Reports of My Demise (xii)

The outer layer of the masculinity crisis, men's loss of economic authority, was most evident in the recessionary winds of the early nineties, as the devastation of male unemployment grew ever fiercer. The role of family breadwinner was plainly being undermined by economic forces that spat many men back into a treacherous job market during corporate "consolidations" and downsizings. Even the many men who were never laid off were often gripped with the fear that they could be next – that their footholds as providers were frighteningly unsteady.

As the economy recovered, the male crisis did not, and it became apparent that whatever men's afflictions were, they could not be gauged solely through graphs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Underlying their economic well-being was another layer of social and symbolic understanding between men, a tacit compact undergirding not only male employment but the whole connection between men and the public domain. That pact was forged through loyalty, through a conviction that a man's "word" meant something in the larger society, through a belief that faithfulness, dedication, and duty would be rewarded in kind, or at least appreciated in some meaningful way – some way that "made you a man." Realizing that loyalty, whether to a corporation, an army, or a football team, no longer allowed a man to lay claim to male virtue – that it was as likely, in fact, to make him a pitiable sap – could be devastating to any man, but especially to those postwar men raised on home-team spirit, John Wayne westerns, and tributes to the selfless service of the American GI.

Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, p. 595

Slogging through Faludi's 600-plus page epic, one often suspects she has slipped in every precious writerly turn of phrase that editors have trimmed from her newspaper articles over the years. Nevertheless, in just over 14 pages, she pulls together a cogent and incisive concluding chapter that's worth more by itself than Hanna Rosin's entire book.

Rosin asks why men can't or won't participate in the New Economy, but she is too polite to seek substantive answers, and her fieldwork is far too shallow to offer them up on a platter. It is ultimately conjectural but by no means without some merit to conclude, as I have devoted much of the month to articulating, that digging deeper in fact threatens to challenge too many of her own basic assumptions about the world and about what people do and ought to want from it.

Faludi on the other hand has the distinct advantage of depth, if not breadth, of engagement, having followed her stories for years on end simply as part of her day job, and thus having developed long-term personal relationships with many of the men she chronicles. And what she found, overwhelmingly, were distant fathers and the gaping chasms they left unfilled in their sons' lives:

For centuries, of course, fathers have disappointed, neglected, abused, abandoned their sons. But there was something particularly unexpected, and so particularly disturbing, about the nature of paternal desertion that unfolded in the years after World War II, precisely because it coincided with a period of unprecedented abundance. In the generation before the war, millions of fathers failed to support their families, and hordes of them abandoned their households, became itinerant laborers, hoboes, winos. But that was the fault of the Great Depression, not of its men. By contrast, the post-World War II era was the moment of America's great bounty and ascendance, when the nation and thus its fathers were said to own the world. Never, or so their sons were told, did fathers have so much to pass on as at the peak of the American century. And conversely, never was there such a burden on the sons to learn how to run a world they would inherit. Yet the fathers, with all the force of fresh victory and moral virtue behind them, seemingly unfettered in their paternal power and authority, failed to pass the mantle, the knowledge, all that power and authority, on to their sons. (596-7)

For all of her insight, Faludi too suffers from a certain reluctance to go all the way on questions such as this, though the word "burden" above is a subtly dropped hint that she does, in fact, have the understanding and wherewithal to do so. I very much doubt she believes single mothers and gay couples to be inherently unfit to raise boys; why, then, should the mere presence of a distant father throw such a wet blanket on the whole enterprise when he is not the only parent present? Rosin's addition-by-subtraction, "just another mouth to feed" analysis certainly comes to mind, but she consistently frames this as a purely economic/financial decision, and one made disproportionately by working-class women; we have reached awfully dark times indeed if it is demonstrably better for children of all classes on grounds of social adjustment as well. That possibility notwithstanding, Faludi never quite so explicitly asks if perhaps the culture at large was responsible for creating in these boys inflated, ultimately regressive expectations of what a father might do for a son. In fairness, she can't really ask this since it violates the trust these men (i.e. the grownup sons) have shown in her in confessing their inner pain for a mass audience. I am asking it here, then, and at the risk of going all Men's Movement on everything, I have another question as well: how many of these distant fathers do you think may once have expressed what was, for them, the responsible intention not to have children only to be, let's say, fooled into impregnating their partner against their wishes? Everyone knows someone.

Another nugget, apropos of nothing in particular: I lost track of how many stories Faludi tells of husbands being laid off and wives more or less immediately moving out and "getting involved" with co-workers. You would think it was a stealth attack on these women's character and motives...that is until she inevitably induces the deserted husband to admit that yeah, he might have hit her this one time, and actually, yeah, he did hit her this one time. Suddenly the sticking around part makes less sense and the leaving part more. So, there certainly is some oblique storytelling here, but I suspect it's intentional, and it's definitely effective as long as the reader is paying close enough attention. It also, however, leaves one wondering if there aren't some simpler big-picture issues for these men to deal with before the intricacies of essentialism-versus-constructionism, inner psyches, and advanced capitalist exploitation can be fruitfully unpacked and offered up for their self-improving consumption.

The last item on that list, however, is one on which Faludi crafts some exceptionally insightful prose, and so in gratitude (is it showing gratitude to plop large sections of someone's book on the internet?), she gets the final word in this year's installment of Reports:

...just because men have wound up in a beauty-contest world doesn't mean women have put them there. The gaze that plagues them doesn't actually spring from a feminine eye. The ever-prying, ever-invasive beam reducing men to objects comes not from women's inspection but from the larger culture. Cast into the gladiatorial arena of ornament, men sense their own diminishment in women's strength. But the "feminine" power whose rise most genuinely threatens men is not the female shoulder hoisting girders at a construction site, not the female foot in the boardroom door of a corporation, not the female vote in the ballot box. The "femininity" that has hurt men the most is an artificial femininity manufactured and marketed by commercial interests. What demeans men is a force ever more powerful in the world, one that has long demeaned women. The gaze that hounds men is the very gaze that women have been trying to escape. (599)

And again:

At century's end, feminists can no longer say of consumer culture with such ringing confidence that "what it does to everyone, it does to women even more." 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." (602)

Don't push me, Hanna Rosin. Don't push me.

