Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man [Paperback]

Susan Faludi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 19, 2000

One of the most talked-about books of last year, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Backlash now explores the collapse of traditional masculinity that has left men feeling betrayed. With Backlash in 1991, Susan Faludi broke new ground when she put her finger directly on the problem bedeviling women, and the light of recognition dawned on millions of her readers: what's making women miserable isn't something they're doing to themselves in the name of independence. It's something our society is doing to women. The book was nothing less than a landmark. Now in Stiffed, the author turns her attention to the masculinity crisis plaguing our culture at the end of the '90s, an era of massive layoffs, "Angry White Male" politics, and Million Man marches. As much as the culture wants to proclaim that men are made miserable--or brutal or violent or irresponsible--by their inner nature and their hormones, Faludi finds that even in the world they supposedly own and run, men are at the mercy of cultural forces that disfigure their lives and destroy their chance at happiness. As traditional masculinity continues to collapse, the once-valued male attributes of craft, loyalty, and social utility are no longer honored, much less rewarded. Faludi's journey through the modern masculine landscape takes her into the lives of individual men whose accounts reveal the heart of the male dilemma. Stiffed brings us into the world of industrial workers, sports fans, combat veterans, evangelical husbands, militiamen, astronauts, and troubled "bad" boys--whose sense that they've lost their skills, jobs, civic roles, wives, teams, and a secure future is only one symptom of a larger and historic betrayal.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Susan Faludi, author of the feminist bestseller Backlash, has done it again with an exhaustive report on the betrayals felt by working men throughout the United States. American men are angry and discontented, she argues in Stiffed, because their sense of what it is to be a man has been destroyed by everything from corporate downsizing and the shrinking military of the post cold war era to the increase in local sports teams leaving town. Whether she's interviewing the teenage male members of Southern California's infamous Spur Posse (who collected "points" for every female they had sex with), Cleveland football fans shaken by the departure of the Browns football team, militia movement activists, or Sylvester Stallone, Faludi seems stuck on the idea that American men today are man-boys, unable to completely grow up because they never received the nurturing they needed, and now constantly disappointed by life. Yet while many of the men Faludi interviews have real problems--bad luck and sad, troubled lives--somehow Stiffed still seems a bit whiny. Faludi's "travels through a postwar male realm" are a fascinating slice of male American life "under siege" at the end of the 20th century, even if she does finally leave us like the men she talked to--still wondering just what went wrong. --Linda Killian --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

While it offers nothing like the eloquent argument she made in Backlash, Faludi's examination of what she dubs the "masculinity crisis" does present a series of thoughtful interviews and fly-on-the wall journalistic excursions into the company of men. Faludi finds that American men are looking for metaphorical Viagra to cure an impotence beyond the literal kind. And sometimes, she argues, they are looking in the wrong places, becoming the proverbial "angry white males." Laid-off aerospace and naval shipyard workers, magazine editors and football fans, patriots and Promise Keepers are struggling to define manhood. Faludi aims wide in targeting the sources of the masculine malaise, citing everything from "the remote-control methods of a military-industrial economy" to "the feminization of an onrushing celebrity culture." Boomers and postboomers, deprived of the heroic status of their WWII veteran dads and having had their sense of virtue eroded by the chastisements of feminism, are trying to find "a route to manhood through the looking glass." As Faludi exhaustively documents the struggles of incredible shrinking men with the "post-cold-war restructuring of the economy," she suggests that the core of the problem is that men have lost "a useful role in public life, a way of earning a decent and reliable living, appreciation in the home, respectful treatment in the culture." Faludi concludes by exhorting men to stop thinking of masculinity as a quality detached from their humanity: "their task is not, in the end, to figure out how to be masculineArather, their masculinity lies in figuring out how to be human." This admonitionAbe a mensch!Ais a sensible way to close a book that proceeds less by well-shaped argument than by the accumulation of anecdotes and Faludi's intelligent, interpretive forays into the lives of men. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (September 19, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380720450
• ISBN-13: 978-0380720453
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (117 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #102,014 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

55 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Strong on narrative; weak on analysis, December 9, 1999

By 

W. F. Gray (Cumberland, KY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (Hardcover)

Susan Faludi is an excellent reporter, and her book is very readable. The quality of the chapters varies. I found the chapter on laid-off workers in California to be very compassionate and forthright. Other chapters spend a great deal of time on men who are really at the fringes of American masculinity, and the tone can me one of mocking sometimes. Not that the mocking is not sometimes deserved, but you have to wonder how a woman could write a 600+ page book about the powerless of the American male and not include anything about divorced fathers or men employed in dangerous occupations. Where is the mainstream?

Most of the time, while the narrative is interesting, Ms. Faludi goes off track when she tries to fit her stories into a pattern. Occasional true insights are lost in a general pattern of blaming everything on "the fathers." It is essentially a boomer book, written from a perspective all too common in my generation--that we are victims of the failures of the previous generation. It is a pity that this comes along at a time when my generation is actually learning to give that generation some credit for bringing us through the Depression and World War II.

