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A UW survey claims young white male workers have a worse start in life, and fewer opportunities for a better life, than their early-’80s forebearers.
Undoubtedly, the Dittoheads will misinterpret these findings to claim affirmative action has gone too far, that women and minorities are now the privileged castes and society must now focus on returning the erstwhile sons of privilege to their supposed rightful place.
What it really means is a new caste system has developed in the U.S., based less on race and gender than on the purer inequalities of money and power. There are still bastions of white-male privilege, in the corporate boardrooms and the corridors of political power. But remember, most rich people are white but most white peope aren’t rich. And the nonrich whites are in the same unstable boat as the nonrich blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and native Americans.
This means progressive-lefty types need to rethink 30-year-old (or older) notions of a world where “white” plus “male” equals “oppressor.” There are millions of pale penis people stuck in the same no-future rut as millions of women and minorities. A liberalism that worked would reach out to these people, inviting them in to a movement to try and make things better for everybody.
THE GUY WHO TRIED to move the Seattle Mariners to Tampa is now in line for a cushy federal appointment, despite his career history of shady dealings.
A SCOTTISH JOURNALIST wonders why the recent media hype over the “porno chic” women’s-fashion fad hasn’t involved actual porn performers.
“44 REASONS NOT to get a boob job.” (By the (male) author of “Why I’m Still Not a Libertarian.”)
The Smithsonian Institution’s museum-store catalog now offers a kimono with pictures of U.S. WWII fighter planes. A Japanese-style woman’s garment, festooned with images of male-piloted attackers ready for their “thirty seconds over Tokyo,” brings up all sorts of potentially odd gender-role imageries we don’t want to even think about right now.
EXERCISE IS GOOD FOR YOU.
That’s the rather obvious main message of Colette Dowling’s book The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality.
A slightly expanded, and slightly more provocative, summary of Dowling’s thesis: Female humans aren’t weaklings; or at least they don’t have to be if they work at it. So get your daughters into sports and exercise now, and they could develop strength and agility comparable to males of the same size/weight class.
Women actually were weaklings once, but that was long ago, when they didn’t get enough iron in their diet and kept dying in childbirth. Modern medicine and cast-iron cookware started women on the road to greater heartiness; the turn-of-the-century “physical culture” movement continued this trend.
And now, Dowling asserts, we’re on the cusp of a great new era in which XXers can fully match XYers, even on the field of sport.
Already, besides the TV ratings and endorsement deals and magazine covers that’ve accrued to female tennis and golf players, there are attempts to bring women into the milieu of team sports. Besides the WNBA (which drove the more exciting ABL out of business), there’s a fledgling Women’s Professional Football League and a soon-to-launch Women’s United Soccer Association.
One of the e-mail lists I’m on had a posting last month about Heather Sue Mercer, who’d tried to become the place kicker on Duke University’s football team. When she was rejected, she filed a gender-discrimination suit against the college. After three years, she’s now finally won a $2 million judgement in the case–now that she’s graduated, in a career, and not planning to try out for team sports anytime soon.
The news prompted scholar Jim Beniger, who runs this particular e-mail list, to comment:
“What will become of commodified content derived from professional and collegiate team sports when women and men are finally fully integrated into them? One obvious possibility is that the audiences for various team sports will double–if not more than double. Another possibility is that there will be far less spitting, and far fewer athletes with police records for the assault and abuse of women. What do you all think? Can you think of even one undesired result? Will the Earth continue to turn on its axis?”
Speaking for myself, as one who’s mighty skeptical of the whole masculinity-as-root-of-all-evil ideology, I’m not so sure of these sky-high hopes.
Have corporate middle-managements become less asinine, college bureaucracies less treacherous, or city councils less corrupt, now that they’re at least more coed than they used to be?
As for the practicalities, I can imagine soccer (which emphasizes lower-body agility) and hockey (which emphasizes speed and finesse) as more easily gender-integratable. Coed basketball would need to deemphasize height and reach; coed baseball would need to deemphasize fastballs and homers; coed football would need to deemphasize brutal takedowns.
All of these changes, of course, might actually be intriguing to a certain brand of fan who prefers the thrill of strategy and team execution to the spectacle of raw power.
