Virgin Views

Nearly two years ago in TVia #31 I asked Sheila to review a book called "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friden. In the Virgin Views editorial of that issue I discussed this book and the implications that it had for males in general and TVs in particular. In that editorial on page 83 I called for someone to write a book on "The Masculine Mystique". Somebody

did and again I called on Sheila to review it which she has very nicely done and done very nicely. And again I wish to devote my column this time to a fur- ther discussion of this book, "The American Male" by Myron Brenton. Don't fail to read it!

The seven chapters of it bear revealing names, I'll list them as a kind of trick to get you to read it. They are; "The Male in Crisis"; "The Masculin- ity Trap"; "Notes on the 'Feminization' of Society"; "Back to the Good Old Days--The Patriarchal Myth"; "The Paradox of the Contemporary American Father"; "Potency and the Sexual Revolution"; and "New Ways to Manliness". There, do they fascinate you? They ought to, because all through this book written cer- tainly by a person not promoting TV are many gems of insight into the very problems that we are concern- ed with. Having read my offerings many times, you, as readers of TVia, will understand why I became impressed with this book when I found it, saying in slightly different language and in different context many of the things that I've been hammering on for a long time. For instance; "Human beings have an enormous range of possibilities in terms of traits and in the ability to play roles of all kinds. These possibilities are severely foreshortened by the pro- cess of sex differentiation too ridgidly applied and by masculinity and femininity too narrowly defined." or, "It's one thing to state that every person con- tains both masculine and feminine components. This is just a different way of asserting that every per-