Westerns, Women and Sexism's Revival
Hmm, the fact that the first long string of comments entirely diverted into the finer points and plot descriptions of ‘50s Westerns wouldn’t at all support the notion that we’re a nation that retreats into a celluloid bubble at the first hint of danger, now would it? As “KAR” put it smartly in a subsequent comment, meditating on our post-9/11 cultural recoil: “I still want to know what happened to America's soul that day but I fear we're moving too far afield of the truth.”
I also want to make a few clarifications to some of the other comments:
1. To the commentator who contended that nothing seems to have really changed after 9/11:
I don’t disagree. That is, in fact, my point. The attacks on Sept. 11 revealed a cultural belief system deeply embedded in the American mindset. It existed before; it exists now; for a moment it was visible.
2. Re: the contention that firefighters inspired simply because they saved women:
But there were, in fact, very few examples of anyone saving anyone on 9/11. Thanks to the catastrophic nature of the attacks, most people in the Twin Towers either were killed or walked out on their own two feet, and on the planes, needless to say, no one remained to be rescued. And in 343 cases, it was the firefighters who were the victims, through no fault of their own (but very much due to the fault of reckless and negligent policies of department brass and city leaders). Media pundits hailed “all those photos” of strapping men carrying women out of the towers—as one commentator put it in early 2002, “the brawny young man in his helmet carrying the wounded young woman in his arms”--but when I went back and searched the media files from those weeks, I could find no such cornucopia of images. Newsweek did run a picture after 9/11 of a firefighter carrying a child, captioned “Horror at Home,” but it was a photo from the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. My point is, in the absence of traditional male heroes saving helpless female victims, our media and political culture created arbitrary designations, by sex. The “heroes” were, by and large, the men who died in the towers or survived their collapse, especially firefighters, and the “victims” became the 9/11 widows, who were fawned over by the press as long as they stuck to the role of helpless homemaker victim and didn’t (ala, the Jersey Girls) demand an accounting from the government of the missteps and protection failures that led up to 9/11.
3. Re: the contention that this is just “wartime” reaction:
Putting aside the fact that most Americans are behaving as if we aren’t at war, a wartime nation doesn’t necessarily react this way. Look at World War II, where a president appealed to our hopes, not our fears, and women, far from being shoved back into the home, were called on to be Rosie the Riveters. The U.S. government even subsidized day care to help women join the workforce in large numbers.
4. Re: the complaint that I left out the story of Jessica Lynch as “Rambo”: First of all, I deal with the Rambo story at great length in my book. The media was almost frantic to shred that version of events. FYI, the reference to Lynch as Rambo came out of a one-day erroneous story in the Washington Post, in which the paper quoted an anonymous military source who claimed Lynch fired her gun to the last bullet. That article was denounced in the media for months (which is why you remember it!), long after the Post had retracted it and had run three apologias by its ombudsman and a 5,600 word corrective article (far more than that paper or its brethren ever did in retracting the falsehoods of WMDs in Iraq). The media advanced in its place the equally mythical story of “little Jessi,” a “doll-like” and “blonde waif” girl who just wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, and who, the media endlessly insinuated, endured sexual assault at the hands of Husein’s rapacious Republican Guardsmen. The media preferred to elide over the fact that Lynch enlisted twice, did not regard herself as passive or weak, and has no memory of being raped.
* * *
Thank you to Amanda Marcotte for returning us to the societal and tangible consequences of recoiling into cultural myth, which, as she points out, are real and damaging “for genuine people in this country.” The reflex that was on display in the aftermath of 9/11—the compulsion to reinstate a national security myth personified by invincible male heroes protecting quivering and grateful young women—never goes away in the American psyche. It just goes underground, where it is less visible, and for that reason, can be all the more dangerous.
