“The press first introduced the backlash to a national audience—and made it palatable. Journalism replaced the “pro-family” diatribes of fundamentalist preachers with sympathetic and even progressive-sounding rhetoric. It cosmeticized the scowling face of antifeminism while blackening the feminist eye. In the process, it popularized the backlash beyond the New Right’s wildest dreams.” —Susan Faludi, Backlash, “Chapter 4—The “Trends” of Antifeminism: The Media and the Backlash.”
Anna Holmes (editor of Digital Voices and Storytelling at Fusion, founder of Jezebel, and columnist for The New York Times Book Review): This chapter left me feeling a bit cold. For one thing, I’m pretty skeptical of Faludi’s assertions that the media was as successful in its efforts to disable female advancement, independence, and self-esteem as she makes it out to be. I’m also skeptical about the entire concept of “the media,” a phrase often used as a rhetorical device by those who can’t — or won’t — construct arguments about failures within journalism with the sort of rigor and precision that actual good journalism demands. Faludi is merciless in her insistence that “the media” and “the press” — phrases she uses some 78 times in this 35-page chapter — promoted bullshit trend stories about threats to women’s professional and personal lives, but she fails to provide many actual examples of how widespread this narrative assault on women really was. (The worst offenders seemed to be Newsweek, ABC News, and The New York Times.) This lack of specificity, coupled with the author’s repeated invocation of the monster that is “the media,” suggest that Faludi may have been suffering from the same lack of intellectual rigor as the writers, reporters, and editors she so unflinchingly castigates.
What makes me perhaps more uncomfortable about this chapter than Faludi’s lack of precision about exactly how “the press delivered the backlash to the public” is her apparent distrust of the psychological resilience of the actual adult women who were its intended targets. Were single women, as Faludi puts it, really whipped “into high marital panic” because a few idiotic newspaper or magazine columnists said they should be? Were that many women “suddenly” feeling “desperate, unworthy, and shameful for failing to reproduce on the media’s schedule,” as she claims towards the end of this chapter? I’m not convinced: Not only do Faludi’s protestations against “the press” suggest a lack of sophistication and media literacy among the adult female reading public, she fails to produce any proof of widespread or systemic psychic harm, save a few anecdotes. (As Faludi knows — and outlines convincingly at times — anecdotes are sometimes nothing more than experience and opinion masquerading as actual data.) I simply have a hard time believing that very many fully-fledged adult American females were profoundly affected by the sort of scare-mongering, anti-feminist claptrap peddled by various members of “the press.”
Leslie Bennetts (correspondent for Newsweek/The Daily Beast, a former reporter at Vanity Fair and The New York Times, and author of The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?): Ironically, a story I myself wrote was among those criticized by Faludi in this chapter; Vogue had assigned me to write about what it called “baby fever,” as boomers with thriving careers confronted the biological clock and questioned whether to have children before time ran out. I quoted a thirtysomething professional woman as saying that the desire to have a child had suddenly gripped her “like a claw.” When Faludi cited this story in 1991, I thought she was being slightly unfair; the woman in question genuinely felt this way, not because the media had told her to but because the desire to have a child is something many women feel very keenly no matter their cultural environment. A quarter of a century has passed since Backlash came out, and the woman I quoted still feels a lot of sadness that she never had children. I think it’s important not to dismiss or trivialize women’s real feelings about these issues, many of which are very painful. But there’s no question that the way the media cover them often exacerbates women’s conflicts and self-doubt, as well as helping to fuel the social pressures they feel. And some of the most irresponsible coverage, by exaggerating and misrepresenting what it depicts, actually increases the spread of toxic ideas and attitudes and misconceptions.
My first thought on rereading this chapter was to recall the old French adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The facile, often specious, and always incomplete media narratives that Faludi identifies began long before the modern era and continue to pose a major challenge for women today. The problem with most of these stories is not that they’re entirely wrong. They usually contain at least a kernel of truth, but the media typically fail to provide a responsible factual context or nuanced analysis, so a significant but limited observation is presented as a sweeping trend story that defines an era, and thus becomes misleading, journalistically irresponsible, and unduly influential as well as potentially very destructive in its social and political impact.
