Book Description
Following in the tradition of John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) and Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed), Norah Vincent absorbed a cultural experience and reported back on what she observed incognito. For more than a year and a half she ventured into the world as Ned, with an ever-present five o'clock shadow, a crew cut, wire-rim glasses, and her own size 111/2 shoes—a perfect disguise that enabled her to observe the world of men as an insider. The result is a sympathetic, shrewd, and thrilling tour de force of immersion journalism that's destined to challenge preconceptions and attract enormous attention.
With her buddies on the bowling league she enjoyed the rough and rewarding embrace of male camaraderie undetectable to an outsider. A stint in a high-octane sales job taught her the gut- wrenching pressures endured by men who would do anything to succeed. She frequented sex clubs, dated women hungry for love but bitter about men, and infiltrated all-male communities as hermetically sealed as a men's therapy group, and even a monastery. Narrated in her utterly captivating prose style and with exquisite insight, humor, empathy, nuance, and at great personal cost, Norah uses her intimate firsthand experience to explore the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity as well as who men are apart from and in relation to women. Far from becoming bitter or outraged, Vincent ended her journey astounded—and exhausted—by the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity. Having gone where no woman (who wasn't an aspiring or actual transsexual) has gone for any significant length of time, let alone eighteen months, Norah Vincent's surprising account is an enthralling reading experience and a revelatory piece of anecdotally based gender analysis that is sure to spark fierce and fascinating conversation.
Praise for Norah Vincent:
“Norah Vincent is a true freethinker and independent journalist in the European manner, challenging prevailing assumptions in academe, politics, and media. Her work has always had a bold skepticism and energy. She is a model of pragmatic, enlightened feminism.”
—Camille Paglia
Customer Reviews:
How To Destroy A Premise With A Lot of Promise.......2007-09-17
The premise of this book is a good one, however, the author's inability to look past the obvious and superfluous make this book predictable, boring, and even offensive at times. Vincent states the obvious, rarely finding insight into masculinity or what it means to be a man that hasn't already been stated by other people in a much more intelligent way. Instead of breaking stereotypes that women hold about men, it seems to perpetuate them, and all of Vincent's observations seem shallow and simply skim the surface of gender identity.
She does not create sympathy for men, and she creates even less for women. I'm not sure where she found the women that she dated, but they seem like some of the most closed-minded, grudge harboring women with so many pent up issues they should be looking for a therapist instead of a date.
Any other book on gender in our society would be a more insightful, riveting, and intelligent read. Skip this one.
ripped book.......2007-08-29
When the book arrived there was a missing chunk out of the paper cover. I was very disappointed since the review given by the seller said "almost new"
Self self self -- we all need to get over ourselves.......2007-07-03
This book has a great premise -- a woman attempting to live as a man, to gain access to the "secret lives" of men. This could have been a very successful magazine article. As a full-length book, though, it's awash in pseudo-insights that range from maudlin to downright offensive. The author comes up with nothing anybody with half a brain didn't already know: "masculinity" is just as much of a potentially crippling construct as "femininity" is. Big surprise.
The author seems to try hard to empathize with men, but after reading the chapter about the bowling league, I came away with a nagging sense of the author wanting to come out and say, "These poor men. The poor dumb brutes. They just can't help it!" The rest of the book wasn't much better -- in fact it was worse. Especially the chapter about visiting strip clubs, which was so cliched as to be repulsive.
And why on earth would someone in the author's situation -- attempting to do research -- join an Iron John men's group? Or a monastery? That's fringe stuff, and unlikely to give the author a true cross-section of "typical" masculine behavior. Even the jobs the author takes on as a man aren't typical jobs.
The women the author dated while she was posing as a man made me embarrassed to be a woman. I do know women who are like that, but I have to say, they are NOT representative of my experience or of my self.
Probably most telling of all is the delight the author seems to take in the big reveal: "Guess what? I'm really a woman!" I find it amazing that nobody she deceived was hurt to the core. How lucky for the author!
This book is the worst kind of self-serving, quasi-intellectual stuff. I wouldn't call it feminist. I wouldn't even call it humanist. The whole human race looks pretty irredemably messed up after viewing it through this author's eyes.
The delicate interplay of identity, expectations and perceptions.......2007-06-20
When Norah Vincent assumes a masculine disguise as "Ned", she gets far more than an admission ticket to some typical all-male venues. It does not come as a surprise that Ned visits strip clubs, male bonding camps in the woods and athletic groups in addition to inflitrating a monastery and a high octane sales environment. What Ned witnesses as a presumed insider at these events is sometimes disturbing but not totally unexpected. If the book was solely a compendium of the observations of a "secret agent" it would not garner much publicity.
However, what Vincent has accomplished from her 18 month foray into the (largely straight) masculine experience is deeper and more subtle than making firsthand observations that generally align with common stereotypes. For one, she sees evidence that actually goes against the common perception of men as unfeeling and uncaring. She concludes that men do indeed display their own form of nurturing and attuned behavior, but in ways that generally do not register on female radar.
Vincent also gains much insight into the delicate interplay between individual identity as well as societal expectations and perceptions in shaping us. Herein lies the main thrust of the book. Time and again, Vincent witnesses how men and women conspire to keep men in line by relentlessly foisting certain expectations of them and punishing those who do not tow the line. Even as Ned, she observes how the mere act of wearing modern day masculine armor - a business suit - causes her to effortlessly change her body language into one that conveys greater authority. The combination elicits more respect from others - even total strangers - which in turn influences Ned's attitude; even "his" speech patterns become less conciliatory.
Going undercover as Ned also provides Vincent - a somewhat masculinized lesbian - with much fodder to ruminate on the complex interplay between gender identity and sexual orientation. Even with her immersion in the masculine environment and attempts to acquire the attendent mind-set, Vincent cannot fathom the stereotypical male ability to separate love from impersonal lust. The foray into the stripper bar leaves her feeling empty and exhausted, sans any erotic charge. She also notes with some irony that her masculine disguise in fact tends to heighten the feminine aspects of her behavior.
