Well, I finally finished reading Stiffed. It took me a while, not because it was not enjoyable, but because it's a big book with a lot to chew on. I definitely give this one a '+', although in the end I think Faludi's reach exceeds her grasp. Stiffed works for me as a set of excellent studies in social history, but ultimately I remain unconvinced that the author has diagnosed The Modern American Male Problem -- or even that there is such a problem. I fear that the category may simply be too broad to admit of a single explanation.
Of course, this is always the problem when trying to write social history. The historian starts by investigating a field in broad sweeps, making note of interesting things, looking for patterns. Eventually, they notice enough patterns to come up with a tentative structure to organize their observations. Then (inevitably? I think so) they start to filter their observations to fit in the structure. The result is a work that hangs together well and supports a central thesis, without necessarily covering all the facts.
One of Faludi's central themes is the betrayal that American men feel because of abandonment by their fathers -- either complete physical abandonment or de facto emotional abandonment. Well, I had a happy childhood without such abandonment, and I was a child of the 60's aerospace world in Southern California: one of the venues that she portrays as involving distant fathers with no concern for their children. Of course, it's hard to know whether this is just a piece of "But I'm not like that!" or a part of the picture that Faludi missed. I think back and I can think of friends from broken homes and others who came through as well as I did. There were dads at Little League (not that I was there much myself, 'cause I hated baseball) and at boy scouts and even just hiking and camping. I don't know the relative size of the two demographics (abandoned vs. happy), but Faludi doesn't even try to estimate how prevalent the overworked, emotionally distant dad was in that culture, or even really admit that there are other types.
I have the same problem seeing myself in her other case studies: Promise Keepers, the Stonewall riots, shipyard workers, and so on. Her findings do a good job of getting at the roots of the angst and depression in some groups of men. But overall I don't think these micro studies add up to her macro subtitle, "The Betrayal of the American Man".
Some groups also seem to be dismissed a bit too shallowly. I would assign rather more importance to gay male culture than Faludi seems to; for the most part, she's content not to investigate that group of men in any depth. Her discussion of the right-wing militia culture also strikes me as extraordinarily shallow; I fear it's a typical liberal dismissal of gun nuts in general. She doesn't seem to recognize that there's a whole spectrum of opinion among those who support the 2nd Amendment as an important American freedom (or even to recognize that there can be people who support firearm ownership on political grounds rather than fashion grounds). ((Truth in advertising: I'm a conservative gun owner myself.))
Enough kvetching. I wouldn't have finished the book if I didn't think it was well-written or that the author was entirely off the wall. While I have been known to read books just because they challenge my basic assumptions, and I've forced myself through some feminist literature on that basis (Gyn/Ecology springs to mind), this book didn't fit into that category. Faludi made me think quite a bit, trying to define why I felt her thesis just didn't work for me. And she also writes well, which is a big plus; the style is accessible rather than academic.
In particular, Faludi's second chapter, "Nothing But Big Work", that tells the parallel stories of the shutdown of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard and layoffs from McDonnell Douglas, worked very well for me. Growing up in southern California, I did indeed see some of the dislocations caused by the downsizing of the defense and aerospace industries, and it's nice to see someone telling the blue-collar and white-collar stories together. Setting labor on one side and capital on the other, rather than white and blur on opposite sides, is hardly a new thing to do, but it's refreshing to see this done in modern American terms instead of rehashed Marxist analysis. (It would have been nice to see a few words about the upper management, who are also men, but they don't really fit into Faludi's picture of the world). This chapter came closest to capturing my own feelings in growing up, though I'm not quite in the same age cohort as the men she's dealing with here.
Her look inside a local Promise Keepers group is also exceptionally well done. Here Faludi manages to discard any preconceptions about Promise Keepers based on the popular view of their upper leadership as antifeminist goons. Instead she spends a good deal of time getting to know some just plain guys who are drawn to this group and try to use it (ultimately unsuccessfully) as a way to deal with their own problems. I came away from this chunk of the book with a good deal more sympathy and understanding of some men who have lives that mine never comes into contact with.
All in all, I'm glad this book came up on this list, and I'm glad that I took the time to read it. Faludi's identification of the roots of some men's troubles, and very tentative suggestions as to aventues to deal with those troubles, provide me with some food for thought, and additional puzzle pieces to fit into my own worldview. It's hard to ask for much more than that from a book.
(As an aside, I did some browsing around for other reviews on the web after I finished writing this email. I'm amazed at the sheer venom poured out by many male reviewers. Why do they feel so threatened by this book? In some cases, so threatened that they didn't even read it, and did a "review" based on Faludi's work in Newsweek or preconceptions they developed from other guys. I'm baffled about this.)