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Stiffed

Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Roots of Modern Male Rage, 20th Anniversary Edition, William Morrow, 2019. Originally published in 1999 as Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. The 2019 edition preserves the original book and adds a new preface in which Faludi revisits its argument after the 2016 U.S. election.

Faludi’s subject is not simply “angry men.” She asks what happened to the social bargain through which postwar American men expected to become adults: learn a useful role, join an institution larger than themselves, support a family, receive recognition for service, and eventually transmit knowledge to sons. Her answer is that much of this bargain collapsed while its masculine scorecard survived. Men were still told to provide, win, protect, master a craft, and prove themselves, but workplaces shed loyalty, public missions lost credibility, fathers often had little usable authority to pass down, and consumer culture increasingly offered visibility and image in place of useful participation.

The book’s recurring contrast is between utility and ornament. Faludi does not use “utility” to mean that a man’s human worth should depend on his output. She uses it for a social world in which men can do something that visibly matters to other people and can locate themselves in a web of reciprocal obligation. Ornamental masculinity is the substitute: manhood as appearance, ranking, brand, celebrity, muscles, sexual performance, victorious pose, or media attention. A man no longer needs to build the stage if he can become the image displayed on it.

What follows reconstructs Faludi’s argument in the book’s own order. The editorial commentary separately checks what later research supports, what remains reportage or interpretation, and what the book contributes to this encyclopedia.

Preface to the twentieth-anniversary edition: Trumped and Abandoned

Faludi returns to the men she reported on in the 1990s after Donald Trump’s election. She rejects the simple interpretation that Trump represented the return of an old patriarchal masculinity. In her reading, he represented almost the opposite: a masculinity based on spectacle, branding, insult, celebrity, and permanent attention.

The older ideal Faludi had encountered in memories of the Depression, World War II, skilled industry, and civic institutions was built around usefulness. Its admired man did a job, served a unit, provided something tangible, and often disappeared into a collective achievement. Trump’s model, as she describes it, is the “flyboy” rather than the grunt: he is visible above the battlefield, turns his own name into the product, and converts attention itself into proof of power.

Faludi revisits men such as Mike McNulty, whose secure professional identity had collapsed with changes in the insurance business and who later built a crusade around Waco. Their grievance, she argues, cannot be understood only as hostility toward women or minorities. Many had experienced real downward mobility, institutional betrayal, job loss, or loss of provider status. Yet diffuse economic forces are difficult enemies. A feminist, immigrant, bureaucrat, or woman in authority is easier to see and blame than the reorganization of corporations, finance, media, and technology.

She also notes that male grievance cannot be reduced to a literal political war between the sexes. Trump’s support among non-college white women complicates that picture. The deeper issue for Faludi is a culture that has moved from nurturance to narcissism, from the value of taking care of a social world to the value of displaying oneself successfully inside it.

Part One. Departures

1. The Son, the Moon, and the Stars: The Promise of Postwar Manhood

Faludi opens with a baby-boom boy looking up at the Echo satellite and at a father who appears to belong to a victorious generation. World War II had given fathers a story of collective mission and success. The postwar order seemed to promise their sons an even larger frontier: prosperity, technology, space, secure employment, family provision, and national purpose.

She argues that later discussion of the “male crisis” often started in the wrong place. Because men are imagined as the authors and masters of the public world, their own social distress is easily interpreted as personal failure or pathology. If men supposedly built the castle, Faludi asks, how can they complain about being trapped inside it? The result is that explanations move inward—to aggression, testosterone, defective fathers, bad psychology—before asking what institutions and historical changes did to men.

Faludi stresses that masculinity is not one timeless biological script. She draws on cross-cultural research, particularly David Gilmore, to treat manhood as a socially conferred status whose required proofs vary by culture. Her question is therefore not “what are men naturally?” but “what did this particular society promise its men, and what happened to that promise?”

For a positive postwar image she turns to war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s infantryman. Pyle’s celebrated soldier is not glamorous. His value lies in competence, endurance, care for comrades, and service without expectation of fame. Captain Henry Waskow becomes a paternal figure because the men trust his responsibility for them, not because he performs dominance for an audience.

Faludi finds a civilian analogue in New Deal programs such as the WPA and CCC. Their ideal “common man” is useful within a public project. She contrasts Henry Wallace’s “Century of the Common Man” with Henry Luce’s “American Century”: one emphasizes shared social welfare and participation, the other national supremacy and command. The postwar order, in her account, increasingly chose the second language while still relying on the cooperative labor of the first.

