Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture

by David Savran

From the Beat poets' incarnation of the "white Negro" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. In Taking It Like a Man , David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism--the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity.

Savran begins with the writings and self-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively and ruggedly masculine, their literary art and personal relations with other men in fact allowed them to take up social and psychic positions associated with women and racial minorities. Arguing that this dissident masculinity has become increasingly central to U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both writer and star, as well as the emergence of a new kind of action hero in movies like Rambo and Twister . He contends that with the limited success of the civil rights and women's movements, white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim of the scant progress made by African Americans and women.

Taking It Like a Man provocatively applies psychoanalysis to history. The willingness to inflict pain upon the self, for example, serves as a measure of men's attempts to take control of their situations and their ambiguous relationship to women. Discussing S/M and sexual liberation in their historical contexts enables Savran to consider not only the psychological function of masochism but also the broader issues of political and social power as experienced by both men and women.

Genres: Gender, American History, Nonfiction, History

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Tristan Bridges · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Sarvan's cultural analysis of transformations (and continuations) in masculinities during the latter half of the 20th century is wonderful. His focus relies primarily on psychological theories to trace elements of masochism that connect these disparate masculine forms. I was interested because he illustrates something that Connell's theory of hegemonic masculinity doesn't always seem to as explicitly acknowledge--the capacity of dominant masculinities to adopt, co-opt, and transform the meanings associated with masculinity practices of marginalized and subordinated groups. His presentation is a powerful illustration of the how a discourse of "crisis" is utilized (strategically?) in ways that continue to work to men's collective advantage. Telling this story alongside demographic transformations and a history of identity rights movements, Sarvan seeks to analyzes the ways in which new masculinities (associated primarily with young, white, heterosexual men) are opportunistic responses to a series of pressures: domestic multiculturalism, the rise and success of identity politics, and a transformation toward a service economy with all of the globalization of labor it entails. "Taking It Like a Man" is a wonderful title. It highlights the irony of having to prove one's masculinity by "taking it," a simultaneously subordinating, homosexualizing process that has the odd effects of shoring up heterosexual, dominant, and dominating masculine ideals and forms. Really wonderful analysis. I don't think it's appropriate for courses (it's a bit too much, and students would have to work to make sociological sense of the text), but it's a piece that is not cited enough among sociologists of masculinities in my opinion.

[Kakanier · Rating 5 out of 5]

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