On Fri, 24 Sep 1999, Chuck Grimes wrote:
> The only quote during this interview that actually seemed to recommend
> Susan Faludi was her comment that 'commercial culture was a culture in
> search of a society'--which I thought was pretty good. Too bad the book
> sucks.
The book may or may not suck, but I certainly wouldn't take Fukuyama's word for it. His views on male-female relations are positively antediluvian. He seems to think that feminism destroyed society, and that all political activists are gay. Not to mention that he published a book on the exact same subject only months ago and is undoubtedly feeling pissy that nobody noticed while Faludi gets all this press.
For what it's worth, here's a more sympathetic review of Faludi's book from Time Out New York:
Despair Club For Men
In _Stiffed_, Susan Faludi explains how guys are getting the short end of the stick.
By Erik Huber
What's eating men? According to Susan Faludi, author of the groundbreaking new book _Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man_, men suffer from isolation, from the lack of a meaningful and communal role in a society that asks nothing of them except that they spend money. Feeling as though they have no social mission requiring their strength or resolve, they can only assert their gender identity through inflated muscles or SUVs or stock portfolios -- through ornamental display. And they blame themselves for their consequent dissatisfactions. In other words, men today resemble housewives of the 1950's -- and it takes a feminist to understand them.
Although it may seem ironic that Faludi, author of the epochal feminist study _Backlash_, would compassionately explicate the condition of men, she feels it was in fact the next logical step for a methodical Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
"After I wrote _Backlash_," Faludi explains from her home in Los Angeles, "I hadn't grappled to my satisfaction with the question of understanding male anger." She began listening to men. Consisting primarily of intimate interviews with a broad spectrum of men -- male strippers, laid-off middle managers, the leader of the infamous Spur Posse, Citadel cadets, Promise Keepers, fanatical sports fans, among others -- _Stiffed_ rebuts the notion that men can't communicate. "There was an enormous need to be heard," Faludi says. "I think that one reason some men feel angry toward feminists is that they feel they are not heard. And as long as I was listening, there was a real desire on men's part to hash this stuff out."
One such man is Sylvester Stallone, who in the book reveals that as a child he used to wear a home-made Superman costume under his clothes. One day a teacher made him strip and reveal it before the whole school. Addressing his obsessively competitive father in the book, Stallone laments, "What is your legacy? That I hate you? That you force me to withdraw into a world of such obvious fantasy?" Faludi explains that Stallone is "generally asked his muscle size or how much money he makes, all sort fo celebrity questions that tend to make him feel like a commodity. Like so many of the other men I talked to, he was quite eager to get into this territory. I felt I was showing up after a long drought with a glass of water."
Despite the intimacy of the revelations she records, Faludi recoils from "psychologizing that tends to isolate people in their individual circumstances." Instead, she seeks to put things in a larger social context. "There was the betrayal," she says, "that so many men feel with what I call the public father -- the whole generation of male elders who were supposed to guide the sones on the path to mature, confident manhood. So many men feel they never made it to that place."
These promises extended from World War II, Faludi says, disputing the conventional wisdom that our nostalgia for that war is a nostalgia for victory. "What the yearning really expresses is a basic human need for a larger mission that is truly meaningful and contributes to society, a mission in which men are truly taking care of each other," she says. This hope was best expressed, Faludi maintains, in Kennedy's speeches, which were often addressed to young men. "That whole generation held up the World War II ideal as a way to become a man, yet that same generation gave their sons Vietnam instead of Normandy. Instead of a real brotherhood like the loyal band of GI brothers, they were offered a brotherhood of organization men in corporate America, and their loyalty was repaid by a sinking feeling that they were going to be left with a pink slip."
It is hard for men to understand, Faludi explains, that instead of "holding the reins, they hold the bit." They need to follow the example of feminists, who learned to face their problems by breaking their isolation and organizing. But will men, who are conditioned to confront their own problems without assistance of complaint, read her book? Faludi laughs and then pauses. "This book wasn't just written about men, but also to men," she says. "It's a woman's attempt to stand in the same place that men are standing in and grapple with the social forces that surround them. It's certainly my fervent hope that men will want to read it and will feel dignified by it."
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__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com