Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male, Part I
STIFFED BY SUSAN FALUDI
Marina explored bell hooks’s FEMINISM IS FOR EVERYBODY: PASSIONATE POLITICS in her June 29, 2011 installment for inContext. Subsequent to her article, a male reader, Clay, responded with (what I assume was) a tongue-in-cheek reaction. Clay criticized feminists for what he sees as a continual attack on men, the pitting of men against women, and above all, the reality of his life wherein he feels no less downtrodden than his female contemporaries.
Susan Faludi addresses Clay at the point he finds himself. Published in 1999, STIFFED: THE BETRAYAL OF THE AMERICAN MANexplores how men are not individually “in control” nor are they better off than women. As male-dominated occupations were either replaced with machinery or cheap labor overseas, men found themselves redundant. They questioned their value and place in a society in which a paycheck was how manliness was defined. The way I describe STIFFED is to say it is the nonfiction version of Chuck Palahniuk’s FIGHT CLUB. (I’ll discuss that next week in part two.) Briefly, what I mean by this is that both texts explore masculinity as a social construct and determine that our culture is as oppressive to the average man as it is to women.
Men are expected to be as physically attractive as women. They are to keep their hair, sometimes also its original color, and a “six pack” set of abdominal muscles is all the rage. In addition to this, men are charged with not only bringing home the bacon (since that is also back in vogue in certain circles) but also being willing to shop for the pan in which they fry up that bacon. Men must be strong, yet gentle. They should be fashionable. The thought goes that if you are man enough, then pink just may be your color. After frying up the bacon, men are to express a desire, not mere wiliness, to watch the latest chick-flick after they’ve put the children to bed. Men are asked to be all that women were ever asked to be while at the same time providing the income that supports the entire family.
When that fails, men get no sympathy. Our American ethic is that of rugged individualism, so if you’ve failed, then you’ve got only yourself to blame. We live in the land of opportunity, and you only miss yours through individual incompetence, or so the rhetoric goes. As Clay asked, if patriarchy is running things, then men shouldn’t have any problem succeeding, right? Faludi claims the blame game over. While she doesn’t use this term, the way I’d describe the new paradigm, she hoped for in 1999, is egalitarianism. My sixteen-year-old daughter asked me the other day why I had to call myself a feminist. If I believed in true equality, wouldn’t I just be a humanist? Since that term already has connotations connected to religious beliefs, egalitarianism is the best way to describe what feminism has always been about: equality. It also explains and describes Faludi’s hope for the future for both men and women.
Faludi believes our consumerist culture causes the problems faced by both men and women. I would like to specifically call to the forefront the principles of capitalism, especially as it is practiced today. The approach to this, for the most part, is that capitalism means a free market and the phrase “free market” includes the word “free,” thus it is what democracy demands. How can we not have a “free market” and yet be a “free” people? If we have socialized schooling and then add socialized medicine to the mix, to keep at least those two things “out of the market,” then we’re sliding down that slippery slope to socialism, which in many American minds is equal to communism and dictatorship or totalitarian government.
Some writers blame “the media.” I believe “the media” is merely another example of corporate interests. Most media outlets are for-profit entities. Since profits are the way they please board members, investors, shareholders and owners, journalists for radio, television, newspapers (online or print) and magazines must walk a fine line so that they do not offend those who make their salaries possible. Magazines, newspapers and radios need the headline or sound bite to capture listeners. They do this by sensationalizing everything. With all the conflicting stories, we’re lost in confusion and paralyzed to do anything about our own situation, never mind that of others. We can’t care about others losing their jobs when we’re worried about losing our own. We don’t want our representatives passing any tax hikes to support the poor when we see the latest oil bill over the winter. We fear that we’re going to be “the poor” (a nameless, faceless group of people) shortly, so we do what we can to keep our own heads above water. In the past month, I’ve heard news stories, on NPR (an independent news outlet), about how women have fared better than men in the on-going recession and have lost fewer jobs than men. Then, a couple of weeks later, I heard men are gaining in fields traditionally female, such as nursing and retail. Men may be a minority in these fields, yet they are represented in ever-increasing numbers.
When I hear men gaining in areas such as nursing and retail, the first thing I think is how women must worry that they’ll be soon locked out of those arenas, as well. There will be backlash where men, the breadwinners, are given jobs over women, who are seen as “earning a second income for the family vacation.” It sounds like post-World War II all over again, right? For one thing, men’s gains in nursing and retail come at a time when men are losing, permanently, jobs that men do traditionally, such as manufacturing and construction. Should they merely remain unemployed? Or, should they seek training in another field, a growing field, so they might support themselves and possibly their families as well? The other thing these reports do is focus on the battle between men and women, and not the shared, universal struggle of a failing or stalled economy.
The headlines these stories make sell newspapers, magazines, increase listener time and viewer time. We wait out the boring commercials and segments of the news, we would otherwise skip, to get the story behind the enticing headline. That is the point of the network, of course. The point is not to share something insightful, per se, to shed light on an issue, or provide education. Besides, you can’t typically do that in a sixty-second or less timeframe.
