Susan Faludi has a new book coming out about how 9/11 and the fear of terrorism, has been used to push women back into the kitchen and out of public participation. Rebecca Traister has a wonderful review at Salon:
Before she can pursue the big picture, Faludi must start where everyone else in America did: her personal experience of Sept. 11. There is her prophetic dream on the night of Sept. 10, in which she is shot while on a plane, a bullet lodged in her throat; she wakes only to discover that the world is under attack. Before the end of the day she has received the phone call that provides her book with its foundation myth: A reporter asks for her reaction to the tragedies, crowing to Faludi, “Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!”
Not 24 hours out, and Faludi has been handed the key to how this plot will unfold: To her mind, Sept. 11 will give the nation, uneasy with the strides made by women in the decades leading up to the attacks, an excuse to stuff them back into traditional boxes. That first gleeful caller is soon joined by others, all anxious to know how quickly women will abandon their corner offices and get back to tweaking their meatloaf recipes.
Apparently, Faludi has spent the past six years writing down the license plate number of every drive-by offense against gender parity, and the first two-thirds of “The Terror Dream” is her obsessive catalog — a simply staggering one.
There are the media stories promoting a never-realized post-9/11 baby boom and the “return of the cowboy/superhero” trend pieces. Here are the fawning portrayals of the macho Bush administration (she’s looking at you, Graydon Carter), the newscasters heralding the death of the “girly-man,” the breezily patronizing “We’re at War, Sweetheart” headlines.
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.
The post-9/11 era has most certainly been characterized by a swaggering macho mentality and a whole lot of fluttering over manly men, from the firefighters and rescue workers (the image of which was always male*, despite the fact that female first responders were killed, too) to Commander Codpiece and his Aircraft Carrier Potemkin (I mean, do you remember how much Chris Matthews swooned over the flight suit? How much the conservabots droned on about how “sexy” Bush was?** I sure do. Damned embarrassing, if you ask me). And the war, probably the ultimate expression of anxious masculinity out there, from Bush’s “Bring it on” to Thomas Friedman’s “Suck. On. This.”
Well, now some of the manly men on whom the backlashers relied to boost their own masculine cred — the firefighters and the soldiers — are rebelling. And the Presidential candidate who’s wiping the floor with everyone else, including the Manly Men of the Republican party — even Mr. 9/11 hisself, Rudy Giuliani — is a woman. The last election was all about who could be tougher on terror. This one, not so much. It’s more about, how the hell do we get out of this damned war and prevent our economy from tanking, and oh, yes, we’d like universal healthcare this century, please.
I’m going to check out Faludi’s book. It sounds like a keeper.
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* Granted, the fire department and unions such as the Ironworkers who worked at the site *are* overwhelmingly male. New York is a wonderful place, but there are certain deep streaks of the old-boy network, and FDNY and trade unions are some of the biggest. The NYPD’s done a much better job of hiring female officers and people of color; FDNY remains largely a legacy operation, which means it stays overwhelmingly male and white; women are most represented in the EMS service.
** I’ve said it before: Bush required an aircraft carrier and a sock in his flight suit to get the “sexy” label. You know it just eats up conservatives that all Bill Clinton had to do to be sexy was bite his lip.