Stiffed
Betrayal of the Modern Man
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
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 streets, from militia men to Promise Keepers, praying husbands to male porn actors.
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 masculine--rather, their masculinity lies in figuring out how to be human." This admonition--be a mensch!--is 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.
