Susan Faludi, author of the feminist bestseller Backlash, has done it again with an exhaustive report on the betrayals felt by working men throughout the United States. American men are angry and discontented, she argues in Stiffed, because their sense of what it is to be a man has been destroyed by everything from corporate downsizing and the shrinking military of the post cold war era to the increase in local sports teams leaving town. Whether she's interviewing the teenage male members of Southern California's infamous Spur Posse (who collected "points" for every female they had sex with), Cleveland football fans shaken by the departure of the Browns football team, militia movement activists, or Sylvester Stallone, Faludi seems stuck on the idea that American men today are man-boys, unable to completely grow up because they never received the nurturing they needed, and now constantly disappointed by life. Yet while many of the men Faludi interviews have real problems--bad luck and sad, troubled lives--somehow Stiffed still seems a bit whiny. Faludi's "travels through a postwar male realm" are a fascinating slice of male American life "under siege" at the end of the 20th century, even if she does finally leave us like the men she talked to--still wondering just what went wrong. © Amazon.com


What 'The Washington Post' says:

Faludi wants nothing less than a revolution of gender in our time. With Stiffed she attempts to do for men what Betty Friedan did for women in The Feminine Mystique: Break them out of the box, out of the prison of public perception. For men don't simply act, they are also acted upon. Just like women.

The classic complaint against feminism is that women acting like men is good for neither women nor men. Faludi inverts this argument, saying that men acting like women is good for neither men nor women. Faludi's triumph is to recognise the rise of "The Ornamental Male," whose erstwhile masculinity is now dominated by the traditionally feminine beauty industry.

In our postwar world, Faludi argues, the traditional roles of man are obsolete. Warrior, frontiersman, sole breadwinner, protector: It's "The Incredible Shrinking Man." What's a baby boomer to do? Shuffle off to the cigar bar? Make a stand at the manse with the animal over the hearth he didn't kill, with the guns on the mantel he didn't fire, with the muscles on his arms forged not in the wild but at the Y?

Stiffed is Faludi's journey through this manscape. As one Waco wacko tells her, "If you want to see what's happening in the stream called our society, go to the edges and look at what's happening there, and then you begin to have an understanding -- if you know how a stream works -- of what's going on in the middle." © The Washington Post Company


What 'The New York Times' says:

The big news about Susan Faludi's second book is supposed to be the change in sexual orientation -- from the problems of women to those of men. The more important news is the change in tone. Her first book, ''Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,'' was a polemic, a point-by-point (and often hilarious) refutation of sexist half-truths about women, mostly those propagated by lazy journalists, though Faludi saw the workings of a larger misogyny behind individual acts of carelessness. ''Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man'' is, by contrast, elegiac. It's a lament for the lost and distinctly unfeminist characters who stumble through its pages: downsized aerospace engineers; suburban teen-age sexual predators; football fans whose teams have skipped town; male porn stars whose livelihood depends on their waning sexual powers; cadets at the Citadel who jeer at all hints of femininity during the day and sneak out to drag bars at night; a gun nut; an ex-astronaut; gang members; Promise Keepers. What these men and boys have in common, Faludi says, is that they have been pushed by forces they don't understand into roles in which their masculinity has nothing to do but roil and fester. Their plight awakens in her a tender sympathy for a sex she now suspects is in greater need of liberation than her own.

''Stiffed,'' which you could see as the American literary equivalent of the British hit movie ''The Full Monty'' -- the story of how the working guy, denied his livelihood, was reduced to a sexual object -- is the product of six years of aggressive reporting and an admirable knack for bringing the results to life. No one will ever put this book down for lack of vivid scene setting or compassionate observation. But Faludi is up to much more here than profiling the down and out. She wants to know what's wrong with men in general. Her answer, surprising from a feminist, is that they've become soft: the modern man is more obsessed with his image than his job, which changes too frequently to be a firm basis of identity, and demeans its holder to boot. © The New York Times Company


What 'The Chicago Tribune' says:

She began, she tells us, observing a domestic-violence therapy group, intending to write a book that would be an obvious continuation into the private sector of the public attacks she had explored in her book "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women," which won the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. But the anger of the men she interviewed turned out to be fuelled by a wider range of frustrations than she had expected, and, to her credit, Faludi shifted her perspective, travelled widely and listened harder, and changed her mind about where the solutions to anxieties might be found.

