"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind."  
                            -- Aristotle

"When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: Whose?"
                            -- Don Marquis

The current economic stagnation has occasionally been dubbed a "Mancession." Certainly, there is some evidence that women have gotten the worst of things, especially considering the epic contraction of state and local budgets, which disproportionately affects education and other service jobs. And unemployed women seem to drop out of the workforce at a higher rate than unemployed men, which inhibits their overall state of recovery.

But there can be no denying that, in an absolute sense, men are taking a beating. After decades of decline in manufacturing (at least as far as actual jobs go -- see my post from a few weeks ago describing the dichotomous state of manufacturing), the current recession is slapping a nice warm dollop of construction-industry contraction on top. And for both men and women, the jobs being added in the recovery are lower-paying than the positions lost, so the general condition of all workers is being ratcheted downwards. You can see this deterioration in every middle-aged man working at a big box home-improvement center: pain-in-the-ass customers hounding a guy who probably took a 30-grand pay cut to pound the concrete on Sundays wearing a bleach-blotched company vest. It's hard not to feel creeping nausea and shame when confronted so directly with middle-aged male downgrade.

In an even broader sense, this economic shitshow is just the most recent ingredient in a larger cauldron of manhood-whomping bouillabaisse, which has been boiling away American manhood since the late 70s. Women's rights, political correctness, workplace equalization (not full workplace equality yet, to be sure, but a general egalitarian drift), gay marriage, the rise of minorities' status, expanding use of contraception, declining marriage rates. All of these things have been radically restructuring what it means to be a man in America. Certainly, there are millions of men who welcome these changes. But for many more, the pace of change is just too rapid. The sheer breadth of the adjustments that men are asked to make, from psychological to sexual to social to economic behavior, is too much to handle. And when the topper is a foreclosure resulting from a layoff and subsequent stretch of joblessness, not many men are going to preserve any semblance of sanity or balance.

This turmoil has really thrown a wrench into American male gender roles. I know, I know -- talk of 'gender roles' smacks of intro-level psychology or sociology. But there really is some legitimacy to the idea. We are social animals, and a good portion of our behavior is modeled from our elders and peers. So if conditions are changing so rapidly that adult men do not know how to act, then younger people are going to be left to the sociopathic guidance of corporate consumerism and it's grotesque cultural apparatus, and the increasingly-irrelevant men themselves are going to descend into paranoia, susceptibility to demagoguery, and perhaps violence.
 
At the root of this social role issue is the traditional linking of specific male archetypes to stable political, economic, psychological, and interpersonal ideologies. As these once-solid systems sputter under harsh postpeak conditions, these traditional gender roles for men are becoming more untenable. Let's look at some of these archetypes (or 'paths of manhood') and how they are shifting under our feet.

The Hero -- Of all American archetypes, the hero is the most apple-pied and tri-colored of them all. This is the man's man, the Gary Cooper/John Wayne/Ted Williams type. Think of the Greatest Generation man, the quiet and stoic savior of the innocent and defenseless. It is hard to overestimate this cultural residue of WW2 and its continuing impact on American maleness. In one of the first posts on this blog, I described this as the basic narrative of America that sits inside the brains of almost every person over the age of 35 or 40. The Greatest Generation is seen as a hard-working, honest, sheriff/outlaw cadre of brave men, men who gave up their comfortable positions of self-reliant piety and personal achievement to go across the ocean and defend the world from tyranny. They made the ultimate sacrifice for their women and their kids, but how were they repaid? Their nobility was eventually mocked and pissed on, first by hippies and other pinkos, and then by all other manner of liberal crusader. The post-war period certainly began with a baby-boom bang and some genuine hero-worship. But it quickly changed into a nightmare of ungrateful ness, filled with liberal projects that poo-pood the war heroes as patriarchal, racist, homophobic dinosaurs. This righteous grievance is built into the heroic archetype. It is a long tradition in American culture: the stolid homesteader who just wants to be left alone to do his job, but who constantly has to step in and mop up after the colossal fuckups of the effete, the citified, and the foreign. There can be no Dirty Harry, Rambo, or John Galt without the greedy, leechlike, equivocating, helpless masses. Really, there can be no American hero without the inherent sinfulness of the regular man, no messiah without a corrupt populace to redeem.

In more archaic economic situations, the American hero-male could actually rule the roost in small towns and cities, and even in large cities, although to a lesser degree. The economic equations, especially after WW2, fit together in a nice algorithm. Men could work hard at a fairly simple job and be successful. Special benefits for soldiers, especially mortgage and education programs, allowed moderately-talented men to find solid professional perches. But as the rest of the world rebuilt its economic capacity, and as technology changed the landscape of business, the Hero saw his range of motion diminished. Women and minorities occupied larger swaths of the labor market; corporations shed layer after layer of high-skilled position and middle management; and the old stand-by sphere of the military became corporatized and pauperized at the same time ('pauperized' in the sense that an all-volunteer armed forces was increasingly stocked with the poor and desperate, and corporatized in the sense that..... well, you know). The hero archetype, which was always somewhat other-oriented as a point of style, had become besieged in reality by every manner of foe, foreign and domestic.

