SOURCE: “How Now, Iron Johns?,” in Nation, December 13, 1999, pp. 18, 20-2.

In the following unfavorable review of Stiffed, Willis objects to Faludi's nostalgic stereotypes of masculinity and her thesis that male anxiety stems from manipulative mass culture and paternal abandonment, rather than the erosion of their historical supremacy.

In Growing Up Absurd, his classic polemic on shortchanged youth, Paul Goodman remarks, parenthetically, that “the problems I want to discuss in this book belong primarily, in our society, to the boys: how to be useful and make something of oneself. A girl does not have to, she is not expected to, ‘make something’ of herself. Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural or creative act.” Goodman’s book was published in 1960; with historical hindsight, it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at the unself-conscious sexism...