holy shit! read this book!

[intertribal]

Susan Faludi's Terror Dream:

Ms. Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of two previous books, was perplexed by the cultural fallout from that day. What she found, she says, was a powerful resurgence in traditional sex roles and a glorification of he-man virility as embodied by Wayne, the ur-savior of virtuous but helpless damsels in distress. The prefeminist thinking was everywhere, Ms. Faludi said: in the media, where female commentators were suddenly scarce after 9/11 and specious trend reports appeared about women nesting and baking; in depictions of that day’s heroes as male and victims as female; and in movies like the 2005 “War of the Worlds,” Ms. Faludi said, with Tom Cruise as a “deadbeat divorced dad emasculated by his wife, reclaiming his manhood by saving their little girl.”

At the end of that movie, Mr. Cruise’s character cradles his daughter in his arms, an echo of the final scene in John Ford’s classic 1956 film “The Searchers,” when John Wayne carries home his young niece, who was captured by Indians years before. “It’s some bizarre, weirdly out-of-proportion fixation,” Ms. Faludi said, “an exaltation of American masculinity in an intergalactic crisis.”

Those who did not conform to this story line, she added — like female rescuers on 9/11 and widows who refused to remain piously grief-stricken or who scrutinized intelligence failures — were treated with contempt.

Comments

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Cool. Had you heard of the book before?