Opportunism knocks for Faludi
A review of Susan Faludi, the famous feminist author of one of the most popular and influential books of the 1990s, The Backlash. This page reviews Faludi, in light of her later effort to reinvent herself as a concerned citizen about the collapse of "patriarchy".
Susan Faludi is a prominent feminist, gaining her fame from the book Backlash, the war against women, which was published in 1992 and became a best-seller. She made a comeback with another book in 1999, Stiffed, the betrayal of modern men.
Faludi deserves analysis for a number of reasons. Firstly this is because her Backlash book is one of the key feminist texts of the last ten years and was highly influential in creating a widely accepted political perception of men and women's power. Secondly, Faludi's more recent analysis of men, like its predecessor, is highly dubious and it is appropriate to intervene against her new claims.
It is worthwhile looking firstly at Faludi's book Backlash, which appeared on the surface to be a thorough and well-researched analysis of an organised patriarchal resistance to female progress. The book was published around a controversy, that one news magazine had claimed single career women found it difficult to meet eligible men. Faludi indicated that the article was merely one manifestation of a conspiracy against women. Furthermore, her interviews and analyses indicated that men were organising to oppose women's gains in the realm of legal treatment, employment, abortion rights, cultural representation, fashion and virtually every other imaginable social realm. In addition Faludi's book eulogised those women who had valiantly struggled to enter bastions of predominantly male employment. She included bizarre stories of women who had their wombs removed in order to gain the right to do 'male jobs' in heavy industries.
But Faludi's analysis was not genuinely detached and scientific, despite a huge array of quotes and source material. It was a thinly veiled propaganda piece that embodied at its core a feminist construction of a specific kind of male power. She presented patriarchy as a system of male dominance designed to cruelly diminish women's rights and to maintain male superiority and exploitation in all social realms.
In one example Faludi presents an account of the legal system in the US, suggesting that police and judges are not only against women in general, but even pregnant women:
"the punitive and vindictive treatment mothers were beginning to receive from legislators, police, prosecutors and judges in 1980's America suggests that more than simple concern for children's welfare was at work. Police loaded their subjects still bleeding from labour, into paddy wagons; prosecutors barged into maternity wards to conduct their interrogations. Judges threw pregnant women with drug problems into jail for months at a time..." (Backlash: 464.)
What Faludi happens to be describing is alcoholic and drug dependent mothers, who would rather score heroin than feed their child. For Faludi, alcoholic mothers need higher welfare cheques, not state intervention. Yet her cunning style of writing made it seem only as if judges were woman-hating barbarians.
In another example from Backlash, Faludi indicates that women are forced to conform to male defined proportions, which can only be achieved by women through painful, expensive and deadly cosmetic surgery:
"In 1989 a Florida woman died during breast enlargement surgery. While the cause, an overdose of anaesthetic, was only indirectly related to the procedure, its still fair to describe her as a backlash victim" (Backlash: 252.)
A woman who wants to look normal or better than normal and dies from an unrelated complication, becomes in Faludi's deft surgeon's hands, instead a victim of the patriarchal backlash. In fact in every instance where women seek to improve their physical appearance or attractiveness (to men) there is a backlash at work. Whether they are boyfriends, marketing men, doctors or employers, men manipulate women like puppets. Yet perhaps what we are really seeing is a relentless feminist distortion of social reality and a contempt for the idea that women think for themselves. Like most leading feminists, Faludi not only hates male power, but she despises women for liking men.
Faludi's did not, to my memory, ever display a single male in a positive light in the Backlash book. Their portrayal was of arrogant domination. In every instance where women supported the so-called backlash they were portrayed as the dupes of patriarchy. Consequently all women fell into the two categories of being either valiant martyrs of the struggle for equality or the servants of patriarchy. The overall impression was that deep down this was also the work of a bitter man-hater, with her closest psychological equivalent being Valerie Solanas, the author of SCUM (Society for the Cutting up of Men). However at the same time this book was far more significant publicly. Faludi won the Pulitzer Prize. The book and its author were treated as authoritative. She toured the world.
The book also created a political anxiety among many women that there was a patriarchal conspiracy operating to restrict their freedom and rights in society, promoting the belligerence that many young women display toward all things male.
The worm crusher that turned
Faludi made her fortune putting the boot into men and portraying women as their victims. So it may seem surprising to see her appear in 1999 with what appeared to be a bright shining new attitude. Faludi spent the time since writing her last book analysing men and what she found is not a pretty picture. Men are in crisis.
"In a culture of ornament, manhood is defined by appearance, by youth and attractiveness, by money and aggression, by posture and swagger and "props" by the curled lip and flexed biceps, by the glamour of the cover boy. No wonder men are in such agony."Source, article by Faludi: http://newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/us/so/so0111-_3.htm
"As the male role has diminished amid a sea of betrayed promises, many men have been driven to more domineering and some even "monstrous" displays in their frantic quest for a meaningful showdown."
Faludi now focuses her attention on men as victims. To reach this conspectus with a currently popular vision of men as being pervasively confused and screwed up creatures, she had to slip many of her previous feminist attitudes behind the couch.