The GI Bill, suburban housing, higher education, and corporate expansion gave many returning men tangible support for the provider role. Faludi reduces the postwar masculine promise to several recurring elements: a frontier on which to act, a clear enemy or problem to overcome, a male institution or brotherhood with a shared mission, and a family whose protection and support made the mission meaningful.

The sons inherit the symbols after the underlying conditions begin to change. Space exploration becomes a televised spectacle in which most men are viewers, not pioneers. Vietnam destroys the certainty of the righteous enemy. Women gain economic and social independence and no longer need protection in the same way. Corporations retain the language of loyalty while treating labor as an adjustable cost.

Faludi uses the film The Incredible Shrinking Man as a parable. As the hero’s physical sphere contracts, he becomes more tyrannical at home and more desperate to find an enemy that will restore his size. The point is not that diminished men inevitably become violent. It is that a culture organized around mastery leaves a man with few honorable ways to understand loss of mastery.

At McDonnell Douglas she finds the corporate version of the shrinkage. Workers receive inflated titles, layers of supervision, slogans about empowerment, and intense monitoring while their actual control over work declines. The logo and corporate identity become more important as meaningful participation weakens. A man is encouraged to identify with the brand precisely when the institution is less willing to identify with him.

Faludi argues that the emerging consumer-media order reverses an older masculine relationship to the public world. The ordinary man becomes less a participant and more a spectator, shopper, fan, and target market. Masculinity itself is packaged as a set of visible signs and sold back to him.

The chapter closes by introducing the 1990s “bad boy” panic. Faludi argues that boys were often discussed as dangers to society rather than as young people being shaped by a changing society. Media and politics sensationalized youth violence while paying less attention to poverty, disappearing work, and the collapse of routes into adult usefulness. The bad-boy image then became another commodity: even rebellion could be marketed.

Part Two. Utility Men

2. Nothing but Big Work: From Shipyards to Space, the Closing of the American Job

Faludi builds this chapter around two Southern California workplaces: the Long Beach Naval Shipyard and McDonnell Douglas. Both are hierarchical male institutions connected to military production. Yet she sees very different forms of authority and belonging inside them.

At the shipyard, work is physically legible. A rigger, electrician, welder, machinist, or boilermaker knows what he does and can point to the ship whose functioning depends on that skill. Huge machines do not erase human mastery; they make mastery visible. Workers acquire standing because other workers know who can actually solve a problem.

The history of Ernie McBride Sr. complicates any nostalgia for the old industrial order. As a Black worker, he encountered discriminatory unions and job restrictions and had to fight for access to skilled electrical work. He wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, challenged exclusion, became active in the NAACP, and connected his craft identity to civic struggle. Faludi uses his story to show that a useful institution can still be unjust and that belonging sometimes has to be fought for.

The shipyard’s strongest paternal relationship is apprenticeship. Older men do not prove authority by keeping younger men incompetent. They prove it by teaching them enough to become masters themselves. Faludi repeatedly hears workers describe respected foremen and senior craftsmen as men who “took care” of people by giving them knowledge, responsibility, and a route upward.

When the yard experiments with project management that places practical authority closer to workers who know the job, Faludi sees hierarchy flatten around competence. Her phrase for the social ethic she observes is close to maternal masculinity: men caring for other men, the institution, and the work itself. Ethnic organizations that once reflected division evolve into mutual recognition; workers even organize around protection of herons nesting at the yard. Care and masculine authority are not opposites in this setting because care has a practical object.

McDonnell Douglas supplies the negative image. The defense drawdown brings repeated layoffs and an “outplacement” bureaucracy that cannot replace what employment meant. Don Motta experiences dismissal not only as lost wages but as emasculation. Supporting a household had become evidence that he was a husband and a man; unemployment therefore feels like a withdrawal of identity. Faludi follows the damage into his marriage and later life, including the paradox that jail can offer him more routine, useful work, and recognition than the labor market outside.

Some displaced workers respond by blaming women, minorities, immigrants, or affirmative action. Faludi records this without endorsing it. Indeed, she points out that some of the men recognize the irrationality of their own scapegoating. Their actual employer is eliminating jobs, yet the loss of white male status makes a nearby competitor easier to blame than corporate restructuring.