Vincent is carefull to stress that her experiences and observations are subjective and by no means constitute an academic study. The primary message she tries to convey seems to be that she is neither the sole product of an immutable individual identity nor a collection of societal expectations, with the boundaries thereof being vague and fluid. The experimental identity change forces her to be more aware of herself and her surroundings (if only to not trip up on her ruse). But even in this state of heightened self awareness her sense of self as an autonomous entity - as opposed to a set of responses - often becomes murky.
Vincent laments the toll the collective pressures - to be strong, to be stoic, to win - take on the masculine psyche. Indeed at the end of the book she reveals how much the effort involved in maintaining the "Ned" disguise has worn her down. In her case, of course, the assumed persona is more at odds with her authentic self than the front put on by a typical straight biological male. Vincent emerges from her exhausting impersonation with greater compassion towards males and a palpable sense of relief at not having to bear their considerable burdens in her everyday life.
Beautiful, but slow towards the end........2007-06-12
I'm not quite sure what possessed Norah Vincent to live as a man as a cultural experience. I know that she was curious; I just don't really think that she took into consideration the feelings of her "victims" (or herself for that matter.) There must have been some harmful repercussions to her experiment. Hopefully there will be no lasting effects.
Nonetheless, she does have a way with words. This books is beautifully written, if you can get that sick feeling out of your stomach. I really can say that despite the deception, this book deserves three stars. It tends to drown on towards the end.
Average customer rating:
- US Misandry.
- Great Piece of Gonzo Journalism
- SOME of "US Guys"
- brillant (of course)
- Versatile
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US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man
Charlie LeDuff
Manufacturer: Penguin Press HC, The
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ASIN: 1594201064
Release Date: 2006-11-02 |
Book Description
Heir to Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff scours the country, tossing back whiskey with the seedy, the dreamy, and the strange in search of the soul of the American male.
No one knows life's underbelly better than New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff. Christened the "bibulous scribe of the working class" by his peers, he's made a career chronicling, with dead-on feel for character and idiom, the gritty lives of the drifters, the forgotten, and the strange-people washed up and washed out on alcohol, broken dreams, lifetimes of hard living. Willing to follow his subjects where no respectable white-collared man would dare go, he is clearly-and admittedly-a writer "not for people who have doormen, but for doormen." And while his wholly original coverage of this beat has brought him acclaim as a journalist, it has also made him something of a working-class hero.
Who better, then, to examine what it means to be a man in modern-day America? US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man is LeDuff's equally intoxicated and intoxicating journey across the country in search of the heart and soul of today's American male. With characteristic audacity, compassion, and humor, he takes part in a Bacchanalian Burning Man festival in Nevada, clad in a Mohawk and little else; trains with the sadhearted Russian clown of a traveling circus; leads a cavalry charge down the Little Bighorn River with war reenactors; joins a C-level professional football team; infiltrates a West Oakland bike gang that holds fight parties; travels with Appalachian snake handlers and tent revivalists; and covers a cowboy love story at a gay rodeo ("Not like the movie. Life is never like the movies. Life is messy and complicated and self-loathing and funny"). At each juncture LeDuff faithfully records their religion and sins and racism, their freaks and misfits, their search for the American dream, and the sweetness they find in living it out, if only for a moment.
Customer Reviews:
US Misandry........2007-10-03
With the subtitle, "The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man," readers can easily discern just how slanted and biased Charlie LeDuff's account of the direct sex is in US Guys. His subtitle, were it to be used in the context of women, would be tantamount to a hate crime. The author would never do that though because, as he admits in the Preface, "I hardly understand women." No doubt he is right but also apparent is his gaudy ignorance of men.
The text is devoid of psychological revelation concerning males, but it does effectively illuminate the pervasive misandry endemic to our culture. Mr. LeDuff possesses as many negative assumptions about men as a Womyn's Studies professor, and he gladly shares them throughout the narrative.
Consider the supposition that time spent brawling with a gang of bikers elucidates the reason "why the American man is so aggressive and angry." It does...assuming one was already convinced of the fact beforehand. The person who is hungry for actual knowledge knows otherwise. Behaviors exhibited by belligerent derelicts cannot be extrapolated to the broader population. After all, deviants are, well, deviant. They are not the norm. The average male neither commits felonies nor scraps on a daily basis.
Yet, in his attempt to depict the soul of the American male, Mr. LeDuff exclusively seeks out the company of freaks. The fallacious menagerie is incorporated by bums in Tulsa, gay rodeo cowboys in Oklahoma City, players on a marginal semi-pro football team in Amarillo, the East Bay Rats motorcycle gang in Oakland, jockeys in Miami, the denizens of the Burning Man festival, and reenactors of the Battle of Little Big Horn. These fellows are no more representative of "US Guys" than my political views are indicative of those held by the average Chicagoan.
The title of this book really should be, "News of the Weird." Of course, that would never sell like one purporting to outline the pathological nature of males. Reports of masculine abomination are precisely the type of thing which fly off the shelves in this country. These essays actually appear to have been created for another purpose altogether. The same topics are covered in episodes from LeDuff's Discovery Channel "Only in America" show. His decision to formally link his experiences to misandry may have been just an afterthought.
US Guys has been dubbed Gonzo journalism which, given the broad confines of the genre, it probably is despite Mr. LeDuff having little in common with Hunter S. Thompson. His travelogue is more in the tradition of Confederates in the Attic as, here too, an intrepid anti-liberal elitist ventures out to our non-Eastern expanses to report back on all the rubes and crackers he came across on the journey.
The pretense that American men possess "true and twisted minds" will undoubtedly endear the author to his intended audience as they regard the nefariousness of men as being an undeniable truth (see the oeuvre of Maureen Dowd). I am sure it sold quite well among those who perpetually look down on their fellow citizens--except for reasons relating to the troika of race, sex, and class. Mr. LeDuff's missive was penned exclusively for the active parishioners of the church of political correctness. Everything they need to reinforce their preexisting superiority and prejudice is here.
Great Piece of Gonzo Journalism.......2007-09-16
Charlie LaDuff is simply a great journalist. He has the knack to write an interesting story about things that shouldn't be that interesting. He could spin anything into a good story. US Guys is less about the men of America and more about America itself. I highly recommend this book for just about any audience. You will learn a little something, and even if you know it all you will certainly find LeDuff's writing style fun
SOME of "US Guys".......2007-08-19
I'm sure if LeDuff felt that some white collar writer were lumping all the men of his generation into some group, he'd rant and rave against such stereotyping. But he's eager to do the same, throwing out sweeping generalizations about the men of his generation (once called "X" now called nothing in particular, he asserts). To draw on his experiences at Nevada's Burning Man festival and say his generation "meanders through life without purpose, charting with a broken compass" sounds nice and deep, but in all honesty, are the people who trek into the Nevada desert (or join the gay rodeo circuit, fight-club motorcycle clubs, or bottom-rung football teams) truly the standard-bearers of an entire generation?
