If you’re not feeling up to snuff in this appearance-mad world–the squishy abs, the thinning hair–don’t look at women. As your enemies, we mean. Because we’re all in the same boat.
“Just because men have been put in a beauty-contest world does not mean that women put them there,” Susan Faludi, the author of “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man,” recently told an audience at Loyola University in Chicago.
She blamed “commercial forces” and said women can relate because of the eons they’ve spent struggling with shallow, and unattainable, expectations of beauty.
So enough with the divisive stuff–Faludi urged men and women to work together to change our “consumer-driven, celebrity-saturated culture.”
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Faludi turned an especially glaring light on the culture since 9/11. After the terrorist strikes, she said, the media declared that manly men were back. Think John Wayne meets some hottie firefighter (figuratively speaking) and you get the idea. The country was eager to feel safe, and men, we were told, were ready to kick butt and take names later.
But men haven’t gotten more or less manly, whatever that means, Faludi said; the media simply were “packaging and marketing a product.” She dubbed it “the promotion of ornamental manhood–the kind you can buy” with, say, the right clothes or car.
To find out what real men care about, Faludi said, look at the obituaries of those who died on Sept. 11. They were called wonderful fathers, loving partners and friends who concentrated on “aiding instead of dominating, caring instead of competing.”
Also, consider the U.S. soldiers in Iraq. They find themselves in the role of caregiver as they try to help a country rebuild–and our nation has what Faludi called “a quiet hunger for that sort of manhood to be celebrated.”