For a postscript, there was a small controversy earlier this year about boys joining a championship little league softball team. Seems that when females break into a previously all-male institution, it’s popularly intrepreted as an overdue challenge to outmoded tradition. When males break into a previously all-female institution, it’s popularly interpreted as a bullying intrusion into a safe little refuge for protection-needing little ladies.
Large parts of society, apparently, are not quite ready to accept the possibility or consequences of equality.
MONDAY: We set our fictional column characters loose for the first time.
ELSEWHERE:
THE RISE OF “BLOKE” MAGAZINES, and of TV shows and commercials based on the same worldview, has, as I’ve previously written here, has propagated a new male archetype.
Call it the Proud Creep.
This character type is just as stupid, boorish, and woman-hating as the villain stereotypes in ’70s-’80s feminist tracts, but proclaims these to be somehow positive qualities.
In many ways, it reminds me of the “He-Man Woman-Hater’s Club” schtick in the old Our Gang movie shorts. It’s certainly just as juvenile.
I hereby propose a different archetype of hetero masculinity. One that is neither the Creep of certain sexist-female stereotypes, the Proud Creep of the bloke magazines, or the self-punishing Guilt Tripper of “sensitive new age guy” images.
It’s a man who doesn’t have to be sexist in either direction. A man who knows yang’s just as valuable as yin.
Herewith, some tenets of our proposed He-Man Woman-Lover’s Club:
As hetero men, we fully admit we need women in our lives. We need women’s beauty, touch, wisdom, style, zeal, perserverence, leadership, and, yes, the occasional constructive nag.
(In a more ideal world, some of the socially-prominent present and former customers of the sex industry would out themselves and publicly proclaim support for sex-workers’ rights. More on that later, maybe.)
I do not personally claim to have fully become this kind of man. But it is an ideal to which I, and I hope many others, will strive.
It’s hard to find contemporary role models for this type of man in the modern pop-culture universe, aside from certain soap-opera hunks or the heroes of the “urban love story” novels written by black men for black women. If you can think of any, please submit them to our luscious MISCtalk discussion boards.
MONDAY: My sordid past with John Carlson.
GENDER EQUALITY has taken another giant stride as of late.
Men’s designer fashions have become just as silly as women’s designer fashions!
The last time guys were so willing to look like clueless fashion victims in public was in the now fondly-remembered leisure suit days. Back then, flamboyance was the goal and new synthetic fabrics were the tools used to achieve it. “Hip” white guys tried too hard to mimick what they thought black guys looked like (i.e., like pimps and gangsters).
The backlash against Qiana and Fortrel was swift and severe. For almost two decades, men’s fashion headlines almost all contained that soon-overused phrase “A Return to Elegance” or some variant on it. When fashion trade magazines talked about exciting new trends in “menswear,” they almost always referred to the “menswear look” for women, not to clothes for males.
There have been trends and subtrends over the years, of course (logo sweaters, “casual Friday” khakies, Abercrombie & Fitch’s gay-crossover look, the unisex sportswear look, etc.) But the main trend, at least as marketed for adult males by prominent design houses, has been a narrow oscillation between “casual elegance” and “elegant casualness.”
But that’s apparently changing. And, once again, it’s at least partly inspired by white middle-class guys who hold an overgeneralized image of black guys as sexy criminals.
In some prisons, clothes are supplied in few sizes and belts are outlawed. Thus, baggy pants and butt cleavage became icons of gangsta toughness in the ’90s, especially to the suburban middle-class kids who became gangsta rap’s biggest market.
That concept “filtered up” to the department stores. Labels such as Tommy Hilfiger came up with big, low-riding pants and boxer shorts with logo waistbands meant to be seen in public. Rap stars were hired to wear these things in videos.
While that particular look hasn’t “graduated” to the couture-designer level, the general principle of flashy outrageousness has.
Few people directly buy couture fashion, but the industry has come to use it as an early-warning marketing device. Looks that get sufficient media attention at the major runway shows soon get altered into tamer, more easily-manufacturable versions for the department stores.
So we might actually see kilt-like shorts, meant to be worn with formal shoes and a suit jacket, in six to twelve months’ time.
