Tuesday 15th

Currently reading Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man by Susan Faludi. I'm hoping to write a paper about the changing face of masculinity, looking at Kerouac's On The Road and Palahniuk's Fight Club. Think I might try to incorporate the trope of the abscent father and how an impossible desire for freedom has been manifested in delusion and schizophrenia. Been reading a lot of Postmodern stuff lately and I'm not sure whether it's suffocatingly prententious or entertainingly awkward - a monkey puzzle. How these things are supposed to compete with the likes of Playstation and BigBrother I don't know. A lot of the time we are encouraged to read from a female point of view - sympathetically analystical, and seldom do we look at masculinity as something that needs to be considered as something that is as damaging to the individual as to society in general. It would appear that it has served well as a tool of survival, but as Faludi points out, it now traps those who once saw themselves as its master. I'm still very confused on the issue. It's hard to know where to stand on such matters. On the one hand you want to be openminded and considerate, but on the other hand you feel if you so much as dared to question and criticise the movement and it's philosophy, you run the risk of being labelled a mysogonist or worse. But like I said, this is only my first real venture into the issue on a critical level.