Witness the backlash pummeling women endured in the ‘80s (some of which was reprised in the media after 9/11), in which, over and over, counsel to back off one’s rights were framed as: strong, independent and ambitious women are going to lose their feminine prerogatives; they won’t be able to find a mate, have a baby, enjoy a “normal” womanly life. It’s significant that these messages were aimed specifically at women who had the education and means to depart from the dependent role. The infamous—and wholly incorrect--“man shortage” trend that Newsweek, et al., plastered on their covers in the late ‘80s, for instance, was directed only at “career” and “college-educated” women. Underlying that barrage against potentially powerful women was a longstanding fundament of the American myth of invincibility: that for men to be strong, women must be weak.
Amanda raises, in her commentary on the Supreme Court case over so-called partial-birth abortion, Gonzales v. Carhart, a fascinating way that these dynamics play out and do consequential harm in arenas far from the “war on terror” front. As she notes, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s dissent could have been plucked straight from the male protection/female weakness playbook. Just to remind readers, here are some excerpts from Kennedy’s opinion on that case: “Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child,” he wrote. “Whether to have an abortion requires a difficult and painful moral decision . . .While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.” That regret might later cause “severe depression and loss of esteem.” Justice Kennedy would rise to the manly rescue to save women from themselves and their muddle-headed “choices.”
More broadly, I’ve always wondered to what extent our peculiar national fixation on abortion springs from this same need to prove American manhood by a demonstration of rescuing the feminine dependent. What could be weaker and more dependent and, so, more in need of “saving” than a fetus in the womb? And it might explain something striking I’ve noticed in anti-abortion literature over the years: the repeated portrayal of the “unborn” as a little (usually blonde) girl.
I also want to second Amanda’s observation that the resurgent sexism in recent times may have sparked a renewal of feminist sentiments among the average woman on the street. From what I have seen and heard, there is certainly a smoldering frustration and anger out there in the American female populace. But will it be translated into actual and effective activism and change? And how does activism take hold in a time when the public and civic arenas necessary to foster and sustain it are so atrophied and have been edged out by a commercial culture of plug-yourself-in gratifications?
Moreover, activism must be preceded by a real discussion, and we haven’t had an honest, searching look at the state of women’s rights in a very long time. Since the late ‘90s, and thanks in large measure to the steering influence of the media, the national “debate” on women has centered on content-free blatherings about Monica and the bad behavior of a host of interchangeable celebrity “girls,” false battles over “Mommy Wars,” disingenuous musings on breast implants and botox as opportunities for enhanced female “self-esteem,” and ephemeral pop-culture “trends” on whether, say, “Knocked Up” heralds the dawn of the “beta male.” This is all very far from the essential question of feminism: how do we remake society (not just give women the equal opportunity to max out their credit cards and be crushed by debt) so that women and men will be truly equal and full citizens, full agents not just in their personal lives but in their responsibilities to a public world?
Thank you to Susan Gardner (who I see has just posted) for your thoughtful comments, which I’m looking forward to engaging in my next post.
Just as writers facing a deadline will reach out for the remembered narrative which offers an apparently relevant hook (lede), cultcritics will reach for a theory of cultural myths as a means of organizing their pensées.
If the commenters spent a great deal of time discussing '50s-'60s Westerns, it may not have evidenced a "deterioration" of the discussion but rather an attempt to decide whether Faludi's theory was explanatory or, on the other hand, overdeterminative.
I, for one, think Faludi has taken the media's tendency to write entertaining fictions as a sign that the society, in general, believes the stories the media publishes or has much psychological investment in them. That has not been my experience.
November 6, 2007 1:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nothing happened to the American soul that day - we reacted in the same manner we always do, people volunteering to help, people raising money for victims, calls for revenge, the government vowing to get to the bottom of it, heart tugging pictures, sad stories, stories of heroism, tough guy talk and then back to the usual grind. It was a fleeting diversion from the monotony of every day life.
Did we retreat to our comforting national myths, cocooning, traditional roles, the pius humbuggery of fake patriotism? Yes, that appears to be our pattern in times of crises. It's a national defense mechanism against reality.
