Word: faludi
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...from all economic backgrounds, often learn as much over dinner and wine tastings at professors' houses as they do in the classroom. But it may also reflect the fact that males are a fashionable subject again. The men's movement, and the rise of male-simpatico feminists like Susan Faludi, have lent quaint Wabash a hip cachet. "An important liberal-arts ideal is 'Know thyself,'" says Wabash president Andrew Ford. "Sometimes you can do that best, or more comfortably, among your own gender, and we offer that choice...
...want Susan Faludi's pity. I want her tight little body. That's the kind of supermasculine attitude that she pines for in her book Stiffed, a lamentation on the emasculated American man. As part of my continuing series on books no one outside the media is reading ("In Defense of Irony," TIME, Oct. 4, 1999, p. 42), I want to say that almost all the parts of Stiffed I read are totally stupid. The main exception is on page 649 in the bibliography ("Joel Stein, 'Porn Goes Mainstream,'" TIME, Sept. 7, 1998, p. 54). I recommend buying the book...
With Stiffed, the pity culture comes to its inevitable conclusion: now people are even feeling bad for white men. Stiffed argues that as men stopped making things and focused on buying them, they no longer knew how to be men. For this, Faludi blames "the culture," which, the last time I checked, is controlled by white men. But when I called Faludi, she warned against such finger pointing. "We're all complicit in a culture that disfigures people. Most of us participate as consumers," she said. "The blame game is too easy. People should deal with a more complex dynamic...
...Faludi had seen Fight Club the night before, a film about a home furnishing-obsessed actuary who tries to recover his masculinity by getting a group of buddies together for bareknuckle fights. She liked the film, noting how the violence spiraled out of control and the main character found redemption with a woman in a familial relationship. She called the movie "Stiffed on speed," so I called Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the novel Fight Club. He was several hundred pages deep into Faludi's book and already calling his story "the fictionalized version of Stiffed." There...
Although Palahniuk agreed with Faludi's analysis of the problem, he said he thought weekly bareknuckle bouts would be cathartic. "Men need violence. We are very much still animals," he said from his home in Portland, Ore., the least manly city in North America. "We can channel violent feelings into working hard and buying things, but they keep popping up. We need to acknowledge that they are not bad feelings; they are human feelings," he said. I asked him why, in that case, the fight clubs in his novel caused so many problems. "Because it was a book...