Men Are They Really That Bad?

(2 of 11)

Perhaps I exaggerate. Anyway, we know the overt man bashing of recent years has now refined itself into a certain atmospheric snideness -- has settled down to a vague male aversion, as if masculinity were a bad smell in the room. Man bashing is dispensed, so to speak, in aerosol spray (Man-Disss), which covers the male's nasty essence in a fine mist of shame.

All men have a dirty secret -- bosses harassing, fathers incesting, priests abusing, ex-Governors of Arkansas tomcatting. We have reached the point where the best a man can say for himself is that he is harmless.

What is the larger significance? Allan Carlson, president of the Rockford Institute, a conservative think tank in Illinois, offers this analysis: "We are at the tail end of the deconstruction of patriarchy, which has been going on since the turn of the century. The last acceptable villain is the prototypical white male."

A surly silence in the hall.

But they're going to miss us, boys. "I think matriarchies are always a sign of social disintegration," Carlson continues, selling wolf tickets in Oprah country. "In history there are no examples of sustained, vigorous matriarchal % societies." Dire conclusion: "I think we're a society in decay and destruction."

Men-devils nodding: Whud I tell you?

Consider a text by Joyce Carol Oates, her latest novel, called Foxfire, Confessions of a Girl Gang. Oates, a gifted writer with an instinct for the violent and gothic, has invented the story of teenage girls banded together as secret female warriors in the '50s in upstate New York. The narrator, called Maddy-Monkey, describes the '50s: "It was a time of violence against girls and women, but we didn't have the language to talk about it then." Her heroine, Legs Sadovsky, tells the gang, "It's all of them: men. It's a state of undeclared war, them hating us, men hating us no matter our age or who the hell we are . . ." Every male who makes an appearance in Oates' 328 pages of female-empowerment myth is a slimy, sweating, smelly brute, a rapist, a feeler, a hitter, a fascist. Here is a casual sample, describing a couple of apparently harmless guys on the street: "The two of them beefy big-bodied men with smallish heads, fleshy faces and restless eyes."

That's the tone exactly: Men-are-animals-I-don't-care-if-they're-not-doing -anything-at-the-moment- they're-thinking-about-it-and-they-will-when-they-have- the-chance. What is expressed here is an aversion that is both aesthetic and intimate, a horripilation of the sexual reflex that is perfectly captured by the word creep. Maddy Monkey knows that women now, in 1994, certainly have the language to talk about it. They are doing so. The war is not exactly undeclared.

But turn the picture inside out: If Legs Sadovsky (a charismatic gender- driven fanatic) were a man, he would say in the '90s: "It's all of them: women. Them hating us, no matter our age or who the hell we are . . ."

Before proceeding, a word about the media.