November 6, 2007 2:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for pointing out that the conversation itself is critical to the activism. All too often I read/hear people whine that there's not enough "kids" hitting the streets, and I'd point out that while protesting is the most visibly interesting part of a movement, the more critical part is the forming of ideas that can be channeled into legislatures and courtrooms. Like Ellen Willis hammered at, writing is activism.
This is why I think the blogs are important, even though I flinch to say that, because self-aggrandizing seems part of that statement. But it's a place to hash out ideas unfettered by the mainstream media forces that reduce everything to prattle or, more to the point, define "women" strictly as the upper class, well-educated, used-to-be-society-wives-but-now-can-have-jobs set.
Granted, as you've no doubt noticed from the comments here, blogs do attract a large percentage of people who have few ideas of their own and make up for it by nay-saying everything. But there's plenty of people out there really kicking ideas around and hopefully we can keep attracting more.
November 6, 2007 2:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you, Andrew and Josh, for bringing Susan Faludi to TPMCafe.
By a strange coincidence, voting closed at midnight for Kevin Drum's Golden Wingnut Award. One of the winners was a post by Kim du Toit, "The Pussification of the Western Male."
This is just a small sample of Kim's post, which came in at number 5. There were 4 other posts that 22,460 voters considered even more wingnutty than his. But written just after the 9/11 attacks, Kim gets right to the heart of Susan's book and makes her case. He would hate that.
What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority. Molly Ivins
November 6, 2007 3:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
If 'straight talk' is an index of manliness, I guess you better count out
George "Weapons of Mass Destruction Related Activities" Bush.
Ms. Faludi:
I've tried asking this in some other threads:
What would/could women have done differently to respond to 9-11? We've seen bad-ass tough talk and "shock and awe" have proven impotent.
I see N. Pelosi especially as representing a last hope. Perhaps her ascendancy, along with H. Clinton will mean a more rational and efficacious response to al quaeda.
So what do you think a feminist would have done differently to respond more effectively?
November 6, 2007 3:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
She answers this in the book, with the "What If" section. I think the proper response was a police action backed by the UN against Bin Laden and a national reckoning where we face up to the fact that our imperialism on the behalf of our corporate masters is what is feeding the worldwide anger that feeds the terrorist machine.
And then a sane nation would start valuing what's truly valuable about us, and it is our vision of freedom and egalitarianism. In every way, we've reacted to 9/11 by indulging our worst sides (misogynist, racist, war-mongering, paranoid, fascist) and dumping our best sides (freedom-loving, feminist, anti-racist, egalitarian). It's basically the opposite of what I'd have hoped.
November 6, 2007 3:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Putting aside the fact that most Americans are behaving as if we aren’t at war, a wartime nation doesn’t necessarily react this way. Look at World War II, where a president appealed to our hopes, not our fears, and women, far from being shoved back into the home, were called on to be Rosie the Riveters. The U.S. government even subsidized day care to help women join the workforce in large numbers.
Well, this raises the question, then, about what is different this time. What triggered this particular set of responses rather than some other responses that could have been triggered instead? As I understand it, your answer centers on the fact that the attack was perceived as an attack on native soil, on the “homefront”, and thus triggered ancient American male anxieties about failure to defend our homes, our women and our families.
I can see elements of that response at work. But I would like to suggest that another set of anxieties, equally gender based, played a more important role.
First, the Trade Center and the Pentagon, though located on US soil, are not exactly symbols of home and hearth. One was a symbol of US global commercial and financial dominance. The other is the symbol of US global military dominance. So the attack was primarily an attack on the US global presence and role, its economic and military empire, and was perceived as such by Americans. The towers were the twin central poles, so to speak of the heralded unipolar world, and the Pentagon is the command center of our sprawling military empire. That’s why they were chosen by the attackers. If the attackers had wanted to launch an attack that would be perceived as an attack on our families and womenfolk, they would have selected a suburban town or a shopping mall.
