Susan Faludi's Stiffed

...This sense of loss reaches beyond the work world because, according to Faludi, they cannot be like their fathers and they are losing their roles as women's protectors and supporters because women are entering the job market themselves and becoming independent...

...The cases she has chosen range from some disaffected heroes, among them the astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission, downsized managers at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft, and many unsavory but nevertheless sympathetic guys whose fulfillment of manhood seeks expression as "Promise Keepers...

...Some sought fame and some were caught up in it, but all were damaged by the manipulations of a bloodthirsty communications industry, which itself "stiffed" men today...

...Faludi learned that some cadets were forced to hang by their fingers from closets and some were stuck with sharp objects in the anus and testicles...

...I think this thesis is questionable...

...Faludi suggests that the basis for men's sense of manhood has become an issue today...

...Similar misogynistic behavior was found among the cadets at the Citadel, a state-supported military academy...

...American men continue to define themselves by their occupational roles, which is why, as Faludi points out, the loss of meaningful work is so debilitating...

...but then, the portraits are assembled from a number of Faludi's articles that appeared in such magazines the New Yorker and Esquire...

...She now explores the anger and discontent of the baby-boom generation of white and black men whose attempts to achieve the "promise of America" have ended in disappointment and often in despair...

...No real analysis of the changing economy is provided...

...Many of them are not very good at giving love themselves...

...Chosen for their skill as test pilots and engineers, the astronauts were reduced to passive passengers on their space craft as NASA Mission Control on Earth programmed their every step through space...

...This produced a "display culture" in which appearance counts more than craft...

...ARE AMERICAN men in crisis, entrapped in a consumer culture without the opportunity to pursue meaningful work, and in psychic despair, searching for the emotional and material support of their fathers...

...But her choice of stories is an example of the very problem Faludi derides—the focus on celebrity and media attention...

...riots of 1992...

...According to Faludi, hazing had become more brutal in recent times but was defended by alumni and cadets alike...

...Here, the legacy of fathers was hardly to be treasured but should be discarded to meet the challenges of a more egalitarian and global society...

...Although Faludi points out that women aren't really doing all that well compared to men, they have become the lightning rod for other problems in society that they cannot do anything about...

...A recurrent theme in the book is that craft does not count for much anymore...

...Indeed, the technological changes of which she writes get mixed in with the cultural changes...

...Faludi asserts that many men today feel "shipwrecked" in a service economy, but that this is only the start of their troubles...

...Faludi refers to Scott's "anguish over paternal abandonment...

...The narratives in Faludi's book are woven through with themes of loss and the substitution of superficial values for the "real" values of meaningful work...

...Artful media programming established them as heroes, but frustrated that their skills were underutilized, most astronauts left NASA soon after their missions...

...The Spur Posse made the news when police showed up at Lakewood High School and 116 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 arrested eight members of the group on suspicion of twenty counts of sexual crimes, including rape, unlawful sexual intercourse, and lewd conduct with a ten-year-old girl...

...Only the third brother of the trio found an alternative lifestyle, all because of the mentoring of the owner of a nearby grocery market, Morrie Notrica, the son of a Greek immigrant known for his support of the community...

...Events showed they had the unfailing support of their fathers and mothers...

...Every time reporters wanted a Los Angeles gangster quote, they got in touch with Kody Scott, whose star escalated with the L.A...

...The book is also populated with sports fans who call themselves "Dawgs," (a group that tried, and failed , to prevent its beloved Browns football team from leaving Cleveland), gang members of the Los Angeles Crips, actors and producers in the Xrated porn video industry, and cadets at the Citadel, a formerly all-male military academy...

...DISSENT / Summer 2000 n 117...

...The star of Rambo films, Sylvester Stallone, is profiled as an example of men searching for meaning in life because he has been forced to play movie roles that he no longer regards as challenging...

...But without collective consciousness, a quality the men in this book do not have, one wonders where the solutions to basic problems of wealth distribution, employment opportunities, and education can be found...

...This is a commendable 114 n DISSENT / Summer 2000 task, but it is doubtful whether men will either accept its premises or identify with the individuals Faludi refers to in making her case...

...FALUDI MOVES in and out of psychological, sociological, and economic frameworks to describe the problems of manhood today...

...In the case of Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, the result was clinical depression...

...IT IS QUITE a jump when Faludi attributes the outrageous behavior of a group of high school students in Lakewood, California, self-styled the Spur Posse, to a failure to achieve dignity through the work their fathers could no longer pass down to them...

...Scores of men, their wives and partners, friends and kin, and the sharks that have exploited them come alive through Faludi's keen reporting...

...Nor does she write of the men who prosper as a result of technological changes...

...Faludi, a Pulitzer-Prize winning author, is best known for Backlash, a book that documented the blame heaped on feminism (even by some prominent feminists) for everything from women's bad divorce settlements to poor child care...

...Although many of their troubles have been widely experienced, their situations are unique...

...Of course, countless men were absent or uncaring fathers in the past, and blaming women for the ills of society is a pan-cultural and historical phenomenon...

...Her interpretation was that "the level of violence fluctuated with the collapse of male fortunes in a consumer culture and the end of the industrial economy the Citadel has been built to serve...

