"The political and popular culture fell into a fever dream out of a ‘50s Western."

Have you ever seen a 50s Western? Many of the most intelligent and thought-provoking movies of the 50s, the ones that wrestle most profoundly with issues of race, of what kind of society we want to have, of what manhood and womanhood are, of when violence is and is not right, of what the limits of American power should be, are Westerns. The Searchers, Shane, Johnny Guitar, Seven Men From Now, Apache, Red River, High Noon, Day of the Outlaw, Broken Arrow, 3:10 to Yuma, The Naked Spur, Terror in a Texas Town-- if you think these, and the decade that produced them, are simplistic and black and white in their moral outlook, then you understand nothing about either the 50s in America or Westerns.

If that's the level of superficial, glib pop culture reference-studded, Maureen Dowd-meets anti-Bush bumperstickers sociological insight that runs through the whole book, I'll save my money and read the backs of Volvos in my neighborhood instead.

I think what we have here is a case of "I read the first paragraph and she characterized my favorite movies in a way that denigrated their total awesomeness so I have to get hissy and skip the rest of the article and leave a hasty comment." We can debate the cultural memes perpetuated by 50's Westerns all day, but that really doesn't have much to do with the topic at hand. She uses Westerns only as a means to tease at complex societal happenings.

I for one think we let 9/11 take women back 30 years. But what do I know, I don't drive a Volvo or have bumper stickers, but if I did I bet you would worry about my driving, as I would be eating sushi on the road and getting my Birkenstocks caught on the pedals, right?

That's not safe! You could spill uni into your cappucino!

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I find a parallel in the mythic view of New York city held by many elsewhere, and the mythic proportions of 9/11.

It seems those familiar with the reality of New York are not swayed by the myth of 9/11. They know it was a real event, a real crime, and they want justice, not wars of adventure and conquest.

Prius, ironically enough.

And I'd argue that part of the appeal of the western genre is that it allows characters to represent different conceptions of the state (the honest lawman, the big landowner, the family farmer, the lone vigilante, etc.) and thus work out dramatically what America should be like.

By the way, check out Jacques Tourneur's Canyon Passage (1946), which is in some DVD set called Classic Western Round-Up. Only a good, not great movie, but a couple of amazing scenes where the settlers are doing something and the Indians show up and just stare at them, radiating guilt for having screwed them over and taken their lands. To its credit the movie doesn't find an easy feelgood answer, but just sort of shrugs guiltily and keeps going...

This is so interesting, Destor. I have sons your age who both say that 9/11 had little or no changing effect on their lives and yet that myth prevails as a "JFK defining moment of your life" type of experience.

I can say that the only effect it had on me was to make me more angry at how we've wasted the opportunities we've had for national renewal.

I really admired Backlash, so I'm grateful to have Faludi here. I haven't read the book, of course, so I'll also be unable to say whether it makes its cultural case. Destor seems to have raised some good objections, though, as we don't know what 9/11 changed culturally. (I know conservatives have asked how Clinton can be so successful if Faludi is right.) The Dirty Harry and Rambo language was more widespread among the right in the 1970s and 1980s, as part of recasting Vietnam history retrospectively. Bush now appears to have been a pretty amateur appropriator of cowboy imagery compared to Reagan.

One could also argue that it changed them only to the extent that warmongering is traditionally a male language, so the anti-feminism could be incidental. Say, the right was happy to applaud its made-up female war hero, and it doesn't seem right to me to say that the 9/11 widows were simply put down. They were used while it was convenient, just like war widows and "support our troops," and then turned on by cynics like Coulter when convenient. Remember when it was sacriligious to have art near ground 0 because it might question patriotism which meant questioning the heroism of the dead at 9/11, a charge led by some of the 9/11 families?

