Theodore Dreiser and the "Crisis of Masculinity"

I recently had something to say of the alleged "crisis of masculinity"--the moral panic evident among both the cultural "traditionalists" and the anti-traditionalist "woke," that young men are either unable or unwilling to follow the "script" for their lives that society conventionally, traditionally, set out for them.

My take on the matter is that the claim that there is a crisis of masculinity is obtuse, reactionary, dishonest and self-serving. Simply put, society makes onerous demands of its members, with the ones at issue here the young. Given how the costs of compliance with those demands seems to be ever rising, the rewards of compliance falling as they grow less certain, more remote, smaller, those of whom the demand is being made are more resistant to the demands than before, and while being more resistant perhaps more questioning of the demands than before. Yes, changes in "gender norms" are part of this. (That women are expected to bear traditionally male demands at work, etc., while continuing to bear the traditional primary responsibility for the home and child-rearing; that men are expected to share significantly, even equally, in those traditionally female burdens, while continuing to bear the traditional primary responsibility for being the household's bread-winner, all as he must resign himself to his home not being his castle, and his spouse not being a supportive wife as he is instead expected to be supportive of her as she makes her own journey through life while juggling all of the aforementioned responsibilities, etc., etc., etc.; inclines both men and women to feel like they are getting a raw deal.) But the narrowly gender-based side of the issue is far from being the whole story. That we have seen a collapse in the real purchasing power of working people's incomes is far from irrelevant to the situation, greatly compounding the stress all of them are under, and making "the deal" that much less attractive, however much the idiots pouring gasoline on the fires of kulturkampf from both sides would like to not notice it. (Like marriage and family the "home ownership" conventionally regarded as a prerequisite for "responsible" establishment of a household today means a mortgage far beyond their means on a money pit designed to be worthless before the mortgage is up for the dubious privilege of living under the thumb of a Home Ownership Association or condo board that will make them feel like less an owner than a tenant or even a squatter, as the political string-pulling vultures of private equity circle over their heads in an arrangement giving them all the "personal responsibility" of home ownership without any of the benefits--such that only an idiot would not have misgivings.)

As one might guess the resistance to the demands in question is not the new thing either side makes it out to be, quite naturally given, again, the demands' onerousness, with Theodore Dreiser's nonfiction reminding me of that. As he explains with great frankness, as a young man he had no desire whatsoever to join the Rat Race, to push and strive to "get ahead" as society demanded. Especially as a young man Dreiser seemed to feel there was something wrong with him for his shrinking from the struggle and hardship and cares of the conventional path--a view that Authority, of course, encouraged, insisting that any healthy young man ought to be eager-beaver to throw themselves into the fray, stupidly, irrationally convinced that they will be the one donkey in the five thousand to get the carrot in that way morons valorize as "confidence." But if perhaps feeling all this more sharply than others as a young man who was exceptionally intelligent, sensitive and intellectual, while at the same time distinctly lacking the social advantages of many of his peers, there was nothing unusual about the sentiments themselves, this indeed the norm among those whom, as Stendhal observed long before Dreiser came into this world, had their youths spoiled by the burden of settling on and starting in a career due to their not having been born rich (as Dreiser so much wished he had been). At the same time, while young Dreiser was certainly (very) interested in women he had no particular desire for marriage and a family--and indeed explicitly challenged the "natalist" view in his writings.

Of course, few read Dreiser these days. But what Dreiser thought others also think in a world that, due to society's miserable failure to address the problems so glaringly evident to Dreiser and those who heeded him in the twentieth century, is still dealing with the same problems ta century on, such that individual young people, faced with the "scam" or "racket" of adulthood more often fail to achieve it, or simply decline it. Authority is horrified but, as usual, lacks any intelligent answer to the discontents before it, leaving us at the present impasse so many misrepresent as a "crisis of masculinity."