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This cinematic vanity is a corollary of the vacuous "ornamental culture" that, Faludi says, has nudged men atop a pedestal not so different from the one women found themselves perched upon in the '50s:

The fifties housewife, stripped of her connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with shopping and ornamental display of her ultrafemininity, could be said to have morphed into the nineties man, stripped of his connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with consumption and a gym-bred display of his ultramasculinity. The empty compensations of a "feminine mystique" are transforming into empty compensations of a masculine mystique.

In a sense, the exploitation of what proto-feminist Betty Friedan called the "housewife market" has expanded, perhaps justly, into the male domain. Search the back pages of any men's magazine and you'll find a burst of glossy ads for hair-growth creams, penis enlargers, videotaped sex lessons: a host of bulletins alerting men to a sad litany of their flaws -- in the same way women are still badgered about, say, cellulite -- and offering quick, high-priced fixes. But then, truth to tell, one doesn't even need to turn the pages that far back; the features themselves reveal the shift in emphasis. In olden times, men's mags such as Esquire exhorted their audience to read more widely, to think more clearly, to be, above all, smarter. Nowadays, even New Man, the Promise Keepers' house organ, emblazons its covers with tag lines on the order of SPIRITUAL KEYS TO LOSING FAT. As Faludi writes,

The commercialized, ornamental "femininity" that the women's movement diagnosed now has men by the throat. Men and women both feel cheated of lives in which they might have contributed to a social world; men and women both feel pushed into roles that are about little more than displaying prettiness or prowess in the marketplace. Women were pushed first, but now their brothers have joined that same forced march.

What's ailing men, then, turns out to be not so different from what's ailing women: The culture has stripped too many of them of their depth and relegated them to the status of baubles. Ultimately, Faludi's dreamy prescription is for men and women to band together against the shadowy forces of culture, to create a new paradigm, to "act in the service of a brotherhood that includes us all." However valid and unimpeachable a solution this may be, it seems -- for the moment, anyway -- naively unrealistic, like a Hollywood ending. Gary Goldstein, after all, is out there somewhere, still waiting to throw a punch.
salon.com | Sept. 30, 1999

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