Oh man, this book looks good. A lot of people didn’t like Stiffed, possibly because it had a “what about the MENZ” theme when women are still the primary victims of the patriarchy, but I thought Faludi was prescient, that she picked up on a forming masculinity crisis that would, in the next few years, really come to fruition and be seen finally as the important issue that it was. In the book, she covered the swaggering, wistful, put-on masculinity that resulted in a rape gang in Lakewood, California, and managed to spell out a lot of the tensions that would become the hyper-entitled masculine culture of “Girls Gone Wild” (which conservatives blame on the girls, of course, but feminists are increasingly realizing is about the boys involved in the videos and the party scenes at which they’re and their sense that they are entitled to demand that girls humiliate themselves for their approval, and how the girls often feel that choosing otherwise might not be a realistic option).
Anyway, my point is that my respect for Faludi’s judgment was strengthened by Stiffed, and this review by Rebecca Traister of her new book The Terror Dream makes me really excited to read it. The book is about how the country responded to the horror of 9/11 in no small part by lashing out at women and telling itself untenable fairy stories about masculine bravery and courage. The urge to be skeptical immediately strikes—it’s so silly to involve feminist analysis in stories of war and terror!—but now that conservatives who found solace in their masculine dominance fantasies are watching their ideas of how to handle terrorism crumble before them, and their reactions are quiet telling:
Yep, they retreat even further. When Jerry Falwell blamed various traitors to the patriarchy—and that’s what his litany (abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians, the ACLU, People for the American Way, and pagans) was mainly about, his interest in traditional and stifling gender roles—people were rightly in an uproar. But he put his finger on exactly how the blame game would play out after the fact. And now that the reactionaries who got Bush re-elected in 2004 by convincing the country that cock-waving would save us from terrorism are being proven dreadfully wrong, they’re just waving their cocks even harder and looking more and more pathetic, as that screenshot from Protein Wisdom demonstrates.
Faludi apparently had evidence from the beginning that 9/11 was going to end up being an excuse to kick the bitches back into the kitchen, when the phone calls began to come in.
Before the end of the day she has received the phone call that provides her book with its foundation myth: A reporter asks for her reaction to the tragedies, crowing to Faludi, “Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!”
I’m reminded of Jessica’s witty refrain: “If feminism is already dead–why try so hard to kill it?” If feminism is concern easily pushed aside, then why does the reporter even mention it? I find unimportant stuff too unimportant to even mention. I’d add that it gives fuel to the fire of suspicion around the liberal internets that the big boy media outlets like the NY Times have it out for women.
In reality, it seems to me that the backlash against women post-9/11 that Faludi chronicles reinvigorated feminism, which brings to mind another witty rejoinder: “I’ll be post-feminist in a post-patriarchy”. Feminism is as relevant as sexism, which is something that people who try to bury it don’t get. Feminists want feminism to lose its immediacy through honest means—feminism retreats because it’s not necessary anymore. Bringing the hammer down on women, curtailing women’s rights, even Chris Matthews having his daily breakdowns over the possibility of a female President, all these things hurt women but therefore give feminism a reason to exist. Thus is the paradox that those who wish to bury feminism must wrangle with.
I’m currently reading Deborah Siegel’s Sisterhood, Interrupted, and I’ll have a fuller post on it hopefully tonight, but the one thing that strikes me about it is how distant I feel from the rather alarming wars between 3rd and 2nd wavers in the 90s . I mean, I get the tensions—they still exist and flare up all over the feminist blogs, even though the notion that they’re generational turns out to be highly overrated, and age isn’t a good indicator of where women will stand on certain issues–but the amount of hostility blows my mind. Family members quit speaking to each other, and over stuff that is, in the feminist pantheon of issues, only 4th tier in importance. I can’t say what changed—maybe 3rd wavers won out. Maybe 3rd wavers wised up and quit making false generalizations about 2nd wavers. Or maybe we live in an era where 1st tier issues, like reproductive rights, are under full-scale assault and we find that arguing over 4th tier issues, while an interesting diversion, shouldn’t affect solidarity. I suspect a combination.
