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.
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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.
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.
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.
- Fight Like a Man: Redeeming Manhood for Kingdom Warfare by Gordon Dalbey on 4 pages
- Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army by Richard A. Gabriel on 4 pages
- Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity by Professor David D. Gilmore on page 15, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes. by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. on page 343, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation by Lawrence M. Baskir in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
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- Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory by Judith Kegan Gardiner on 5 pages
- The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of Depression and Aggression by Jed Diamond on 4 pages
- Eco-Man: New Perspectives on Masculinity and Nature (Under the Sign of Nature) by Mark Allister in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and page 218
- The End Of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties by Jon Lewis on page 98, page 203, and page 209
- Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons by Andrea O'Reilly in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and page 110
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