Michiko Kakutani reviews Susan Faludi's Latest Book

This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name.

With “The Terror Dream,” Susan Faludi has taken the momentous subject of 9/11 and come to the conclusion that it led to … an assault on the freedom and independence of American women. In the wake of 9/11, she argues, the great American cultural machine churned out a myth meant to “restore the image of an America invulnerable to attack” ”” “the illusion of a mythic America where women needed men’s protection and men succeeded in providing it.”

She contends that there was a “peculiar urge to recast a martial attack as a domestic drama, attended by the disappearance and even demonization of independent female voices” and that there was a “beatification of the ideal post-9/11 American woman” as “undemanding, uncompetitive, and most of all dependent” ”” a woman who “didn’t just want a man in her life” but “needed one.”

These efforts on Ms. Faludi’s part to use the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as an occasion to recycle arguments similar to those she made a decade and a half ago in her best-selling book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” (1991) feel forced, unpersuasive and often utterly baffling.

Read it all.

Posted in * Culture-Watch

4 comments on “Michiko Kakutani reviews Susan Faludi's Latest Book

  1. Irenaeus says:

    “This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name”

    Susan Faludi has been asking for that.

  2. Marty the Baptist says:

    I keep hearing from leftists — all over the place — that the freedoms and liberties we’ve lost since 9/11 are just not worth the price.

    I keep waiting for one of them to be specific about exactly which freedoms and liberties we’ve allegedly “lost”.

    Still waiting…

  3. Ruth Ann says:

    When I clicked and found myself on the NYTimes site, I just clicked back. This is nothing more than pure feminist bull****! And to get this kind of publicity…………….! How right is Kendall to label it in the Culture-Watch category. Sadly, it does speak for our culture and the path on which we are on, encouraged by radical feminists.

  4. ElaineF. says:

    Radical feminism, spearheaded by radical lesbianism, has cut a wide and deep swath of destruction through American society. Susan Faludi has lapsed into incoherence as becomes instantly clear with a casual perusal of that article.