And who knows? They might actually attract the attention of women. A woman might actually see a guy in one of these new getups and think, Now THERE’S a total clueless fashion victim. He obviously doesn’t have a woman in his life to tell him how stupid he looks. He doesn’t know it, but he needs me.
TOMORROW: We are driven.
I’VE BEEN THINKING OF MOVING to another building.
In the great tradition of “We’d Rather Sell It Than Move It” sales promotions, I’ve been auctioning pieces of my book collection on eBay. (Please go ahead and click here to look at what I’ve got up there today; I promise I’ll still be here when you get back.)
I’ve been augmenting the sale items I’ve already got wtith a few titles I’ve picked up at second-hand outlets, for whch I can find avid collector-buyers.
One of these was The Girls from Esquire.
That was a 1952 hardcover collection (which I’ve already sold; sorry) of stories, essays, and cartoons about and/or by women, originally published in “The Magazine For Men” during its 1933-52 original heyday.
(For the uninitiated, the first version of Esquire, created by legendary editor Arnold Gingrich (no relation to Newt), was far different from the sad little mag it is today. It was a lush, oversize compendium of top-drawer fiction, quasi-naughty humor, “good girl art” cartoons, pinup paintings, fashion, and other material for the sophisticated Urbane Gentleman, or rather for the man who fantasized about being an Urbane Gentleman.)
The main attractions of The Girls from Esquire for modern-day collectors are (1) the cartoons and (2) the big-name authors. The authors include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Benchley, Ilka Chase, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Brendan Gill, Langston Hughes, Budd Schulberg, and James Jones. The cartoons, by such unjustly-forgotten greats as Abner Dean and Gardner Rea, mostly depict gorgeous, splendidly-dressed fantasy women who are totally adorable even when doing less-than-proper things (kept mistresses, husband-killers, etc.)
The fiction pieces are great. So are the profiles of four of the period’s great women (Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, and Ingrid Bergman).
But what makes this book truly a relic of an earlier age are the seven essays (four by female writers) complaining about those uppity U.S. females who insist upon careers in the work-world and upon dominating marriages and families at home.
Piece after piece rants on and on about how American had lost their femininity, their sense of purpose, their joy, their fashion sense, their homemaking skills, and their “knowledge of woman’s rightul place”–especially as compared to the WWII war brides from Britain and the European continent, who (the various authors claim) were more attractive to men and more satisfied with their own lives because they still knew how to be soft, beautiful, quiet, modest, and deferential to men.
A half-century (and umpteen new paradigms for American womanhood) later, similar arguments are still being made by hate-radio hosts and by mail-order-bride websites. Books like The Rules and A Return to Modesty and What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us propose to bring back “old fashioned” feminine values and principles.
And Esquire is in a circultion and ad-sales rut; threatened by the British-led spate of “bloke” magazines celebrating the end of the Urbane Gentleman and the rise of the Guy. Freed from the sole-family-provider role and from the associated need to appear mature and stable, the new Guy (at least in these magazines’ fantasies) can remain an overgrown boy, possibly for life. He can drink and cavort and drive fast and sleep around and perform any other number of less-than-responsible behaviors, leaving the women to run more and more of the household and the world.
Any return to old-fashioned womanhood would require a return to old-fashioned manhood. By that I don’t mean the drunken rapist boor of radical-feminist villain imagery, but the suited-and-tied, emotionally repressed breadwinner who used to read Esquire in order to fantasize about being an Urbane Gentleman, going to Broadway shows with the wife and to hotel afternoons with the mistress.
Despite the recent cocktail and swing revivals, I don’t think many men really want that era back.
TOMORROW: Memories of the Bicentennial summer in Philadelphia.
BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
YESTERDAY, we discussed the newly-ascending adolescent sex-role stereotypes. Instead of depicting boys as all privileged-and-powerful and girls as all suppressed waifs, the new stereotype depicts girls as empowered achievers and boys as lost, clumsy oafs.
Part of the reasoning behind this new conventional wisdom is the notion that boys, particularly boys with feminist teachers and/or divorced moms, are growing up receiving a steady dose of overt and covert anti-male messages. These boys, the argument goes, come to see themselves as inherently and irrepairably stupid, insensitive, brutal, and immature; even as personally responsible for every bad thing any male ever did to any female.
