Rebecca Traister is so good sometimes that I get highly annoyed. Her latest, for example, an article on Susan Faludi's new book, "The Terror Dream," is so frigging thorough that I'm left with nothing to add. So I'll just quote shamelessly:
You'd almost forgotten the feeling of impotence provoked by 9/11? Faludi hasn't. Here's her recounting of the people lined up at the blood banks with no one to give blood to, the police faking "live saves" to cheer up rescue dogs on the pile, because even the canines were depressed. There's the adoration of the firefighters and of the "Let's Roll!" male heroes of Flight 93 -- remembered always for their college sports achievements and their regular-guy toughness -- while the stewardesses who boiled water to throw on the terrorists were written out of the myth.Just when you think there can't be more, Faludi concludes Chapter 3 by asking, "If women were ineligible for hero status, for what would they be celebrated?" Well, see Chapter 4: "Perfect Virgins of Grief." From here on out you'll find the victimization of Jessica Lynch, and the tale of how widows -- especially stay-at-home-mom widows, and especially widows who were pregnant -- became the golden geese of the morning shows. She recalls articles about how lonely all those haughty, self-satisfied single career women were now that we'd been attacked by terrorists and they had no one to snuggle up with at night; the Bush administration's phony interest in women's rights in the Middle East; makeup tips on how to look like a pale, pure angel; the decrease in female bylines; the nesting obsession.
Seriously, I can't wait to read this book.
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Wow. Sounds awesome. I just requested it from my library.
I hadn't even considered that widow stuff! That is some awesome analysis.
Count me in as another feminist who can't wait to read it!
I love, love, LOVE Faludi. It's officially on my Amazon wishlist.
Yay another Faludi book! I read Backlash for my AP Lit class back in high school...the teacher warned me that I might find some of her ideas a little too radical, and yet when I read the book there was nothing that I disagreed vehemently with. Clearly my teacher didn't know me well enough ;-)
Don't wade into the comment section. It's very depressing if the men commenting there are actually liberals.
On a similar note, I heard a caller on a left wing radio show arguing that Ron Paul should be elected because he's the only candidate that hasn't bought into the military industrial complex--his views on women notwithstanding.
Why is it that "women's issues" and "gay issues" are always the first on the chopping block in liberal circles?
The book is very good. I read it in July as an Advance Reading Copy (I work at a bookstore and we were sent a copy). Her research is very thorough and well documented, and it is written very well also. She brings up many things that really need to be discussed. I definitely recommend it. I'm going to have this book as my next "We Recommend" selection since it's out as of yesterday. (And... buy local! Buy independent!)
Love Faludi, I can't believe I'd never heard that about the stewardesses on Flight 93 :(
Faludi's an embarrassment. What a narcissist hack. She claims to have had a prophetic dream about death on an airplane the day before the attacks, then boldly goes on to interpret the events through her self-absorbed frame of endless victimization. Leave the b.s. prophecies to psychotics like Muhammad and Jim Jones. Also, her century-outdated recapitulation theory as metaphor really showed her weak, poorly informed, poorly thought-out thesis. She probably saw the Marxist Paleontologist S.J. Gould's book title and, wondering what it meant, looked it up and thought it was a cool idea. Clearly she didn’t bother to read the book, of course, wherein it's debunked. When pigs take wing I'll read another lugubrious Faludi book. I read Backlash as an undergraduate, convinced as I was at the time that being a feminist allowed me to be a smart, reasonable, compassionate, thinking person, supportive of equality and pluralism. Since the 80s though, I and untold thousands of others have dropped the label for fear of being confused with the dupes of intellectually bankrupt gender theory.
darwin,
i find starting off your argument with a comparison of jim jones, who oversaw the murder of a congressperson and the mass suicide of all his followers, with mohammed, who is seen as a "true" prophet by the second-largest religion in the world, a dubious place from which to build an argument.
that said, you clearly feel very strongly about this author, and i don't feel qualified to speak to your beef with her as i've not yet read any of her work.
however, i do hope that you can find the courage to base your social and political framework on what you actually believe, rather than what you are afraid people with think of you.
only you can allow yourself "to be a smart, reasonable, compassionate, thinking person, supportive of equality and pluralism". don't let anyone take that away from you. unfortunately, i think calling mohammed a "psychotic" may have just torpedoed our plans to be "supportive of... pluralism".
whatever.
all the best
Blitzgal - msot liberal dudes don't give a shit about "women's issues." Oh, they support abortion rights because if they knock their girlfriends up they want to be sure it'll be taken care of, but that's the extent of it for most guys who don't identify as "feminist" (and most liberal dudes do not).
They're just as sexist as conservative men.
I love Faludi and I'll probably read this, but I'm a little disappointed with the premise. We're in the midst of a backlash against feminism, but it's not just about macho post-9/11 militarism. Since she wrote Backlash, the left has embraced misogynists like Eminem and Bill Maher who "tell it like it is." Mainstream science journalism has uncritically touted every backlash study that's appeared (and made some studies into antifeminist screeds even if their actual findings aren't even close to what's in the heaadlines.) The hipster-geek culture that suffuses the Internet is, if anything, more unfriendly to women than the culture of those testosterone-driven political talk shows. Meanwhile, as Traister points out, Bush has put more women into power in his administration than ever before.
I've been waiting for a new Faludi book for a long time, but I'm not sure that this is the one.
Puckalish,
I could have emphasized Muhammad's child molesting proclivities (unless you want to call sex with his 9 year old wife Aisha consensual), but instead I went with psychotic. Psychotic may have been too strong, but his revelations were accompanied by seizures, and he came very close to suicide on mount Hira because of his internal struggles. Whatever he was, he was some kind of nut. And, more to the point, the comparison of Muhammad to Jim Jones is horrifyingly appropriate. Nuts like Jones, David Keresh, Joseph Smith--they're a dime a dozen and once a century or so, one of them becomes an accepted messiah. Have you ever read the accounts of Joseph Smith and the early Mormons? They were viewed as complete chucklenuts and Mormonism a freaky cult. Look how far they've come in a century. Come back in a thousand years and Joseph Smith, a known crook, fraud, and liar might be the Son of God to half the planet (at the rate they have babies!). I am a pluralist; don't let my realistic views on religion fool you on that count. On both religious and cultural fronts, I work for and value pluralistic, peaceful coexistence and the maintenance of different traditions. That doesn't mean I can't have strong opinions. I think Jesus and Moses are equally hogwash, or, if they actually existed, delusional goofballs. I also make a great distinction between screwball Christianity, and Christians--many of whom I love deeply. They know I'm an atheist, I know they are religious--no biggie.
Faludi's a hack--I repeat! She needs to read more widely. Good Zeus, is all of gender studies this poorly reasoned and argued? Faludi’s supposed to be big time, and she’s intellectually lazy and out of touch. Does she not read anything but gender stuff?
All the best,