“A society of utility, for all the indisputable ways that it exploited men’s health and labor, and in an industrial context broke the backs and spirits of factory workers and destroyed the lungs of miners, had one saving grace: it defined manhood by character, by the inner qualities of stoicism, integrity, reliability, the ability to shoulder burdens, the willingness to put others first, the desire to protect and provide and sacrifice. These are the same qualities, recoded as masculine, that society has long recognized in women as the essence of motherhood. Men were publicly useful insofar as they mastered skills associated with the private realm of maternal femininity. Like mothers tending selflessly to their babes, men were not only to take care of their families but also their society without complaint; that was, in fact, what made them men. Masculinity as “a nurturing concept” was one of the few continuities anthropologist David Gilmore found in his cross- cultural study. A maternal conception of manhood was precisely what Henry Wallace had in mind when he compared the Common Man who served in World War II to “a she-bear who has lost a cub.”
“In a culture of ornament, by contrast, manhood is defined by appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by money and aggression, by posture and swagger and “props,” by the curled lip and petulant sulk and flexed biceps, by the glamour of the cover boy, and by the market-bartered “individuality” that sets one astronaut or athlete or gangster above another. These are the same traits that have long been designated as the essence of feminine vanity, the public face of the feminine as opposed to the private caring, maternal one. The aspects of this public “femininity"—objectification, passivity, infantilization, pedestal-perching, and mirror-gazing—are the very ones that women have in modern times denounced as trivializing and humiliating qualities imposed on them by a misogynist culture. No wonder men are in such agony. Not only are they losing the society they were once essential to, they are “gaining” the very world women so recently shucked off as demeaning and dehumanizing.”
– Susan Faludi, from Stiffed