Finally, it might be argued that the causation runs the other way around: they spoke the gender language of a reactionary era to support the war, not the other way around. But I'm looking forward to seeing how the analysis holds up.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

susan,
first off. congrats on a very important book. i've been reading much of your commentary recently, and wanted to bring up the issue you frequently talk about -- the harassment/refused entry to travellers to this country who are civil/human rights activists.

but yet, just last week, the nydaily news had a story about a croatian band -- known for its ultranationalist leanings -- giving performances in this country. and in this particular case -- at a venue owned by the catholic church.

there appears to be a growing fascist contingent -- esp among former eastern europeans -- in this country. other groups in the northwest are associated with virulent anti-gay speeches.

it's frightening to think of the possibilities when these disparate groups find common cause.

This is a good point. When Bush and Rove looked around for imagery to employ post-9/11 to justify what Cheney and Rumsfeld wanted to do, the most readily to hand was Reagan (after all, they couldn't really use Nixon), and he fed directly into John Wayne and the myths Faludi talks about. While it is true that creative directors in the '50s used the Western to play against type and say something new, overall the imagery of the time was pretty black and white, and overarching all was the "US good, Soviets bad" theme. Reagan reinvigorated that, and Bush just substituted Muslim jihadists for the Soviets.

This is a fascinating collection of topics, Ms. Faludi, and it’s about time someone looked at the ongoing role of gender issues, gender identities and gender-based narratives in the cultural and political response to 9/11. I have just a few random suggestions to make:

1. My guess is that some of the cultural reactions you describe, including the re-assertion of traditional gender roles, are typical of “wartime” movements, and are not peculiar to the American experience. So I think one question we have to ask is why the United States was so prone to respond to a terrorist attack, which was after all the work of just a handful of individuals, as a Pearl Harbor-like strike by the vanguard of a much larger army.

If Spain and England have not responded in the same way, perhaps that is because they were somewhat more experienced with terrorism, and somewhat less prone to interpret terrorism in conventional military terms. But I would also suggest that there were people in this country who had for some time hoped to bring the US into a broad civilization war against “the Arabs” or “the Muslims”, and who used the opportunity of 9/11 to launch a pre-prepared narrative.

2. Along with the impact of the American frontier narratives you describe in determining our cultural response, I would add another influential body of gender-based romantic narrative: orientalist romances of the rescue of captured maidens from the harem. The civilization war response to 9/11 has been filled with the exhortation to liberate Muslim womanhood from the veil and the burkha, and save Western women from the same fate: potential enslavement under lascivious Saracen sheikhs bringing global Islamification. This is still a prominent theme in our discourse, if not often presented in precisely those terms.

3. The cultural matrix in which 9/11 took place was suffused with very palpable, growing nostalgia for war, warriors, wartime heroics and wartime sacrifices. 9/11 was preceded by several years of “greatest generation” veneration. There were movies about D-Day, Pearl Harbor, bands of brothers etc. The 90’s cultural landscape was also rife with wishful depictions of President’s acting with superb manliness – some of the more ridiculous being the films Independence Day and Air Force One. I think this might have had something to do with a level of dissatisfaction or discomfort with Bill Clinton, who was known to have avoided the draft.

Along these same lines, it seemed to me that many male baby-boomers of the Vietnam era were afflicted with strong cases of survivor guilt or shame. I heard several commentators speak openly after 9/11 of an opportunity for generational “redemption” – a chance for boomer men to finally prove their manhood. There is apparently a little worm of doubt eating at the consciences of men who did not serve during the Vietnam years, expressed as some of these internal accusations: “Maybe the reason I didn’t want to go to Vietnam had nothing to do with substantive and principled objections.”, “Maybe I just chickened out.”, “Maybe my dad’s generation was right.”, “Maybe when the country calls, you’re just supposed to go.”, “Maybe dominoes were falling” , etc., etc.

4. You touch on the firefighters. I talked to several guys after 9/11 on whom the firefighters and their heroic deaths made a huge impression. I think the common denominator of the response was something like this: After a few decades of sagging masculine pride and bad press for men, where men were increasingly depicted as wife-beating, child-abusing, sex-offending, chore-shirking, impulsively violent, intellectually inflexible and dualistic dinosaurs - a sort of anachronistic sub-species evolutionarily built for a more primitive form of social existence, and decreasingly valuable and functional in the modern world – here were some guys finally doing something right, and displaying traditionally masculine traits in a very positive way . They were doing guy things that showed male energy and physicality still played a vital social function. They were saving women, not beating them. You could be proud to be a guy again.

