I would usually wait until I’ve read the whole thing (which will take a while because it’s the book I keep in the car and read only while I’m waiting somewhere). However, it looks like the basic reasoning is in the introduction, the first 45 pages. The other 550 pages fill in the details. So I can summarize her thesis (or at least most of it) now and fill in the details at some later time.
There has been a lot of talk recently (well, actually over the last 50 years) about: What’s wrong with men? Why are they behaving the way they are? Is it something men are doing? Or is it something that is being done to them? Are they outlaws? Or castoffs?
There is a modern American perception that men must be at the controls and must feel in control. Men are told they must be at the helm.
It wasn’t always like this. Daniel Boone is now (thanks to that early TV show) portrayed as a lone fighter, taming the wilderness with rifle and knife. Yeah, he was – so that he could be a homesteader and bring family and society to the wilderness and be an integral part of it. A man was measured by his service to the community.
That changes in the 19th Century as heaps of dead pelts and a rags-to-riches drive and the corresponding image of a virile man could compensate for a loss of service to the community. There developed a tension between being socially engaged and useful and maintaining control and surviving.
Women felt the contours of the box society – men – put them in. They saw the forces that created the box and began to figure out how to get out of it.
Men feel the contours of the box, too, but they are told that the box is of their own manufacture, designed to their specification. Who are they to complain? The box is there to showcase the man, not to confine him. After all, didn’t he build it – and can’t he destroy it if he pleases, if he is a *man?* For men to say they feel boxed in is regarded not as laudable political protest but as childish and indecent whining. How dare the kings complain about their castles?When men begin to look around for a solution there are a lot of voices to tell them the problem isn’t they are trying to control things they can’t or shouldn’t, the problem is they haven’t seized enough control. Have a problem with supremacy? Demand more supremacy!
During World War II there was a lot of reporting of both the “dogface” soldiers and the flyboys. Famous newspaper writer Ernie Pyle championed the soldiers. He reported that the men in the Army saw themselves as pieces of a larger whole. They formed a family with men caring for each other under the benevolent hand of the ranking officer. It wasn’t about dominance, but about cooperation and association. Soldiers said what they loved about their time in the Army was the absence of competition.
In America the decade before the war the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) developed the same things. President Franklin Roosevelt said in a 1932 speech that “The man of ruthless force had his place in developing a pioneer country.” But now was likely to be a danger as a help, a danger because the “lone wolf” doesn’t join in creating the public welfare.
Henry Wallace, who became Roosevelt’s Vice President, talked about the Common Man, one who shouldered responsibility of meeting the needs of the world, rather than wanting to dominate it. His focus was on the society he was a part of.
However, there was also Henry Luce promoting the American Century in which the average man could become grander by helping make the society he was a part of dominate the world through unapologetic force.
If Wallace’s manly ideal was all about parental care and nurturing, Luce’s was all about taking control – and, more importantly, displaying it.Luce went so far as to imply failing to flex the national muscle was a loss of virility. Wallace replied that force without justice would make us into what we hated in the Nazis. Luce’s ideas prevailed.
The soldiers came home. They took advantage of the egalitarian GI Bill and its emphasis on education. They had children. And everything revolved around the sons. Fathers said this grand nation we built, we’re going to give it to you.
After the war a promise was made to these boys, one that had four parts: A frontier to be claimed – space. A clear and evil enemy to be crushed – Communism. To be a part of an institutional brotherhood for greater institutional glory – engineers, managers, and bureaucrats in places such as NASA. And a family to provide for and protect – with a wife at home.
Implicit in all this was a promise of loyalty, a guarantee to the new man of tomorrow this his company would never fire him, his wife would never leave him, and the team he rooted for would never pull up stakes.But it all went wrong.
Russia beat us to space. And space is not a place to be colonized. Few men actually went.
The boys did get their own war, but it was Vietnam. In contrast to WWII there was no clear and visible enemy. The mission wasn’t clear. The victory wasn’t clear. And when the soldier came home, rather than proclaiming exploits of liberating oppressed people, he was labeled the oppressor. Sometime even by his wife.
Those institutions who had given him a desk job offered a job, not a vital role. And then these grand corporate institutions laid him off.
And his sports team packed up in the middle of the night and slipped away to another city with a better stadium deal.
He was promised he would be master of the universe. He ended up master of nothing. So who was the enemy he was promised he would fight? Who is to blame? That search for someone to blame resulted in several shooting incidents.
The earlier idea of manhood was to uphold and improve the community. Towards the end of the 20th century a new question arose. In the digital age what and where was his community? What was important in this digital age was display. The only field of battle was now vanity.
These men of WWII made promises to their sons, but fathers went to the office and abandoned their sons. The fathers didn’t pass on the skills needed to negotiate the promises and their lack in reality. Anger over this abandonment became part of the currency of glamour and display. This is a currency that women denounced as trivializing and dehumanizing. Men were left with the thing women rejected.
Faludi poses these questions:
Why, despite a crescendo of random tantrums, have [men] offered no methodical, reasoned response to their predicament? Given the untenable and insulting nature of the demands placed on men to prove themselves in our culture, why don’t men revolt? … [W]hen the whole deal turned out to be a crock and it was clear that they had been thoroughly stiffed, why did the sons do nothing?
…
The level of mockery, suspicion, and animosity directed at men who step out of line is profound, and men respond profoundly – with acquiescence. But that is not a wholly satisfying explanation either, for haven’t women, the object of such commercial and political manipulation, kicked over these traces successfully?
If men do not respond, then maybe it is because their society has proposed no route for them to venture down. Surely the culture has not offered an alternative vision of manhood.
Faludi says she answers those questions – somewhere in the next 550 pages.
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