Faludi is unflinching. There will be people who will read this book--sometimes I found myself one of them--as voyeurs; she is not afraid to hang out in the underworld of inner-city crime, among the producers of pornographic movies, with men who collect guns. Her inquiries start at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard, south of Los Angeles, and take her to Los Angles suburbs struck by the downsizing of aerospace firms, where teenage boys name themselves the Spur Posse and count sexual encounters like scalps, and demoralised men join the Promise Keepers; and to the Citadel in South Carolina, where Shannon Faulkner's effort to enter a state-supported military academy was met with sexualised violence. Faludi gains the confidence of men who have made the location of the destruction of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, a site of pilgrimage, and of young black men whose lives in gangs "unfolded on the bereft streets of South Central Los Angeles."

As she travels, Faludi maps a landscape marked by competing visions of manliness. A stunning opening chapter on men who have lost their jobs contrasts the skilled workers of the Long Beach dry dock, who have remained psychologically whole, with the demoralised white-collar middle managers of McDonnell Douglas. The demise of traditional local booster clubs, which paternally supported professional athletes at the start of their careers, is contrasted with the pathos of working-class fans who find in the Cleveland Browns something they think they can be part of and are devastated when the franchise abandons them for another city. The gay editors who invent the lively magazine Details are replaced by owners who hope to increase circulation by "heterosexualising" it. © The Chicago Tribune Company

"What has been once thought out cannot be taken back!"

'The Physicists' - Die Physiker - is one of the most well known plays of Friedrich Durrenmatt, the famous Swiss writer/dramatist. Durrenmatt was born in Konolfingen on 5 January 1921 and passed away in Neuenburg on 14 December 1990. Durrenmatt wrote 32 plays, 16 novels and novellas, 18 major articles and a large number of essays. His writing has been translated into almost all the European languages and into Afrikaans. In his last years, Durrenmatt had also taken to painting. 'The Physicists' was written when the cold war was at its zenith. The Physicists was the most popular play in 1962/63. It was once again the subject of much discussion in 1982/83 during the time of the Star Wars project.

In his play Durrenmatt examines the responsibility scientists have towards humanity, towards the well being of the world. Is a scientist entitled to carry out his studies just because he cannot help acting according to his intellectual curiosity? Is today's scientist innocent of any responsibility because he simply travels the path paved long ago - as the British historian Arnold Toynbee says in his monumental book, "Mankind and Mother Earth" - when the first stone was fashioned into a weapon by man? Should a scientist be dictated by that hidden god who takes care of the morality of things? Even in today's times during which just the words genetic engineering create horror scenes in the mind, these questions are of tremendous importance.

Durrenmatt always understood that his job as a writer is not to heal but to diagnose, not to show a way out but simply to portray the complexity of the world. It is the reader and not the writer, the spectator and not the dramatist, who has to judge and act accordingly.

The Play, 'The Physicists', takes place in a lunatic asylum. Durrenmatt has named his main character Mobius, Johann Wilhelm Mobius, obviously after the 19^th century German mathematician. This Mobius has been able to solve the ultimate mystery of physics, and has put together the final unified theory which embraces all the theories of physics. He has understood the power that is inherent in his theory, that it can be misused to put an end to the world. In order to save the world, Mobius decides to hide from the world, and takes refuge in the lunatic asylum where he believes that both his theory and he himself are safe. He is believed to be mad by his family and others because he declares again and again that king Solomon, who ruled Israel from around 879 to 930 BC, and who is the known for his wisdom and magnificence, appears to him regularly. In fact, he asserts that King Solomon has revealed to him his knowledge. Two other physicists are also inmates of this place; Ernst Heinrich Ernesti who acts as if he believes himself to be Albert Einstein and Herbert Georg Beutler who believes to be none other than Sir Isaac Newton. There are other patients too - millionaires, managers, musicians, etc - but these occupy the new annexe. Only the physicists have the place of honour, and occupy the old villa. The asylum belongs to and is run by Dr Mathilde von Zahnd, an old spinster, bent with age.

