Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
By Susan Faludi
3.5/5
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About this ebook
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.
Susan Faludi
Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of The Terror Dream, Stiffed, and Backlash, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, she has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, and The Baffler, among other publications.
Read more from Susan Faludi
Complaints & Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stiffed: The Roots of Modern Male Rage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Stiffed
82 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ms. Faludi tackles economics, culture, pychology and gender. She addresses the collapes of the American New Deal, the expectations of the Boomers, the shocks of overshoring and outsourcing manufacturing and the disappearance of the jobs that had supported a hope of affluance for the working and middle classes. She assumes that the popular psychology of the late 20th century is right - that men lack hope and self-respect, and can blame society and absent fathers for their unhappiness but instead lash out against women and others. Her stories of the collapse of the aircraft building industries and shipyards of southern California are solid, and the manouevers of the fans millionaire owners of the NFL Cleveland Browsn, although I do not agree with the pop psychology that permeates her analysis. Whileshe writes fairly respectfully about working class men, she maintains they have a false consciousness (i.e. they are deluded to think that traditional male occupations - making things and fighing wars matters - what matters is making money). She writes well about some books, writers, movies, producers and actors famous or somewhat popular in the 80s and 90s.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An excellent dissection of how an unequal society that privileges men can end up screwing them over along with women. Also, a great book to share with someone who thinks feminism must, by improving things for women, make things worse for men.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Following very much in the path broken by Barbara Ehrenreich's Hearts of Men, Susan Faludi’s massive and moving chronicle of American masculinity, Stiffed, draws on the experiences of a wide variety of men: aerospace industry engineers, dockyard workers, professional football coaches, Viet Nam vets, astronauts and convicts, porn stars and (a surprising sympathetic) Sylvester Stallone. The overarching trajectory of Faludi’s analysis is that postwar America made, and then broke, a series of implicit promises to men of all races and all classes: that they would be active participants in society, that they would have work which provided them not just a livelihood but self-worth and dignity, that they would be able to achieve a stable and coherent manhood. What they got instead, Faludi details in scores of interviews, is the profound disappointment of inhabiting a superficial culture in which status has replaced substance and consumption has replaced achievement. All of the men in Stiffed are haunted, to varying degrees, by this sense of loss, and though all look around them for those responsible (feminists, the New World Order) none places the blame where it lies, on a culture interested more in finding new ways to sell products than in offering its inhabitants meaningful roles. Again, though, as Ehrenreich before her, Faludi takes solace in the notion that out of crisis will emerge progressive change in men’s sense of themselves and their relations with women: “Social responsibility is not the special province of masculinity; it’s the lifelong work of all citizens in a community where people are knit together by meaningful and mutual concerns. But if husbanding a society is not the exclusive calling of ‘husbands,’ so much the better for men’s future. Because as men struggle to free themselves from their crisis, their task is not, in the end, figuring out how to be masculine – rather, their masculinity lies in figuring out how to be human” (607).
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A deep and powerful insight is flogged, thrashed, and beaten to death. Susan Faludi is incredibly smart, and just doesn't seem to know when she's won the argument. I admire her-- and I would never, ever, debate her!