...Almost every individual and group in the book has been on the front pages of newspapers throughout the country and on prime-time television...

...Today's men see, for the first time, a situation in which women can claim some independence and have alternative ways of surviving in society other than their dependence on men's bread-winning abilities...

...Instead, the group racked up exploitative sexual encounters...

...And how important is the pathos of Sylvester Stallone's unfulfilled wish to play serious dramatic parts...

...Their commanders, their fathers, and indeed, the legislature of South Carolina strove to maintain it as an allmale institution, challenging the discrimination suit of Shannon Faulkner, whose admission threatened to desegregate the school...

...the promotion of the gang being his main work...

...Faludi ends the book by making a final plea for men to "forge a rebellion commensurate with women's and create a new paradigm for human progress...

...Yet there is more at stake...

...Through this book she hopes to make men conscious of their condition and to encourage them to mobilize in ways approximating the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s...

...My father never passed any knowledge to me...

...The men she writes about are presented as prototypes of the generation of babyboomer men who have experienced layoffs, broken promises of upward mobility, the Vietnam War, meaningless work, and new definitions of "what it means to be a man" in contemporary America...

...In more than six hundred pages documenting numerous case studies, Susan Faludi suggests that they are, and that they fear not only downward mobility but the loss of adequate "fathering" provided to the generation that preceded them...

...In some BOOKS cases wives they once supported now support them or leave them for men with more secure jobs...

...I got these ideas from watching movies and television," he explained...

...But they fail to convince the reader that the responses of the men she cites are anything but deviant...

...Violence was not about defense or even aggression, but about glamour," according to Faludi...

...And of even greater importance is that manhood created by producing and doing has been replaced by an "ornamental masculinity" As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a decade ago in her book The Hearts of Men, Faludi claims the roots of ornamental masculinity go back to the sixties when the Playboy magazine philosophy decreed that one could be a man not by doing but by shopping...

...Television and the press also got ideas from him...

...Kody's not your usual gangsta...

...CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN'S latest book (coauthored) is The Part-Time Paradox: Time Norms, Professional Life, Family and Gender...

...Stallone and most of the other subjects of Faludi's in-depth interviewing are pictured as enveloped in a media hype culture in which celebrity and consumerism is all and they are the perfect representatives of it...

...Gang Member, and proved to be a good media figure...

...I further learned that in Charleston, an up-andcoming community, an old-boy network sought to maintain its privileges and certainly did not want its traditions (Old South and conservative) disrupted by the integration of blacks at the school (fought unsuccessfully some years back) or women...

...The Citadel's defense claimed that the bonding of male students accomplished through hazing of all newcomers would be disrupted by the presence of women...

...Few men seek to redress the problems of establishing manhood by writing about their murderous activities or by performing as porn actors...

...As he told her, "you put in work and you feel needed in a gang...

...The men in Faludi's book seem to be searching for love wherever they can get it— from fathers, wives, buddies, and bosses...

...Yet, I learned (as an expert witness in the Citadel case) that most Citadel graduates do not usually go into the military, but get tickets to the professional and managerial community in South Carolina through the network of alumni who see to it that graduates get jobs with their friends and associates...

...Some are abusive or unfaithful husbands or neglectful fathers...

...Faludi links the astronauts' accounts with a long excursion into the tragic saga of the Scotts, a black family disrupted by a broken marriage in a community affected by the loss of employment at the Long Beach shipyards...

...Victims of downsizing and de-skilling, they no longer play breadwinner roles in their families and develop difficulties in their marriages...

...She has a lot to say about a society in which men face mass layoffs with minimal social support, the loss of opportunity to practice their crafts and skills, and the knowledge that their fathers usually had achieved more by their age...

...It is doubtful that these structural problems can be solved by establishing "manhood" in traditional ways or by simply "finding fathers...

...The family fell out of the respectable working class after the father left home and two of the three sons found work only with the Eight-Tray Gangsters, a subset of the infamous Crips who dominated their neighborhood...

...The hazing was tantamount to torture of cadets and produced a climate of fear at the school...

...Kershon and Kody Scott's only inheritance from their father was an arsenal of guns, and the murder Kershon committed with one of them landed him in jail...

...She infers that part of the problem they have with women's move toward equality is that their manhood is based on women's dependence...

...This is commendable...

...Many are " searching for their fathers" both symbolically and actually, as models and supporters in a work world where family ties could be useful (consider the case of George W. Bush...

...A number of the men are heroes or "stars," and many live on the fringe of acceptable society...

...It is a testament to American culture that the boys spent only a week in jail and found fame through appearances on television talk shows...

...These men pleaded to be given someDISSENT / Summer 2000 n 115 BOOKS thing to do...

...The cases Faludi chose to illustrate her points that American men have been "stiffed" BOOKS by a consumer culture and the failure of their fathers provide vivid reading...

...This is an odd assortment of "representative" American men...

...A further "cause" of their plight, she writes, is the emphasis on celebrity in American culture...

...Violent behavior also put him in prison, but he wrote a memoir there, Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A...

...This is dramatically illustrated in Faludi's eye-opening account of the Apollo 11 astronauts...