Susan, I wonder if you wouldn't mind addressing a question I have about your thesis.

I believe you are right that much of the response to 9/11 in the United States was brimming with the gender anxieties you describe briefly here, and I'm anxious to read the book to see these described in more detail. I really do believe that people who profess not to have noticed these responses couldn't have been paying close attention.

What I'm interested in is what lead you from that observation to reflection on the literary artifacts from the New England colonial period. In your introductory post, that transition comes off as a rather sudden leap which I assume is developed more carefully in the book. What is your reason for thinking that the gender anxieties of September, 2001 America have their source in, or are significantly illuminated by events of 300 years ago? Can't we find such gendered reactions to violence, protection, attack, war etc. in most cultures? If we look at the response to an attacks on and abductions of women in most any country, from almost any time over the past few thousand years, wouldn't we find much the same male reaction?

My point in raising this issue is that I'm initially skeptical about your claim that what happened here points to things that are culturally unique and specific to the United States. In the post, you defend this claim only by noting the lack of such a response to recent attacks in England and Spain. But the circumstances were quite different, and those are cultures that have long experience with domestic terrorism. I suspect that if the United States went through several decades of sporadic train and building bombings, our response would also become progressively more muted, less emotional, and more bureaucratic.

It inspires defensiveness because it appears to place the ultimate responsibility for our response to 9/11 on one group of people - men. Of course they're going to be defensive, Faludi and Ducat are attacking them - whether that attack is justified is another matter.

Frankly, I agree that our "response in large part...was to repair a cherished American myth...of American invincibility." I believe it was, there is certainly enough anecdotal evidence to support the claim, but I don't know that this myth is peculiar only to Americans - the British certainly responded to their recent wave of terror attacks by implementing authoritarian measures across their society and the Brits seem to cherish a myth of invincibility. On the other hand, Spain, a chauvinistic society moved farther to the left, so how do we explain that?

Then we have the conundrum of the east mythologizing and romanticising the western male as the epitome of masculinity and yet the western states were the first to recognize women's rights and enfranchise them. That's certainly conflicting to the mythology of the western hero as master of the world.

As to Matt's criticism, I don't believe that whether Faludi's statements are falsifiable or not is valid criticism. Faludi isn't offering a theory, (or technically a thesis either) but a claim with arguments from which she draws a causal inference - male insecurity drove our response to 9/11. Faludi cannot prove and Matt cannot disprove a causal inference, because while a causal inference should be informed by strong premises, it is still subjective in nature.

Matt can offer counter arguments (he can even offer a counter claim if he wishes) but Faludi isn't obliged to offer empirical evidence and ample anecdotal evidence is proper as argument as long as its provenance is correctly attributed and linked to her premises.

Marcotte simply muddies the waters with the reference to Threat Management Theory - without the protocols, there is no way for the reader to judge for himself if TMT is evidentiary and supportive of Faludi's arguments. By saying that Matt's response is "denial" or an unwillingness to address issues which make him uncomfortable, she is offering nothing more than a circular argument which is a fallacy. Clearly Matt is engaged and has addressed the issues - Marcotte is unwilling to accept his statements as counter-arguments and therefore rejects them out of hand without providing any reasons other than labeling Matt.

That respondents here disagree with Faludi's claim doesn't mean that they're against women, it means that they disagree wtih Faludi and those respondents who disagree with Faludi shouldn't dismiss her arguments because she's a feminist. When an idea is attacked for the source of its origin, that's the fallacy of ad hominem and that makes everyone "wrong."

Strawman. There's no doubt that women are enamored of the fantasy of a hyper-gendered world where our anxieties about death can be calmed by sending women back to the kitchen out of the voting booth. Exhibit One: Ann Coulter. If you bothered to read the book, instead of kicking your feet and denying outright anything a dreaded feminist says (at this point, you'd squall if one of us said the sky was blue), you'd know that Susan actually addresses the number of women who participated in the sexist response to 9/11.

For the naysayers, who want to deny the gendered tone of the response to 9/11, what say you to this video?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CkqESQ48qrQ

It's not there? I won't click it? Nuh-uh and by linking that video you demonstrate that you secretly hate men?

