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American Masculinity at the End of an Era
Nation Books
November 2013
On Sale: November 5, 2013
338 pages
ISBN: 1568586965
EAN: 9781568586960
Kindle: B00BKRW6AO
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
"[W]e can't come off as a bunch of angry white
men.”
Robert Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican
Party
One of the enduring legacies of the 2012
Presidential campaign was the demise of the white American
male voter as a dominant force in the political landscape.
On election night, after Obama was announced the winner, a
distressed Bill O’Reilly lamented that he didn’t live in “a
traditional America anymore.” He was joined by others who
bellowed their grief on the talk radio airwaves, the
traditional redoubt of angry white men. Why were they so
angry? Sociologist Michael Kimmel, one of the leading
writers on men and masculinity in the world today, has spent
hundreds of hours in the company of America’s angry white
men – from white supremacists to men's rights activists to
young students –in pursuit of an answer. Angry White
Men presents a comprehensive diagnosis of their fears,
anxieties, and rage.
Kimmel locates this increase in
anger in the seismic economic, social and political shifts
that have so transformed the American landscape. Downward
mobility, increased racial and gender equality, and a
tenacious clinging to an anachronistic ideology of
masculinity has left many men feeling betrayed and
bewildered. Raised to expect unparalleled social and
economic privilege, white men are suffering today from what
Kimmel calls "aggrieved entitlement": a sense that those
benefits that white men believed were their due have been
snatched away from them.
Angry White Men
discusses, among others, the sons of small town America,
scarred by underemployment and wage stagnation. When
America’s white men feel they’ve lived their lives the
‘right’ way – worked hard and stayed out of trouble – and
still do not get economic rewards, then they have to blame
somebody else. Even more terrifying is the phenomenon of
angry young boys. School shootings in the United States are
not just the work of “misguided youth” or “troubled
teens”—they’re all committed by boys. These alienated young
men are transformed into mass murderers by a sense that
using violence against others is their right.
The
future of America is more inclusive and diverse. The choice
for angry white men is not whether or not they can stem the
tide of history: they cannot. Their choice is whether or not
they will be dragged kicking and screaming into that
inevitable future, or whether they will walk openly and
honorably – far happier and healthier incidentally –
alongside those they’ve spent so long trying to exclude.
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