Reports of My Demise (xi)

It's time to start thinking endgame here, and there are indeed a couple of loose ends to be tied up concerning the gender discussion I opened up earlier in the month. (Actually, there are thousands of them, but you know what I mean. Only hours left in the month and way too many unread books remaining on the stack to think that today will mark the end of this dialogue.) One of them concerns Hanna Rosin's use of the phrase "creative class," which I have to assume is a direct nod to Richard Florida's 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class. Blogging about this book in 2014 is almost a retro-hipster maneuver; when I started this site way back in the mid aughts and went looking for other bloggers to read, it seemed to be nearly everywhere I looked. Today I finally jumped in and have managed to read the first hundred-plus pages, roughly a third of the book. It certainly bears the dual stamp of pop-economist authorship which so endears such works to the blogosphere: admirable empirical authority with which to support our otherwise poorly-supported diatribes blended with an occasional obliviousness to stuff everyone else knows, thus opening myriad avenues for criticism and discussion.

I guess that should be reason enough to plop yourself down and read a book, but frankly the fact that I, the bibliophobe, am taking the time at all tells you how deeply troubled I've been by The End of Men, since I'm really only interested in fact-checking Rosin's appeals to the concept, given as she is to dropping breezy, shallow references where more depth might be helpful. As it turns out there's not much to get worked up over this time around: Florida's book, like Rosin's, is not really about artists at all. Really, then, it's all those mid-aughts blogmongers who deserve a slap on the wrist for getting just a bit over-excited that artists and musicians suddenly were being posited as members of an ascendant class uniquely well-positioned to thrive in a Brave New World of impermanence and volatility. If you'd asked, we could just have told you that those forces are wreaking havoc with our lives and careers as well.

Instead, our presence is mostly just a convenient indicator to mercenary job-hoppers that a given place is good enough for them. We're lumped in with Florida's "super-creative core" because, well, how could we not be? Creativity is central to what we do, whereas the smaller, secondary category of "creative professional," while granted honorary membership in the larger Creative Class, is merely required "to think on their own" and "engage in creative problem solving" (69) without necessarily being expected to innovate, design, or build. So how many "super-creative" musicians are pulling down near the average annual salary Florida cites for his Super-Creative Core ($42,719 in 1999 dollars)? Probably not too many. One enviable point about us, though: we care about what we do and we know why it matters.

Indeed, the most interesting chapter to me so far is called "The Machine Shop and The Hair Salon," wherein Florida lays out not only anecdotal but also extensive empirical evidence that self-fulfillment matters more than ever to today's labor force, exceeding even financial compensation in many cases. He speaks of "the growing number of young people who are 'good with their hands' but choose to wrap their hands around a tattooing needle, DJ turntable or landscaping tools rather than the controls of a turret lathe" despite the latter skill's greater marketability and stability. His is at least a far more satisfying, less d-baggy list of metiers than Rosin's ("publicity assistant, wine critic, trail mix creator, sustainability consultant, screenwriter"). The loss of manufacturing jobs has been a real trend, but so, evidently, has a growing distaste for them among young people who might in earlier generations have mindlessly gravitated in that direction. "I don't think guidance counselors can change this," says Florida, and really, how could I or any of my music school compadres on either side of the stand observe crops and crops of glassy-eyed, ill-prepared frosh and doubt that he's right?

Now, Hanna Rosin on the "seesaw marriage:"

Couples are not chasing justice and fairness as measured by some external yardstick of gender equality. What they are after is individual self-fulfillment, and each partner can have a shot at achieving it at different points in the marriage. The arrangement got established in an era where the creative class moves more fluidly through jobs and no one expects to stay in the same job forever. It thrives in a culture that privileges self-expression over duty. It's progressive in it's instinctive gender blindness and rejection of obligatory work, and utterly conservative in its comfort with traditional marriage.

[my boldface emphasis throughout]

There is a hidden premise here; it is well-hidden indeed, but I for one insist on "going there." Why exactly is it, Ms. Rosin, that both partners can't chase individual self-fulfillment concurrently rather than being limited to doing so in shifts? What exactly is this shadow force tying down our otherwise adept, Creative, educated married couples, alternately derailing one's quest for happiness, then the other's? Clearly it is exists; you just wrote a whole paragraph about it. But does it have a name? It couldn't be...children, could it Ms. Rosin? You wouldn't consider...children such an obvious, non-negotiable component of your own notions of self-fulfillment that their wet-blanket effect on virtually every other such avenue could avoid being directly articulated for chapters on end, would you? Ah, but that's precisely what has happened here. "Domestic work" is such a weasel-word euphemism in so many books on gender: no pair of grown adults creates so many dirty t-shirts and cereal bowls by themselves that cleaning them up becomes a second full-time job. It's the kids, stupid! Lose the a priori assumption that domestic partnership = childrearing and suddenly the world opens up.

Why is this so hard to do? For once, Rosin cannot claim to be a just a reporter and not a theorist; in fact she does theorize in spates, for example that the seesaw marriage is "progressive in it's instinctive gender blindness and rejection of obligatory work, and utterly conservative in its comfort with traditional marriage." Bullshit: what she describes here is an overwhelmingly conservative orientation; the taken-for-granted assumption that procreation is an essential feature of heterosexual domestic partnership colors every square inch of it. Seriously, having a kid doesn't create any "obligatory work?!" And the "gender blindness" part? It merely dictates that instead of the woman being derailed entirely and the husband hardly at all, both partners instead take turns getting derailed. "Do you do, or don't you don't" as professor Zappa said, but the root of "progressive" is "progress" and I respectfully disagree that there's more than a smidge of that represented here, at least not with the world's population, wealth distribution, and natural resources standing where they each do at this moment.

(Am I saying humans should stop reproducing altogether and just go extinct the old-fashioned way? It wouldn't break my heart, nor that of any polar bear or grey wolf you might stop to ask.)

