He notes the appearance, the hard and rectangular hair and clothing styles, the "bluff, hearty, and sarcastic conversational style" of suburban house-wives and suggests that, cheated of a career by the male-dominated standards around them, these women express their "masculinity" (society's primary calling-card to success and self-fulfillment) in the only form left to them.
Throughout The Pursuit of Loneliness, in a wildly subjective manner, Slater delivers compelling conclusion upon conclusion. His criticisms reach all portions of American society, digging deep into the dark crevasses where the Toilet Assumption has attempted to hide significant and pressing problems. Many revelations, following what we have often felt but never considered deeply or cogently expressed, appear excessively simple upon investigation.
For example, in order to feed its own economic gain, Madison Avenue has sought "to maximize sexual stimulation and minimize sexual availability," so that an infinite supply of consumer products can be inserted in the resulting gap. The basis for this assumption is flimsy at best. He offers no evidence. The direction of his prose attempts to push us along, quietly nodding, into the next gaggle of generalizations.
When the young, who grew up not in a scarcity-oriented environment but one of affluence, remove society's artificial restraints upon sexual availability, Slater says, the stage is set for their refusal to fall for the pseudo-erotic lures of the commercial culture. And another conclusion slips by.
Slater, who fears the gnawing individualism of American life, cautions against the disordering influence of anarchic "do-your-own-thingism" upon America's counter-culture. A sense of firm community and individual involvement within that community-requiring social compliance and shared responsibility-is essential to Slater's solution. The individual must reintegrate himself into his environment before he becomes totally estranged from his fellows and himself.
Slater's desire, of course, differs considerably from Thoreau's demand for more individual autonomy based upon the dictates of his own personal different drummer.
"The only obstacle to utopia," he notes, "is the persistence of the competitive motivational patterns that past scarcity assumptions have spawned. Nothing stands in our way except our invidious dreams of personal glory. Our horror of group coercion reflects our reluctance to relinquish these dreams, although they have brought us nothing but misery, discontent, hatred, and chaos. If we can overcome this horror, however, and mute this vanity, we may again be able to take up our original utopian task."
The Pursuit of Loneliness, frequently imaginative in its observations, often weak in its catch-all subjectivity, is nonetheless a vivid critique of a society increasingly reckless in its push toward lonely self- destruction.