Sure, LeDuff, go ahead and write about the down-and-outers, but don't lump everyone else born in the same couple of decades into your groups of directionless losers. Your stories are an interesting look at a small group of disaffected American men, not all of us, so jump down off your high horse of judgement and recognize the limits of your choice of experiences.
brillant (of course).......2007-07-04
I caught Charlie's interview on the "Colbert Report" and just had to go out and buy his book. As it turns out, I knew Charlie from Ann Arbor, and he's at least as brilliant now as he was then. Bravo.
Versatile.......2007-06-03
Whether blue collar, white collar; whether a pragmatist or philosopher, this book will give you something to talk about. No matter what type of crowd I'm around, a beer hockey league or a wine and cheese party, I can bring up this book as a conversation piece. That rarely, if ever, happens with a book. Worth the read.
Book Description
When former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries came out of retirement on the fourth of July, 1910 to fight current black heavywight champion Jack Johnson in Reno, Nevada, he boasted that he was doing it "for the sole purpose of proving that a white man is better than a negro." Jeffries, though, was trounced. Whites everywhere rioted. The furor, Gail Bederman demonstrates, was part of two fundamental and volatile national obsessions: manhood and racial dominance.
In turn-of-the-century America, cultural ideals of manhood changed profoundly, as Victorian notions of self-restrained, moral manliness were challenged by ideals of an aggressive, overtly sexualized masculinity. Bederman traces this shift in values and shows how it brought together two seemingly contradictory ideals: the unfettered virility of racially "primitive" men and the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. Focusing on the lives and works of four very different Americans—Theodore Roosevelt, educator G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—she illuminates the ideological, cultural, and social interests these ideals came to serve.
Customer Reviews:
On Theory and History.......2006-03-24
Of course Bederman is "biased," she is a human being trying to understand something with the mental tools she has available to her. So is everyone else. Bederman is called biased because the tools that she chooses to apply are different from those some readers are used to or like. Bederman very is very clear that her book is about applying particular theories and examining particular threads in history in order to make certain aspects of that history visible which are not visible under other frameworks. Bederman's history will not explain everything that happened between 1880 and 1917, even everything that happened to or was done by the figures she chooses to highlight. It would be a mistake to wander around for all of one's life trying to make everything one encounters fit within Bederman's historically specific argument, but by carefully examining the evidence available to her she does succeed in making what was merely assumed or unseen visible to modern readers.
The figures she presents seem to doing something very similar to Bederman herself: using the ideas and ways of thinking available to them for their own ends and changing them in response to what they saw in their environment. In reading the introduction and the early parts of each chapter I expected to be frustrated, even angry with many of the characters for their racism, sexism, arrogance, etc. But I wasn't. As Bederman explained the mental tools they were using their actions and writings made sense to me and I could see the ways in which they improved upon those tools, even if the results still seem unacceptable to me. Of course I am still aware that some of them caused harm and that, given the chance, I would have a lot to argue with them about and try to convince them of, but they made human sense and I would have a much better idea how to do that arguing.
It is not a flawless work by any means. Sometimes Bederman may, for the sake of argument, treat some of her figures as if they were thinking about the discourses they were drawing on a little more consciously and explicitly than is necessary or provable. While she chooses wonderful quotes to illustrate her arguments she is too inclined to "analyze" quotes by repeating what they said in slightly different words. This, among other things, gives the book a very repetitive feel and one has the sense that, if she were a little more confident in her reader's ability and willingness to understand her points the first time round, the book might be considerably shortened. That would be a welcome change for although reading a chapter or two of the book is enjoyable as well as interesting it soon becomes frustrating. Perhaps it would be best to put the book aside for awhile between chapters so as not to let the frustration build up.
A Challenging, Subtle book.......2004-09-06
This book is a shining example of how to apply literary theory (ideas such as "discourse") to historical study. Even those who might disagree with Professor Bederman's methodology will benefit from her lucid theoretical explanation in the introduction. In short, the book makes a strong, convincing historical case for the importance of gender in understanding how the concept of civilization was used during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
As one who has had some interaction with the author and knowing many others who have worked with her, I cannot resist adding that Professor Bederman has garnered immense respect from those who know her best (including many conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants who may vehemently disagree with her on certain points). That her work comes from a specific point of view is undeniable, but to equate it with bias is both unfair and over-simplistic.
But don't take my word for it...read this book for yourself and decide.
Gender as a historical construction and analytical tool.......2004-04-20
After reading the reviews of this book I feel obligated to issue a contrasting view that many of the reviewers, oblivious to the gender system that invisibly yet inextricably contours their own behavior and sense of self, have missed; incidently, their reviews provide interesting insights not in any regards to the book as they utterly misinterpret the text, but rather themselves and the political texture of contemporary society.
Bederman illustrates how fin de seicle white men marshalled tropes of masculinity - their conceptions of manhood - to question African-American manhood. The narration of Ida B. Wells simply illustrates how she and other reformers inverted the gender discourse against the predominant, middle-class Anglo conception of manhood to crystallize their hypocrisy. Moreover, in no way does her feminism subvert or in some other way negate the value of this book, as it was, and remains a most valuable contribution for gender studies simply because the book shows how gender, and yes, men are gendered, is socially constructed.
Subdued Bias.......2004-02-15
Bederman chronicles the lives and movements of four prominent figures in the 1880-1917 period: Theodore Roosevelt, G. Stanley Hall, Ida B. Wells, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. However this work seems more of a history of feminism than a cultural history as Bederman focuses mainly on the achievements of women, the attempts women made for suffrage and better working conditions, all the while trying to explain away the positions of the male counterparts as lacking, unfairly oppressive, or some other pejorative term. Bederman's portrayals are quite thorough and academic yet they are not without bias, even though the bias may be subdued in some places.