These depictions, and the explanations used to justify them, are just as irresponsibly oversimplified and overgeneralized as any stereotypes. Still, just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, there are a few young males who have been caught up in the futile trap of self-gender guilt tripping.
I’ve seen a few such young and less-than-young males out there. For them, and for any of you who may be caught up in this self-esteem ruination, some words to ponder:
MONDAY: WIth or without the antitrust hoopla, is Microsoft’s era over anyway?
“GIRLS RULE; BOYS DROOL” says a bumper sticker in my neighborhood.
It’s a popular sentiment these days, even among males of a certain “sensitive” pretense.
Now, it’s beinig confirmed, at least in secondary and post-secondary education in North America.
In the May Atlantic Monthly, a female member of a leading conservative think tank cites several research studies from recent years to assert that, contrary to assumptions held in some circles, females are on the whole doing quite better in academic performance and college admission than males, and that this gap’s been getting wider.
I could certainly buy the article’s arguments.
In my own childhood, and later as a secretarial temp in the Seattle schools, it was the girls who consistently dominated the top-math-scorers’ lists, the student governments, the non-athletic scholarships, etc. Non-athletic boys were pretty much stereotyped for life as either troublemakers or geeks; while official and unofficial school programs encouraged girls to strive to become anything they wanted. Adolescent-psychology books and self-help programs in the ’70s and ’80s pretty much ignored the existence of emotional problems or learning difficulties among boys; presuming that all guys always had everything easy.
The emerging new stereotype of boys-in-trouble may have first attracted notice in the inner cities, where early-’90s studies showed some high schools’ graduation rates as up to two-thirds female. Later on, criticisms of gender-specific schemes such as “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” challenged the popular practice of giving girls special attention while expecting boys to fend for themselves.
Now, the Atlantic cover story (following a mini-slew of “saving-our-sons” books last year) has firmly established the new gender-divide concept in the country’s conventional wisdom.
Of course, both the oppressed-girls stereotype and the abandoned-boys stereotype are gross overgeneralizations, which work better as headline fodder in punditry magazines than as schemes to help individual kids.
What would be better for all genders of kids would be to treat them as individuals, with individual strengths and issues, rather than to shove them into the Diagnosis Du Jour.
With the WNBA coming to Seattle later this month, we’re going to get a lot of PR about encouraging girls to be good at sports.
In my ideal school system, it would be OK for a girl to be good at sports. But it would also be OK for a boy to be bad at sports.
TOMORROW: On a similar note, how to be a male feminist without hating yourself.
AH, THE NINETIES. Weren’t they just such A Simpler Time?
Only a mere 32 TV channels. Telephone modems that ran as fast as 28.8 kbps, and connected you to bulletin-board systems and the original Prodigy. Easy-to-hiss-at national villains like Newt Gingrich. Crude but understandable gender politics (anything “The Woman” did was presumed to be always right). A Seattle music scene in which all you had to do to be considered cool was to pronounce how Not-grunge you were.
All this and more was brought back when I re-viewed Kristine Peterson’s 1997 movie Slaves to the Underground, finally out on video.
It was a make-or-break “art film” career-change for director Peterson, who’d moved from Seattle to L.A. in the ’80s and had been stuck ever since in the career purgatory of directing direct-to-video horror movies, “erotic thrillers,” and Playboy Channel softcores. Its largely-local starring cast also all moved to L.A. after making the film. I don’t know of anything either they or Peterson has done since.
The plot is relatively simple. A Seattle slacker-dude zine publisher reconnects with an ex-girlfriend, who’d left him when they were both Evergreen students after a mutual acquaintance had raped her (she’d never told the ex-boyfriend about the attack). Now, she’s playing guitar in a riot grrrl band fronted by her lesbian lover. The ex-girlfriend leaves the lesbian lover, and the band, to re-hook-up with the ex-boyfriend, who vows to do anything for her (even go to work at Microsoft to support her musical career!).
