My Son, the Feminist

This piece is mostly about bad books, and the reader may ask— since no one has time to read presumably good books—why bother? A fair question. My view is that bad books count, partly because they are bought and read, and because their authors inhabit the talk shows, and because they one way or another affect our lives: they moisten the bog of received ideas through which we slog each day. And because it is now and then possible to learn something from bad books. And because bad books are often about good subjects. There is an exemplary subject in the air right now: the lot of American men.

The Masculine Mystique

Why not begin with the most abysmal? Dr. Harvey E. Kaye’s MALE SURVIVAL: MASCULINITY WITHOUT MYTH (Grosset & Dunlap, $8.95) announces its ambience on the contents page, where such titles as “The Sex Life of a Penis,” and “From Adam’s Rib to Women’s Lib,” stand opposite a paragraph of acknowledgments, including thanks to an assistant “for her delicate and restraining editorial touch.” It’s hard to give fullest attention to the theme of this book. The mind wanders to the editorial offices of the publisher and asks why it happened. The answer, of course, is that Dr, Kaye had hooked a live anxiety, men’s doubt over their role. Dr. Kaye’s essential message is that men have been suffering. The villain is social mythology, “the masculine mystique”—that set of ideas about man’s powers, sexual and otherwise, that lead men to ask too much of themselves. This proposition has some plausibility, though as presented it turns out to be crude flattery of the sensibility it means to alter: the reader is told he’s been seeing himself as Superman, or the Sexual Athlete, or the Achiever. There is also a villainess in Dr. Kaye’s scheme of things, or several of them, such as the “covert female chauvinist” who is characterized by her “obscene passivity.” Essentially, Male Survival amounts to the kind of pep talk a certain sort of father gives his son:

The Sexual Athlete should take a seventh-inning stretch and consider the welfare of his penis. While an increase in the recreational aspects of sexuality is strongly recommended, the relational components should not be negated. “The Sex Life of a Penis” is not to be construed as an invitation to a neverending and indiscriminate orgy, although no one prefers being the last to arrive at these soirees. In their proper proportion and place, relational considerations enhance sexual satisfaction. A sexual experience should be appreciated, like a fine wine or a good cigar . . .

Is it possible that Dr. Kaye, a “practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst,” thought this book might help someone? Nice to think so, but the thing itself lacks what is called redeeming social value.

Can you expect anything better from a book called THE MALE DILEMMA: How TO SURVIVE THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION (Aronson, $12.50)? Well, it wouldn’t seem so, but in fact this study by Anne Steinmann and David J. Fox cuts considerably deeper than the work of Dr. Kaye, though it starts from a similar premise about the beleagueredness of the American male.

It began as an extensive piece of sociological surveying on concepts of sexual identity—“thousands” of respondents of several years. The authors include examples of their questionnaires. These don’t fully win my confidence; at least, many of the statements with which one is to agree or disagree seem to demand an essay, not an answer on a scale of 1 to 5. “I am not sure that what a man gains from marriage makes up for sacrifices.” (Which marriage do you have in mind?) “I would rather be famous, admired and popular throughout the nation than have the constant affection of just one woman.” (Tell me about that woman.) The results, in any case, were not startling. Men felt that they ought to be more “strong and aggressive,” but that women didn’t want them to be. Women felt that men ought to be more strong and aggressive. This makes a certain rough sense; it’s what mothers have been telling their sons forever. But one is left with the problem of what those terms actually mean. This book is in part a victim of its packaging.

The authors’ advice on “how to survive the sexual revolution” is essentially to avoid it, which may not be bad advice, but is less than universally applicable. They are concerned with the “sexual revolution” only as it affects the lives of stable nuclear families; they presume conventional domestic life. When all the inflated sociology, and the trendiness, is cut away, there is some decency left. The authors are at their best in making a case for the continuation of family life in socially altered conditions.

Hard to say who constitutes this book’s natural audience; at heart it’s a textbook dressed up in unfortunate commercial clothes. But within its narrow range it speaks with some common sense and dignity.