Manhood is womanly.......2003-10-26
Like many others, I had to read this book, for college. Before telling us who the author was, we had to read the first two chapters. It was more than easy to tell that it was a woman. After all, she spends more time male bashing than discussing the issues critical to the text. Her development on HOW manhood is a social creation could use some help. How she develops it as it changes though time is interesting, but to bland. Some of her argument is based on stereotypes instead of facts. She may be a proffesor, but not everything she says is truth. Nevertheless, she does an exellent job adding storylines into her text to keep it interesting. I gave it 2 starz b/c the author writes well, but I would not recommend it to anyone unless the title was renamed Womanhood & other male bashing tales.
Book Description
The word gay has never described mere homosexuality. Gay is a subculture, a slur, a set of gestures, a slang, a look, a posture, a parade, a rainbow flag, a film genre, a taste in music, a hairstyle, a marketing demographic, a bumper sticker, a political agenda and philosophical viewpoint. Gay is a pre-packaged, superficial persona--a lifestyle. It's a sexual identity that has almost nothing to do with sexuality.
Androphilia is a rejection of the overloaded gay identity and a return to a discussion of homosexuality in terms of desire: a raw, apolitical sexual desire and the sexualized appreciation for masculinity as experienced by men. The gay sensiblility is a near-oblivious embrace of a castrating slur, the nonstop celebration of an age-old, emasulating stimga applied to men who engaged in homosexual acts. Gays and radical queers imagine that they challenge the status quo, but in appropriating the stigma of effeminacy, they merely conform to and confirm long-established expectations. Men who love men have been paradoxically cast as the enemies of masculinity--slaves to the feminist pipe dream of a 'gender-neutral' (read: anti-male, pro-female) world.
Androphlia is a manifesto full of truly dangerous ideas: that men can have sex with men and retain their manhood, that homosexuality can be about championing a masculine ideal rather than attacking it, and that the wicked, oppressive 'construct of masculinity' despised by the gay community could actually enrich and improve the lives of homosexual and bisexual men. Androphilia is for those men who never really bought what the gay community was selling; it's a challenge to leave the gay world completely behind and to rejoin the world of men, unapologetically, as androphliles, but more importantly, as men.
Customer Reviews:
Revolutionary Book with Flaws!.......2007-05-07
Androphilia examines the CORE of why male homosexuality is hated in this world. That core is that gay males (and gay male identity) are seen as effeminate, whereas straight men (and straight male identity) are seen as manly. Jack Malebranche argues that homosexuality need NOT mean this, that a man can be turned on by men sexually and STILL be a man. This is a radical message. The gay community, Malebranche argues, encourages effeminateness in gay men (e.g., "you go girl") and reinforces the very stereotypes that make the mainstream not want to associate with male homosexuality. The book criticizes effeminateness in men because effeminateness--whether perceived or real--separates gay (read, effeminate) men from the larger brotherhood of straight (read, real) men. If gay men embrace traditional masculinity, Malebranche argues, they would discover that rich world that straight men enjoy (e.g., courage, emotional control, and being tough). Straight men would also not be uncomfortable around gay men. This is a revolutionary message.
Androphilia, however, has drawbacks as serious as the book is revolutionary. Its utopian vision is: 1) A world where gay men--not just straight men--have embraced traditional masculinity and 2) A world where androphiles (men sexually attracted to men) and straight men associate as men FIRST and as straight or androphile SECOND. The problem is that the book does not address the IMPLICATIONS of this. If male homosexuality is seen as manly as male heterosexuality, then the fear of male homosexuality would diminish among straight men. As activist Peter Tatchell has argued (barely mentioned in Androphilia), more men would then have straight AND gay sex without identifying themselves as straight or gay. Bisexuality would become the norm. The b word, however, is used but twice in Malebranche's book. The assumption of Androphilia is that the straight/gay divide would continue as if it were an innate difference. Perhaps, that is the gist of the book's problem. In adopting an either/or stance on sex and gender, Malebranche goes to the other extreme. He questions the idea that masculinity is constructed to argue that it is innate. What about BOTH?
The danger of this book is that it elevates straight men (and male heterosexuality) as masculine and does not critically examine heterosexuality itself. Many straight men, for example, wear long hair, earrings, and even nail polish. Many straight men are also soft-spoken. There is nothing wrong with this, of course. But rather than address today's metrosexual phenomenon (which may be a prelude to a bisexual future for men, not just for women), Malebranche instead argues that most straight men are traditionally masculine. This is still true. But things are changing. This flux of masculinity is important because if same-sex attracted men are to embrace their masculinity, they need to first understand WHAT they are embracing.
In the epilogue, Jack Malebranche rejects gay marriage because, in his view, marriage is designed for men and women about to reproduce and raise children. For androphiles, Malebranche proposes fraternal unions based on traditional rituals of manhood (e.g., sharing blood). This is a fresh departure from the gay marriage debate. But Malebranche's solution assumes that ALL androphiles (including bi men) want to be ONLY with men without raising kids. Also, Malebranche's solution does not question the couple paradigm. What about people who want to marry more than one person? There is a growing movement in the West for polyamory (many loves). But Malebranche does not address this in his gay marriage epilogue. Where do bi men and bi women fall in this? What about men who fall in love with the same woman? What if the woman wants to marry both of them in the future? What if one man is straight, one man is bi, and the woman is bi? What would such a marriage look like in the future? Androphilia proposes ONE model for masculinity (e.g., traditional masculinity), ONE model for same-sex unions (e.g., the couple paradigm), and ONE model for same-sex desire (e.g., becoming apolitical and rejecting all queer subcultures). In so doing, this book does not present MORE CHOICES for males--let alone, for females.
Overall, Androphilia calls on men sexually attracted to men to accept their homosexuality as MEN (actually, as one TYPE of man, the traditional kind) and to take responsibility for CHOOSING to act--or not act--on their homosexual desires. This is commendable. But the book rejects romantic love between men as unmanly. The book argues that violence against gays is a thing of the past. This simply isn't true. Malebranche even dismisses as pathological men with different homosexual tastes than he has.