Not to take a "defensive" male position but might the motivation have been something other than male insecurity? I'm not arguing that insecurity did not play a part, but rather maybe there are other older drives or conditions which might also be involved.

The thing that came to my mind was an image of males fighting for the alpha role and thus winning the right to sire future generations. I don't think it's quite so literal in our age but it is something that seems "hard-wired" into males isn't it?

In terms of insecurity, couldn't one also argue that one of the sources of the male insecurity derives from this literal alpha conflict having been all but removed from society? BTW I am grateful that it has been removed (more or less) because I'm no Hercules and as such it would have made meeting someone even harder than it already is!

So if these two thing are reasonable statements then it would seem we went to war, in part, to compensate for our feelings of insecurity over not being able to go to war as often as we'd like. Is this an insane idea? It is Friday and I've had no coffee or Guinness yet today and this can make me either cranky or crazy or both...but I'm am curious.

It doesn't really matter whether Susan calls it a theory. It's a statement about the real world. It also doesn't matter if she had the hypothesis before she made observations. (Scientists do this all the time.)

Let's say I had a claim about the real world, say, that there's an elephant eating spaghetti in my room. You'd think this was a crazy claim, right? And you'd probably ask why I thought this was true. Well, if I said, "No reason," then you'd probably think I was crazy and you wouldn't believe me.

You might say, "You're crazy: I don't see an elephant in your room." To which I would respond, "Well of course you don't see it, it's an invisible elephant." If you say, "I don't smell spaghetti," I say, "It's an odorless, flavorless spaghetti." It starts to become clear that there's not much you could say to make me give up my crazy belief. Without the possibility of being falsified, a claim about the world doesn't have much meaning.

Well Susan's argument is nothing like that. She has logic, historical evidence, and well-supported psychological theory to back her up. But because her argument is based on logic and evidence, if it's meaningful at all then it's got to be falsifiable (whether you call it a "theory" or a "claim" or a "hypothesis"). Perhaps not easily so, but this is the nature of psychological claims.

I thing the hard wired desire to be the alpha male and earn the right to mate with females is alive and well in humans but I don’t think that is an instinct for violence. It manifests itself in flashy cars, striving for a promotion, winning at sports, ect.

Even it the animal world the instinct is to resort to violence as a last resort, using ritual displays to establish dominance and resorting to fights as a last resort and even then not fighting to the death.

way ahead of those reviewers who made me “cranky”

Repeatedly insisting that the "reviewers" have misunderstood her book isn't helping.

This is a forum, where she is invited to present her theories, and discuss them, with supporters and critics, in conjunction with the release of her book. The response has generally been negative it seems. Specifically people seem to find her theory uncompelling and supporting anecdotes to be somewhat flimsy.

I'm actually a little sympathetic to her frustration and "crankiness." She must feel like she'd walked into a furnace. (maybe Gollis can console her a bit and explain this is the way of direct feedback?)

Re, European vs. American reactions to terrorist threats, the cultural memory of two catastrophic wars in the last century must have gone some way towards tempering a hyper-masculine response.

"These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men - and the feelings of all the other women - are changing. We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world - ruled by men, glorifying the strong man - is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of ‘Man’. In earlier wars men could claim that the privilege of killing and being killed for the fatherland was theirs and theirs alone. Today, we women, too, have a share. That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex."
Anonymous A Woman in Berlin

. . . she's offering a claim supported by arguments made through inductive reasoning.

Which is a pretty good definition of a "scientific theory." In fact there isn't any scientific theory that isn't the result of inductive reasoning -- else we'd call it mathematics.

So --- why do you say "[s]he's not offering a scientific theory, she's not offering a hypothesis"? Seems to me that, pursuant to your own description of her practice, that's exactly what she's doing.

On the other hand if you're arguing that rumination over whether a nation's cultural myths have an effect upon the elite's choice of policies is bulls**t -- that is, statements the truthfulness of which no one, least of all the proponent, cares a whit about -- I suppose it doesn't much matter how she came upon her speculations.

