When Men Were Men

The author of "Backlash" argues that 9/11 revived traditional gender stereotypes.

THE TERROR DREAM

Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America

By Susan Faludi

Metropolitan. 351 pp. $26

Think of the authors whose books about Sept. 11 and America have made a splash: Richard Clarke. Steve Coll. Lawrence Wright. Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton. Peter Beinart. Dinesh D'Souza.

One thing is immediately apparent: All are men. But if the voices of women have been discounted since 9/11, The Terror Dream should change that. Any list of important books about that dark day will now have to include Susan Faludi's sharp and spirited account of gender politics in the feverish aftermath.

Her assessment of our post-9/11 discourse is far from admiring. To our detriment, she argues, we Americans have taken refuge in an old, mythic landscape of swaggering, violent men and meek women in need of protection. From George W. Bush's "dead or alive" bluster to bogus trend stories about women giving up work for June Cleaver domesticity; from the phony tales about Jessica Lynch to the trashing of the "Jersey Girl" 9/11 widows; from the invention of fearful "security moms" to the slandering of Susan Sontag and Katha Pollitt -- to these gender-war outbreaks Faludi brings a feminist critique that's not only astringently smart but also eminently sane. Call it Backlash II.

Faludi opens her book with an account of five teenage girls who, independently, visited the hospital shortly after the terrorist attacks because they were literally starving. (Faludi's source for this account is Trauma at Home: After 9/11, a book by Judith Greenberg, who happens to be my sister.) Each believed that fragments from the conflagration -- possibly of human remains -- were blocking her throat, leaving her unable to swallow. The constriction in their throats, according to the doctor who examined them, was real; but the presence of any external physical object was not. Here was hysteria, straight from the pages of Freud, that metaphorically captured the indigestibility of the 9/11 atrocities.

Picking up on this idea, Faludi argues in The Terror Dream that women and feminists were indeed constricted after Sept. 11, denied a voice in the ensuing discourse about politics, culture, patriotism, heroism and how to respond to the attacks. She perceptively interprets a series of passionately waged debates that played out in the news and entertainment media.

One concerned the cult of the fireman. Most analyses of firefighters' efforts on 9/11 brushed past the tragic fact that short-sighted directives may have sent hundreds of rescue personnel to needless death. Summarily billed as supermen, the firefighters -- now always firemen, despite the women within their ranks -- couldn't simultaneously be seen as passive victims. Then, in the following weeks, feature stories touted firemen as "a hot commodity in the dating game" and "as de rigueur as . . . the latest Louis Vuitton bag," while a documentary called "The Women of Ground Zero," pilloried by the right, sank without much notice. Similarly, narratives were spun about the rugged male passengers on flight 93 -- the one that crashed in Western Pennsylvania -- who sacrificed their lives to save the U.S. Capitol, even though too few data exist for anyone to know what really happened onboard. Yet talk shows and newsmagazines singled out a few burly athletes manqu¿ for posthumous praise and largely ignored evidence of women who showed equal bravery -- like the stewardess Sandra Bradshaw, who, according to a phone message she left, boiled water in coffee pots to scald the hijackers.

Faludi's other examples are equally illustrative. The thrust of each one, however -- showing the resurrection of sexist tropes and the renewal of ancient gender roles -- is basically the same. There's little variation or progression from one chapter to the next. As a result, the book's argument doesn't develop.

More nuance, too, might have graced Faludi's treatment of "the media," which she often portrays as a monolith. In showcasing Americans' crude attitudes and sexist assumptions, she doesn't distinguish enough among mainstream news accounts, propaganda from the Bush administration and the ravings of right-wing hacks. Thus, Faludi makes an important point when reporting that in "the first six months of 2002, more than 75 percent of the Sunday talk shows on CBS, Fox, and NBC featured no female guests" -- along with other telling statistics about women's disappearance from political debates. But it is of rather less import that misogynist epithets are being posted on the ultramontane Free Republic Web site, that some crackpot has a Web site calling Ground Zero "the land of the smoldering vagina," or that Midge Decter wrote a breathless paean to Donald Rumsfeld's virility -- a book that, as I recall, was roundly ridiculed at the time.

The Terror Dream's last 100 pages are historical in scope. Synthesizing the work of scholars from Henry Nash Smith and Richard Slotkin to June Namias and Mary Beth Norton, Faludi argues that America's post-traumatic reversion to the creaky myths of stout-hearted male conquerors and frail female victims dates to the Puritan era and runs from the settlement of the West through the Cold War. Although late 20th-century feminism made progress toward rooting out these deep tendencies, according to Faludi, the work has barely begun.

I'm not so sure. Faludi's overall argument is powerful, convincing and very much in need of articulation by a bestselling author who can commandeer a public pulpit. But the post-9/11 rout of feminism is, I think, less complete than she suggests. Indeed, the very robustness of many of the clashes she details -- the outrage over the army's Jessica Lynch propaganda, the critical pans of Harvey Mansfield's retrograde Manliness, the now-routine exasperation with Bush's cowboy persona -- shows that if conservative voices have prevailed since 9/11, they've hardly gone unchallenged.

It remains uncertain whether, in the wake of the debacle that is the Bush administration, the balance will shift. But the 2008 presidential election is shaping up as a referendum on the very cultural politics that Faludi spotlights. One party is likely to nominate a self-styled sheriff from the urban frontier running on his record as a merciless dispenser of draconian justice and a partisan of extreme measures after Sept. 11. The other is poised to choose, for the first time in history, a woman -- one who is unfairly derided for her feminism and careerism and caricatured as a Lady Macbeth. The face-off between the Modern Woman and the Macho Man may yet reveal how tenacious and lasting the myths that Faludi so bracingly documents really are. *

David Greenberg, author of "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image" and "Calvin Coolidge," teaches at Rutgers University and writes for Slate.