Second, it is not as though the US just discovered Islamic terrorism and unruliness on 9/11. The 9/11 attacks were a culmination of decades of insufferable insults to American prestige and power. Numerous hijackings, the hostages in Lebanon, the Klinghofers, Iraqi defiance following the Gulf War, the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut, and above all the Iranian hostage crisis - which we will all recall evoked a national obsession with “America Held Hostage” – had gradually built fury and resentment, and the 9/11 attacks were seen as the “last straw”. Again, these were all assaults on our extraterritorial power, on our ability to control events abroad, and to keep our subjects and subordinates in line. And they were perceived as having a common source: Arabs, Muslims.
This is what accounts for the undifferentiated response of lashing out at the whole Muslim world. One might say that the reason Americans were willing to attack Iraq is because they were tricked into believing Saddam was behind 9/11. But I’m not sure that is as important as the brute urge to execute payback on the entire Muslim world, an urge felt even among many who were not deluded about the precise relationship or lack of relationship between Saddam and terrorism. During the Abu Ghraib trials, I recall one of the soldiers was described as just wanting to go over to Iraq and kill some Arabs.
Also at work in the background was a palpable fear of national decline and loss of empire. The end of the Cold War had an interesting effect on this country. By eliminating the great enemy of the Western anti-Soviet coalition, the conflict’s termination immediately began to dissolve the coherence and raison d'être of that coalition. America’s place in the world had been defined for decades as the “leader of the free world”, and the perceived necessity of US leadership was the key source of US power. The collapse of the Soviet bloc marked the end of an era that was surely the high tide of US power and prestige. The message we were beginning to receive from our old allies was “Nice job helping to save the free world and all, but now that the threat is gone, we don’t need a leader anymore, thank you very much.” This feeling that the US empire was slipping away prompted much scrambling in the Pentagon and among the Very Serious foreign policy types to find some other great enemy, and some other cause and purpose for NATO and the old coalition. It also made the country very sensitive to further injuries to the eroding imperial edifice – of which 9/11 was a stunning example.
So, while I agree that gender norms played a role, I don’t think that the dominant male perception was of an attack on our children and womenfolk, an attack that demanded vengeance and a stepped up effort at protection. It was an attack on our “intrinsic manhood”. There is an element of traditional manhood that has nothing at all to do with defending and protecting women. It’s the sheer urge to dominate other men. That’s what is expressed in the drive toward power and empire.
The historical background of threatened empire perhaps accounts for the similarities between the proto-fascist response here in America following 9/11 and the rise of fascism in Germany after the First World War. The German empire was carved up and contracted after that war, which was an insult to German manhood which prompted the reactive celebration of masculinity that was such a big part of Nazi ideology.
If the chief male emotional reaction after 9/11 was an urge to protect and defend our families, one would expect greater attention to be paid to the Homeland Security side of the war on terror. But in fact, the attention hasn’t been focused very much on the so-called home front, and the country seems rather diffident about expenditures to further secure the Homeland. The focus of the national effort has been abroad. The post 9/11 response is an urge to defend our alpha status – and this is an urge many men feel even when there are no women involved at all.
November 6, 2007 4:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Putting aside the fact that most Americans are behaving as if we aren’t at war, a wartime nation doesn’t necessarily react this way.
IMO, the Bush administration and the rest of the NeoCon gang does not want the culture to react to the war and has striven to prevent such a reaction ("Don't worry, Go shopping"). Some of this is due to a desire to carry out their policy free of close inspection by the public. But I also think that they are seeking to avoid major social and cultural upheaval. Every major war the US has fought (except maybe for the War of 1812) has led to an era of rapid change and reform, seldom friendly to the interests of the elite or the guardains of traditional morality. We know what Vietnam brought at home. Korea and WWII gave us the Civil Rights movement and modern feminism. WWI gave us Prohibition, women's sufferage and the sometimes forgotten sexual revolution of the Roaring 20s. The Spanish-American War ushered in the Progressive Era. The Civil War, Reconstruction. The Mexican War ignited the debate about slavery. This is one reason why, I believe, Bush-41 shut down the Gulf War so quickly-- and even so he was sweot from office the next year. And now despite the best efforts of Bush and friends to lull the public to sleep, the stars are all aligned for another vast upheaval in our culture. The GOP itself may well be doomed if it can't free itself from its dwindling reactionary base. Twenty years from now I suspect we will be a very different country.
