The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, part 3 of 8
Playboy presented, by the beginning of the sixties, something approaching a coherent program for the male rebellion
Modern day alt-right incels didn't invent the caricatures of masculinity that they celebrate. Over-simplified ideas about men have been evolving for a century, often with a disgusting amount of support from official institutions who worked to wrap bad ideas in the kind of formal intellectual language which could then be sold to the public.
Let's not confuse what is admirable with a theatrical production that mimics what is admirable. Let's be clear about what is honestly admirable.
Male or female, it is easy to respect the person who can handle large responsibilities. Indeed, in our own social lives, we typically do admire the people who seem able and willing to take on the task of propping up others, or propping up the organizations we care about. Both of my parents were admired for the different ways they contributed to their local community. My father served on the school board for a few years, and my mother served on the Environmental Commission for 46 years. It is natural to admire the people who take on big responsibilities and who try, in various ways, to make the world a better place.
But these are burdens undertaken voluntarily.
By contrast, in the early and mid-20th Century there was a pressure on men to conform to a narrow ideal of masculinity. Wages for working (and middle class) men rose rapidly after 1890 and there was an intense campaign, waged by the churches and the governments and the universities and the corporations, to get working men to use their new affluence to start families. Higher wages meant that men could, in theory, do a lot with their lives, or perhaps work for a few years and then take a whole year as a vacation, or perhaps go off and explore their creative sides. Affluence leads to options, but a world where formerly poor people have options is a revolutionary situation. Many of the various, diverse, ever-shifting factions that collectively make up the leadership of the USA seemed utterly confused and nervous at the thought of working men with options. The campaign to get them all to be family men was intense. This amounted to an effort to change an old, historic pattern:
In one of the landmark essays of historical demography, John Hajnal (1965) revealed that the historic marriage pattern of Western Europe differed dramatically from that of other parts of Europe and from the rest of the world. This "European Marriage Pattern," as Hajnal termed it, was characterized by very late marriage for both men and women and by high proportions of individuals never marrying. At least as far back as the eighteenth century, Hajnal demonstrated, the mean age at first marriage for western-European women generally varied from 24 to 27, and for men from 26 to 30. About a sixth of the European population never got married at all.
For centuries there had been a tradition that said a man had to earn his fortune first before starting a family. For that reason, the marriage rate was relatively low in 1850. It rose after 1890 and peaked in the 1960s. Thereafter it fell. In retrospect, the Baby Boom was the most intense phase of this longer-term trend toward marriage, and it amounted to a brief demographic revolution that then collapsed:
Two things were happening: working men were more affluent, and they were in an economy that had been fully transitioned to the use of money, and suddenly money could buy almost everything. Mere affluence would not have been so freeing if every man was still working on a farm, but affluence as money leads to options. Put differently, if you own a big farm, you are affluent but you don't have options about what you will do next year. By contrast, a man with money but no property is a man with a lot of options.
Being able to buy things with cash was a big change for men, and of course it changed the relationship between men and women. In the mid 1800s the USA did not have many restaurants, and so there was the saying, told to young women, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” In 1850 a man might have cash but it still couldn’t buy him a meal — he might buy some chicken from the local butcher but the man might not have a place to cook it. “Starting a family” implied several things: setting up a home, having a real kitchen, having regular meals. The 20th Century saw the growth of retail, especially after 1920, so by 1960 a man with cash could buy everything he might need or want. Therefore, one of the old reasons for starting a family had disappeared.
My point is, at least part of the cultural struggles of the 20th Century can be read as a two phase battle. During the first phase, the powerful forces of social stability worked to get men to take their new cash-based affluence and spend it in traditional ways. During the second phase, our politics were dominated by a discussion that pitted the dangers of Communism against the freedom of Libertarianism, with the USA supposedly acting as the champion of a world in which everyone had cash and having cash meant freedom. In such a world, how could anyone hold together the old conformist ideal? Obviously, it collapsed. And not just collapse: an ideology developed that suggested that men were fools for getting sucked into marriage, when true happiness was waiting for them in the celebration of all that the money economy offered them.
In her book, Barbara Ehrenreich looks at the emergence of the new ideals, and she gives a lot of credit to Playboy for articulating something like a coherent platform for male liberation.