Inside the corporation, management language promises “empowerment” while multiplying reporting, surveillance, and layers of authority. Titles such as “engineer” become status substitutes even where the holder has little power over the product. Faludi contrasts authority grounded in knowledge with authority grounded in the organizational chart.

The company increasingly advertises itself and its image while shedding workers. Eventually even the company store, selling logo merchandise, becomes a bitter symbol: former employees can return to the institution not as builders of aircraft but as consumers of its brand.

Faludi’s conclusion is not that every factory job was humane. It is that the loss of work can be more than a labor-market event when a society has made work the main route through which men establish competence, provision, adult standing, and membership in a public community.

3. Girls Have All the Power: What’s Troubling Troubled Boys

The next generation grows up in Lakewood, a suburb built around the aerospace economy just as that economy contracts. The boys inherit sports fields, schools, and the outward scenery of postwar opportunity, but the adult institutions that once gave those activities a destination are weakening.

Faludi examines the Spur Posse scandal, in which a group of boys became nationally notorious for a sexual “point” system. Her interest is not to excuse their treatment of girls. She is interested in the peculiar form their masculinity takes: sex as score, statistic, story, and public display rather than intimacy or even private pleasure.

Media attention intensifies this logic. The boys learn that notoriety can be worth more than ordinariness. Television producers ask for dramatic poses and cleaner narratives; participants discover that a story can become more valuable by becoming more outrageous. Faludi follows Billy Shehan, who is frightened less by moral disgrace than by becoming nobody. Being a notorious character appears preferable to returning to anonymity.

Sports show a similar shift. Games can still offer teamwork, but rankings, statistics, recruitment, and visibility make athletic life a celebrity sweepstakes. The boy learns to ask whether he is being seen and selected rather than what useful adult role the activity is preparing him to perform.

The chapter then moves to the Citadel, where an institution dedicated to an explicit masculine code violently polices the line between masculinity and femininity. Faludi documents misogynistic and homophobic hazing, abuse directed at women, and the campaign against Shannon Faulkner. She does not present this brutality as harmless ritual.

At the same time, she notices a concealed dependency inside the all-male order. Cadets tuck one another’s shirts, inspect bodies and uniforms, shower together, hug, care for exhausted classmates, and experience “Recognition Day” as an intense scene of mutual acceptance. The system permits forms of tenderness and dependency so long as they are protected by military language and kept from being interpreted as feminine or homosexual.

Faludi compares this with Charleston drag performers, whose all-male backstage world also creates a protected place for men to exchange clothes, advice, physical care, play, and affection. The surface identities could hardly be more different, but both groups build spaces where men can depend on other men without straightforwardly naming the dependence.

Her argument is that rigid masculine systems can become violent partly because they have to conceal how much care their members actually need. The harsher the rule that dependence is unmanly, the more threatening it becomes for outsiders to see the dependency that already exists.

The Spur boys and Citadel cadets therefore represent two responses to the same uncertainty. One group rushes into display culture and tries to turn notoriety into identity. The other tries to build a fortress against it. Neither has a clear route into an adult world where useful contribution itself confers manhood.

4. A Good Dawg Will Always Remain Loyal: The Cleveland Browns Skip Town

Faludi next treats professional football as a study of loyalty. She traces an older football culture in which teams, schools, factories, and cities could function as institutions of male civic identity. Massillon, Ohio, becomes an example of booster culture in which adult men invest time and practical help in boys and treat the team as a community project.

Paul Brown initially represents the admired coach as teacher: a man who transmits knowledge, prepares younger men, and builds a disciplined collective. Over time, Faludi sees professional football moving toward a managerial and commercial model in which the coach, owner, television network, advertiser, and franchise brand become increasingly separate from the local community that supplies loyalty.

The Cleveland Dawg Pound grows out of fans’ desire to participate rather than merely watch. John “Big Dawg” Thompson buys an old dog mask and becomes a recognizable figure. Other working men arrive with hard hats, dog costumes, bells, bones, and props. The boundary between players and fans seems briefly to narrow as players acknowledge them and invite their noise.

Many Dawg Pounders are men whose workplaces no longer reward the same loyalty they give the team. Vince “D. Dawg” Erwin works in a factory transformed by mergers, accountants, benefit cuts, and an ineffectual union. The stadium gives him something work no longer reliably gives: a visible group that cheers when he shows up and interprets his stubborn loyalty as virtue.

