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commerce merely and quite innocently “infinitely multiplied and varied the means of
personal happiness (1988, 316.)
Faludi, it seems, has found evidence that confirms the critics’ predictions.
Without a common good that sets the acceptable contours of ambition, “Each man must
father his own image, create his own Adam” (35). Fame has been reduced to what gets
you noticed, not the good that you do. Among the ‘models’ of American manhood Faludi
finds populating American civil society is a bizarre conglomeration of examples that
share little more than an affinity to be or appear in command of oneself and the world,
even if this means something as vapid as being the ‘baddest boy’ around. From 19
th
century precursors in “wastrels” and “tycoons” (11), to yesterday’s “advertising
doppleganger” of the old “King of the Wild Frontier,” “the Marlboro Man” (12); from the
‘hunters’ of “women at the office, or gays in the military, or young black men on the
street, or illegal aliens on the border” (32) to “teenage gang warriors” and “youthful
looking ski-masked bank robbers” (44); from “the Nike-shod thug with his predatory
‘attitude’” to the “bare-chested Calvin Klein poster boy with his gigantic tented
underwear” (44); from young men who “see surliness, hostility, and violence as
expressions of glamour” (37) to “ghostly two-dimensional armies of superatheletes,
gansta rappers, action heroes, and stand-up comedians on television” (39): these and
other characters have become ‘models’ of American masculinity for millions of
American boys and men today.
But there is more to the characteristic features of American masculinity than this
un-harnessed ambition, which is manifested in the wide variety of ways in which
American men try to gain or appear ‘in control.’ In an interpretive construction that has
Convention