In 1991 Faludi, a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter and Harvard graduate, wrote her best-selling first book, Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. It described a "powerful counter-assault on women's rights, a backlash, an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women."And, of course, most of the backlashers were males - Robert Bly, Allan Bloom, and others - threatened by feminism's recent progress and future prospects. Backlash documented and criticized this supposed opposition to women's rights, but did very little in the way of explaining why men oppose equality.

In Stiffed Faludi asks why: "Why do our male brethren so often and so vociferously resist women's struggles toward independence and a fuller life?"Because, she writes, men are in crisis. On the surface, economic fluctuations are responsible (Faludi seems to have written amidst the recent spate of layoffs, a trend which has since waned) but the breakdown of loyalty in the public domain is more important than layoffs. And a decline in fatherhood is more important than lost loyalty. But most important of all the causes - the phenomenon prior to and partly responsible for economic, social, and family concerns - is the rise of what Faludi calls "ornamental culture."According to Faludi, ornamental culture is an unhealthy and pervasive emphasis on style and appearance rather than substance. It "pretends that media can nurture society, but our new public spaces, our 'electronic town squares' and 'cyber-communities' and publicity mills and celebrity industries, are disembodied barrens, a dismal substitute for the real thing... Constructed around celebrity and image, glamour and entertainment, marketing and consumerism, it is a ceremonial gateway to nowhere."Men once filled socially useful roles, and felt manly as a result, but since the ascendance of ornamental culture, it's every man for himself, may the vainest man win.

But, Faludi writes, relatively few of America's 100 million men are winning. How does she know? Because she interviewed a few hundred of them. 

As social science, Stiffed is, well, slacking. Faludi claims to have discovered a crisis of masculinity, a broad problem which affects most American males, but she offers only anecdotes to support her bold argument - an argument which, by the way, could fit squarely within a fifth of Faludi's 600-plus pages. She fills the flesh of her obese volume with flabby life stories and meaningless interviews. Consequently, the bulk of the book reads like an extended feature from a daily newspaper. 

As befits her purpose, Faludi writes lengthy profiles of the tired, poor, huddled masses of men yearning to be liberated from an oppressor which, until now, had no name. Her subjects range from porn stars to Christians, wife beaters to Promise Keepers, manual laborers to astronauts - but all appears blue under Faludi's unkind light. This rich diversity of men led a Boston Globe reviewer to fawn: "The sheer number of fronts she researches lends authority to her conclusions."

But diverse evidence is not necessarily good evidence. Faludi's stories should be taken for no more than anecdotal illustrations of her argument that men are faring poorly. Christina Hoff Sommers, writing in the Weekly Standard, worries that "the reader never learns why the disconsolate figures Faludi has selected for attention are representative of American men;"indeed, even if her subjects were intended to be representative, and there is no reason to believe they were, a study of so few men would hardly reflect the status of an average American man.

Perhaps, then, the premise of Faludi's argument is flawed. Are men really in crisis? Faludi might have offered some figures to support her claim. For instance, female students are beginning to outnumber males in several areas of higher education - among undergraduates 55% are female, 45% male. She might also have examined wages: according to one recent study, men's wages have stagnated of late while women's continue to rise. Then again, several opinion polls suggest that if men are declining they have yet to get upset about it - an overwhelming majority of men seem to enjoy their lives and careers.

Arguments regarding cultural phenomena should not require support from social science, at least not initially. For instance, recent conservative critiques of feminism, most notably Wendy Shalit's A Return to Modesty and Robert Bly's Iron John, the foundational text of the most recent "Men's Movement,"have largely abandoned statistics and their positivist allure. Nevertheless, to argue effectively that no less than one half of the population is in crisis, as Faludi does, it's useful to have something to substantiate the claim.

Given many recently published books and articles tolling men's fall, Faludi might consider the question settled. Whatever the reason, she takes it for granted that men are in fact declining, and asks why this is so. It is here where Faludi's argument is most interesting, and also where considering Betty Friedan is most rewarding.

