The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
Barbara Ehrenreich
Language: English
Pages: 206
ISBN: 0385176155
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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that Selye proposed—cannot be measured, detected or located in any particular set of circumstances, except in the most intuitive fashion. It was not easy to make the case that contemporary men suffered from any greater exposure to stress than their less coronary-prone ancestors, or that executives suffered more than janitors. Fred Kerner, who popularized Selye’s work in a 1961 book entitled Stress and Your Heart (blessed with a preface by Selye himself) acknowledged the difficulty: Every
of sole. But once the food had arrived, everyone showed a total unconcern about it. They sawed away at their filet of sole or other dishes as if they were meat and potatoes at a highway roadhouse.13 For the young Reich, unlike his ascetic comrades, the commodity spectacle was always a secret source of pleasure, even salvation. One night, overwhelmed by depression, he considers “a dozen remedies” and settles on a walk to the supermarket: I arrived at the large, modern, brightly lit supermarket,
support, even among the middle class, is inadequate or nonexistent. And, according to population expert Andrew Hacker, despite the much-hailed mini-trend of single-father-headed households, the number of men raising children on their own actually declined in the decade of the seventies.7 The result of divorce, in an overwhelming number of cases, is that men become singles and women become single mothers. In fact, one of the most striking changes of the seventies was in the number of men who
illustrates, if nothing else, the deep faith her profession has had in the “naturalness” of the male breadwinner role. Benedek’s hypothesis was that the conventional male role, like that of the female, has “instinctual roots.” With women, things were straightforward, since “mothering behavior is regulated by a pituitary hormone.” In the case of men, no fathering/providing hormone was, as yet, “recognizable” so she cited the exemplary behavior of male birds and certain species of fish, who,
longer hold, and in which the most transient satisfactions become reasonable motives. In a similar spirit, many readers from the left will strengthen their case against consumer capitalism, with its endlessly renewable spectacle of temptations. Here they will have found fresh evidence that capitalism itself acts as a tidal force wearing away against the family, or against any of the human attachments that sustain us in an amoral world. Finally, readers from both the left and the right can take