Even if we saw through all of the INCITEful headlines and realized the stories behind them are not usually INSIGHTful at all, we’re still left in a society wherein the cure-all for everything is not just the pills they advertise, but also the very act of consuming. The “enemy wins” when we stem the tide of purchases, or so we were told by our last President. It is only through buying that we exert our power in the world. It is not a humanitarian cause, but more bags full of stuff we don’t really need that defines us. That men find this as stifling as women comes as no surprise.
This first section first published: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2011/08/11/stiffed-the-betrayal-of-the-american-male-part-i/
Stiffed (Part 2): Fight Club & the Plight of the Modern Man
STIFFED: BETRAYAL OF THE AMERICAN MAN (HARPER PERENNIAL, 2000) BY SUSAN FALUDI
Last week, I promised I’d compare FIGHT CLUB and STIFFED. While I did not own the film version of FIGHT CLUB until just a few years ago, I learned from the DVD booklet that I’m not the only person to compare these two books. Laura Ziskin, President of Production for Fox 2000 pictures for the film version of Fight Club, read STIFFED after optioning Palahniuk’s book. She, too, found that Faludi’s text addressed the same issues asFIGHT CLUB.
Both books explore the plight of the modern male. They both take a shot across the bow of consumer culture and the ways in which it undermines men and women. FIGHT CLUB and STIFFED explore the juxtaposition of qualities expected of the modern man, especially by advertising and marketing. Men, in our consumer culture, are asked to fit as stringent a set of physical traits as women ever were and continue to be. In STIFFED, we find men so lacking control over parts of their lives that they turn to violence. They do not commit violent acts to feel in control, but rather feel so out of control that they cannot stop their rage from spilling into physical aggression. (This refers to some men, not all men, of course.) While somewhat different, the formation of the fight club mimics the mindless actions of perpetrators of domestic violence. Men, like women, long to be a part of something larger than themselves and their individual lives. Faludi finds men who join religious organizations for this purpose. We see men join fight clubs and “project mayhem” in Palahniuk’s story.
STIFFED devotes an entire chapter to men in the porn industry and their treatment is exposed as worse than the women in the business. In fact, women are in control of who they will have sex with and how. Men have to actually perform in porn films, as well, while women can act and no one cares one bit. It seems the film studio owners and producers, male or female, are the only people who benefit in the industry since it eats up and spits out men and women performers, and is ultimately full of false promises and sets unrealistic expectations that can ruin what might otherwise be healthy, happy sex lives of ordinary people.
In FIGHT CLUB, the Tyler Durden character discusses growing up without a father. Faludi points to failed promises of fathers as part of the betrayal of the past two or more generations of men. Palahniuk’s men appear misogynist (at worst) yet are more likely merely dismissive of their “need” for another woman in their lives after being raised solely by mothers. It’s worse for men in Faludi’s book, wherein they find themselves spurred by women for their inability to produce an adequate paycheck—through no fault of their own.
FIGHT CLUB (W.W. NORTON, 2005) BY CHUCK PALAHNIUK
Both texts examine gender roles and call them into question. Palahniuk gives us Tyler Durden, presenting him as virile, muscular, and in-control. At the same time, he dresses flashily, runs a cottage industry making soap by hand and even dons a woman’s bathrobe. Yet, for all this, we see him as distinctly male and manly. The narrator’s character dresses close to our image of a 1950s businessman (in the Western world). He wears suits, oxford shoes, flannel pajamas and a trench coat. For all his outerwear, there are times at which we question his manliness. In Faludi’s text, we find men who struggle with what defines manliness in much the same way.
To eek out a life, characters in FIGHT CLUB take on multiple jobs and find themselves unsatisfied with the nine to five grind. InSTIFFED, there are men who would give anything for any kind of job, so that they might provide for their families. In FIGHT CLUB, the men reject the status quo in favor of what is called “project mayhem,” wherein they commit acts of “consumer” disobedience and attack the incongruous aspects of society to make a statement. What they do is akin to what we know as eco-terrorism. In the end, these men find that violence and destruction leads merely to more of the same. They must overcome this in order to find something meaningful in their lives. Faludi’s cast of real characters must do the same. Men must find new ways to define manhood and manliness.
At the end of FIGHT CLUB, we see that the narrator, who suffered split personality disorder as the result of the pressures of consumer society, heals himself and finds solace in a relationship with the main female character in the text, herself a flawed heroine. Together, they are able to move forward into a new world, one in which the possibilities are only imagined as the book ends. Faludi, too, imagines such a future shared by men and women wherein they bond over their mutual betrayal at the hands of consumer society and find an egalitarian future. I hope for our sakes that Palahniuk and Faludi are prophets and not merely the warnings we do not heed.
This section first published: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2011/08/18/stiffed-part-2/
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