Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi

Some key excerpts that I want to keep around for later from the book.

These are the final two paragraphs of the book.

'Social responsibility is not the special province of masculinity; it's the lifelong work of all citizens in a community where people are knit together by meaningful and mutual concerns. But if husbanding society is not the exclusive calling of "husbands," all the better for men's future. Because as men struggle to free themselves from their crisis, their task is not, in the end, to figure out how to be masculine - rather, their masculinity lies in figuring out how to be human. The men who worked at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard didn't come there and learn their crafts as riggers, welders, and boilermakers to be masculine; they were seeking something worthwhile to do. Their sense of their own manhood flowed out of their utility in a society, not the other way around. Conceiving of masculinity as something to be turns manliness into a detachable entity, at which point it instantly becomes ornamental, and about as innately "masculine" as fake eyelashes are inherently "feminine." Michael Bernhardt was one man who came to understand this in his difficult years after he returned from Vietnam. "All these years I was trying to be all these stereotypes" of manhood, he said, "and what was the use?... I'm beginning to think now of not even defining it anymore. I'm beginning to think now just in terms of people."From this discovery follow others, like the knowledge that he no longer has to live by the "scorecard" his nation handed him. He can begin to conceive of other ways of being "human," and hence, of being a man.

And so with the mystery of men's nonrebellion comes the glimmer of an opening, an opportunity for men to forge a rebellion commensurate with women's and, in the course of it, to create a new paradigm for human progress that will open doors for both sexes. That was, and continues to be, feminism's dream, to create a freer, more humane world. Feminists have pursued it, particularly in the last two centuries, with great determination and passion. In the end, though, it will remain a dream without the strength and courage of men who are today faced with a historic opportunity: to learn to wage a battle against no enemy, to own a frontier of human liberty, to act in the service of a brotherhood that includes us all.'

Also from the last chapter, but close to the beginning:

'...From the start, I intended to talk to the men in this book about such matters as work, sports, marriage, religion, war, and entertainment.I didn't go to them originally to ask about their fathers. But they insisted that I do so. Over and over, the breakdown of loyalty in the public domain brought my male guides face-to-face with the collapse of some personal patrimony. Behind all the public double crosses, they sense, lay their fathers' desertion.

This connection between the public and the paternal betrayals sensed more than reasoned. The men I came to know talked about their fathers' failures in the most private and pesonal terms, pointing inevitably to small daily letdowns that were their most visible disappointments: "My father didn't teach me how to throw a ball" or "My father never cam to my Little League games" or "My father was always at work." That they had felt neglected as boys in the home, that their fathers had emotionally or even literally abandoned the family circle, was painful enough. But they suspected that in some way hard to grasp, much less describe, their fathers had deserted them in the public realm, too. "My father never taught me how to be a man" was the refrain I heard over and over again. "I was not guided by my father," Jack Schat, from the domestic-violence group, said to me once, his voice full of anguish. Having a father was supposed to mean having an older man show you how the world worked and how to find your place in it. Down the generations, the father wasn't simply a good sport who played backyard catch, took his son to ball games, or paid for his education. He was a human bridge connecting the boy to an adult life of public engagement and responsibility. That was why shipyard worker Ernie McBride, Jr. took me to meet his father: Ernie McBride, Sr., had taught him "how to be a man," not by playing sports or brining home a paycheck, but by leading a meaningful life - by being the kind of man who would struggle against racism at a shipyard union local, a neighborhood grocery store, a public school; by being a man whose actions mattered to a society he cared about.

For centuries, of course, fathers have disappointed, neglected, abused, abandoned their sons. But there was something particularly unexpected, and so particularly disturbing, about the nature of the paternal desertion that unfolded in the years after World War II, precisely because it coincided with a period of unprecedented abundance. In the generation before the war, millions of fathers failed to support their families, and hordes of them abandoned their households, became itinerant laborers, hoboes, winos. But that was the fault of the Great Depression, not of the men. By contrast, the post-World War II era was the moment of America's great bounty and ascendance, when the nation and thus its fathers were said to own the world. Never, or so their sons were told, did fathers have so much to pass on as at the peak of the American Century. And conversely, never was there such a burden on the sons to learn how to run a world they would inherit. Yet the fathers, with all the force of fresh victory and moral virtue behind them, seemingly unfettered in their paternal power and authority, failed to pass the mantle, the knowledge, all that power and authority, on to their sons.

If only the fathers could have explained why. Because the men I got to know could have borne even their fathers' failure to bestow a legacy, ; they could have weathered the disappointment of a broken patrimony. What undid them was their fathers' silence. The sons grew up with fathers who so often seemed spectral, there and yet not there, "heads" of household strangely disconnected from the familial body. The nonpresent presence of paternal ghosts haunted long after the sons had left home, made families of their own. An aching sadness remained. Men spoke to me of waiting, year after year, for a sign, a late-night confidence, a death-bed confession, even - desperately - a letter delivered posthumously, for any moment that would decode the mystery of their mute fathers. "My dad was real quiet," Dennie Elliott, of the Glendora Promise Keepers, said to me one afternoon, his voice more mournful than bitter. "You could sit in a room and if he said a dozen words in an afternoon, you were lucky. We'd always say, 'Wonder what Dad's thinking?'" Dennie would never find out. "In all the time I knew my father, he only me, 'Always be good at what you do,' and 'Don't be later - always be on time.'"

As I was finishing this book, a new novel by sociologist and former antiwar activist Todd Gitlin arrived in the mail. When I had talked to Gitlin many months earlier, he had told me he was working on a father-son story that he thought might be of interest. Sacrifice turned out to be the tale of an adult son whose inexplicable and estranged father has just died, having either jumped or fallen in front of a subway train, the son doesn't know which. The father has left him an inheritance of sorts: a stack of diaries from "the abandonment years," in which he has inscribed, sometimes moment by moment, his innermost thoughts, yearnings, secrets. "He thought these materials were yours by right," the father's attorney tells the grown son. "He wanted you to have them." And the emotionally starved son devours them, not wanting the words to end. "Father, say more," he appeals to the dust-covered books, "I can take it." The novel is the eloquent, mature reprise of a boy's fantasy, a fantasy shared by so many grown postwar sons: that salvation may come through paternal speech, by a father's silence broken at last.

That layer of paternal betrayal felt, for many of the men I spent time with, like the innermost core, the artichoke's bitter heart. The fathers had made them a promise, and then had not made good on it. They had lied. The world they had promised had never been delivered. But some of the men fathomed that there was yet one more level within, a betrayal deeper than that of personal or public male elders. It was a betrayal so all-encompassing that, as a few men understood, it could hardly be blamed on the fathers. Its tsunami force had swamped the fathers as well as the sons. Its surge had washed all the men of the American Century into a swirling ocean of larger-than-life, ever-transmitting images in which usefulness to society meant less and less and celebrityhood ever more, where even one's appearance proved an unstable currency. It wasn't that real work had disappeared or that men weren't still doing it, and it wasn't that men were no longer needed in their communities. But now even the most traditional of craftsmen and community builders lived in a world where personal worth was judged in ornamental terms: Were they "sexy"? Were they "known"? Had they "won"?