'Something is not right with the boys' -- SRobinson at Orcinus

[bobbieinok]

http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/

....

Something is not right with the boys. Something in the way Americans look at males and manhood has gone sour, curdling into to a rank, toxic, and nasty brew that is changing the entire flavor of our culture. Men everywhere seem to be furious. Some turn it outward against women, against society, against the institutions that no longer seem to nurture them. Some turn it inward against themselves, putting their energies into bizarre self-destructive fantasy lives centered around money, violence, and sex. Some, more disenchanted than angry, check out entirely, abdicating any interest in making commitments or contributions to a family, a profession, or a community to spend their lives as perpetual Lost Boys. Together, all this misdirected, destructive energy has become a social, cultural, and political liability that we can no longer afford to ignore.

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Many comments at the site.
As the old preacher asked in the opening scenes of The Big Chill: "Are the satisfactions of being a good man among our common men no longer enough?" Given the number of men who seem to be completely disconnected from the very idea of the greater good, let alone the thought that they have any responsibility to it, the answer seems to be: No. They're not.

....

But maybe what we are seeing here is a loose end, a leftover bit of unfinished business that hasn't even begun to be addressed yet. Maybe, for the men, the process of re-creating their place in our culture has hardly even started -- and their confidence in the enterprise is far less certain. While the shift has generally worked out well for men who had the education and resources to process and adapt to it, there are apparently a great many men who are still deeply grieving the loss of our widely-shared traditional assumptions about what makes a man, and what men are supposed to contribute to the larger society.

Without those assumptions to give their lives structure and meaning, these guys are drifting -- not sure how they fit in, or what they're supposed to contribute, or what separates the men from the boys in this rearranged new world. And some of them, as we've seen here, are drifting off in very dangerous directions as they try to express a little manhood in a world where it doesn't seem to mean much any more.

....

We have been here before. Detached, disaffected, angry boys with guns were a national scourge during and after the Civil War. Gangsters made city neighborhoods violent in the years just before and during the Depression. I'd like to think we're going to get through it this time, too.

But we will not stop it -- nor prevent its reoccurrence in the years ahead -- until we come to grips with the deeper reasons so many men are angry, and start figuring out how we are going to address that rage at its root. It's time for that discussion to begin.

[grasswire]

1. this is an interesting direction for the author...

...because he is a bit of an expert on the very radical right in the U.S.

[bobbieinok]

5. this is actually by Sara Robinson who posts there

[Viva_La_Revolution]

2. I have a hard time dealing with the 'waaa! we're losing all our

privileges' crowd. I understand that their 'place' in the world has changed, but ya know what, so has everyone's. Things are more fair now. tough. deal with it.

sorry to harsh on your post (it's good!) these people just piss me off. :(

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. And our pop culture doesn't help

When baby boomers were growing up, the male heroes presented to children on TV were cowboys or soldiers or detectives, but they were clearly ordinary men with attractive but normal faces and physiques. (George Reeve as Superman even looks a little flabby by today's standards.) They used violence as a last resort, never got carried away with it, and exhibited good manners and kindness in their interactions with the non-villains.

Ever since the Reagan era, we've had the Rambo type, reaching its extreme in the WWF wrestling freak show: steroid cases with wild looks and wilder actions. What was with WWF wrestling showing up on several channels at once all of a sudden in the early 1990s?

Crudity is king, starting again in the Reagan era with "You've Gotta Fight for Your Right to Paaaaaaaaarty" and the pointless bragging, over the top cursing and sexism, and mock aggressiveness of the commercially promoted rap stars.

"Jackass" was the logical conclusion.

What's with all the movies that consist mostly of car chases and explosions?

It's as if the pop culture is conspiring to make everyone, but especially boys, meaner and dumber.

It's a real tough time for boys who don't fit into and can't fake the mean and dumb pattern.

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

7. Bingo...

... the WWF/WWE musclebound morons that can only trash talk and cut others down has been a peeve of mine since it returned to the mainstream in the 1980's. They all think the more crude your insults, the more powerful they are. It is sad. We seriously needed Captain Kangaroo in the mornings to tell kids to have a nice day, instead of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles et al, advocating violence a half hour before walking out the door for school.