Reports of My Demise (ix)

I recall countless high school classes where I sketched compositions during time allotted for a head start on that evening's devoirs. After noting their reticence to intervene, I began silently daring my teachers to reprimand their best student for being off task. I am convinced, however, that status had far less to do with their complicity than did my choice of something as intellectual, esoteric, and over-romanticized as handmade lines-and-dots music. Perhaps on a more practical level my demonstrated ability to lap the field academically without being given extra time to finish my homework had something to do with it too. In any case, by the time it wasn't cute anymore, I was an adult and a college graduate. And man, was it ever not cute anymore. Plastic turns to Cardboard in a hurry for those of us given to intellectual, esoteric, over-romanticized pursuits.

There is a similar reticence that prevails out in the liberal bourgie world, where relativism-as-social-grace acts as a filter and no one wants to be the first to tell you quite so baldly that "Improvising Tuba Player" is not a real job. There is in addition, as I touched upon early on in this series, the lovingly crafted, overdetermined, eminently socially and academically respectable path of university music study. And indeed, not only was I myself almost impossibly meritorious in this academic arena, but my particular mancessory, the tuba, is typically so difficult to recruit that my undergrad school picked up virtually the entire tab for my studies there. And so I left behind high-powered academics in one fell swoop to become a student-athlete of sorts, privy to none of the social perks while suffering from many of the same drawbacks, namely an intellectually stilted curriculum and profoundly limited employment prospects post-graduation. Had I not concurrently taken a student job with the campus security department at a time of rapid post-9/11 growth in both the public and private security sectors, who knows how I would have supported myself in the interim. Indeed, this led me to make yet another statistical contribution to Hanna Rosin's work: I am a college graduate, and now a graduate degree holder, who has never held a job that requires a post-secondary education.

Even having excelled at my course of study and having managed to remain blissfully free from the crushing debt faced by most of my peers, I less launched myself into the real world than did an epic faceplant in its lap. Certainly my timing could not have been worse: an historical recession was on the horizon and, in related news, Western art music had never been less marketable. I don't deny, however, that my distinctively male unwillingness to "adapt" has profoundly shaped this leg of my journey as well. This series of posts has been devoted largely to defending that posture and to enumerating its potentially broader, gender-neutral social utility.

Most of the people I have known who are making a real living as musicians are not the best musicians. Some of them are quite far from it. What distinguishes them, in my experience, is their willingness to do just about anything to achieve this. They will play, teach, and quite frankly, say anything they have to, walking right up to the line between ethical and unethical behavior, and in occasional cases crossing ever so slightly over to the other side. There is, meanwhile, a small collection of people I can count on one hand who are even more uncompromising and sensitive to issues of honesty than I am, who have strongly influenced the way I go about my own business, whose work I find unusually compelling, and who, like me, have generally had a much tougher time of it.

I know, I know, you've heard the art-versus-commerce whine-fest before and you're not too keen on rehashing it through the eyes of a latent mancessionist. If you insist on more excitement, I defy you once again to ponder the deep, dark questions lurking all around this old trope as the (un)willingness to compromise enters popular discourse as a decidedly gendered concern.

The gendering of compromise is a central theme of Rosin's The End of Men. It is a maneuver which holds up quite nicely in the polite company she evidently keeps. The Arts are in this way, though, a far less polite domain, which is why there's no trace of a Maria Schneider, Ingrid Jensen, or Nicole Mitchell anywhere to be found here. How naively parochial and presumptuous such a list is when we're talking about mainstream journalism for mainstream readers; but for me, working in a field where such remarkable women are still breaking ground, it's hard to ignore their being ignored.

In the place they might have occupied, we are of course left with that fleeting, threadbare caricature of a hyper-bourgeois "creative class" of mercenary consultants and entertainment industry frill-mongers, proxies for more substantive notions of creativity and insults to the aesthetic risk-takers who anonymously feed the machine from below. Rosin must understand that creativity and compromise are, if not truly anathema, then at least strange bedfellows, which is why she forgoes meaningful engagement with the kind of art and artists that, wittingly or otherwise, challenge bourgeois values. She sticks instead to an investigation of the new "Plastic Woman" (7) who is "nurturing" (124), "approachable and consumer responsive" (135), "more nimble and responsive to trends." (248) These are above all women who "tend to respond to social cues and bend their personalities to fit in what the times allow," (191) all while demonstrating "the willingness to adapt and bend to a fast-changing economic landscape." (270)

As I encountered each of these turns of phrase for the first time, I was constantly reminded of a paper by Gordon Downie which I had dug up for a prior research project:

With the expansion of free-market neo-liberalization in the form of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics...those performance measures associated with commodity form and behavior have spread to encompass not only public sector services such as health care, utilities, infrastructure, and education, but also cultural provision and production...

...any organization or individual seeking to maximize their strategic advantage in society will be required to adopt those behaviors that are congruent with those metrics of performance associated with marketization and commodity form. Phrases such as "selling yourself" and "making the right impression" point to a process that seeks the extension of the commodity form away from material artifacts and goods to soft services and interpersonal behavior profiling. (197)

'Cultural Production as Self-Surveillance: Making the Right Impression.' Perspectives of New Music 46. 1 (Winter 2008)

At some point in the not-so-distant past, the phrase "Well-behaved women rarely make history" achieved that certain critical mass required to find its way onto a popular bumper sticker. In those terms, the most disturbing aspect of Rosin's Plastic Woman is what a well-behaved capitalist she is. Of course, the key takeaway from The End of Men is that the world we now live in seems keen on rewarding these characteristics to a greater degree than ever before, rendering that bumper sticker a tad bit miscalibrated and odiously vengeful. And yet, anyone who has been shopping for something other than groceries has seen what "the extension of the commodity form away from material artifacts and goods to soft services and interpersonal behavior profiling" looks and feels like. I for one certainly have seen it. Perhaps I have a tad bit more empathy for these workers than the average Cardboard Man, or perhaps I have a raging case of corrugation myself since I just don't like to shop all that much, but generally this is a condition that breaks my heart and my spirit in equal measure. These are the ultimate mediated men and women, and they do not seem to be the least bit happy having been tasked with concealing their employers' criminality beneath parade smiles and complimentary bottles of spring water.

