A review by sdbecque
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America by Susan Faludi

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.