The Businessman -- One of the more interesting and uncomfortable relationships in American culture is the strange co-existence of the Hero and the Businessman. The former has traditionally been ambivalent towards the latter, but the latter has always wanted to be the former. Prior to our current corporate hagiography, the Businessman arena was a somewhat grubby venue, peopled by the poindexter and the bespectacled nerdlinger. Perhaps in an overreaction to the hated robber barons, the middle of the 20th century saw the hero tolerating the necessary tedium and baseness of the businessman. World War 2 was won by soldierly men of action and by Rosie the Riveter, not by number-crunching nerds and greedy corporate bigwigs. But by the end of the 70s, the Hero was in decline and the Businessman was on the rise. The sheer power and wealth of the corporate sector virtually guaranteed self-aggrandizement. CEO-worship was grafted onto the emerging celebrity culture, which was made possible by monstrously-large mass media, and corporate chieftains flaunted their stacks of cash and opulent lifestyles.

The problem for regular American men, unfortunately, is that the two dominant male archetypes, the Hero and Businessman, are either obsolete or out of reach. The black and white world in which the hero thrives has been washed asunder by the graying tides of globalization and technological change. One of the weirder effects of 9/11 was the refuge of easy answers that was opened up, a place where heroes could again step in and battle unabashed evil. But no easy moral dichotomy can long withstand the seeping and seeking onslaught of digital capital and transnational profit-seeking. The heroic is now forever beyond our grasp, at least as an overall hook on which to hang our manhood. And on the businessman front, the return of Gilded Age inequality is making a mockery of the small entrepreneur and the Horatio Alger. Study after study is showing that wage collapse is creeping up the educational ladder, that intergenerational mobility has been brought to a halt, and that the fastest-growing jobs of the future will actually be in the unskilled (i.e., low-paid) sectors. Regular Joes inhale mountainous clouds of business book, bio, and blog, but the awesome future of businessman-success seems more closed off than ever. It is very difficult to preserve that sickening boosterism for business when the reward is year after year of wage stagnation. I cannot help but think of the poor schleps who shuffle around airports an cheap hotel lobbies, hoping that this current trip will finally bust loose the logs of inertia and flood their lives with kingly Gordon Gekko loot. Unfortunately, these life-changing deals are as elusive as winning lottery numbers. 

With these traditional roles choking off, what does that leave for regular men? How do they style their behavior?  Well......

The Babbitt -- This is the functionary, the cubicle jockey, the salesman. In earlier economic times, this class of men would inhabit more self-reliant positions like farmer and shopkeeper. But with most independent means of livelihood cut off, the Babbitt has become the ubiquitous fodder for Hero and the Businessman alike. On one side, they are exploited for their labor, forever teased with the possibility that they might someday be a VIP or a COO or a CIO. Unsurprisingly, they never quite make it. On the other side, Babbitts are ridiculed by the older, heroic-minded men, mocked for their paper-pushing, pussy-ass ways. 

The Babbitt is the lifeblood of the American economy, a service-oriented drone who battles the cosmic evils of carpal tunnel and type-2 diabetes. And to throw a bit of quasi-sexism in, placid (flaccid) service jobs are a bit more in the wheelhouse for women than men. In general, women have better social radar and more cooperative tendencies, which enhances the potential for success at the ground level of most office settings. Young women are also staying in school at a more rapid clip than young men, so the basic analytical skills that Babbittry demands are becoming a more gynocentric trait in general. But there are also millions and millions of male Babbitts, gobbling up Dilbert radicalism and stealing office toilet paper and coffee to nip the gilded fingertips of the Man.

Unfortunately, the Babbitts took their lumps and parked their money where Jim Cramer said to. They took out second mortgages and trusted their retirement funds to the benevolent financial services industries. Well, we know how that turned out. Trillions lost, millions of home foreclosures, nest eggs gone (around 45% of Americans have less than $10k in retirement savings), and job prospects alarmingly bleak. And almost all of the relief from government went to the already-rich: bailouts, TARP, zero-interest Fed funds, tax-cut-laden stimulus. The Babbitt Bargain (work hard, don't make waves, tolerate workplace dehumanization and humiliation) has come unraveled, and millions of men are left looking for their cash and their balls.

The Hipster -- this is simply a young Babbitt. Not much needs to be said here. These are the ironic and over-educated. They were told that they could follow their dreams and do whatever they wanted in life, even if it was heavily liberal artsy. Being slightly older than the truly tech-savvy kids raised on texting and FaceBook, Hipsters are almost over-eager to engage in every strain of silicon/plastic masturbation. They are a bit more jaded than the traditional Babbitt, so they don't quite buy in to the stoking of the corporate furnaces. They perform their tasks smirkingly and mutteringly, knowing that their true joys lie outside office walls, in their bands and their online profiles. 