In short, Androphilia is a starting point for seriously original thinking about the future of gay male identity (and culture) and by implication, the future of straight male identity (and culture). But just that: a starting point. Most important, Androphilia resurrects the long-neglected ideas of Adolf Brand, a German writer/activist who, in the 1890s, organized against the idea of homosexual men being a "third sex." Androphilia mentions Brand in passing and that the gay community--and straight world--adopted instead the "urning" (third sex) idea of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Brand's idea that homosexual men were NO DIFFERENT (gender-wise) from heterosexual men was ignored, Malebranche writes in passing. But WHY Brand's ideas were rejected (e.g., the mainstream fear of bisexuality) is not explored. Still, Androphilia resurrects Brand's forgotten paradigm, one that proposed a return to ancient male cultures (e.g., ancient Greece). For this alone, Androphilia deserves to be read. For this IDEA. The INTENT of the book, however, is to create a respectable way of being homosexual. In this, Androphilia echoes writers like Andrew Sullivan and Camille Paglia. The idea of embracing traditional masculinity is valid--up to a point--in an age of masculinity being pathologized. But readers ought to know that beyond this groundbreaking message, this type of literature is part of the conservative backlash against everything that the 1960s represented. The 21st century will require MORE options for humanity, not less.
Can a gay man be a real man?.......2007-04-09
After three decades of it, I might not be ready to start "rejecting the gay identity" but "reclaiming masculinity" is something I have been engaged in for a long time. So Jack Malebranche's "Androphilia" is a welcome voice. When he noted, just for starters, the pervasive infections of "anti-male feminism, victimist mentality and left-wing politics" in the gay mainstream, he had my attention. And kept it. Although Androphilia is a manifesto, it is well-written, accessible and yet richly packed with content that you can return to and mull over after first reading. I have.
An image of my own that supports his take on the Orwellian strangeness of current gay identity/culture: A transgender man who asserts, "Just because I don't have the `right' equipment doesn't mean I'm less a man", will be praised and defended. An ordinary gay male who asserts, "Just because I'm a Republican doesn't mean I'm less gay", will be booed and booted out.
Malebranche has a strong point: contemporary gayness is a pre-packaged ideology and lifestyle often at odds with the natural masculine identity of its own population, and pressure to buy the whole thing is very intense. Deviance, ironically, is not well tolerated.
The primary slur against homosexual men is that we are not men at all, but something less, something like faux-females. Malebranche underestimates the deep contempt many men still have for one of their own who, how shall I put it, kneels or bends over. One defense against this is for us to identify with the slur and defiantly transform it into a mark of pride. This is how the cross, the ancient analogue of our noose or chair, became a religious symbol of victory. The same inversion with the pink triangle.
So, many gay men embrace the feminine that they are accused of aping. And in its defiance, it is a masculine act. But far too often, it is an unintegrated and adolescent, even pathological, femininity. And it remains perpetually stuck in defiance mode, becoming a pose or a cartoon, retarding their maturation as men. Rather than refuting the slur, they sadly prove its point. It is not necessary. It is painful to see. And it is not rare. And it is very rarely challenged from within the gay world.
Although I may differ with Malebranche on the depth of the feminizing stigma, or his reflections on desire as preference vs orientation, or his regrettable but minor decision to use Andrew Sullivan's bogus "Christianist" lingo -and I am glad that he minimized his old notion of fetish--, I stand with him solidly and gratefully on his central androphile point, true for all men, but especially now for us men who love and desire other men. To paraphrase, "Manhood is not the problem, it is the solution".
Essential Reading For The Homosexual Male........2007-04-07
Though the GLBT movement prides itself on diversity it's view have become quite narrow and it's battles, petty. This book removes the blinders off gay men and shows a better way of living and loving. This book affirms and builds men.
A Very Important Book.......2007-03-28
Malebranche, Jack. "Androphilia: A Manifesto--Rejecting the Gay Identity Reclaiming Masculinity", Scapegoat Publishing, 2007.
A Very Important Book
Amos Lassen and Literary Pride
It is not often that a book knocks me out but "Androphilia" by Jack Malebranche did just that. It is such an important book that has so much to say that it should be read by every gay male in the world today. Jack Malebranche tells it like it is and holds nothing back as he shows us how to find a more manly way of doing things and shows us how the return to masculinity is so important. He tells us that we must join "the army of men" and reclaim our masculinity and shows the problems in the gay community today. [...]
For a short book (143 pages) there is a lot to read here. There is definitely a great deal of food for thought here. You do not have to agree with everything in the book but all of us will see ourselves to some degree in it.
A Place of Truth.......2007-03-28
Jack Malebranche speaks to me with the voice of a much sought-after mentor. I concur with a previous comment, lamenting the fact that this voice was not around when I was first coming to grips with my desire. This book is a must-read for any self-identified gay man. Even if you vigorously disagree with Jack's thoughts and observations, it will speak to you. At a gut level, as a man first, I know he writes from a place of truth.
Book Description
Winner of the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, this brilliant work challenges the conventional wisdom that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet.
Customer Reviews:
An engaging and informative book.......2007-09-22
George Chauncey has written an engaging and informative book that provides entry into another American era's conceptualizations of what we today think of as homosexuality.
Gay New York takes great pains to debunk what Chauncey terms "the three myths" of isolation (gay men led solitary lives prior to Stonewall), invisibility (the gay world was difficult for isolated men to find) and internalization (gay men were self-loathing and universally accepted their denigration by the dominant culture). In addition to gay men's diaries, the book provides a glimpse into a bygone world through personal interviews, meticulous documentation by police investigators and arrest reports, sensationalistic newspaper accounts of police raids, cartoon illustrations from popular magazines, advertisements for drag balls, medical writings and other ingenious and esoteric sources. Combining serious scholarship and humor, the book capably documents the perspective of a culture that defined sexuality and gender roles using criteria that are altogether different from those we use today. In demonstrating the fluidity with which human beings define their own sexual behavior, Chauncey provocatively stirs the postmodern debate between essentialist and social constructionist explanations of sexuality.
In reading Chauncey's book, one appreciates how a culture makes sense of sexual activities. In the days of Gay New York, the terms pansy or fairy were used to define a gender role, what we would today refer to as effeminacy, rather than a sexual orientation. Effeminacy was presumed to indicate that a man was sexually available to other men. In that cultural nosology, the man who had sex with another man was not stigmatized as long as he did not act effeminately and if the homosexual acts in which he engaged were masculine, meaning insertive.
