Post-9/11 backlash

THE big striped armchair in the Russian Hill coffeehouse made Susan Faludi look even smaller than she is. It was Oct. 2, publication day for her latest book, and she was getting ready to head down the Santa Cruz coast to talk about “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America.” After that, she’d be on a plane east for the official book-tour kickoff.

Faludi herself was fine, she said, with the prospect of a month or so on the road. But when the suitcases were dragged out, her high-strung cat went into severe gastric distress, which led to a midnight visit to the veterinarian and a crash apartment cleanup.

“I’m much calmer than I was half an hour ago,” Faludi said by means of introduction in her noisy neighborhood coffeehouse, where chunks of “The Terror Dream” were written. “You can ignore the signs of stressful chaos.”

It was an awfully soft voice for a cultural lightning rod, someone who has railed vehemently in print about how women have been punished for the gains of feminism (“Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women”) and how popular culture has warped the lives of men too (“Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man”).

Now, in her latest work -- “Backlash” meets “Stiffed” and thinks about terrorism -- Faludi wonders why the nation’s response to the 2001 attacks was to retreat into a mythological framework that insists the only way for America to be safe is for men to be strong, and the only way for men to be strong is for women to be weak.

Or as she describes the combined reaction of media and government in “Terror Dream”: “Why were we willing ourselves back onto a frontier where pigtailed damsels clutched rag dolls and prayed for a male avenger to return them to the home?”

Those are fighting words -- at least they will be for some, written by a slender 48-year-old who could barely be heard above the whir of the coffee grinders, the scrape of chairs and the wail of Norah Jones from the stereo.

Edith B. Gelles, her good friend and a Colonial historian at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, called this the “dissonance” of Susan Faludi.

“Her whole persona is a very gentle self,” said Gelles. “It contrasts very greatly with the ferocity of her writing.”

And “Terror Dream” is ferocious indeed, 296 pages plus copious footnotes that point out the more absurd responses to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, particularly in the media.

Faludi was cautiously optimistic last week about “Terror Dream’s” reception. Early reviewers “really got the book, which was gratifying,” she said. “Sometimes you get a good review and you say, ‘Oh, well, that’s nice. But they didn’t really understand what I was trying to say.’ ”

Her sense was that, “if it came out a couple of years ago, it would have encountered a wall of hostility,” she said. “But things have changed so much. . . . The American electorate is very unhappy about the place we’re in and open to taking a new path.”

On second thought, she was suddenly superstitious about the early good news. “Just by saying this, I’ll probably be viciously attacked in the next month.”

In fact, some of the early adulation has already begun to give way to thoughtful quibbling. What about the other feminist voices that cropped up after the terrorist attacks, asked one reviewer in Salon.com.

LATimes.com columnist Tim Cavanaugh groused that “Terror Dream” “fails in its central project of proving that the hysterical reaction to 9/11 was about rebuilding a traditional American myth of male strength and female helplessness.”

Gelles, for one, said she is not surprised. The book, she said, “is going to be highly controversial. What is it that’s said about any good idea? First there’s disparagement, then discussion and finally it’s taken for granted.”

It will likely be a while before Faludi’s ideas are taken for granted, as readers digest “Terror Dream’s” basic premise about the failure of government and the media in the wake of the 2001 attacks.

Women commentators disappeared from news shows and opinion pages, Faludi writes. People magazine and “Primetime Live” duked it out to see which could gather together the most babies born of fathers who died on Sept. 11 for feature stories with their lonely mothers.

There were baseless trend pieces about women rushing to the altar so they’d have someone to call on their cellphones if terrorists hijacked their planes and about post-attack baby booms that never materialized.

“What I’m criticizing in the book is not that normal, human, emotional and healthy response, but the way that it got harnessed by popular culture,” Faludi said, “by the media, by the political culture, so that wanting to be near good friends gets translated into wanting to get married and have a big man to protect you.”

Faludi heaps particular scorn upon the story of Jessica Lynch, the young West Virginia soldier who was injured in Iraq when her convoy was ambushed. “The story of a helpless white girl snatched from the jaws of evil by heroic soldiers was the story everybody wanted,” Faludi wrote.

But in truth, “the story fell uncomfortably outside of the girl-in-need-of-rescue script.”

Which brings Faludi to the last third of the book, an effort to use history to explain the painful present.

Faludi argues that the nation’s response to 9/11 was to revert to our earliest foundational myth -- “about the big brave cowboy protecting the helpless woman of the prairie.”

Only it didn’t really happen that way.

“If you read the accounts of the captivity narratives -- women in particular being taken captive -- what you read over and over again,” she said, “are accounts of men . . . failing to protect frontier towns in ways that sometimes uncannily ring a bell with 9/11.”

To feminist commentator Katha Pollitt, one of the greatest strengths of “Terror Dream” is that it “opens up the feminist conversation to larger questions” beyond the mainstream media’s obsession with work-family balance and “issues of whether girls wear short skirts and do they sleep with too many men.”

Faludi’s book is “a very important wake-up call to voters about the risks of getting caught up in a kind of war-like fearfulness,” Pollitt said. “That was what happened after 9/11, and pretty soon we were involved in two wars.”

Jennifer Terry, chair and professor of women’s studies at UC Irvine, lauded Faludi for bringing into the mainstream discussions that have been going on in academic circles since the terrorist attacks.

“She adds to it her own intelligence,” she said. “She’s doing a very important work.”

But Terry wonders whether Faludi focuses too tightly on a single myth and ignores its contradictions, chief among them the fact that there is “a growing number of women in the United States associated with empire expansion, war, militarism and security.”

Just think Condoleezza Rice or Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In fact, Faludi said she finds Clinton and the entire Democratic slate “encouraging” because they’re not part of “that cowboy, go-it-alone . . . lone ranger mentality” that has characterized the Bush administration for so many years. And the electorate is increasingly receptive.

“I also don’t think that Hillary Clinton is changing the paradigm simply because she is a woman, or because she is biologically different or more morally superior or more daintily sensitive,” Faludi said.

“If she changes the paradigm away from ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ and ‘evil-doers-versus-good-guys,’ it’s because she’s for years now in the Senate shown that she can work both sides of the aisle, focuses on the facts . . . and is able even to work with the very people who [worked] to impeach her husband.”

Faludi, who lives with longtime “beau,” writer Russ Rhymer, was born in Queens and graduated from Harvard in 1981. She wrote for the San Jose Mercury News and the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau and won the Pulitzer Prize for a 1990 article about Safeway Stores’ leveraged buyout and its effect on laid-off workers.

And although the New Yorker in her often wonders why she’s here in California, Faludi said, she has her own personal “mythological thinking about women and the West.”

“Coming west for me, anyway, and for a lot of women I know, feels a little bit like throwing off some shackles of East Coast roles,” she said. “There’s somewhat more freedom to develop your ideas in directions that are outside the conventional wisdom.”

In fact, she falls into a healthy tradition. Susan Sontag grew up in Arizona and Southern California, Joan Didion in the Sacramento Valley. Pauline Kael worked at Pacifica Radio. .

“Every once in a while, I think I want to write a history of women of the West,” Faludi said. After all, “there were women running newspapers in San Francisco in the 19th century.”

maria.laganga@latimes.com