Apparently, this wasn’t just a response from men. I recall an interview I heard with one of the female 9/11 survivors. I’m sorry that I can’t locate the exact passage, but it went something like this:

“I saw them going up and as I was coming down. I felt so bad them. They were falling.”

“What do you mean they were falling?”

“The equipment they were wearing was so heavy, they were falling down under it.”

“What else do you remember?”

“They looked so handsome.”

What all-American guy could resist the appeal of this icon? A combination of Christ-like forbearance under a heavy burden coupled with masculine duty and courage. And handsome too!

5. Just one other personal response, apropos of I don’t know what: I was extremely excited following 9/11. I recall driving to work on 9/12, listening to the news reports. I suddenly noticed an itching sensation in my forearms, and raised my sleeves to find my arms covered with hives. One might think that was an anxiety response, but I felt intensely awake and exhilarated, and had a strong sense of something exciting and historical breaking through the boredom of everyday life, and re-activating latent responses.

Did I say everything? Damn, I did.

Maybe I'm just too neanderthal to get it (though as a househusband primary care giver, I doubt it) but what in the wide, wide world of sports did 9/11 do to push women back into a Betty Crocker role? I really don't even know what she's talking about here, unless she means that some people, gasp, actually disagreed with the 9/11 survivor gals or Cindy Sheehan or the Dixie Chicks when they turned political, but then I still come from the old school that believes that taking someone seriously enough to challenge and debate them is a sign of respect and equality, it's treating them as too delicate to stand up in the rough and tumble that reduces them to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjxY9rZwNGU

Last I checked, we're about to elect a female president, what the hell does 9/11 have to do with the status of women in America (I get what it has to do with the status of women in Afghanistan, a point somehow I bet Faludi glides over).

Ms. Faludi,

I am a longtime fan of your work, and when I first read the premise of your book, I connected with it instantly. I am actually married to a cowboy and live in rural West Texas about a hundred miles from where Bush likes to claim he grew up, and believe me, the cowboy ethos/mythology is still alive and well--certainly in red state and rural areas.

I also agree with Dan that the military hero story has thrived under this so-called "war president." My son and two other family members have served SIX combat deployments to Iraq with the Marines and army, and another one has been to Afghanistan--and I can tell you that REAL soldiers and Marines are very uncomfortable with being constantly referred to as "heroes" in the popular culture.

They know what true heroism is; combat vets have seen it; and they know they're not all heroes just because they volunteered to serve, but watch most any media wartime news coverage of the war and you will see bold graphics, heroic B-roll, swelling music--war made glamorous and romantic. Fictional television shows do the same thing. Again, ask the real soldiers and Marines how romantic they think war really is.

Ask them how romantic and glamorous it is, for example, watching cats eat the faces of corpses in the street, watching their friends die, seeing innocents suffer and not being able to help beyond calling a medic. Or don't ask, because the true heroes really don't like to talk about it all that much.

So what you are saying--that a macho male rescuer of a feminized country was adopted in popular American culture after 9-11--has the ring of truth to me. I would also like to add that it's my opinion that the entire nation suffered post traumatic stress disorder from 9-11, and rather than lead and inspire and mobilize in shared sacrifice, as FDR did after Pearl Harbor (another attack on American soil; 9-11 wasn't the only one)--the Bush administration chose to whip up the fear into a frenzy, politicize patriotism, send the country to Disneyworld while less than one percent staggered under the burden of war, and construct myths like the jet pilot-in-chief strutting across an aircraft carrier in his warrior costume.

As an aside, I would like to say that, having married into a family full of very masculine men and more than one real war hero--it is an absolute fact that REAL men; true, masculine, manly men (as opposed to macho strutters)--respect, admire, and do not fear strong women. Every male family member I have, married strong women and have stayed married for decades.

Those who succumb to the macho myths and strut around with the outer trappings of "manhood" are usually the ones who try and control or suppress strong women, have the most personality conflicts with them in the workplace, feel most threatened, and hero-worship the other strutters of the world. They don't seem to understand that there is a difference between acting macho and being genuinely manly.