When the play starts, a murder has been committed. Police are already on the scene. Einstein has killed the nurse assigned to take care of him. The murder has been committed using the standing lamp. It was not the first murder to take place in the asylum. A month ago, Newton murdered another nurse, and he did it with the cord used to tie the curtains. Murder! Murderer! These words are not to be used here. The people who kill are, after all, mental patients. Murder is just another act, a consequence of an impulse born in the dark corners of the mind not under control. Still, the police officer (Durrenmatt's figure is almost a caricature), is uneasy, and succeeds in convincing the doctor, Matilde von Zahnd of the necessity of replacing the female nurses by male ones. It is this decision, meant to prevent the occurrence of more undesirable acts like these ones, which leads to the next murder. Nurse Monika Stettler comes to bid goodbye to Mobius. She comes actually to declare her love for Mobius and to show that she has complete trust in him, and to convince him that he should accompany her when she leaves the place. Nurse Stettler cannot stay longer in the lunatic asylum, she has to move out so that the male nurses can move in. Mobius is taken aback, but acknowledges his love for her. But when he realises how far nurse Stettler's plans have gone, that she has even arranged for a university position for him, he knows that he has to sacrifice her in order to hide his work from the world. So the third murder is committed, this time with the cord used to tie the curtains.

The police officer who arrives immediately on the scene knows not to refer to the killing as murder. Things start falling into place when that evening the male nurses arrive, and the physicists discover that they are cut off totally from the outside world with no way open to escape. They start opening their hearts to one another. It is soon revealed that none of them is really mad. That only Mobius had honourable intentions when he decided to act like one. The other two physicists are spies, they are there on secret missions, wanting to worm out his secret as they have guessed the great value of his theories. Mobius is surprised but tries to convince them the necessity of his hiding his work from the world's greedy eyes. As a last resort, he reveals, he has just then burnt his copy of his work. Horror of horrors! Dr. Matilde von Zahnd enters the room and reveals to the astonished physicists that she has all the time knew their secrets, that she also had understood the value of Mobius's work. Matilde von Zahnd has not only saved a copy of Mobius's papers, but is about to found an international consortium to put these theories to use. It was she who was responsible for the three murders, albeit indirectly, because in order to keep the three physicists always under her control, she deliberately encouraged the nurses to fall in love with their patients, and to plan for their future with their patients. The physicists have no way out. Having come under the power of the power mad Matilde von Zahnd, they have to continue to act mad, so that they can stay in the lunatic asylum. If they were to dare to get out, they would have to spend their life behind real bars. They are utterly helpless, though they recognise that 'what has been once thought out cannot be taken back!'

Durrenmatt poses the question, "What is madness? Who is really mad, here? How mad is a person who is mad after power?" The language of the physicists is very simple and straight forward. Still it contains much food for thought. The theme of the play is timeless and is most suitable for the stage.

It was first staged in the Schauspielhaus (Theatre house) of Zurich in 1962. The role of Matilde von Zahnd was played by the incomparable German actress, Therese Giehse. Actually Durrenmatt rewrote the play for Therese Giehse to whom he also dedicated the piece. In the original version the doctor was a man. Giehse is supposed to have let a long sigh out after reading the play, and to have wondered, loudly, why it was so that such interesting roles were never meant to be played by women! Durrenmatt obliged immediately. Therese Giehse made the play immortal in the German speaking world. Rest is history of the German drama.