And yet, I want to thank Faludi for going to the library while the rest of us gave in to baser instincts, drank a six-pack and passed out. I want to thank her for adding it all up and making shape and sense out of six years of history. When she writes about how the attacks provoked "the denigration of capable women, the magnification of manly men, the heightened call for domesticity, the search for and sanctification of helpless girls," it's almost a relief: Of course! I knew there had to be an explanation! This must also have led to the fetishization of parenting, the mommy wars, the obsession with celebrity baby bumps, and stupidly expensive baby strollers! Wheee! Thank you, Susan Faludi, for drawing the map!
Except that she hasn't. She doesn't really get to any of those things. In fact, while she has pulled through a critical thread, "The Terror Dream" does not show the full tapestry of post-9/11 gender relations.
There are oddly blank spaces in her argument. In her estimable effort to diagnose the toxicity of attitudes toward women, she eliminates events that do not fit her argument, and thus fails to tell the whole story. In the discussion of the big-dicked alpha-male Bush administration, why doesn't Faludi examine the roles of Karen Hughes and Condoleezza Rice and Harriet Miers? Hughes is brought up when she quits to spend more time with her family -- a move that supports Faludi's argument and merits consideration. But why not complicate the issue by exploring why, exactly, the Mr. Guns Blazing president has put more women in positions of power than any chief executive before him? Faludi's argument is strong enough to withstand complexity. That she rarely acknowledges it only serves to weaken her claims.
Faludi devotes part of the book to tallying the diminished number of female bylines in papers, the paltry number of girl guests on TV. She's not the first to do this, and she's not wrong. "The silencing of women took place largely in silence," she writes dramatically at the conclusion of her passage on the media.
Eh. Sure. For a while. But in the years Faludi is describing, Jill Abramson ascended to the top of the New York Times masthead and Katie Couric took over the nightly news, albeit to ill effect. Why not explore the unearthing of feminism as a beat by young women like Ariel Levy at New York magazine, Sheelah Kolhatkar, formerly of the New York Observer, by Meghan O'Rourke at Slate, Jessica Valenti at Feministing, and by several of us here at Salon? Levy is mentioned in "The Terror Dream," but only as a cog in New York magazine's dastardly scheme to tell free-loving New York women they should be getting married; Faludi does not credit her for writing one of the better-received feminist books of the past decade, "Female Chauvinist Pigs." What about Linda Hirshman's "Get to Work" or Leslie Bennetts' "The Feminine Mistake"? It's not as though these women are working in echo chambers: Levy was on "Oprah"; she, Valenti and Linda Hirshman have all appeared on "Stephen Colbert" ... To talk about feminism! ... On television!
None of these developments make Faludi's argument less true: There was, and is, a paucity of women in major newspapers, magazines and political blogs, and on the talk shows. But it is possible to make that point while also acknowledging a simultaneous increase of women, besides Faludi, who are rattling the chains and getting heard.
Can a book that alleges that the United States reembraced a John Wayne model of male leadership post-9/11 really only contain three references to the woman who may be the first major-party female candidate for president? What about the first female president of Harvard, the first female speaker of the House?
The first two-thirds of "The Terror Dream" offers a compendium of the offenses against gender civility without extending itself to contemplate how they have evolved and what they have come to mean now, in 2007. Faludi lays it all out, gets the reader good and riled, and then ... nothing.
That's because she is far less interested in the present or the future than she is in the past. Her real thesis (more complicated than "9/11 pushed us back into traditional roles") is laid out in the preface, but does not get fully realized until the book's bizarre structure becomes apparent. Her central idea is that Ernst Haeckel's hypothesis that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" -- or, as Faludi translates for us, that the development of an embryo repeats in compressed form the evolutionary stages of its species -- can be applied to American history.
Faludi wants to show how "the way we act, say, in response to a crisis can recapitulate in quick time the centuries-long evolution of our character as a society and of the mythologies we live by." But because Faludi does the recapitulation part -- the reactions to Sept. 11 -- before she gets to the evolution part more than halfway through the book, her point gets muddied, and readers may wonder, upon beginning the final section, whether they walked into a graduate thesis on America's founding conflicts.
