'Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man'
By Susan Faludi
Published by Chatto & Windus 1999
ISBN 0-7011-5703-8

Pg 607


Social responsibility is not the special province of masculinity;
it's the lifelong work of all citizens in a community where people 
are knit together by meaningful and mutual concerns. But if 
husbanding a society is not the exclusive calling of "husbands,"
all the better for men's future. Because as men struggle to free 
themselves from their crisis, their task is not, in the end, to 
figure out how to be masculine -- rather, their masculinity lies 
in figuring out how to be human. The men who worked at the Long 
Beach Naval Shipyard didn't come there and learn their crafts as 
riggers, welders, and boilermakers to <i>be</i> masculine; they 
were seeking something worthwhile to <i>do</i>. Their sense of 
their own manhood flowed out of their utility in a society, not 
the other way around. Conceiving of masculinity as something to 
<i>be</i> turns manliness into a detachable entity, at which point
it instantly becomes ornamental, and about as innately "masculine"
as fake eyelashes are inherently "feminine". Michael Bernhardt was
one man who came to understand this in his difficult years after he
returned from Vietnam. "All these years I was trying to be all these
stereotypes" of manhood, he said, "and what was the use? ... I'm 
beginning to think now just in terms of people." From this discovery
follow others, like the knowledge that he no longer has to live by 
the "scorecard" his nation handed him. He can begin to conceive of 
other ways of being "human," and hence, of being a man.
   And so with the mystery of men's nonrebellion comes the glimmer 
of an opening, an opportunity for men to forge a rebellion 
commensurate with women's and, in the course of it, to create a new
paradigm for human progress that will open doors for both sexes. 
That was, and continues to be, feminism's dream, to create a freer,
more humane world. Feminists have pursued it, particularly in the 
last two centuries, with great determination and passion. In the end,
though, it will remain a dream without the strength and courage of 
men who are today faced with a historic opportunity: to learn to wage
a battle against no enemy, to own a frontier of human liberty, to 
act in the service of a brotherhood that includes us all."



End.