All this is a mere premise for the film’s real purpose–depicting Peterson’s vision of oversimplified riot grrrl/slacker boy stereotypes. They’re basically the same old gender roles, only completely reversed. All the riot grrrls are depicted as stuck-up brats and/or sexist bigots. All the slacker dudes are depicted as shuffling, submissive cowards, deathly afraid of ever doing anything that might incur a woman’s wrath.
(Non-slacker males are shown in the form of the rapist “friend,” who appears briefly at the film’s start, and assorted right-wing authority figures; all of whom are depicted as fully deserving the riot grrrls’ vengeances. Non-riot-grrrl females do not appear at all.)
Aside from this annoying Hollywood oversimplification of sex roles, the rest of the film’s depiction of the seattle scene at the time is fairly accurate. The scenery (the Crocodile, Fallout Records, Hattie’s Hat restaurant, and the late Moe’s club) is right. So are the characters’ stated motivations–to make music and art and political action, not to Become Rock Stars. (A subplot toward the end, in which the riot-grrrl band is courted by an L.A. record label, is Peterson’s one betrayal of this.)
Slaves to the Underground is OK, but would undoubtedly had been better had Peterson not felt the need to dumb down the characters and the sexual politics to a level stupid Hollywood financiers could understand. The best fictionalization of the ’90s Seattle rock scene remains The Year of My Japanese Cousin (still not out on home video), made for PBS the previous year by Maria Gargiulo (sister of Fastbacks guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, who was the film’s cinematographer).
TOMORROW: Low-power radio, high-powered lobbying.
IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Times wine columnist Tom Stockley was on the doomed Alaska Airlines flight from Mexico. I’d known his daughter Paige at the UW; my few recollections of him are of a decent enough gent, even though my punk-wannabe ideology made me pretty much opposed to the whole concept of wine writing…. Turns out a friend of mine had flown on that route just days before the crash. This is the third such near-miss among my circle. In ’96, another friend flew TWA from Paris to N.Y.C. en route to Seattle; that plane’s N.Y.C.-Paris return flight (which my friend wasn’t on) crashed. In ’98, I was on Metro bus route 359 exactly 24 hours before a disturbed passenger shot the driver, sending the bus plunging off the Aurora Bridge.
ON MONDAY AND TUESDAY, I’d discussed Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian tract.
In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.
The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every citizen aged 21-45 (except child-bearing women), and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).
Obviously, nothing like that ever happened. Soviet communisim was a police-state regime that used egalitarian ideals to justify its brutality. Euro-socialism featured government-owned industrial companies that operated just like privately-owned companies, only less efficiently and less profitably.
But could Bellamy’s fantasy have ever worked in anything close to its pure form? Undoubtedly not.
It would’ve required that everybody (or at least enough people to impose their will on the rest) submit to a single, purified ideology based on rationality and selflessness. Any uncensored history of any major religious movement shows how impossible that is, even within a single generation.
We are an ambitious and competitive species. The “rugged individualist” notion, long exploited by U.S. corporations and advertisers, has a real basis in human nature.
We are also a diverse species. Especially in the U.S. whose citizens are gathered from the whole rest of the world. Bellamy’s totalized mass society would require a social re-engineering project even greater, and more uprooting, than that of the steam-age society he’d lived in. The kindly-doctor character’s insistence that all these changes had coalesced peacefully, as an inevitable final stage of industrial consolidation, may be the least likely-seeming prediction in the whole tome.
As I wrote previously, most utopian fantasies require that everybody in a whole society conform to the writer’s prescribed sensibility. (Some even require that everybody belong to the writer’s own gender or race.)
In most cases, the prescribed sensibility is that of a writer, or at least of a planner–ordered, systematic, more knowledgeable about structures than about people.
The impossibility of such monocultural utopias hasn’t stopped writers and planners from thinking them up. But at least some folks are realizing any idealized future has to acknowledge that people are different from one another and always will be.
We’ll talk more about this idea of a post-mass, post-postmodern future in future weeks.
TOMORROW: Musings on Biggest-Shopping-Day Eve.
YESTERDAY, we began to look into potential alternate routes to the philosophical-aesthetic cul de sac that postmodernism has become, and to instead seek a more pro-active way to see the future.
