Conclusion

In the opening pages of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, journalist and author Susan Faludi repackages a venerable narrative about the feminisation of American culture in the 1990s, arguing that the ‘crisis’ of manhood in late twentieth-century America stemmed from the fact that men had become “consumers instead of producers,” that is, “passive reflectors of consumer culture rather than active participants in it” (38). Similarly writing in the nineties, albeit from a perspective of masculinist rather than feminist prerogatives, mythopoetic male activist Robert Bly advocated the need for men to “get in touch with their primal instincts for competition and violence” (64–5) and to reclaim the “spiritual core of maleness” that had long been buried beneath the feminised dictates of commoditised capitalism (4). As previous chapters have shown, the representation of masculinity through the prism of an emasculating late capitalist commodity culture, together with the homosocial backlash of “Angry White Male” politics (Faludi 40), became increasingly popular and increasingly foregrounded in literature as early as the late sixties and seventies, from James Dickey’s “river-mystique” (45) to Michael Herr’s soldierly “John Wayne wet-dream” (19). Given the continuing relevance of this conceptual framework in succeeding decades, however, it is important to appreciate the extent to which such popularity marks more than an acceptance of the fact men were in supposed crisis during the 1970s, which would diminutively equate the opening and closing of the decade with the respective overture and closure of ‘masculinity’ and its ‘crisis.’