But that has everything to do with feminism and women's roles in this discussion we're having. For a long time, I've been wondering about a crisis of masculinity in our generation, a generation in which opportunities were truly available to at least middle-class women. We weren't just told we could do anything; we were expected to do everything. But we were always told how difficult that would be, that we would confront challenges and pay high prices for our satisfactions. I don't know that men of our generation were sent the same message. So when things get tough, women don't enjoy it any more than men, but they are not surprised. Whereas men -- at least some of the ones I've known -- have been paralyzed by life's hardships.
If what you're talking about is the inculcation in women of a tragic sense of life -- the sense that nothing comes without a price -- that is the sine qua non of masculinity, the masculine tragic attitude that we see in books and movies. "This is gonna hurt, but it's necessary; it ain't gonna be easy, but you're gonna have to suck it up and take it." But what you're saying is very interesting. If the tragic sense of life, this masculine property, should have been transferred to women, [and] men have come to be seen as these cosseted creatures denied any sort of full contact with reality, then this is a really important historical crossover.
Well, let's not get carried away. I'm guessing here.
Run with it. What you've just described as an attitude is something that is historically associated with men rather than women. When we encounter it in men we tend to consider it masculine. And something that is probably universally lacking in men we find twee and weak and indecisive is this tragic sense.
I noticed it when friends lost jobs during the most recent economic bust. I saw a lot of men who sat on their couches and felt impotent and embarrassed about being jobless, but who made no move to do anything about it. It's not that there weren't women who reacted that way too, but most of my female friends went out and got some kind of job. Of course, many men did too. But I knew a lot of them who were just paralyzed.
To really aggrandize these generalizations we've been making, you could claim that a great historical crossover has occurred, that a sense of tragic, dignified realism has become the [mark] of femininity while men have become head-in-the-clouds dreamers who want things to be ideal if they're to be at all. I think of that novel by Henry Green, I can't remember if it's "Living" or "Loving," [in which] this sheltered industrialist's daughter witnesses an industrial accident where a workingman dies. And she cries for two days straight. No one else in the novel does this because only an upper-class sheltered woman would cry for two days about someone dying in an industrial accident. It's a very sad thing, but no one's so sheltered that they could react that way! If men respond to a post-industrial accident like losing their job in the same sort of way -- that they just can't believe that the world has disappointed them -- that's interesting. But you'd also want to praise one aspect of it: If men, by being unrealistic, dreamy or weak, are preserving a sense of how life should actually be lived, then good for them.
Well, let's not overdo it. I don't think this historical crossover is a done deal. What we're talking about is very much in process; these shifts may just be working themselves out. For all our generalizations, I'm speaking very specifically, about my peers who live in New York City and at 30 are almost all single. It's possible that I just have really unmarriageable friends.
But probably not.
No, probably not, in that they are hot and successful: desirable by commonly held human standards. But I don't think my stoic female friends don't acknowledge injustice or pain. They just process it in a traditionally female mode -- by talking about it. It's like they transform that chatter into a fuel that men don't have.
So old-fashioned men are silent stoics. Newfangled women are chattering stoics.
Right.
And newfangled men are not stoics at all.
This story has been corrected since it was originally published.
About the writer
Rebecca Traister is a staff writer for Salon Life.
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