It is also interesting that someone writing about the powerlessness of American men should have lambasted other authors who have had similar points of view, such as Warren Farrell, in her earlier book BACKLASH, and apparently sees no change in perspective between the two. Most American men, like most American women, do not want to think of themselves, and do not want to be thought of by others, as victims. But Faludi does a good job of exploring the fact that most of the worst of male behavior springs not from male power, but the lack of it (the book grew from the point when a light bulb went on over her head while meeting with a group of male abusers, and she realized that it was the lack of power that was the source of their behavior).

It's worth reading, but I would borrow it from a library to avoid its cost, and I would feel free to skip certain sections. The chapter on Vietnam vets is slanderous to the group, and other sections (e.g. the making of Rambo) are just a waste of time.

Although our observations are sometimes way off base, it is good to see Faludi writing on men and making the effort to understand us, given the slant of her previous writing. Still, I wish she had seen fit to deal with some more typical men, their more typical problems and ways of dealing with them. To judge American men by those who populate most of Faludi's pages is like judging Mexico by Tijuana.

55 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Feminism or Humanism?, January 25, 2000

By 

Allen Smalling "Constant Reader," (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (Hardcover)

I read Faludi's "Stiffed" more out of duty than desire (I'm a bug for gender issues). I liked it more than I thought I would, but I could recommend it more wholeheartedly if it were about 200 pages shorter. I have to commend her on her research, though--she gets to known men as diverse as inner-city "gangstas," laid-off aviation executives, Spur Posse members, Promise Keepers and shipyard workers.

Faludi's thesis is that present-day American men have been sold a bill of goods--"stiffed"--denied the opportunity to fulfill their true masculinity. Clearly she's on to something, or else why would the yearning for father be so strong, as expressed by youth gangs, Iron John, Robert Bly, and the Promise Keepers? Faludi locates the great betrayal historically (but a tad mystically) in the dislocations of the cold war, which forced our fathers into regimented, frequently overblown or meaningless work--and, as distasteful as that might be, such makework started to disappear through layoffs and downsizing just when the Baby Boomers started to claim what they thought was their rightful inheritance. In essence she is saying that American men, regardless of socioeconomic standing, have become a throwaway generation.

Faludi's writing style is delightful and her sympathy is obvious. She does hymn the despair for too long, though, and she might have clued us in on how some men avoided getting stiffed (or is EVERY American man a tragedy? ). Faludi came to her analysis as a feminist, presumably from the political left--yet much of what she says was anticipated 20 years ago by neoconservative Christopher Lasch in "The Culture of Narcissism," when he opined that most modern Americans don't get the opportunity to do truly meaningful work. His conclusion was the same as hers--resulting in the kind of futility that he calls "narcissistic" and she calls "ornamental." "Stiffed" is an important book, not a seminal work like "The Feminine Mystique" or even "Iron John" but nonetheless a book that people will talk about. It is a feminist book, but also a humanist book, and her sympathy is welcome.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Take it for what it is, March 8, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (Paperback)

Take this book for it is: a series of journalistic essays chronicalling a substraint of human existance in the USA. It is not a "study" in the academic sense and I doubt Faludi meant it as such so reviewing it as if it were a deeply researched, objective archialogical dig is probably missing the point. This turns out to be a problem for me but not simply because it is much closer to Charles Kuralt (sp?) than Jared Diamond. I don't mind reading people's opinions and obsevations, especially if it's well written like "Stiffed."

Be clear: Faludi is a feminist and she says so many, many times in the book. She interviews her subjects as a female writer of a book on masculinity and she never claims anything else. She analyizes the problems of her subjects through the lens of feminism and she "admits" that as well.

Unfortunately even if you lower the bar and grant all these things to her up front she still over-reaches. She extrapolates far too much from far too little. You can't build a grand antidote from small anectodes. At one point in the book she quotes a cute line from a hollywood cynic that the film industry sees the USA as New York and Hollywood with everything inbetween as "in-flight movie" -- the irony is that she goes on to do exactly that in this book! With the notable exception of Vietnam veterans, almost every interview in the book is about Southern Californians and New Yorkers. Can she really be making that case that because something happens in South Central or Manhattan that it must be happening in Seattle and Montgomery the same way? Perhaps she does this hyper-inference to compensate for a problem I had with this book...

I was drawn to the book because of its over-riding message of a mass-media celebrity culture promoting an ornamental society driven by consumerism as the root cause of problems in our society. But the message is made uncomfortable by the fact that the book is being sold to me as a commodity, that she herself is an attractive, heavily made-up, coiffed female and that the style of reportage in "Stiffed" is, in fact, not academically rigorous and therefore kind of "surface" -- ornamental, to borrow a phrase.

To apply the same kind of psychoanalysis to her as she does to her subjects: I'm betting that Susan Faludi struggles with lots and lots of demons; that it is hard for her to rationalize what she knows to be good and true about feminism against what she needs to do to earn a living, feel useful to society, connect with the loved ones in her life, maintain calm relations with her parents, etc. In other words, I'm betting she's just like the rest of us.