Re: I think the proper response was a police action backed by the UN against Bin Laden...
That's pretty much the way it started in Afghanistan which was an international effort with very little dissent. Of course the Bushies had other ideas and it didn't take them long to let bin Laden fade into the hills so they could veer of course into Iraq.
Re: and a national reckoning where we face up to the fact that our imperialism on the behalf of our corporate masters is what is feeding the worldwide anger that feeds the terrorist machine.
No country in the aftermath of an atrocity like 9-11 is going to react with this sort of breast-beating. And no country should. 9-11 no more called for this sort of response than Tim McVeigh's murderous act should have led to a national breast-beating over how we fail our working class youth (as indeed we do). Both deeds were morally indefensible acts of mass murder and required justice to be done on the perpetrators. That Bush used 9-11 to carry out a dreadful agenda he could never otherwise have spoken aloud in public does not excuse what was done that day. It only adds to the moral repugnance of the event.
November 6, 2007 4:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . a police action [was] pretty much the way it started in Afghanistan . . . .
Which puts paid to the idea that the nation was on a macho tear to rescue damsels in distress.
In fact the leadership was so uncertain of the American people's support for a military response, a few body bags was enough for it to back off the "hunt for Bin Laden" and let the Afghan warlords, as corrupt and lackadaisical as they were, take over the manly work of making war.
As Bill Maher put it, our warrior heroes are only expected to evidence their machismo from 30,000 feet.
November 6, 2007 5:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow, that's a stretch. I believe all or almost all the firefighters who died on 9/11 were male.
November 7, 2007 1:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, activism is great when it's substantial and justified. Otherwise it's just rabble rousing and fear mongering perhaps for the paycheck.
Faluti claims, and you seem to agree her, that:
Some facts for consideration:
* I checked photos and names on the NY Times of all the firefighters killed on 9/11. Unless I missed some, they're all 343 men. I couldn't find statistics by gender.
* Of the 23 NYPD killed, 2 were women.
* Of the 8 EMT killed on 9/11, all were men. Of the 3 EMT who later died as a result, 2 were men, 1 woman.
* Of the 37 port authority police killed, 1 woman.
That's over 99% male.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/091101rescuers.html
http://nypdrant64609.yuku.com/topic/4064?page=1
http://www.our.homewithgod.com/mkcathy/portauthority.html
So, there's the facts. Faludi's claims of "arbitrary designations, by sex" seems factually lacking to say the least. (She was a reporter for the WSJ? What happened to fact checking?)
Many civilians were killed and families terrified on 9/11. People looked for heroes and a firefighter is an obvious choice, as protecting families is what they do and many died on 9/11.
A photo can be a) asexual or faceless and impersonal, b) a female firefighter to be less statistically accurate and more PC, c) a male firefighter since all of the dead 9/11 firefighters were male.
No paranoia required to understand. Just common sense. But that's too obvious to sell books I guess.
November 7, 2007 1:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually I suspect it's because so many westerns are both entertaining and thought provoking, so there's a lot to discuss. While Faludi's theories and book seem to be much less so.
Geeze, talk about straw men. I've never heard anyone say that. I'd like to see where that's ever been a popular meme. What I've consistently heard, seen, and read, is the NYFD were heroic for dying in the line of duty in large numbers trying to save people. Which is obvious. I've not heard anyone harping on gender, besides Faludi, though the fact is they were all or almost all male.
Ok, so nobody is sacrificing. Not exactly an original thought as countless other books have made the point better and without gender baggage.
We don't have "Rosie the Rivoter" because we already have a huge and bloated defense industry.