On To Androgyny

Bad-book aficionados may feel a certain tremulousness—the sense of having discovered a classic—on reading Marc Feigen Fasteau’s THE MALE MACHINE (McGraw-Hill, $8.95) which, though full of halftruths, is (not paradoxically) in many ways the best of the books on men so far to appear. For one thing Fasteau is writing out of his experience, as an upwardly mobile young professional and as a man who has been influenced by the women’s movement, and he has provided not a buck-up talk, but an indictment of American manly ways. He has in mind an important theme: the ways in which masculine style works against emotional awareness and expression.

Marc Feigen Fasteau is the husband of Brenda Feigen Fasteau, a feminist. Fasteau has adopted his wife’s maiden name as his middle name, as an egalitarian gesture. This was explained recently on the society page of the New York Times, in an article with a photograph of the couple announcing the opening of their law partnership.

Fasteau and Feigen (the order of the names chosen, as the article explained, alphabetically). There is something uneasy in the way “Marc” and “Brenda” appear in the book. Of Brenda, we learn that she is “the most important person in my life, . . . who cared enough, and had the perception and courage not to let me get away with the standard masculine avoidances.” This testimony serves as Brenda’s identity, and she appears now and then in the book as a full-blown figure, except that we know nothing about her. Fasteau is better on his own inward life. He explains the origins of the book in his relationship with his wife and his discovery of the importance of affective experience.

I had to learn to use my feelings in addition to my intellect as instruments for registering and understanding how she felt and what she needed. . . .

The less touchy I became about being tough in the traditional sense, the better able 1 became to put aside her surface anger and respond to the plea for help underneath. . . .

. . . the difficulties I had experienced in these situations were in large part the result of having internalized a particular set of values—I was judging my behavior against an ideal of invulnerability that was shared in rough outline by other men but not, for some reason. by women . . . in the process of trying to “protect myself” against these “unmasculine” feelings, I was somehow cutting myself off from all but a narrow range of human contact.

Although this statement is believable and admirable, it is also the source of an underlying confusion in the book. What Fasteau is describing might be called, without unfairness, Growing Up. Seeing these life-lessons in terms of masculinity doesn’t necessarily lead toward clarity—but it does lead unerringly toward simplicity.

The masculine ideal as described and debunked in the book is a monolithic and (quite a familiar) intellectual object. Aggressiveness, toughness, the need to dominate, rationality at the expense of the full self, are the central characteristics of Fasteau’s representative man. Fasteau, to repeat, has been much influenced by the women’s movement, and many of the ideas in this book are simply restatements of feminist observations. Even as you accede to the truth they contain, you wonder how Fasteau can invest such newness in them. We meet the MCP in his various forms—warrior, sexual bumbler, office autocrat, sports freak—yet again. Fasteau also participates in the one hard-to-forgive feminist vulgarity: the willful confusion between gender and class (in its worst feminist form, “woman-asnigger”). Speaking of American men as a group of oppressors (who share a certain self-debilitating code) leads Fasteau to ignore the way in which men up and down the social structure use their countless varieties of masculine style as a weapon against one another. And, though Fasteau now and then makes such distinctions as blue-collar and professional, he seems to have little sense of what a blue-collar man might feel about his masculine role. He describes himself attempting to enlighten a cabby on the subject of the working wife, an encounter that one suspects was even less successful than Fasteau realizes:

A New York taxi driver who thought it was all right for women to work in financial emergencies but not otherwise told me he wanted his wife at home because nobody else could cook as well. When I hypothesized a housekeeper with comparable cooking skills, he said that, in any event, he wanted to be able to get her on the phone at any time. When I hypothesized an office job where she would be reachable . . .

Fasteau is relentlessly literalminded. He reports some impressive horror stories about corporate life, for instance, but fails to recognize that for much of corporate America the language of toughness and aggression is just a wistful reference to an imagined past, or to areas of experience that are thought to be more manly than marketing or public relations. But it is in the nature of this book to disallow complexity.

There is little recognition here that the lamentable abstractions Fasteau identifies as maleness have another side: that “toughness,” for example, is a lesser form of courage; that even “self-control” can be a virtue; and that if these qualities have been falsely abrogated to men, they are not in themselves without value. Nor would the terms of Fasteau’s argument allow him to examine the history of “gentlemanliness,” civilization’s long effort to refine virility without eradicating it. Concomitant with his devaluation of conventional manhood is a sentimentalization of womanhood, felt, in his oddly antique argument, to be the repository of special gifts of emotional sensitivity. He brings nothing but a bland liberal inattention to the possibility that women have a capacity of their own for perversity.