Some sex researchers treat sexual orientations as irreducible traits or markers while many cultures, like the one described in Gay New York, treat gender role behavior as such. Today, many laypeople are willing to accept a sexual orientation as the basic component of human sexuality that can be studied, dissected and for which an eventual etiology will emerge. The incorporation of this newer view into the culture has had interesting political ramifications. On the left, if a homosexual orientation is defined as an intrinsic, genetic trait over which a person has no control, then denying people equal rights because of that trait is akin to racism or discriminating on the basis of a disability. On the right, even if a homosexual orientation is intrinsic, it is considered part of man's baser nature and should be controlled, like a genetic tendency to drink or take drugs. Further on the right, religious and historical beliefs condemn homosexuality as a transgression of rigid, gender roles defined by ancient texts and customs presumed to go back to the dawn of civilization. These latter beliefs totally reject the modern classification of orientations and as in the world of Gay New York, they conflate sexual attraction with gender identity.
In his successful portrayal of a once-thriving same-sex culture, Chauncey makes the point that the oppression that immediately preceded Stonewall was not always the norm. He ably does the job he set out to do in disproving the myths of isolation, invisibility and internalization. He makes the case that "the excoriation of queers served primarily to set the boundaries for how normal men could dress, walk, talk, and relate to women and to each other" and that "the normal world constituted itself and established its boundaries by creating the gay world as a stigmatized other" (pp. 25-26). He argues, somewhat ominously, that an increased visibility of the homosexual culture ultimately led to its own demise. Starting in the 1930's, restrictive and sometimes violent enforcement of laws against gay men evolved in reaction to the openness of their lives. Although the nature of the debate has changed, today we see a backlash in response to the increasing numbers of gay men and women coming out. History teaches us many lessons and Gay New York is highly recommended reading for both the historical facts that it provides as well as for the scientific, political and cultural questions that it raises.
History at its Finest.......2006-08-29
George Chauncey gave himself an incredibly daunting task when he set out to reconstruct the sexual and gender landscape that Gay Male New Yorkers inhabited from the fin de sielce until the beginning of World War II. In order meet this challenge, and make sense of the awe inspiring amount of research he was able to amass, Chauncey finds it necessary to set himself up with a mega question--what did it mean to be a gay man in New York during the period in question?--with a series of much smaller topical questions. From the myriad of smaller questions I have mined Chauncey's work in order to concentrate upon four questions. First, what was the dominant understanding gender, male sexuality and sex practices during the period in question? Second, how did Gay men in New York negotiate their way through a city that was largely hostile to their existence and make themselves visible to each other? Third, how were Gay men able to appropriate public and private spaces for their own purposes? Fourth, how did the increasingly draconian laws and regulations that followed in the Great Depression's wake affect Gay life? Only by exploring these questions can we even begin to understand how Chauncey was able to construct Gay New York.
Chauncey asserts, quite convincingly, that we have a fundamentally different understanding of sexuality and gender than the generations that he studied. Most peoples' understanding of sexuality is a binary one based on the anatomy of the two sexual actors--homosexual if the actors have the same anatomy and heterosexual if they do not. A person attracted to both sexes fits within the small space left between the poles known as bisexual. In sum, our definition is based solely on sex actors' biology. Though by the end of the nineteenth century, this view of sexuality had made some in roads among the medical community and was beginning gain credence among the middle classes, it was not the dominant view of sexual practice of society as a whole and was not the view of huge swathes of working class men from many backgrounds. The understanding that working class men had of sexual practice, as well as the one that much society had, was a gendered view that fit under the rubrics of normalcy and deviance. This understanding allowed normal men to play the penetrating or fellated role in same sex acts and not have their masculinity questioned. The dominant understanding regarded all men who played of gratifier as feminine. Ours is a world where men and women are gay or straight. Theirs' was a world wherein men were men and women were women, but men were also women because sexual aim took precedence over sexual object. This view allowed for a great deal of sexual contact between men where only one of the actors would be viewed as a homosexual.
Gay New York existed as a city within a city. Words were part of an intricate code that, along with dress and affectation, allowed gay men to recognize each other while remaining largely invisible to the outside world. The dropping of certain words in a conversation; a loud suit with a red tie; bleached hair and tweezed eyebrows; the gait of one's walk or the rhythm of one's speech--all these and many other things played their part in allowing gay men to operate in public surreptitiously when the need to do so arose, but they also allowed straight men (or those who were defined above as normal) to identify gay men within realms that were dominantly straight but allowed for a large amount of intermingling between straight and gay men. Putting aside the person of the fairy--a hyperbolic form of gay affectation that most gay men could not maintain without a the threat of ostracism--the great body of gay men had a tenuous position within the communities lived in and sought partners because communities and private vigilance groups hostilities towards their existence, and law enforcements official virtual outlawing of their sexual behavior. To be gay during this period meant knowing how to behave in ways that signify homosexuality to other gay men (and those interested in affairs with gay men) while having that behavior appear ambiguous enough to those of ill will to avoid censure or worse.
Gay men did not always have to operate through the use of coded behavior. In the worlds of rooming houses, or with the connivance merchants, restaurants and saloons, gay men were able to turn much of what would be regarded as public spheres into primarily gay spaces or at least gay friendly. This was certainly the case with several YMCAs' throughout Manhattan. As Chauncey points out Y's had a legendary aura around them regarding gay activity: "some New Yorkers," he writes, "took rooms at the Sloane House for the weekend, giving fake out-of-town addresses."(156) In the case of the YMCA's security could be bribed, indifferent, or it could be the job of gay men to enforce managements rules that would have the effect of hindering openly homosexual behavior. Since it was not until the 1930's that serving gay people became a business liability, many bars and restaurants were happy to have their business. Being a public space, but in point of fact private property these venues allowed for more overt forms of same sex courtship and interaction. Like the YMCA's and rooming houses Gay men were able to operate here under the sufferance of only unofficial supervision and were therefore only obliged to worry about the community where the venue was located and the proprietors. Although there were occassional police raids, or a proprietor could enlist the help of police forces to make his establishment more or less off limits to openly gay people, these venues would still generally allow for a greater freedom of movement and interaction.
