Books and Cooks West
December 2001
Stiffed
by Susan Faludi
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
by
Susan Faludi
Jared and Dawn's place
Veggie lasagna, salad, bread, donuts
Our rating: 4.25 cups of tea!
Talking points
How would the book been different if written by a man? By a younger author?
Are her conclusions an accurate portrayal of American men?
Why haven't more books appeared about this topic?
How much are her conclusions limited to baby boomers? Working-class men? Whites? Heterosexuals?
What topics should have been included but weren't? What topics could have been left out?
How does this book compare to Backlash?
She extensively discussed men's relationships with their fathers,
but barely mentioned their relationships with their mothers, wives, and children. Why?
Who is betraying the American man (in the book's subtitle)? What is the betrayal?
What does it mean to be a man? How does it compare to what it means to be a woman?
How do men of your age and class define being a man?
What other communities could she have talked to?
How did her selection of interview subjects affect her conclusions?
Did her profession as a journalist increase her empahsis upon the effects of the media?
from Amazon.com
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 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 postwar 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.
