Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man

When I listen to the sons born after World War II, born to the fathers who had won that war, I sometimes find myself in a reverie. It is a reverie fashioned half of my own recollections and half out of the memories of others. The more men I talk to, the more detailed this imagined story becomes. It is a story of a boy. He is in bed, pretending to sleep. He is waiting for his father. Tonight, the father has promised, he will reveal to the son his miraculous inheritance: the transit of an artificial star.

The father appears in the doorway, hall light streaming over his shoulders and falling in a solid and luminous rectangle across the bedroom floor, like the dusty beam from a movie projector. For a moment, from the boy's vantage, his father seems almost unreal, a flattened spectral image. And then the image moves forward into the room, hustling the boy into a jacket over his cowboy pajamas, arming him with a big chrome flashlight, digging out his Keds from under a heap of clothes in the closet. And the boy pulls the coat around himself and, even though it is August and not cold, feels wrapped in a delicious and unexpected comfort, enveloped in his father's hushed exuberance, in the thrilling novelty of a father-son collusion.

After dinner earlier that evening, while his mother was busy scraping dishes in the kitchen, the boy and his father hunched conspiratorially over the latest Life magazine, the father pointing out the features of this fantastical orb they were to observe, just the two of them alone, at an hour later than the boy had ever been allowed to be awake: ten stories high! Seven times as bright as the North Star! His father said the satellite was really more of a balloon, a "satelloon," and told him how it had been pinned down with huge clothespins and folded into an egg-shaped magnesium sphere for the launch, and how the shell had hatched open, right on time, when it reached its orbit, a mighty man-made explosion giving birth to a shiny big beach ball called Echo. His father said Echo's skin was half the thickness of the cellophane wrap on his cigarette pack; a meteorite could puncture it: even the sun's rays would disturb its course. It could collapse at any moment! His father said. And it was this that would linger in the boy's mind: that something so powerful could be so fragile.

The boy, clutching his flashlight and his Davy Crockett cap, races after his father, along the shadowy upper hallway past the other bedroom where the boy's mother lies sleeping, then down the stairs and through the living room where the blank eye of their new black-and-white Philco gazes cooly upon their passage. On a sticky July evening a month ago, the boy had sat with his parents before the Philco and watched a young presidential nominee on a confetti-strewn podium turn his face ceremonially to the west and call on the young men" of the "new generation" to join "a race for the mastery of the sky." It was up to boys like him, the man on the TV set had said, to save not just Earth but the "far side of space" from a communism that had already "penetrated Asia," a phrase which made the boy picture a many-tentacled alien insinuating itself into the crevices of garrisoned borders -- a monster more likely, the boy imagined, to come from outer space than to invade it.

He follows his father through the glinting kitchen, the Frigidaire thrumming in darkness, through the back screen door and down the steps, where the aluminum patio furniture and the shiny globe of the barbecue grill phosphoresce like so many flying saucers come in for a landing. Then they are out on the black-green quarter-acre stamp of clipped lawn. His father bends, spreading his old navy peacoat like a blanket on the buzz-cut grass. The man and then the boy in his racoon cap kneel on the scratchy wool, two pioneers of the crabgrass prairie, and then the father reaches over and snaps off the boy's flashlight. All the familiar moorings drop away and they are swept up, a father and son on a magic carpet, into the bright sky. The father touches the boy's shoulders, and directs his vision to a faraway glimmer. The boy knows that what his father is pointing out is 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. At first all he sees is the blanket of stars, spreading out cold and vast between the trees. But then, there it is at last, a pinpoint of animated light crawling across the firmament, infinitesmally tiny, impossibly bright.

I KNEW THIS BOY OR, AS ANYONE WHO GREW UP AS I DID IN the late '50s and early '60s, I knew dozens of them. He was Bobby on the corner, who roamed the neighborhood with his cap gun and holster, terrorizing girls and household pets. He was Ronnie, who wore his Superman suit way past Halloween and, sure he could fly, leaped from his living room stairs one day and cracked his head open on the foyer linoleum. He was Frankie, who blew off part of his pinkie while trying to set off a miniature rocket in the schoolyard. Even if he wasn't one of the boys brought out into the backyard and shown an American satellite glinting in the sky, he was introduced to the same promises and the same vision, and by such a father. The fathers often seemed remote, as unreachable and unreal as the TV-show dads, though not intentionally so. They were just fathers in the era after the war, living in brand new suburbs with wives and children they barely knew, working at brand new jobs in brand new corporate "campuses," miles from their brand new aluminum-sided houses. Which is to say that the life of the postwar fathers was altogether too newly out of the box for them to understand it, much less explain it to their sons.