Reports of My Demise (vii)

I'm a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.

(Man's Prayer, The Red Green Show)

Why pay such heed to Hanna Rosin and a years-old trope that's already been picked apart by a variety of smart people? It certainly has been a useful prompt for me to verbalize quite a few thoughts that had remained abstract and unarticulated for quite some time. It inspired me to read up on a subject other than music, probably in more depth than I ever have before. It was also a great excuse to get excited for Blog Month. Above all, though, these sorts of public mastheads for issues of great social importance and interest seldom represent the private thoughts of isolated individuals. It certainly caught everyone's attention when in the immediate wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures the right promptly dispatched David Brooks to smear The Solitary Leaker as "the ultimate unmediated man," pinning responsibility for his treasonous actions on

the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.

Sound like anyone we know?

Brooks continues:

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

True enough in a vacuum. But you know, Dave, I have to imagine it's easier to live such a mediated life under the watchful eye of our "gigantic and menacing state" when you've made a nice chunk of change publicly defending that state's imperial wars. Then they only spy on you for fun, or maybe for practice. The rest of us, meanwhile, can't help but be thankful that there are a few people unmediated, unpropagandized, and unafraid enough to sound the alarm on wholesale violations of the law that threaten to upend the foundations of Western civilization far more thoroughly and violently than the scourge of atomized "technological existences" among a few malcontent kids ever could.

All of that being as it is, the real tragedy here, obviously, is that no quick-witted political cartoonist seized on the opportunity to render Unmediated Man as an overweight, unshaven comic strip superhero who goes around repelling bad guys with his body odor and infiltrating government spy agencies by striking up conversations about fantasy football. Cartooning in fact was an early artistic interest of mine, long before music. At my youthful behest mom even shuttled me off to a few Saturday morning cartooning classes in middle school; I however found representational drawing, then as now, intensely difficult, and quickly gave up. And so the Unmediated Man franchise may be licensed free of charge by any more skilled cartoonist who cares to do so. You're welcome.

In the end, about all I can say for David Brooks is that at least he has the good sense to focus his laser beam of mediated male ire on issues of pressing importance, misguided though he seems almost exclusively be. The military, the police, the private security industry, and the New York Yankees meanwhile all fixate publicly and overbearingly on the minutiae of grooming as expressions of mediated masculine discipline. Is finding the time and willpower to shave every single day really such a harrowing accomplishment? Perhaps I could forgive the casual observer for thinking that some of us indeed find it to be an impossible challenge. The reality, though, is not that it is too hard but rather too easy, too insubstantial, too ornamental. The unshaven are not the class clowns; we are the kids whose schoolwork isn't challenging us. For a real, unmediated challenge, we might just decide to piss our lives away in isolation pursuing mastery of esoteric bodies of knowledge and their attendant technical skills with virtually no worldly social or material incentive beyond our own self-fulfillment and, perhaps if we're lucky, occasional small validations of our irrational faith in the greater social utility of such seemingly decadent pursuits. You want a challenge? Put down your fucking safety razor and try that shit on for size. Do any of you in these industries realize that you're not only committing the Fallacy of the Beard, but in fact committing it about beards? And in the name of "discipline?" How fucking pathetic is that?

I'm not above ruthlessly questioning the "social utility" of any artist's work, of course, nor am I prepared to crown each and every "whistleblower" a national hero on the spot without a frank assessment of the particulars. Once again, as with Plastic Woman and Cardboard Man, our galling collective predisposition toward black-and-white analyses rears its head: Mediated or unmediated? Hero or traitor? Seldom are things so simple, and seldom can relationships to "family, neighborhood, religious group," and especially not to something as baldly trivial as grooming tell us everything we need to know about someone. More importantly, it likely tells us nothing at all about whether the release of a secret government document is a matter of urgent civic necessity or how it impacts the personal safety of Americans overseas. Crummy people occasionally do heroic things, and vice versa.

There's nothing noble in achieving discipline over something trivial or something loathed. A task is not too easy simply because you love it; indeed, the pursuit of mastery often entails summarily eradicating the honeymoon phase, discovering all manner of unseemly corners of one's metier and oneself, and inevitably falling, at least partially, out of love. There's no surer way to become unenamored of a jazz solo than to transcribe it down to its smallest details, no surer way to dethrone a lines-and-dots composer than close examination of a score to reveal, often enough, frighteningly simplistic approaches. To uninhibitedly love a music is to keep it at arm's length; getting closer more or less mandates making an often uncomfortable peace with its shortcomings as they become increasingly perceptible. Some of us so inclined were damaged goods from the start, never destined to excel at the Americanist meritrocracy; others were impeccably qualified and simply couldn't be bothered to do both things at once. But make no mistake that the true artist is, by definition, the furthest from an unmediated man or woman, no matter their metier, and especially not because or in spite of the aesthetics of their appearance.

Reports of My Demise (iv)

Virtually no matter the explanation(s) one might seek for male overrepresentation in certain Western artistic traditions and subcultures, a double-bind often lurks in the shadows, sprouted in the fissure between the separatist and integrationist wings of feminism, and eagerly awaiting any conscious man of progressive, radical, uncompromised aesthetic sensibility who either charges or stumbles into the chasm. I am referring to the difference between (a) advocating for women's advancement in traditionally male dominated fields of endeavor, and (b) dismissing such fields of endeavor and their value systems as inherently male and therefore useless to over half the population. The term "difference feminism" is evidently in circulation, though (b) is still an extremist stance, even under that rubric; Naomi Wolf's distinction between "power feminism" and "victim feminism" is in the ballpark as well, but ultimately it also is broader and more moderate than what I am describing.

