Where we once lived in a society in which men in particular participated by being useful in public life, we are now surrounded by a culture that encourages people to play almost no functional public roles, only decorative or consumer ones. The old model of masculinity showed men how to be a part of a larger social system; it gave them a context and it promised them that their social contributions were the price of admission to the realm of adult manhood. That kind of manhood required a society in order to prove itself. All of the traditional domains in which men pursued authority and power – politics, religion, the military, the community, and the household – were societal.

Ornamental culture has no such counterparts. Constructed around celebrity and image, glamour and entertainment, marketing and consumerism, it is a ceremonial gateway to nowhere. Its essence is not just the selling act but the act of selling the self, and in this quest every man is essentially on his own, a lone sales rep marketing his own image with no paternal Captain Waskows to guide him. In an age of celebrity, the father has no body of knowledge or authority to transmit to the son. …

The culture reshapes his most basic sense of manhood by telling him as much as it tells the celebrity that masculinity is something to drape over the body, not draw from inner resources; that it is personal, not societal; that manhood is displayed, not demonstrated.

An excerpt from the first reading for a course on feminist geography. The full text is a book by Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. My favorite thought-provoking quote from the reading (and there were many):

“Without a society, Daniel Boone would have just been a killer.”