The thing about REAL cowboys is that the west was a place settled by frontier women in very harrowing circumstances, and to this day, ranchers depend on their spouses as equal partners. In the old west, if they had to be away for several days, they had to know she could take care of the place and their children in his absence, even if it meant answering the door with a shotgun. This has not changed.

Many--certainly not all--but many of the old west movies were created by the sensibilities of 40's and 50's males who'd never really lived on a ranch before, and there were plenty of helpless females needing protecting in those movies. The actual truth is that weak women simply did not survive.

As for me, I admire and respect John Wayne as an actor and have enjoyed his movies, as have my family--both his westerns and his war movies.

But the truth is that he, like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush before him--never served in a real war.

Only pretend ones.

Maybe I'm crazy, but this seems so transparently true that there probably did not need to be a book about it.

Yeah, yeah.

Can't a guy make sweeping generalizations these days??? 

What came to mind were two movies that had subtle political messages inserted, or should I say "subliminal." The first Superman flick with Chris Reeves. Just after Lex Luthor blew up Boulder Dam, a scene of a Mexican family sitting on the porch of their house, beside a dry desert wash, and water begins to trickle down the stream bed. The Mexicans jump up and down hooting and hollering. Whatever inspired that cinematic aside? Mexico fights the US every year since the construction of that dam in International Court over their share of the Colorado River water. Another was the casting of Jean-Louis Trintignant as Marcel Jazy, Anastasio Somoza's death-squad mastermind in that great film about the Sandinista Victory in Nicaragua, Under Fire. It's not well-known that the Latin American Death Squads were the product of French-Algerians who had escaped to South and Central America after the end of the French Colony in Algeria.  Clever screenwriters.

Neoboho

Ms. Faludi,

One thing struck me like a bolt from the blue when Pelosi was sworn in.

Namely, that it's probably women that will save us from these MALE terrorists.

It struck me that the biggest weakness we have is male delusions of grandeur. The problems of our world are just too complicated - male notions of 'dominance' and so forth are simply antique.

This idea of tough talk to bin laden is laughable. I mean how do you scare people who are LITERALLY on a suicide mission?

The truth is 'valor' is simply not efficacious. Yes valor is a virtue - just not the one that will resolve the terrorism issue.

In rise of Pelosi, and likely Hillary, I'm reminded of a diary of a Berlin woman during WWII - published about a year ago.

At the end of the war, when the men came back there was this palpable sense of the defeat not just of Germany, but of all the cartoonish masculinity of the Nazi years. They'd been sold a bill of goods on Aryan masculinity, and masculinity itself had been totally defeated.

But its not just that. He actively avoided service during WWII. I think it was John Ford who joined up and kept writing him letters asking when he was going into service and Wayne kept writing back that it wasn't a good time for him or something.

That's the inherent contradiction in those who site John Wayne as a potent American symbol - it's all too fitting that he really was literally a myth.

What we may have to "confront and dismantle" is why we seem willing to subvert the very principles that make the American Idea worth protecting because we are unable or unwilling to to even think about sacrificing not just our soldiers and money but our personal safety and comfort to hold on to them.

Have we become so selfish and scared that we don't even want to consider whether some things - an open society, consent of the governed, enumerated powers, pluralism, due process, transparency - just might trump safety?

9/11 may have forced us into an 'historic opportunity' to show ourselves and the rest of the world that, even though we certainly value our personal safety and comfort, we're willing to put them at risk if necessary to save our democratic republic.

Why do you think he left town on a buckboard?

Right. Even John Wayne wasn't John Wayne!

