Society for Cuttin' Up Men

Posted by Lex Konrad in Opinions | Sep 21, 2005

Yesterday I saw this piece on Salon, wherein Rebecca Traister “interviews” lad-lit author Benjamin Kunkel about his recently released novel, Indecision. I say “interviews” because the article is less of an interview than a soap box for Traister’s lumpenfeminist ramblings; Traister, playing the frustrated single New York woman, has an axe to grind and Kunkel serves as her willing patsy.

Traister believes today’s young men are listless in a way that young women are not. These passionless lads have little interest in careers, women or anything else:

I have observed the birth of a new breed of man: a man of few interests and no passions; a man whose libido is reduced and whose sense of responsibility nonexistent. These men are commitment-phobic not just about love, but about life. They drink and take drugs, but even their hedonism lacks focus or joy. They exhibit no energy for anyone, any activity, profession or ideology.

I wonder how Traister can claim to have even a passing familiarity with the world beyond her circle of clucking hens. New York is the place where young people of both genders come to “find themselves”—and yes, many of them seemingly drift aimlessly until they do. The story is nearly as old as the city itself. Since personal observation here is as good as Truth, I’ll simply note that I’ve encountered enough young single women to know that drinking and drugs and listlessness are not the sole domain of young men: just swap out the Xbox and Entourage for a Tivo and Sex and the City reruns.

Rather than examine more plausible (and prosaic) explanations for the seeming listlessness of an entire generation—the dot-bomb, the recession and subsequent jobless recovery, the war, etc.—Traister stoops to the pointless gender stereotyping that’s common among frustrated singles. Her observations may make for interesting chit-chat among her SATC-wannabe friends but they are hardly worthwhile as sociological analysis.

Traister goes on to assert (through her mouthpiece Kunkel) that today’s young lads are actually unworthy of their female counterparts (or at least, presumably, of Traister and her friends):

Men are unworthy in the sense of being more unfinished as people [and] in the sense of being, as romantic partners, bumbling and dishonest in a way that women are maybe not as often.

This statement (and Traister’s endorsement of it) serves only to highlight the author’s smugness and the interviewer’s bitterness. It’s the same old there-are-no-good-men-left tripe women have been swallowing for years—better suited, at any rate, to the pages of Cosmo than those of a political magazine. It’s so much easier to lay the blame at someone else’s feet than take responsibility for your own shortcomings and lousy choices. Relationships require, above all else, a modicum of self-awareness and at least a little awe at the thought of another human being willing to tolerate—even embrace—your flaws. I, for one, count my blessings every day.

The real problem with our generation is this: men and women alike are rarely able or willing to invest time and energy into building meaningful relationships. These days, young singles quickly lose patience with each other in our world of on-demand satisfaction. Kunkel touches on this, albeit much too briefly:

Partly, a model of shopping has overtaken our experience of romance. Love, historically, has been associated with a sensation of destiny. It’s very difficult for us to attain a sensation of destiny where love is concerned anymore, because we think we can always look for something better, which is essentially a shopper’s mentality.

Increasingly, people enter their late twenties and early thirties lacking even the most basic relationship skills—skills that make one bearable, at least, to a romantic partner. Age only exacerbates the problem as people grow attached to the lazy habits and quirks of their single lifestyles. They become more demanding, less flexible, and less willing to make the sorts of compromises that any relationship requires. Their hearts harden under the accumulated weight of perceived injustices. Friends couple up and disappear, leaving only the echo-chamber of other people stuck in the same rut. Ultimately, as in Traister’s case, singles begin to suffer paranoid, sociopathic delusions more commonly found among mental patients. “I’m not crazy,” they insist. “Everyone else is.”

So what’s the antidote to this madness? Going nowhere fast, Kunkel and Traister take us on a tour of the contradictory impulses that characterize postmodern feminism. At first, Kunkel rather foolishly suggests that women as a whole withhold sex in order to force men to shape up, but this smacks of the sort of gamesmanship that poisoned modern relations between the sexes in the first place. Then he advocates militant promiscuity, which is surely a recipe for disaster (news flash here: there aren’t many men who are able or willing to achieve this sort of radical disconnect between the physical and the emotional). Then they both ramble on about stoicism, which strikes me as yet another pointless tough-gal act.

The real answer, I think, lies in just the sort of soul-searching Traister seems to despise, the kind of self-examination and exploration that lies, ironically, at the heart of Kunkel’s book. Men and women need to figure out what their real values are and make life-altering decisions based on these values—they need to stop viewing each other as success-objects, or as props in delusional fairy-tales. Though we may live in an age of self-sufficiency and militant individualism, I don’t think it’s a sign of weakness to seek a partner before you’re “prepared” in some narrow life-improvement sense. We all need to realize that as humans we’re always works-in-progress.

There’s nothing wrong with taking a long look in the goddamned mirror.

Comments Off | Top ↑