cover image Masculine Mystique

Masculine Mystique

Andrew Kimbrell. Ballantine Books, $23 (367pp) ISBN 978-0-345-38658-8

Unlike most books on the ``crisis of masculinity,'' this call to action by lawyer and environmentalist Kimbrell (The Human Body Shop) is neither an attack on nor a reaction to feminism. Rather, it advances the proposition that men, no less than women, have been victims of social change since the advent of the industrial revolution. The effect of such changes, Kimbrell argues, has been to turn workers into machines whose only concern is to turn out more products and for whom feelings are nothing but excess baggage. Thus the modern masculine mystique presents a gender model who is competitive, aggressive, violent, insensitive and hyperrational, a portrait accepted by sociobiologists, who maintain that these qualities are in the genes. Not so, says Kimbrell, who asserts that the resultant misandry has damaged men in their relations with women, their children and other men. After exploring precisely how men suffer from this stereotype, he issues ``a manifesto for men'' with recommendations to remedy the situation, none of them antifeminist and all of them achievable. An important analysis that recalls The Feminine Mystique (1963) of Betty Friedan. Author tour. (Aug.)