Something for the Boys

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SOURCE: Johnson, Diane. “Something for the Boys.” New York Review of Books (16 January 1992): 13–17.

[In the following excerpt, Johnson discusses the significance of The Beauty Myth and renewed interest in feminism, gender roles, and masculinity, as reflected by a number of new books published in the early 1990s.]

1.

Dorothy Parker is said to have remarked to the authors of Modern Woman, the Lost Sex, “I bet you say that to all the sexes.” Reading these books together is like being locked in the coat closet at a cocktail party to overhear a muffled cacophony of half-truths, partial insights, and entrenched wrongheadedness, from which emerges the general impression of a society foundering in reproachful cries of loster-than-thou from all the sexes (cries which the events surrounding the Clarence Thomas hearings and the William Kennedy Smith trial have intensified). The male writers, as usual, tend to find women essentially peripheral to their lives, and seem more interested (or more free of practical cares) to address existential questions of individual moral and emotional progress, while for most of the women writers, men are still the problem. Underlying the discussion are the abiding central questions of definition: What ought “real” men to be like? What are women really like? What is “masculinity”? Does a real man “feel”? Are “caring” and “nurturing” the essence of femininity?

While in all of these many books about men and women the reader may object to an absence of historical perspective and an abundance of arguable assertions, oversimplifications, esoteric private vocabularies, global abstractions, and naive prescriptiveness—Sam Keen's Fire in the Belly has lists and quizzes—it should be said at the outset that something emerges from this profusion of viewpoints that, though not necessarily scientific or even sound, adequately describes what many people feel subjectively to be the state of things about men, or women, or themselves.

One has only to look at magazine photographs of anorexic fashion models wearing chains and decorative bruises to agree that Naomi Wolf is probably right (in The Beauty Myth) to see in the discomforts of fashion some sadistic backlash against women. (This is in fact something people have always said about fashion, designers who “hate” women and so on—but recent fashions for dog collars and penciled-on wounds and other references to torture and masochism make the perception somewhat more explicit.) Most people would instinctively feel that Suzanne Gordon is right to regret (in Prisoners of Men's Dreams) that people consider nurses lower than doctors, or that an uneducated male janitor is paid more than a woman teacher. The deluge of books, especially on the “men's movement,” also reminds that according to some unexpressed principle, by the time books about certain social problems come to be published they are already slightly out of date; that is, while Wolf sees an epidemic of victim-anorexics, the federal guidelines on ideal weight have actually been recently increased, and there's a new fat Barbie doll called “Happy to be me.” And while men proclaim their wish to get back to masculinity, it is probably the emotional values acquired since the Sixties, of cultivating the “feminine side,” that make them aware of the need to do it.

Several new and best-selling books describe the process by which sensitive modern men, having agreed since the Sixties that the effect of what has come to be called “patriarchy” (war, rape, domestic violence, and environmental destruction) is unacceptable, nonetheless rather miss it, and are nostalgically seeking to reconstruct masculinity as a positive quality along traditional lines. The leading figure of this new men's movement, Robert Bly, contrasts men today with an archetypal “1950s Man,” a boyish and optimistic, responsible, hard-working but domineering male who appreciated women's bodies but had little sense of women as individuals, and “unless he has an enemy, he isn't sure that he is alive.” Some of these men may have been or be good guys, but collectively they embody the repugnant “patriarchy” recently caricatured by, US senators in the Thomas hearings.

In the Sixties, responding to the Vietnam War as well as to the claims of feminism, younger men became what Bly has called “soft,” by which he means that they rejected many of the values of aggression and dominance so important to their fathers, in favor of lives of richer emotional sensitivity—their so-called “feminine” sides. Today, feeling that they have gone far enough in that direction and, perhaps, in helping with the dishes, men are seeking to recapture “masculinity” without reviving a discredited patriarchy. A “real” man, in this new (or old) view, is not an inarticulate, testosterone-engorged bully, not someone who as Bly says is “a cold-hearted survivalist, living in the Idaho of the mind with his dogs and an AK-47,” but a person who incorporates with the modern ability to “feel” and “care” some of the values we remember many men to have had even before the Sixties, of responsibility, protection of the weak, leadership, confidence, and virtue, rather as described in the Boy Scout Handbook or in accounts of ancient Athens. Added is a newfound fashion for crying, as Russell Baker noted recently (“All right, men, we now know you can cry, so could we just turn the manly tear ducts down to a trickle, fellows?”).

To judge from the popularity of these books, men must feel they have lost their way, and they use certain grim statistics to confirm it—that men (however willingly) are nearly 100 percent of the soldiers killed in war and most of the victims of murder, are two thirds of the nation's alcoholics, 90 percent of the homeless, 90 percent of those arrested, four times as many suicides, overwhelmingly a majority among criminals and the imprisoned. Of course it has always been men who have filled the armies and the prisons, but only now have men come to see themselves as particularly victimized. And rates of all their afflictions are increasing.1

Commentators variously blame the economy, the imperfect social vision of our leaders, and, frequently, feminism for having unmanned the male, though Margaret Mead has observed that “the central problem of every society is to define appropriate roles for the men.” In Robert Bly's view, manhood is to be recaptured by getting in touch with the “grief” arising from the shame past male behavior has brought upon men, because “so many roles that men have depended on for hundreds of years have dissolved or vanished,” and from men's loss of connection to their fathers. Part of their reconstruction is to come when the severed ties are knitted up between young men and the elders of their tribes, just as in Africa, so that male lore and values, male cooperation and friendship, can in our society as in others welcome and nurture the young man, and also fit him for happiness and the society of women. In Bly's view, this may entail rituals as simple as parades (for instance to welcome returning soldiers, helping to ease them back into nonwarrior status), or as amorphous as gaining what used to be called “the tragic sense of life,” perhaps, like the bookish Bly, from reading the great poets of Western culture, from Homer to Rilke. …

Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth) in this connection argues that the patriarchy, and its agents the film makers and magazine editors of both sexes, and the marketplace generally, imposes unattainable images of beauty as a way of keeping women in their places, and that women, lacking other forms of power, accede to this form of subjection. Wolf details a dismal catalog of anorexia, bulimia, and job discrimination against the plain or fat. She is witty on the “holy” oils sold them in ads, in which “unseen dangers assault an unprotected female victim” (she quotes a long passage of excerpts from Elizabeth Arden, Estée Lauder, and a dozen more, identifying the language of “defense” against “attack,” “danger” to the skin “assaulted by age and ultraviolet exposure,” and “external aggressions,” language she suggests is used subliminally to frighten and control).

No doubt women are insecure about their bodies, too much preoccupied with appearance and easily alarmed by such rhetoric. Social change is slow, cyclical, and must be both outward and inward, both “equal opportunity” and “transformative.” Beauty is a useful commodity, and one of the most powerful assets some women have had with which to secure material privileges and “success”; and it takes time to unlearn old ways or be willing to squander proven assets. At present one sees women trying, as a last gasp before taking the real plunge into the man's world, to compete in the old female way because for many it is easier to be pretty than to go to law school.

Whether the desire for beauty is innate,2 as Plato would have said, or a male plot is less knowable. If it is a plot, there is at least some evidence that it is not succeeding. In a few cases anyway, women are challenging legal issues relating to their appearance and are winning. like the Delta employee who won the right not to wear makeup. In any case, one could also say it is the profit motive, not men, who are at fault. “Going on appearances” is a way we all make judgments, and to take appearance into account is not necessarily evidence of deep social pathology.

Might it not be that women, pressed to give up some of the perquisites of the narcissistic, passive female role in their move toward “selfless agency,” cling to fashion and “beauty” as evidence of a femininity they wish to conserve as anxiously as men wish to conserve masculinity? The resonant little phrase of Gilmore's to the effect that manhood is marked by a transition from the self-directed mood of childhood to selfless action in the world seems meaningful here, for it could be argued that not only the beauty victims but also the “caregivers” are, like patriarchs, arrested in a state of passive narcissism—in the case of caregivers, the narcissism of powerless moral superiority. It has been noted that today's anorexic is yesterday's religious mystic. There have never been many avenues of adventure or opportunities for mastery for girls, and anorexia, like piety, may be at least a form of agency.

Wolf does not appear to have much sympathy for the project of self-perfection in any form; nor does she apparently think much of the pleasures of pursuing beauty—the fun of spas, back rubs, and facials—seeing only sadistic surgeons, bruises, scars, and pain. In fact, she ultimately attributes all social evils, including child abuse and the increase in violence against women, to the frenzied thrashings of threatened manhood, and here it is possible that she has not cast her net wide enough, ascribing to the beauty myth what Susan Faludi in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women finds in many more places besides, and documents with an impressive array of examples taken from popular culture, and more alarmingly from politics, quoting various New Right figures on their unashamedly antifeminist political agenda—which until the Thomas hearings one would have thought was on the fringe, but which those hearings all too aptly confirmed. …

3.

Are men and women enemies? The Jungian men's movement writers do not think so, or at least do not say so. What, then, is the enemy? Surely all these books find too little fault with the objective conditions of modern American life. Besides such major problems as drugs and poverty, and family disintegration, etc., there is another villain, whose shadowy presence in many of these texts is there but nearly unremarked by the authors who put it there. Each of these commentators illustrates the pace and isolation of modern life by noting the human relationships which are actually conducted with machines, especially the car, which enables and thus compels hours of commuting for fathers (compared with the—by someone's calculation—eight minutes a day he will spend in direct conversation with his son). While father is exiled to the freeway, a car, that “adolescent equipment … which is most dear to every man's heart,” is insinuated into the emotional life of every teen-aged boy, with which he is banished to the garage and the mall, as Robert Johnson remarks: “Every car should be named Rocinante.” Keen too finds it an important symptom of puerility, and ridicules the equation of cars and other “toys” as definitions of success: “To the victors belong the marks of status and the repair bills.”

Henry Adams slyly suggested as early as 1906 that American men, being denied the advantages of culture and history, have sacrificed their masculine authority to the internal combustion engine—perhaps specifically the automobile—which has deprived men of their manhood and set women on the path of feminism, and thus began the decline of American civilization:

The typical American man had his hand on a lever and his eye on a curve in his road; his living depended on keeping up an average speed of forty miles an hour, tending always to become sixty, eighty or a hundred, and he could not admit emotions or anxieties or subconscious distractions, more than he could admit whiskey or drugs, without breaking his neck. He could not run his machine and a woman too; he must leave her, even though his wife, to find her own way, and all the world saw her trying to find her way by imitating him.

Perhaps this is all that Bly and Keen are saying out there in the woods with their dads, and their cars and women left behind.

Notes

  1. Andrew Kimbrell in The Utne Reader, May-June 1991, p. 66.

  2. By Beauty, she means personal appearance, or even grooming, not Beauty in the sense of form perfected, which of course is something else, a rare quality like tallness for basketball players, not within most people's grasp.

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