Finally, after waiting patiently in line behind women, blacks, gays, and countless others, men are pounding out the drumbeat of victimization. In his new book, The Masculine Mystique: The Politics of Masculinity (Ballantine, 320 pages, $ 23), Andrew Kimbrell offers a litany of male woe more sweeping than anything Betty Friedan came up with in her Feminine Mystique: Men were cut off from their natural role as nurturing caretakers by the Industrial Revolution, which brought an abrupt end to an idyllic time when people worked in communion with each other and rarely, if ever, sought personal gain. Now, men are beset on all sides by the ills of mechanized society.
Following in the footsteps of Warren Farrell, author of the similarly portentous The Myth of Male Power, Kimbrell suggests the troubles of men are accelerating at the end of the 20th century. There has been, he says, "a dramatic: drop in real wages for the average working man, while that of women has increased." And if that's not bad enough, "Men face serious discrimination in the criminal justice system." Ninety-four percent of the people in jail are men, he says, even though women are charged with nearly 20 percent of all crimes. Never mind that he doesn't bother to discuss the differing sorts of crimes with which the sexes are generally charged; men are getting the shaft. And even those men who manage to stay out of jail face punishment-the punishment of a fulltime job. Work is a very bad thing; Kimbrell describes it as a joyless, dulling affair, a "harness" of dehumanizing conditions. It leads to our becoming "robopaths," which he defines as "creatures of a society that worships mechanical efficiency, regularity, and predictability." We all suffer from robopathology to one degree or another, he warns. And small wonder: "Currently over 75 percent of all jobs consist of repetitive motion and little else."
It soon becomes clear that Kimbrell's real target is our capitalist economy, a system plagued by competition. He condescendingly points to "primitive" societies as places where communities worked together. Cooperation was the watchword in cultures as diverse as "the American Indian, African, and pre- modern European societies."
Really? What about China and India, both of which had vast empires thousands of years ago, empires built through a level of competition that would make most corporate executives blanch? Or the Mayas, who were almost as war-like as the Aztecs? Kimbrell pays them no heed. Instead, he focuses on anthropologist Bronis-law Malinowski's famous 1922 study of the Trobriand people of the South Sea Islands. They made extensive use of elaborate gift- giving, which Kimbrell assumes is purely altruistic. Kimbrell seems either unaware of or unconcerned with the lengthy scholarly debate surrounding Malinowski's study. It's now abundantly clear that "gift-giving" was merely another version of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours," that the islanders used it as a form of diplomacy to cement relationships and avoid conflict, even as other forms of trade took place away from the pomp and circumstance of the offcial ceremony. Kimbrell would have had better luck arguing that cooperation dominated in prehistoric times -- and today -- only in societies where people live in groups of 50 or fewer. But even there only the most romanticized anthropologist could ignore the many examples of competition -- cases where the best hunter received the best share of the kill or people attempted to gain status in one way or another. But Kimbrell insists on believing that competitiveness and profiteering are modern inventions, whose roots he traces to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations.
In a later bit of foolishness, Kimbrell decides to illustrate the totalitarian world of corporate America by examining the culture of General Electric. He fearfully describes Jack Welch, its CEO, as wielding "near- dictatorial power over millions of people." Kimbrell refers to Welch's " regime" as a time when more than 200,000 employees have been fired and says that Welch and other CEOs have "the power to dominate and coerce others into actions and behavior. Corporations are not democracies." Choosing GE as his prototypical Evil Empire is ironic since, as any business-school student would have told him, GE is the classic recent example of a corporation that abandoned its autocratic and stodgy ways and embraced teamwork and cooperation -- the very attributes Kimbrell professes to admire.
He notes with puzzlement that GE has increased in value a whopping $ 67.6 billion since Welch took over, but seems to have no conception of what that means. Like most anti-business writers, he probably imagines it locked away in some musty vault. The truth is that the increase in value means an assured future for the 200,000 employees still working at GE (not to mention their families). It means more income: for the tens of thousands of private individuals who bought stock in the company either directly or through a mutual fund. It also means increased stability for the many pension funds that placed their trust in GE and had that trust rewarded.
In the end, Kimbrell makes only a few modest requests when he isn't talking about "a near-constant confrontation with current economic and social structures."
Men should spend more time with their children and mentor fatherless boys in their community. Men should practice preventive medicine and discourage teens; from taking steroids. Men should push for reform of divorce proceedings, where custody of children is heavily weighted towards women. But there is one economic doozy at the center of his platform: a 30-hour work week, which he blithely states would "drastically cut unemployment." And don't worry about losing any income -- that would be maintained through tax incentives for employers and some unnamed "other devices."
It takes a real man to make such a claim. But not a real bright man.
Michael Giltz is a free-lance writer living, in New York.