Fifteen years after Backlash was published, I became so upset about the stupidity and inaccuracy of the media’s “opting out” narrative about women leaving the workforce that I wrote a whole book, The Feminine Mistake, to try to correct the record. The New York Times had decided that well-educated professional women were quitting their careers to become full-time homemakers because it was just too hard to juggle work and family, and the rest of the media quickly jumped on the bandwagon. The problem was that virtually all the coverage idealized the life of the stay-at-home mom, omitted the many benefits of work and economic autonomy, and failed to document the consequences of dropping out by ignoring what actually happens when women leave the labor force and later try to get back in. As a result, women were not receiving accurate information about how difficult reentry might be or what kind of financial and professional penalties they pay as time goes on. The trend stories that inspired my book were precisely the kind of biased, agenda-driven narratives that Faludi had documented, and they hadn’t changed in the intervening years. Indeed, her historical perspective in this chapter makes it stunningly clear how consistent the backlash against women’s economic, social, sexual, and political autonomy has remained over the course of the last century. Today’s backlash narratives abound, with the mainstream media constantly amplifying all the handwringing about everything from women’s sexual license (they have hook-ups — oh, the horror!) to their increasing reluctance to conform to conventional gender roles (having children outside marriage or avoiding marriage altogether!) to their declining fertility rates, and on and on ad nauseam.
That said, the Internet has vastly increased the number and diversity of different perspectives available to everyone; the days when a handful of magazines and a few television networks controlled the content consumed by most Americans are long gone, and there’s a lot more feminist commentary and critical analysis providing alternative points of view than there used to be. To me, that’s a crucially important development. Maybe it’s because I’m considerably older than Anna, and many of the trend stories Faludi wrote about were aimed squarely at my baby boom demographic, but I’m not as sanguine as Anna is about their impact, or the lack thereof. Those scare stories about working women not being able to find husbands or have children really terrorized a lot of boomers who were enjoying unprecedented career opportunities back in the 1980s. I think they exacerbated the anxiety and distress women always struggle with around these issues involving work and family. Similar messages continue to be recycled today, and the bottom line remains the same: If women don’t conform to conventional gender roles, terrible things will happen!
I reviewed Backlash for the Columbia Journalism Review when it first came out, and my basic opinion of it now is the same as it was then: I think Faludi performed an invaluable public service in documenting the extent to which our culture consistently churns out doomsday scenarios about the impact of women’s autonomy. From one generation to the next, we are constantly bombarded with negative propaganda about women’s empowerment, and we forget or minimize that at our peril.
Mikki Halpin (author of It’s Your World: If You Don’t Like It, Change It: Activism for Teenagers): I felt like I was having emotional time travel when I initially reread this chapter—awash in the same excitement and frustration I felt while reading it back in 1991. Back then, dedicated to underground culture, I was horrified at Faludi’s assumption that young women are a monolithic group taking their cues from mainstream media like Newsday, Fortune, and Ladies Home Journal. Those magazines, in my world, were no part of what a feminist should be reading. At that point in my life, I pretty much exclusively read zines, books by women authors, mysteries and, yes, Leslie, Vogue. (I’m a radical who loves clothes. Shut up.) I found Faludi’s fixation on corporate attention troubling and, like Anna, I thought—and still do—that the unqualified use of terms like “the media” and “the press” in this chapter are problematic, so much so that it makes me tend to discount some of the smart analysis she does offer.
And here is what I think is smart: Faludi’s outrage at journalists who meekly accept the results of sloppy studies; her constant refrain that trend stories do not reflect real women’s lives; her disdain for manufactured crises. I agree with Leslie that, “Faludi performed an invaluable public service in documenting the extent to which our culture consistently churns out doomsday scenarios about the impact of women’s autonomy.” But I think Faludi cherry-picked the pieces in the chapter to serve her thesis. Which is probably what Malcolm Gladwell and others in the cultural coinage business do as well, but it irritates me.
Faludi clearly thinks big media is important for feminism. She brings up Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times on the first page of the book’s introduction. Big glossy national magazines and talk shows are where, for her, the backlash can be seen, both in this chapter and in the rest of the book. Faludi gauges feminism’s success or failure by how it plays out on that stage. It makes sense: The movement relied on mainstream media coverage for validation as it began. By the late ’70s the coverage had become more and more positive, and she expected that to continue. In fact, I read a lot of this as Faludi being angry about her brand of feminism not being covered by the outlets she read as she would have preferred—her brand being, of course, equality-focused, white-middle-class-cis-straight-lady feminism. (I say this as a white-middle-class-cis-straight lady.) This is the only conversation she is interested in. Thus, Faludi deems a story like Wendy Kaminer’s piece “Feminism and Its Identity Crisis” a “backlash article,” excoriates it for not including real women (a crime Faludi herself is guilty of), and ignores very pertinent feminist issues raised in the piece: The disillusionment of women of color, the drawbacks to focusing on equal rights over liberation, the limits of gender essentialism, and the rise of Camille Paglia. (This chapter reintroduced me to so many colorful characters—Paglia! Faith Popcorn! Patricia Morrisroe!)
