Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man

by Susan Faludi

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062038258
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	674
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Susan Faludi is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, which won the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. A contributing editor for Newsweek and a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, she has written for many magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, Double Take, and The Nation. She lives in Los Angeles.

Read an Excerpt

The Son,
the Moon, and
the Stars

The Promise of Postwar Manhood

When I listen to the sons born after World War II, born to the fathers who won that war, I sometimes find myself in a reverie, conjured out of my own recollections and theirs. The more men I talk to, the more detailed this imagined story becomes. It is the story of a boy in bed pretending to sleep, waiting for his father. Tonight, the father has promised to reveal to the son a miraculous inheritance: the transit of an artificial star.

The door opens, and the hail light streams in, casting a cutout shadow man across the bedroom floor. For a moment, from the boy's vantage point, his father seems almost unreal, a flattened spectral image. Then the shadow moves forward into the room, hustling the boy into a jacket over his cowboy pajamas, arming him with a big chrome flashlight, digging out his Keds from under a heap of clothes in the closet. The boy pulls the coat around him and, even though it is August, feels wrapped in a delicious and unexpected comfort, enveloped in his father's hushed exuberance.

Earlier that evening, while his mother was busy scraping dishes in the kitchen, the boy and his father had hunched conspiratorially over the latest issue of Life magazine, the father pointing out features of the fantastical orb they were to observe, just the two of them, at an hour later than the boy had ever been allowed to be awake: Ten stories high! Seven times as bright as the North Star! His father said the satellite was really more of a balloon, a "satelloon," and told him how it had been clamped down with huge clothespins and folded into anegg-shaped magnesium sphere for the launch; how the shell had hatched open, right on time, when it reached its orbit, a mighty man-made explosion giving birth to a big, shiny beach ball called Echo. His father had said Echo's skin was half the thickness of the cellophane wrap on his cigarette pack; a meteorite could puncture it, even the sun's rays might disturb its course. It could collapse at any moment! And it was this that would linger in the boy's mind: that something so powerful could be so fragile.

The boy, clutching his flashlight and his Davy Crockett cap, races after his father along the shadowy upper hallway past the bedroom where his mother lies sleeping, then down the stairs and through the living room where the blank eye of the new Philco TV gazes coolly upon their passage. On a sticky July evening a month ago, he had sat in front of the Philco with his parents and watched a young presidential nominee on a confetti-strewn proscenium turn his face ceremonially to the west and call on the "young men" of a "new generation" to join "a race for the mastery of the sky." It was up to boys like him, the man had said, to save not just the Earth but the "far side of space" from a Communism that had already "penetrated into Asia."

He follows his father through the kitchen, the Frigidaire thrumming in the darkness, out the screen door and down the steps, where the aluminum patio furniture and the shiny globe of the barbecue grill phosphoresce like flying saucers come in for a landing. They are on the black-green quarter acre of clipped lawn now. His father bends, spreading his old navy peacoat like a blanket on the buzz-cut grass. The man and the boy in his raccoon cap kneel on the scratchy wool, two pioneers of the crabgrass prairie, and then the father snaps off the boy's flashlight. All the familiar moorings drop away and they are swept up, a father and a son, into the bright sky. The father touches the boy's shoulder and directs his vision to a faraway glimmer. The boy looks up, knowing that his father is pointing out more than just an object; it is a beacon of pride and secret knowledge, a paternal gift rocketing him into a future his father has helped to launch. At first, all he sees is the blanket of stars spreading out cold and vast between the trees. But then, there it is at last, a pinpoint of light crawling across the firmament, infinitesimally tiny, impossibly bright.

I knew this boy. Like everyone else who grew up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I knew dozens of him. He was Bobby on the corner, who roamed the neighborhood with his cap gun and holster, terrorizing girls and household pets. He was Ronnie, who wore his Superman suit way past Halloween and, sure he could fly, leaped from his living-room stairs one day and cracked his head open on the foyer linoleum. He was Frankie, who blew off part of his pinkie while trying to ignite a miniature rocket in the schoolyard. Even if he wasn't brought out into the backyard and shown an American satellite glinting in the sky, he was introduced to the same promise and the same vision, and by such a father. The fathers of that era often seemed remote, as unreal as those perfect dads on television, though not intentionally so. They were just fathers in the era after the war, living in brand-new suburbs with wives and children they barely knew, working at brand-new jobs on brand-new corporate "campuses," miles from their brand-new aluminum-sided houses. Which is to say that the life of the postwar father was altogether too newly out of the box for him to understand it, much less explain it to his son.

