The War at Home

WHEN HUGH HEFNER founded Playboy magazine in 1953, he did little to help foster the sexual revolution; instead, his radical publication helped stimulate the rise of consumerism while maintaining what was ultimately a "clean" sexual ethic. This is one of the more provocative arguments feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich puts forth in The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, which offers a fresh approach to the battle of the sexes. Written with wit, style, and no small degree of social insight, this important book significantly challenges popular beliefs about the women's movement and the current anti-feminist "backlash."

Ehrenreich's central thesis is that it was not the feminism of the 1960s at all that provoked this counter-revolt. Instead, a male revolt, or "flight from commitment," had begun a decade before in the form of the Beat movement; which responded to the rampant conformity of the '50s. Everyone knows the Beats were rebellious: they drifted around the country in search of "kicks," abandoning all shreds of the traditional male role as husband, father and breadwinner. But how many people connect the Beat form of rebellion with the subsequent reclassification of "responsibility" as an unhealthy, even neurotic trait?

Ehrenreich builds a solid and innovative case for the primacy of the male rebellion, founding her scenario almost entirely on economic arguments. In her introduction, she explains why both sexes have been disadvantaged, even oppressed, by the traditional structure of the family as economic unit. It is economic factors, far more than psychological or biological ones, she argues, that have precipitated the rebellions of both sexes:

The fact that, in a purely economic sense, women need men more than the other way around, gives marriage an inherent instability that predates the sexual revolution, the revival of feminism, the "me generation" or other well-worn explanations for what has come to be known as the "breakdown of the family."

Ehrenreich begins her inquiry with the traditional "breadwinner ethic," according to which the goal of every male was maturity, and maturity meant not only emotional but also material responsibility to a wife and family. Ehrenreich illustrates the discontent that prompted the various types of male revolt. Besides the Beats, there were those aberrant males who remained unmarried, even homosexual. Whatever their choice of deviance, they were condemned by psychology and popular opinion alike. Predating the Beats, Heiner's supposedly crotic magazine made its initial contribution to this complex scheme. Rather than bringing glossy sex to the pages of America's coffee-table literature, the author claims Playboy helped legitimize the growing movement away from conformity and toward a new, personally materialistic prototype. Ehrenreich describes "the ultimately sophisticated charge against Playboy: it wasn't really 'sexy'." She describes the "pink-checked young Playmates whose every pore and drop of perspiration had been air-brushed out of existence. Hefner was 'puritanical' after all..." Certainly the centerfolds gave men something to look at, but it was the advertisements in the magazine--every new male status symbol from sports cars to cologne--that had the greatest effect on its readership.

Playboy was not the voice of the sexual revolution, which began, at last overtly, in the 60s, but of the male rebellion, which had begun in the late 50s. The real message was not eroticism: but escape--literal escape, from the bondage of breadwinning...to male liberation...Sex's or Hefner's Pepsi-clean version of it--was there to legitimize what was truly subversive about Playboy. In every issue, every month, there was a Playmate to prove that a playboy didn't have to be a husband to be a man.

Thus Hefner's contribution was the emergence of the acceptability, even laudability, of bachelorhood. But the magazine sustained the ideology of capitalism, raising it, in fact, to new heights. It was rebels like the Beats who took the movement a step further and legitimized even the forsaking of wealth.

THE PLAYBOY CHAPTER is particularly amusing and thought-provoking, but many other passages in The Hearts of Men deserve close scrutiny. Whether Ehrenreich is examining the macho image as portrayed in films of the '70s or having a good laugh about the hot-tub culture, she substantiates her claims with a rich store of medical, psychological, and popular articles, as well as more than a few personal accounts. Many of her points are made with graceful subtlely. Others, while sometimes questionable in their logic, are direct and often funny. At one point, examining the link, among the New Right, of anti-communism and anti-feminism, she cheerfully employs reductio ad absurdum to show her obvious antagonism and impatience with this group:

In the calculus of the right, flag and family have never been independent variables: A threat to one is a threat to the other. Communism would abolish the family, and conversely, any loosening of our traditional sex roles would weaken our defense against communism. So you did not have to believe in the natural inferiority of women, or in the necessity of their natural confinement to the high-tech purdah of American middle class kitchens, to see that there was something menacing about feminism.

Ehrenrich's strategy as a feminist is not to use rhetoric but instead to expose humorous non sequiturs and inconsistencies of the other side: it is the politics of discredit. Shortly after the above passage comes this gem:

The reason for having a strong military [according to the right] was ultimately to protect our women..."After all." [Congressman John] Schmidt argued never for a moment doubting that the FRA would mean instant conscription of American women into combat duty:

...defense of our women and girls is one of the most basic reasons why we men are prepared to fight in defense of our homeland if we were willing to see them killed, mutilated, or captured because they are 'equal,' we might as well say, 'come and get them.'

Ehrenreich's argument is not always as jocund as this: there are some very sober statistics about the "feminization of poverty," on the fact that with current trends prevailing, soon the vast majority of the population below the poverty level will be women and children. And her conclusion is a balanced, thorough look at the battlefield of the war of the sexes after the key early stages.

Although some sections are rather dry, and a few points seem to rest on rather subjective logic. The Hearts of Men gives a unique and important perspective on the history, implications, and possible remedies to the battle of the century. Not only is it a significant reference work, but it may just spark a valuable rethinking of the battle lines of the war that directly affects us all.