What bothers me is that Faludi takes “the media” to task for not covering what she says is really happening in women’s lives and in the women’s movement, yet she too ignores important discussions and crucial ’80s texts and issues that took up feminist energy while the “backlash” was happening. The decade kicked off in 1979 with Alice Walker’s coinage of womanism and the valuable discussions that still surround her writing. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color was published in 1981, as was bell hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman? Donna Haraway published A Cyborg Manifesto in 1983. Indigenous women were beginning to react to white feminism and define their own movement, with the anthology A Gathering of Spirit: Writing and Art by North American Indian Woman in 1984. Mary Daly wrote Pure Lust in 1984! The feminist anti-pornography movement was at its peak, with Andrea Dworkin testifying before Congress and leading direct actions against porn stores. (I’m not saying it was all good activity.) The infamous lawsuit by the women who worked at Newsweek was announced the same day that “Women in Revolt”—a Newsweek story Faludi covers in this chapter—was published, but she doesn’t even mention it. Surely the women reading that story were also reading about the lawsuit. The 1980s were such an amazing time for feminism, and that is all erased in this book in favor of Faludi’s personal crusade to discuss the movement as being under siege by these white male media outlets.
I’m not trying to demean the book by saying “It’s personal.” I love the parts where it is clear Faludi is just getting into a froth about things like pouf skirts. But it’s worth noting that mistaking the personal for the universal is what oppressors do—it’s how they teach others that their own story isn’t relevant, that it doesn’t need to exist.
The fever and excitement of second-wave feminism, for many women, came when they began to point out that male narratives (and offices and boardrooms) were excluding them, and their stories. The oft-pointed out fact that it was initially mostly well-off white women who identified this problem is important—they are the ones who could afford to. This work led to Faludi’s unique position to identify and name “backlash,” and to the incredible impact her work had. But to me, the backlash movement, like the movement that spawned it, comes at the exclusion of stories, even stories of real women, that contradict the narrative.
As Anna noted, this naming paradox, or naming privilege, prefigures so much of what I find frustrating and alienating about professional feminism today. While naming something that hasn’t been named before is still a powerful organizing tool, it is also used by a certain few to launch or maintain careers. Coining terms can create community, and also get you assignments and followers and prestige. I keep thinking about this book coming out now. How would we react to #backlash? Would it feel grassroots or would it seem like Faludi was forcing it on us?
LB: Mikki, these are valuable observations, but I think perhaps you underestimate the impact of the mainstream media back then, and overestimate the influence of underground culture in the days before the Internet. To say that bell hooks, Native American women, Andrea Dworkin, and others were offering alternative points of view is obviously true. Still, the numbers of women reached by these points of view were minuscule compared with the reach of the women’s magazines, whose circulations numbered in the millions back then, and network television news broadcasts, whose audience numbered in the tens of millions. Most media institutions were run by men, and the women’s magazines edited by women often trafficked in the most retrograde points of view. So while the perspectives reflected in their coverage weren’t entirely monolithic, they often reflected a shocking unanimity of opinion — those opinions being predominantly the ones held by privileged white males and the women who worked for them,
Contrary to the way you framed your remarks, Faludi was not specifically addressing her critique to “young feminists” — her aims were much broader, and her intent was to detail for the media establishment and larger culture how deep-seated were the biases embedded in the prevailing cultural consensus and the coverage thereof. So while you’re entitled to your opinions about “what a feminist should be reading,” the real question was what America was reading, and what the consequences of its unexamined prejudices were. It’s not fair to criticize a piece of work published in 1991 by invoking the circumstances or criteria that exist today. I don’t see how anyone could possibly argue that big media wasn’t crucial to the ways that feminism was seen and interpreted back then, when big media was — if not the only game in town — the one that determined what kind of information was reaching the vast majority of the population.
AH: I’m sympathetic to both the argument that Mikki lays out here, and the one that Leslie counters with, namely, that the feminist demographic that Faludi represents was (and still is, in some cases) fairly myopic and self-referential, AND that the influence of the mainstream media was more considerable than it is today. I remain unconvinced, however, by Faludi’s assertion that American women were grievously injured by those doomsday scenarios, mainly because she provides no actual evidence that this was the case, nor does she, as Mikki points out, bother to clarify just what she means or who, exactly, she’s referring to when she uses phrases like “real” or “live women,” or even the “women’s rights movement.”