Faludi notices a reversal. Earlier boosters had acted almost as fathers to teams, financing and supporting young players. The modern fan increasingly asks the team to father him—to validate his faithfulness, give him belonging, and make him feel that his presence matters.

When owner Art Modell announces the team’s move to Baltimore, the event becomes more than a sports disappointment. Fans describe it in the language of family abandonment and betrayal. They had treated loyalty as a moral contract; the franchise treats location as an asset that can be moved for a better deal.

Faludi parallels this with corporate restructuring. “Family” language binds employees and fans downward, while owners and executives retain the option to exit upward. The man who believes the contract is reciprocal discovers that only his side was moral rather than commercial.

Some Dawg Pounders channel the betrayal into protest; others cling harder to the brand. Erwin eventually sees the parallel between football and Morton Salt and withdraws his participation, including a personal boycott of Nike. The old work institution and the new consumer institution, in his view, are selling the same false promise of loyalty.

Big Dawg briefly becomes a marketable image himself—appearances, merchandise, an agent—but the market loses interest. Faludi contrasts his wish to leave his children a Big Dawg costume with the actual paternal inheritance he has already given them by openly loving them. The branded persona feels more permanent to him than the relationship, even though the relationship is what his own father failed to provide.

The final home game turns the metaphor physical. Fans saw and hammer the stadium bleachers apart. The sound resembles men at work, except now they are destroying rather than building. Big Dawg remains seated, cries after players embrace him, walks onto the empty field, and finally leaves with a clod of turf. Faludi presents the scene as the funeral of an institution that had become a substitute home for men who increasingly had nowhere else to put their loyalty.

5. Where Am I in the Kingdom?: A Christian Quest for Manhood

Faludi begins with an Alternatives to Violence group for men who have hit or abused women. She is explicit about the violence. Her question is why some men remain in the group after the required counseling period.

The men speak the language of personal anger management, but many cannot identify the object of their anger. Jack Schat, a McDonnell Douglas stress engineer, feels as if he is “on remote control.” Faludi argues that a therapeutic framework focused entirely on individual self-control can teach a necessary skill without answering the men’s second need: membership in a social matrix in which responsibility is reciprocal.

Their fascination with D-Day and World War II is therefore less a wish to be shot at than a wish for the imagined platoon: a structure in which men come for one another and where one man’s survival matters to men who may not even know him personally.

Several men turn to Promise Keepers. Its stadium rallies borrow the choreography of football but promise something more than spectatorship. Men are told they can become responsible husbands and fathers through faith, “servant leadership,” accountability, and brotherhood.

Faludi treats the movement’s politics and its rank and file separately. The stage often promotes conservative Christian positions, male headship, and antiabortion politics. The men in the seats, however, frequently present themselves not as triumphant patriarchs but as ashamed, frightened, failing men. They line up obediently, buy branded material, take notes, confess inadequacy, and value most the small prayer huddles in which they are permitted to cry with other men.

The organization itself contains contradictions. Speakers arrive on motorcycles and chant about power, then tell stories about fear, helplessness, submission to God, homemaking, and following a wife’s career. Faludi sees less a coherent program for domination than a collection of men looking for an authority that will finally take responsibility for them while teaching them how to take responsibility for others.

The father becomes the central spiritual problem. Writers such as Gordon Dalbey describe a “father wound”: the son wants to know whether he measures up and whether his father loves him. Men tell Faludi stories of absent, frightening, silent, or emotionally unavailable fathers. Christian conversion allows them to imagine a Father who cannot disappear and a brotherhood based on sharing that Father.

Faludi is skeptical of a solution built only on forgiveness. Some men are urged to forgive fathers without ever hearing those fathers acknowledge what happened. The theological father can become another way to preserve paternal authority without forcing the real father-son relationship to speak honestly.

The local Glendora Promise Keepers group illustrates the problem. Members repeatedly say they want “heart” relationships in which a man can admit financial, marital, sexual, or emotional trouble. Yet the group struggles to move past polite friendship. A member can disappear for weeks without receiving a call. When Jeremy Foote challenges them about this, the men defensively insist that they care, then return to the same weak habits.

National Promise Keepers eventually repeats the institutional betrayal Faludi has seen elsewhere. Bill McCartney expands the organization, stops charging admission to boost attendance, and then lays off the paid staff when finances deteriorate while his own economic security remains intact. The father figure’s promise is again stronger than his reciprocal sacrifice.

