SOURCE: “Men are Miserable Too,” in Times Literary Supplement, March 17, 2000, pp. 9-10.

In the following negative review of Stiffed, Kimball finds Faludi's description of a generalized “male crisis” unconvincing and contends that Faludi has merely applied the feminist argument of Backlash to men in Stiffed.

In Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, Susan Faludi spent 550 pages telling her readers how unhappy and powerless American women are:

The truth is that the last decade has seen a powerful counterassault on women’s rights, a backlash, an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women. …

Just as Reaganism shifted political discourse far to the right and demonized liberalism, so the backlash convinced the public that women’s “liberation” was the true contemporary American scourge.

That was in 1991. Now Faludi is back with Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Modern...