"[There's] fairly strong evidence that in many ways it sucks much more, at this point in American history, to be a man than to be a woman, and very compelling arguments that it’s still women who are getting the shaft from the patriarchy much more than it is men who are getting the shaft from any kind of gynocracy."--Dan Oppenheimer
Dan Oppenheimer of the blog Masculinity and its Discontents, who wrote several posts for The Feminist Dissident, discusses the recent Vanity Fair article Men Evolving Badly: American manhood is in crisis (4/21/08) in his latest submission below.
Men v. Women--Who’s screwing who, and to the benefit of whom?
By Dan Oppenheimer
James Wolcott, a critic who I admire, has a surprisingly unsatisfying review in this month’s Vanity Fair of a number of books on the masculinity crisis. Wolcott writes:
"The American man is in a sorry way. And here I thought it was just me mewling into my milk dish. But, no, my brother-men are hurting and hiding behind the adobe walls of foolish pride, unheard, unseen, unattended—until it’s too late. If the books banked around me are halfway credible, a large-scale crisis has befallen the American male, a prolonged batting slump that has bottomed into pathos, self-recrimination, and pathological dysfunction. It is a silent epidemic, a shadow plague of frustration, festering anger, and doubt, the misery held inside until it erupts into the headlines or fills up the cardiac unit. Its toll is indicated in everything from the suicide rate (four times as many men commit suicide as do women) to testosterone dips (a study in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism found a substantial decline in male testosterone levels between 1987 and 2004), to porn-addled masturbation to the point of glazed stupor (the ick-perfect cover photo of Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity presents the partially shown face of a young man against a backdrop of bathroom tiles, his mouth ajar after presumably selfishly entertaining himself)."
Wolcott continues, describing the claims offered in these various books, and name-checking, among others, the one and only Glenn Sacks (who gets a lot of love in Guy Garcia’s The Decline of Men: How the American Male Is Tuning Out, Giving Up, and Flipping Off His Future.) What he doesn’t do, and I understand this at the same time that I was disappointed by it, is render a persuasive judgment of what it all means or how to assimilate it into our picture of the universe.
He makes two true, but disappointingly dry, points (it’s not that points shouldn’t be dry, it’s just that what makes Wolcott great is his acute psycho-cultural insight; he makes really wet points). The first is that in the realm of the super-elite, it’s clear that men still run the show. He writes:
"In his informative, provocative guide to the 'global power elite,' Superclass, David Rothkopf spells out the eight key rules for admission into the atrium of the Davos gods, among them 'Attend an elite university' and 'Get rich.' Topping the advisory list: 'Be born a man.'
"'There is no group as disproportionately under-represented among the members of the superclass as women. On a planet where 51 percent of the inhabitants are women, the global power structure is still locked in the dark ages on this issue. Only 6.3 percent of the superclass are women.' Corporate boardrooms are still predominantly boys’ clubs—'As of 2007, there were only thirteen women chief executives among Fortune’s top five hundred, twenty six among the top one thousand.'”
His second point is that it’s really the economy, stupid, that, “The primary threat to the psychological well-being of most men (and women) isn’t sexual or pop-cultural but economic, the fear that a single swing of the ax could render one destitute and undo everything one has attempted to build.”
What he doesn’t get into is the subjective emotional experience of gender relations in America, and how they radiate out into the political culture (and vice-versa). He doesn’t clarify at all the painful ambiguity that’s flummoxed me so much in trying to navigate between the fairly strong evidence that in many ways it sucks much more, at this point in American history, to be a man than to be a woman, and the very compelling arguments that it’s still women who are getting the shaft from the patriarchy much more than it is men who are getting the shaft from any kind of gynocracy.
I’m still left wondering: Who’s screwing who, and to the benefit of whom? Or is everybody screwing everybody, to the benefit of no one? Wolcott’s answer, I suppose, is that it’s the super-elite who are screwing everyone, using whatever divisive tools they have at their disposal—racism, sexism, classism, reverse-racism, reverse-sexism, reverse-classism, xenophobia, multiculturalism, political correctness, political incorrectness, etc.—to set all the different categories of sub-people against each other so that no one notices that the only ones really making out are Greg Marmalard and the other boys in the Davos Phi Davos fraternity.
To the extent that this quasi-Marxist, the base determines the superstructure kind of perspective is true, it does point to where there could be, or at least should be, some overlap between men and women in trying to address a gender situation that doesn’t seem to be working out all that well for any of us who aren’t members of the superclass [universal health care, for instance, might ease some of the painful insecurity that adds stress to so many marriages, and paid maternity and paternity leave would enable mothers and fathers to devote more attention to both their children and to each other in the (usually very stressful) early months after a child is born].
I guess my instinct, at the end of the day, though, is that in addition to whatever conspiracies or establishments or oppressive classes are out there screwing us to advance their own interests, there’s also a pretty substantial chunk of what’s going on that’s just effed up in a way that serves no one’s interests.
We’re a neurotic society. We just don’t know how to be normal, how to be excellent to each other (as Bill & Ted recommended), how to find some sane equilibrium between individualism and the common good, how to nurture the entrepreneurial dynamism that fuels the growth of our economy while also providing enough economic security to the masses so that it doesn’t feel like we’re all climbing over each other to get to the top. In a lot of ways, we just suck.
Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker (pictured) of the Washington Post Writers Group recently came out with a scathing piece criticizing Fox's Bad Dads and supporting our campaign protesting the show. Her column--'Bad Dads' a Bad Idea (5/2/08)--has run in 300 newspapers over the past week.
"Child Support Intervention (CSI) was the first private agency to begin broadly publicizing the names and identifying information, including pictures, of deadbeat parents. The practice began in February 1995 and was covered by much of the media (CNN and Time included) when the first billboard was erected in Fort Worth, Texas. 
Background: According to TIME magazine, "For nearly two years, James Rhoades...has been fighting to establish in law what science and fact already have shown beyond any doubt: He is the biological father of the boy dubbed J.A.R...the boy's mother, J.N.R., whom Rhoades met while taking an online graduate course...was — and still is — married to another man, who was stationed at a Pensacola Air Force base during their affair in 2005. And that's the problem.
"[There's a] difference between how we handle Mother's Day compared with Father's Day in church. If it's like in years past, it won't be pretty.
"Nine years ago Chris Hobbs and his wife divorced. At the time the two had joint custody. Then, Chris got a job as a Huntsville Firefighter."'So when I became a firefighter in January of 2005, the last thing I would have expected that would be used as a basis of a lawsuit and then that would be used to take my child away from me,' said Hobbs. But that's what has happened in the end result as we stand right now.'
Most fathers would do anything to protect their children, and here's another example.
"So some have learned to lobby on their own behalf.