Unsurprisingly, hipsters are generally urban and liberal. They are somewhat aware of the epic levels of inequality in the American system. And with the recession hitting them much harder than their older age-cohorts, they are becoming more aware, by the day, of the empty promises made to them in their youth. They are likely carrying outlandish college debt, facing a grim future of joblessness and parental basement habitation. But Hipsters are conflicted, because the system churns our so much cool shit that they love to consume. Ironic detachment and snarling mockery are not easily translated into a coherent critique of our current arrangements. The Occupy movement is the perfect example here. Lots of sound and fury and process going on with these groups, and actually lots of actual policy demands (the Occupiers do have very specific recommendations, despite what their detractors say). But when push comes to shove, no effort to reform the system, no matter how coherent or reasoned, can turn back the relentless currents of labor de-skilling, globalization, financial evolution, and other corporate trends. In that sense, it's hard to fault the Hipster too much. There aren't many people of any persuasion calling for a completely new way of dealing with the Long Emergency and potential collapse, so how could they be expected to be much different? The only point in this piece is to show the difficulty of coiling a male identity around such a motif.

Douchebags, Rednecks and Gangbangers -- I lump these male archetypes together because they share common traits: general idiocy, faux-tribal bullshit, undereducation, (thankfully) apolitical, obsession with body markings, horrible music, homo-bashing, chick-fucking, and general enthusiasm for anything considered even remotely manly or 'hard' (e.g., anything that inflicts physical pain or causes discomfort to others: cage fighting, snowmobiling, Slim Jims, pit bull cultivation). Not much needs to be said about the image this presents to our male children, nor about the sources for these personality types. I generally despise these roles, but I don't hold the people themselves too responsible for their condition. Decades of easy consumerism, lack of educational opportunities, and a general erosion of civil society are good enough explanations for me right now. The danger is that a rapid collapse of our current arrangements will leave this large and diverse swath of assholes in the driver's seat. Wonderful.

The Fag -- First of all, in full PC disclaimer-mode, I use the F-word here not in a bashing style, but as an archetype that gay men are presently creating for themselves. Similar to the way that African Americans have appropriated 'nigger' for their own internal use, to drain it of its racist sting, so the gay community has fired up 'fag' for its own purposes. And I get that. They turn a derogatory term on its head and wear it as a source of pride and power. I only bring it up here because it is quickly increasing in importance as a male archetype, a path of American manhood. And while some may find the Fag role too over-the-top, campy, and hyper-sexualized, we have to consider the sheer youth of this archetype in America. Openly gay men have not been able to flaunt their identity in a broad way for very long, and it is certainly still dangerous in many areas (see the section directly above, for example). So it's hard to fault the Fag archetype as not serious enough for the long haul of postpeak conditions. But I would recommend that gay men work fairly quickly to turn the Fag to more pressing and grave matters. Time is short.

Phew!  Okay, that's a whirlwind tour of what I see as the current paths of American manhood. As we have seen, virtually every path and archetype has its problems. Deteriorating economic conditions are now exacerbating long-standing cultural shifts, wreaking havoc with traditional definitions of what it means to be a man. The Hero archetype is being fused with the Businessman and celebrity cultures, resulting in a nauseating and ultimately unsatisfying Frankensteinian abomination. This toxic motif, because it doesn't really deal with the uncomfortable truths of postpeak decline, is forever seeking enemies and scapegoats, to alleviate undercurrents of rage and powerlessness. Since so many men are searching for simple answers and solid guidance, all manifestations of complexity or Otherness are deemed unmanly and unAmerican, an easy equation that carries no truly- redemptive potential.

This free-floating sense of grievance creates a desperate attempt to preserve obsolete attitudes and behaviors, a frame of mind that is supremely unequipped to deal with the realities of economic contraction, the collapse of labor-value, and a future that belongs to collective social forms. 'Manly men' thus see softness and stereotyped feminity wherever they turn -- in welfare cheats, deadbeat mortgage defaulters, the jobless, the homeless, and in Big Government lefties. Indeed, decades of American change and decline, resulting from huge socioeconomic and ecological shifts, are reinterpreted as one colossal failure of manhood, an unwillingness to just 'Man Up.' Such simplicity of explanation might feel good in the late hours of the night, like that fifth shot of tequila. But the truthful morning will bring only pain, nausea, and exhaustion. 

Post-peak American will need completely new archetypes of manhood, paths for becoming a strong man that are not so caught up with old ideologies and prejudices. Paradoxically, the answer is perhaps a turn back to the even-older ideology of the tribe, the group. Unlike the faux-tribalism of the douchebag/redneck/gangbanger, a post-peak tribalism will shed the illegitimate intolerance for the female and the Other, in favor of that deep evolutionary heritage of cooperation and inclusion. No man is an island.