Taking It Like a Man
Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture
DAVID SAVRAN
Copyright Date: 1998
Published by: Princeton University Press
Pages: 392
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7spqr
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Taking It Like a Man
Book Description:

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. InTaking 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 likeRamboandTwister. 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 Manprovocatively 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.

eISBN: 978-1-4008-2246-1
Subjects: Sociology
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. ix-2)
  4. INTRODUCTION
    INTRODUCTION (pp. 3-38)

    Much to the chagrin of U.S. pundits and politicians, the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City turned out to be the act not of fervid Libyan or Iraqi terrorists but of true-blue, all-American patriots. The arrests of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols on charges of planting a homemade explosive device that killed 168 people (on the second anniversary of the siege of the Branch Davidians at Waco) threw a lurid spotlight on the so-called Patriot movement, a loose alliance of right-wing, antifederalist religious and constitutional fundamentalists. According to observers, the movement may number as...

  5. PART I
    • Chapter One THE DIVIDED SELF
      Chapter One THE DIVIDED SELF (pp. 41-103)

      Until William Burroughs discovered the splendors of Tangier in the mid-1950s, Mexico was his exilic homeland. After a difficult year in New Orleans (memorably fictionalized by Jack Kerouac inOn the Road[1957]) during which he was arrested for the possession of marijuana, heroin, and sundry firearms, he removed his family to Mexico City in October 1949. Rum, tequila, and boys were cheap, drugs easily obtainable (although not the benzedrine inhalers of which his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, was so fond), young men walked the streets arm in arm, the clap could be treated for two dollars, and the police...

    • Chapter Two REVOLUTION AS PERFORMANCE
      Chapter Two REVOLUTION AS PERFORMANCE (pp. 104-160)

      Speeding on their Harleys across the painted deserts of the Southwest in Dennis Hopper’sEasy Rider(1969), Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) are Americans on the move—and the unmistakable heirs ofThe Wild OneandOn the Road. Drug dealers, potheads, hippies, free spirits, they, like so many of the generation they represent, rebel against the conservatism of the cultural orthodoxies of the domestic revival by taking to the road on their motorcycles, making up their own laws, and improvising their lives. Owning only what they can carry (and carrying a large stash of bills earned...

    • Chapter Three THE SADOMASOCHIST IN THE CLOSET
      Chapter Three THE SADOMASOCHIST IN THE CLOSET (pp. 161-210)

      Philip kaufman’s 1983 filmThe Right Stuffis an oddly ambivalent representation, both adventure film and satire, celebration and critique of the “macho” American male so giddily cited by theNewsweekcritics and of the increasingly commodified and mediatized culture that emerged after World War II.¹ Based on Tom Wolfe’s 1979 novel, it featured Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager who, in 1947, became the first pilot to break the sound barrier. The film was something of a coup for Shepard, providing him not only with the one role with which he has been most closely identified (and one that plays...

  6. PART II
    • Chapter Four QUEER MASCULINITIES
      Chapter Four QUEER MASCULINITIES (pp. 213-239)

      Two leathermen: one, a psychopath and killer, the other, his unsuspecting trick. They meet at an S/M club in the meatpacking district of New York’s West Village and go to a grotty hotel room. In the next scene, the trick emerges from the bathroom in a black jockstrap (while in the room the closet door is—literally—wide open!). He lightly tweaks his nipples and goes over to a suitcase (in which his assorted sex toys, including a dildo, lie) to take a hit of amyl nitrite. Happily for the camera (for this is no mere written fiction), a mirror...

    • Chapter Five MAN AND NATION
      Chapter Five MAN AND NATION (pp. 240-292)

      At the end of World War II, the United States staked both its identity as a nation and its plans for global economic dominance on its opposition to communism as an economic, political, and ideological system. However, in the early 1990s, the dissolution of the Soviet empire and the fall of communist parties from East Berlin to Moscow was greeted with something other than unalloyed jubilation. Behind the giddy triumphalism of George Bush’s State of the Union Messages, one may detect the sense of a national identity crisis in the making. A reluctant president admitted in his 1992 address that...

    • Chapter Six THE WILL TO BELIEVE
      Chapter Six THE WILL TO BELIEVE (pp. 293-320)

      If one of the proposed solutions to the social and political crises that loom at the end of the Cold War has been a revival of nationalism, then another surely is the turn to spirituality. Indeed, the 1990s have witnessed the burgeoning of a multibillion-dollar industry of products and services that betray what trendspotters call a “spiritual renaissance.”¹ A multitude of books dealing with spirituality have flooded the marketplace, from self-help manuals to accounts of near-death experiences, from New Age novels to catalogs of angels. James Redfield’sThe Celestine Prophecy, Betty Eadie’sEmbraced by the Light, Thomas Moore’sCare of...

  7. NOTES
    NOTES (pp. 321-364)
  8. INDEX
    INDEX (pp. 365-382)
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