Attack of the listless lads

One of reasons I liked "Indecision" was also one of the reasons it made me crazy: that it so precisely portrayed not just the indecisiveness but the lack of energy in men of my generation -- men whom I've known and dated. They haven't had things they loved, or even things they really cared about ...

[Interrupting] Women shouldn't have sex with these guys! As a whole, you should go on some sort of a sexual strike against just such men.

Well, I sort of have.

No. It's like with the labor movement: an individual worker striking won't do it. There needs to be a general strike. If there is not a mass strike against such men they will be able to achieve libidinal expenditure relatively frequently, if not satisfyingly; they'll fail to sublimate their libidinal energies in the way that actually makes men attractive, which is by accomplishing things that may not be what they've always wanted to accomplish but are worthy things all the same, and they'll respond to women with the slack apathy with which one might respond to women if one felt that women were too available to them. Women as a whole should go on sexual strike; this is what I'm proposing.

Why is it up to us? A girl likes to get laid, too, after all. Why should it be our responsibility to go on a sex strike just to energize the male population?

You need to make an old-fashioned masculine distinction between sex and love. Just find some guy and use him. The guys you want love from? Give them nothing.

So is that the only solution? Or is there another way this dynamic can change?

I don't really know. I'm dealing with this from a highly theoretical standpoint. Of course, there is a broader sense of male apathy that I'm sure has causes that aren't just romantico-sexual in nature. It has to do with the difficulty of finding something that seems meaningful to do in the world.

Why would the difficulty of finding meaning afflict men more than women?

I suppose because the fact that nearly the whole universe of jobs is open to women is a tremendous gain in possibility for them. For men, there's been no corresponding gain. In fact, we live in this world that for reasons that are kind of hard to explain, [though] I think Hannah Arendt has gone some distance in explaining them, it seems that meaningful action is harder to take than it has been in previous historical times. I think this is the sense even of people who have no historical sense. It's something that they feel.

Are you saying that the role that men have historically been expected to play has been muddied by the fact that women are now able and often expected to play the same role?

I don't think this has anything to do with women.

No?

No. I think it's something that men sense more acutely than women because men have been actors in the world, as a whole, for more generations than women have been. I think there's got to be a reason that the slacker -- the person who feels that nothing he could do could really be all that meaningful, so why really do anything -- is a more common male figure than a female figure. It must be because the person expected to act meaningfully in the public world, man or woman, has been a man forever. And men then are in a better position to sense some sort of decline in the ability to feel that you can do something meaningful in your life.

So men are responding to broader political issues?

Yeah.

And why is there this decline in the ability to act meaningfully?

Well, the answers that people like Arendt have given have to do with bureaucratization. You could also adduce the narrowness of political hopes in our time. [Historically], someone with a relatively meaningless job might have nevertheless felt he belonged to a very meaningful group, whether he was a fascist or a socialist. I feel out of my depth talking about this stuff. It is very important but hard to wrap your head around. I think men inherit -- if from nowhere else than from the movies -- the impression that in order to win the respect and love of a woman, you ought to be doing something meaningful in the world. And if you can't hold your head up high in that sense, then why ask somebody to love you?

Well, maybe the question I'm about to ask comes from the movies too, but forget about "asking a woman to love you." What happened to actively, and ardently, loving a woman?

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. There's no destiny when it comes to buying pants or shirts or a dress. There'll be the nicest thing you can afford this season. But then a new season will [bring] more attractive styles and you'll actually be able to afford something better. I think that tremendous passion that we feel other generations had and that we missed was attached to a sense of destiny, and of permanent love that would survive changes in station and opportunity and fortune.

That's a very unromantic thing you just said. Not just because it's about the shopping model for love, which is certainly a societal model to which women are just as susceptible. But because what you're saying is that the model overpowers any genuine passion or raw desire.

Raw desire is soon formed and soon spent. It is not what sonnets or the romantic comedies of the '30s want me to desire. They want us to desire that our souls should be paired with someone else's. And I think the phases of people's lives feel too disposable for that to be something easily settled upon now.

Coming back to fiction, I would say the only persuasive love story I've encountered in fiction, [especially] fiction written by a man over the last 20 years, is in Norman Rush's "Mating," where a man has set up a utopian feminist commune in the desert of Botswana. It allows the woman to take him seriously as a man. He's a man who on the one hand is fully aware of the legitimate claims of feminism, but at the same time is being a great man in this old-fashioned way by founding a society.

Next page: Has "tragic, dignified realism" become the mark of femininity?