Many of these fathers were veterans of World War II or Korea, but their bloody paths to virility were not ones they sought to pass on, or usually even discuss. Because the fathers offered few particulars about their "baptisms" at Normandy or Midway or Heartbreak Ridge, war was a remote romance that each boy had had to embellish with details culled from Sergeant Rock and his combat adventures in DC comics, or Sergeant Bilko and an endless procession of television war series (Crusade in Europe, Crusade in the Pacific, Victory at Sea, The Big Picture) , or later, GI Joe and his miniature arsenal. Not that paternal knowledge of the war, even if shared, could have helped those sons, whose male proving grounds were to be on peaceful terrain. This was to be the era of manhood after victory, when the pilgrimage to masculinity would be guided not by the god of war Mars, but by the dream of a pioneering trip to the planet Mars. The satellite: here was a visible patrimony. And so Echo, with its reflective shell floating one thousand miles above the earth, became a remote point of triangulation connecting one generation of men to the next, and a visual marker of vaulting technological power and progress to be claimed in the future by every baby-boom boy. The men of the fathers' generation had "won" the world and now they were giving it to their sons. Their nation had come into its own, powerful, wealthy, dominant, in control of the greatest destructive force ever imagined. The fathers had made their sons masters of the universe and it felt, as in the time of Alexander, that what they had created would last forever.

Copyright © 1999 by Susan Faludi

Table of Contents

Part 1	Departures
1	The Son, the Moon, and the Stars: The Promise of Postwar Manhood	3
Part 2	Utility Men
2	Nothing But Big Work: From Shipyards to Space, the Closing of the American Job	51
3	Girls Have all the Power: What's Troubling Troubled Boys	102
4	A Good Dawg Will Always Remain Loyal: The Cleveland Browns Skip Town	153
5	Where am I in the Kingdom?: A Christian Quest for Manhood	224
Part 3	Evil Empires
6	Gone to Soldiers, Every One: The Vietnam War That No One Dodged	291
7	The Creature in the Mirror: The Fantasy Cavalry to the Rescue	359
8	Burning Down the House: The Fire Last Time in Waco, Texas	407
Part 4	Hood Ornaments
9	Man in a Can: Moon Walkers, Ghetto Stars, and Cross-Dressers in a Gilded Age	451
10	Waiting for Wood: A Death on the New Frontier	530
Part 5	Destinations
11	Parting Shots: The Fighter Still Remains	577
12	Rebels in the Kingdom	594
	Acknowledgments	609
	Notes	611
	Index	651

Reading Group Guide

Synopsis
In this landmark book, Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Backlash, explores the masculinity crisis plaguing our culture at the end of the millennium. As much as the culture proclaims that men are made miserable or brutal or useless by their own inner nature and design, Faludi finds that even in the world they supposedly own and control -- men are at the mercy of cultural forces. In a culture driven by entertainment, technology, and consumerism, in an era of massive downsizing, fractured militia groups, and Promise Keepers, American men have watched as the culture has stripped their lives of power and identity.

Faludi's journey into the modern male landscape takes her into the lives of men whose accounts reveal the heart of the male crisis. Bringing us into the world of Vietnam veterans, astronauts, porn stars, sports fans, industrial workers, gang members, and transvestites, Susan Faludi exposes the loss of something more fundamental even than men's skills or wives or teams or ability to provide: they have been robbed of their sense of themselves as men.

Discussion Points

Faludi writes that she began her research with the assumption that the "male crisis in America was caused by something men were doing unrelated to something being done to them" (p. 7). With what assumptions did you approach this book? In what ways did Susan Faludi's research undermine your preconceptions? Confirm them?

What solutions do you see for reconstructing our culture's prescriptions for manhood?

Discuss the ways in which shame has been instilled in American men.

Why has it been so difficult to pinpoint the root of the masculinity crisis?Why has feminism been perceived as such an emasculating force?