I want to be clear about something: My memory of that era, the early to late ’80s and on into the early ’90s — is both spotty and highly specific: Backlash came out in 1991, the year I graduated high school. Marriage, not to mention children, were the furthest thing from my mind, meaning that I was, blessedly, inoculated from some of the more intellectually dishonest, if not completely incoherent, messages that were being put forth by media outlets like Newsweek and The New York Times. Maybe I have it completely wrong: Maybe significant numbers of American women WERE falling victim to a sustained and toxic media narrative that threatened to — and often succeeded in — destabilizing everything they thought they were up until that point, or thought they could be. But I don’t think I do. Regarding your question, Mikki, as to “how we would react to #backlash?” I can assure you that I would respond to it the same way I do many other self-satisfied social justice Twitter hashtags: with exasperation and contempt. That’s probably not the answer you were looking for, but my position is that the people most likely to try to coin or spread catchy phrases or terms on the Internet are not so much professionals as they are amateurs and attention-seekers. Unless, of course, they work in marketing or advertising, in which case…okay.
MH: Haha, Anna—I think you will be surprised but let me respond to Leslie first.
Leslie, I hear you on the young women—you’re right that the book wasn’t specifically about them, but in this chapter Faludi focused on articles about when to get married, whether to have children, and such pieces are chronically aimed at young women, so that’s where I was coming from there.
We can agree to disagree on whether feminists should read Newsweek!
Overall, though, I think you are missing my point. The chapter makes me wonder what Faludi would prefer “the media” cover. She laudably calls them out for ridiculous trend stories but why does she fail to highlight the feminist issues they weren’t covering? Furthermore, why doesn’t she acknowledge that while the mainstream backlash against feminism was occurring, very valid critiques of feminism were also being made by women of color, queer women, and feminists who weren’t against porn?
Anna, when I brought up the concept of #backlash, I wasn’t thinking specifically of Twitter activism, but it’s all part of that power of naming. Marina Warner wrote an amazing piece about this that I’m trying frantically to find. Ms. Magazine had “click”, Malcolm Gladwell made “the tipping point” into a thing, and tons of feminists use “rape culture.” Facebook gave us “FOMO.” There is even #backlashbookclub for this very enterprise. Sometimes names resonate and are powerful tools for indentifying experiences or phenomena that haven’t previously been pulled out for analysis. Sometimes they are self-serving.
I remember one professional feminist on the radio telling the host: “It’s called SlutWalk because if it was called Empowerment Walk I wouldn’t be here.” I found this horrifying—for one thing, that isn’t why Sonya Barnett and Heather Jarvis named their action SlutWalk—because it implies that getting on TV, getting into the papers, is a feminist goal in and of itself. There is a difference between naming things (or hashtagging them) in a way that connects people and creates community and change, and naming them in order to give one’s elf a platform. I feel like I see the very beginnings of this very media and spectacle-oriented feminism in Backlash and it bums me out, even as I am in awe of Faludi’s voice and analysis.
AH: I want to say one other thing because I realize I’ve been quite negative: I didn’t hate this chapter, nor do I dislike the book! I love Faludi’s use of language, her mastery of the unapologetic, wince-inducing analogy — “the media did more than order up a quiet burial for the feminist corpse” — and the confidence with which she pillories the laziest and most powerful people in the news business for assigning stories based on nothing more than flashes of intuition, the potential for provocative headlines, or cocktail party chatter traded at industry events. I think she is on the money when she indicts specific media outlets — not “the press” — for choosing “to peddle the backlash rather than probe it,” and her critique of newsmagazine pieces about women that don’t feature ACTUAL WOMEN reminds me of a little — a lot, actually — of contemporary cable news producers’ habit of booking all-male, all-white panels to discuss issues like women’s health and abortion rights. Lastly, her indictment of the commercialization of feminism feels all too familiar, because the increasing visibility and embrace of feminist messaging over the past decade has given way to a few high-profile hucksters (no, I’m not naming names) who I fear are warping the feminist project with, among other things, the creation and promotion of elite “women’s” conferences more concerned with money and professional advancement than politics. On the one hand, yuck. On the other, WHATEVER. I have more faith in feminist messaging, and in the ability of women to recognize and reject profit dressed up as politics, than I ever have before.
Lots of ways to read along and join in: Post your own Backlash response on Medium, tweet at @readmatter with #BacklashBookClub, or comment on MSNBC.com. We’ll be featuring some of your posts and tweets as we go.
Read more of the Backlash Book Club, featuring Lena Dunham, Anna Holmes, Aminatou Sow, Roxane Gay, and others.
Illustrations by Hannah K. Lee
