Lately, though, things have turned around. Voices from all corners–feminists, gangsta rappers, fundamentalist Christians, gender theorists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists, biochemists-are re-examining the nature of masculinity. A half decade after the bloom of the men’s movement, a handful of recent books posit that what a man really wants is . . . well, power, dominion and the rest-but there’s an explanation.
As Badinter reckons, masculinity–far more than femininity–is an abstraction, something to be achieved rather than simply lived out. From birth, girls are intimately tied to womanhood through their connection with the maternal womb. Boys are more distant, biologically and socially, from the manhood of their fathers; they have to learn their sexual identity from remote sources. Even in adulthood, men strive to “become” men, or to become “real men,” as if genetics weren’t enough. Badinter and the rest endeavor to construct men into a coherent class, in the same way that women, minorities, gays and other groups have been construed to form recognizable classes, with their own needs and histories. In the fractured universe of identity politics, men, it seems, need a segmented identity just like everybody else.
The new masculinist literature is alternately defensive or pitying. As Margaret Atwood writes in the ambitious recent anthology, “The Male Body,” now out in paperback (310 pages. University of Michigan Press. $14.95), “men’s bodies are the most dangerous things on earth.” By these lights, all men are Packwoods waiting to happen. So where do we go from here?
In “The Masculine Mystique: The Politics of Masculinity” (368 pages. Ballantine. $23), Andrew Kimbrell argues that male bad behavior is really an awful burden for men to bear. Kimbrell, a lawyer, environmentalist and men’s advocate, was named one of America’s “100 Visionaries” by the Utne Reader. He contends that the components of modern manhood–competitive drive, appetite for wealth and power, devotion to work at the expense of family-form a “masculine mystique,” a stereotype that has come to obscure a kinder, gentler “true” masculinity. In gauzy terms, Kimbrell describes a beneficent pre-industrial masculine state, when men worked by the sides of their mates and penetration meant planting a seed in the ground, not violation.
Kimbrell argues, with a mixture of good sense and squishy hokum, that the Industrial Revolution, with its need for male labor, separated men from this “generatire” ideal of masculinity. Men no longer worked with their families, or drew their sense of self-worth from within the home. Instead, through advertising and financial rewards, they were fed a series of stereotypes that made them better workers but worse men. In Kimbrell’s reasoning, industrialization becomes less an economic history than a gender issue. If this perspective is cockeyed, it does illuminate some home truths. In the book’s most convincing section, he tallies the burdens that have come with the new economy and the masculine mystique. He brings new light to familiar statistics: men die earlier than women; suffer higher incidence of heart disease, alcoholism and other stress disorders; work the most dangerous jobs; comprise the majority of the homeless, and so on. “I was very careful not to say we’re being victimized by women,” says Kimbrell. “As more women become more prominent in the workplace-as they have a right to do–my view is that they will begin to take on the same archetypes that make up the masculine mystique.” Kimbrell closes with a rosy call to activism: for father’s rights, for a 30-hour-workweek, and for more parental leave for men as well as women. Utopian, perhaps, but it beats ritual drumming.
The problem with Kimbrell’s book, and with most of the others, is that men really don’t constitute a class along the lines of other groups. To consider men the victims of the Industrial Revolution, for instance, is to ignore men’s role in leading it. When Kimbrell notes that men run greater risks of being incarcerated or executed, he conveniently ignores that men are also more likely to commit violent crimes.
For all their good intentions and occasional insights, there’s a slack complacency to these books. All begin by accepting the conventional wisdom that men are pigs, then commit their wisdom to examining the finer points of pork. An examination of masculinity ought to challenge the stereotypes, not just excuse them. So what does a man want? No easy answers. But at the very least, he deserves a more probing book than he’ll find here.