The Hearts of Men
American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Copyright © 1983
Page 37-38
A more moderate position was that women did not control the corporations, but they did control just about everything else. Thus, the corporate work world was actually a refuge - perhaps men’s last indoor refuge - in a matriarchal society. As Look described man’s flight from female tyranny:
For a while, the male fled to the basement and busied himself sawing, painting and sandpapering. But the women followed him, and today they are hammering right along with him. No place to hide here.
Having exhausted the nooks and crannies in their homes,
...some men are finding more and more escape in the pleasures and fraternity of corporate life. A large proportion of business in now conducted “in hiding” on the golf course and on all-male fishing trips... Men who can afford only a $1.50 lunch are spending three times that in fancy restaurants, and, when traveling, live in spacious suites, entertain lavishly and meet all kinds of interesting people. Home is never like this.
The corporations may have been the enemy of men’s initiative, but it was men’s ally in the struggle against woman, who was portrayed in cartoons as an oversized, dolphin-shaped figure, awaiting her late-arriving husband with arms akimbo. And if the corporate work world benumbed men’s minds and crushed men’s spirits, this too could be blamed on women. “Female dominance,” Look opined, “may, in fact, be one of the several causes of the ‘organization man’ who is so deplored today. What he is doing is just building his own masculine world. His office is his castle…” In a dizzying reversal of nineteenth-century domestic sentimentalism, home had become forbidding territory, and the corporation was man’s “haven in a heartless world.”
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Page 50-51
Playboy’s visionary contribution - visionary because it would still be years before a significant mass of men availed themselves of it - was to give the means of status to the single man: not the power lawn mower, but the hi-fi set in mahogany console; not the sedate, four-door Buick, but the racy little Triumph; not the well-groomed wife, but the classy companion who could be rented (for the price of drinks and dinner) one night at a time.
So through its articles, its graphics and its advertisements Playboy presented, by the beginning of the sixties, something approaching a coherent program for the male rebellion: a critique of marriage, a strategy for liberation (reclaiming the indoors as a realm for masculine pleasure) and a utopian vision (defined by its unique commodity ensemble). It may not have been a revolutionary program, but it was most certainly a disruptive one. If even a fraction of Playboy readers had acted on it in the late fifties, the “breakdown of the family” would have occurred a full fifteen years before it was eventually announced. Hundreds of thousands of women would have been left without breadwinners or stranded in court fighting for alimony settlements. Yet, for all its potential disruptiveness, Playboy was immune to the standard charges leveled against male deviants. You couldn’t call it anti-capitalist or un-American, because it was all about making money and spending it. Hefner even told his readers in 1963 that the Playboy spirit of acquisitiveness could help “put the United States back in the position of unquestioned world leadership.” You could call it “immature,” but it already called itself that, because maturity was about mortgages and life insurance and Playboy was about fun. Finally, it was impervious to the ultimate sanction against male rebellion - the charge of homosexuality. The playboy didn’t avoid marriage because he was a little bit “queer,” but, on the contrary, because he was so ebulliently, even compulsively heterosexual.
Later in the sixties critics would come up with what seemed to be the ultimately sophisticated charge against Playboy: It wasn’t really “sexy.” There was nothing erotic, Time wrote, about the pink-cheeked young Playmates whose ever pore and perspiration drop had been air-brushed out of existence. Hefner was “puritanical” after all, and the whole thing was no more mischievous than “a Midwestern Methodist’s vision of sin.” But the critics misunderstood Playboy’s historical role. Playboy was not the voice of sexual revolution, which began, at least overtly, in the sixties, but of the male rebellion, which had begun in the fifties. The real message was not eroticism, but escape - literal escape, from the bondage of breadwinning. For that, the breasts and bottoms were necessary not just to sell the magazine, but to protect it. When, in the first issue, Hefner talked about staying in his apartment, listening to music and discussing Picasso, there was the Marilyn Monroe centerfold to let you know there was nothing queer about these urbane and indoor pleasures. And when the articles railed against the responsibilities of marriage, there were the nude torsos to reassure you that the alternative was still within the bounds of heterosexuality. Sex - or Hefner’s Pepsi-clean version of it - was there to legitimize what was truly subversive about Playboy. In every issue, every month, there was a Playmate to prove that a playboy didn’t have to be a husband to be a man.