Grumpy Old Man: An Interview with 'Sissy Nation' author John Strausbaugh

Sissy Nation: How America Became A Culture of Wimps And StoopitsSissy Nation: How America Became a Culture of Wimps and Stoopits (Virgin Books, on sale February 6) is one of the funniest books you will ever read -- if you aren't a sissy. Author John Strausbaugh, a contributor to the New York Times, unloads on every target that has infuriated him over the last fifty-six years of his existence: left-wing political correctness, right-wing religious fundamentalists, the obesity epidemic, the anorexia epidemic, the neutering of NASA and the death of brazen American individualism.

If you believe in anything whatsoever, Strausbaugh will probably offend you, but the fact that you are offended is his point. Jewcy interviewed Strausbaugh by e-mail. (Some of his answers are cut-and-pasted from the book, but we're too Sissy to ask him to paraphrase.)

The book seems like a primal scream, something that has been repressed for a very long time. How long has this rage festered inside of you?

Sissies repress. You calling me a Sissy? I've been ranting about our increasing Sissitude for years, but I didn't know that's what it was. It took time for me to realize that these separate rants were all reactions to mutually reinforcing aspects of one big trend. So I wrote Sissy Nation, my unified field theory of Sissitude.

Your definition of "sissy" isn't "weakling," at least not necessarily. You include everyone from the overweight to those who don't want to colonize Mars.What ties all of them together?

I don't mean Sissy as in gay versus straight, or girly man versus manly man. This is not about a lack of muscles, but a lack of courage and conviction -- a lack of spine, a lack of brains and a lack of balls. You can be the biggest, buffest mofo on your block, and just be disguising your inner Sissy. In fact, if you're a big, buff bully, then you're definitely a Sissy, because bullies are just Sissies in tough-guy drag.

I call us Sissy Nation because we have become a culture of fat, soft, stoopitized, fearful, whiny, infantile, narcissistic, fatalistic, groupthinking victims. Americans were once known around the world for their pioneering spirit, their bold individualism, their brashness and ballsiness. Now we're hiding from the world in our safely padded virtual reality bubbles... We all swim in the same sea of Sissitude, and none of us is unaffected.

When did you first realize that we had become Sissy Nation? Had it already happened by the time you saw the light?

From the 1950s onward we manifested all the characteristics of our Sissitude one by one: conformism, groupthink, consumerism, fundamentalism, political correctness, infantile narcissism, manufactured fears and panics, defeatism, laziness, obesity, gender confusion, the cult of victimhood, the flight from reality into virtuality, the mistaking of a lifestyle for a life, and the confusion of a fulfilled life with a life merely filled with junk.

It was only pretty recently that I saw that these aren't separate and distinct problems. They all come together in a Perfect Storm of Sissitude. We're not just fat, we're not just lazy, we're not just conformists, we're not just narcissists. We're all those things and all the others, rolled up in one big, soft, squishy ball.

You were a Woodstock-era hippy. Were the hippies sissies, or was standing up to '50s-era conformity decidedly un-sissy?

Some hippies were trying to be stand-up individualists, trying to resist the pull of the consumerist hive brain. A whole lot of others were just conformist hipsters, same as today's hipsters with their off-the-rack tattoos.

Is Sissy Nation a product of the baby boomers? Gen X? Gen Y? Did it start when the Greatest Generation came back from the war?

It's hard to put a single start date to the spread of Sissy culture. Some aspects of it go back a long way. But I do believe the slide downhill picked up a lot of speed after World War Two when the American Empire was fully up and running.

The empire builders then handed it over, fully formed and functional, to their descendants -- my generation, the so-called boomers -- who did what the descendants of empire-builders throughout history have done: We grew fat, lazy and decadent, and we raised our children to be even fatter, lazier and more decadent, and now they're producing kids who are boneless globs of protoplasm with google eyes stuck on top, permanently plugged into gadgets that shut out reality, or medicate them the instant a little reality should somehow seep in.

Unlimited prosperity and great power have a way of ending an empire. Ask the Chinese, the Romans, the British, the Eloi. We turned inward and distracted ourselves with increasingly frivolous pleasures and pursuits, devolving toward our present state of Sissiness. It's gotten pretty I, Claudius around here, don't you think?

You have very strong feelings about the space program. Was that the pinnacle of American un-sissiness?

The race to the moon was the last vestige of the pioneering, adventuresome, can-do, gung-ho, don't-tread-on-my-dick spirit that made America great. We had crawled all over this continent, and it was time to go explore new territory.

Problem was, we were just crossing swords with the Rooskies. When we beat them to the moon, we lost interest. A few years later, NASA made it official by announcing that we would not be exploring the solar system anymore -- we were just going to take the Space Shuttle in and out of the garage. I knew it was over the first time I read the words "Space Shuttle." A shuttle bus in space. You don't explore the cosmos in a shuttle bus. Shuttle buses are for trundling handicapped children to physical therapy and senior citizens to the early bird special.