Sometimes the two modalities are interleaved (dare I say cross-contaminated?), as when Patricia Hill Collins in the course of her eloquently written, painstakingly researched, and elaborately referenced Black Feminist Thought incongruously picks away at positivist methods of "validating knowledge claims" as "ask[ing] African-American women to objectify ourselves, devalue our emotional life, displace our motivations for furthering knowledge about Black women, and confront in an adversarial relationship those with more social, economic, and professional power." (274) Instead, she argues in favor of equal consideration of claims proceeding from "an experiential, material base" of "collective experiences and accompanying worldviews," from a "mother wit" by which "your personal experience is considered very good evidence" (275-6, the latter two turns of phrase attributed in the text to other authors.) Indeed, this is known in "elite white male" circles, and a few other places, as anecdotal reasoning; are we simply to be content, then, that "subordinate groups have long had to use alternative ways to create independent self-definitions and self-valuations and to rearticulate them through our own specialists" (270), or does the ultimate liberation of such groups unavoidably entail winning a piece of the positivist pie?

Wolf fittingly describes an early lecture engagement of hers where extremists from both camps were in evidence:

The ring took turns not so much offering criticism of my work...but rather, calling me to account for myself to them. One woman charged that I was too elitist – I had used compound sentences – while another complained that I was insufficiently academically rigorous, since to make The Beauty Myth accessible, I had used endnotes instead of academic footnotes.

(Fire with Fire, 127; the power/victim taxonomy also comes from this book)

It was, incidentally, with this book that Wolf herself blossomed into a full-fledged integrationist, taking Audre Lorde's famous pronouncement that the "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" and riffing instead that only the master's tools are up to the task. The inconvenient fact for both camps, however, especially in The Arts, is that the master had excellent taste in houses. Moreover, even if the sculpture gardens, marble countertops, and manicured lawns are easily dispensed with, the running water, refrigeration, and climate control certainly are less so.

Where does this last realization leave us? I am male and perhaps biased as a result, but on this question I for one am casting my lot with Katha Pollitt:

In the arts, we hear a lot about what women's "real" subject, methods, and materials ought to be. Painting is male. Rhyme is male. Plot is male. Perhaps, say the Lacanian feminists, even logic and language are male. What is female? Nature. Blood. Milk. Communal gatherings. The moon. Quilts.

Haven't we been here before? Indeed we have. Woman as sharer and carer, woman as earth mother, woman as guardian of all the small rituals that knit together a family and a community, woman as beneath, above or beyond such manly concerns as law, reason, abstract ideas – these images are as old as time. Open defenders of male supremacy have always used them to declare women flatly inferior to men; covert ones use them to place women on a pedestal as too good for this naughty world.

(Reasonable Creatures, 44).

Make no mistake, by the way, that not all of the "covert" operatives are men.

Perhaps the aesthetic values of Western musical modernism are a bit less universal and absolute than those of "logic and language," but I for one am less afraid of that constructionist booby trap than that of historically oppressed groups' pre-modern survival tactics becoming posited, even celebrated, as essential markers of identity, as if members of those groups should (still) be happy to have them. Collins' elevation of anecdotal reasoning strikes me as a telltale example of this; Rosin's celebration of women's willingness to compromise as an inherently salutary trait is another. To wit, have all those bumper stickers admonishing us that "Well Behaved Women Rarely Make History" so fallen out of circulation that it has become socially acceptable to praise women as "approachable and consumer responsive" (TEOM, 135), to celebrate their marshaling of "'soft'" power (29) and "social intelligence" (199), to breezily namecheck their "flexibility and responsiveness" (263) and "willingness to adapt and bend to a fast-changing economic landscape" (270); all of this without so much as a peep of concern for what they really, truly want? Indeed ladies, haven't we been here before?

You can hear a few such peeps throughout The End of Men, but only if you're listening carefully for them, for they are articulated near-exclusively through distinctively bourgeois narratives: the footloose and fancy-free single young professional woman who has "mastered the hookup"; the calculating breadwinner wife grasping at jobs, kids, and houses while Mr. Mom vacillates between euphoria and boredom; the all-star PharmD student who pines for "a house by Lake Wisconsin with a path lined by ferns and hostas" (126), who "read somewhere that classical music activates parts of your brain you don't really use" (114), and who for some reason tolerates a do-nothing, know-nothing long-term boyfriend simply "because we crack each other up." (116)

For her part, Rosin is at least apt to lament that successful young women who outpace their male peers find it nearly impossible to "marry up" in the manner of their mothers and grandmothers, and that half-liberated men have been slower to embrace domestic responsibilities than their superstar wives have been to inhabit formerly male professional spaces, leaving the women as overtaxed as ever if not more so. And she is not above granting that working-class single mothers have it rough when, as she repeatedly emphasizes, taking a husband from among their own lot increasingly means gaining little more than another mouth to feed. Marriage, she reports, has in fact become a class privilege in America.

Meanwhile, what is conspicuously absent from the book in my opinion (it is perhaps more of an opinion than a fact, but bear with me) is a woman of any economic class chasing true personal fulfillment through any but the most materialistic, bourgeois avenues. Occupying this void instead is a predictable strawman caricature, the "creative class" of mercenary job-hoppers and rear-guard parasites: "publicity assistant, wine critic, trail mix creator, sustainability consultant, screenwriter." (118) These are indeed the poster children for compromise, artistic and otherwise, however you feel about it. If you are a Creative Type who aspires to outearn your spouse, certainly there is greater potential for that here than virtually anywhere else you might set up shop, certainly this situates you well in the coming Service Economy eclipse, and certainly Hanna Rosin would be happy for you. If we didn't have escapist entertainment (or, god forbid, trail mix) we'd have to invent it; but someone has to probe the outer reaches of aesthetic possibility as well. This is no task for compromisers, and yet it cannot possibly be ideally fruitful if men are the only participants. Yet another double-bind...or is it really?

This dynamic seems not to have occurred to a great many commentators on contemporary gender relations, though perhaps it is more accurate to say that they, like nearly everyone else in the world, just don't care that much about it. Encouraging girls to pursue STEM careers becomes a universal global concern while encouraging them in marginalized artistic disciplines remains strictly an internecine campaign against a decidedly first-world problem. To be sure, I'm certainly in no hurry to convince any promising young student that the life of an uncompromising progressive artist is a sensible aspiration. Really, though, what the hell is a "sustainability consultant" anyway? How truly "creative" does your average wine critic ever get to be for god's sake? And when exactly did "screenwriter" become a reliable, stable career path? Am I just too male to see the dignity and self-fulfillment here? Or is this "progress" something of a hollow victory for women, a mainstream, postmodern update of the blood/milk/moon/quilts meme?