Of course, some highly-paid pundits are already doing something sorta like that.
But the likes of George Gilder are really in the business of stooging for the elites, telling people with money and power that they can count on having even more money and power in the 2000s.
Gilder’s futurism purports to predict a “revolution,” but merely a “revolution in business” which would leave the cleverest and most ambitious corporate go-getters in charge of a world totally and unalterably under the firm control of Global Business.
They don’t imagine how emerging Net-communications, digital-DIY media, and other empowerment tools could subvert big business’s privileges of scale and influence. Either that, or they don’t want to imagine it.
No, I think there is a real new era coming–if we work at it. I don’t have a splashy book-title name for it yet, but I’m working on it.
Wired’s “digital age” hype doesn’t quite describe it; nor does the “chaos culture” notion promoted by rave-dance folks a few years ago.
(The right-wing-think-tank people behind Wired are too trapped in their own privileged status to support a real revolution; the rave people are seeing only the most hedonistic aspects of the revolution.)
Without wanting too much to sound like a certain late multimillionaire who sang about a future without possessions, I’ll ask you to imagine.
Imagine a world in which motion pictures are made everywhere, not just in one city in the whole world.
Imagine a world that had actors but not movie stars. Imagine no more gatekeepers.
Imagine a society without a right-wing hierarchy of privilege or a left-wing hierarchy of righteousness. A world in which women are equal to men, but in which men are also equal to women.
A world without bestseller lists, Billboard charts, or box-office rankings. A world of artists, not celebrities.
A world with no master race, no master gender, no master nationality, no master religion, no master economic system, and even no master operating system.
(This is all still largely a reactive, PoMo vision, I know. But future installments will be more proactive, I promise.)
The techno-corporate futurism of Gilder, Wired, et al. is only a feeble half-step in this direction. The real revolution wouldn’t be a revolution for corporations, but against them. Not new opportunities for the Viacoms and GMs, but the means toward their overthrow.
And yes, it is a revolution. But like any real revolution, some people will find it, well, revolting.
But that’s a topic for another day.
TOMORROW: We escape the topic of Century 21 for a while, to look at the history of escapism.
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed, in which she claims that there’s no universal male conspiracy against women and that the socio-emotional problems faced by many current males are due neither to any supposed innate male evility nor to feminist ball-busters, but rather to a social and economic system that values money and power, and which devalues the personal worth of individuals of all genders.
Still, it’s one thing for a female author of impeccible feminist credentials to speak out in sympathy toward men.
It might be even more provocative for a male to proclaim male equality–not superiority, but equality.
That’s what illustrator/performance artist Douglas Davis did recently in two essays for the New York Press, “The Wick vs. the Prick: Heterophobia and the Gender Wars” and “Phallus Rising: Or, the Prisoner of Joy.” (The original pieces are no longer on the paper’s site (it maintains only its current issue on its site), but Davis has put it up somewhere on the “Hyper Texts” section of his own site and also has a forum site based on some of the ideas in them.)
Some of his ideas:
We need yang as much as yin; masculine energy can be a force for good; it’s perfectly OK to be a male (or a female who actually likes males); and, if we play our cards right, the next century could lead toward a “Wild Future” in which we get beyond such superficial arguments and instead learn to celebrate our selves and our others’ selves–female, male, straight, gay, bi, wild, mild, and everything else.
Some of my takes on these ideas:
I’m just old enough (42) to have discovered sex at the exact same time the mass media did. I didn’t get the valuable lesson that if the media were lying to me about sex they must be lying to me about other topics. Nor did I grow up in an America where hardcore video was easily borrowable from your next-door-neighbor’s parents’ basement.
Early-’90s style hardcore porn turns me off, as do the Brit-inspired “bloke magazines” such as Maxim. Both are predicated on a soulless, brainless, heartless stereotype of male heterosexual desire; a stereotype ultimately not far from that of certain sexist female essayists.
Allegedly “sex positive” ideologies that try to limit the range of permissible nongay sexual behavior to masturbation, chaste S/M, and media-mediated fantasies only make things worse. They reinforce the ultimate loneliness of the late-modern condition. They promote the orgasm as just another consumer activity, no more life-changing or world-changing than a really good bottle of wine.
