I've been writing in my op-eds, for the past four years, since before the war started, that the right wing in America is engaged in a war against the feminine-- not just women, but also the feminine archetype. Jean Shinoda Bolen has written extensively about the need for women and feminine energies to make a difference (in her super book MESSAGE FROM MOTHER; Gather the Women and Save the World) Faludi brilliantly describes just how the weak, pathetic "Stupid White Men" culture that Michael Moore described in his book, of that name, how the media and the right systematically orchestrated this attack on women as strong and heroic.
She says, near the end of the book, "When an attack on home soil causes cultural paroxysms that have nothing to do with the attack, when we respond to real threats to our nation by distracting ourselves with imagined threats to femininity and family life, when we invest our leaders with a cartoon masculinity and require of them bluster in lieu of a capacity for rational calculation, and when we blame our frailty on "fifth column" feminists-- in short, when we base our security on a mythical male strength that can only measure itself against a mythical female weakness-- we should know that we are exhibiting the symptoms of a lethal, albeit curable, cultural affliction. Our reflexive reaction to 9/11-- fantastical, weirdly disconnected from the very real emergency at hand-- exposed a counterfeit belief system. It reprised a bogus security drill that divided men from women and mobilized them to the defense of a myth instead of the defense of a country."
Damn, she nails it. When I had a chance to meet John Kerry, I cryptically said to him, "don't let Bush be Viagra." I've said for years that Bush, his war, his cowboy idiocy, have all been props the boys in this myth, this terror dream have been projecting upon, so they could salvage their masculinity. Faludi dissects the apparition that infected America's soul. Having cast light upon it, there is no doubt it will no longer have the power it has previously enjoyed.
She writes, "To not understand the mythic underpinnings of our response to 9/11 is, in a fundamental way, to not understand ourselves, to be so unknowing about the way we inhabit our cultural roles that we are stunned, insensible, when confronted by a moment that requires our full awareness. To fail to comprehend the historical provenance of our reaction, the phylogeny behind our ontogeny, is to find ourselves thwarted in our ability to express what we have undergone..."
The book is a brilliant exploration of aspects of American culture we don't ordinarily think of. If you like Zinn's People's History of the United States, or if you are willing to see America with new eyes, this book could be for you.
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