Men on the Edge

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

At some point during Susan Faludi's epic journey into the heart of American manhood, Mike McNulty, maker of a documentary film about Waco, Texas, told her, "If you want to see what's happening in the stream of our society, go to the edges and look at what's happening there, and then you begin to have an understanding--if you know how a stream works--of what's going on in the middle."

And this is exactly what the Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist has done. With her new book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (Morrow; 662 pages; $27.50), we meet men on the edge and over the edge: porn stars, hyperfanatical sports fans, wife beaters, gang bangers, a battle-weary parade of America's veritable down-and-outers. This is masculinity in crisis, all right, and Faludi, the author of Backlash, a 1991 best-selling study of feminism, wants to know why. Initially, she writes, her question was, "Why are so many men so disturbed by the prospect of women's independence?" But in the end, she says, what compelled her was why men--like the feminists before them--were not choosing to come together and rebel against the society that had thrown them into this crisis. For though her subjects tend to rail against "feminazis," women are not the true culprits, she believes. Men--just like women, in fact--are victims of a competitive, consumerist, "ornamentalist" system that strips men of their sense of belonging and their ability to nurture and be nurtured.

Her conclusions, of course, are debatable. Who, after all, set up and continues to dominate every last one of these hierarchical, market-driven institutions? And where, one does begin to wonder, are some of those men who have thrived under this system, who were well fathered and are themselves wonderful fathers, who participate usefully in the world around them? Surely, if she already believes that she can learn much from looking outside the mainstream, these men are no less meaningful than the subjects she chose.

Yet Stiffed is a brilliant, important book. Unlike Backlash, which felt at times like a compendium of statistics and a sweeping survey of popular culture, here Faludi's reportorial and literary skills unfold with a breathtaking confidence and beauty. These men talk to her as they have probably never talked in their lives before, and the rich and intricate tapestry she weaves from their stories is enough to make one rethink our entire Western value system. When she describes the family spirit and pride in their work of the men at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, shut down by the government, or the still reverberating agony of one of the soldiers who witnessed the My Lai massacre, or the pathetic, "I wanna be a star" fantasies of a member of the Spur Posse (the California teens who kept score of their sexual conquests), she goes a long way toward eliminating the black and white, good and evil, male and female polarities that have riven the sexes in the past three decades.

The book is overlong--even the paperback will be hungry-man size--but it is easy to see why Faludi couldn't stop writing. Her men have much to say, and in Faludi they found their dream woman: one who listens, and who understands.

--By Elizabeth Gleick