Faludi’s conclusion is not that men need a stadium religion. The men have correctly identified a need for male intimacy, purpose, accountability, and reliable brotherhood, but a branded organization cannot manufacture those relationships simply by teaching the vocabulary of the “heart.”

Part Three. Evil Empires

6. Gone to Soldiers, Every One: The Vietnam War That No One Dodged

Vietnam is Faludi’s generational checkpoint. Millions of young men had to decide—or discover that class and institutions had largely decided for them—whether to serve, seek deferment, resist, flee, or somehow remain in the uneasy middle.

The draft system itself divided men. College deferments and tests made educational privilege relevant to physical risk. The public story nonetheless framed the outcome as an individual test of courage. A young man could avoid the war and fear that he had failed to become a man; he could go and later fear that obedience itself had been a moral failure.

Faludi rejects the clean opposition between the good veteran and the rebellious antiwar son. Both groups are dealing with paternal and institutional authority. Some resisters refuse the father’s command precisely because they take moral responsibility seriously. Some soldiers submit to authority because submission has been taught as the path to honorable adult manhood.

The New Left initially retains much of the same masculine structure it opposes: heroic confrontation, competitive leadership, disdain for weakness, and eventually misogyny toward women inside the movement. Faludi’s point is that changing the declared enemy does not automatically change the masculine script.

Her central case is My Lai and Michael Bernhardt, a member of Charlie Company who says he did not join the massacre. Faludi reconstructs the command culture surrounding Lieutenant William Calley and Captain Ernest Medina, the men’s training, dehumanization of the enemy, and the breakdown of moral authority.

Ron Ridenhour’s investigation and the later Winter Soldier testimony become attempts to replace victory with moral reckoning. To Faludi, this is a different model of masculine courage: not proving loyalty by hiding failure, but accepting responsibility for what one’s own group did.

The fathers often cannot help. Some regard public criticism as betrayal or simply cannot speak about their own wars. World War II has been handed down chiefly as victory rather than as moral injury, confusion, or civilian destruction, leaving the sons without a language for defeat.

Bernhardt eventually rejects the idea that manhood must be defined by the national scorecard. He moves toward an ethic of keeping one’s own promises and caring rather than winning. Faludi sees this as one of the book’s few genuine exits: if a man can define courage through moral responsibility, he no longer needs a clear enemy to prove himself.

7. The Creature in the Mirror: The Fantasy Cavalry to the Rescue

After Vietnam, American culture tries to repair defeat through fantasy. Ronald Reagan denounces the “Vietnam Syndrome” and presents the war as a noble cause. Faludi argues that a conflict already mediated by television is eventually given the victorious ending reality denied it.

Reagan matters to her as an image-maker. He can occupy the role of reassuring father while remaining a performer, sometimes recalling movie scenes with the emotional force of personal memory. The country looks into a historical mirror and sees cinema.

The transformation of David Morrell’s First Blood into the Rambo franchise becomes the chapter’s main case. Morrell’s original story is darker, more tragic, and saturated with damaged father-son relations. Rambo and Sheriff Teasle are both wounded products of older authority; the story allows violence to destroy both rather than reward one with clean victory.

Faludi traces repeated rewrites in which the paternal conflict changes. Writers and directors search for a figure who can understand, rescue, command, or redeem Rambo. Colonel Trautman becomes the good father who recognizes the abandoned son.

The personal histories of Morrell, playwright David Rabe, and Sylvester Stallone reinforce Faludi’s reading. Each carries a complicated relation to paternal absence, authority, competition, or abuse. Stallone describes a father who challenged rather than taught him, turning physical prowess and competition into measures of worth.

Faludi is especially interested in the distinction between instruction and challenge. A useful father passes on knowledge and eventually enables the son to stand on his own. A competitive father simply demands proof: do it, win, be tougher, outperform me. The son’s body then becomes the evidence that he has survived the test.

The film version of First Blood ultimately refuses the tragic ending. Rambo survives, receives the understanding of Trautman, and later sequels eliminate most of the moral ambiguity. The franchise converts a story about institutional and paternal failure into increasingly pure fantasies of muscular restoration.

For Faludi, this is ornamental repair. The image of invincible manhood becomes more spectacular while the actual father problem disappears from the plot. Fantasy can make the son look victorious without giving him any inherited knowledge or social role outside the performance.

