<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" You have to laugh, or at least smile nervously. Just when the broadside hit of feminism has finally been dealt with, when the turn and counterturn of gender politics is beginning to make sense, when it seems possible to occupy a modified sort of manhood--tuned in, flexible, but still strong--news arrives from the front lines. We&amp;#039;ve been &amp;quot;stiffed,&amp;quot; sold down the river by the very culture that we built from the shiny materials of the postwar world. Stiffed--that&amp;#039;s the title of Susan Faludi&amp;#039;s new would-be bombshell, the successor to her 1991 bombshell Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women.  This woman is clearly on a mission: Find a soft place in the collective male self-esteem and drive at it until the lance runs red. Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. The premise? So far as manhood is concerned, we are in the midst of a &amp;quot;domestic apocalypse.&amp;quot; Faludi lists off Tailhook, militia violence, schoolyard shooters, crime among urban blacks, deadbeat dads, even the president&amp;#039;s recent public debacle. These are effects. The cause? Men&amp;#039;s traditional sense of mastery is at the mercy of &amp;quot;global, cultural, and commercial forces that seem to be sweeping away the soil beneath their feet.&amp;quot; Is this for real? The opening salvo of the teaser pamphlet (books were not made available to reviewers) is so general, so vastly inclusive, that I can&amp;#039;t tell. Does she mean me? Do I feel stiffed? Does my neighbor John or my friend Tom, the poet? I look down the street at the guys washing their cars and playing street hockey with their kids. Raise your hand if you feel stiffed. We are obviously in the realm of punditspeak here, where anyone can say anything about anything and be as right as the person who says the opposite. Still, it nags. Am I being unnecessarily defensive? Could Faludi be catching the corner of something here? I do a few hundred push-ups and change the oil in my car, but all the time I&amp;#039;m thinking about her opening parable. She writes about a postwar father waking his young son in the night, hurrying him into the yard. This is the archetypal male errand--the legacy moment. &amp;quot;Earlier that evening,&amp;quot; she explains, &amp;quot;the boy and his father hunched conspiratorially over the latest Life magazine, the father pointing out the features of this fantastic orb they were to observe. . . .&amp;quot; A father myself, I am a sucker for this dad-and-lad kitsch. I read how they kneel together on the scratchy wool blanket. The father points to a glimmer in the sky. The boy knows that this is &amp;quot;more than just an object; it is a beacon of pride and secret knowledge, a paternal gift, rocketing him into a future that his father helped to launch.&amp;quot; Faludi uses this anecdote to invoke the whole imperialist macho of the postwar space race--science and American know-how rampant--and then goes on to trace the collapse of that spectacular optimism in the lives of a generation of males. Gender wars are only a sidebar issue; the point is that we overreached and are now reaping a pervasive sense of diminution. I&amp;#039;m not quite getting it, though. Examine myself as I will, I can&amp;#039;t seem to forge a link between the space program and my self-image as a man. But I do come up with a different notion, another way in which that culprit technology robbed that boy&amp;#039;s--and my--sense of entitlement about being in the world. I&amp;#039;m talking about computer culture, about the vast, mergered bureaucracy that makes it possible. This is where the diminution really happens. Masculinity, manhood--these are not absolute qualities that we simply manifest. No, they are part of a dynamic of interchange; they flourish according to context. And perception is a vital part of any such context. Every man knows exactly how his sense of himself--his vitality of presentation--waxes or wanes in the admiring or coldly dismissive gaze of a woman. This works in other ways, too. When the bank teller nods and says, &amp;quot;Good morning,&amp;quot; you feel seen; your membership in the ranks of the living has been stamped. When the ATM spits out a ribbon of paper, by contrast, you feel slightly reduced. Another part of you has gone unused. The circuits don&amp;#039;t see you. More and more of the circuits don&amp;#039;t see you. This carries over; it&amp;#039;s bound to. As Lieutenant Kojak used to say, &amp;quot;Who loves ya, baby?&amp;quot; Well, the people you live with. Your neighbors, your family, and, maybe most important, your kids. It may be that it&amp;#039;s even harder to be a man in the public arena, but that just means that it&amp;#039;s all the more vital on the home stage. Faludi is dead wrong. Manhood is not in crisis. It&amp;#039;s just retooling to meet a new range of demands. As the father of a very watchful five-year-old, I think about this all the time. What does my son see when he looks my way? What are his criteria? Can you even have criteria at his age? His understanding of masculinity at this point comes from two major sources: television and videos on one hand, and interactions with his peers and family--me--on the other. What a split. The entertainment imagery is all about impossible strength and heroics--figures whose wishes translate purely into deeds. His own world, meanwhile, models a comparatively shocking ordinariness: kids who mainly miss the ball when they swing, and a father who offers him no silver balloon. Two worlds, two very different projections of manhood. But somehow I don&amp;#039;t fret that my son will grow up feeling &amp;quot;stiffed&amp;quot; when he finds that the real does not even begin to map the ideal. He won&amp;#039;t because times have changed. A master of the image culture, he already understands the gulf between worlds. I don&amp;#039;t know how he knows this, but he does. The betrayal that Faludi worries about with such a terrier zeal happened--if it happened at all--under the old dispensation, when children were raised, as her father-and-son account makes painfully clear, in a literal culture, a culture with no ironies. The new version of manhood will be--already is--savvy and contextual, without implied reference to some clench-jawed expectation, nine tenths of which was posturing anyway. It will be more human, softer, because in a society so tyrannized by the circuit, the idea of the human will itself be so much more precious. Self-constructed, the new man--who fancies ribs but also pesto--will pay no heed whatsoever to anxious trend-spotting like Faludi&amp;#039;s. He will know that such self-consciousness is to real masculinity as the query &amp;quot;Is everything okay?&amp;quot; is to a budding erection--the kiss of death. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a292/esq1099-oct-page/>