Inherent Vice, feminist work?, always sez Alice, even when not ten feet tall

[Mark Kohut]

A writer and scholar named Meghan Abbott published "The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir." 

Crux was, she sez [interview in Brooklyn Rail, Oct 2009], rise of [the genre] relected a white male anxiety about a loss of stature and power at that time, coming out of the depression and WW2. Especially in the post-war experience, there's a sense of an embattled white masculinity. ...the genre would seem to re-empower men because they show a very strong white man with a gun in his hand who can fix the world's problems on his own...
..However, I think they reflect the anxiety more than the solution because they're filled with neurotic men suffering madly and unable to control themselves. 

Discuss. 

Discuss Doc as the 'solution'....