well...
I guess it's worth reading...
I have just read an interview of her...
But I think that's enough to make me read her new book..!
:)

An excellent dissection of how an unequal society that privileges men can end up screwing them over along with women. Also, a great book to share with someone who thinks feminism must, by improving things for women, make things worse for men. ( )

I'm not a fan of Faludi's work but i consider this book really interesting. She covers many aspects concerning the role of the modern man and his relations to woman. ( )

Following very much in the path broken by Barbara Ehrenreich's Hearts of Men, Susan Faludi’s massive and moving chronicle of American masculinity, Stiffed, draws on the experiences of a wide variety of men: aerospace industry engineers, dockyard workers, professional football coaches, Viet Nam vets, astronauts and convicts, porn stars and (a surprising sympathetic) Sylvester Stallone. The overarching trajectory of Faludi’s analysis is that postwar America made, and then broke, a series of implicit promises to men of all races and all classes: that they would be active participants in society, that they would have work which provided them not just a livelihood but self-worth and dignity, that they would be able to achieve a stable and coherent manhood. What they got instead, Faludi details in scores of interviews, is the profound disappointment of inhabiting a superficial culture in which status has replaced substance and consumption has replaced achievement. All of the men in Stiffed are haunted, to varying degrees, by this sense of loss, and though all look around them for those responsible (feminists, the New World Order) none places the blame where it lies, on a culture interested more in finding new ways to sell products than in offering its inhabitants meaningful roles. Again, though, as Ehrenreich before her, Faludi takes solace in the notion that out of crisis will emerge progressive change in men’s sense of themselves and their relations with women: “Social responsibility is not the special province of masculinity; it’s the lifelong work of all citizens in a community where people are knit together by meaningful and mutual concerns. But if husbanding a society is not the exclusive calling of ‘husbands,’ so much the better for men’s future. Because as men struggle to free themselves from their crisis, their task is not, in the end, figuring out how to be masculine – rather, their masculinity lies in figuring out how to be human” (607). ( )

gender issues ( )