Reports of My Demise (iii)

The notion of compromise is uniquely fraught, loaded, and just plain complicated for artists no matter their particular relationship to it, a fact which makes reading The End of Men from the perspective of an artist a particularly uncomfortable experience. In so breezily and uncritically tossing the notion around, Rosin indicates, at the most parochial level, that The Arts are not on her radar, and, at a more substantive level, that she is oblivious to the pitfalls of hitching the wagon of women's progress to a service economy paradigm rife with both institutionalized and individualized injustices.

Under these circumstances, I believe it might profitably fall to artists to elaborate a bit on our strained relationship with compromise, this in hopes of rounding out the picture for the benefit of those more apt to make peace with the concept on account of having led very different lives. Start with the fact that The Arts inhabit Western society's most hyper-relativistic space and are valued and supported tremendously unevenly across various American demographics. Broad pronouncements about who has "pulled ahead" of whom in The Arts have always been particularly contentious for us, be it a question of gender, nationality, style, discipline, posture, finances, or virtually anything else. There will be no "data wars" here, only style wars, some of which will have a gendered character while others will not.

(A brief aside: faced with this, some will inevitably lament the loss of pre-modern cultural consensus and attempt to appeal exclusively to micro-consensuses, or to grow them in a laboratory so to speak; cultural fragmentation is, however, ultimately just one inevitable consequence of a free society, and so if we intend to build the latter, the former is something we need to learn to live with, and soon.)

This slippery state of affairs has many well-known and much-lamented implications for the quotidian lives of non-celebrity artists. Lurking more quietly: the lines between artistic idealism and "mancession" (TEOM, 3), chasing technical refinement and playing with "boy toys" (113), being dedicated and being "isolated" (156), having a long-term plan and being "slow to cook" (159), and so on are typically difficult or impossible for non-initiates to see. Who among my fellow artists reading this, whether male or female, has not experienced both types of reactions, sometimes in the same evening, maybe even from the same person? To work in a field of endeavor where the notion of success itself is almost entirely subjective is to accept the impossible challenge of ingratiating oneself to everyone while at the same time risk failing to ingratiate oneself to anyone. And so if the drive to ingratiate, or lack thereof, is, as Rosin is convinced, itself a highly gendered phenomenon, that opens quite the can of worms for those of us who work in and value socially marginalized musical subcultures. In fact, you may want to change into clothes you don't mind getting dirty, so numerous are the ensuing wormy messes.

In my unmediated maleness, I can think of two good (to me) arguments against compromise that apply to The Arts and not to the archetypal American office building. One is this: the hyper-relativism of artistic reception dictates that while we certainly can ascribe greater and lesser probabilities of material success to different musico-stylistic arenas, the only thing guaranteed by compromising your own aesthetic and/or cultural values is that you will have compromised them, while the only thing guaranteed by refusing to do so is that you will not have. Professional artists are thus the perfect control group in an evil science experiment designed to disprove the existence of a meritocracy: having all but disallowed the concept of merit itself, and under absurdly redundant, oversaturated supply conditions, the chance elements and pre-existing advantages that are the real wellsprings of material success both here and elsewhere are laid bare. In The Arts, people pay you to do what they want, not what you want; and they seldom qualify as rational actors in why they want it and who they want it from.

The second argument both follows from and completes the first; it concerns how the ego is situated in The Arts as opposed to how it is situated in standard-issue office building politics. Placating the ego by getting one's way over co-workers is always a hollow victory, usually bad for business in the long run anyway, and, to invoke Warren Farrell again, a literal death trap for the red-faced perpetrator and his escalating blood pressure. Conversely, achieving fulfillment through wholly self-directed artmaking, while it is undeniably also an ego-driven pursuit, is real, personal, and ameliorative; if you're happier, so are the people around you, the people around them, and so on. Indeed, on that last count, who better to cite than Hanna Rosin (and Susan Faludi, from whom she gratefully borrows the concept of "ornamental masculinity") for evidence that civilization is virtually disintegrating under a shock wave of deeply personal male discontent? Under these circumstances, it rather boggles the mind that men who have all but disavowed long-term financial stability, creature comforts, social respectability, and long-term domestic partnerships could be routinely derided as egotistical, elitist, self-indulgent, decadent, etc. simply for following their muses. I mean, those manufacturing jobs are not coming back, and there certainly are worse ways to pass the time than making art.

Reports of My Demise (ii)

It was at one time in the not-so-distant past a central concern of crusaders for gender equality that men learn to define success more intrinsically and less materialistically, that we become conscious of how the need to dominate imprisons us as well as our targets. Take, for example, Warren Farrell's contention in in The Liberated Man (1975) that, "Every step of the masculinity value system encourages the need for external approval and appearances of success rather than internal approval or human satisfaction" (104). "The pursuit of excellence," on the other hand, "is the pursuit of balanced personhood, a free body, an open mind. It is being able to contribute my all to my work by causing it to contribute to me. ...It is first choosing one's love as one's goal and then seeking a way to make a living through that love." (59)

These words were aimed at men, but, as Farrell himself would later become infamous for insisting, perhaps there are a few women out there who could also use a refresher. When Rosin, for example, appeals pejoratively to the scare-quoted phrase "creative pursuits" (48) as metonym for the new male obsolescence, she casts her lot with this group. And while she continues to chase headlines, rankling orthodox third-wavers from the "college, professional class" with bold claims that "the patriarchy is dead," a classic deconstructionist question dangles in the breeze: whose definition of "pulling ahead" are we using here, and whose interests are served by it? Further, why exactly is it that the New Economy places such a premium on soft skills, self-mediation, compromise, and accommodation, and what are the broader implications for a capitalist society so thoroughly structured by such demands?