Yes, there will be a Wild Future. But not quite the way the “dildonics” advocates proposed it seven or eight years back. Rather, it will be a celebration of all sexualities (male as well as female; hetero as well as gay; “Total Woman” Christians as well as leather-Goth-neopagans). At its center will be the central act of biological existence, M/F coitus. In a post-mass world, all the countless other sex expressions (lesbian, gay, transgender, assorted fetishes and kinks) will continue to blossom; but the central act will remain the figurative maypole around which all these other variants dance their joyous dances, sometimes glancing back at the maypole and sometimes not.
I oppose the dichotomy that claims there can only be two kinds of nongay male sexuality: evil and suppressed. We must promote positive notions of masculinity, neither brutal nor emasculated, neither dominant nor submissive, not against women but with women.
TOMORROW: A few more old buildings and their hidden tales.
A NUMBER OF recent books and essays are questioning one of the central “received ideas” of the Lifestyle Left–the notion that males, particularly heterosexual males, constitute some sort of inborn and irretrievably evil subspecies.
You’d think the notion that 40 percent of the human race shouldn’t be stereotyped or collectively dehumanized, particularly by folks who claim to be all about “celebrating diversity,” should be a well-duh.
But nope, it’s taken a while for the idea to catch on.
Some well-meaning psychology-types put out a few books such as Real Boys, whose basic premises include: Girls aren’t the only kids with problems. We shouldn’t treat adolescent identity crises and emotional traumas as if only girls got them. Stop scoffing at the very idea of males having souls or needing help. So what does at least one reviewer do? Scoff at the very idea.
Then comes Susan Faludi, whose ’91 book Backlash was widely misinterpreted (even by readers who liked it) as portraying an organized, deliberately anti-woman conspiracy of All (or Most) Men against All Women. It actually detailed a bunch of generally-reactionary government and corporate trends during the Reagan-Bush era, as they specifically affected feminist issues.
(Before that, Faludi worked at the Wall St. Journal, where she wrote a highly influential expose of Nordstrom’s labor practices.)
Faludi’s now come out with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man– not a repudiation of Backlash but an expansion of its real premises. (Here’s an excerpt.)
Faludi’s point here: It’s not Men Against Women and it never was. What we’ve really got isn’t a “Patriarchy” but a profit-and-power society that treats most anybody as an expendable, replacable part. Feminism isn’t to blame for men who’ve lost their sense of place in the world, it’s the forces that really run things (like globalized business and the non-community of suburban angst) you should look at.
Indeed, she continues, to blame some collectivized entity called “Women” or “Men” for one another’s problems only prevents you from more clearly seeing a social structure that keeps us down and out and blaming each other.
So far, Faludi hasn’t gotten the kind of sneers the “boy books” have gotten. (Though she has gotten milder scorn such as this.) Maybe because of her feminist-insider credentials, or because certain neo-sexist critics might accept a female author speaking in sympathy for men but might trash a male author who tried to say the same things.
Or, I hope, because Faludi’s argument provides an escape route beyond the ideological recursive trap that is the Lifestyle Left.
Faludi’s saying the purpose of a real progressive movement is to seek progress, not merely to let its own members boast of their personal moral superiority. Man-bashing’s as dumb as woman-bashing, and just as futile. It’s not Us vs. Them, Good People vs. Bad People. It’s much more impersonal than that. And the impersonality of the system is one of its problems.
Faludi’s leading toward something I’ve dreamed of for years, an American Left that worked (both “work” as in achievement and as in at least getting up to actually do something).
MONDAY: We’ll talk about an actual man who dares to speak out for men (not against women but with them).
LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Beloit University’s annual list of once-ubiquitous pop-cult references incoming college students might not know about.
Yesterday, we began our own such list.
Now, in the spirit of equal time, a few reference points today’s 18-22-year-olds get that folks closer to my age might not:
(Though the self-congratulatory hype surrounding the electronica scene can be just as annoyingly smug as that surrounding “progressive” rock. But that’s a topic for another time.)
TOMORROW: Can Net hype REALLY sell movie tickets?
century will be the ‘storyteller'” (found by Rebecca’s Pocket)….
