Analysis Of Susan Faludi's 'The Naked Citadel'

In Susan Faludi’s “The Naked Citadel”, she analyzes the homosocial nature of men as she tries to discover the causes behind sexism and to find out “why men who oppose women’s progress are so angry” (Faludi, 72). The main subject of her reading is the all boys college named the Citadel and its vehement opposition to admitting a female into its ranks. The boys become aggressive and angry about the thought of an independent and unique woman becoming a part of their student body. The thought of it threatens the gendering society established within the Citadel where the boys rely on each other to establish their own gender identities. Gender identities rely a lot upon the shaky foundation of the social dominance of one sex over the other. In today’s

Gladwell defines the FAE as, “overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context…[reaching] for a ‘dispositional’ explanation for events, as opposed to a contextual explanation” (Gladwell, 159). What is important to note about this idea is that there is a tendency towards continuity in the mind for the attributions we give to others. Gladwell quotes psychologist Walter Mischel that, “the human mind has a ‘reducing valve’ that ‘creates and maintains the perception of continuity even in the face of perpetual observed changes in actual behavior” (Gladwell, 159). This reducing valve that creates a “perception of continuity” is the reason why the students of the Citadel are so inclined to maintain a social patriarchy just like the one present outside of their private ecosystem. The “observed changes” that Mischel mentions can be attributed to the sudden change in environment for the students, the change from a heterosocial to homosocial. The boys respond to this change by maintaining continuity of the social judgements and predispositions they had prior to enrolling in the Citadel. As Gladwell says, “ The FAE also makes the world a much simpler

In their homosocial environment, there are no specific roles to play, it is an unstable, unspecified environment on which the foundation of dominance is placed to create roles. This lack of roles and desire for patriarchy creates the perfect environment for the boys to enact methods of obtaining dominance. The boys obtain their hierarchy through the “fourth-class” system by abusing and effeminizing the “knob” underclassmen. Their method of obtaining a patriarchal dynamic between all men is very similar to the manner in which the experimental prison guards established dominance in the Stanford experiment in Gladwell’s reading. In this experiment, the volunteers placed as guards were “given uniforms and dark glasses and told that their responsibility was to keep order in the prison” (Gladwell, 157). In a sense, these guards were given a specified role in a new environment, but were not given an explicit method of how to do so. It was entirely up to the guards as to how they would go about enacting their new roles to “maintain order”, or establish dominance in the environment. The only way the guards knew how to obtain such dominance was through violence, for “as the experiment progressed, the guards got systematically cruieler and more sadistic” (Gladwell, 158). By abusing the volunteer prisoners, the guards made them weak