The Man Question.

• Author: Young, Cathy

Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male, by Susan Faludi, New York: William Morrow & Company, 662 pages, $27.50

Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say, by Warren Farrell, New York: J.P. Tarcher, 371 pages, $24.95

The debate about gender has been, by and large, a debate about women. For centuries, the "Woman Question" had no male counterpart; men's condition was seen as the universal human norm, and little thought was given to how equality would change male roles. Over the past few decades, however, the notion of a universal human anything has been left in tatters, and feminism has increasingly shifted its focus from formal barriers to equality to cultural beliefs about gender--including the male gender. Meanwhile, three decades of often turbulent change in relations between men and women have given rise to talk of a "decline of males" and a "crisis of masculinity" and engendered a fledgling men's rights movement.

The latest book to wrangle with the Man Question comes from Susan Faludi, whose previous contribution to the gender wars was the 1991 bestseller Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. An almost completely mythical expose of a society-wide, decade-long effort to undo women's gains, Backlash was not a very male-friendly book. Its central thesis was that men feel threatened by gender equality, and so male-dominated culture mounts a "backlash" whenever women make even modest steps toward this goal.

Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male is the result of Faludi's six-year exploration of "the American male dilemma," which began, by her own account, as an attempt to find out just why men "so often and so vociferously resist women's struggles toward independence and a fuller life." It says a great deal about the original spirit of her project that the first stop on her quest to understand men was a batterers' counseling group (which is rather like starting a study of women by hanging out with hookers). But along the way, Faludi became convinced that she was asking the wrong question; that the "male crisis," while real, had nothing to do with feminism; and that men--even the batterers--were, like King Lear, more sinned against than sinning.

So who's doing the sinning? Faludi says it's mainly modern capitalism, which strips masculinity of its positive and meaningful aspects.

Interestingly, unlike many feminists, Faludi does not equate traditional masculinity with abusive, egotistical dominance. Rather, she notes that cultural concepts of manhood have always been based on care-taking, social responsibility, and productivity--values she sees embodied in the workingmen of a glorified industrial past, like the rugged steel factory foreman in the 1946 photo on the cover of Stiffed. The older order may have "exploited men's health and labor," may have "broke[n] the backs and spirits of factory workers and destroyed the lungs of miners," but at least, Faludi writes wistfully, "it defined manhood by character, by the inner qualities of stoicism, integrity, reliability...the desire to protect and provide and sacrifice."

Is this the same Susan Faludi who once described male attachment to the provider role as the chief obstacle to women's progress? Yes, it is. But she has hardly turned into a new traditionalist. Her romanticized portrait of blue-collar manliness is strangely unsexed: The workingman's sense of male identity, she asserts, came from doing something "worthwhile," not from being masculine per se. She carefully skirts the fact that this identity was based on a sexual division of labor: the ability to take pride in doing a man's job" (i.e., occupational segregation by gender) and in supporting a stay-at-home wife.

Faludi's account of the plight of men today is just as skewed. Men, she writes, "find themselves in an unfamiliar world where male worth is measured by participation in a celebrity-driven consumer culture and awarded by lady luck," where "useful" work matters less than glamor, where they can only "enact a crude semblance of masculinity" before the media's looking glass. The...