50 Responses to “Zombie feminism”
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I know I sound like a broken record, but…
One of the biggest mistakes a man can make is to blame women for the way that a capitalist patriarchy fucks up everybody in the culture. Feminism as an egalitarian principle stands to benefit everybody. It is one of the reasons why the metaculture hates feminism: it plays a key role in getting everybody to think about gross and mandatory inequality. People at the apex of the apex stay there because they can distract men from how badly screwed over they are by lying to them that women are screwing them over.
I would like to read most of books, mentioned on this blog. Unfortunately, they aren’t in the local library.
Amanda, unfortunately I joined the discussion on “I burned my bra and saved my marriage” too late. Can you answer 2 questions I asked you there, please? My comment is number 109. [The second question was whether you would ever write about MSN again].
elanor_x — Does your library do ILL (interlibrary loan)? Cause then you can borrow the books from other libraries.
“…but feminists are increasingly realizing is about the boys involved in the videos and the party scenes at which they’re and their sense that they are entitled to demand…”
Amanda….get some coffee this morning GEEZ!!!!
I haven’t read the book yet but I read Traister’s review and it made me look forward to reading the book and finding out if I think Faludi is overly pessimistic.
I certainly noticed the male dominance arguments increasing right after 9/11, together with a drop in female commentary in much of the mainstream media. But my impression is that the push to cancel feminism didn’t last quite as long as Faludi may be saying. And of course there are now all these feminist blogs which didn’t exist then.
It does sound like an interesting book, but not an entirely shocking premise. It’s the same sort of thing that Nice Guys do by blaming women for their lack of dates instead of admitting that they’re too boring/ugly/whatever to get a date, but writ large on a geopolitical scale.
the parties at which they’re
At first reading that bothered me too, but now I rather like it. Never saw a a contraction used that way, but it’s actually a deft distillation of “the parties at which they are.”
Sure beats “the parties they’re at.”
Well the modern political theory on the progressive side is that everything affects everything else, that no issue is an island and that everything is interconected, so that this applies to feminism as a whole as well isn’t that surprising, or at least it shouldn’t be.
Oh, the irony. I thought one of the big problems with the Taliban and the thing that fuels the growing “Islamofascist threat” was how they treated their womenfolk.
Sorry to ask someone else to do my research for me, but is there a good list of those “tiers” of feminist issues?
telling itself untenable fairy stories about masculine bravery and courage. The urge to be skeptical immediately strikes—it’s so silly to involve feminist analysis in stories of war and terror!—
Go read the following account of how men glorify themselves and destroy the lives of women in war. Feminist analysis of this is not silly, it’s critical:
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=332
I am really interested in this book. Nesting is a huge issue up here where I live now, I guess after Sept. 11th, a bunch of New Yorkers moved up here to have babies and drove up the cost of living in an area that is actually pretty impoverished. Now they’re starting to move back (just in time for us to move up here to not-nest), which is probably going to register at least a 4.2 on the already fragile economy.
Roxanne, the American Taliban only opposes the way they treat their women because they’re envious of the success they’ve had at it.
It might be very interesting to read Faludi’s book alongside Robin Morgan’s “Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism.” She has a great analysis about the patriarchal attitudes and violence against women that are widespread in terrorist sub-cultures. Cock-waving abounds.
Could it be — gasp — that the terra-ists and the goodguys(TM) are really just fighting about who gets to oppress the womens and homos?
I have a lovely hardbound of Clarke’s terrific Jonathan Strange I’ll send you.
[got a fiction block just now, so hardly read]
The boss has my address.
This is a salient point. I think anti-feminists understand it on some level, because they love to jump on the meme that “sexism doesn’t exist anymore, men and women are equal, so you can shut up already. I said shut UP!”
Peripherally, why are conservatives so much better at mocking Islam than we are? It’s not as though mocking Islam is any less important than mocking Christianity, which is an extensively developed art form.
