Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man.

• Author: Flanders, Laura

Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi William Morrow & Company. 416 pages. $26.00.

I had the luck this summer to spend a weekend with my relatives Doug and Loft Chambers, and I thought of them as I read Susan Faludi's latest book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. Doug chambers is perhaps five feet five inches and 130 pounds: too small to be a he-man, but American through and through. If anyone promised him a productive life followed by a secure retirement, Doug was betrayed for sure. He served in the Army in the 1950s, then worked twenty-one years making concrete blocks. Two decades of pounding wrecked his joints and his hearing, forcing him into early retirement last year at age sixty-one.

Today, Doug applies for lighter jobs--more than 100 so far, he says. But when the human resource officers see his graying hair and hearing aid, they turn him away. So he cooks and cleans and keeps house for his wife, Lori. She's exhausted each day by her minimum wage job at a local factory, where she makes wire grates and grills. On hot days, Doug drives out to take her a frozen Slurpee for her lunch break. He himself eats barely a meal a day: "Housework doesn't burn calories," he says, and he doesn't want to get out of shape.

Stiffed is full of men not so different from Doug: fired, fed-up, discarded, scared. Faludi "set out to explore the American male dilemma," she says. After Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Crown, 1991), her masterful account of the media's treatment of the white, straight women's movement, Faludi says she was plagued by a question: Why do men "so vociferously resist women's struggles toward independence and a fuller life?" But what started as an inquiry into men's resistance to feminism became instead a discovery of how American men find their own aspirations derailed. Finally, she settled on a new question: "Why don't contemporary men rise up and protest against their betrayal?"

In the second half of the twentieth century, according to Faludi, the laid-off laboring man has lost his work mates, the sports fan has lost his team, and fathers worry about keeping their wives' attention and their kids' respect. "A masculinity crisis playing out on the American stage," Faludi calls it. The kicker; she says, is that "men see women's advancement as a driving force behind their own distress."

Her reporting is stellar, as it was in Backlash. Faludi patiently follows her topic from shuttered...