Throughout Faludi's research, men make reference to their inability to recognize themselves in their own reflections. What is it about themselves that men are unable to recognize?

Faludi observes that for the men she interviewed, "Beyond all the public double crosses . . . lay their fathers' desertion" (p. 596). How did postwar American men desert their sons and why? Where else can men look to find role models and heroes that represent and give meaning to manhood?

Faludi writes that "for some men . . . there was no winning for losing in a world where they had been taught that winning was all and losing less than nothing" (p. 580). Who is the opponent? Where does this paradigm come from? How is this taught?

Does the fact that this book is written by a woman color your reading of the text?

Discuss which man's story or profile you found particularly resonant. Which most surprised you?

Faludi asserts that men and women need to work together "to wage a battle against no enemy, to own a frontier of human liberty, to act in the service of a brotherhood that includes us all" (p. 608). How do you think men's and women's needs would differ in this enlightened brotherhood?

How do you think the plight of today's boys differs from that of today's men?

Why do you think Susan Faludi chose Stiffed as a title for this book? What have men been cheated out of? What is every person owed? Who owes it to us?

Editorial Reviews

What's Wrong with Men?

I won't tell you too much about the purpose of Stiffed; the excerpt here that opens the book does an excellent job of laying out the scope of Susan Faludi's research and what motivated her to undertake it. I also will not reveal the evidence Faludi found in her years of research that support her theory that we have evolved a culture and false mythology that damages men and the roles they play in society. Faludi is a meticulous and complete reporter, and any attempt from me to distill into a few short paragraphs the work she packs into 606 pages of prose and 39 more of notes would do a thorough disservice to the book.

I can tell you what I feel about Faludi, however. When I read Backlash: The Undeclared War on American Women back in 1991, I, as a young journalist, recognized it as one of the best pieces of reporting I had ever read. No, Faludi had not risked her life at the front lines of a war, painted a moving portrait of hope in poverty, or performed any of the other tricks the media use to add emotion to the coverage of issues, invariably blurring the discussion. What she had done was much more impressive. Using facts and statistics, reams and reams of them, she painted a shocking and utterly convincing portrait of a culture and an economy at war with 53 percent of the population. She destroyed myths about "the man shortage" as thoroughly as she documented the increasing wage gap between men and women.

Now, and in no small part because of the effect Faludi's own earlier work had on me, I approach Stiffed with some apprehension. Men still run almost all of the nation's largest companies and dominate all of the state and federal legislatures. Men still earn more than women.

But it turns out that these are not really the men Faludi is talking about. Just as, at the time Backlash came out, there were women living lives of success and influence that could be used to refute the general argument, so too are the men who run the country exceptions to the rules Faludi lays out for the lives of the average American male. She looks at the majority of men who have little economic power, little or no public influence, and nothing but falsely constructed images of the successful American man of the past to try to live up to, something they can't do. And once again, Faludi has amazed me with her ability to expose the fault lines of our society.

To detail more would be to try to mirror Faludi's expertise, which I can't. So I'll let her take over. This excerpt is from the opening of the first chapter.

—Greg Sewell

bn.com

No one will ever put this book down for lack of vivid scene setting or compassionate observation...
— NY Times Book Review

Judith Shulevitz

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. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In her much-anticipated second book, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award winner Faludi follows her remarkable study of the cultural response to the women's movement in Backlash with a good hard look at American men. Long cast as perpetrators of patriarchy, men, Faludi argues, are actually suffering under the thumb of a cultural oppression similar to the one that inspired feminism's second wave. Victims of our "ornamental culture" that values (and rewards) style over substance, men are increasingly disaffected, emasculated, and frustrated. Through a number of compassionate, objective portraits of men--from displaced workers in a shipyard to disappointed Promise Keepers to porn stars who struggle to get hard-ons, and more--Faludi traces the American male's fall from potent contributor to insecure narcissist. These portraits unite to present a frank picture of just how difficult it can be to be a man in America today. At the "bitter heart" of this crisis, she finds an overwhelming sense of paternal abandonment. Although her conclusion that men and women have an opportunity to move beyond an adversarial relationship to create change together won't surprise anyone who has considered the limits of the gender wars, it cannot be stressed enough. This important book is sure to spark dialog, and all libraries should have it on hand.--Rebecca Miller, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In Stiffed, Susan Faludi listens carefully to men's stories and tells them back to us with a distinctive combination of empathy and clarity. She shines full light on her subjects, and at the same time she lets them speak and works hard to understand their points of view...massive and important.
—Tikkun