I was somewhat disappointed by Stiffed, not because of its focus on men (which I agree, Amanda, was potentially rich) but because it was overly long and seemed not to know its own strengths. I had really been looking forward to the book after reading Faludi’s articles on the Citadel and men in the porn industry that appeared beforehand in (I think) The New Yorker. But IMO Stiffed ended up being less than the sum of its parts.
One thing I really liked about the book was its (implicit) critique, a bit underplayed by Faludi, of the hagiography of the men of the “Greatest Generation,” who come off in Faludi’s book as wounded and inadequate, especially as fathers.
I should say that Faludi visited my campus right after Stiffed came out. She was extraordinarily generous with her time. Many of my students felt incredibly energized by her visit.
Sorry to ask someone else to do my research for me, but is there a good list of those “tiers” of feminist issues?
No, because if you actually tried to do it, people would spend all their time squabbling over minutia. But what I find interesting is that people do things like pit Susie Bright against Andrea Dworkin (Susie does it herself) and what gets lost is that those two have far more in common than not, politically. Both pro-choice, both economically far to the left, both anti-violence, etc. Hell, they both believe you can tell a lot about a culture’s sociopolitical tensions by examining its porn. They are divided on tactics more than meaning, but that gets blown way out of proportion.
Anyway, I’d categorize the most important issues as: reproductive rights, pay equity, expanding the social safety net, mainstreaming mothers and women of color, fighting violence against women, etc. I’d suggest that the debate over whether or not reclaiming words like “bitch” is possible is a minor issue compared to the biggies.
They don’t have the book in any of the Aiken-Bamberg-Barnwell-Edgefield Regional libraries.
Abortion is the most important issue to me. The anti-choice has been trying for the last 34.75 years to make sure that all of you “uppity bitches” go back into the kitchen. We must stop the anti-choice at all costs. Failure is not an option.
Definitely check out Faludi’s column in the Sept-7 NYTimes. Fully brilliant.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/opinion/07faludi.html
…and…to get Freudian, when sex in our culture is reduced to penetration and ejaculation on the part of the male, and women are just objects to receive, the prognosis is very, very, bad.
I have a friend who works as an English teacher in Eastern Kentucky where the libraries consider Stephen King great literature and her library is part of a larger book borrowing network (in other words, she gets books from Lexington and Louisville). She has developed a good relationship with a local librarian who helps her get whatever she wants. I’m not saying that this option is available everywhere (and Eastern Kentucky is particularly poor, so we have a Gates Foundation grant that helps out with library services), but perhaps if you cultivated a relationship with one of the librarians, he/she might be able to swing it for you, Jovan 1984.
Regarding Faludi’s latest book, I’m going to read it. I’m particularly interested in the development section that talks about abduction narratives (Rowlandson, etc) and invasion–how she reads our collective tea leaves as a matter of national DNA. I’m not sure that I buy it, particularly since Rowlandson was very compassionate when later writing about her captivity (proto-Stockholm Syndrome or perhaps a realization of our status as the invader?). Anyway, though I think finding collective mythos and self-identity through that myth-making process resonant and interesting, I also think that it fails to provide for a variety of interpretations (kind of like X-ian Fundies who can only read the Gospels and get the concept that Jesus died for “our sins” and not all the other stuff about justice and concern for the poor and oppressed).
Peace
It is for *us*. Mockery *must* begin at home, otherwise it’s bigotry.You get to mock your own culture. You *must* mock — or at least acknowledge the bad, silly, arbitrary, or stupid aspects — your own culture. Once you’ve got a track record for mocking your own culture, you *might* — maybe — get a pass to mock someone else’s culture. But the chances are you won’t be very good at it, because only those really inside the culture know the most mockable bits.
Salman Rushdie gets to mock Islam. Madonna gets to mock Christianity. Rushdie may be cross-cultural enough to get a Christianity-mocking license, but Madonna doesn’t get to mock Islam because it’s not part of her psyche.
Here’s another way to put it: humor that is directed at the Other is an ingroup/outgroup marker, it gets us in the habit of being divisive and cruel. Humor that is directed at the *self*, at the ingroup, can be a road to self-understanding, to becoming *less* cruel.
