Had I Known

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  What accounts for this change in men? Or, perhaps I should ask more broadly, for this change in our notion of masculinity—a change that affects not only single, affluent young men but potentially the married, middle-aged, and financially immobile male? Sheldon Kotel, a Long Island accountant in his early forties who was my host on a local radio talk show, attributes any change in men to a prior revolution among women. From the early 1970s, he says, “You could see what was happening with women, and we had to get our act together, too. They didn’t want to be in their traditional role anymore, and I didn’t want to go on being a meal ticket for some woman.”

  Certainly the new man’s unwillingness to “commit himself,” in the old-fashioned sense, could be interpreted as a peevish reaction to feminist women—just as his androgynous bent could be interpreted as a positive adjustment, an attempt, as the advocates of men’s liberation would say, to “get in touch with one’s feminine side.” Spokesmen for men’s liberation, from Warren Farrell in the early 1970s to Donald H. Bell, whose book Being a Man: The Paradox of Masculinity, was published in 1982, depict themselves and their fellows as wrestling with the challenge of feminism—giving up a little privilege here, gaining a little sensitivity there, to emerge more “whole” and “self-nurturing.”

  But for the most part, the new men one is likely to encounter today in our urban singles’ enclaves (or on the pages of a men’s fashion magazine) bear no marks of arduous self-transformation. No ideological struggle—pro- or antifeminist—seems to have shaped their decision to step out of the traditional male role; in a day-to-day sense, they simply seem to have other things on their minds. Stephen G. Dent, for example, is a twenty-nine-year-old member of a private New York investment firm who was also interviewed by Harriet Bernstein. Dent defines his goals in terms of his career and making money, “because that’s how the score is kept.” To this end, he rations his time carefully: more than ten hours a day for work and approximately half an hour a day for calisthenics and running. Women definitely figure in his life, and he is pleased to have reduced the time spent arranging dates to an efficient five minutes a day.

  Dent feels that “Sensitivity is very important to being a man. It’s easy for people to become so caught up in their career challenges that they don’t stop to be sensitive to certain things.” By that he said he meant “being able to appreciate things that girls appreciate. Like being able to window-shop, for example. An insensitive guy probably won’t stop and look at a dress in a window.”

  For Brian Clarke, like Stephen Dent, the pressures of upward mobility have pushed marriage into the distant future. He is thirty-three and works fourteen hours a day as a production assistant for a major network television show.

  Feminism has not figured much in his life; he discussed it respectfully, but as if it were an idiosyncracy he had not encountered before. Yet he agreed enthusiastically to being identified as a new man. “I’m going uphill, and I don’t see the top of the hill yet. So for now there is no one woman in my life.…I say it on the first date, ‘No commitments!’” He is, furthermore, an ardent and tasteful consumer who remains au courant by reading GQ, M, Interior Design, and Playboy, this last, he reassured me, “for the fashions.”

  So I do not think there is a one-word explanation—like feminism—for the new manhood. Rather, I would argue, at least a part of what looks new has been a long time in the making and predates the recent revival of feminism by many decades. Male resistance to marriage, for example, is a venerable theme in American culture, whether in the form of low humor (Li’l Abner’s annual Sadie Hawkins Day escape from Daisy Mae) or high art (the perpetual bachelorhood of heroes like Ishmael or the Deerslayer). As Leslie Fiedler argued in 1955 in An End to Innocence, the classics of American literature are, by and large, propaganda for boyish adventure rather than the “mature heterosexuality” so admired by mid-twentieth-century psychoanalysts.

  The sources of male resentment are not hard to find: In a frontier society, women were cast as the tamers and civilizers of men; in an increasingly urban, industrial society, they became, in addition, the financial dependents of men. From a cynical male point of view, marriage was an arrangement through which men gave up their freedom for the dubious privilege of supporting a woman. Or, as H. L. Mencken put it, marriage was an occasion for a man “to yield up his liberty, his property, and his soul to the first woman who, in despair of finding better game, turns her appraising eye upon him.” After all, the traditional female contributions to marriage have been menial, like housework, or intangible, like emotional support. The husband’s traditional contribution, his wage or at least a good share of it, was indispensable, measurable, and, of course, portable—whether to the local tavern or the next liaison.

