Terrorism’s effect

Thank you for the article on Susan Faludi’s new book, “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America” [“Post-9/11 Backlash,” by Maria L. La Ganga, Oct. 9].

I especially appreciated the characterization of Faludi as, “Her whole persona is a very gentle self.”

Often, it is the gentlest among us who rail most strongly for truth, and against injustice and inequity.

Jeanine D’Elia

Granada Hills

The trend Faludi decries (machismo taking over in violent times) has been the way of the world for years, and will be in the future. I fear it may simply be common sense she laments and the role she (as a woman) is offered in a fearful environment.

Rightly or wrongly, both genders adjust their roles in violent times and places.

Whether men can actually protect women effectively is immaterial; women do tend to think men can protect them (from physical harm) better than other women can -- and the frontier women in pigtails she mocks have their 2007 equivalents in Darfur, Algeria and the housing projects of Paris.

In places that are constantly violent, where the crime rate is higher than, say, San Francisco’s Russian Hill (ghettos, trailer parks, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Iraq), feminism is but a quaint notion from another world. And the women-folk tend to gravitate (rightly, wrongly) to what is perceived as strength.

Only a white, educated, Western woman could have Susan Faludi’s perspective -- and it’s a relatively privileged, exclusionary one.

God bless her, but she is so not of the people.

Drew Weaver

San Clemente