SUSAN FALUDI: Think the Gender War Is Over? Think Again (moonbat feminazi alert!)

NY Times ^ | June 15, 2008 | SUSAN FALUDI

[neverdem]

FOR months, our political punditry foresaw one, and only one, prospective gender contest looming in the general election: between the first serious female presidential candidate and the Republican male “warrior.” But those who were dreading a plebiscite on sexual politics shouldn’t celebrate just yet. Hillary Clinton may be out of the race, but a Barack Obama versus John McCain match-up still has the makings of an epic American gender showdown.

The reason is a gender ethic that has guided American politics since the age of Andrew Jackson. The sentiment was succinctly expressed in a massive marble statue that stood on the steps of the United States Capitol from 1853 to 1958. Named “The Rescue,” but more commonly known as “Daniel Boone Protects His Family,” the monument featured a gigantic white pioneer in a buckskin coat holding a nearly naked Indian in a death’s grip, while off to the side a frail white woman crouched...

--snip--

If Mr. Obama’s campaign has fashioned any master narrative, it’s that of the young man in the bower of a matriarchy — raised by a “strong” mother, bolstered by a “strong” sister, married to a “strong” wife and proud of his “strong” daughters. (Bill Clinton had a similar story, although his handlers highlighted his efforts to save his mother from domestic violence.)

--snip--

Will such attacks succeed? The wild card in the campaign drama to come is 9/11, which for a while kicked us into Daniel Boone overdrive. But in recent years, the dangers and costs of that prolonged delusion have become painfully apparent. In the primaries, a substantial portion of Democratic voters turned away from the dictates of “The Rescue.” In choosing between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain in the general election, Americans will pass a referendum on 200 years of bedrock gender mythology.

[neverdem]

IIRC, there is a supermarket tabloid, I don't believe the National Enquirer, that in effect said Obama hated his mother because he was eventually raised by his grandparents, feeling abandoned or rejected by his mother. Does anyone remeber seeing this? It was on the front page. I didn't read the story. I just glanced while waiting to check out of the supermarket. It might explain why he cottoned to the hate whitey Rev. Wright.

[A_perfect_lady]

I can’t tell what she’s saying. Is she saying that now it’s down to two men and McCain is more masculine because Obama has an emasculating wife?

[Frank_2001]

“I can’t tell what she’s saying.”

Typical feminist blather. Perhaps she’d feel better if the statue portrayed the white woman helping out Daniel Boone by giving the Indian a kick in the family jewels?;)

[highlander_UW]

"...but a Barack Obama versus John McCain match-up still has the makings of an epic American gender showdown.

Sounds like they're calling Obama a woman. Democrats sure are race and gender fixated...and then they project their own racism and sexism on others.

[Nathan Zachary]

Obama’s Mother a “Strong woman” ? BAh-hahahahaha! His wife a “strong woman? BAh-HAHAHAHA! Both sucked the government teat for all the taxpayer money it could give.
It’s the taxpayers strength, sweat and the money it earned who fund welfare (Obama’s mothers strength), and free education programs, student aid, (Michelle’s strength) as well as special treatment for not so special people initiatives that Obama’s Character is built on.

[ozzymandus]

Wait, Obama is a chick?

[patriot08]

He looks gay to me. I read stuff about his being gay/bi long before Larry Sinclair showed up.

[garyhope]

Her real name is Susan Bologna Falacious.

The left can only and forever think in tired cliched stereotypes. They drag around the same of crap over and over again, no matter how burned out it is.

They are incapable of thinking new thoughts. They just follow the same old Marxist line of thinking.

[Nathan Zachary]

Not a chick, A Momma’s boy that stands with his head hung low behind his wife, Michelle is the one who has the real strength in his family. He’d be nothing without her and his mothers ubringing is what the article is saying. Even though Obama’s mother didn’t even raise him, his grandparents did. Obama’s mommy sat on welfare most of the time when she was between husbands.

[rabscuttle385]

I can’t tell what she’s saying.

Tell me about it...or, actually, don't.

[kcvl]

Throughout the eighties she wrote several articles on feminism and the apparent resistance to the movement. Seeing a pattern emerge, Faludi began to write Backlash, which was released in late 1991. She now lives with fellow author Russ Rymer.

Russ Rymer is a book author and freelance journalist with articles in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, and others.

From 2005 to 2006 Rymer served as editor-in-chief of Mother Jones magazine.

she considers Mr. Rymer to be a model ‘’evolved’’ male, one who combines old-fashioned know-how with new-fashioned values

The two share many things: two cats, a 1947 house and a passion for social justice.

During the day, they sometimes hang around the doors to each other’s offices waiting to be noticed. They remain at this point wedded to their work and skittish about marriage. ‘’We like to do what’s not expected,’’ she said. ‘’A lot of people seem to want to make the institution of marriage substitute for a real relationship.’’

******

Faludi argues that 9/11 reinvigorated in America a climate that is hostile to women.

In her book, which she calls a journey, Ms. Faludi tries to come to grips with postwar social upheavals, from downsizing to the Vietnam War, that she feels have short-circuited men.