Faludi claims women are being "shoved back into the home" due to the war, for which she presents zero evidence. With the obvious exception being spouses of combat troops having a greater domestic burden becoming defacto single parents, but that's hardly a cultural trend.
Huh? That's not how I remember it, and I remember it well. The Jessica Lynch Rambo story played for two and a half months, until after she was rescued, and facts emerged it was all complete nonsense, even according to her. The media didn't "shred" the myth, it clung to it as it crumbled over a few weeks, and then utterly disintegrated as propaganda. Only when it became scandalous were long corrections printed. Which indicates the media was thrilled to create a heroic female figure, in combat no less, which totally contradicts Faludi's theory and book.
Chronology of Jessica Lynch on Sourcewatch, which I found by Googling "Jessica lynch chronology" something which Faludi the journalist ought to try sometime.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Jessica_Lynch_2003_Chronology
Yeah, swell pals. I don't know what you just said, but great. Now, how about some facts and journalism?
November 7, 2007 2:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Try Google. Susan on Alternet
kozmik are you going out of your way to validate Susan's point? Because that is the net effect of your comments.November 7, 2007 5:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's not whether men died. It's whether they were valiantly rescuing anyone. Turns out they shouldn't have really tried.
In fact the firefighters were actually hindering the escape of those walking down the stairs because the stairway was so narrow.
It actually proves the point that 'valor' is largley vainglory.
It's simply not efficacious...kind of like the Iraq war...kind of like the idea of throwing an army at villains who, by their very definition, sidestep armies - that's what 'terrorism' is.
It seems to prove the point of the book we're discussing.
November 7, 2007 7:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
You could say Afghanistan was the 'police action' as it had broad support and real international cooperation (even the Germans are there).
The difference is Faludi's idea of 'national reckoning.'
Reading this, it strikes me:
The right wing, and its response to 9-11 is pretty much entirely based on denial.
"Don't blame America first!"
The party of personal responsiblity refuses to brook the very idea that US skullduggery could in any way come back to haunt the US. Cold reality: it's not whether it would 'blowback' it's why it took so long.
Denial here would be a uniquely male and 'conservative' vice that perhaps women leaders wouldn't be hindered by.
November 7, 2007 7:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for answering my contention that not a lot changed because of 9/11. That the observation is part of your thesis means you're making an argument that's perhaps more sublte and yet more timeless than I realized.
Now I wonder how much of this is innocent, how much is planned (or manipulated) and how endemic it all is.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
November 7, 2007 9:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hmm, the fact that the first long string of comments entirely diverted into the finer points and plot descriptions of ‘50s Westerns wouldn’t at all support the notion that we’re a nation that retreats into a celluloid bubble at the first hint of danger, now would it?
I think you're misunderstanding the point of us blogging here.
At the least, your underestimating the ability for us bloggers to stray off-topic on ANY particular issue or post. No just yours. It's not personal.
The fact that your ideas launched us into many conversations in several different directions over hundreds of user comments is a good thing; it's what's supposed to happen in a place centered on discourse and thinking.
"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani
November 7, 2007 10:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
To the commentator who contended that nothing seems to have really changed after 9/11:
I don’t disagree. That is, in fact, my point. The attacks on Sept. 11 revealed a cultural belief system deeply embedded in the American mindset. It existed before; it exists now; for a moment it was visible.
Yes, where we disagree is in believing that this belief system was false. On the contrary, I think many people would say that what was revealed to be false on 9/11 was the notion that we lived in a soft, gentle, feminized world that had no intention of harming us. And the traditional male values-- courage, physical strength, willingness to use violence to defend-- became visible again as necessary to safeguard the freedoms that men AND women in our society enjoy.
For five or six years our culture, which had nearly rooted out traditional male values as neanderthal, has begun to give them credit again, take them seriously again. And obviously many people don't like that, and want to discredit them as both ineffectual and out of date. Maybe someone should write a book about this process. Here's an idea for the title: Iraqlash.
November 7, 2007 2:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's obnoxious. The whole post is obnoxious.