The single such implication explored in The End of Men is that women seem to be willing and able participants in this brave new world while men merely bristle and bluster. Fair enough. Is there more? Certainly there is if data wars are your style. My concern here, however, is less with Rosin's basic thesis than with her smug obliviousness both to the injustices of the service economy and to the ongoing utility of individualism in certain (not all) areas of human endeavor. Her book is a giant missed opportunity to interrogate the unreasonable, unjust demands this economy makes on its grunts, the differing demands it makes on them based on sex, race, orientation, class, etc., and the superficial conclusion that personal malleability is an inherently salutary trait simply because it makes for more eager cogs in the machine. "Hire for personality, train for skills" certainly has a feminine ring to it; but it also points to the corporate need to mystify and obfuscate, to find front-line people who will always smile and wave even as they are being #$%ed in the #$%.

In The Arts as well, as this rhetoric of Cardboard Men and Plastic Women becomes, if not always in those words, ever more mainstream, the harder it becomes to ignore the gendered aspects of art-specific dialogues on compromise, self-mediation, and collaborative practice. Musicians certainly are accustomed to enduring our share of well-warranted handwringing over more quotidian gender-related issues: discrimination in orchestral hiring practices, college professors sleeping with students, the benefits and drawbacks of identity-based curation, and so on. The gendered character of aesthetic polarities themselves tends to live a bit further off the grid. It is rarely invoked in other than veiled, coded, or humorous terms ("his girlfriend broke up with him after she found out he liked jazz"), since a double-bind of knee-jerk reactions awaits any commentator, male or female, who endeavors to verbalize what everyone else was thinking but was afraid to say.

Against my better judgment, then, allow me to attempt a crude taxonomy anyway, keeping in mind the core assumptions of The End of Men and, as a last resort, social constructionism, as safety valves. The polarity of solitary, physical, masculine work versus collaborative, face-to-face, feminine work has a clear analog both intrinsically and historically with that of high art versus entertainment. So does Rosin's pet issue of masculine single-mindedness versus feminine accommodation. The solitary artist uncompromisingly creating from whole cloth was a staple romantic archetype throughout the era of Western male hegemony from which our contemporary notions of high art are descended, whereas today even all-white, all-male groups (e.g. Kneebody) are falling all over themselves to declare their sovereignty from this paradigm, so far has the pendulum swung in the other direction. Co-composition, personal relationships with fans, and an equal sharing of administrative burdens among ensemble members are overdetermined core values of a great many contemporary musical organizations. You've probably read about them on the internet many times over the last decade, and there can be no denying their heritage in traditionally constructed femininity.

It is but a stone's throw from all of this to more parochially musical territory, such as abstraction/representation, absolutism/narrativity, and untexted/texted. It also goes without saying that the mastery/nurturance and competitive/non-competitive gender polarities potentially loom large in music education, as well as in the determinist/experimentalist aesthetic polarity. Finally, bringing it all home to the backbeat of socio-political context, a feminine, accommodating, self-mediated, tit-for-tat posture vis-a-vis the capitalist system is an inherently bourgeois, self-preserving maneuver, whereas a masculine unwillingness to be placated by the system's individual material rewards is a prerequisite for anyone wishing to spearhead real change. I have personally known too many bold activist women, starting with my own mother, to be able to write that last sentence without cringing just a bit; and yet, if you'll permit me my own occasional anecdotal riff a la Ms. Rosin, certainly most of them have been quite far indeed from the trappings of traditionally constructed femininity. Could that possibly be a coincidence?

This is a crude rendering of some awfully intricate territory, and it is only muddied further when we try, necessarily, to separate questions of aesthetic valuation from those of gender essentialism. Did I put all the good stuff in the men's column? Or do I only think it's the good stuff because I'm a man? Essentialist theories of gender demand a high degree of aesthetic relativism: men and women are different and therefore will make different art; both are valid because no one can change who they are, and it doesn't matter whether or not you "like" it aesthetically. Constructionist theories of gender, ironically, better support aesthetic essentialism: there is good and bad art, and if certain genders and sexual orientations become associated only with certain aesthetic modalities, that is merely an unfortunate consequence of their regressive, polarized constructions, which we can change if we really want to.

Certainly I am not here to lapse into the same black-and-white thinking for which I have impugned Rosin above. The larger project of liberating ourselves from regressive, circumscribed gender roles of all types is not one of coming up with new, equally polarized ones; it rather lies, as the most sober commentators on the issue have always maintained, in refusing to be hemmed in by convention, and thus being individually able and willing to take what we need from any point along the continuum and leave the rest behind on the scrap heap. Certainly it is entertaining and thought-provoking to read chronicles of women behaving as only men once did, sexually, professionally, and domestically; a mere reversal of polarity, however, can't possibly count as progress, and there can be no a priori acceptance of these changes without evaluating how they play out-in-the-world.

Reports of My Demise (i)

...throughout my reporting, a certain imaginary comic book duo kept presenting themselves to me: Plastic Woman and Cardboard Man. Plastic woman has during the last century performed superhuman feats of flexibility. She has gone from barely working at all to working only until she got married to working while married and then working with children, even babies. If space opens up for her to make more money than her husband, she grabs it. If she is no longer required by ladylike standards to restrain her temper, she starts a brawl at the bar. If she can get away with staying unmarried and living as she pleases deep into her thirties, she will do that too...

Cardboard Man, meanwhile, hardly changes at all. A century can go by and his lifestyle and ambitions remain largely the same. There are many professions that have gone from all-male to female, and almost none that have gone the other way. For most of the century men derived their sense of manliness from their work, or their role as head of the family. ...Some decades into the twentieth century, those obvious forms of social utility started to fade. Most men were no longer doing physically demanding labor of the traditional kind, and if they were, it was not a job for life. They were working in offices or not working at all... And as fewer people got married, men were no longer acting as domestic providers, either. They lost the old architecture of manliness, but they have not replaced it with any obvious new one. What's left now are the accessories, maybe the "mancessories"–jeans and pickup trucks and designer switchblades, superheroes and thugs who rant and rave on TV and, at the end of the season, fade back into obscurity.

