For my last reflection on these two books and their intersections, I want to focus on their eloquent conclusions and what they suggest about dismantling gender roles as a path toward true liberation.

No matter what you think of some of the logistical leaps and ambitious parallels Faludi makes in The Terror Dream, you can't deny that she is a wildly talented writer. Towards the end she sums up her thesis:

When an attack on home soil causes cultural paroxysms that have nothing to do with the attack, when we respond to real threats to our nation by distracting ourselves with imagined threats to femininity and family life, when we invest our leaders with a cartoon masculinity and require of them bluster in lieu of a capacity for rational calculation, and when we blame our frailty on 'fifth column' feminists--in short, when we base our security on a mythical male strength that can only measure itself against a mythical female weakness--we should know that we are exhibiting the symptoms of a lethal, albeit curable, cultural affliction.

When we are most fearful, we are most likely to regress into familiar, albeit limiting scripts about who we are, what our dreams might be, what's safe and what's too scary. Faludi painstakingly details the ways this plays out for both women and men--the damsels in distress or the proud, vengeful mothers or the cowboys and heroes. Bottom line: none of these roles are authentic. None of them make us more safe. And none of us are free as long as some of us aren't free. Our cartooned femininity is directly related to men's cartooned masculinity. Until we recognize the relationship, and the ways in which its continuance makes us feel somehow invulnerable, we will be doomed to smaller, more fear-based lives.

And May, whose every leap and parallel are meticulously executed (chalk it up to her academic orientation), ends by looking at the ways in which Boomers dismantled some of the domestic romanticization and containment so lauded post WWII. She quotes one smart woman as writing at the time:

'What is wrong with the women trapped in the Feminine Mystique is what's wrong with men trapped in the Rat Race...Isn't it true, that one of the problems, the biggest really, of our present day society is that there isn't enough meaningful creative work for anyone these days?'

It makes me shudder to think how true this statement still is, fifty some odd years later. Until we look at the ways in which our families are structured--both in terms of our own personal preferences and those that are dictated by institutions like the corporation and government policy--we won't be free to truly explore who we are, what our purpose and passion dictates, how we can be in relationship fearlessly. Both women and men have to be liberated from traditional notions of femininity, masculinity, acceptable work, if we are to live out enlightened personal lives, and the whole damn country has to be liberated from traditional notions of cowboy power, retaliatory violence, and safety in regressive tradition, if we are to live out enlightened political lives.

But all of this is different than love, which seems to be the missing word in a lot of these reflections. I still believe that love--radical, role bending, life-giving love--is the beginning of the answer. As bell hooks writes, "The moment we choose to love, we move towards freedom."