“While a few of these thinkers openly denounced women’s demand for equality, most professed neutrality. They were engaged in a philosophical, not a personal, discourse over female independence. When they said feminism had wounded women, they were speaking only as informed and concerned bystanders, surveying the feminist-crime scene from an objective distance. The public could trust their judgment. They just wanted what was best for women.”—Susan Faludi, “Chapter 11—The Backlash Brain Trust: From Neocons to Neofems.”
Salamishah Tillet (Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of A Long Walk Home): This was my first time reading Backlash. I may have read parts of it before, but I don’t think I’ve read the entire book. And now I wonder if I’m a pretend feminist because there are certain things you should have read if you claim a certain position. And then you realize that maybe you hadn’t even read it.
Adam Serwer (editor at Buzzfeed): I went to a men’s rights conference in June, and the main difference between the anti-feminist backlash that Faludi describes in the book and what’s happening with the men’s rights movement is that it is deliberately echoing the rhetoric of leftist liberation movements. These men want to sound like the Civil Rights Movement or the black power movement and not like conservatives. They want sound like Malcolm X . I had not read Backlash before, and this chapter was really fascinating.
Tressie McMillan Cottom (Sociologist, Writer, PhD Candidate Emory University): Everyone wants to be a civil rights rhetorician these days.
This was my first time reading as well. Faludi is a great writer and tells a very compelling narrative, but this was not written to me and it wasn’t particularly written for me. In the grand ecosystem of feminist text, I knew this existed and was a big deal, but I didn’t really understand the context. I mean, she’s clearly not talking to black women. And that is odd throughout the book, but particularly in a chapter about academia and feminism, given black feminist created an accessible archive of our feminism in the academy.
AS: She doesn’t really get into race at all, which I find staggering. The fascinating thing about the chapter for me, though, was how alive all of the backlash ideas are and the extent to which there is an audience for a very specific kind of argument. It could be the argument that feminism hurts women—and not only that—it’s that men are being harmed by the notion that women have choices. When you drill down, that is actually what people are saying: Women have too many choices about what to do in terms of employment, they have more freedom to choose their mates, or to not have a mate period. This somehow crushes men’s ability to succeed or pursue their own dreams.
ST: That’s the argument throughout the book: The feminist movement creates a castration of men and also demoralizes women. That’s the argument Faludi consistently tries to refute, while also trying to demonstrate how that argument gains a lot of credibility because academics or public intellectuals are putting forth that as a thesis as well as capitalizing from that financially.
In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan put forth a similar thesis and MYTH about black mothers as matriarchs who castrated black men and by extension created poverty within the African American community in his now notorious, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action.” For him, it was single-black mothers, not de jure or de facto segregation that emasculated black men. Faludi shows how this same rhetoric gets revived and retooled for white families, but it doesn’t seem part of Faludi’s historical framework. It almost seems like the backlash that she references in the 1980s and 1990’s is brand new, as opposed to building off this history. I don’t even know if Faludi’s larger definition of feminism includes people of color or women of color because for her, the “backlash” is to the specific gains that white women made.
TMC: Also in this chapter is a larger argument about feminism becoming commodified. Faludi is arguing, in part, that some well-known feminists cashed in or cashed out on feminism. But that is not unique to feminist scholars in the academy during this time. Nigel Thrift, Gaye Tuchman and others peg this time period to the ramping up of the corporate university. Academics across the ideological spectrum were undercutting their counter-culture credibility in pursuit of market value. So, is this a special case or is it just a trend line? Those kinds of absences in the book made me uncomfortable about Faludi’s choices. I mean, if this is the counter-history of feminism then that context is important.
ST: It’s interesting to note the access Faludi has. She’s able to interview these people and they just prove how hostile they are at the same moment they are inviting her into their home. It was such a strategic and clever way of telling the story. Even if you’re just practicing feminism in your home, you may be reporting to the world that you’re anti-feminist. It was striking to see the revisionism of Betty Friedan and Carol Gilligan. They are associated with a certain version of feminism—whether it’s your feminism or not.
AS: I’m glad you mentioned Betty Friedan because, not to bring it back to the men’s rights types, but her clash with feminists in her later years is very much an important part of the men’s rights understanding of why feminism is bad. She was mentioned several times over the course of the men’s rights conference I attended as a feminist apostate who had seen the light. The novelty of an anti-feminist woman is something that somehow always seems new, even though it’s very much not new. It’s very old, it goes back to the First Wave, but it is somehow repackaged for every generation. t’s an organic reaction to today’s feminism, but it looks very similar to every backlash that has happened before.
