Scan barcode
showlola's review against another edition
5.0
This is the best thing I've read all year. Faludi's style is informational but compelling, so don't look for a ton of conversational style or intense slice of life pieces. Instead she piles on the facts, making for a weighty argument that feels completely fresh and previously unexplored.
The last third of the book is a movement in tone, as it focuses mostly on tying historical themes to the War on Terror. Its still really interesting, but it does feel like she's squeezing a lot in to one book. Still, totally satisfying, eye-opening read.
The last third of the book is a movement in tone, as it focuses mostly on tying historical themes to the War on Terror. Its still really interesting, but it does feel like she's squeezing a lot in to one book. Still, totally satisfying, eye-opening read.
gregbrown's review against another edition
5.0
An astonishingly informative and intelligent and relentless book, albeit one that really changes gears about two-thirds through. The book starts by dissecting the shift in post-9/11 discourse as the media—unable to track down Bin Laden, explain how or why it happened, or find any emotional closure—reverted back to a traditional narrative of women being in danger and men charging in to save them and sacrifice themselves. This doesn't sound all that dangerous, until Faludi goes into incredible and horrific detail about the ways media narratives shifted and bowdlerized themselves to fit this narrative and exalt older ideas of masculinity while reducing females.
We'd expect this kind of behavior from some of the media figures like Mark Steyn and The New York Post. And others, like Christopher Hitchens (and, unmentioned in the book, Orson Scott Card and Dan Simmons), were sort of pushed over the edge into a neoconservative lunacy by having to mentally grapple with the attack. But you wouldn't expect this kind of talk from Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter, in charge of a magazine whose purpose is largely to be as boring as possible. Yet he did go there, and quite a few other mainstream commentators did too.
This trend didn't just end with the invasion of Afghanistan and other cathartic measures, continuing up to and through the 2004 presidential election. Faludi even devotes a whole chapter to the story of Jessica Lynch, a damsel-in-distress myth largely concocted up by this asshole but eagerly lapped up and perpetuated by a compliant media. As someone who was 15 when the September 11th attacks happened, this first section of the book was frustrating beyond belief as I confronted my own inability—albeit in high school—to see through these narratives as they were built. And it drives me crazy that they continue to this day (listening to this audio).
The last third of the book almost feels bolted on at first: a historical accounting of how the damsel-in-distress myth became entangled with American identity during the wars with Native Americans. Some of the earliest American works of literature were captivity narratives, the stories of people captured by Native Americans who eventually—through escape, ransom, or armed attack—were able to rejoin their original societies. But while the earliest featured earnest accounts of female ingenuity, they gradually turned into virginal women unable to cope with their vicious captors, only able to hold on long enough for their heroic men to ride in and rescue them. Even real-life captivity narratives that didn't fit this trend were often fictionalized a few years later with few changes outside of diminishing the role of women and changing the names around slightly. Faludi also traces how this narrative slowly metastasized throughout larger and larger circles of American culture, first in the Salem Witch Trials—which she convincingly recasts as a means to terrify independent women—and later in the postbellum south's captivity stories that substituted black men for the original's indian savages.
This last section is different in both sweep and method from the first two-thirds, and doesn't have the sense of urgency and necessity as a critique of our own times. It leads me to believe that this book was originally written differently, with the historical stuff preceding the media criticism. I imagine Faludi (or her editor) rearranged the book to grip the reader faster—or emphasize the present-day narrative to sell more copies. Either way, I think this book would be much more effective reading the last third before everything else, as it seems to lead up to and contextualize Faludi's far more devastating fact-gathering on the present day. My fiancee is even about to read through the book for the first time in that fashion, and will report back whether it really seems to cohere in that sense.
Either way, this is a fantastic book that deserves to be read by everyone, whether you're truly interested in the sociological and historical aspects of this narrative or simply interested in being a good person who is thoughtful about what you say..
We'd expect this kind of behavior from some of the media figures like Mark Steyn and The New York Post. And others, like Christopher Hitchens (and, unmentioned in the book, Orson Scott Card and Dan Simmons), were sort of pushed over the edge into a neoconservative lunacy by having to mentally grapple with the attack. But you wouldn't expect this kind of talk from Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter, in charge of a magazine whose purpose is largely to be as boring as possible. Yet he did go there, and quite a few other mainstream commentators did too.
This trend didn't just end with the invasion of Afghanistan and other cathartic measures, continuing up to and through the 2004 presidential election. Faludi even devotes a whole chapter to the story of Jessica Lynch, a damsel-in-distress myth largely concocted up by this asshole but eagerly lapped up and perpetuated by a compliant media. As someone who was 15 when the September 11th attacks happened, this first section of the book was frustrating beyond belief as I confronted my own inability—albeit in high school—to see through these narratives as they were built. And it drives me crazy that they continue to this day (listening to this audio).
