I’ve never read as much by Ellen Willis, who died last year at the age of 64, as I’ve wanted to, probably because she’s never really caught the zeitgeist in the last 10 years (i.e. my time as a semi-serious reader of criticism) to the point where I felt like it was my professional duty to immerse myself in her, and because she doesn’t really have a definitive collection of essays that a sympathetic teacher might assign in class, one that captures both her early phase as a pioneering feminist and pop music critic and her later phase as a kind of hip old lady of the cultural criticism scene.
Anyway, she’s a pretty fierce writer, and so it’s nice to see that NYU, where she taught for many years, had now set up a nice, if short, set of links to some of her more recent essays and reviews. In the course of perusing it I came across “How Now, Iron Johns?” her review of Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. The review is in some ways harsh—she thinks the book gets its fundamental analytical frame wrong—but it also recognizes what Faludi does well, and in it Willis, like Faludi, approaches the “plight of American men” with a lot of sympathy for the men. She writes:
Faludi is surely right that male doldrums cannot be reduced to antifeminist backlash–and that antifeminist backlash cannot be reduced to the simple reflex of a privileged class determined to protect its power. She is right, I suspect, that in their jobs, their relationships with women and their overall experience of the world, most American men most of the time do not feel especially powerful. Certainly her own depictions of men support these claims, and it is a tribute to the quality of her reporting that even unappetizing characters like the sex-for-points Spur Posse come across as recognizable human beings, not political caricatures. Nonetheless, she is wrong to deny that women and feminism are at the heart of the matter. The themes of men’s problematic relations with women and with their own "femininity" figure prominently in some of Faludi’s portraits–notably in her devastating account of misogyny and male intimacy at the Citadel, and in the less successful Promise Keepers and porn-movie chapters–and run through others like persistent minor fugues. But even when women are virtually or entirely absent from the narrative, their negative presence broods.
?In a male-supremacist society, maleness is regarded as synonymous with generic humanity, and since the Industrial Revolution took most forms of work out of the home, creating a split between the public world of wage labor and the private domestic economy, men–and "man"–have been identified with the former. As a result men have tended to conflate worldly human achievement and, specifically, achievement in the world of paid work with proving their manhood. From this perspective, to fail at a job, or to have a job that does not seem worth doing, is not simply human disappointment but emotional castration–especially when it entails another major blow to masculine self-definition: the inability to support a dependent wife and children.
The inevitable corollary is that men who equate their humanity with their sexuality with their jobs have a strong emotional investment in keeping those jobs a male preserve; the communities of skilled workers who represent Faludi’s masculine ideal have typically reacted with virulent hatred to women’s efforts to integrate their turf. In turn, the closing of ranks against women reinforces the work-masculinity equation. This is a closed, ultimately self-defeating circle. More than one reviewer has decried Faludi’s nostalgia for America’s industrial past and the politics of working-class solidarity that went with it, but this criticism misses the essential point. There’s nothing inherently wrong with invoking the past as a standpoint for criticizing the present. The problem, in the context of this book, is that this particular past offers no exit from the real masculinity crisis: men’s need to adjust to the decline of patriarchal culture by developing a sense of themselves and their place in the world that does not depend on the segregation or subordination of women.
The problem, as Willis elucidates further in the essay, is not just that the working world is no longer exclusively male, but that every successive refuge of last resort for masculine identity seems be undermined in turn. Thanks to hypercapitlaism, most jobs no longer pay enough money for men to support their family exclusively on their wage, so men can no longer be the provider in an uncomplicated way. Feminism ended the era of unquestioned male dominance at home, so men are no longer, in an uncomplicated way, kings of their castle. Now women are often making as much, or more, money than their men, so men can’t even bring a relative wage-earning superiority to the table.
Willis never gets around to saying what exactly the New Man, no longer dependent on the segregation or subordination of women to anchor his identity, would look or feel like, but she looks mostly to an as-yet-unimaginable resurgence of socialist politics, or something like that, to be the source of the answer:
If men had a more modest view of what their masculinity ought to entail, perhaps they could move on from debilitating feelings of loss to tackling their real economic and political problems.
In the thirties, despite massive unemployment, failed masculinity was not a public issue. There was at that time no major challenge to conventional male-female relations but, equally important, the left and the labor movement provided an alternative framework for interpreting work, or the lack of it: This was a question not of manhood but of class. Today the changes that are generating enormous inequality, progressively destroying "real jobs" with security and benefits, demanding longer and longer hours and at least two incomes per household as prerequisites for a minimally middle-class existence, and depriving people of control over their work even in the professional classes are taking place in the absence of any credible opposition to the free-market dogma that rules the day. On the contrary, the capitalist triumphalists are riding high on a wave of "prosperity" that has enriched a minority of the population while obscuring the long-term slippage of our standard of living and our quality of life.
There is indeed an obsessive and borderline-hysterical quality about the current emphasis on getting, spending and celebrity, not because we are brainwashed by the media but because the marketplace is our main source of readily available pleasure and shopping one of the few socially convenient acts that feel something like freedom. It’s impossible these days to trade money for time, to decide to work less and live modestly. The choice–for those who have a choice–is endless work for low pay or endless work for high pay. If you have it, why not spend it? And if you don’t, there’s always a dollar and a dream. What bedevils most men is not that they are ornamental but that they are subordinated. As for those few at the top of the corporate hierarchy–the ones who are absent from Faludi’s pages–they do not seem too worried about their manhood (and I doubt that they feel like ornaments, either). They still have power, in the world and, by and large, over the women in their lives.
… My point, though, is not that men’s feelings of emasculation are merely a displacement of class oppression. It’s that for men who have no sense that their society could be different and better, the rise of women and the erosion of male power are an unmitigated grief. A crisis of masculinity happens when men are told it’s the end of history at the very moment they realize that history has passed them by.
I would add to that, of course, that lo those many years ago when men left the home, and invested their sense of worth and their expectation of satisfaction exclusively in the workplace, they also gave up the satisfactions of home, and in particular the satisfactions of fatherhood. One of the things that would have to go in tandem with reconstructing a humane and just economic order, would be a rediscovery of the role of the father in the intimate life of the family (rather than just father as breadwinner, superego and occasional little league coach).