  But before male resentment of marriage could become anything more than a cultural undercurrent of grumbling and misogynist humor, three things had to happen. First, it had to become not only physically possible but reasonably comfortable for men to live on their own. In nineteenth-century homes, even simple tasks like making breakfast or laundering a shirt could absorb long hours of labor. Bachelorhood was a privileged state, sustained by servants or a supply of maiden sisters; the average man either married or settled for boardinghouse life. As a second condition for freedom from marriage, men had to discover better ways of spending their money than on the support of a family. The historic male alternatives were drinking and gambling, but these have long been associated, for good reason, with precipitate downward mobility. Third, the penalties levied against the nonconforming male—charges of immaturity, irresponsibility, and latent sexual deviancy—had to be neutralized or inverted.

  Within the last few decades, all of these conditions for male freedom have been met. Domestic appliances, plus a rapid rise in the number of apartment dwellings and low-price restaurants, made it possible for a man of average means to contemplate bachelorhood as something other than extended vagrancy. As Philip Roth observed of the 1950s in My Life as a Man, it had become entirely feasible—though not yet acceptable—for a young man to “eat out of cans or in cafeterias, sweep his own floor, make his own bed, and come and go with no binding legal attachments.” In addition, that decade saw two innovations that boosted the potential autonomy of even the most domestically incompetent males—frozen foods and drip-dry clothes.

  Perhaps more important, the consumer-goods market, which had focused on a bland assemblage of family-oriented products, began to show the first signs of serious segmentation. Playboy’s success in the 1950s instigated a revival of sophisticated men’s magazines (sophisticated, that is, compared with True, Police Gazette, or Popular Mechanics) that delivered an audience of millions of independent-minded men to the advertisers of liquor, sports cars, stereo equipment, and vacations.

  In Playboy’s case, the ads were complemented by editorial exhortations to male revolt and feature articles portraying wives as “parasites” and husbands as “slaves.” There were better ways to spend money than on power mowers and patio furniture, as Hugh Hefner insinuated in his magazine’s very first issue: “We like our apartment.…We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion of Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” And in case that sounded suspiciously effete for 1953, the centerfolds testified to an exuberant, even defiant, heterosexuality.

  No sooner had the new, more individualistic male lifestyle become physically possible and reasonably attractive than it began also to gain respectability. Starting in the 1960s, expert opinion began to retreat from what had been a unanimous endorsement of marriage and traditional sex roles. Psychology, transformed by the human-potential movement, switched from “maturity” as a standard for mental health to the more expansive notion of “growth.” “Maturity” had been a code word, even in the professional literature, for marriage and settling down; “growth” implied a plurality of legitimate options, if not a positive imperative to keep moving
from one insight or experience to the next. Meanwhile, medicine—alarmed by what appeared to be an epidemic of male heart disease—had begun to speak of men as the “weaker sex” and to hint that men’s greater vulnerability was due, in part, to the burden of breadwinning.

  The connection was scientifically unwarranted, but it cast a lasting shadow over conventional sex roles: The full-time homemaker, who had been merely a parasite on resentful males, became a potential accomplice to murder, with the hardworking, role-abiding breadwinner as her victim. By the 1970s, no salvo of male resentment—or men’s liberation—failed to mention that the cost of the traditional male role was not only psychic stagnation and sexual monotony, but ulcers, heart disease, and an early death.

  Today, the old aspersions directed at the unmarried male have largely lost their sting. Images of healthy, hardworking men with no apparent attachments abound in the media, such as, for example, the genial-looking bicyclist in the advertisement for TV Guide, whose caption announces invitingly, “Zero Dependents.”

