STIFFED

In this pathbreaking study of the contemporary “male crisis,” award-winning journalist and author Faludi solidifies her reputation first gained in Backlash (1991) as one of our most astute analysts of gender relations.

Something is wrong with men. They are unhappy, angry, bewildered, and all too often violent. Conventional wisdom—which Faludi always delights in skewering—suggests that either men must change their individual natures to overcome this crisis or that men are victims of the undeserving: “scheming feminists, affirmative-action proponents, job-grabbing illegal aliens.” Faludi comes to a different conclusion. In the course of spending time with men—laid-off industrial workers, bewildered Vietnam vets, young male sexual predators, evangelical truth seekers, and many others—chronicling their thoughts, aspirations, explanations, and exasperations, she finds that men are not to blame for their current predicament, nor on the whole is some sinister other. Rather, American men of the post-WWII world have been betrayed by culture and society. Taught by fathers to assume inheritance of a world they would firmly control, it turns out they don't control it at all. Meaningful work that both established and existed within a broader social purpose is gone for all but a few. The virtues of trust and loyalty are now laughable anachronisms. All that is left of masculinity is an ornamental facade of what Faludi terms individual male “superdominance.” This pose of control without a reality behind it is surely a recipe for crisis. Yet it is this very pose of control that prevents men from seeing their dilemma as a human crisis of powerlessness in modern society (one women recognized long ago) and collectively acting to change their situation. Instead, they howl at the moon to recapture their masculinity or lash out at supposed enemies. In the end, the more they struggle the more tightly they are bound.

This is brilliant stuff, cutting through nonsense, letting men speak for themselves and taking from their words original and compassionate insights. Bravo.