Race is really instructive here. There is a sense in which it is a victory when your enemy has to start using your language. So, anti-racist language is pretty universal in the United States today. I mean, even when people are being racist they say, “I’m not a racist, but…” There is something similar with feminism going on. Very few people want to publicly say that women should have fewer rights or opportunities than someone else, but there is a way in which it becomes commodified, ways in which you can change it from what it was to mean something else.
TMC: These men’s rights conferences are still very much in the guise of pop marketing sort of segment of stuff. I think it certainly leads us to this generation of Lean In as a corporate feminist movement and ideology. I just came from the American Sociological Association annual meeting. There was an entire talk at the conference with Sheryl Sandberg that was legitimized by the fact that she had social scientists working on and ghost-writing that text with her. That’s a type of institutionalized feminism, but certainly not one that I would consider evidence of the overall success of feminism. It’s a complicated relationship.
ST: I’m glad you brought up the the Sheryl Sandberg conversation and Lean In, and the ways it’s become a popular version of feminism—even if it’s liberal feminism or corporate feminism—but I was wondering about the debate about “Can we have it all?” and the anxiety that certain women feel about that. It’s a very specific subset of American women who Ann-Marie Slaughter is talking to, and can identify with. It’s the same readership that Susan Faludi was writing to. I would never say that Slaughter was an anti-feminist feminist, but I think a lot of the anxiety that people had when she wrote about why middle to middle-upper class women can’t have it all is still a part of this sense that the problem was feminism and not the patriarchy.
AS: As long as we’re talking about the commodification of feminism, I’m sort of interested to see what you think about the recurring type of story in the media today, about whether or not a celebrity will say she is a feminist.
TMC: Oh, if you say Beyoncé I am OUT.
ST: Well, what I saw during the VMA performance was this image of Beyoncé on a pole imitating a burlesque dancer or an exotic dancer. An image we would often associate with a sexualized exploitation of women’s bodies. And then the next thing I saw was the word “feminist” and her dancing in front of it. So, for me that was really complicated. And it’s not even like liberal feminism because it’s something that strikes me as maybe newer and different. I thought it was challenging, but people seem very excited about it because it was just the word, “feminist.” But that word used to mean something very radical.
TMC: I’m not taking issue with Beyoncé—please don’t send her people after me—but I would like to point out that I danced through that entire set like any good red-blooded American does when Beyoncé comes on, so I’m living the complications along with everybody else. I think Adam’s question is a good one, and one that nobody has resolved, and if we were able to somehow resolve it here today we would probably be way too powerful to be sitting here talking to each other. Is there a point in which you can be a mass movement without being mass-ified? Can we have a pleasure in our movements without selling the pleasure as a movement?
ST: I think what Faludi is arguing in this chapter, though, is that the marriage of these two is really dangerous for women’s freedom. It’s a mass movement, but also, what does it mean to have a commodified feminism? Beyoncé’s a brand. She’s selling albums, she’s a marketing force, but what does that actually mean, then, for feminism? What does that mean for capitalism? And maybe there isn’t even a conflict here. You may have commodified feminism and maybe that’s okay. Or feminism as a commodity may be okay. I think what Faludi is arguing in this chapter, though, is that it’s really dangerous, but we may say that it’s fine and that you can have the two that coexist and that’s perfectly useful for people.
AS: So I’m going to make what is maybe a controversial argument, but I think every movement needs an element that makes its ideas really fun for people to spread. Part of what’s happening in this chapter is that all of these people realize they can make their names by being anti-feminists. There’s a big audience for that, there’s an audience that wants to read and hear about it, and there are magazines that will put it on the cover. f nothing else proves that there is a market for feminism, it’s Beyoncé. And maybe it’s not exactly the sort of revolutionary feminism that some movement feminists would prefer, but I think it does a lot for the movement in its own way.
ST: I wonder if the future is some messy version of feminism that we have to live with today. That happens to have a really, really good beat and a really, really beautiful spokesperson.
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Read more of the Backlash Book Club, featuring Jamelle Bouie, Alex Pareene, and Michelle Goldberg, and others.
Illustrations by Hannah K. Lee
