Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture

4. Reforming the Hard Body: The Old Left, the Counterculture, and the Masculine Kulturkampf of the 1960s

159 Reforming the Hard Body: The Old Left, the Counterculture, and the Masculine Kulturkampf of the 1960s During the 1960s, cultural critics often viewed social and cultural changes as products of a generational conflict. Lewis Feuer’s The Conflict of Generations (1969), for example, posited that the student protests of that time were essentially a collective Oedipal rebellion against the values of the older generation. Feuer, a philosophy professor at Berkeley who witnessed firsthand the emergence of the free speech movement of 1964 and the rise of the student-led antiwar movement, argued that the students were intent on defining themselves as “uncorrupted” (unlike their parents) and “determined to changetheworldtheelders[would]transmittothem”(416).1 Feuer’s Freudian analysis of the student movement is critical of the counterculture and the New Left: “Large numbers of vigorous youth, often enjoying the securities of bourgeois existence, with all their freefloating aggressive energies seeking an outlet, a cause, congregate in the universities” (523). At the same time, the popular adage “don’t trust anyone over thirty” suggested that many younger people were also apt to view the social conflict in generational terms. Timothy Leary, a guru of the counterculture, often used ageist rhetoric that pittedtheoldergeneration(“white,menopausal,mendaciousmales”; 4 160 Pinks, Pansies, and Punks Politics of Ecstasy 363) against the youth culture of the 1960s (“the gentle, the peace-loving, the young”; ibid.). The fact that Leary was technically a member of the over-forty generation was conveniently ignored by the advocate of LSD and his youthful supporters. MuchlikeFeuerandLeary,LeslieFiedlerin“TheNewMutants” (1965) also attempts to examine the tumultuous 1960s as a generational conflict. However, Fiedler’s analysis of the counterculture is complicated by a literary and cultural understanding of the “new sensibility”thatspawnedboththeNewLeftandthecounterculture.2 Feuer’s portrait of the younger generation, The Conflict of Generations , clearly expresses the older generation’s point of view, but fails to acknowledge the actual political issues at stake. Moreover, his monocausal thesis—that the New Left and the counterculture were fundamentallymotivatedbyrepressedresentmentandaggression— prevents him from appreciating the disparate intellectual and cultural influences that fostered the various youth movements of the time. Although Fiedler often patronizes the younger generation, his essay presents a more well-rounded view of the younger generation and their gender attitudes, a topic that Feuer only marginally discusses . Fiedler’s provocative essay is of interest to today’s scholars of gender because it outlines the parameters of macho criticism in relationtothecountercultureandtheNewLeft.3Whenapproaching literary texts and artifacts of popular culture, Fiedler polices painstakingly the boundaries between the masculine and the feminine and castigates the male authors who have been seduced by feminine tropes. Fiedler is particularly adept at uncovering homoerotic narratives and motifs. Whereas Feuer focuses on the Oedipal conflict between the fathers of the Old Left and the rebellious sons of the New Left and the counterculture, Fiedler emphasizes a gendered view of America’s evolving literary culture and stresses how various cultural texts of the 1960s are saturated with a gendered subtext and how the American male is gradually becoming more soft and more effeminate. In Gates of Eden, Morris Dickstein argues that Fiedler is the first literary critic who sets out to prove that he is “more macho” than the author he is discussing. While Fiedler’s hyperbolic style certainly encourages this view, it would be a mistake to read Fiedler’s work in 161 Reforming the Hard Body a purely hypermasculinist vein. Fiedler’s apparent anxiety about the feminization of American letters is often a rhetorical device that is deployed to shock and amuse the reader. Fiedler’s later work in the 1960s and early 1970s, especially Being Busted (1969) and Cross the Border—Close the Gap (1972), suggests that he is often sympathetic to the counterculture and the student protest movement. Fiedler relishes playing the role of the conservative éminence grise who pretends to be appalled by the antics of the younger generation. Fiedler was particularly good at playing this role in his critical essays, and this is partly why his work was so popular in the 1960s. Younger readersrespondedtoFiedler ’sworkbecausetheytookpleasureinthefact that Fiedler was so shocked and appalled. Among Old Left critics, Fiedler is unique because he is explicitly concerned with gendered themes and the cultural evolution of masculinity.4 Fiedler’s essays from the 1950s and 1960s demonstrate his anxiety about the cultural outbreak of soft masculinity, the rise of homosexual authors, and the feminizing of the Western male...