The problem I have with this is that it's not at all the way I remember it. OK, partly it is: the flag-flying, anthem-singing, jingoism yes. The knee-jerk militarism, yes. But I don't recall any corresponding movement to infantilize women. If anything I recall the opposite: a potrayal of American women as tough cookies too, especially those in the military or in leadership roles (see: Condi Rice; Hillary Clinton). And for that matter, the Western mythos the author cites was not about weak and fainting women: its heroines tended toward pluckiness if not outright toughness, though the men of course were tougher. Though a "Southern" rather a Western consider "Gone with the Wind", more or less "The" American novel its racism, notwithstanding (or maybe that's an essential part of its Americanness). Scarlett O'Hara may have made a total mess of her love life, but she faced an enemy army, worked herself to the bone to keep her family from starving, and founded a successful business to claw her way back to the top again. That's the classic American heroine, imbued with that good old American pioneer can-do, never-look-back spirit.
I wonder if Ms. Faludi has simply cherry picked her examples. After all, in a country of 300 million you can find just about anything, and before 9-11 Victoria's Secret, cookie baking, "The Rules", a supposed move toward stay-at-home moms, and religious sects inveighing against gender-bending were all part of the American landscape. I really don't remember 9-11 changing anything there.

That's very well written, esp. for someone who can't find words. ;-)

Your choice of words is very mythological. Let's look at them in terms of Joseph Campbell's model, the round of the monomyth.

"That was a knee jerk gut reaction. A rallying point for my conscience being confronted squarely with the unconscionable." Mythological symbols act as innate releasing mechanisms. As everyone knows, art speaks directly to the heart. 9/11 was such an event. Our brains function by making ratios--comparisons, that is. The terms of 9/11 just didn't compute in your mythology. That's the Call to Adventure.

[Side A] --- [Side B]
[Good God USA Us Me Mine] --- [Evil Devil Iran Them You Yours]

Earth's every visual system can discriminate that there are 'things' on either sides of 'lines.' It takes a human to see the indivisible field between and around these words, showing us as plain as day that we find our common ground in the spaces in between.

That indivisible field, my friend, is Us. It's divinity, too. We stand in divinity just exactly as these words right here are standing in this field right now.

And that's why sovereignty inheres in We, the People. So too inheres Truth. (Contrary to the X Files, the Truth can only be found within.) So don't worry about that, Truth and we are inalienable.

Charlatans and fakirs, like televangelists and tele-terrorists, claim to "have" the truth, they claim to speak from the Line. When the lies behind their very words shout them down even as they speak, we stop listening. That's the definition of "absurd." Is that when you "checked out," when you realized their words meant nothing?

America sure is Hell these days, no? It's the next stage in the cycle of the monomyth. We have to die to our former selves, quit all claim to all we held dear, and subject it to cold, pragmatic analysis, before we can go on. I must confess, I voted for Reagan in my wayward youth. I've died to that self, and am aborning my new self. Or so I hope.

As a poet, I see the way forward thus: We are going to midwife ourselves in giving birth to our new shared mythology even as (and this will be the tricky part) we jump from the mechanical monster we're riding as it crashes to ground. You could call this monster, Ike's Revenge.

I'm sure you've seen this motif: every hero nearly dies. Perhaps it's something like rebooting your soul. At any rate, here we are in Hell. Nice place to visit, no WAY am I living here.

BushCo hopes you'll stay stunned and frightened and, most of all, open to suggestion. This is what Naomi Klein is illuminating in her book, Shock Doctrine. And it works: look how many people mistook Giuliani for a real leader after 9/11. And how did they happen to have the voluminous PATRIOT Act ready and waiting? It's a perverse Jedi mind trick: 'you don't need your civil liberties. You want to go shopping. Bush is the next best thing to god.'

We have to dream up a new mythology together. I'm not rejecting the message of our Judeo-Christian traditions, it has at its heart the same mystic message found all around the world. The problem is, its vessels have been hijacked to Greedland.

Yes, BushCo is the embodiment of our worst nightmares, and they are torturing us still, but you know what their worst nightmare is? Torture victims who heal and return. You know why?

Can't touch this! Been through the fire, got nothing left to burn!

Excellent post.

I remember a rightwing blog publishing a picture of a female helicopter pilot in the Army with the headline "Hey, Osama, we're kicking your ass with our teenage girls!"

Maybe not the perfectly progressive thing ever said, all in all, but hardly forcing women back into traditional roles, either.

oh hell

"Fort Apache" seemed different when the individual tribal chiefs introduced themselves, and, when the chief of the White Mountain Apache rose, I realized "hey, those are our guys!"

