Well, aside from the fact that it was about Teh Menz (and about Menz who were particularly thuggly at that)–I mainly couldn’t read it, at least not very thoroughly, because it was some kinda postmodernist impressionistic memoir-y thingie. Very very different sort of book than say, Backlash, which was straight journalism. Backlash was not all about subjective memes and roles perceived from the inside, it was about an objective orchestration of–damn, I’m blanking out on what C Wright Mills called the ideological system, including but more than the media–oh yeah, “the cultural apparatus.” It was about how the cultural apparatus was systematically, consciously, warring against feminism and against women. I was hoping Stiffed would be a parallel book about how men also, by being divided against women, are thus also ruled. I suppose somewhere in all the PoMo narration, one can construct a sort of holographic image of same. But I think it suffered badly from Faludi letting her selected men talk about how it looked to them, without attempting to frame their subjective narratives with objective socio-economic facts, which would have given more power to the mens’ well-founded complaints and also shown up the pathological parts of their subjective adaptions to their objectively bad and worsening situation.

If ever there is a time to stick to traditional, more or less linear, journalistic narrative of the kind the progressive Left does so well, it is when one is making a case to men that they too are screwed by the gender system and getting more screwed the way things are evolving. I wish Faludi had done so in Stiffed.

OK, I’ll be reading this thread first chance I get.

And now that I’ve broken my own vow not to overly criticize people I mostly agree with, I’ll leave it at that. Most mockery of the other comes from ignorance, but some of it has truth. I’m the annoying person (or “asshole” if you prefer) who will usually say any absolute isn’t.

Roxanne: Oh, the irony. I thought one of the big problems with the Taliban and the thing that fuels the growing “Islamofascist threat” was how they treated their womenfolk. No, that’s not a problem… it’s an opportunity to shut up womenfolk at home! You can see a slight variation on this meme in the above-screencapped jab at Glenn Greenwald, where it’s explained that because he hasn’t personally been vanished and tortured, he cannot be critical of anything. Likewise, so the story goes, women in Western countries cannot criticize anyone close to home, because women somewhere distant have it worse; thus, they must spend all their time criticizing brown people and supporting our bombs.

It’s kind of funny how, despite the Christian fetishization of persecution which leads to much moaning about how bad they have it (in some far-off land), you never see Christians declining a media circus about, say, a Folsom Street Fair poster due to there being Much More Important Things To Do.

Doctor Science: Mockery *must* begin at home, otherwise it’s bigotry.

As for library troubles, if anyone lives anywhere near an academic library, they’d be likely to have Faludi’s books. You may have to read them onsite or buy a community borrower’s card (at my nearby academic library, it’s $25/year), but they’re pretty likely to have Backlash and Stiffed if they’re a sizable school.

And who didn’t like Stiffed because it was about men? Did someone honestly have a problem with the author doing a book about how PHMT?

The first edition of Backlash was 15 years ago, and now we’re sliding back to the Eighties with a guy who makes Reagan look benign at the helm.

As for humor, it should always be used on the powerful by those with less power. Anything else, and it’s just bullying.

Y’all, Doctor Science is right about mockery. Listen to Doctor Science. If you don’t, you’re probably an asshole. Ah, but the Principle of Proctouniversality states that “there’s a little asshole in all of us”, while the Principle of Non-Autoproctology or No Man His Own Proctologist says that “you’re not the best person to tell how much of an asshole you are”, and the Law of Procto-Nonconservation shows that “there’s no limit to how much of an asshole a person can be, nor is there a limit to the number of assholes.”

So basically, agreeing with me is no guarantee that you’re *not* an asshole — not as long as you’re human.

I don’t see the point you’re making. I can’t even tell if you have a point, or were just starting out by feeling bad about how Islamic countries treat women and then wandering into other ideas completely tangentially.

You do know the left has a longer history of criticizing the Taliban than the right wing, right? Just because we don’t usually mock (and mocking is even different than making jokes about– it is taunting, othering, and therefore not used in mainstream media), doesn’t mean we don’t criticize. But how well would mockery work for criticism of another culture? Turning someone’s exact phrases against them doesn’t work well if you are working off a translation of what they said. Dialect, a useful device in humor, becomes offensive if used for an oppressed or significantly different group. It isn’t even really clever if comedians go outside their regional group in mockery; Amanda can mock Texans. I kind of can’t because there’s too much tendency for Blue states to denigrate Red states. I can, however, *criticize* Texas, complaining about how fewer worker’s rights and looser pollution laws mean that bad-intentioned corporations pick up and move there, leaving *both* states worse off. But I can’t mock Texan racism while there are still White supremacist groups running towns in the hills of Northern California.

If anybody had and agreed to send to my email, I would be very grateful. (I live in Israel.)