Porn Stars, Promise-Keepers, and "Pound Dawgs" A Comment on: Stiffed, by Susan Faludi

Susan Faludi

By Cynthia Peters

Male porn stars get paid based on their ability to sustain an erection. Promise Keepers are told to look to God as a Father they can trust, and to stock up on Promise Keeper mugs, t-shirts, and other memorabilia. "Pound Dawgs" - extreme fans of the Cleveland Browns who dressed in orange and brown, wore dog costumes to games, barked at the opposing team and threw dog biscuits on the field - felt a kinship with the players and other fans until they were betrayed by a money-grubbing owner who got a lucrative deal from Baltimore and summarily moved the team, leaving the "pound dawgs" desolate.

These guys have been "stiffed" according to Susan Faludi, author of the unfortunately titled book, along with the laid-off ship-builders, gang members, Vietnam vets as well as their anti-war counterparts, Citadel students, drag queens, and numerous other men. In an interview with Don Hazen of Alternet, Faludi says, "I don't endorse reductive thinking." Yet the title of her book calls to mind the occasional condition of a male body part, and the subtitle refers to the "American Man" - as if there were such a singular thing that could be uniformly betrayed. Even the photo on the front cover offers a sharply reduced image of masculinity - a single white steelworker in a macho pose.

Reductive thinking is perhaps the greatest flaw of this exhaustively researched journalistic account of some men's lives in the late 1990s. In her effort to show how post-World War II men have been betrayed by an increasingly "ornamental" culture that prizes consumerism over productive activity, loyalty to brand names over service, and consumption over connections to family and community, Faludi conflates all men and virtually ignores the profound race, class and cultural differences among groups of men. Although Faludi features the emptiness of the marketplace and a robotic corporate culture as culprits in men's failure to be initiated into meaningful masculinity, ultimately the blame seems to go to the "fathers" of these men.

Faludi, author of Backlash!, is a feminist, but she employs none of feminism 's hard learned lessons about analyzing gender problems. Too bad. Stiffed would have greatly benefited from a more nuanced definition of men and masculinity. Faludi says one of the reasons men have not organized to fight their own oppression the way women have is because they have no identifiable enemy. She thinks that feminists have had an easier time uniting because they have a common enemy: men. But that is not so. While there may have been some aspects of second wave feminism that saw men as the enemy, most feminists in the 1960s and 70s were attempting to understand and defy patriarchy, which is a system, a set of institutions, not a collection of individual men. True, patriarchy was sometimes narrowly defined and not always contextualized by race and class. But thanks to mostly women of color, third wave feminism came along and moved us beyond a white middle-class definition of patriarchy. Feminism has taught us that identities and power relations are not rooted solely in gender and that there is no single definition of womanhood.

Faludi does not pin personal blame on fathers. She sees them as having been battered by forces that left them emotionally "crippled," mute, incapable of ushering their sons into "manhood." Having been abandoned by their fathers, sons are left with no moral compass, no sense of responsibility, forever in search of paternal figures elsewhere, usually to no avail.

Unlike their fathers in World War II, soldiers in Vietnam, according to Faludi, did not benefit from being in a brotherhood of men headed by paternal officers who would give rough but loving guidance. Instead, the military of the 1960s adopted a corporate style of management that treated soldiers like replaceable cogs, did not inspire discipline or respect, and was mostly incompetent. The worst officers were - you guessed it - fatherless, or nearly so, thus lacking those all important roots in a sturdy masculinity that would enable them to properly "father" their young recruits. "Symbolically speaking," says Faludi, "what the fathers really passed on to their sons was not the GI ethic but the GI Joe `action figure,' a twelve-inch shrunken-man doll whose main feature was his ability to accessorize."

Faludi can certainly turn a phrase. Her writing is witty and clever, and sometimes penetrating. But just as it can be hard to "establish a foothold on the shiny flat surface of a commercial culture," so can it be difficult to wrestle with some of Faludi's slippery concepts. What exactly was the G.I. ethic of the previous fathers? Did it somehow net us fairer wars? And what's so bad about accessorizing anyway? A lot of men do it. Gay men flaunt it. But then again, they're not real men. So what is a real man? I still don 't know. Again, Faludi misses an opportunity to critique the entire notion of masculinity, and instead almost appears nostalgic for the old fashioned kind.

In one of the most moving but ultimately disappointing sections of the book, Faludi tells the story of the My Lai massacre through the eyes of Michael Bernhardt - a witness of, but not a participant in, the massacre. While the rest of his company speared babies and slaughtered children as they knelt in prayer, Bernhardt ran around screaming, "This is wrong!" Why did Bernhardt have the backbone to protest his fellow soldiers' actions? And where did he get the courage to later come forward and publicly expose their terrible crimes? Faludi offers a range of insight, but it comes down to the fact that Bernhardt had a loving and present father who taught him that "being a man is about responsibility, it's about taking care of people." Lieutenant Calley, the officer immediately in command of Charlie Company, came from an "emotionally cold family," with a father who drank too much and "didn't really listen." Juxtaposing these two men in this context implies that My Lai might not have happened if the officer in charge had had a stronger relationship with his father. Indeed, it is possible that another officer might not have ordered his men to kill in that particular instance. But "My Lai" would have happened anyway, as it did, over and over again in Vietnam. Villages were strafed; children were napalmed; the country was laid to waste; and untold civilians were murdered in a fundamentally corrupt, illegal, immoral war.

Yes, men are oppressed. In wildly different ways. Black men have a significant chance of being imprisoned or dead before they reach middle age. Gay men are repeatedly punished in a variety of ways for their sexuality. Working class boys will get funneled into high schools that specialize in auto mechanics while their upper class counterparts will go into liberal arts programs that teach the skills of decisionmaking and control. Some working men spend their adult lives manufacturing useless gadgets and barbaric weaponry, performing dangerous and boring labor, or providing service with a smile to the privileged. Immigrant men pick pesticide laden food at substandard wages. Upper class men, well, they have a hard time expressing their feelings and they draw huge salaries from corporations that pay them to maintain meaningless hierarchies. Poor things.

In an eloquent passage, Michael Bernhardt, the My Lai massacre witness, wonders about the definition of man. "All these years I was trying to be all these stereotypes. And what was the use? It's a variable thing. You can't score it. I'm beginning to think now of not even defining it anymore. I'm beginning to think now just in terms of people." Faludi applauds Bernhardt's rejection of the masculine yardstick, and she echoes his sentiment in her conclusion. But deciding to think of everyone as "people" doesn't work either. That means not having to address the way power can fall along gender lines, with the guys usually coming out on top, even if they get stiffed along the way. In other words, we still need to understand how society constructs a damaging "masculinity," at the expense of everyone, and we need to envision the plethora of liberating ways it could be reconstructed.