8. Burning Down the House: The Fire Last Time in Waco, Texas

The 1990s “Angry White Male” enters Faludi’s story as another search for an enemy after the old masculine map has stopped working. Political movements offer conspiracies, federal villains, feminists, bureaucrats, gun control, abortion, and the New World Order as targets clear enough to restore a frontier.

Faludi does not deny the men’s material losses. Aerospace engineer Nelson Clayton tells her that institutions made promises and then threatened him. Mike McNulty had a successful insurance career, family house, and provider identity before industry restructuring eliminated his business. The grievance precedes the chosen political enemy.

Waco becomes a powerful image because the Branch Davidian compound can be imagined as a home destroyed by the state. Patriot activists cast themselves as guardians of the dead women and children. The role gives them dependents to protect, a visible enemy, a moral mission, and a burned frontier on which to stand watch.

The contradiction is that the people supposedly being protected do not always welcome the protectors. Faludi records survivors who see armed militia visitors as frightening or as men appropriating their tragedy. The protector role can become a fantasy performed for the protector himself.

McNulty turns investigation into the documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement. Faludi follows the project as evidence gathering, political mission, media production, and finally a dispute over credit. Facts about the fire are contested; McNulty increasingly has difficulty allowing evidence that complicates the story he needs Waco to tell.

At the same time, the film offers him a new career possibility. The anti-establishment investigator starts thinking like an entertainment producer. His grievance can become a ticket into the very image economy he condemns.

The conflict over producer credit and Academy Award recognition repeats the book’s institutional pattern: the man who believed he was doing the real work discovers that public identity belongs to whoever controls the image, paperwork, access, and media relationships.

His domestic life continues to deteriorate. Faludi repeatedly contrasts the protector persona—guns, investigations, public crusades—with the inability of those props to repair the marriage or replace the ordinary provider work that disappeared.

The chapter’s final point is that a gunslinger image has little utility in an ornamental culture. What matters is whether the image receives attention. Even rebellion against spectacle can become spectacle.

Part Four. Hood Ornaments

9. Man in a Can: Moon Walkers, Ghetto Stars, and Cross-Dressers in a Gilded Age

Faludi now turns directly to the world of display. By the end of the century, she argues, top billing matters more than building, representation more than production, and visible identity more than useful participation.

She begins with the astronauts. The Apollo program appears to be the ultimate old frontier, but astronauts are also among the first modern male pinups. Life magazine and NASA manufacture heroic images before the men have performed the heroic acts. Their bodies are tested, measured, photographed, monitored, and made into national symbols.

The paradox deepens in space. The astronaut is portrayed as the autonomous pilot while much of the mission is controlled by teams and computers on the ground. Faludi does not deny the skill or courage involved. She argues that the public myth increasingly emphasizes the image of solitary mastery over the collective technical system that makes the mission possible.

After the moon landings, the role itself offers little obvious next step. Faludi follows the disorientation of astronauts whose greatest public identity arrives early and cannot easily be translated into ordinary civic usefulness. The pioneering image can become a can around the man.

The chapter then moves to South Central Los Angeles and the Scott brothers. Kershaun values books and initially resists the muscular gang identity around him, but eventually follows his older brother Kody into the Eight-Tray Gangsters. In the gang, “putting in work” creates a brutal form of usefulness: other men need him, call on him, and recognize him for action.

Kody’s criminal identity is subsequently converted into media celebrity. Photographers and publishers want a singular “Monster Kody” who can represent the hood. Props and poses are adjusted to make the image more menacing. Kershaun notices that the public photograph is less authentic than the actual gang dress, but authenticity is no longer the product being sold.

Faludi is interested in the humiliation embedded in this recognition. Kody wonders whether he is being treated as a guide to a social world or as a “talking gorilla” in a cage. The media elevate him by reducing him to the most marketable version of his violence.

Kerwin Scott represents another route. He values steady work, supports his mother, learns practical tasks, builds model boats, and forms a paternal bond with grocer Morrie Notrica. Morrie can teach him responsibility and local service, but in a chain-store economy he cannot pass down a durable independent craft.

Kerwin also experiments with male exotic dancing and bodybuilding. What begins as strength connected to work becomes another display market. Paying customers gain access to his body, and he discovers the loss of control that accompanies being purchased for touch and appearance. He eventually returns toward practical work and model boats: at least the boats, not the men, are on display.