There's no doubt that women are enamored of the fantasy of a hyper-gendered world where our anxieties about death can be calmed by sending women back to the kitchen out of the voting booth

Did you forget some qualifiers there, like "some women"? Instead of expressing doubt, you say "no doubt," none at all.

Generalize much, do ya? Some of your rhetoric, geez, sometimes I can't help but think you're a plant to aide in the destruction of the feminist movement. I've just got to say it: for me, you're arguments for Faludi's case are not helping, they're hurting. Faludi seems to make a much better case for her book without your "help."

BTW, to this feminist, growing up at the start of the movement, thoughts of having to be in the kitchen like my mother's generation were very similar to thoughts of death. (And 9/11 didn't change that one wit, even though I live only a few miles away from where it happened. That it reminded me for the second or two of the misery of the life of women under the Taliban didn't make me want to run to the protective arms of a macho man, nope, that it didn't. I still saw it macho men as causing yet another problem. And so did my Mom! Funny that.)

Another BTW, sisters like BevD, they're not your enemy. She is a sister, I know from her posts here. You're the one constructing a classic strawman out of her with the nonsense about "kicking your feet and denying outright anything a dreaded feminist says."

There's a case to be made that European countries have had a less gendered response to terrorism not just because they have more experience with terrorism, but because gender is less of a battlefield in European politics and culture overall. But this also seems to be a post-WWII development. The cult of masculinity in politics was everywhere in Europe during the insecure period of the '20s and '30s, assuming culturally appropriate forms in each country -- Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Churchill, Stalin. More recently, many Eastern European states turned in that direction during a period of similar insecurity: Ratko Mladic, the Limbaugh-esque Milosevic, and in Russia both Yeltsin and Putin following different models of Russian hypermasculinity. Meanwhile Gorbachev's image has been feminized in terms worthy of those applied to Jimmy Carter in the US.

But it is rather striking that the US elected the hypermasculine GOP to a legislative majority during the peaceful '90s, that we elected Bush in a highly gender-bound election while at the peak of our prosperity in 2000, and that we seem to be nearly as obsessed with the masculinity of our leaders as Russians are, despite being the richest country in the world and facing no significant threat of attack or civil war. Which suggests there may be something peculiar going on here, and maybe Faludi has a point.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

Re: But it is rather striking that the US elected the hypermasculine GOP to a legislative majority during the peaceful '90s, that we elected Bush in a highly gender-bound election while at the peak of our prosperity in 2000

But we didn't elect Bush in 2000. Al Gore won the popular vote total. You might have a point if Bush had won by the sort of majority Reagan piled up in 1980, but he didnlt. He won due to a quirk in the Constitution and the willingness of the Supreme Court to take on a role it had no warrant for.

.  .  .  inductive reasoning is used all the time in geometry  .  .  .  .

Actually, no.  Geometry is axiomatic. 

So? Inductive reasoning in geometry is observation - it can be observed that in a few given rectangles the diagonals are congruent, the observer can then inductively reason that rectangles have diagonals that are congruent. Whether it is axiomatic is not the point - inductive reasoning flows from a set of specific observations to a general observation, and deductive reasoning is the opposite. They're methods of organizing thinking, they're not the definition of anything.

RogerGathman
The american encounter with Iraq - perhaps not the lead up to it, but the encouter - also has deep, gender specific roots in American history - namely, the history of the encounter of the young American state with the indian nations east of the Mississippi. Henry Knox, George Washington's secretary of war, created the doctrine that the Indian nations were to be folded into the U.S. by means of "civilizing" them. That meant Christianizing the Indians, getting them to change to a landowning, cropraising economy, and - and this was very important - putting women back in the domestic sphere. It shocked the colonial mentality that Indian women "worked', or did the farm labor, and that Indian men were "parasitic" on their labor,i.e. hunted. Although this often meant that the settlers interpreted the Indians purely as a hunting society, since what women did in the economy had to be minor. It further shocked the Americans that some Indian nations, like the Shawnees, consulted with the older women in the tribe on matters like war.