Another other way to put it: Islamic culture helped shape Rushdie, and that means a small part of it belongs to him. Catholicism helped shape Madonna, and so part of it belongs to her. The culture in your head is *yours*, and you get to do whatever you want with it — including mock it.
Amanda, that is a rather brilliant connection you’ve made here - between Faludi’s stiffed and our current experiment in semi-fascism.
It is a big puzzle, in a sense, why a war as unpopular as the Iraq war continues, unabated, with the Democrats acting either as handwringers or abettors. After all, the core 15 percent of the superhawks are never going to be Democrats. They will never vote for democrats. They have pretty much established their independent outlets, like Fox, and they will keep going as they are going. So what is their power?
Surely it has to do with the fact that this 15% is composed, mostly, of highend white males. And - surprise - the decision makers in both parties are either high end white males or those who have gone through the rite de passage and become honorary members. It strikes me that the Blackwater massacre and its aftermath gives us an excellent x ray of the rabid testosterone that rules us. From the Washington Post editorial that tutted and came to the conclusion that we, after all, still need Blackwater - heavens, let’s not let go of our mercenaries! - to the John Edward’s pitch that he is going to, all so toughly, regulate our mercenaries (not, of course, fire them or - beyond the beyond in the current discourse) investigate them under the RICO act and have murder charges filed as appropriate) - we live in that group’s dire spell. And dire it is - as they become more inbred, they become more illogical, and - counter-intuitively - more powerful. The constant lament on the liberal side that such and such an action will look bad to Bill O’Reilly, or feed the myth of backstabbing - as if one should care - are about the reality, which is where the power is held, and what it is taboo to attack.
I liked Stiffed partly because it showed what happens when a group strangles its moral imagination and taboos any instrument that would incite it to think - opting, instead, for a primitive, action movie view of the world which feeds into the rage and frustration, as such a view is undone by its own contradictions, as well as its irreality.
And it does look like things are going to get much worse before - one hopes - they get better. In some ways we owe Rove and Bush our thanks, for inadvertantly exposing how sick this society is, from the top to … well, the top.
Oops, this seems to have been swallowed. Apologies if I am simply doubling a comment that will eventually appear.
Amanda, that is a rather brilliant connection you’ve made here - between Faludi’s stiffed and our current experiment in semi-fascism.
It is a big puzzle, in a sense, why a war as unpopular as the Iraq war continues, unabated, with the Democrats acting either as handwringers or abettors. After all, the core 15 percent of the superhawks are never going to be Democrats. They will never vote for democrats. They have pretty much established their independent outlets, like Fox, and they will keep going as they are going. So what is their power?
Surely it has to do with the fact that this 15% is composed, mostly, of highend white males. And - surprise - the decision makers in both parties are either high end white males or those who have gone through the rite de passage and become honorary members. It strikes me that the Blackwater massacre and its aftermath gives us an excellent x ray of the rabid testosterone that rules us. From the Washington Post editorial that tutted and came to the conclusion that we, after all, still need Blackwater - heavens, let’s not let go of our mercenaries! - to the John Edward’s pitch that he is going to, all so toughly, regulate our mercenaries (not, of course, fire them or - beyond the beyond in the current discourse) investigate them under the RICO act and have murder charges filed as appropriate) - we live in that group’s dire spell. And dire it is - as they become more inbred, they become more illogical, and - counter-intuitively - more powerful. The constant lament on the liberal side that such and such an action will look bad to Bill O’Reilly, or feed the myth of backstabbing - as if one should care - are about the reality, which is where the power is held, and what it is taboo to attack.
I liked Stiffed partly because it showed what happens when a group strangles its moral imagination and taboos any instrument that would incite it to think - opting, instead, for a primitive, action movie view of the world which feeds into the rage and frustration, as such a view is undone by its own contradictions, as well as its irreality.
And it does look like things are going to get much worse before - one hopes - they get better. In some ways we owe Rove and Bush our thanks, for inadvertantly exposing how sick this society is, from the top to … well, the top.
If you’re stuck in an area with bad interlibrary loans and no used bookstores, don’t forget the alibris option, which hooks sellers of used books up with buyers. They have “Jonathan Strange” starting at $1.99 plus shipping, so you could probably get it for under $6.