The last third of the chapter follows gay culture, drag, and men’s magazines. Faludi notes that marginalized men have long used camp, drag, and stereotype as weapons—taking an imposed image, exaggerating it, and turning it into solidarity or political speech. But a commercial culture can absorb even a rebellious pose and sell it back as style.

The history of Details magazine illustrates the transition. Its earlier form linked style to gay liberation, feminism, art, and a wider loosening of gender roles. Under corporate ownership it becomes a machine for producing a marketable young male identity through fashion, bodies, celebrities, and consumption.

Editors wrestle with a basic problem: a men’s magazine has to show men without making the male reader feel that he is gazing at men in an unmanly way. One solution is to present extreme male display as rawness, athleticism, sex, or dominance. The body can be objectified as long as the pose insists loudly enough that it is masculine.

Faludi argues that men’s anxiety about women controlling the sexual gaze can obscure the actual institutional gaze. Advertisers, publishers, publicists, corporate owners, circulation numbers, and focus groups decide which male image sells. A photograph of a woman may reassure the male reader that he is the viewer while the commercial system is simultaneously studying and selling him.

The older utility-oriented men’s magazine had offered things to make, repair, understand, or debate. The new magazine offers things to buy and an identity to display. Faludi treats this as a shift from citizenship and craft toward lifestyle branding.

10. Waiting for Wood: A Death on the New Frontier

Pornography becomes Faludi’s extreme laboratory for ornamental masculinity. Here the male body is not merely represented. Its visible performance is literally the job.

She opens with the lost paternal gaze. Earlier men in the book wanted a father or master craftsman who could watch them work, judge improvement, and pass on knowledge. The commercial gaze only looks. It can rank, hire, reject, and consume, but it cannot teach the observed man how to become an adult.

The pornography industry has more aspiring male performers than it needs. Men are paid less and are more replaceable than female stars. Reliable erection becomes an occupational qualification, and the industry’s term “woodsman” turns sexual performance into a parody of manual skill: the modern lumberjack carries no craft except his visibly functioning body.

Cal Jammer, born Randy Potes, is the chapter’s central tragedy. He had been an electrician, set builder, handyman, and capable maker. His path into pornography moves him from building the stage to displaying himself on it. Faludi sees this as an unusually literal version of the larger economic transition.

At first the male performers can interpret their role as sexual power. Yet their employment depends on directors, female stars, producers, cameras, and a crowded supply of other men waiting to replace them. The “power” exists only while the body performs on command.

Competition undermines brotherhood. Men joke about one another’s failures, undermine confidence, compete for access to female stars, and know that another man’s lost erection creates a job opening. A man’s supposed sexual freedom becomes a form of performance anxiety governed by the market.

Faludi follows other performers whose histories again contain failed paternal relationships, collapsed trades, and the search for recognition. Men with backgrounds in farming, mechanics, construction, firefighting, or other practical work arrive hoping that porn can supply money and visibility when ordinary work no longer confers enough status.

Cal wants more than employment; he wants to become one of the few famous men in the business. Faludi presents his suicide at thirty-four as a crisis the industry is unable to metabolize. Male performers gather at the funeral and recognize that “he could be any of us,” but the recognition does not produce a durable network of care.

Even death is unequal in the display market. Faludi contrasts the commercial attention given to female porn stars with the quick disappearance of Cal’s story. His death is not marketable enough to preserve his image.

The chapter’s point is not that pornography alone creates male despair. Porn is the most concentrated version of a wider arrangement: a man once expected to demonstrate mastery over things; now he is increasingly expected to demonstrate the market value of himself.

Part Five. Destinations

11. Parting Shots: The Fighter Still Remains

Faludi returns to many of the people she has followed. The first image is brutally literal: the closed Long Beach Naval Shipyard has become an action-movie location, and an artificial explosion rises over the place where men once repaired real ships. A production site has become scenery.

Ike Burr now manages facilities at a Marine base and uses his building skill privately by buying and refurbishing townhouses. The work lacks the scale and public mission of turning around a ship, but it still lets him make something tangible.

Big Dawg is honored by the Pro Football Hall of Fame through a Visa-sponsored fan contest as the Browns return to Cleveland in a new commercial setting. The recognition preserves his image even as the old stadium-community relationship has been replaced by a more explicitly branded entertainment business.

McDonnell Douglas disappears into Boeing after years of layoffs. Faludi quotes the corporate view that the firm’s primary obligations are to customers and shareholders. The old rhetoric of employment family has given way to a cleaner declaration that employees are not the institution’s children.