Knox's civilizing program was especially important in shaping policy to the Cherokees, who were the successful case of the civilizing process. Washington wrote a letter to the Cherokees in 1796 in which he advised the men to raise sheep and cattle and the women to stay indoors and weave and spin. As Nancy Shoemaker points out in her book, Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women, Washington's letter addressed the Cherokee men only, referencing "your wives and daughters" - for conversation would only be between the men, here.

What happened is well known - as the Cherokees did adapt the civilizing program, the white male leadership of the Southern states got increasingly angry that Cherokee land was withheld from other white citizens. Eventually, the Cherokees were ethnically purged, forced to move to Oklahoma, taken by train or force on foot. And of course there was mass death.

Much of this seems like the American program in Iraq. But there are differences. For instance, American imperialism now exploits the liberal discourse of feminism to the extent that the Americans cast themselves as the 'protectors' of Islamic women, turning them out into the public sphere. In the past, the Americans were 'protectors' of Indian women by casting them into the domestic sphere. In both cases, though, gender plays a strong role in the imperialist apologetic.

RogerGathman

Ellen, don't think the letter quite went like that. More like this:
http://oll.libertyfund.org/
?option=
com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=
848&chapter=102186&layout=html&Itemid=27

"My beloved Cherokees, Some among you already experience the advantage of keeping cattle and hogs: let all keep them and increase their numbers, and you will ever have a plenty of meet. To these add sheep, and they will give you cloathing as well as food. Your lands are good and of great extent. By proper management you can raise live stock not only for your own wants, but to sell to the White people. By using the plow you can vastly increase your crops of corn. You can also grow wheat, (which makes the best bread) as well as other useful grain. To these you will easily add flax and cotton, which you may dispose of to the White people, or have it made up by your own women into cloathing for yourselves. Your wives and daughters can soon learn to spin and weave; and to make this certain, I have directed Mr. Dinsmoor, to procure all the necessary apparatus for spinning and weaving, and to hire a woman to teach the use of them."

Washington's beloved Cherokee did quite well, economically, selling deer hides for tanning, by the way - but you can't have indians traipsing around on newly stolen ground as if they owned it, can you?

Re: It shocked the colonial mentality that Indian women "worked', or did the farm labor

Huh? Colonial and pioneer women most certainly worked too: many of them worked so hard they ended up in an early grave because of it. Very few people on the frontier were rich enough to let their wives sit around in idleness. I don’t think the fact that native women worked shocked anyone. You’re reading back 1950s American notions on a very different world. Hard labor was a universal way of life for women and men for centuries; only the rich were free of it.

Re: Knox's civilizing program was especially important in shaping policy to the Cherokees, who were the successful case of the civilizing process.

We should remember here that the Eastern and Mississippi Valley tribes were not hunter-gatherers, but had actually founded proto-civilizations and proto-states by the time the Europeans came on the scene. They did not have far to go to reach “civilization”. They did have to learn about the use of metals and of guns, and the domestication of animals, and of course the whites wanted them to become Christian. But to a large extent “successful” tribes like the Cherokee (and the Navaho out west) can be said to have civilized themselves.

Re: as the Cherokees did adapt the civilizing program, the white male leadership of the Southern states got increasingly angry that Cherokee land was withheld from other white citizens.

They probably wouldn’t have cared except that small amounts of gold were found on Cherokee land. It turned out not to amount to much, but at the time there were dreams of the sort of gold rush that Anglo settlers had felt cheated of since the days of John Smith and Jamestown.

Re: Eventually, the Cherokees were ethnically purged, forced to move to Oklahoma, taken by train or force on foot.

There were no trains going to Oklahoma at the time of the Trail of Tears. Railroads were in their earliest infancy. The Cherokee and their neighbors were removed by foot. Although some managed to remain behind high in the Appalachians where their descendants remain to this day.

Re: Much of this seems like the American program in Iraq.

????
How so? Nobody in the US wants to live in Iraq. Iraq will not become the 51st state.

RogerGathman

Sorry, I should have said wagon trains. Mostly, though, the cherokees walked on foot. As for your other points.

