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Reader Feedback on "The Masculine Mystique"
Whhaaa ! Craig, I really enjoyed how you described your relation with women! I seriously fantasise about one night with you (or more). You're so cute....
Moreover, I appreciate your worries about the relationship between men and women. Mostly, when it is the object of a book.
Regards,
--Caro
03/23 |
Is it rare for a writer to add to the comments section? I don't know. Unprofessional? Well, I never said I was a professional. Here I am, anyway. You see how I've added my email address to my byline; that was specifically because I've frequented this site, love it, but find the comments section amongst the most vicious I've ever come across. This, in a way, ties in with the point of the article: some people, the virulent "EC's" of the world (this, for everyone's edification, is how I picture EC while he wrote his comment: sitting behind his keyboard, a beret tilted at an agressive angle atop his pointy candle head, frothing at the mouth) really think this counts as confrontation. It's not. It's sniping from the weeds. Thing is, I agree with a lot of what EC says. I'm frequently wrong and don't mind being called on it. But if EC, or anyone, called me a toolbag to my face, I'd do my level best to beat the almighty fuck out of them. Nobody ever has, yet. I got to believe it happened less in my parent's generation, too, because you'd have to say it to someone's face at the risk of losing a rack of teeth. It happens now because a lot of jackasses have this as their only outlet of confrontation, though it strikes me as not much of an outlet at all. I mean, Christ, I even made a point of emailing LeDuff's publicist to make him aware of the piece, and I'll have to own the opinions of his book should he ever come knocking. But I signed my name to it and I'll live with what happens. So EC, if you want to email me privately, which is why I posted my email, we can go from there. If you showed up at my door and called me a toolbag---I can give you my address---well, at least I'd have a modicum of respect. Here, in this venue, you're just a potshotting cowardly gasbag who can't even sign his own name. Maybe it was wrong for me to post here. If so, I apologize. Too late now, anyway.
---Craig Davidson
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03/22 |
Regardless of the merits of the book or the discussion, I really appreciated seeing here in Nerve a much more thoughtful, serious and less superficial/joky discussion of gender issues than I'm accustomed to seeing here. I'd love to see more stuff like this ...
--cw
03/22 |
Not in a million years would I read that book, based on this description, but your discussion of it has make me want to commit suicide this morning and it's not even 8:30AM. To quote the waiter dude in Ferris Bueller, I weep for our future.
--CH
03/22 |
Ummmm, is it just me, or does this book sound like just another card-carrying media elite type mining the margins for kooky anecdotes, with the necessary gimmick of "meaning" to tie it all together (and pump up the book advance)?
If you want to parse the masculine mystique, go where the real men are: the Armed Forces, pro sports (including pro rodeo, which requires athletic skill and lifestyle commitment far beyond its gay counterpart), the gay leather scene, the fire house, the hospital, and the clergy (you think men of God don't have b*lls? You're missing the whole Christian Masculinist movement, friend). Some poncy douche in a Civil War playgroup is more representative of where men are at today than some guy who just redeployed from Afghanistan? Please. Get some balls, Le Duff. You've got the TIMES cred behind you, surely you could have at least investigated being an embed. (He'd probably hide behind the "I can't leave my WIFE and BABY" schtick--a dodge military men are not allowed).
Smells like meandering, rationalizing chest-pounding to me ("We're so IMPRISONED by the world, man!"). I don't need to hear what some pampered-handed guy from the Times or middling "tough guy" novelists think about men, when I've got my own soldier to ask. Yes, women need men. Poser men? Not so much. Stick to writing Chandler knockoffs instead.
And as far as Craig Davidson's woefully clueless remark that "Nowadays this yearning [to test one's manhood] manifests itself in more foolish, somehow pathetic ways. I think of a mother answering her door during World War II to a melancholy corporal telling her that her boy has died charging a machine-gun nest. Skip ahead to present day, a mother answering her door to have some dork in a spangly flightsuit saying her son perished jumping out of a plane with a snowboard lashed to his feet." Check this, Canadian Kid: 3200 (mostly male) troops have died so far in the War on Terror, countless thousands more injured in both body and spirit. There are hundreds of thousands of men in the military testing their manhood through selfless service, not self-gratification, every single day. Get a clue, tool bag.
--EC
03/22 |
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