The logical end of Fasteau’s argument is that American men ought to become more like American women, and this is a solution from which he doesn’t shrink in a concluding chapter urging “androgyny.” As Fasteau gazes into the future, he crosses over into fatuity: “Physically, of course, men and women will still be different and the sexual appeal of this difference will undoubtedly persist.” And yet he does name, and occasionally describes, a real phenomenon: the disastrous isolation common among American men. The Male Machine is one of those books that is so wrong because it is so nearly right.

More to Come

In January the literature of men will be increased by the appearance of THE LIBERATED MAN: Beyond Masculinity: Freeing Men and Their Relationships With Women by Warren Farrell (Random House, $8.95). Fasteau seems to have stolen a march on Farrell. Their essential arguments, and their tone as well—the voice of one who has been saved—have much in common. Farrell, though, is more political (in the broad sense), an advocate of behavioral change through consciousness-raising. Lingoists will value this book, where you can experience such terms as “attaché,” meaning someone “with whom one has a deep emotional attachment” as opposed to “living friend,” meaning roommate.

Let’s Be Honest

Is it possible to speak freshly about American manhood? Is there in fact any reason to think something new can be said? At the moment when all the evidence adds up to “No,” along comes a small book that gives me pause. A novel. All that you can see at a glance would seem to predict this book’s quiet fate. A blind title: WITHOUT BARBARIANS by Jim Magnuson (McGraw-Hill, $6.95). The cover looks as if it were designed in a spare ten minutes over coffee and Danish in the art director’s office. It features one of the least prepossessing passages from the book. Flap copy perfunctorily hails the book as “the debut of a major novelist.” Like most such debuts, this one is probably backed by an advertising budget of $2000, if that. Slim chance of a talk between the author and Barbara Walters.

Without Barbarians, like scores of other recent novels, is the account of a dissolving marriage: a young couple, social workers, coming apart by means of extramarital relations. There is nothing particularly engaging about this scene as it is presented in the opening pages, except for an attractive plainness in the prose that persuades the reader to stay for a while. Then gradually the narrator, the husband, becomes an interesting fellow. It is his wife who is the sexual experimenter—first an affair, then another, and before long a full-scale California orgy. The husband is a sexual conservative, but he abides by some of the contemporary rules. Two principles guide: men and women don’t “possess” one another, and everything’s all right as long as we’re honest. But of course married people do want to possess one another, and a lot is not all right, and it’s impossible to be “honest.”

Over that summer I listened to her: I won’t sleep with him again, it’s too dangerous. I don’t want to hurt you, but I have to see him again. I need him, he makes me alive, my life has been a long straight line and I’m going to change that. He needs me, I help him. it isn’t basically sexual. I’ve never known anyone like him. Just because we’re married doesn’t mean we’re each other’s property. It’s possible to love more than one person, you’ve admitted it yourself.

I care for him in a different way than I care for you.

Where to find a rule? There was no rule.

Without Barbarians reminds you, ah, yes, there is something unusual about the situation of American men. It is possible, for one thing, to write a novel now, without providing unusual psychological explanation, about a cuckolded man who willingly forgoes the jealous rage sanctified by tradition. Magnuson, of course, is not trying to make a major statement on American manhood. He simply has hold of a situation that illuminates one corner of contemporary male anxiety.

The novel gains its edge from a reversal of expected sexual roles, but something more occurs. Its accomplishment is to relay some emotional information that is not confined to one gender. What it feels like to be trapped in our half-crazed rationality about feelings. What it feels like to be the partner of someone who is consciously Growing As A Person. When these conditions are realized with enough particularity they become universal—as is always the case, on the page or during the day—and you find yourself allowing terms such as “human,” or “person,” those politicized words that are so difficult at present to use with sincerity.

I don’t want to table-thump over the neglect that is the almost certain destiny of Without Barbarians. No doubt better novels will be ignored this year. A great deal is wrong with this one, and much of my praise for it surely derives from the context in which it was read: hard not to be struck with how much more thought, feeling, discipline it contains than is found in a book like The Male Machine. Wisdom arrives in fragments, but we’d rather buy it wholesale, and publishers and writers are all too happy to oblige; hence, bad books. As for Without Barbarians, all it is is a good one.