Smith

Stiffed is an exploration of the individual and collective behaviors—from spouse-battering to militias—that, to Faludi, show American men of the nineties being manipulated and controlled by an entire culture whose trajectory they resent but do not comprehend. From this perspective, the most troubled men are those who best fit Faludi's paradigm of unfulfilled expectations, which is to say, those who had the furthest to fall...Faludi consistently confuses cultural representation, particularly in the mass media, with actual experience, and routinely substitutes a psychological analysis for a political one—both habits of a mediated, middle-class mentality.
—The Women's Review of Books:

Lillian S. Robinson

There are richly poignant stories here of working stiffs and superstars, media movers and porno studs. Faludi weaves these tales together in a style that's threaded with empathy.
—Ms.

Richard Goldstein

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 womenrecognized 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. (Author tour)

Kirkus Reviews

A groundbreaking, 600 page treatise that shines feminism’s insights into various corners of masculinity in a way that hasn’t been done before . . . Stiffed is eye-opening enough to change the way we understand each day’s news.” — Boston Sunday Globe

“Faludi masterfully weaves larger essays with case histories and personality profiles. She connects the general to the specific and enlivens her argument with a host of haunted voices.” — Washington Post Book World

“Susan Faludi’s Backlash . . .[is] the most important book on women in recent decades . . . Stiffed is even better than Backlash. It is a significant and serious work.” — New York Review of Books

“The worst thing about Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man is that you immediately want to run around grabbing people by the lapels and beseeching them, “Read this book! Now! I’ve got to talk about it . . . ” — San Diego Union Tribune

“[Susan Faludi’s] ear knows how to listen; her heart is made of sympathy; her mind is always changing... Brilliant book. ” — John Leonard, New York Newsday

“In this monumental and surprising book, sure to make a tremendous impact on thoughtful people, [Faludi] overlooks no part of the national landscape . . .  As in her Pulitzer-Prize-winning Backlash, Faludi accuses society, and documents her claims. Read Stiffed. You’ll never forget it.” — Harriete Behringer

“[Stiffed] is the product of six years of aggressive reporting and an admirable knack for bringing the results to life. No one will ever put this book down for lack of vivid scene setting or compassionate observation.” — The New York Times Book Review

“[Stiffed is] a work of astonishing compassion . . . It issues a dare for both men and women who’ve long been dunned into passivity to do something significant to change their lives, to reject the values of a society that would prefer for them to seek easy answers.” — Seattle Weekly

From the Publisher

The worst thing about Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man is that you immediately want to run around grabbing people by the lapels and beseeching them, “Read this book! Now! I’ve got to talk about it . . .

San Diego Union Tribune

Susan Faludi’s Backlash . . .[is] the most important book on women in recent decades . . . Stiffed is even better than Backlash. It is a significant and serious work.

New York Review of Books

[Stiffed is] a work of astonishing compassion . . . It issues a dare for both men and women who’ve long been dunned into passivity to do something significant to change their lives, to reject the values of a society that would prefer for them to seek easy answers.

Seattle Weekly

Faludi masterfully weaves larger essays with case histories and personality profiles. She connects the general to the specific and enlivens her argument with a host of haunted voices.

Washington Post Book World

A groundbreaking, 600 page treatise that shines feminism’s insights into various corners of masculinity in a way that hasn’t been done before . . . Stiffed is eye-opening enough to change the way we understand each day’s news.

Boston Sunday Globe

[Stiffed] is the product of six years of aggressive reporting and an admirable knack for bringing the results to life. No one will ever put this book down for lack of vivid scene setting or compassionate observation.

The New York Times Book Review

[Susan Faludi’s] ear knows how to listen; her heart is made of sympathy; her mind is always changing... Brilliant book.

John Leonard

In this monumental and surprising book, sure to make a tremendous impact on thoughtful people, [Faludi] overlooks no part of the national landscape . . .  As in her Pulitzer-Prize-winning Backlash, Faludi accuses society, and documents her claims. Read Stiffed. You’ll never forget it.

Harriete Behringer