With the publication of BACKLASH, Susan Faludi became a world-renowned authority on the gender war, and ‘backlash’ in the gender sense became a household word. STIFFED picks up where BACKLASH left off. It seeks to understand male behavior in order to close the chasm between the sexes, and asks the all-important question – why? Why are men so fear ful of women’s independence? Why is a little liberation seen as too mu ch? What is it that men really fear, and why? The author shows that we should really focus on The Man Question; at the end of the millennium, it is men who are in crisis. She argues that we are all at the mercy of social forces distorting our lives. She takes us from the shuttered shipyards to the mass lay-offs of the defence industries, from Hollywood action heroes to gang-torn streets, from militia men to Promise Keepe rs, praying husbands to male porn actors. Faludi explores the economic , cultural and political roots of the crisis, unpacks the media messag es sent to men in the last twenty-five years, and charts new territory for male-female relations in the twenty-first century.