For Faludi, the ascendant ornamental culture hurts both men and women; however, women alone have rebelled against it. Faludi considers the 1960s and 1970s feminist movement misdirected, or at least misnamed. This movement, she says, was nominally aimed at men, who unwittingly stood as proxies for the real enemy - ornamental culture. Women were upset with ornamental culture, and so they looked to see who was most "in control"of society's business, political, and cultural institutions. There they found a male-dominated elite, and they directed their movement accordingly. 

Faludi calls feminists' strategy the "male paradigm of conflict,"in which "an enemy could be identified, contested, and defeated."And the movement was successful. By associating culture with men, then rebelling against men, feminists were laying the groundwork for a rebellion against culture itself. Which is to say, feminists were preparing to achieve autonomy as described by Simone de Beauvoir, the intellectual grandmother of modern feminism. Having achieved a degree of autonomy, women could stand away from their culture and choose to fill certain roles, to accept certain obligations. Whereas social participation had always been determined by tradition, inheritance, or obligation, the new voluntarism advocated by Beauvoir in her book The Second Sex depended on weaker - if more liberated and autonomous - forms of social participation. 

Faludi wants to incite men to follow in women's pump-steps. But, she warns, they'll have to abandon the male paradigm of confrontation in order to do so successfully. Whereas women could identify men with ornamental culture and not miss the mark by much, men would err badly to identify ornamental culture with women, or even with feminists. Women, for all of their progress, do not control central cultural institutions in the same way men controlled such institutions during the birth of modern feminism. Were men to attack women or feminists, they would not approach what Faludi considers the true culprit. Even if ornamental culture is the source of men's plight, it is extremely difficult to determine exactly what about the culture restricts men's potential manliness.

Because the enemy is so difficult to define, the male paradigm of conflict must be abandoned in favor of some alternative. But what? Faludi suggests that men must develop a new paradigm; men have "to learn to wage a battle against no enemy, to own a frontier of human liberty, to act in the service of a brotherhood that includes us all."Sounds lovely, but what does it mean to wage a battle against no enemy? It can only mean that men must wage a battle against ornamental culture itself, which is so broad a concept - it includes most everything - as to be indiscernible, i.e. "no enemy."The only way to fight such an enemy is to successfully achieve the transcendence glorified by de Beauvoir and attempted by earlier feminists - that is, total autonomy from traditional social obligations. 

But Faludi is reluctant to follow her formulation to its conclusion. She thinks fondly of an era in which men could work for the common good, could know their labor was useful. Her prose glows when describing healthy paternal bonds and quasi-paternal working relationships. But such sentiments belong to a time when men were indeed embedded in culture - precisely what de Beauvoir was trying to avoid. 

Betty Friedan recognized the tension Faludi overlooks. Friedan's was indeed a radically new critique of commercial society, but it did not promote abstraction from commercial culture so much as a different position within the same culture. She addressed housewives suffering from "the problem with no name...that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities,"advising them that "the only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own."Creative work might mean a job, or some nonprofessional task requiring intelligence, but the idea of creative work was anything but foreign to Friedan's audience. After all, most housewives in need of some example of free, creative life could simply look to their husbands - or, for that matter, to Friedan herself.

But Faludi offers no models for men to emulate within ornamental culture. She comes closest to doing so a few paragraphs from the end of the book when she praises gays' collective response to the AIDS epidemic: forming support networks and caring for one another. But AIDS is an identifiable enemy, and gay men need not transcend an all-encompassing ornamental culture in order to combat it. The fight against AIDS is an excellent example of the male paradigm of conflict - the very same paradigm Faludi urges men to abandon.

If men are in fact in crisis, Faludi offers a hopeless account of their plight, incapable of resolution. For men to counter ornamental culture they must abstract from culture altogether, but to regain something akin to the glory days of manliness, during which work meant something and was good for the community, they must achieve the old form of social embededness. Faludi's argument ends in irresolvable tension. As a result, Stiffed cannot serve as the foundation for a renewed"Men's Movement," nor can it inspire men as The Feminine Mystique inspired so many women.