Equating the FF who lost their lives trying to help in a chaotic and rapidly developing situation, with the politicians prosecuting a war and foreign policy going on for years, which they chose on false premises... total non-sequitur and utterly obnoxious.
It's even more obnoxious you're hypocritically making this peevish argument while deriding the supposed "vainglory" of the FF who died.
Hardly anyone on the left or the right would support that view. It sounds like something a completely irresponsible jackass would say, like Rush Limbaugh or some other shock jock.
You've totally lost my respect.
(though you'll probably now get uprated by sphealy for it. lol)
November 7, 2007 11:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
That has nothing to do with it.
The fact remains that the NYFD were seen as heroes after 9/11. And the dead were 99% male. So of course a magazine looking to put a FF on the cover is more likely to be male.
That's not some media conspiracy to drive people towards a misogynistic notion of protector males and helpless women as Faludi speculates.
***
And in regards to FD in general, it requires a great deal of upper body strength. More than most any other profession. That's a fact of the job. So FD in every culture I'm aware of have always selected for the biggest and strongest people, which naturally are going to be men. And not even any men, but always the biggest and strongest men.
In regards to bias against women in the FD, some of that is probably true, but it's not entirely unfair either. The fact is women are on average smaller and have less upper body strength. And so historically FD have always been male, and then it becomes traditional. Also, they traditionally live together much of the time which complicates issues of privacy.
The way these matters have been settled is to set an equal burden for all to qualify for the FD. Which of course is physically intensive. That's equal opportunity, but it's not quotas.
Some women (and men) who can't qualify would like to have the bar lowered, and say the standards are set too high deliberately. Others say the standards can be met by men on the large and strong side, and some women, and that there is no need to lower the bar. They say strength is paramount so you don't want to lower the bar unnecessarily or you'll reduce safety.
Personally, if I'm injured in a burning building, I want a big strong person to carry me out, who is also smart and skilled. I don't really care about their gender. But they should have all those in abundance. And if a man or woman can do that, more power to them. If not, I don't think they're right for the job.
Regardless, it's not the responsibility of a magazine to reconcile all these issues before running a cover photo featuring a FF after 9/11.
November 7, 2007 11:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
With a normal president we might be talking about how the cautious Afghan action undercuts the argument of male reaction. But it is understood that Afghanistan was vitiated by early shifting of resources to Iraq, which was in response to Bush's fixation on Iraq. War in Afghanistan was difficult ("not enough hard targets") while Iraq had those nice, open deserts, and lots of actual roads.
I do note an excess of war defenders asserting that liberating Muslim women is a justification.
November 8, 2007 6:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's not whether men died. It's whether they were valiantly rescuing anyone. Turns out they shouldn't have really tried.
In fact the firefighters were actually hindering the escape of those walking down the stairs because the stairway was so narrow.
It actually proves the point that 'valor' is largley vainglory.
============================================
I agree this is obnoxious. You're speaking with perfect 20/20 hindsight knowing that the towers would collapse. At the time the firemen and other rescue people went into the buildings their job was to evacuate people on the lower floors, put out the fires on the middle floors to save the people stranded above them.
That was not "vainglory" - that was a realistic plan to save hundreds of lives when there was no expectation that the buildings would collapse. And even if the towers hadn't collapsed there would have been danger enough involved in putting out the fires in that situation - requiring "valor".
You're like those people who complain, "Why did we waste all that money on defense during the Cold War. Everyone knew the USSR was going to collapse."
November 8, 2007 9:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
. . . a police action [was] pretty much the way it started in Afghanistan . . . .
Which puts paid to the idea that the nation was on a macho tear to rescue damsels in distress.
In fact the leadership was so uncertain of the American people's support for a military response, a few body bags was enough for it to back off the "hunt for Bin Laden" and let the Afghan warlords, as corrupt and lackadaisical as they were, take over the manly work of making war.
As Bill Maher put it, our warrior heroes are only expected to evidence their machismo from 30,000 feet.