[kcvl]

Susan Faludi first became interested in writing about feminism in the fifth grade when she polled her classmates to determine their feelings about the Vietnam War and legalized abortion. In the furor that followed Faludi’s release of her data demonstrating the liberal attitudes of her peers, Faludi came to realize, as she put it in a recent interview, “the power that you could have as a feminist writer. Not being the loudest person on the block, not being one who regularly interrupted in class or caused a scene, I discovered that through writing I could make my views heard, and I could actually create change”

Faludi a household name—she appeared on the cover of Time magazine alongside Gloria Steinem and, almost overnight, she became a national spokesperson on women’s rights and the future of feminism.

Faludi believes that “[t]o revive a genuine feminism, we must disconnect feminism from the individual pursuit of happiness and reconnect it with the individual desire for social responsibility: the basic human need and joy to be part of a larger, meaningful struggle, which engages the entire society”

Faludi, she came to understand that male dissatisfaction with feminism is actually evidence of a larger sense of betrayal that men feel—a sense that they have been betrayed by a society that “ had made a promise to them and not delivered.”

Why, she asks, did an assault on American global dominance provoke an almost hysterical summons to restore “traditional” manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did our media react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fueled by hatred of Western emancipation lead to a regressive fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity, with trembling-lipped “security moms,” swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the “rescue” of a female soldier compulsively recast as a “helpless little girl”?

On September 11, Americans were once again returned to an experience of homeland terror and humiliation. And, once again, they fled from self-knowledge and retreated into myth.

SHE IS NUTS!!!

[ChicagahAl]

“Perhaps she’d feel better if the statue portrayed the white woman helping out Daniel Boone by giving the Indian a kick in the family jewels?;)”

No. She’d feel better if the statue portrayed the white woman helping the Indian attack Daniel Boone.

[kcvl]

The Jessica Lynch story, or I should say the manufactured Jessica Lynch story, was the perfect parable of our cultural myth. The story we were told by the government and the military and the media was that Special Ops teams armed with all kinds of fancy weaponry battled their way through a fierce fight into the Iraqi hospital to rescue Lynch from these bloodthirsty Fedayin death squads. Of course, the reality was that there was no battle and there were no death squads and the hospital was mainly peopled by doctors and nurses who were trying to take care of her and were actually trying to return her to the U.S. military. What we turned it into as a culture was the story we wanted to hear of the daring raid and the helpless, rescued girl.

Women are acculturated not to jump in there and yell and scream and pontificate and bloviate as much as men in this country. But even factoring that in, there was a dramatic decline from the low point. You had a 40% drop of women guests on the important Sunday morning talk shows. You had dramatic declines on all the Op-Ed pages of all the important newspapers, and even women who would seem like obvious guests for the Sunday morning talk shows, like Diane Feinstein or Barbara Boxer who are both chairpersons of subcommittees on terrorism, there was this feeling that this was the time for men and women should take a back seat. There was one place where there were plenty of women’s faces on TV, and that was the 9/11 widows, as long as they played the role of helpless homemaker victims. In the absence of female victims in the planes or rescued from the events of 9/11, the TV shows trotted out 9/11 widows as the substitute victims. Then, the Larry Kings and Bill O’Reillys acted like daddy saviors towards them...There was this need to assert the protective authority role of men, particularly after a trauma in which every aspect of the male protective system failed. Our government ignored warnings that we were about to come under attack. Our 9/11 dispatch system did not warn people properly. Our military did not protect our skies.

Susan Faludi
on 9/11 Myths and Truths

She has a problem with men, obviously.

[AmericanExceptionalist]

After all, [John McCain] actually starred in a real-life captivity narrative, having withstood five and a half years of imprisonment by non-white tormentors...

The tendentious use of the modifier "non-white" is obviously intended to fit the leftist template: America is a racist nation, whose citizens--the unenlightened savages that they are--tend to be far more upset by torture at the hands of those of a different race or ethnicity than they are by torture inflicted by other Caucasions. For proof of this charge, Ms. Faludi offers...well, nothing. Nothing at all.

This is typical of leftist doctrine: It is steeped, not in evidence, but in attitudes. By offering up the proper attitude, progressives are unburdened of any responsibility to present proof of their statements. Or so they seem to believe, anyway.

[kcvl]

Susan Faludi

“Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!” a reporter told Susan Faludi on 9/11, and in the weeks after the attacks, the author of Backlash and Stiffed watched pundits across the political spectrum herald a return to John Wayne–style manliness and milk-and-cookies femininity. In The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, Faludi connects that panicky yearning for home and hearth not just to the military adventures that followed the tragedy but to centuries of American anxiety about being attacked on native soil, particularly from the Native Americans who were conquered for the sake of Manifest Destiny.

[Veto!]

McCain’s mother is 95, stands ramrod straight, is smart as a whip. She should quell any feminist blather. No one in their right mind would get into a staredown with her.

[kcvl]

As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women’s mental health: employment improves it.
Susan Faludi

Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.
Susan Faludi

Feminism’s agenda is basic: It asks that women not be forced to choose between public justice and private happiness.
Susan Faludi

[A_perfect_lady]

Typical feminist blather. Perhaps she’d feel better if the statue portrayed the white woman helping out Daniel Boone by giving the Indian a kick in the family jewels?;)

No no no no... how insensitive... the statue should have been of the woman putting a flower in the muzzle of Daniel's musket while the Indian cries over the litter on the side of the road.

[A_perfect_lady]

she considers Mr. Rymer to be a model ‘’evolved’’ male, one who combines old-fashioned know-how with new-fashioned values...

...and who doesn't want to marry her. Oh boy. If you think she's bitter now, wait till he dumps her for a 23 year old grad student.