Gay life in New York always had to operate underground, beyond both the official and unofficial radars of society because of the possibility of harassment, arrest and sometimes long prison terms. If the first third of the twentieth century was a time where cunning, code, and great circumspection would have to be employed in order to build an actively gay life, then these tools would become doubly necessary to keep the edifice of gay life from crumbling in the period that immediately followed it. With the end of prohibition putting a huge venue, bars, of gay life under the microscope of a newly vigilant law enforcement community--both the police and a new and militant State Liquor Authority--that was becoming more and more hostile to gay life. New Yorkers of this period, because of the economic calamity all people suffered as part and parcel of the Great Depression, also knew a gender anxiety which they had not know immediately before this because of the massive number of men who were no longer bread winners. Coupling all of these factors together with the election of the dynamic, but moralizing Fiorello La Guardia, in 1933 and the campaign to sanitize the city in time for 1939 World's Fair (especially the areas where the greatest number of gay friendly haunts were) and a situation was created where gay life was severely circumscribed.
At the very least, Chauncey is able to thoroughly dispels the notions that Gay life as we know it today began with the Stonewall revolt and the history of Gay life is one of unimpeded progress. As his narrative shows the history of the oppressed shows, we never live in the best of all possible worlds and very often the past can seem much rosier than the present because it was just that.
A treasure chest of forgotten lore.......2003-12-31
This book was preceded in my conciousness by high critical praise and so I approached it with great expectations. And in great part it met these expectations.
More than anything else, this is a work of love, being the excavation of forgotten facts in the history of gay life as it was lived by decades of gay men, experiences now mostly forgotten or scattered in obscure and fading documents. It is an extraordinary work of social archeology, resurrecting a world I never knew exisited. And Chauncey does this in exceptional detail, using clear prose, so that by the end the geography of this world has been salvaged and reconstructed, like Combray from Marcel's teacup.
As the book proceeds, the writing becomes stronger, particularly as the facts become more readily available, and the arguments and conclusions become more convincing. The last chapter is especially good on the submergence of gay life after Prohibition. This book is clearly one of the masterpieces of gay history, on par with John Boswell's work especially in it's dependence on primary sources.
The only criticism I have lies in the fact that Chauncey often has trouble shaping his information and often can't create a forest out of the trees. Especially in the earlier chapters, he often fails to make a summary statement without such a host of qualifiers that you wonder why he bothers in the first place. And as a previous reviewer has noted, there are alot of repetitions that a good editor should have corrected.
Despite all these reservations, for those interested in discovering a lost world, this book will be a revelation.
Fresh Thinking About Gay History.......2002-06-15
Chauncey's book offers serious and original thinking about queer history and about general urban history as well. Freed from the myths that have persisted about the place of homosexuals in U.S. society, the author paints a new portrait of what transpired just before the turn of the last century and into the early decades of the 20th century.
The most important idea he explains is that the concepts of "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" as we understand them today didn't exist one hundred years ago. Chauncey's research shows that it was adherence to traditional gender role, rather than choice of sex partner, that labelled a man as either a "fairy" or "normal." The author provides detailed descriptions of the process by which working class men in particular could have sexual relations with other men and perserve a "normal" identity so long as the sex partners were effeminate. He uses extensive supporting materials that undergird his conclusions, including accounts of the "pansies" who were not, in fact, demeaned or ostracized but instead were tolerated, courted, and may even have served a vital purpose to working men who had relocated alone to the city to support families that lived elsewhere or to make their way into adulthood.
Chauncey shows how the definition of "invert"-- detour from standard gender role-- shifted gradually to the notion of "degenerate" or "homosexual"-- men who chose other men as sex partners. He makes clear how the emerging definition of homosexuality depended on a similarly new definition of heterosexuality. These subtle but powerful social mores are detailed at length, in convincing prose.
The book explains that there were places in early 20th century society for gays, countering the mistaken belief that the 1960's rebellions brought people out of the closet. The author hints, but doesn't explicitly state, that societal needs may have some not insubstantial effect on how prominent the gay people will be in our communities, or even how many young men may experiment with homosexuality for identity, financial need, or other reasons.
Chauncey's prose is vivid and evocative. He many times, especially in the early parts of the book, uses a hair-splitting preciseness with terms that can become tiresome to a reader. He also shows an academic's obsessiveness with source material: his book is chockful of lengthy source notes in the appendix and footnotes at the bottoms of the pages. These practices make his work explicit for purposes of academics but also tedious for general reading.
He employs other techniques that I believe weakened the impact of the reading. Chauncey summarizes a great deal at the end of each chapter, which dilutes the momentum of his historical survey. He is prone to repetitions of concepts and quotes. He also divided his themes such that each chapter covers expansive times. This has the reader continually moving back to the beginning of his chosen era, which diffuses the reader's sense of progressions over time. My sense is that he was not able to decide if the book were to be textbook for teaching, academic document for university colleagues, or general historical account. Nevertheless, his interesting prose, his unique perspectives, and his strong synthetic thinking make this an important work.
A new era in queer theory........2002-04-15
Great book that has ushered in queer theory. Great for gay history people and NYC history people. Great evidence. Great everything.
Average customer rating:
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Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema
Raz Yosef
Manufacturer: Rutgers University Press
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Binding: Paperback
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Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen
ASIN: 0813533767 |
Book Description
Raz Yosef explores Israeli cinema's role in the creation of national identity and the complex ways the marginalization of queerness became necessary to that goal. Zionism was not only a political and ideological program but also a sexual one. The liberation of Jews and creation of a new nation were closely intertwined with a longing for the redemption and normalization of the Jewish male body. That body had to be rescued from anti-Semitic, scientific-medical discourse associating it with disease, madness, degeneracy, sexual perversity, and femininity—even with homosexuality. The Zionist movement was intent on transforming the very nature of European Jewish masculinity as it had existed in the diaspora. Zionist/Israeli films expressed this desire through visual and narrative tropes, enforcing the image of the hypermasculine, colonialist-explorer and militaristic nation-builder, an image dependent on the homophobic repudiation of the "feminine" within men.