Hanna Rosin, The End of Men, pp. 7-9

First and foremost, allow me to take credit for my contribution, however small, to any statistical case that women have "pulled decisively ahead" of men, to quote the publisher's blurb for Rosin's faux-provocative screed. I can't claim that pursuing a music career has been either a graceful or a constructive way to disavow my white male privilege, but it certainly has been an effective one: I am 32 years old working for $11 an hour; I hold an entry-level position in an industry where I previously worked for over 5 years; I have never held a job that required more than a high school diploma; I rent a room under the table in a shabby shared apartment close enough to spit on the Hollywood Freeway; I have been single for longer than I care to admit; and of course, like so many of Rosin's Cardboard Men, I have spent most of my life trying to make play look as much like work as possible.

Admittedly, to implicate myself in this way requires strategically omitting a few incongruous details, such as my enviable academic track record, a graduate degree from an expensive private college, a stellar professional resume in a field wholly unrelated to the aforementioned day job, and a life that on the whole has been more frequently over- than under-privileged. Call it my Plastic side if you will; it has nonetheless proven entirely ineffectual in delivering even a whiff of the self-made material or domestic respectability by which polite bourgeois society measures its charges. And while any grand pronouncement on the contemporary economics of gender is well-suited to attract attention, that Ms. Rosin's appears through and through to have been issued from the perspective of just this sort of contended, materialistic non-culture is, as many have already pointed out, the real lead story here. This much, at least, is obvious to anyone who has lived concurrent Cardboard and Plastic lives, and who thus inhabits part of the vast grey area unaccounted for by her imaginary comic book duo.

In my case, the highway from academic all-star to broken manhood runs squarely through territory most commonly (if unwieldily) referred to as The Arts, ironically thought by so many unliberated men to be the exclusive domain of sissies and faggots, but which, as even its seasonal inhabitants quickly learn, in fact harbors its own litany of gender terrorists, macho men, misogynists, and homophobes, some of whom would undoubtedly get on just fine with their more politically conservative brethren in fields like finance, law, and politics. A more substantive defining characteristic of The Arts, rather, is the inevitable disparity between intrinsic and popular valuation arising under advanced capitalism and fragmented postmodern culture, a disparity which, as intensely uncomfortable as it is for many artists to verbalize, itself has an unmistakably gendered component. The Arts in fact present a more extreme case of material incentive lying almost entirely on the side of compromise, accommodation, and malleability than most any economic sector Rosin endeavors to chronicle. If those have become, as she argues, highly gendered characteristics, then the valuation discussion indeed takes on a highly gendered character.

Such it is that for a field of endeavor so often and so loudly criticized for representing, literally or figuratively, the interests of male aristocrats and colonists, it is today difficult to locate which upper class privileges, exactly, are being enjoyed by any but the most conventionally successful artists; that is to say, by those exhibiting the ostensibly feminine "willingness to adapt and bend to a fast-changing economic landscape." (TEOM, 270) The true men and women of leisure one encounters in artists' circles are far more likely to have simply inherited a fortune than to be collecting royalties from a hard-won mainstream breakthrough. And yet the rest of us white men do not simply divest ourselves of privilege in one fell swoop by choosing to become workaday professional artists; privilege, or the lack thereof, reproduces itself as long as one continues to exhibit the trait(s) with which it is associated. Such it is that as far out of my lane as I might seem to be these days, I am nonetheless reminded frequently and vividly that white male privilege is powerful enough to moderate even the extreme indignities and vicissitudes of the service sector in ways that most of my co-workers will never enjoy. This makes it hard for me to take seriously any argument that a service economy could ever serve as the backdrop to real feminist progress.

There is more than one reason for the underrepresentation of historically oppressed groups in so many Western artistic disciplines. It starts with good-old-boy politics but it does not end there. Becoming an artist of almost any kind worthy of the name in a world where cultural consensus and common practice have gone extinct is one humongous risk. All artists sign up for certain challenges, but only some see these challenges magnified immeasurably by intersecting oppressions. An arts career is thus a more manageable proposition for someone of my background who can count on relatively fair job interviews and loan approvals and an emergency familial safety net; it is less so for people truly on their own whose lives are already defined by underground discrimination and the daily risk of police brutality and/or sexual assault. Much as health care reform will do more for artists than a hundred NEAs, winning the ability for everyone to count on basic human dignities from their employers and governments is infinitely more central to the task of diversifying perspectives in The Arts than identity-based curating or grantsmanship ever could be.

And so, while I do wonder if my high school teachers, for example, might not be horrified at what has become of me, I can also accept this as a First World Problem. I have a steady job, a roof over my head, and just enough "spare" time to maintain the semblance of a music career working with some very talented people. Make no mistake that the ability to be an uncompromising artist at all and still attain even this basic degree of human dignity has everything to do with having had untold advantages from the outset. As such, I do not and never have considered holding a service sector day job to be in and of itself an affront to my dignity. To conclude from this that I have not been "successful" in life is, on the other hand, beyond an insult.

Indeed, there are always just enough artists of various stripes succeeding in polite bourgeois terms to make the more uncompromising elements look like failures. Just as surely, there will always be a few bourgie busybodies observing all of this from a safe distance and jumping to questionable conclusions; sometimes we meet them after a show, other times in print. Such it is that while the ostensibly cherrypicked, anecdotal nature of Rosin's case studies and her alleged statistical misstatements have proven fertile territory for critics wishing to engage her on her own turf, for me it is the turf she neglects to cover which opens up a far more revealing line of inquiry. Indeed, The Arts had to be more or less ignored to maintain Rosin's central conceits; the life of a modern-day Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Bix Beiderbecke, or Herbie Nichols would blow the roof off of such clean and clear distinctions between success and failure. These men, like virtually everybody else, male or female, artist or not, were both successes and failures, compromising and uncompromised, part Plastic and part Cardboard. The "old architecture of manliness" has seldom been more than an undue burden on The Arts, but nor does consigning The Arts wholesale to the playpen of "mancessories" and "ornamental masculinity" do them justice. Literally, this is not what The End of Men does; by proxy and the occasional odd whiff of hostility, it comes closer.