[some guy]

11. a little deeper

than just the heroes on TV - before the baby boomer generation, there was essentially no TV, so boys got their impressions of "what a man is" from the men around them, not from images on TV which only show portions of "what a man is" or is supposed to be, emphasizing certain aspects, completely ignoring others, so there is only a partial man to model one's self on.

The 60s culture of rejecting societal norms worked better for women than it did for men; women, especially from a feminist POV could look at traditional male roles, and say to themselves, "We are being prevented from those things, so those are goals to strive for, barriers to break down." From a male perspective, it was just "We don't want to do what our fathers did!" - but without a clear expression of what was wanted instead. Forty years later, that new male perspective is still missing.


edit: spell-check - embrace it...

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

4. My anecdotal evidence as a female citizen.

I work with, know, and am friends with men. I love my family, many of whom are men.

I have been married to a man I love for over two decades.

I see anger and I also see humanity and a hunger to see things fair and just.

Men are in the unenviable position, in this country, of being expected to be strong and brave and the hero and the rescuer and the daredevil and the genius, and oh yeah, perfect as a son, brother, husband or father.

The men I know and love seem to have an instinct to protect those they love, those they feel are being hurt, either physically or emotionally and enjoy being the father and husband. They do get very angry, these men, who do everything from hunt to heal in their personal lives. The gay men I know are mostly in long term committed relationships and don't shy away from who they are.

To the men I know and love: :patriot: MKJ

[rucky]

6. In Ohio where we've lost 200,000 jobs

I'm not seeing the guys still working feeling the pride of being a working man anymore. There are some serious self-esteem problems with guys I meet here, compared to my friends from the West Coast.

Providing for your family, and job security are tied to a man's self-esteem. Here in the heartland, they still buy into the role of man as provider. When he can't do the job because of the incredible squeeze that's being put upon the middle class, what's a guy to do? Can't blame anybody but himself, otherwise he'll sound like a whiney baby (and he'll have to admit that he's struggling). The frustration has come out some way.

This is America, right? If you work hard, you should be able to earn a living, feed and care for your family, and retire when you're 60. That deal's off as far as corporate america is concerned. If there isn't that guarantee, what else does a working person have to hold on to?

[raising2moredems]

8. The pukes figured out how to use the blame game

Starting with the reagan lie of the welfare queen, they've brainwashed white males to believe that it is <insert domestic enemy of the day> fault. The pukes need an enemy and the cold war is over. So we uppity women are "taking" all the jobs and girls get an "unfair" advantage in school, the poor boys are "left behind". Can't possibly be the politicians choking off money for education etc. or corporate america's greed. And yes if you work hard, you should be able to make a living wage but for too many whiners, they keep voting the damn idiots back into office. The one and only weapon the average american has is his/her pocketbook. I use my weapon wisely, e.g. minimal debt and purchasing as little as possible.

[rucky]

12. Yep. scapegoating is a safe way to take off some of that pressure

they put on themselves.

And the people actually responsible (GOPs and CEOs) are really good at pointing that finger away from themselves.

[ixion]

9. gee, what's not to love about living in society?

You're tagged and ID'd from the moment you're born.

You spend most of your time trying to appease one agency or institution, trying to comply with some regulation or paying some tax or fee.

You scramble trying to stay alive, trying to make a living -- not to even mention 'getting ahead'.

Any number of mistakes or deviations from a rigid 'norm' can cause you to be effectively ostracized from this same society. Bad credit? Use drugs? Like sex? Any of these can affect the kind of job you may or may not get, and what kind of life you can expect to lead.

Society demands passive behavior, but requires aggressive behavior to 'get ahead'.

Society demands ethics, but requires unethical behavior to 'get ahead'.

Society demands adherence to a (constantly changing) strict moral code, yet exhibits no morality when a social institution interacts with the individual.

Society demands truth, but institutions consistently lack honesty when dealing with the individual. The truth, if 'inappropriate', is not to be discussed.

