except that her retrospective has a left-wing twist you'd never see on ABC. Specifically, she's popularizing a school of social thought that dates back to the turn of the century and Thorstein Veblen (author of the phrase ''conspicuous consumption'') and was rejuvenated in the 1970's by Christopher Lasch. It's called productivism -- the idea that when we went from being a nation that made things to one that bought them, our alienation from the physical world and our diet of advertising and salespeak bred in us a sickly inauthenticity. This thesis has been much debated, though Faludi offers it up as undisputed fact. Basic economic logic would seem to contradict her highly romanticized version of productivism, at the very least, since the form of productivity to which she's sentimentally attached -industrialism -- wouldn't thrive if there weren't lots of consumers around to purchase its products. Faludi's paeans to our industrial past are meant to lend pathos to her tales of the present, but the effect falls flat, becuse throughout the book she assumes something that's no longer true: that America is in the throes of downsizing and job loss. One melancholy section is set in and around a McDonnell Douglas ''outplacement center.'' Another describes what happens to a man after he's been laid off by an insurance company (he becomes a Waco fanatic). You would never know from ''Stiffed'' that American economic growth is the highest it's been in a quarter-century and unemployment the lowest. As for the generation of young men who have found satisfying and wellpaying jobs in the post-industrial economy, Faludi leaves them out of the discussion. She mentions technology only in passing as a force that has caused men to be replaced by machines and has spawned electronic culture, ''a dismal substitute for the real thing.'' After all, people in high technology don't work with their hands. Or do they? Maybe the computer programmers of today are the skilled laborers -- the shipbuilders -- of yesterday. That Faludi doesn't even entertain the possibility is the biggest oversight in this book. She might justify her exclusion of the new economy by saying that she's not worried about the privileged few, the college educated, who reap the benefits of the technology boom. She's worried about the high school graduates or dropouts, the regular guys who lack the training or even the personality they need to get by in a computerized, salesand-service-oriented world. The quick comeback to that would be, well, she should have said she was talking about class; she claimed to be talking about gender. The more thoughtful response is that the plight of the male blue-collar worker does indeed require him to change, to develop qualities he might not have thought of as masculine, like the ability to communicate effectively, as well as qualities that are traditionally masculine but not working-class, like entrepreneurial skill. The real solution to that problem is to demand that America give him the education he needs to succeed, not to dismiss the opportunities available to him as meaningless or sinister. Faludi's palpable hunger to return to the working-class values of a half century ago does the men (and women) of the coming century no favors. Judith Shulevitz writes the Culturebox column for Slate, an Internet magazine. Return to the Books Home Page
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