  Perhaps most important, a man can now quite adequately express his status without entering into a lifelong partnership with a female consumer. The ranch house on a quarter acre of grass is still a key indicator of social rank, but it is not the only one. A well-decorated apartment, a knowledge of wines, or a flair for cooking can be an equally valid proof of middle-class (or upper-middle-class) membership, and these can now be achieved without the entanglement of marriage or the risk of being thought a little “queer.”

  Certainly feminism contributed to the case against the old style of male conformity. On the ideological front, the women’s movement popularized the sociological vocabulary of “roles”—a linguistic breakthrough that highlighted the social artifice involved in masculinity, as we had known it, as well as femininity. More practically, feminists envisioned a world in which neither sex would be automatically dependent and both might be breadwinners. Betty Friedan speculated that “Perhaps men may live longer in America when women carry more of the burden of the battle with the world, instead of being a burden themselves,” and Gloria Steinem urged men to support the cause because they “have nothing to lose but their coronaries.” Yet feminism only delivered the coup de grâce to the old man, who married young, worked hard, withheld his emotions, and “died in the harness.” By the time of the feminist revival in the late 1960s and ’70s, American culture was already prepared to welcome a new man, and to find him—not caddish or queer—but healthy and psychologically enlightened.

  But if the new man’s resistance to commitment grows out of longstanding male resentment, there are other features of the new manhood that cannot be explained as a product of the battle of the sexes, no matter which side is presumed to have taken the initiative. Married or single, the preoccupations of these men suggest anxiety rather than liberation, and I think the anxiety stems from very real and relatively recent insecurities about class.

  The professional-managerial middle class, which is the breeding ground for social ideals like the new man or new woman, has become an embattled group. In the 1950s and ’60s, young men of this class could look forward to secure, high-status careers, provided only that they acquired some credentials and showed up for work. Professional-level job slots were increasing, along with the expansion of corporate and governmental administrative apparatuses, and jobs in higher education increased to keep pace with the growing demand for managerial and “mental” workers.

  Then came the long economic downturn of the 1970s and whole occupations—from public administration to college history teaching—closed their ranks and lost ground. One whole segment of formerly middle-class, educated youth drifted downward to become taxi drivers, waiters, or carpenters. As other people crowded into the most vocationally promising areas—medicine, law, management—those too became hazardously overpopulated. According to recent studies of the “disappearing middle class,” the erstwhile middle-class majority is tumbling down and out (both because of a lack of jobs and because those that remain have not held their own against inflation), while a minority is scrambling up to become the new high-finance, high-tech gentry. Our new men are mainly in the latter category, or are at least holding on by their fingernails.

  Times of rapid class realignment magnify the attention paid to class insignia—the little cues that tell us who is a social equal and who is not. In the prosperous 1960s and early ’70s, the counterculture had temporarily blurred class lines among American men, mixing Ivy League dropouts with young veterans, hip professionals with unschooled street kids. Avant-garde male fashion was democratic: blue jeans, gold chains, and shoulder-length hair could equally well be affected by middle-aged psychiatrists, young truck drivers, or off-duty tax lawyers. Thanks to Army-surplus chic and its rock-star embellishments, there was no sure way to distinguish the upward bound from the permanently down-and-out.

  By the insecure 1980s, class lines were being hastily redrawn, and many features of the new manhood can best be understood as efforts to stay on the right side of the line separating “in” from “out,” and upscale from merely middle-class. The new male consumerism, for example, is self-consciously elitist: Italian-knit sweaters and double-breasted blazers have replaced the voluntary simplicity of flannel shirts and denim jackets. Esquire announced a “return to elegant dressing” that excludes not only the polyester set but the rumpled professor and any leftover bohemians.