Before the end of the day she has received the phone call that provides her book with its foundation myth: A reporter asks for her reaction to the tragedies, crowing to Faludi, “Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!”
Really, Mr. reporter? Because I could make a case that the brutality of AQ & the Taliban represent right-wing religious misogyny taken to its logical conclusion, while reminding everyone that western feminist groups sounded warnings about them for years before anyone had heard of Khobar Towers or the USS Cole. But that discussion would lead to places which would make American right wingers very uncomfortable, so we’re not going to have it. At least not in our media.
Roxanne, the American Taliban only opposes the way they treat their women because they’re envious of the success they’ve had at it.
SarahMC, exactly. The important thing is having women crushed by the correct set of religious tenets.
Thanks Amanda. I wasn’t sure if that was rhetorical or a specific reference.
Incidentally, there’s also an enlightening discussion of the Lakewood CA incident in Joan Didion’s Where I Was From.
For folks looking for hard-to-find books, there’s always Paperback swap.
Stiffed really is a brilliant, insightful book.
I was going to make the same point as Sour Kraut, Tyrant of Tuna. Since I can’t, I’m going to accuse him or her of being a terrorist who hates America. Sour Kraut, you are a terrorist who hates America.
Zombie feminism - that means you read some tripe and desperately cry for MORE BRAINS!
Surely it has to do with the fact that this 15% is composed, mostly, of highend white males.
High end? Oh my! Down Senator Widestance, Down Boy!
To those of you with problems finding these books in your local libraries, you should definitely talk to a librarian, and not only because she/he might be able to wrangle a copy for you. It’s important to let librarians know what books you want. Keep making requests - you can influence what the library buys.
I’m currently reading Deborah Siegel’s Sisterhood, Interrupted, and I’ll have a fuller post on it hopefully tonight,
Haven’t heard of this book, looking forward to your thoughts. How would you classify the author? (2nd or 3rd wave?) Read the Amazon description and it sounds very interesting.
Doctor Science: “It is for *us*. Mockery *must* begin at home, otherwise it’s bigotry.”
I disagree. The only difference between mockery and bigotry is whether the criticism is fair or not. I can mock a foreign culture fairly or unfairly just as easily as I can mock my own. And I don’t need a track record of self-mockery before I can go out and point out stupidity elsewhere. The hypocrite and the self-aware both have eyes and brains. And bigots can see truth on occasion, whether we want to admit it or not.
The question is, what to do when the bigots have a point?
The question is, what to do when the bigots have a point?
There’s no shame in accepting a point of fact. The question is about relevancy and policy issues.
There’s no problem in saying fundamentalist Islam is violently anti-gay and anti-woman. But even if I accept that point, that dosen’t mean that the solution is to bomb Iran For Freedom. The sectarian violence in Iraq is evidence against the effectiveness of this sort of action: Women who were relatively free are now caught in the crossfire of fundamentalist resurgence and sectarian violence.
It also doesn’t mean that Islam is any more incomparable with liberalism than any other religion. I’ve met women who are observant Muslims, but are as free as any other woman you’d see in North America.
For me at least, the risk here in North America (In my case, Canada) is not from Islamic influence. I’m far more likely to be beaten up by a pair of white Christian rednecks for looking gay than I am likely to be harmed by a Muslim for any reason. Either way, the solution here is goiung to be the seperation of church and state. I don’t know what the solution for the Middle east would be, but I think we can agree that high explosives are not on that list.
jon said:
No, you can’t. Pretty much by definition, you don’t understand a foreign culture as well as you do your own, because you haven’t lived what you’re talking about.
And you’re completely overlooking the *function* of mockery & humor to mark ingroup/outgroup boundaries.
This is nonsense. Bigotry is about exclusion — the content is almost irrelevant. (see: the whole insert-the-ethnic-group-of-your-choice-here class of jokes.) Mockery *can* exclude, but it doesn’t have to.Y’all, Doctor Science is right about mockery. Listen to Doctor Science. If you don’t, you’re probably an asshole.