The usual approach taken by feminists when dealing with men as victims, is to lay the blame at male feet. Feminists usually indicate that men are victims of the system that they themselves created. If they are victims, it is of their own patriarchy and therefore again, men have only themselves to blame. And yet Faludi clearly adopts a position toward men that seems positively warm and sympathetic. Men are no longer seen as inherently violent. They are violent because they have been betrayed! She claims males have been betrayed by an existing culture, which she doesn't make too much effort to define. This may seem ironic for those who have read Backlash critically.
In the Backlash book Faludi claimed forcefully that women live in a male created culture:
"...by imagining the conflict as two battalions neatly arrayed on either side of the line, we miss the entangled nature, the locked embrace, of a 'war' between women and the male culture they inhabit."
Yet now in a review of her own book she alludes to the idea that the word "patriarchy" should be put in inverted commas and that feminists had used men as an almost mythical enemy to obtain their ends.
"If men have feared to tread where women have rushed in, then maybe women have had it easier in one very simple regard: women could frame their struggle as a battle against men."
Souce, article Faludi: http://newsweek.com/nw-srv/printed/us/so/so0111-_3.htm
Is she now portraying the feminist struggle against patriarchy as just a conspiracy theory? Almost. Slippery as an eel, she extricates herself from her previous feminist convictions and reverses many of the polarities that it espoused about sexual oppression. Her new ideology is that women are largely a liberated sex and that men now occupy a level of development somewhere around the 1950s. Men now need liberation. However there is a key problem for men because men must not, or cannot, frame their liberation path as a struggle against women. According to Faludi men must not find an enemy, they must not confront anyone or anything. She even claims that the very notion of identifying an enemy and confronting HIM is a "Male strategy". George Orwell would smile from his grave if he heard Faludi's decription of "sisterhood" as a male construct!
There is an ironic intellectual dead-end to Faludi's analysis. The conditions of men that ostensibly existed in the 1950s appears to have redeeming features in Faludi's eyes and yet she condemns the unrealistic ideals of men portrayed by actors such as John Wayne. The image of male as breadwinner, absent from child rearing was a limited lifestyle occupied by men and restricted their fuller human experience. Yet she maintains that women have been liberated by feminism, clearly because of their opportunity to enter many bastions of male employment. But in a sense women have therefore come to experience life a lot more as men do and many professional women cry that they work a 60 hour week, with no time to even think of having children. If men are subject to unrealistic images of what they can be, why would we not say the same thing about women, given the additional pressures to succeed that have been put on them. In that case, why is it only men who are experiencing a crisis? Surely they were already liberated.
The dangers of Faludi
Faludi is expert in the manipulation of data, emotion and exaggeration of trends to popularise pernicious ideas. Adopting a detached academic approach to distance herself from ideas she had previously held with passionate conviction, she has now latched onto the new subject of men. Faludi has previously engaged in a grotesque distortion of the reality of female power and cultural representation. Now she has grafted her theoretical system onto the analysis of men. As her theory was a lie when it applied to women the theoretical portrayal will be equally fraudulent when applied to men. Yet cleverly she has also stepped onto one wing of this men's movement: the one that tends toward self pity and the belief in male victimhood. This is the most self destructive element of the men's movement.
There certainly is every reason to advocate that the majority of men need to develop but feminist guidelines are misleading.
Faludi's analysis of men and women is necessarily muddled, as it tries to reconcile opportunist ideological agendas and false assumptions with blinkered observations. For example Faludi's identification of men as becoming more ornamental is significant.
There is a subtle and fundamental difference between ornament and symbolism which she does not distinguish and yet which is critical.
Men are defined to a large extent by employability and so ornament is very secondary. Most men remain employable and this is not an ornamental status. Indeed male employment is now reaching record levels once again in Western economies such as the US.
Certainly many men are pretending to be something that they are not. In this respect they often take on board either objects or behaviours that might be called ornamental. The question then is: should men stop pretending, or should they try to become what they allude to in their ornament and symbolism? Such issues have been around for eons and they do not represent a new crisis. They represent a potential minor crisis for individual males.
Wont get stiffed again
When there wasn't a backlash Faludi said that there was one. Now that there is the basis for a real backlash she gets all cosy with men and takes an interest in our misfortune! What's the story?
An impression is that both men and women are slowly starting to develop a potent opposition to feminism and it is likely that feminists are seeking to address this by changing their battle plan. Initially they attacked men aggressively, but they realise that this strategy may now backfire on them. So the new tactic is the display of sympathy: we are on your side boys. We're here to help. We wish you well. The aim of this strategy is, to an extent, to mystify their true colours and to become a Trojan Horse in the 'men's movement'. So once again it will be man-haters who seek to become the main spokespersons describing the conditions of men, meaning that men will again be denied access to a means of self-obtained self awareness.
The most significant issue to highlight with the appearance of this new book on men by Faludi is her incredible capacity for opportunism. So when the opportunist knocks, we should tell her where to go.
Further reading and references on the internet:
Susan Faludi: Backlash, The Undeclared War Against Women, (Chatto & Windus, London, 1992)
isteve
waco
rightgrrl
Salon: a typical Harvard...
Rhodes scholar-Her mind is a mess
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