So many of the fathers were veterans of World War II and Korea, but their bloody path to virility was not one they sought to pass on or much discuss. Because the fathers offered few particulars of their baptisms at Midway and Heartbreak Ridge, the war was a remote romance that each boy had had to embellish with details culled from Saturday afternoon movie dialogues and, later, from the minibiographies printed on the side of his CI Joe's coffin-shaped cardboard box. Not that their father's knowledge of the war, if they had shared it, could have helped the boys, whose male proving ground was to be on peaceful ground. This was to be the era of manhood after victory, when the pilgrimage to masculinity could not be guided by Mars.

But the satellite: Here was a visible patrimony. And so Echo, with its Mylar-like reflective shell floating a thousand miles above the earth, became a remote point of triangulation compassing one generation of men to the next, and a visual marker, an I.O.U., of vaulting technological power and progress to be reaped in the future of every American baby boom boy. The men of the fathers' generation had "won" the world, and now they were giving it to their sons. Their nation had come into its own, powerful, dominant, controlling the greatest destructive force. The fathers had made their sons masters of the universe and it felt, as in the time of Alexander, that what they had created would last forever.

The American period of soaring expectations that followed the close of World War II is conventionally known as the "baby boom" era, as if its defining trait was the nesting and diapering habits of young mothers. But truly it was the era of the boy. It was the culture of My Three Sons and Leave it to Beaver episodes, of Pop Warner rituals and Westinghouse science scholarships, of BB guns and rocket clubs, of football practice and lettered jackets, of magazine ads where "Dad" seemed always to be beaming down at his scampish cowboy-suited son or proudly handing the boy's older brother the keys to a brand-new tailfinned convertible. It was a father-son Eden showcased in Life magazine with such headlines as "In New England, Busy Day with Dad" and "Pointers for Playful Fathers," and with pictorials like the one where Dad shows Bill, nine, and Rob, eleven, "how to remove an old stoker motor from the furnace in the cellar." It was a world where, regardless of the truth that lay behind each garden gate, the popular culture led us to believe fathers were spending every leisure moment in rounds of roughhouse play and model-airplane construction and backyard catch with their beloved boys.

In the aspiring middle-class suburb where I came of age, there was no mistaking the belief in the boy's preeminence; it was evident in the solicitous attentions of the parents and the schoolteachers, in the centrality of coaches and Cub Scouts and Little League, in the community life that revolved around boys' contests and boys' championships and boys' scores -- as if these outposts of tract-home America had each been built as exhibition rings for male achievement, which perhaps they had. It was evident in the periodic rampages of suburban boys that always seemed to go unchecked, the way they tore up the lawns with their minibikes and hurled rocks at newcomers with impunity and tormented the girls at the public swimming pool; inherent in their behavior was the-assumption that this was their birthright -- to be imperial bullies over their miniature dominions. To grow up as a girl in this era was to look on with envy and to perceive the boy as being automatically entitled and powerful. Surely when we were grown, he would have the control. He would dispense the gifts. The boy believed that, too.

Theirs was to be a frontier that encompassed the galaxies, an enemy that loomed massive over the oceans and stained much of the globe red, a brotherly institution that would swallow up billions of federal dollars and employ record numbers of men, and a domestic front in which feminine dependency was elevated to a near religion by the media and Madison Avenue.

In this common campaign, men had a clear purpose: to promote and expand their nation's dominance. And if this was a greater burden than their fathers had shouldered, well weren't the sons better equipped to execute it? They were Cold Warriors representing the most powerful country in the world. They had the strongest economic pulse recorded in national history. Wouldn't a boy in this world have every right to believe in his father's patrimony, his father's promise? Wasn't be in charge of his destiny -- and his nation's?