Integration within the community is requisite, but only if the interaction occurs within the parameters mentioned above.

The basic underlying tennant of western society is this: "everyone for themselves."


...

And yet people sit around scratching their heads wondering why there are angry people out there.

[bobbieinok]

10. Susan Faludi's book about men Stiffed

(She also wrote the book Backlash about the war on women.)

One review at amazon.com

Were the Astronauts Who Went to the Moon "Stiffed?", January 6, 2006
Reviewer: Roger D. Launius "Roger D. Launius" (Washington, D.C., United States) - See all my reviews

...

At sum, Faludi makes the case, sometimes strained but always relentlessly argued, that fundamental shifts to a stable and traditional society in the 1960s and 1970s transformed the male world in ways that required totally new mindsets. Particularly, she sees the move from a culture that valued loyalty, collegial relations, and skill in a vocation to what she calls an "ornamental culture" focused on image and celebrity. The emphasis of flash over substance has been found in all sectors of modern America's society, Faludi insists, and it continues to dominate our public discourse.

Since there are many fascinating reviews available of "Stiffed," I want to focus attention on the section of the book I found most useful. I have been working on a study of "Project Apollo in American Myth and Memory" and Susan Faludi's chapter, "Man in a Can," has proven quite useful in igniting thoughts on the place of the astronauts in the Moon landings. In this chapter Faludi concentrates on telling the story of the deep depression, alcoholism, "nervous breakdown," and divorce of Buzz Aldrin after his return to Earth following the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. No single person was more important than Aldrin in helping the United States reach the Moon, whose work on orbital rendezvous made possible the Gemini and Apollo missions. But Aldrin had a delicate psyche. He could never accomplish enough to satisfy his father and his failure to become the first person on the surface of the Moon signaled a fundamental failure, something he was spring-loaded to adopt anyway because of years of conditioning by his father. Aldrin tells that story in his confessional and courageous memoir, "Return to Earth" (Random House, 1973).

Susan Faludi mines Aldrin's book, as well as others, for evidence of a devolution of the importance of individual skill and the emergence of an "ornamental culture" at NASA in which the astronauts were little more than props for a larger publicity campaign. She asserts, quite rightly, that "The astronaut served as an emblem in many matters preoccupying cold-war America: beating the Russians, demonstrating national mastery, wedding technology to progress, proving the point of man over machine. But paramount among his symbolic roles, he was to be a masculine avatar for a strange and distinctly new realm on earth." She argues that the astronaut was "a first-draft response to disturbing questions about manhood in an ornamental age" (p. 452). Rather than being valued for their capabilities in pushing back the final frontier, Faludi comments, the astronauts were charged with the opening of a new entertainment frontier. She draws direct linkages between Aldrin and his fellow astronauts with earlier western entertainments such as Wild Bill Hickok's Wild West Show. "But the astronauts heralded a time," she emphasizes, "when the sideshow would as never before supplant the main event" (p. 452).

All of this was totally understandable to Faludi. She adds: "NASA needed the pleasing faces, the frenzy of celebrity, to seduce the government, the media, and the public into accepting the huge expense of the aerospace program" (p. 461). Aldrin reacted to this "ornamental culture" drastically, but Faludi believes that many other astronauts recoiled from this approach. They just responded in different ways.

Were the astronauts simply "ornamental?" Clearly, they were celebrities, but their celebrity status seems to have been predicated on their exciting and important work. An interesting question: Were the astronauts "famous for simply being famous?" Were they famous for "real" feats, or "perceived" feats? Did the public really understand (or care) about the feats that were achieved? Or were they famous because somebody told the public they were famous? I believe astronauts can be likened to sports and entertainment idols. Like them, to remain a hero they had to attain great feats. This begs the question, how effective was NASA in scripting the perception of the public?

I question if Faludi is correct in her analysis, at least in the context of the Apollo astronauts, but her discussion provides an interesting perspective on masculinity in recent America and highlights some, but not all, of the issues at play among men in this post-modern society.