I have a White Mountain friend, whom I think neoboho knows as well. Retired Army type.

Do we want to examine the individual and state choices in "Blazing Saddles"?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

It's sometimes interesting to discover what some Hollywood actors did in real life. I knew of Eddie Albert as a lighthearted guy on "Green Acres". It was some years later, reading some detailed accounts of the Battle of Tarawa, to find that he was an ensign handling a rescue boat in the surf, under heavy fire for an hour or so, and, with his crew of 2, pulling at least 70 Marines out of the water, and going back again and again until the boat sank from enemy fire. Tarawa was one of those battles where some rear-echelon chair-warmer limited the number of decorations that could be awarded, regardless of the action. From a number of accounts, his Bronze Star was almost an insult.

It may well be that my favorite line from an actor in real war was from David Niven. While some stories have him on the beach at Normandy, he actually arrived a few days later, but was in significant fighting inland. In the small world department, Peter Ustinov was his orderly.

Supposedly, he was commanding a unit about to go into heavy fire, and said "It's all very well for you chaps, but I'll have to do this all over again in Hollywood with Errol Flynn!"

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

They are clues to an underlying pattern that says a lot about our culture in general, beyond the victimization of women. The attacks brought our deepest belief systems, and denial systems, to the fore. They made visible the cultural machinery that is usually subterranean. In that, 9/11 provides us with a historic opportunity to perceive our reigning mythology, to examine some of the most powerful fictions and delusions that disfigure our cultural and political landscape, and maybe even to confront and dismantle them.

Yes we are delusional! Just take everything we say we are the best of and compare to other countries. Ops, we never compare anything to world-class examples in another country. Our media never informs us abut what others have done to solve the same problem. We are supposed to be in a world-class competition and the only thing we know that may be world class is sports in other countries. What values does that tell about our culture!

Our bravado or diminishment as members of either sex is reinforced to dehumanize our common humanity and separate us into small groups to prevent common goals. Keep them divided and controled is the mantra.

Our patriotism myths are to emphasize nation-state over our common humanity with others in this world. Again keep divided and control is the mantra.

We are tools of the powerful elite who look upon the masses as rabble. That is the story of America. The patterns that should be called reinforcing myths cloud our view of the environment we live in. The media does not dare include information about other countries and societies, as it would interfere with the self-delusional myths that are implanted for controlling our views and actions.

Racism and they are low class does not begin and end with rednecks, it goes to the top and we are below that top. We are the low class to the higher level above us and they are lower to the level above them.

Do not look below, look above and around to the controls and fences we are placed in with our “best of” blinders and yokes.

I do not see many posters straining at the fences, jumping for freedom, or fighting myths that impart thought control! I include myself in that criticism.

Maybe tomorrow.

-----------------------------------------------
Today, are we searching for I deals or Ideals?
-Thinking

"An intelligent carrot. The mind boggles."

Neoboho

I actually think Blazing Saddles is a much more daring movie now than it was in the 70s-- it's shocking, in our genteely PC age, to have all the racism AND all the myths of black sexual superiority shoved in our faces so gleefully (not to mention such copious use of the N word).

He won't be making a Broadway musical out of THAT one.

We are tools of the powerful elite who look upon the masses as rabble. That is the story of America.

Jesus, if that's our story, what's the story of Prussia or China?

That describes the Clintons doesn't it;-)

Thats what I always find funny about the dynasty arguement.
I didn't know a person with Bill Clintons white trash background could have a dynasty.
It gives me hope for myself

Jack

Can't a guy make sweeping generalizations these days???

No. All sweeping generalizations are stupid.

Hey, wait a minute.....never mind.

Well let me state the obvious - 9/11 shouldn't have changed anything.

I would highly recommend David Niven's autobiography "Bring on The Empty Horses" - wonderful anecdotes, very nicely written.

My main point was not about the sincerity of your concern for women's oppression in the ME, and I apologize if I gave that impression. I'm not sure where you come by the notion that "our intelligentsia is so casually dismissive about the real horror of women's oppression in the ME." It's a straw man argument to say that the analysis of an ideological formation in this country which may be described using the psychological concept of a "fantasy structure" implies any denial of the real horror of women's oppression anywhere.