The last third of the book almost feels bolted on at first: a historical accounting of how the damsel-in-distress myth became entangled with American identity during the wars with Native Americans. Some of the earliest American works of literature were captivity narratives, the stories of people captured by Native Americans who eventually—through escape, ransom, or armed attack—were able to rejoin their original societies. But while the earliest featured earnest accounts of female ingenuity, they gradually turned into virginal women unable to cope with their vicious captors, only able to hold on long enough for their heroic men to ride in and rescue them. Even real-life captivity narratives that didn't fit this trend were often fictionalized a few years later with few changes outside of diminishing the role of women and changing the names around slightly. Faludi also traces how this narrative slowly metastasized throughout larger and larger circles of American culture, first in the Salem Witch Trials—which she convincingly recasts as a means to terrify independent women—and later in the postbellum south's captivity stories that substituted black men for the original's indian savages.
This last section is different in both sweep and method from the first two-thirds, and doesn't have the sense of urgency and necessity as a critique of our own times. It leads me to believe that this book was originally written differently, with the historical stuff preceding the media criticism. I imagine Faludi (or her editor) rearranged the book to grip the reader faster—or emphasize the present-day narrative to sell more copies. Either way, I think this book would be much more effective reading the last third before everything else, as it seems to lead up to and contextualize Faludi's far more devastating fact-gathering on the present day. My fiancee is even about to read through the book for the first time in that fashion, and will report back whether it really seems to cohere in that sense.
Either way, this is a fantastic book that deserves to be read by everyone, whether you're truly interested in the sociological and historical aspects of this narrative or simply interested in being a good person who is thoughtful about what you say..
niamhsquared's review against another edition
4.0
The analysis of 9/11 is excellent, thorough and insightful. There is, however, a bit about Native Americans that I neither agreed with nor felt was particularly relevant or interesting.
dkeane2007's review against another edition
3.0
I love her analysis of current events and how she pulls separate events together. But I didn't find the historical section very interesting.
sdbecque's review
4.0
Let it be known, Susan Faludi can mother-fucking write. I happen to think this book works best if read after her also amazing [b:Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man|200884|Stiffed The Betrayal of the American Man|Susan Faludi|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1402713826s/200884.jpg|969699] which showcases the crisis of American Masculinity that's also on display in the "Terror Dream." But I think it could also be read on it's own.
She begins the book by carefully documenting the response to 9/11 on several fronts, but specifically gendered. The silencing of female voices, discussing the tragedy in terms of "the end of feminism" or blaming feminism for the attacks themselves, the valorizing of certain male voices, the invocation of John Wayne and Daniel Boone, the dismissal of any women who attempted to counter their own narratives, and finally the 'rescue' of Jessica Lynch. Many of the events she describes here I remembered, but it's been awhile, so this point by point reconstruction of the period directly following the attack is useful.
In one of my favorite bits, Faludi documents how mass media sources claimed that one response to the attack would be women (especially those who had not had children previously) would now be having desperate sex for children in the days following 9/11. They were so convinced that this would be the female response, the they predicted a "baby boomlet" nine months after the attacks. They then camped out at hospital waiting rooms waiting for the births to come, and they never did. Because they had made it up, or based it on the response of one or two women, and then expected their own pontificating it to be true.
After setting up all of the responses, Faludi then moves into her larger point - "The heroic ideal of the knight in shining armor and his damsel in distress is, of course, common to all cultures. But the monomyth assumes a particular shape and plays a particular role in American life. After all, the British didn’t invoke Lancelot or invent a Guinevere to weather the trauma of the terrorist bombing of London’s mass transit in 2005. Nor did the Spanish reenact the chivalric romance of Amadis and Oriana after the 2004 Madrid train attack. America’s wilderness history has given that hoary ideal a complexion and prominence it enjoys nowhere else. At pivotal moments in our cultural life extending back to the Puritans - moments when America was faced with a core crisis - we restored our faith in our own invincibility through fables of female peril and the rescue of ‘just one girl.’ Jessica Lynch had a legion of historical sisters.
We create a whole culture based on male strength and female weakness that provides the need for 'female' rescue, especially from rape, which will shore up male strength. Naturally, Faludi documents the falsity and ridiculousness of this whole enterprise. If you're still reading my rambling at this point, you should probably just read the book. Or read "Stiffed." Seriously.
More...