LEONARD KRIEGEL
Gender and Its Discontents
In
our America, writers are no longer merely writers. They are black
writers or Jewish writers, gay writers or straight writers, WASP writers or
native American writers, Irish-American writers or Southern writers,
Midwestern lesbian writers or California bisexual writers. Peripheral issues
absorb public discourse, while both talent and language are circumscribed
by classification. Nor is this true only of writers. Throughout America,
occupation defines identity: black dentists, Italian accountants, Jewish
cops. Every day, new groups step forth to demand recognition of "our
truth." The accidents of classification - sex, gender, ethnicity, religion,
race - are called on to give life meaning. And among those accidents, sex
and gender are now the true growth industries.
Race and ethnicity still command attention, but one senses that their
appeal has begun to wane as sex and gender questions increasingly domi–
nate cultural discourse. And not merely cultural discourse. Americans
were transfixed by the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination be–
cause the sex and gender battle was joined. In hearings intended to de–
tennine a mediocre jurist's fitness to sit as a judge on a mediocre Supreme
Court - once the most dignified and prestigious position in the land -
gender publicly wrestled with race. If those hearings constituted a debate
about judicial fitness, the debate was decided when Eve bit into the apple.
The wink and leer of bodily contortions give way to the spiritual
significance of gender. Even the most sympathetic observer must recog–
nize that the American woman's quest for equality over the past three
decades has produced a certain rhetorical overkill. That overkill, in turn,
has now led to the latest in gender myths - the
oppression
of the American
male. A "new" American masculinity, as sensitive to the temperature of
its nourishment as a hothouse flower, threatens to seize the stage which
feminists have worked so hard to construct. And if what is already being
called by the acronym NAM (New American Masculinity), follows the
example of American feminism, we will soon find its rhetoric echoed
from Tokyo to Lima, from Murmansk to Johannesburg.
It is not a particularly appealing prospect. No one seems quite certain
ofwho is "oppressing" them, but men in America have learned to weep–
and they are, God help us, crying with a vengeance. As Macho Man slips
toward his long-awaited death, male tears become fashionable. Indeed,
