Backlash by Susan Faludi

Author:Susan Faludi [Faludi, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-42687-1
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 1991-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

Susan could solve her “problem,” Gilder writes, if she would only lower her standards and marry Arnold, an unsuccessful writer and bachelor. Arnold is a persistent, if somewhat pathetic, suitor, but Susan considers Arnold barely worthy of her Rolodex. His latest manuscript gathers dust on her desk.

Susan will pay for spurning Arnold, Gilder writes. Simon won’t leave his wife and Susan will end up “well into her thirties, without a husband.” She “will have to marry whoever happens to be available as her thirties pass by. . . . If she waits too long, she may well find that even Arnold is no longer interested, particularly if he has at last managed to succeed in his career. He may reject her with regret. But reject her he will, in favor of a woman in her twenties.” Nebbishy Arnold will have the last laugh. And she will become a spinster who “all too often . . . gives herself to drugs and the bottle.”

Why must Susan marry Arnold? Women “have to bet on the Arnolds of the world,” Gilder writes, because “by choosing them and loving them and bearing their children, the young women greatly enhance the likelihood that struggling young single men will in fact become successful men like Simon.” In other words, Susan must marry Arnold for Arnold’s sake. The princess’s “problem,” it turns out, is the prince’s.

In the ’70s, the struggling author and frustrated bachelor was having his own Arnold-like difficulties. He was past thirty, unwed and, by his own account, extremely unhappy about it. Gilder’s “single man’s predicament,” as he calls it, is a constant complaint in his works from this decade. Of his five boyhood friends, he writes worriedly, every one of them is married except for “P.J.,” a marine who recently shot himself in the head. Eager to avoid a similar fate, Gilder “was very aggressively pursuing women”—but none would marry him.

In Naked Nomads, single George describes his encounter with one such resistant prospect, a voluptuous twenty-five-year-old he spies on an island beach; he’s holed up writing in the Caribbean, alone. He approaches her, but she turns out to be an adamantly independent woman sailing across the ocean alone, a feminist type with her “head held ideologically high.” She tells him, “I would never get married. Never, never. It is stupid today.” Then, walking by himself along the island’s cliffs (to a spot where he hoped to get a tan because, as he explains, “after all, I am a single man”), Gilder falls and breaks his nose. He suspects at once that his bachelor status is to blame for the mishap. “[S]ingle men are six times more likely than married ones to die from ‘accidental falls,’” he reports. Then he starts worrying that his flattened nose will make him unlovable. Finally he comforts himself with the notion that women fall for the prizefighter look. “Perhaps, I would not have to be single for the rest of my life.”

Gilder’s books lament the oversupply and shaky emotional status of contemporary single men.

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