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I disagree. I think the issue really was how logistically difficult it was to get large numbers of troops on the ground in Afghanistan. Remember when the Soviets went in they had a common border and could drive in. For the US to put any reasonable amount of equipment into Afghanistan it would have to go by sea (as in Gulf War I) to Pakistan and then go a few hundred miles over the mountain passes to get there. Air transport will only get you so much.
Putting in special forces, airstrikes, supporting the regional tribal chiefs, and the light infantry we had were to put pressure on the Pashtun/Taliban until more substantial stuff could be done.
Turns out that pressure was enough to knock down the whole Pashtun house of cards. Instead of being a big boot stamped on the country (like the Soviets) that angered all the regional ethnic groups, this came off more as a revolt of the Northern Alliance against the Pashtun
November 8, 2007 9:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: the contention that firefighters inspired simply because they saved women
Geeze, talk about straw men. I've never heard anyone say that. I'd like to see where that's ever been a popular meme. What I've consistently heard, seen, and read, is the NYFD were heroic for dying in the line of duty in large numbers trying to save people. Which is obvious. I've not heard anyone harping on gender, besides Faludi, though the fact is they were all or almost all male.
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Faludi claims women are being "shoved back into the home" due to the war, for which she presents zero evidence. With the obvious exception being spouses of combat troops having a greater domestic burden becoming defacto single parents, but that's hardly a cultural trend.
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I have to agree with both of these. I have no idea where this "women shoved back into the home" idea comes from
November 8, 2007 10:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, where we disagree is in believing that this belief system was false. On the contrary, I think many people would say that what was revealed to be false on 9/11 was the notion that we lived in a soft, gentle, feminized world that had no intention of harming us. And the traditional male values-- courage, physical strength, willingness to use violence to defend-- became visible again as necessary to safeguard the freedoms that men AND women in our society enjoy.
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After Gulf War I we spent the rest of the 90s on our vacation from history. The Cold War was over, we got our peace dividend by cutting back the military, and spent our energy on partisan political sniping on what looks like pretty trivial topics today.
All the Islamic terror attacks of that period: African embassies, Khobar Towers, USS Cole, first attempt on WTC, etc looked like annoying pin-pricks
November 8, 2007 10:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
I am curious how a global empire with a $13 trillion economy is supposed to go about its business without stirring up some resentment elsewhere in the world, and that resentment occasionally flaring up into direct action. 9/11 was a despicable act and painful to the country, but what was the British Empire's annual casualties from what today would be called terrorist attacks between 1800-1950?
sPh
November 8, 2007 10:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
First, the Trade Center and the Pentagon, though located on US soil, are not exactly symbols of home and hearth. One was a symbol of US global commercial and financial dominance. The other is the symbol of US global military dominance. So the attack was primarily an attack on the US global presence and role, its economic and military empire, and was perceived as such by Americans. The towers were the twin central poles, so to speak of the heralded unipolar world, and the Pentagon is the command center of our sprawling military empire. That’s why they were chosen by the attackers. If the attackers had wanted to launch an attack that would be perceived as an attack on our families and womenfolk, they would have selected a suburban town or a shopping mall.
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You're not accounting for the failed attack on the US Capitol - the plane that went down in PA
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The historical background of threatened empire perhaps accounts for the similarities between the proto-fascist response here in America following 9/11 and the rise of fascism in Germany after the First World War. The German empire was carved up and contracted after that war, which was an insult to German manhood which prompted the reactive celebration of masculinity that was such a big part of Nazi ideology.
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What did they lose - Lorraine, Namibia and Tanganyika?
I think what was more significant was the "stab in the back" meme. Unlike in WW II, the German army was not completely destroyed in 1918. They really didn't feel that they had been defeated - at the time of the Armistice there were not Allied armies over the German borders. The army stopped fighting intact under orders and the whole country felt like they had been betrayed by their poiticians.
November 8, 2007 10:24 AM | Reply | Permalink