i haven't read _stiffed_, and even if i did i couldn't say fer sher, but from what i've read it sounds as though faludi's doing something pretty contrary and possibly excellent. not without lots of problems, no doubt--but so what?
it's been a long time since i read _backlash_--which was quite good--but my impresion was that faludi was positing a sort of teeter-totter model of gender discourse, wherein one men's loss was another women's gain. i think she observed this zero- sum logic at work; i don't think she endorsed it as 'real' beyond the fact that many people seemed to see things that way.
phillips-fein announces her program at the outset:
> I can't wait till Susan Faludi takes this one apart, I thought.
no such luck:
> Now Faludi's new book <...> finally has come out, and women
> [not men, of course] who've waited eight years for a follow-up
> to Backlash may feel a little betrayed themselves.
worse still:
> Nearly positioned to tap into post-Littleton anxieties, Stiffed
> says almost nothing about women, let alone anti-feminism.
thereby presenting our stalwart reviewer with an exercise in cognitive dissonance: this isn't the book she wanted faludi to write, and faludi didn't say what she wanted her to say. so she falls directly into the _baffler_ trap of revealing that her consumerist addiction left her jonesing for a fix of _nightmare on elm street part 2_, but got _eyews wide shut_ instead.
> Faludi opens Stiffed with a heartfelt admission that to write the
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ewww... right?
> book, she had to admit that men did not, as she'd thought, hold "the
> reins of power"; instead, even the wife-beaters among them often felt
> weak, themselves battered by economic forces and internal demons. She
> writes: "What if we put aside for a time the assumption of male
> dominance, put away our feminist rap sheet of men's crimes and
> misdemeanors, or our antifeminist indictment of women's heist of male
> authority, and just looked at what men have experienced in the past
> generation?"
this doesn't sound especially heartfelt, but makes it pretty clear what the book *is* about--and it doesn't seem to involve using socio-economic stats as a technique for invalidating 'experience.' that category is, of course, the foundation of the american philosophical tradition, and as such pervasive in a vaguer sense in american culture. it's been analyzed brilliantly, for example by jackson lears; but those analyses haven't banished the specter from the everyday lives of every- day american men, who are indeed (a) left with this legacy, which (b) has been theoretically' discredited--for example, by the extensive use of socio-economic stats to reveal that what people experience may not be what's going on. so we can add a (c): it's been empirically discredited as well. but these theoreticalquantitative exports have yet to become staples of life for all these poor suckers, who themselves, as a result, are faced with a certain cognitive dissonance. it's my impression that _stiffed_ is sort of about the problems this poses.
> But when Faludi stops reporting things and starts analyzing them, her
> ideas get fuzzy and her interpretations bizarre. Seemingly cribbing
translated: her analyses aren't doctrinaire, and she tries to remain close to the experience of cultural dilemmas isntead of doing what a well-behaved brand-name stepford author should do, which is discredit them by any means necessary.
> This reinterpretation of 20th century American history in terms of
> "manhood" weaves in and out of 600 pages of interviews and reporting.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
i think the phrase is 'unifying theme'--maybe 'subject.'
> by lady luck. There is no passage to manhood in such a world."
i suspect this is where we see that faludi is actually sharp and phillips-fein a bit of a 'yapping puppy,' to quote cortazar. i wonder how fein-phillips feels about pre-industrial cultures: are theire rites of passage just a bunch of twaddle that we could just as easily replace with hanging out at the mall and other after-school slacktivities? and all that crusty e. p. thompson shite about the folkways of those slated to become the british working classes? it's just as well that more pressing concerns laid waste to those traditions and revealed them to be nothing] more than an empty foil, the prehistory of billy braggian 'nos- talgia.' somehow, i doubt phillips-fein would be quite so cava- lier. so why, then, should an 'advanced' culture--that is, a culture whose technical advances have brought about the destruc- tion of capital-C Cultural traditions be so comfortable about the undiginfied liquidation of masculine rites of passage. she makes very clever quips about litteton, but i think that maybe such events bear some connection to the fact that these narra- tives--narratives on and out of which lives are built--don't really exist anymore.
> In lachrymose tones, Faludi reports that men are in crisis because in
> such a shallow, glittery world, they can no longer support each
> other. They mourn the closing of a shipyard that employed thousands
> not because it means losing work: "The more profound loss is of a
> world where men cared for each other."
ewww.
> men." The Citadel, she now sees, is a bastion not of male privilege,
> but of a gentle, caring masculine culture: "Women were just proxies
> for the real war-against a new economy and a new culture that could
> not be battled with obscenities and violence." No doubt that would
> relieve the female cadet who was set on fire by her male peers.
anecdote's ok in the service of the cause, i guess.
> With its fusty Victorian nostalgia for a lost "manhood," and its
> elegiac descriptions of absent fathers and aching sons, Stiffed reads
and so are cultural narratives too, i guess.
> I doubt, though, that Faludi's mission to write a Feminine Mystique
> for men will win her many readers; the problems of the men she
> describes seem to have more to do with ordinary economic distress
> than being confined by gender, anyway. The real appeal of the book
ah, yes, 'ordinary economic distress.'
> isn't what it says about men, but its admonishment to women to try
> harder to understand the male plight. Ultimately, Stiffed says more
> about the timidity and confusion of feminism than it does about men.
as opposed to our fearless reviewer.
> How hard do men have it, really? They still earn more than women;
> they still do less housework and child care; they aren't publicly
> scolded for wanting to make their own choices about sexuality and
> marriage and children. It's true that working-class men have been
> screwed by the economic policies of the '80s and '90s, but it's not
> like everything is rosy for women, who still occupy the worst-paying
> jobs in disproportionate numbers. Faludi might say this is beside the
> point; as she puts it, "while being laid off was agony for a female
> employee, the one part of her life it didn't ruin was her feminine
> identity." Fair enough. But surely if it's gotten harder to "be a
> man," in the good old-fashioned sense of the word, it's not really
> because of deindustrialization - though it may be true that widening
> economic inequality spawns all kinds of theories of natural
> hierarchy, including gender roles. Nor is it because craft labor is
> in decline, as it has been for the past century. It's because
> relations between men and women have been so deeply transformed over
> the past 25 years. Strangely, Faludi effectively has written a book
> about men as if women hardly existed at all.
to say nothing of papua new guineans--but she wasn't writing about them, now, was she?
> It's hard, after all, to take seriously Faludi's contention that
> "manhood" is all about apprenticeship, wartime bonding and man-to-man
> talks. Superiority to women historically has been central to ideas of
> what it means to be a man; communitarian shibboleths about a "culture
according to a certain rather parochial view of history, yes. this same author would, of course, bridle at media repors that the wars in yugoslavia and rwanda are manifestations of 'ancient ethnic/religious hatreds,' but when it gets close to home--say, american men and women--well, that's what it's about, innit?
> Since Faludi doesn't say much about transforming men's attitudes
> toward women, it's hard to know exactly what she means when she
> writes about imagining "a life without predetermined masculine
> expectations." Does she want men to become more stereotypically
> "feminine" in their personalities and expectations, as their jobs
whoops!
etc., etc.
cheers, t