One of your complaints is that nobody knows mechanics or craftsmanship anymore. Why did we lose those skills? Is it okay that we've lost some skills and gained others -- like how to find adware-free FFFMMMMMM vids?

Your average adult used to have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the tools around him/her worked, and how to fix them when they didn't work. A rake was a rake. A very simple and efficient device. If, say, the handle broke, most reasonably intelligent humans could figure out some way to fix it. That's why God created duct tape.

It used to be that you opened the hood of your car and saw a recognizable internal combustion engine. It was iron and steel and wiring. It was mechanical. With a little bit of training -- I got mine from my dad, like most kids in my day -- you knew which parts did what, so when it failed to function in a certain way, you at least had an idea of which parts to check. Now you lift the hood of your car and it's like lifting the casing off your computer. You need a Ph.D. from DeVry and a million dollars in diagnostic equipment to work on it.

So most of us don't even try. If something goes wrong, we ask The Man to fix it for us. Don't you find that demoralizing? And emasculating? And Sissifying? You couldn't even fix it if you wanted to, because the capacity has now been lifted completely beyond you.

Your take on politics is interesting in that you're a "butch liberal," for lack of a better term, which is a rare beast. Why aren't there more of those? Are there plenty, but we just never hear from them because they're the strong and silent type?

Butch liberal. That's funny. But I'm not any sort of liberal as it's now defined in Sissy Nation. Once upon a time, up through the civil rights and equal rights movements, liberals believed in the individual. They strove to make America live up to its ideal as a social environment where each and every individual had the opportunity to be the best and happiest and most fulfilled person s/he could be.

Sissy liberals don't believe in the individual anymore. They mistrust the whole idea of the individual. They see us all as members of various identity groups, and do a lot of squabbling over which identity groups get the most victim bragging rights. Lately, liberal Deomcrats are forcing themselves to choose between two of their favorite victim identity groups, women and African Americans, and it's making them crazy nasty. The whole collectivist hive is in a tizzy.

At the same time, why do "tough guy in drag" conservatives get to claim the mantle of manliness?

Left wing Sissy, right wing Sissy, it's all chicken. George W. Bush came to power in the classic Sissy way: Daddy gave it to him. Give a Sissy power, and what does he become? A bully.

You are offended that so many Americans are offended over so many things -- and that so many refuse to have a nuanced debate beyond "that's sexist," "that's racist" or "that offends people of faith."

Politics in America has always been a shouting match, but I believe it's only been in the last 30 years that we've seen the thought-deadening effects of politically correct discourse spread far enough through our increasingly Sissy culture that one could end any discussion on the spot with two little words: "that's offensive."

Once you accuse someone of being a racist or a homophobe or an utterer of offensive language, he's guilty of it until he can prove his innocence. How can he prove his innocence? He can't. He can only accept or reject his guilt. If he rejects it, he's obviously guilty anyway. Only a racist would refuse to defend himself against charges of racism. Only a denialist would deny his denial.

I see all this as a function of the global spread of fundamentalism. I don't just mean Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, bad as both are. There's all sorts of secular fundamentalism too. PETA fanatics are, obviously, furndamentalists. There are people who don't just believe global warming is happening, they believe in global warming as a secular apocalyptic religion. Sissies are attracted to fundamentalism because it absolves them of the terrible burden of having to think and form opinions of their own.

You say that sissiness isn't about male vs. female. What's your ideal un-sissy woman like?

That's correct. Sissiness as I'm defining it has nothing to do with male versus female, manly man versus girly man, gay versus straight. An un-Sissy man or woman is an individual who thinks for him- or herself, has the courage of his or her own convictions, is open to ideas and opinions that haven't been prethought and predigested by some figure of authority or power, and doesn't hide from reality in a virtual playland. For starters.

Who are examples of unsissy Americans?

Why should I tell you? You'd just look up their pictures on the Internet and try to dress like them.

We Sissies are always expecting someone else to tell us what to do, how to act, how to think, how to dress, what tattoos to get, what's cool. This is not a self-help book and I am not Oprah. My goal is to remind my fellow Sissies what it's like to think for yourself and stand by your own opinions, and that includes finding your own sources of inspiration.

You know in what ways you're a Sissy, and you know how to change them if you want to. Stop your whining. Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. Stop blaming others for your own faults, your weaknesses, your disappointments, your failures, your discontent. Stop looking to God, the lottery, the fridge and the medicine cabinet for quick-and-easy happiness.

It's nothing your mother didn't teach you when you were seven. Obviously you weren't listening to your mother. You're breaking her heart.

Haven't grumpy old men always condemned their limp-wristed juniors? If you're complaining about a culture of complaint, aren't you part of the problem?

Since the dawn of time. But I don't believe Sissiness began with people younger than I am -- I'm dismayed by Sissies younger than me and my age as well. I'm old enough to have watched us descend farther and farther into Sissitude. We all contribute to our Sissy culture -- us old farts as well as you young pups.