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PDF FormatTo Faludi, this fixation on restoring an “invincible manhood” by means of a retreat to fifties-era tropes of femininity in fact belonged to a longstanding American pattern of response to threat, one immortalized on the silver screen by the 1956 classic The Searchers. “The Super Cult movie of the New Hollywood,” according to a film survey quoted by Faludi, The Searchers tells the story of Ethan Edwards’ (played by John Wayne) obsessive search for his niece, captured in an Indian raid as a young girl. This narrative, Faludi writes, is America’s oldest national myth, a formulaic attempt to allay societal fears of insecurity by prevailing over terrorists and saving the girl:
We perceive our country as inviolable, shielded from enemy penetration. Indeed, in recent history the United States has been, among nations, one of the most immune to attack on its home soil. And yet, 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, complying with no accepted rules of Western engagement and subscribing to an alien culture, who attacked white America on its “own” soil and against civilian targets. 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.
Indeed, writes Faludi, the chastened singles and “weeping widows” who populated the post-9/11 landscape had a legion of historical sisters, women whose supporting role in the original American “rescue fantasy” was crucial to the nation’s efforts to restore its own sense of invincibility—even, perhaps especially, when they hardly needed saving.
Take, for instance, the case of Cynthia Ann Parker, the real-life inspiration for The Searchers, who, captured by Comanche warriors in 1836 at the age of nine, grew to love her adopted tribe, eventually married its chief and bore him three children, and then, confronted with “salvation” decades later, fought desperately against rejoining white society. Or Mary Rowlandson, the Puritan minister’s wife who used her ingenuity to keep herself alive during her ordeal among hostile Indian captors and negotiated her own release. Or Hannah Duston, who took an axe to her Indian abductors while they slept, even managing to scalp them for good measure. In short, by Faludi’s reckoning, the women of the wild frontier managed to take care of themselves quite nicely, thank you very much. If their narratives of cunning and courage have come down to us as stereotypical “redemption tales,” in which the brawny white male rescues the helpless female, it is only because American men sought to counter their humiliation at having failed to protect their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters from attack by “savages” in the first place. Then as now, Faludi concludes, if anything needed saving, it was the American male ego from itself.
There is no doubt that Faludi’s newest work is inventive, albeit in both senses of the word. Her ability to draw endless historical comparisons—President Bush to Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone; Jessica Lynch to Cynthia Ann Parker; “security moms” to Puritan female exemplars; and even the attack on the Twin Towers to the “surprise” Indian raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1704—is admittedly impressive and frequently entertaining. Yet if the pieces of Faludi’s historical puzzle seem to fit together a bit too well, it is likely because she is exceedingly selective with the facts and anecdotes she uses to build her case.
She complains, for instance, that female politicians were given the cold shoulder in the wake of September 11, but makes no mention of female politicians such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who played a crucial role in shaping America’s response to the attacks, and the powerful Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton. She also rues the rise of tough-guy “Neanderthal TV,” while ignoring a string of recent hit shows with strong female leads, such as “The Closer,” “Women’s Murder Club,” “Private Practice,” “Commander in Chief,” “Alias,” and “The Bionic Woman,” to name just a few.
Perhaps the clearest example of her one-dimensional reading of the facts at hand is her summary of the plot of The Searchers, on whose narrative rests her entire argument for default gender roles. She hints at a simplistic story of masculine virtues, when in truth it is anything but. Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is not portrayed, as Faludi insists, as “heroic,” nor is he, for most of the film, “the consummate effective protector.” Rather, he is a nasty, violent man who seeks to kill his niece on account of her rape at Indian hands and subsequent shaming of his family. Moreover, it is only once he finds her that empathy awakens within him, and although he does end up rescuing her, in the final shot he wanders off alone, exiled from his family once more. This is hardly the triumphal he-man-rescues-helpless-woman tale Faludi would have us believe it to be. As with most of the evidence she puts forth, there is no fact too contrary to be conveniently left out or too undermining to be glossed over. She seems to be hoping that by simply lobbing enough favorable examples at the reader, he will be too overwhelmed to question the veracity of her argument as a whole.
Faludi also exhibits the unfortunate tendency to write herself into a corner, as the very evidence she marshals to shore up her argument often has the effect of undermining it. This is the case, for instance, with her lengthy description of the Jersey Girls, a group of 9/11 widows who pieced together a timeline of the federal blunders leading up to the terrorist attacks. The Jersey Girls transformed themselves into investigators who “seemed to know more than their official counterparts,” and Faludi argues that their “violation of the script”—that is, their political independence and rejection of the “my government knows best” attitude—was cause for widespread censure from those in government and the media alike. And yet, she herself concedes that the Jersey Girls played an essential role in forcing the creation of the 9/11 commission through “what was widely recognized as a powerful address” before Congress.
Then there is Faludi’s tendency to recycle old arguments, rendering them even less persuasive. She claims, for example, that the “opt-out revolution” stories were the result of the media’s efforts to play on post-9/11 anxieties and that even post-9/11 fashions were bent on returning women to their inner Victorian Angel of the House. Yet her own Backlash maintained that in the 1980s—a period absent the fears associated with terrorist threats—the media were also trumpeting tales of professional women’s alleged return to the home, and fashion designers were trying to “corset” liberated women with their creations.
Finally, Faludi’s over-the-top contempt for the Bush administration and her intimations that America is the true “oppressor” of everything and everyone will likely only encourage those readers of a different political persuasion to write off her arguments as ideologically inspired. Like all those on the far Left, she is hard-pressed to find anything praiseworthy about American actions post-9/11—just as she has nary a harsh word for the jihadists who forced America’s hand. She boils at the curtailing of civil liberties, seethes at the “authorization of torture,” and rails at the scandal of Abu Ghraib and “our reckless fool’s errand into Iraq.” Nowhere, however, does she express a similar fury toward Osama Bin Laden, and nowhere does she rage against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Indeed, in one of the most egregious examples of ideological obduracy, she complains that American policies only made matters worse for Iraqi women, going so far as to imply that the American overthrow of Saddam’s regime is to blame for a sharp rise in rapes, abductions, and sexual slavery in Iraq—a country, that is, whose deposed despot’s son was a well-known maniacal rapist and sadist.
The same goes for the Taliban, responsible for many of the worst human rights abuses against women in recent decades. Once again, instead of rejoicing at the United States military’s overthrow of this women-hating regime, Faludi complains petulantly that the administration didn’t really do it for the women. Sadly, Faludi seems to belong to that camp—of which many academic feminists are fellow members—which would prefer to see an “evil” America humbled at all costs, even, so it would seem, if it means leaving millions of oppressed Muslim women to their own devices. It is, therefore, one of the sadder ironies of Terror Dream that in using the tragedy of September 11 to further her own political positions, Faludi displays a flagrant disregard for one of feminism’s animating principles: the belief in interventionism as a means of ensuring gender equality.
