Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern Man - Softcover

Faludi, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701157038 ISBN 13: 9780701157036

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1999

Synopsis

With the publication of Backlash, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist 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 and aggressive in the face of women's independence? Why is a little liberation seen as too much? What is it that men really fear, and why? Where other theorists have looked at The Woman Question, Faludi shows us that we should really focus on The Man Question; at the end of the millennium, it is men who are in crisis. With her sharp historical sense, meticulous documentation and lively, probing reportage, and with a remarkable empathy, she argues that men as well as women are at the mercy of social forces distorting their lives. She takes us on a journey through the modern masculine landscape, with unexpected revelations along the way - from the shuttered shipyards to the mass lay-offs of the defence industries, from Hollywood action heroes to gang-torn street, from militia men to Promise Keepers, praying husbands to male port actors.

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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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0701157038
• ISBN 13: 9780701157036
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 672