  Food fashions, too, have been steadily gentrified, and the traditional masculine culinary repertory of chili and grilled meats would be merely boorish today. A recent issue of GQ magazine gave its readers the following advice, which I would have thought almost too precious for the pages of Gourmet: “To turn dinner for two into an affair, break open the caviar again—this time over oysters or spooned into baked potatoes with melted butter, a dollop of crème fraîche and a sprinkling of minced green onion. Or offer truffles—black or white…tossed with pasta, cream and butter.” Real men may not eat quiche—which has been adopted by the proletariat anyway—but new men are enthusiasts of sushi and cold pasta salads, and are prepared to move on as soon as these, too, find their way to more plebeian palates. As M magazine half-facetiously warned its readers, sushi may already be “out,” along with pesto dishes and white-wine spritzers.

  Consumer tastes are only the most obvious class cues that define the new man and set him off, not only from the old white-collar man but from the less fortunate members of his own generation. Another is his devotion to physical exercise, especially in its most solitary and public form—running. Running is a new activity, dating from the 1970s, and it is solidly upscale. Fred Lebow, the president of the New York Road Runners Club, describes the average marathon runner as a male, “34 years old, college-educated, physically fit and well-off,” and a New York Times poll found that 46 percent of the participants in the 1983 New York City Marathon earned more than $40,000 a year (85 percent of the participants were male). The old man smoked, drank martinis to excess, and puttered at golf. The new man is a nonsmoker (among men, smoking is becoming a blue-collar trait), a cautious drinker, and, if not a runner, a patron of gyms and spas.

  I would not argue that men run in order to establish their social status—certainly not at a conscious level. Running is one manifestation of the general obsession with fitness that gripped the middle class in the 1970s and for which there is still no satisfactory sociological explanation. On one level, running is a straightforward response to the cardiac anxiety that has haunted American men since the 1950s; it may also be a response to the occupational insecurity of the 1970s and ’80s. Then, too, some men run to get away from their wives—transforming Rabbit Angstrom’s cross-country dash in the final scene of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run into an acceptable daily ritual. Donald Bell says he took up running (and vegetarianism) “to escape somewhat from the pain and frustration which I felt in this less than perfect marriage.”

  But whatever the individual motivations, running has become sufficiently identified as an upper
-middle-class habit to serve as a reliable insignia of class membership: Running is public testimony to a sedentary occupation, and it has all but replaced the more democratic sports, such as softball and basketball, that once promoted interclass male mingling.

  Finally, there is that most promising of new male traits—sensitivity. I have no hesitation about categorizing this as an upscale-class cue if only because new men so firmly believe that it is. For more than a decade, sensitivity has been supposed to be the inner quality that distinguishes an educated, middle-class male from his unregenerate blue-collar brothers: “They” are Archie Bunkers; “we” are represented by his more liberal, articulate son-in-law. As thoughtful a scholar as Joseph H. Pleck, program director of the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, who has written extensively on the male sex role, simply restates (in a 1976 issue of the Journal of Social Issues) the prejudice that blue-collar men are trapped in the “traditional” male role, “where interpersonal and emotional skills are relatively undeveloped.”

  No one, of course, has measured sensitivity and plotted it as a function of social class, but Judith Langer, a market researcher, reports that, in her studies, it is blue-collar men who express less “traditional” or “macho” values, both in response to products and in speaking of their relationships with women. “Certainly I’m not suggesting that only blue-collar men show such openness,” she concludes, “but rather that the stereotype of blue-collar workers can be limited.”

  To the extent that some special form of sensitivity is located in educated and upwardly mobile males, I suspect it may be largely a verbal accomplishment. The vocabulary of sensitivity, at least, has become part of the new masculine politesse; certainly no new man would admit to being insensitive or willfully “out of touch with his feelings.” Quite possibly, as sensitivity has spread, it has lost its moorings in the therapeutic experience and come to signify the heightened receptivity associated with consumerism: a vague appreciation that lends itself to aimless shopping.