Also, the book was just published on Tuesday. You might give your libraries time to get it in before you freak out.
P.S.—Here’s the current sitch in Nashvegas:
I think a very brief view of a culture can be enough to fairly mock it. And it can lead to bigotry as well. In fact, the less that is known, the more likely it is to be bigotry. But my point was that even bigots can point out the unhappy truths in other cultures as well as their own. If, to use an easy stereotype, a black activist comedian/pudding-pop pusher decries the fact that many young blacks don’t take school seriously, it may be in the form of mockery. If a white supremacist says many blacks don’t want to learn, it’s more than likely to be in the form of outright bigotry. But they might be seeing the exact same facts.
Bigotry is more than about exclusion. It is about being pig-headed when the facts don’t fit the preconceived notions. Bigots may have their blinders on when examining themselves, but they have the ease of hypocrites when examining other cultures. That’s why they are so dangerously self-assured, and why their ideologies are so simplistic. They have a simple solution to complex political situations, they can sum up their ideology on bumper stickers, and they never have to deal with a pesky unfavorable fact.
Which is not to say they can’t be right now and then. The problem is, how to confront people you agree with about the problems when they are completely fucked up when it comes to solutions? I think the left has been hammered over and over regarding many issues while the right has framed debates, issues, and policies around fear and tradition. Whether it’s feminism, Iraq, healthcare, or Britney’s dancing skills, the right has framed too many debates on their own terms. I don’t know how to get past the framing, but I would suggest that the left stop getting so angry about minutia and get on with the notion that the enemy isn’t those who only agree with 80% of our core beliefs (Clinton v. Nader, Kucinich v. Obama) but those who agree with only 40% (Edwards v. Brownback, or Obama v. McCain.)
And that’s my grossly-inflated two cents.
Thank you, has_te. Jonathan Strange is one of the few books that are in the library & I am planning to take it in the nearest future. I meant books about feminism, like Sisterhood, Interrupted, Stiffed, Full frontal feminism(?), etc.
If anybody had and agreed to send to my email, I would be very grateful. (I live in Israel.)
Jon, sometimes, I think my only real contribution to the comments here is to rephrase someone else’s post because it’s clear other people didn’t see the point that someone was making.
I don’t see the point you’re making. I can’t even tell if you have a point, or were just starting out by feeling bad about how Islamic countries treat women and then wandering into other ideas completely tangentially.
You do know the left has a longer history of criticizing the Taliban than the right wing, right? Just because we don’t usually mock (and mocking is even different than making jokes about– it is taunting, othering, and therefore not used in mainstream media), doesn’t mean we don’t criticize. But how well would mockery work for criticism of another culture? Turning someone’s exact phrases against them doesn’t work well if you are working off a translation of what they said. Dialect, a useful device in humor, becomes offensive if used for an oppressed or significantly different group. It isn’t even really clever if comedians go outside their regional group in mockery; Amanda can mock Texans. I kind of can’t because there’s too much tendency for Blue states to denigrate Red states. I can, however, *criticize* Texas, complaining about how fewer worker’s rights and looser pollution laws mean that bad-intentioned corporations pick up and move there, leaving *both* states worse off. But I can’t mock Texan racism while there are still White supremacist groups running towns in the hills of Northern California.
Ah, but the Principle of Proctouniversality states that “there’s a little asshole in all of us”, while the Principle of Non-Autoproctology or No Man His Own Proctologist says that “you’re not the best person to tell how much of an asshole you are”, and the Law of Procto-Nonconservation shows that “there’s no limit to how much of an asshole a person can be, nor is there a limit to the number of assholes.”So basically, agreeing with me is no guarantee that you’re *not* an asshole — not as long as you’re human.
Jon, you can mock it. But it won’t be funny nor relevant and will quite likely cause people to think you’re an asshole. But there are not hard and fast rules in humor. I disagree that humor shouldn’t ever be used to “other” someone—but it works better if someone is already inside your culture and you know them well. Mocking anti-choicers, for instance, is hardly good-natured. It’s about taking horrible people down 15 notches. But it is funny, because we who do it know them and their nutty ideas very well.