It's a pity, because this last section -- the phylogeny -- is brilliant and exhilarating. Faludi examines with great gusto the popular captivity narratives of 18th and 19th century America, including those of Mary Rowlandson and Cynthia Ann Parker. The stories themselves are fascinating, like that of Hannah Duston, captured in 1697 by Abenaki Indians, five days after having given birth to her 12th child. Before her captors could take her to Canada, Duston took a hatchet to them (two men, two women, six children) and escaped, only to return to collect their scalps. This bravery earned her the attention of that famously easygoing Massachusetts Bay preacher Cotton Mather, who was concerned that nice, passive women might get the wrong idea about their own self-sufficiency from Duston's story.
Faludi's point is that our behaviors in the wake of the supposedly unprecedented terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 were in fact practically written into our national DNA. "Our foundational drama as a society was apposite, a profound exposure to just such assaults, murderous homeland incursions by dark-skinned, non-Christian combatants under the flag of no recognized nation," she writes. "September 11 was aimed at our cultural solar plexus precisely because it was an 'unthinkable' occurrence for a nation that once could think of little else. It was not, in fact, an inconceivable event; it was the characteristic and formative American ordeal, the primal injury of which we could not speak, the shard of memory stuck in our throats. Our ancestors had already found a war on terror, a very long war, and we have lived with its scars ever since."
This argument is fluid and thrilling to read. It just should have been its own book, perhaps with Faludi's collected contemporary gripes appended as evidence of how in the narratives of the country's founding we can find the dental records of nearly every one of our modern impulses to contain femininity.
Faludi leaves us with a list of kidnappings and witch hunts that provide a fascinating tableau against which we are free to measure -- without much direct guidance from her -- our modern gender impulses. But again, the book feels unfinished, the work of connecting the dots left to the reader; Faludi has laid down a good strong drumbeat, but little melody to carry us through.
Which brings us back to Bruce Springsteen, whose album catalogs the very stuff that "The Terror Dream" is concerned with: Here is the cowboy George Bush, showing up 'round sundown on Election Day, "boot heels clicking like the barrel of a pistol spinning round" in "Livin' in the Future." There is the image of perfect, angelic femininity in a barmaid 'round whose hair the sun lifts a halo. Where Faludi has prophetic nightmares, Springsteen imagines, in the title track, a world in which bodies hang from trees in a tableau of post-Katrina racial horror.
I'm not sure that one line from Springsteen's song "Devil's Arcade" wasn't actually written by Faludi: "You said heroes are needed, so heroes get made," and that the two of them aren't making identical points about the manipulative power of terror when Springsteen's magician in "Magic" evilly cajoles, "Leave everything you know/ Carry only what you fear."
In Faludi's concluding chapter, "What If?" she takes a stab at hope, wondering, "What if the nation had responded to 9/11 differently? What if we hadn't retreated into platitudes and compensatory fictions? What if we had taken the attack as an occasion to 'confront the truth'?" Or, as Springsteen puts it in "Livin' in the Future," a song in which he retroactively reimagines Election Day: "Don't worry, darlin', now baby don't you fret/ We're livin' in the future and none of this has happened yet."
Both Faludi and Springsteen have always specialized in seeing the personal in the political and vice versa. Faludi tends to see dysfunction, in ways that have been exceedingly useful in the past, as they are here. Her failure this time is in her refusal to acknowledge the upside. Springsteen, of course, has always been a hope peddler, if not an optimist. Laced throughout both these texts are frustration, bewilderment, a desire to shake the country by its shoulders. With Faludi, the sense is that none of this comes as a surprise, she is just Charlie Brown kicking the football, only to have it yanked out from under her by a country that is still, yup, sexist. So it was written by Cotton Mather, so it will be post 9/11.
For Springsteen, the realization that "this is what will be" is both more startling and more painful. He is, like Walt Whitman before him, pained at the vision of his beloved nation torn asunder.
Both writers are furious. And I sort of want to tell them: Have a little faith. But maybe this is a moment in which there is little to believe in, and a lot to fear.
About the writer
Rebecca Traister is a staff writer for Salon Life.
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