Salon Books | What's ailing men?


Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food Columnists Current Wire Stories Click here to read the latest stories from the wires. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon Books stories, go to the Books home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon Advanced Search \| Help - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Books Reviews "In the Family Way: An Urban Comedy" A master chronicler of family life considers love and sex at the end of the '90s. By Polly Morrice [09/30/99] A tempest around "Isaac's Storm" The bestseller's author answers a meteorologist's charges of inaccuracy. By Craig Offman [09/29/99] Reviews "Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America" A sensational history recounts the face-off that altered the course of the nation. By Katharine Whittemore [09/29/99] Ivory Tower Check your head Untreated concussions could be academic headaches for college football players. By Alex Salkever [09/29/99] How Dawn Powell can save your life Ground down in a world driven by envy, greed and hypocrisy? America's wittiest satirist can help. By Gerald Howard [09/28/99] Complete archives for Books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		What's ailing men? \| page 1, 2, 3 Faludi writes in such a persuasive, cool-headed way that she convinces you even when you're unconvinced; it's all too easy to find yourself drawn into her rhetorical web, so breathtaking is her talent for narrative and analysis. But she has also assembled (and "assembled" seems the proper verb here, as oftentimes her chapters feel more pressed together than composed, like strangers at an orgy) a book that roams so widely as it darts among the culture's ceaseless betrayals of men that one chapter can provoke fist-waving agreement while the next induces little more than a curious sigh of "Well, maybe." Among the latter sections are her chapter on Vietnam, which feels foggy if not rehashed, and her famously (due to a juicy excerpt in Tina Brown's New Yorker) intriguing but hollow peek into the male end of the porn biz. (Porn stars may be emblematic of the male crisis -- if you're observing from the moon.) Her portrayal of former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney's Promise Keepers movement falls short as well, because she can't quite force it within the confines of her theory: Of all the men she witnessed, this particular branch, grounded in the tenets of the conservative right, seems the most clearly reactive to feminism. In addition, Faludi handpicked many of her interview subjects -- porn stars, over-the-top football fans, scraggly gun nuts -- from the farthest cultural shores. This tactic certainly has some merit, and Faludi defends herself admirably. (She quotes one interview subject as follows: "If you want to see what's happening in the stream called our society, go to the edges and look at what's happening there, and then you begin to have an understanding … of what's going on in the middle.") But you can't help but finish several of her chapters wondering where the hell she ever found these colorful losers. (And permit me to add, in an effort to stave off the obvious rebuttal, that I'm writing this not from the gilded coasts of Los Angeles or New York but from the deep-flyover terrain of northern Mississippi.) Moreover, too many of her subjects seem thwarted by concerns not just masculine but human, such as marital crackups, job stress and obesity. Nonetheless: If these are missteps, they are noble missteps, evidence of Faludi's grand ambition to squeeze every last shred of modern male decay into her gentle but crumbly hypothesis. And yet, for all my carping, there's a tremendous high point to Faludi's book, an analysis so perceptive -- and so fundamental to men's current squirming -- that it sings with a sort of sociological genius. "By century's end," Faludi writes, "the dictates of a consumer and media culture had trapped both men and women in a world in which top billing mattered more than building, in which representation trumped production, in which appearances were what counted." In other words, it's no longer enough just to be the kind of traditional Joe who works hard, raises a family and dies from eating too much butter. The stoical humility of the World War II generation drowned in a new ambition -- a hunger for stardom, for the role of the leading man. Next page \| A dead-on analysis of life, the movie


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