I just ordered this book, not being aware that Faludi had a new book out. It reminds me disturbingly of “Backlash” in the way some excuse is used to shove womens’ rights back. The minute Jessica Lynch became the poster child for the female soldier, instead of Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, it was pretty clear that we were moving backwards instead of forwards. (Hester led a counterattack when her convoy got ambushed by insurgents and was awarded a Silver Star—but no book deal, no TV deal, no media appearances. Female soldiers still have to be ‘girls’ and you can’t act like a real soldier and be a girl at the same time.)
The first edition of Backlash was 15 years ago, and now we’re sliding back to the Eighties with a guy who makes Reagan look benign at the helm.
As for humor, it should always be used on the powerful by those with less power. Anything else, and it’s just bullying.
Exactly, gin. “Afflict the comfortable”, that’s the ticket.
No, that’s not a problem… it’s an opportunity to shut up womenfolk at home! You can see a slight variation on this meme in the above-screencapped jab at Glenn Greenwald, where it’s explained that because he hasn’t personally been vanished and tortured, he cannot be critical of anything. Likewise, so the story goes, women in Western countries cannot criticize anyone close to home, because women somewhere distant have it worse; thus, they must spend all their time criticizing brown people and supporting our bombs.It’s kind of funny how, despite the Christian fetishization of persecution which leads to much moaning about how bad they have it (in some far-off land), you never see Christians declining a media circus about, say, a Folsom Street Fair poster due to there being Much More Important Things To Do.
May I compliment you on that being a flat-out brilliant way of condensing my last few paragraphs into a delicious aphorism?As for library troubles, if anyone lives anywhere near an academic library, they’d be likely to have Faludi’s books. You may have to read them onsite or buy a community borrower’s card (at my nearby academic library, it’s $25/year), but they’re pretty likely to have Backlash and Stiffed if they’re a sizable school.
And who didn’t like Stiffed because it was about men? Did someone honestly have a problem with the author doing a book about how PHMT?
Some asshole at amazon commented that he was sure gonna read a book about men that was by somebody named ’susan.’ It’s hard to top that for breathtaking hatred.
Accurate criticism in mockery can be damn funny, provided it is in fact accurate. Ignorant people can rarely get away with mockery of anyone, even their own family. Smart people can often be incredibly good at pointing out the foibles of others. The problem is that most people think they’re above average.
And now that I’ve broken my own vow not to overly criticize people I mostly agree with, I’ll leave it at that. Most mockery of the other comes from ignorance, but some of it has truth. I’m the annoying person (or “asshole” if you prefer) who will usually say any absolute isn’t.
Commenting before having any chance to read the thread or even the post–just going off of Amanda wondering about why people didn’t like Stiffed–
Well, aside from the fact that it was about Teh Menz (and about Menz who were particularly thuggly at that)–I mainly couldn’t read it, at least not very thoroughly, because it was some kinda postmodernist impressionistic memoir-y thingie. Very very different sort of book than say, Backlash, which was straight journalism. Backlash was not all about subjective memes and roles perceived from the inside, it was about an objective orchestration of–damn, I’m blanking out on what C Wright Mills called the ideological system, including but more than the media–oh yeah, “the cultural apparatus.” It was about how the cultural apparatus was systematically, consciously, warring against feminism and against women. I was hoping Stiffed would be a parallel book about how men also, by being divided against women, are thus also ruled. I suppose somewhere in all the PoMo narration, one can construct a sort of holographic image of same. But I think it suffered badly from Faludi letting her selected men talk about how it looked to them, without attempting to frame their subjective narratives with objective socio-economic facts, which would have given more power to the mens’ well-founded complaints and also shown up the pathological parts of their subjective adaptions to their objectively bad and worsening situation.
If ever there is a time to stick to traditional, more or less linear, journalistic narrative of the kind the progressive Left does so well, it is when one is making a case to men that they too are screwed by the gender system and getting more screwed the way things are evolving. I wish Faludi had done so in Stiffed.
OK, I’ll be reading this thread first chance I get.