The creation of a new heterosexual Jewish man was further intertwined with attitudes on the breeding of children, bodily hygiene, racial improvement, and Orientalist perspectives—which associated the East, and especially Eastern bodies, with unsanitary practices, plagues, disease, and sexual perversity. By stigmatizing Israel's Eastern populations as agents of death and degeneration, Zionism created internal biologized enemies, against whom the Zionist society had to defend itself. In the name of securing the life and reproduction of the new Ashkenazi Jewry, Israeli society discriminated against both its internal enemies, the Palestinians, and its own citizens, the Mizrahim (Oriental Jews).
Yosef's critique of the construction of masculinities and queerness in Israeli cinema and culture also serves as a model for the investigation of the role of male sexuality within national culture in general.
Book Description
While the 1950s have been popularly portrayed-on television and in the movies and literature-as a conformist and conservative age, the decade is better understood as a revolutionary time for politics, economy, mass media, and family life. Magazines, films, newspapers, and television of the day scrutinized every aspect of this changing society, paying special attention to the lifestyles of the middle-class men and their families who were moving to the suburbs newly springing up outside American cities. Much of this attention focused on issues of masculinity, both to enforce accepted ideas and to understand serious departures from the norm. Neither a period of "male crisis" nor yet a time of free experimentation, the decade was marked by contradiction and a wide spectrum of role models. This was, in short, the age of Tennessee Williams as well as John Wayne.
In Men in the Middle, James Gilbert uncovers a fascinating and extensive body of literature that confronts the problems and possibilities of expressing masculinity in the 1950s. Drawing on the biographies of men who explored manhood either in their writings or in their public personas, Gilbert examines the stories of several of the most important figures of the day-revivalist Billy Graham, playwright Tennessee Williams, sociologist David Riesman, sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, Playboy literary editor Auguste Comte Spectorsky, and TV-sitcom dad Ozzie Nelson-and allows us to see beyond the inherited stereotypes of the time. Each of these stories, in Gilbert's hands, adds crucial dimensions to our understanding of masculinity the 1950s. No longer will this era be seen solely in terms of the conformist man in the gray flannel suit or the Marlboro Man.
Book Description
Post-Columbine has been a time when the issues of popular culture and the behavior of boys have generated more heat than light. This complex, contested intersection has led to censorship and worse-alarm, irrationality, and a failure to examine our ways of teaching, particularly teaching literacy to boys. In this book Tom Newkirk takes an up-close and personal look at elementary boys and their relationship to sports, movies, video games, and other venues of popular culture. Unlike the alarmists, he sees these media not as enemies of literacy, but as resources for literacy.
Through a series of extraordinary interviews, Newkirk listens to young boys, and girls, who describe the pleasure they take in popular culture. They explain the ways in which they use visual narratives in their writing. They even defend their use of violence in their work. Newkirk disproves the simplistic stereotype of boys who are primed to imitate the violence they see. He shows that, rather than mimic, boys most often transform, recombine, and participate in story lines, and resist, mock, and discern the unreality of icons of popular culture.
Using a mixture of memoir, research project, cultural analysis, and critique of published findings, Newkirk encourages schools to ask questions about what counts as literacy in boys and what doesn't, to allow in their literacy programs boys' diverse tastes, values, and learning styles. In other words, if we want boys to join "the literacy club," then we have to invite them in with genres of their own choosing.
Customer Reviews:
A must read for educators!.......2007-04-23
Author Thomas Newkirk offers insight into what turns boys on and off to literacy. Through his interivews, short stories, reviewed research, and personal accounts, he paints a picture that cannot be ignored. Throughout his book, Newkirk challenges literacy standards and literacy standards bearers to look at the choices and genres boys, in particular, are choosing when they read and write, and not to make assumptions about what boys enjoy. Newkirk also encourages us to confront cultural anxieties towards socicalization of boys, and not to "misread their masculinity". Lastly, through his book, Newkirk insists that we ask questions. We should question ourselves and our choices, our practice, our standards, and our interactions with boys in order to assist them in opening up the world of literacy that they have been denied full access to for a long time.
English teacher? Go buy this book........2007-02-13
Parents and others will find it interesting too. This is a fascinating look into the implicit anti non-middle-class-girl bias in our schools!
One of the ways to keep kids engaged is to make sure the curriculum doesn't assume a life experience foreign to them. Just as we wouldn't teach math using only sports analogies -- pre-Title IX this used to be an obvious case of pro-boy bias -- we shouldn't teach English using a reading list that alienates boys.
Also the companion book should be "Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys."
Book Description
This pathbreaking study of region, race, and gender reveals how we underestimate the South's influence on the formation of black masculinity at the national level. Many negative stereotypes of black men-often contradictory ones-have emerged from the ongoing historical traumas initiated by slavery. Are black men emasculated and submissive or hypersexed and violent? Nostalgic representations of black men have arisen as well: think of the philosophical, hardworking sharecropper or the abiding, upright preacher. To complicate matters, says Riché Richardson, blacks themselves appropriate these images for purposes never intended by their (mostly) white progenitors.
Starting with such well-known caricatures as the Uncle Tom and the black rapist, Richardson investigates a range of pathologies of black masculinity that derive ideological force from their associations with the South. Military policy, black-liberation discourse, and contemporary rap, she argues, are just some of the instruments by which egregious pathologies of black masculinity in southern history have been sustained. Richardson's sources are eclectic and provocative, including Ralph Ellison's fiction, Charles Fuller's plays, Spike Lee's films, Huey Newton's and Malcolm X's political rhetoric, the O. J. Simpson discourse, and the music production of Master P, the Cash Money Millionaires, and other Dirty South rappers.
Filled with new insights into the region's role in producing hierarchies of race and gender in and beyond their African American contexts, this new study points the way toward more epistemological frameworks for southern literature, southern studies, and gender studies.
Book Description
Since it was launched in the mid-1980s, the modern men 's lifestyle magazine has provided an important popular site for the articulation of modern masculinity and for speaking to the male consumer. This edited collection explores this burgeoning genre, its production and consumption, and related constructions of masculinity.The book provides a broad-ranging, interdisciplinary introduction to the subject, drawing on scholarship from sociology, media studies, cultural studies, and linguistics. The contributors make use of a range of methodologies, including interviews with magazine editors, focus groups with readers, corpus linguistics and discourse analysis. Most also use new research data for their analysis, including comparative data from men 's magazines in different countries, gay magazines and sporting magazines.
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Books Index
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