Exhuming gender myths

Susan Faludi is going to be talking in Berkeley.
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/search/events.php?oid=506598

by Wallace Baine
Sentinel staff writer

Feminist author Susan Faludi was in Europe when a series of suicide bombings struck London in July of 2005, an event known in the U.K. as the "7/7 bombings" What struck her, she said, was the differences in reactions between 7/7 and 9/11.

"They treated it as a criminal action that needed to be investigated and the perpetrators brought to justice and prosecuted. Whereas we treated 9/11 as a judgment on our identity as a nation. Why was that?"

In her new book, "The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America," Faludi presents what is sure to be a controversial interpretation on the reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks of the government, the public and, most pointedly, the news media. The 9/11 attacks, she said, uncovered a deeply buried national myth of gender roles that harkens back to the American experience settling the New World. In other words, 9/11 exhumed a primal American impulse to go back to an era where men were rescuers and women damsels in distress.

"It was almost as if we fell into some kind of fever dream," said Faludi, the author of "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women," who will speak Wednesday, Oct. 3 at the Capitola Book Cafe.

"Our pundits and politicians seemed frantic to re-enact this drama out of the old frontier. There was all this cowboy rhetoric coming out of the White House: 'Wanted: Dead or Alive' and 'We're going to smoke 'em out.' There were pundits from the Atlantic Monthly to the Wall Street Journal to ABC talking about how the War on Terror was really about 'taming the frontier and fighting the Indians.' The media proclaimed that this was a return to the era of John Wayne manhood. It was almost a reflex reaction, like when you hit someone's knee and it jumps up"
The New York-born Faludi won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 and has written widely on gender stereotypes and their effects on both men and women. Her analysis on the immediate post-9/11 period focuses not on the dynamics of international terrorism, but of a media campaign — mostly subconscious, she says — to turn back feminism.

She touches on everything from cultural obsessions in the months following the attacks to an extended interpretation of American history in the 200 years before and around the founding of the U.S. Her most pointed criticisms are aimed at the news media, which, she said, perpetuated ideas with little or no basis in fact.

"After 9/11, there were all these stories in the media that 9/11 was going to cause single women to rush to the wedding altar. Working women were going to return to homemaking. Then, on the flip side, we were going to return to the age of the manly man, and all that wimpy, new-age sensitive man stuff was out. It was almost as if 9/11 were some kind of referendum on our sexual politics"

But the linchpin of her argument is the story of former Pvt. Jessica Lynch, who overnight became a symbol of the Iraq War. In April 2003, according to military and media reports, Lynch was rescued by a special assault unit from an Iraqi hospital where she was being treated for serious injuries as a result of her capture. A book published soon after even alleged that she was raped. Since then, much of that story has been discredited or disputed, even by Lynch herself in testimony before Congress earlier this year.

Behind the Jessica Lynch story, claims Faludi in her book, is a notion that women must conform to roles in which they play objects of protection. "It wasn't enough just to tell the story of an American soldier who was captured and injured and taken to a hospital and ultimately returned. Instead, we had to turn it into this parable of our national myth. It's the story we gravitate to, the all-American story we want to tell: fragile, young, blonde girl who is rescued by big strapping guys in uniform. The myth of the helpless, rescued girl is really important to us and we cling to it no matter what the facts are"