1. Women's labor. No doubt colonial women worked - but they did not work in extensively cultivating crops. The Cherokee, Shawnee and other Indian nations did have women doing such work, and - vide Washington's letter - it was considered part of the program of civilization to enclose women in the domestic sphere. Don't interpret this as enclosing women in some sphere of leisure - rather, it was enclosure in a sphere where the work would be household labor.
2. The gold rush that started in 1829 merely accelerated the demand for Cherokee land which was expressed by the State of Georgia to the Federal government before gold was discovered, beginning in 1802. The white southerners wanted the land for farming. To squeeze the Cherokees, the State of Georgia adopted a set of laws to make them non-people, much like the Nuremberg laws, accompanied by resolutions for expulsion - one of which passed in 1827, two years before the discovery of gold. For instance, they couldn't testify in court against a white person, which of course made it impossible to take a white landgrabber to court.
3. The Cherokees that remained in the Smokies came under a different treaty, and the government of North Carolina took a different approach to the Federal government concerning the Cherokees.
4. The model of treating the indian nations as objects of a civilizing mission is the parallel with Iraq. Not conquest. In both cases, women figured in the discourse as 'oppressed' by the Other's males, and in need of American liberation - in the case of the Indians, from the 'slavery' of supporting their male partners in the fields, and in the case of Iraq, from the oppressions of Islam. In the case of the Indians, the general consensus of the historians at present is that the settlers had it backwards, and that Indian women had a more elevated status vis a vis men than was the case with the settler society.

Re: work and women.

Men and women in the pre-industrial past both worked at farm labor. This was the norm throughout the Old World. The men of course generally had the heavier and riskier tasks, but women were too were to be found in the fields. We have pastoral paintings depicting this. I believe the distinction you are trying to get at is that among many Native peoples women and children alone did farm work while men hunted. On the whole too remember that very few people, women or men, worked outside the home (counting farm fields as "home"). Your "domestic sphere" contained and encompassed the workplace for almost all families. And even under industrialization, when home and work did become separate places, for some generations women (and children) also worked long, hard hours in factories. Don't confuse the lifestyle of the elite with that of the great mass of people.

Re: Status of Native Americans:

I don't see your citation of various discrminatory laws as meaning much. Native Americans were regarded legally as citizens of their own nations. They were not US citizens and did not ever have the rights of citizens. Even the 14th amendment (which codified birth citizenship for everyone else) did not change this. Detailed legislation on the subject was initially unnecessary when whites and natives lived physically separate from each other, just as Jim Crow laws were unnecessary in states where there were few or no Blacks. But once the populations began to butt up against each other such laws became necessary due to the conflicts that easily arose. Since they were drafted by whites they were ineveitably discrimnatory against the natives.

Re: The model of treating the indian nations as objects of a civilizing mission is the parallel with Iraq.

There is no sense in which Iraq is not civilized, as the term is generally understood. It has agriculture, animal husbandry, social classes, formal government, organized religion, written language, metal use. The Native Americans lacked some of these and the white mission to civilize them had some basis in fact, albeit it was patronizing as best, racist and geneocidal at worst.

thanks, A.A.

Re: It wasn't the only factor - Plains indians, having increased access to horses and firearms, changed in such a way that the male warriors increasingly came out on top, and women came out on bottom.

I thought we were talking about Native Americans in what is now the Eastern US. The Plains tribes are a diferent world-- as different as the Mongols were from the Europeans. Beware of lumping all natives under the moniker of "Indian". The Native peoples of North America were very diverse in all respects-- more so I think than the peoples of Eurasia in the same era.

Re: You mean the right to testify in trials? Sure they did

This was a citizenship right. Note that slaves also lacked it.

Re: I don't think you are seeing the point of the Iraq comparison, which is not about 'civlizing' Iraqis, but about the equivalent

There is no "equivalent" here. We are not more "civilizing" Iraq (a place which has hosted civilization for 5000 years!!!) and the excuse that we are bringing them democracy is so laughable I don't see why you are even taking it seriously. We are in Iraq to establish a beachhead in an uber-important strategic region of the world. "Civilizing" the Indians made some minor amount of sense given that even their most advanced civilizations were technologically inferior to those of the old World. Iraq is/was not one whit inferior to the USA in civilization, unless you wish to adopt a Christianist point of view and suppose that they must accept Christianity to reach our level.