NY Times Review - Angry White Men

[johnkarls]

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NY Times – 11/22/2013

Even Madder Men
By Hanna Rosin – the author, most recently, of “The End of Men: And the Rise of Women”

The characters populating Michael Kimmel’s new book, “Angry White Men,” are familiar types: Rush Limbaugh’s dittoheads, neo-Nazis, wife beaters, rampaging shooters and the divorced rageaholics of the men’s rights movement. Crowded together under one banner, they make for a scary and unpleasant lot: full of fury and blaming everyone but themselves for their problems. Mostly, they blame women: ex-wives, would-be girlfriends, the phantom black women who stole their jobs. The editor of a men’s rights website proclaims, “The real question here is not whether these women deserve the business end of a right hook, they obviously do, and some of them deserve one hard enough to leave them in an unconscious, innocuous pile on the ground.”

Kimmel, a sociologist at Stony Brook University in New York, is unusually adventurous for an academic. As he did in his last book, “Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men,” here, he ventures into unfamiliar territory and finds himself engaged in the kinds of conversations he is unlikely to have at department meetings. At a gun show in Shippensburg, Pa., Kimmel passes time with a guy he calls “Rick,” who mans the K.K.K. table and says what you would imagine such a person would say about the black man in the White House. At a batterer’s intervention group, Kimmel gets into the action, prodding one man who had hit his wife by asking, “Well, why didn’t you just pick up a knife and stab” her?

A longtime feminist, Kimmel maintains a delicate balance when handling his sources. He wants to be sympathetic to the people he interviews and yet loyal to his academic principles. After a series of humbling recessions and other economic shifts, men like Rick feel emasculated and humiliated, he writes, “betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway.” Their sin, according to Kimmel, is a failure to adjust. These guys refuse to admit they’ve been handed privilege all these years by a world that puts white men on top. White men, he writes, “have been running with the wind at our backs all these years,” and “what we think of as ‘fairness’ to us has been built on the backs of others.”

Failing to concede this, men get stuck in a permanent dysfunction Kimmel calls “aggrieved entitlement,” in which they “refuse to even be dragged kicking and screaming into that inevitable future” of greater gender and racial equality. Instead they rage, not at the corporate overlords who have actually shipped their jobs overseas but at the amorphous feminists, or more likely “feminazis,” who have stolen American manhood.

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell how mainstream a phenomenon Kimmel is describing. In one chapter he recounts the case of George Sodini, a 48-year-old who went to his gym and shot dead five women (and then himself) because, as he wrote in an online diary, “I dress good, am clean shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me.” Sodini, Kimmel writes, has “legions of fans” on men’s rights websites, people who call him a “hero” for standing up to all the “freeloading” women out there. But are these fringe lunatics or, as Kimmel labels them, an army of “everyday Sodinis” who beat and batter women with abandon? After all, rates of nonfatal violent victimization of women have dropped significantly since the 1990s, according to a 2011 White House report on women and girls. Visible rage may be increasing, but most men may feel impotent to act on it, or may be adjusting in more ways than we realize.

In one fascinating chapter Kimmel explores the changing nature of school violence. Once the scourge of urban black institutions, this phenomenon has taken on new form in suburban and rural neighborhoods. The school shooter is now pretty much always male and usually white (Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, being an exception, although Kimmel asserts that he had much in common with the Columbine killers and others). Kimmel makes a convincing case that this shift has to do with a sense of aggrieved entitlement, showing how these boys spent a lot of time fending off insults to their masculinity from the “jockocracy” that ruled their schools. But Kimmel also strains a little too hard for a tidy sociological explanation, arguing mightily (and pointlessly) against the idea that these attackers were singularly deranged or psychotic. Like the suicide bombers he compares them to, one can be both uniquely psychologically vulnerable, a total outlier, and yet tuned in to a broader cultural trend.

Kimmel’s balance of critical distance and empathy works best in his chapter on the fathers’ rights movement, a subset of the men’s rights movement. Members of this group are generally men coming out of bitter divorce proceedings who believe the courts cheated them out of the chance to be close to their children. They exhibit some of the wrath and obsessive qualities of other angry white men, routinely refer to their ex-wives in the nastiest ways and tend to overstate their involvement in family life. (As one child reported to a custody evaluator, his dad didn’t spend a lot of time with him “because he’s always busy working on his fathers’ organization.”) That said, their grievances are based on a legitimate insight. Often, Kimmel writes, family court judges act as if “they’re adjudicating Don and Betty Draper’s divorce,” back in the 1960s. They fail to recognize that fathers these days do a lot more child care than they used to, that mothers should not always be the default caretakers, and that fathers often want to remain an active presence in their child’s lives, as something beyond a steady paycheck — another sign that many men are in fact getting used to a new world order.

Outside a more elite audience, Kimmel’s diagnosis of aggrieved entitlement will be, I imagine, a tough sell. The men he’s writing about have gone through several recessions and 40 years of economic shifts. They live in a world where, as one man tells him, you’ll never find a job as a plumber but you might find one as a Walmart hostess. Beyond that, families around them are falling apart. Among men like them, without a college degree, divorce rates are high and fewer people get married; for women with only a high school degree, for example, nearly 60 percent of births occur outside marriage, rendering fatherhood a relic of the past. These men may have once run with the wind at their backs, but the air has been dead still for a long time.

Kimmel’s hope is that more men will give up their sense of entitlement and accept a gentler, fairer notion of what it means to be a man. That’s the right ideal, and pop culture has been helping him along, providing ever more TV shows portraying working-class men as loving fathers. Kimmel’s own book, too, offers evidence that men are making adjustments, choosing to be active parents or attending batterer support groups in an effort to change.

But in the short term, class inequalities loom larger than gender or race. You won’t easily convince Rick or the other men in the book that, due to the long arc of male privilege over the course of world history, he owes something to the likes of Barack Obama or Sheryl Sandberg, or to a sociology professor who lives in New York.