AS THE NATION PROGRESSED TOWARD THE MILLENNIUM, all the nation's pulse takers seemed to agree that a domestic apocalypse was underway: American manhood was under siege. Newspaper editors, TV pundits, fundamentalist preachers, marketers, legislators, no matter where they perched on the political spectrum, had a contribution to make to the chronicles of the "masculinity crisis." Right-wing talk radio hosts and left-wing men's movement spokesmen found themselves uncomfortably on common ground. Periodicals of every political stripe bannered the crisis. "Men on Trial," the headlines cried. "The Trouble with Boys," "Are Men Necesssary?" "Maybe Manhood Can Recover." Newspaper and broadcast journalists raced to report on one toxic young male hot spot after another: the Citadel, the Spur Posse, Tailhook, South Central gangsters, militiamen blowing up federal buildings and abortion clinics, and Arkansas and Mississippi and Kentucky and Oregon schoolyard shooters. The media's softer lifestyle outlets happily turned their attentions to male crisis lite. the boom in male cosmetic surgery, the hair-growth and impotence drug bonanza, the resurgence of "gentlemen's" cigar clubs and lap-dancing emporiums. Social scientists from right, left, and center pontificated on "endangered" young black men in the inner cities, Ritalin-addicted white "bad boys" in the suburbs, "deadbeat dads" everywhere, and, very occasionally, the distress of downsized male workers. Social psychologists issued reports on a male-only rise in pathologies: mental illness, suicides, certain criminal behaviors. And political pundits by century's end seemed incapable of discussing anything but the president's supposedly dysfunc-tional masculinity; they contemplated Bill Clinton's testosterone level and manly credentials (Too much or not enough? Office lech or military virgin?) as if they were the nation's greatest blight.

Pollsters investigated the electoral habits of a new voting bloc they called "the Angry White Male," and researched the shopping choices of an emerging men-in-crisis demographic that they dubbed the "Contenders" or, less charitably, the "Change Resisters." Marketers hastened to turn the crisis into entertainment and profits -- from TV programs such as Men Behaving Badly to sporting-goods sales of T-shirts that proclaimed "Destroy All Girls" and "Wife Beater" (a phenomenon described accurately enough in a front-page newspaper headline as "Cashing In on the Bad Boy Image") to advertising campaigns meant to salve the crisis-ridden male's wounds, like Brut's new aftershave slogan for the '90s, "Men Are Back!" And by the hundreds of thousands men without portfolio confirmed the male-crisis diagnosis, attending mass gatherings of both the black Nation-of-Islam-led Million Man March in 1995 and, two years later, the largely white evangelical-led Promise Keepers rally entitled, hopefully, "Stand in the Gap."

If so many concurred on the existence of the male crisis, the consensus collapsed as soon as anyone asked the underlying question: Why? Not that there was a shortage of responses. Everyone proposed a favorite whipping boy -- or, more often, whipping girl -- and blame-seekers on all sides went after their select culprits with a righteous and bitter relish.

As a feminist writer, I had my own whipping boy, but over the years as I came to know the stories of men who had faced the betrayal of the patrimony, my opinion would come to change, and a new idea would suggest itself.

Underlying all the disagreement over what is causing men's confusion and crisis runs a constant Line of thinking that blinds all of us -- whatever our political beliefs -- from understanding the nature of men's predicament. Ask feminists to diagnose men's problem and you will get a very clear explanation: Men are in crisis because women are properly challenging male dominance. Ask anti-feminists, and you will get a diagnosis that, in one way, agrees with that of their political opponents. Men are troubled, conservative pundits say, because women have gone far beyond their demands for equal treatment and now are trying to take power and control away from men. Both the feminist and anti-feminist views are rooted in the peculiarly modern American perception that to be a man means to be at the controls and to at all times feel yourself to be in control. That popular cliche of the feminist saying men that are to blame for everything is just the flip side of the "family-values" reactionary expecting men to be in charge of everything. The problem with this perception is that it bears no correspondence to how the average man actually feels and what his actual position is in the world. It doesn't recognize that "control" can be a last-ditch substitute, a stand-in for other needs -- to build, provide, be of use to a public world.

If men are the masters of their fate, what do they do about the unspoken sense that they are being mastered, in the marketplace and at home, by global, cultural, and commercial forces that seem to be sweeping away the soil beneath their feet? If men are mythologized as the ones who make things happen, then how can they begin to analyze what is happening to them? The very paradigm of modern American masculinity -- that it is all about being master of your universe -- prevents men from thinking their way out of their dilemma, from taking active political steps to resolve their crisis. That they are seen only as acting upon the world stops them from acting on their own behalf. How would men's problems be perceived if we were to consider men as the subjects of their world, not just its authors? What if we put aside for a time the assumption of male dominance, put away our feminist rap sheet of men's crimes and misdemeanors, or our antifeminist indictment of women's heist of male authority -- and just looked at what men have experienced in the past generation? God is the only being who has no history. Even the most "powerful" man has had at least as much happen to him as he has made happen.

What did happen to that generation of boys I grew up with, to the men of postwar America?

Copyright © 1999 by Susan Faludi