Here's where I believe the confusion lies in your post, and reply, about what the analytical focus of the discussion is. The object of Faludi's analysis and my original reply to you is a cultural and discursive formation that has been mobilized by 9/11.

Just as individuals have dreams and waking fantasies that sit atop unconscious drives and motivations, it may be that collectivities have these fantasy structures, too, what Frederic Jameson called the "political unconscious." Faludi is showing how 9/11 mobilized aspects of a political unconscious in America that are bound up with the role of the frontier in the American cultural imagination (drawing in her argument, I believe, on a long tradition in American Studies of the frontier beginning with Frederick Jackson Turner and continuing in the "myth criticism" of Americanist scholars in the 1950's-60's, of which Slotkin's book is one of the more recent).

These fantasy structures, or archetypes, are bound up with and in turn help to structure gender distinctions. Male gender role identities are modelled through various hero types familiar in the kinds of popular culture manifestations discussed on the thread, as well as the Daniel Boone or Kit Carson "Indian fighter" archetype discussed by Slotkin at length in his book in an argument that analyzes relationships between masculinity,violence, and a kind of recuperative or restorative narrative of national identity going back to the Puritans ("regeneration through violence").

America has recurrently responded to national crises (which among other things threaten masculine identity) by engaging in acts of collective violence that restore or regenerate the sense of a national self (violence which is replete with masculine imagery because part of what is at stake in it is the restoration of a masculine self-concept of strength and invulnerability).

I think what Faludi is getting at, in part, at least, is how the response to the crisis of 9/11 has reactivated these deep drives and fantasies lodged in the political unconscious of the country which function to restore the sense of wounded masculine role identification and reassert the boundaries of gender difference. Hence her original, but I would agree not entirely convincing analysis of the retrenchment of feminine empowerment as a cultural response to the crisis of 9/11.

I actually agree that this is the least convincing part of her argument. Rather than a retrenchment of female empowerment into traditional feminine role models in the post 9/11 symbolic environment, I see something a little different. Setting aside whatever symbolic imagery and vocabulary may be emerging as a response to the crisis of 9/11 domestically, at least as regards the projection of American military power beyond its borders, what is distinct about the post 9/11 environment, for me, is the new way in which the imagery of female power is part of the military tactics and psychological operations of the War on Terror. The Afghanistan and Iraq invasions are the first American wars in which female soldiers have had a significant role in combat operations. However much women in the military may be subject to sexual victimization, and whatever limitations on their actual power within still male dominated military command hierarchies, and an overwhelmingly hypermasculinist military culture, still, there is a concerted element of an imagery of female empowerment that is part of the overall military strategy in the GWOT, what I might almost call a "feminist militarism."

Military operations and, even more so, interrogation techniques, seek to break down Muslim masculinity by deploying the symbolism of female power and domination. This is what I was trying to get at in my reply to your post: there is a way in which an ersatz feminism is deployed as part of the vocabulary, imagery, and legitimation of the projection of American military force beyond its borders in the GWOT. As empires of the past had done before today, conquest of the Orient is justified by the "mission civilatrice" of white men emancipating Oriental women by carrying democracy to benighted regions of the globe. This element is what is missing in Faludi's analysis, I think, because of her focus on the domestic gender implications of the cultural response to the crisis of 9/11.

I'll just end my comment with what to me has been the most striking single image to come out of the invasion of Afghanistan. It's an image of American soldiers hooding Taliban captives with burqas, what I believe they call "giving the Burqa treatment" to detainees in Afghanistan. This image encapsulates the point I am trying to make about the way in which a Western (today, above all American) fantasy of "white men saving brown women from brown men" deploys a phony feminism to legitimate Western hegemony over the Orient.

On top of which it's hard to see how destroying a government liberates women that are oppressed by their culture. It would require religious suppression, essentially, to enforce new mores.

Women's groups were working, but the US Army, the greatest force for feminism in the world, did the job. As usual.

How did the British end suttee and foot-binding, Tom?

