MISCmedia for 10/8/99
Times That Try Men's Souls

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).

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