Stiffed
By Susan Faludi
Random House Australia
1999, 662 pp., $27.95 (pb)
Review by Kath Gelber
It was with some trepidation that I approached Susan Faludi's new book, Stiffed, and it had little to do with its sheer volume. I was impressed by Faludi's first book, Backlash (1991), which provided generous detail on the ways and means by which the establishment was trying to turn around the gains made in the 1970s by the second wave of feminism.
Backlash provided older and new feminists with knowledge with which to combat the backlash and keep struggling for women's liberation. It contained a clear central argument, and the reader forgave Faludi her tendency towards verbal excess because the essence of the argument was lucidly captured.
I approached Stiffed with an open mind. I was disappointed. In contrast to Backlash, Stiffed contains no clear argument. The reader is continually forced to ponder where Faludi is going, and why you have to wade through more than 600 pages to get there.
In the first chapter she gives a tantalising clue: the answer to both men's problems and feminist demands lies in not being "antagonists", each are poised "to be vital in the other's advance". "But" she warns, "that answer [comes] at the end". And so Faludi forces the reader to endure another 560 pages. The stories are not new, they're not particularly enlightening and, worst of all, they are uncritically repeated.
Faludi started her research on Stiffed six years ago, wondering why many men opposed feminism. She came to believe she was asking the wrong question. She began to wonder why men seem to be in a state of crisis, which manifests itself in antagonism towards feminism.
Men, she bemoans, are losing their sense of self. In the post World War II-era, men were promised roles as father and husband, breadwinner and patriarch. As the century has progressed the promises "that they would rule their domestic castles, find permanent and meaningful employment, and even conquer outer space" have been broken by unemployment, economic rationalism, job insecurity, restructuring, reductions in real wages, and the resulting social pressures of marriage breakdown, family crises and poverty.
Today's men were brought up by stern, distant fathers who promised them that when they became fathers they would have it all. And they don't. Men today are searching for an ethereal "community" — via a church, war or sport. But it's not working.
"The boy who had been told he was going to be master of the universe and all that was in it found himself master of nothing" and now needs "someone to blame". Women, minorities, or people of colour are the usual targets.
On the surface, this argument is valid. Working-class men were sold fake ideals that have been destroyed by global economic changes. But Faludi spends many pages telling us what we already knew.
Faludi's approach is to introduce the male problem in chapter one, and then spend 10 chapters providing detail. Some of it is enlightening, such as the inside information on the North American pseudo-religious men's organisation the Promise Keepers, personal accounts of the trials and tribulations of the Cleveland Browns football fans and an account of the male pornography industry.
By and large, Faludi let the interviewees tell their own stories. She therefore lets questions go unanswered and prejudices go uncriticised. For example, in conversations with gang members who score points for having sex with women, the youths complain that because women can get them into trouble by filing sexual harassment charges, "Girls have all the power". Faludi lets this comment sit unchallenged.
In discussing sports fans' lack of family and home life, the men declare that the problem is "mothers never being home any more". These same men blame the lack of funding for men's sports on the fact that the "girls aren't interested" in attending their games as fans, being "more into girls sports", which receive the funding.
It seems that Faludi assumes her readers will object to such statements and that they therefore don't need commentary, or she is aiming with this book for a broader audience sympathetic to such comments. Either way, it's a cop out.
But what is most galling are Faludi's conclusions about the direction men are going. Instead of being defined as breadwinner and patriarch, "manhood" is being redefined "in a culture of ornament" by "appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by money and aggression, by posture and swagger and 'props', by the curled lip and petulant sulk and flexed biceps, by the glamour of the cover boy, and by the market-bartered 'individuality' that sets one astronaut or athlete or gangster above another". Men have stopped becoming the breadwinners (i.e., the producers), and become consumers.
This is glaringly inaccurate. Although it is true that many more men are unemployed now than a few decades ago, the majority of men are not unemployed. The majority of working class men are still producers of wealth, goods and services, and the profits that are gleaned from this work by the owners of industry are greater than ever. The majority of men are in jobs with worse pay, worse conditions and less security than they used to be.
The contradiction between capitalism's need to continue to drive profits up by sacking workers and its need for waged workers to buy its goods and services has been recognised since Karl Marx.
Faludi's next conclusion is derived from the first: "Objectification, passivity, infantilization, pedestal-perching and mirror-gazing are the very traits that women have in modern times denounced as trivializing and humiliating qualities imposed on them by a misogynist culture. No wonder men are in such agony." Surely Faludi has underestimated the sum of her forays into the depressed male condition. Is this what it amounts to? Ornamental imprisonment?
The element of objectification that feminists so rightly rejected and began to organise against was just one aspect, a symptom of the larger female condition they opposed — women's economic subordination. By focussing on objectification and ornamentalisation as the peak of men's alienation, Faludi trivialises what they are going through. It is a poor explanation for men's psychological crisis.
Faludi's limited conclusions should come as no surprise. She is a liberal feminist — she reduces women's liberation to a demand for equality with men within a rotten capitalist system. Capitalism (Faludi only uses the word once in 662 pages) treats women and men badly, in different ways but for the same reason. Women suffer sexism as a super-exploited section of society; working-class men suffer exploitation generally. Faludi doesn't seem to understand this basic idea.
And just in case you weren't convinced that she really doesn't get it, to prove her point that ornamentalisation affects all men, not just poor ones, she throws in a chapter on Sylvester Stallone. Yep, the Rocky guy who has the world at his feet. He is a breadwinner, a family man and the embodiment of the modern patriarch. But is he happy?
Faludi charts Stallone's desperate attempts to break out of the Rocky persona. He played a cop in a movie that was a flop. He had to put on weight for the role and that made him feel bad. After the movie bombed, Stallone wasn't offered another decent script for a couple of years.
By this stage, I was in tears. In her next meeting with Stallone, he had lost weight, was back in the gym and was preparing for his next screen role — Rocky IV.
Faludi's conclusion is that since men's and women's problems both result from ornamental imprisonment, they should join forces to fight. On the surface, this is not a bad idea. Many feminists have for decades been arguing that the only way to win the women's liberation movement's demands is for feminists to make alliances with other oppressed groups, including working-class men.
But Faludi does not hint anywhere in Stiffed that she has even the barest of systemic analyses of women's and working-class oppression. The closest she gets is a vague reference to "the larger culture". Because of her reluctance, or refusal, to identify the enemy as a system based on the exploitation of both women and men for profit, her proposed alliance has little to hold itself up. It amounts to a rejection of consumerism, not a challenge to reshape society.