The Glendora Promise Keepers group fades. Martin Booker loses his marriage, ministry job, and house and eventually finds relief in tile and marble work. Manual craft gives him a more immediate relation between effort and result than the abstract promises of the movement.

Billy Shehan also retreats from notoriety toward a smaller, more anonymous life. Faludi presents such moves not as grand political rebellion but as partial exits from the demand to turn the self into a public performance.

Even ornamental “winners” struggle to escape. Sylvester Stallone tells Faludi that the action persona has made him feel hollow and seeks ensemble and working-man roles. He gains weight deliberately for Cop Land, hoping to stop being only an arranged mass of muscle and to inhabit a character whose life is measured by work and relationships.

But image is difficult to shed once it is the source of one’s market value. Studios still want the old body; journalists interpret every change through branding; even rebellion against the image becomes publicity for a new image. Stallone discovers that losing ornamental employment is still losing employment. When movie work stalls, he again measures himself by whether he is earning and useful.

His fascination with bridges and old ironwork returns Faludi to craft. He imagines the satisfaction of seeing a structure and being able to say, in effect, “I built that.” The longing is not simply for manual labor. It is for a public object that exists independently of applause and proves participation in a shared world.

12. Rebels in the Kingdom

Faludi closes by reconstructing the path of the book itself. She began expecting to explain male resistance to women’s equality. The men she met certainly could be angry at women, feminism, affirmative action, immigrants, and other visible targets. But those hostilities repeatedly sat on top of deeper experiences that could not be reduced to a gender war.

She describes the structure as layers. The outer layer is economic: disappearing jobs, provider status, and career security. Beneath it is institutional loyalty: companies, armies, teams, churches, and public authorities demand commitment but no longer reliably reciprocate it. Beneath that lies paternal transmission: sons repeatedly say that fathers never taught them how to be men or explained the world they were inheriting.

At the center is the cultural transformation from utility to ornament. Fathers as well as sons were overtaken by it. The world promised to the sons could not be delivered because the fathers themselves had lost the stable social institutions that made their own authority meaningful.

Faludi argues that male anger at women is therefore often misdirected. Women’s entry into work and public life is highly visible, while deindustrialization, financialization, corporate restructuring, and media commodification are diffuse. A woman can look like the rival who took a place; the system that changed what the place means has no single face.

She returns to feminism and consumer culture. Second-wave feminists recognized that women were being reduced to decorative and sexual objects in a commercial system. Faludi now argues that the same system has expanded its reach into male identity. Men, too, are asked to market themselves, police appearance, compete for attention, and accept externally defined scores.

This does not make the sexes’ experiences identical. Her claim is that the old confidence with which commercial objectification could be described as something done chiefly to women no longer captures the full social transformation.

Men face an additional political obstacle. Feminist revolt could name an enemy—male exclusion, discriminatory law, patriarchal institutions—and build sisterhood around fighting it. Men cannot simply copy that model. If they declare women the enemy, they miss much of what has actually happened to them. If they declare themselves the ruling sex, they have no language in which to describe their own subordination to institutions and markets.

That vacuum helps produce proxy enemies. A movement can blame feminists, government agents, immigrants, affirmative action, or a particular woman in power because a traditional masculine struggle expects an opponent. Faludi argues that the useful male revolt may have to be a battle against no enemy.

She sees hints of this in men’s mass gatherings when their most meaningful function is simply showing isolated men that they are not alone. But gathering is insufficient without practical social work. Her constructive example is the response of gay men to the AIDS crisis: men built clinics, care networks, support organizations, and a culture in which taking care of one another became public action.

The shipyard returns as the book’s positive model. Its best workers did not arrive each morning to prove that they were masculine. They came to weld, rig, wire, repair, teach younger workers, and make the fleet work. Masculinity followed from socially useful action rather than existing as an image that had to be displayed first.

Michael Bernhardt gives Faludi the corresponding moral exit. After years of trying to fit stereotypes and scorecards, he begins to think less about “being a man” and more about being a person who keeps promises and cares about what he does.

Faludi therefore ends where her feminism and her study of men meet. Male liberation cannot mean restoring women to dependency, and female liberation cannot be complete while men remain trapped in roles that require dominance, invulnerability, endless provision, or marketable display. Her proposed frontier is not a restored masculine kingdom but a shared public world in which men and women can become useful citizens without turning one another into enemies.