The Emasculation Proclamation

I don’t want Susan Faludi’s pity. I want her tight little body. That’s the kind of supermasculine attitude that she pines for in her book Stiffed, a lamentation on the emasculated American man. As part of my continuing series on books no one outside the media is reading (“In Defense of Irony,” TIME, Oct. 4, 1999, p. 42), I want to say that almost all the parts of Stiffed I read are totally stupid. The main exception is on page 649 in the bibliography (“Joel Stein, ‘Porn Goes Mainstream,'” TIME, Sept. 7, 1998, p. 54). I recommend buying the book just for that page.

With Stiffed, the pity culture comes to its inevitable conclusion: now people are even feeling bad for white men. Stiffed argues that as men stopped making things and focused on buying them, they no longer knew how to be men. For this, Faludi blames “the culture,” which, the last time I checked, is controlled by white men. But when I called Faludi, she warned against such finger pointing. “We’re all complicit in a culture that disfigures people. Most of us participate as consumers,” she said. “The blame game is too easy. People should deal with a more complex dynamic than ‘Who are we going to put on a wanted poster?'” Wanted posters sound good and manly to me.

Faludi had seen Fight Club the night before, a film about a home furnishing-obsessed actuary who tries to recover his masculinity by getting a group of buddies together for bareknuckle fights. She liked the film, noting how the violence spiraled out of control and the main character found redemption with a woman in a familial relationship. She called the movie “Stiffed on speed,” so I called Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the novel Fight Club. He was several hundred pages deep into Faludi’s book and already calling his story “the fictionalized version of Stiffed.” There was a lot of love going around.

Although Palahniuk agreed with Faludi’s analysis of the problem, he said he thought weekly bareknuckle bouts would be cathartic. “Men need violence. We are very much still animals,” he said from his home in Portland, Ore., the least manly city in North America. “We can channel violent feelings into working hard and buying things, but they keep popping up. We need to acknowledge that they are not bad feelings; they are human feelings,” he said. I asked him why, in that case, the fight clubs in his novel caused so many problems. “Because it was a book, it had to go somewhere,” he explained. “It needed a climax.” It was a manly answer. Palahniuk wrote his book in three months; Stiffed took seven years. Men don’t ask a lot of questions when they’re looking for a climax.

But both Faludi and Palahniuk have it wrong. Pity is over. Oprah’s national hugs have been replaced by Jerry Springer’s mocking chants for fisticuffs. Men are fine. We don’t want to go back to construction work with other men, mostly because construction is hard and screaming “Nice ass” never seems to work. No, we’re not men like our fathers: confident, stern and single-handedly supporting a family. But we’re happier and more pleasant in our permanent adolescence reading Maxim and watching The Man Show. It definitely beats going to war.