Well, can I point out that women are still in the burkhas? I don't see where things have changed much for women in the Middle East - I also mght point out that in Iraq, a previously somewhat secular society, the burkha is being donned again.

The British had nothing to do with the ending of suttee or footbinding.

As was Major Clark Gable.

I would recommend Roland Barthes' Mythologies if you like to challenge your own notions.  Barthes' rather technical definition of myth doesn't support the notion that myth is some sort of a teaching tool.  You know,  you don't really need Oedipus to discover that it's not good to marry your parent.  In fact this kind of cultural knowledge about incest is what was required for the Oedipus narrative to be enormously popular.  Barthes defined myth as something the audience already knows, without realizing that you already know it.  It's what is popular in pop culture.  Inadvertant knowledge of the outcome of the narrative, redundancy, self-reference and so on.  We love that stuff.  The intimate discovery of "Oh, I knew that" is a great pleasure.  Thus comic books are the number 1 circulated narratives in the world today.  Joseph Campbell thought that the proliferation of his "hero with a thousand faces" revealed the wellsprings of the human soul - but he didn't bother to consider that the story's manifestations were due to it being a great story iterated over and over with changes to the names of the actors and contexts.  

Neoboho

Gee, I'm sorry - I should have said the British government and the British army had nothing to do with ending the practice. The British government and the British army practiced non-interference in local custom and practice.

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Except that they made it illegal

Yes we are delusional! Just take everything we say we are the best of and compare to other countries. Ops, we never compare anything to world-class examples in another country. Our media never informs us abut what others have done to solve the same problem. We are supposed to be in a world-class competition and the only thing we know that may be world class is sports in other countries. What values does that tell about our culture!

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We compare ourselves to world-class examples all the time. A former employer of mine spent thousands of dollars training me in Japanese manufacturing quality techniques. Six Sigma quality derived from Japan is mostly the US standard these days. Virtually every debate about nationalizing health care (ever see that in the media?) goes on and on about the systems other countries use. Ever heard of ISO? The International Standardization Organization that certifies company performance based on international best practices? US companies spend millions of dollars getting ISO certified - in many cases foreign companies won't buy from non-certified businesses.

After Hurricane Katrina I saw a large number of pieces in the media saying how we should learn flood control techniques from the Dutch.

Also, I guess that "the only thing we know that may be world class is sports in other countries" is the reason we buy German cars, Italian suits, French wine and Finnish cell phones.

Well, it's a bit early to tell, isn't it, even for the perpetually impatient culture of 2007 America?

I mean, it's not like Japanese women have come that far since 1945. And yet real progress has been made.

You and I may just live long enough to see a middle east begin to come out of the slough of despond, of backwards barbarism and Ottoman cruelty, and embrace modernity as similarly backwards nations in Asia and elsewhere have done. And as with Reagan, we may just live long enough to take back some of the things we said in the heat of it about the dunce in the White House with his simplistic views which obviously aren't helping lead to peace and freedom.

That would be a very odd thing for Nepean to say, considering the fact that he was governor of Bombay where suttee wasn't practiced except by a few outliers.

Isn't it interesting that on a so-called "progressive" site, one of the most common outlooks is complete despair about the idea of progress?

"We have nothing to fear but-- oh shit, we are like totally fucked, man!" --Franklin D. Roosevelt

Exactly what I was thinking. The "classic" Westerns of the 1950s are classics because they were much more complex, nuanced stories. But the ideology of most John Wayne movies (and other very popular Westerns of the time) was very different. And the TV westerns--whicsh have had a much wider audience than the classics of film-- tuck pretty close to the most cherished American myths about race and gender.  Remember the Chinese cook on Bonanza? Or how the best women always died?  (Reminds me of a famous American saying about Indians).

I have to assume . . . .

Why do you "have to assume"? After all, instead of speculating you could go up to them and ask them, directly, why they put up with it. You might find that they put up with it for the exact same reason you don't ask them why they put up with it.

Out of curiosity, how do you manage to avoid being included in those "long lines of people dutifully taking off their shoes"? And if you don't, can we all assume that you're one of "those people [who] really believe that the folks checking their bags are making the country safer for democracy"?