Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man - Softcover

Faludi, Susan

3.91

1,007 ratings by Goodreads

9780099304913: Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099304910 ISBN 13: 9780099304913

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

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With the publication of BACKLASH, Susan Faludi became a world-renowned authority on the gender war, and 'backlash' in the gender sense became a household word. STIFFED picks up where BACKLASH left off. It seeks to understand male behaviour in order to close the chasm between the sexes, and asks the all-important question - why? Why are men so fearful of women's independence? Why is a little liberation seen as too much? What is it that men really fear, and why? Faludi shows that we should really focus on The Man Question; at the end of the millennium, it is men who are in crisis. She argues that we are all at the mercy of social forces distorting our lives. She takes us from the shuttered shipyards to the mass lay-offs of the defence industries, from Hollywood action heroes to gang-torn streets, from militia men to Promise Keepers, praying husbands to male porn actors. Faludi explores the economic, cultural and political roots of the crisis, unpacks the media messages sent to men in the last twenty-five years, and charts new territory for male-female relations in the twenty-first century.

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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 are 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 post-war 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

About the Author:

Susan Faludi won a Pulitzer prize for journalism when she worked on the Wall Street Journal, and is the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction for 1992, remained on the New York Times bestseller list for six months, and was a worldwide bestseller, translated into ten languages.

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