Man, I don't even want to write this review, because I'm going to get all pissed off again and I would much rather go keep reading
The Hunger Games; it would be better for my blood pressure. Anyway, I read Susan Faludi's
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. I did this for a few reasons: One, I am woefully behind on my familiarity with the sort of big "canonical" feminist texts and I am really easily guilted into feeling like a bad person for not having read something because I think I am supposed to have read everything. Secondly,
Backlash is apparenty like The Big Keystone Book That Kicked Off The Third Wave, and so far I have only read The Big Keystone Book That Kicked Off The First Wave, Mary Wollstonecraft's
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and it was awesome. (I'll get around to
The Feminine Mystique, um, one of these days.) Thirdly, my eighties and early nineties history is TERRIBLE. All my history schoolings ended around the Vietnam War, because that is when my teachers, being a generation older than me, thought "history" ended and "current events that everyone knows about" begins, but I wasn't born until 1987. The first big political anything I remember being aware of was the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and that only
after it became a big scandal--I was too busy playing with slap bracelets and shit to know anything about the witch-hunting that preceded it. So I was hoping this book would fill in that fifteen-year gap in my understanding of how the universe works. Which it did, and more.
The book is split into four parts. The first part compares the 80s backlash to other backlashes following advancements in women's rights, and the ways in which, even during the next "spurt" of feminism, these backlashes are essentially never talked about, leading to the popular misconception that women's rights have only ever gotten better. This is a myth that drives me batshit, because it is still held by all sorts of totally well-meaning people who seem to think that if there's any rights or socials standing women don't have yet, it must be because we either don't really want it or we're too dumb to have realized it yet, because if we wanted it, we'd have it. Because nobody (or at least not many people) are ever fighting
against feminism. I think most people have some sort of vague idea that the suffrage movement was only a couple of years long, and the nice gentlemanly men "gave" women the vote as soon as they'd acclimated to the idea, maybe some of them didn't sign on immediately because it had never occurred to them before and they were surprised for a few minutes, but then only a small group of dedicated Terrible People really
opposed it. We don't like to think about the fact that it took almost a hundred years for well-meaning, perfectly respectful, highly educated, liberal gentlemen to start thinking of it as anything other than patently absurd, or that suffragists were jailed, beaten, force-fed, etc. for years before we won the vote. Any demand for increase in women's rights has only ever been met with reactions ranging from violent hostility to condescending indifference, and any real or percieved success in increasing women's rights has inspired powerful backlashes in which the people who control the institutions that shape society come up with new and creative ways to fuck up women's lives, or to encourage women to fuck up their own. Abortion and birth control, unreliable as they were, were perfectly legal throughout most of American history until the late Victorian era, until a combination of racist fears about not enough white babies and the rising demand for increased women's education caused the medical, political, and media establishments to suddenly decide it was immoral and ban it. The post-World War II backlash was especially nasty, purging women from factories and back into the kitchen en masse, and replacing the smart and funny female leads of 30s and 40s cinema with stomach-churningly misogynistic "comedies" like
How To Murder Your Wife. The 80s backlash was a clearly foreseeable occurrence--for the few people with a strong enough knowledge of women's history to be aware of the history of backlashes. Many of the basic myths of the 80s backlash--the "man shortage," the "infertility epidemic," the supposed increase in nervous/mental disorders brought on by thinking about stuff other than babies--are recycled from earlier backlashes, too. Faludi dedicates several pages to uncovering the absurd misuse of statistics and incomplete studies that the media seized on to create the "marriagiability expiration date" myth (the one that said a woman over 30 had less than a 5% chance of ever getting married). It reads like a bizarre comedy of errors, except it's not remotely funny. It appears mainstream media science writers were even more douchetastic and scientifically illiterate in the 80s than they are today, and that's saying a lot.
Part II focuses on pop culture--anti-feminism in movies, TV, pop psychology, advertising, and the fashion and cosmetics industries. My favorite part of this chapter was the stuff about the fashion industry, partly because this was a part of the backlash that overshot itself and therefore failed, and partly because it was so over-the-top. Apparently, in late 1987, major fashion designers were all mad about how women were buying suits and stuff to go to work in, and started trying really hard to bring back frilly, ridiculous semi-Victorian wear. Like, AS WORK CLOTHES. They tried to dress it up in feminist language, being all like "Now you can choose your choosy choices to exercise your right to dress like a Victorian baby doll at the office!" It was really big on huuuuuuuge poufs and bows and flowers and crinolines and bustles and shit. The media raved about it. It may have been amusing on a runway, but women in the 80s just kept right on wearing suits and other "Dress for Success" type stuff until Christian Lacroix' manhood was insulted and the media turned viciously on John Molloy, the poor dude who wrote "Dress for Success," for supposedly single-handedly tipping off American ladies that by this time, bustles were costume, not clothing. (Because we're so dumb we couldn't figure that out without a dude to tell us. IN 1987. Also, you know who was responsible for turning bustles into costume instead of clothing? The feminist Dress Reform movement.) The underwear industry also decided to engineer a Revival Of Lacy Underthings, which totally flopped--the only underwear people to make any money were Jockey, who introduced the exact opposite product ("underwear that won't ride up, won't fall apart in the wash, and actually is the size promised on the label"), and Victoria's Secret, who had a brilliant little scam going where the front half of their store sold lacy underthings to dudes and the back half of their store made 50% of their revenue at the Miscellaneous Cotton Panties table, where the women shopped. Faludi's retelling of the failure of High Femininity and the non-existence of the Intimate Apparel Explosion of 1987 are
masterful, dryly pointing out details such as which retail ladies pimping "The Right to Look Feminine At Work" were wearing suits.
Marcus, get me that AIG report or you are FIRED. Hey... hey, stop laughing!Being a person of the Gothy persuasion, I am all for taking people seriously when they are wearing ridiculous costumes, as well as the right to wear ridiculous costumes whenever you damn well feel like it. This... wasn't that. It's only a "choice" to wear froufrou impractical shit if you have the option of taking it off and wearing pants when you decide it's time to sit down and focus on something else now.
The best thing about this narrative is that it didn't work. Eighties ladies just stopped buying clothes, basically. There are some fabulous on-scene reportings from Faludi hanging out in department stores listening to women complain about the options, refuse to buy things, or return shit they'd already bought. The apparel market dropped like a stone. I read about it and laughed my Timberlands-to-my-corporate-job-wearing butt off.
The third part of this book is scarier because this part's about politics--the professional antifeminists and antifeminist organizations. It covers stuff I knew about already, like Randall Terrorist--I mean, Terry--and Operation Rescue, and some stuff I'd vaguely heard about but wasn't really familiar with, like what exactly got targeted for neutering under "Reagan Administration=Ill-Advised Budget Cuts" and the politics and personalities behind, for example, the extreme downgrading of the government's equal opportunity employment office. I think my favorite part of Part 3 was Faludi's rundown of the 80's leading anti-feminist personalities, because many of them are so pathetic it's hilarious. There are some whiny dudes whining about how feminism has made men feel bad about themselves because women don't stay home and wipe their butts for them anymore, like George Gilder, and there is the poet Robert Bly, who hosted a bunch of "man retreats" that basically involved going into the woods and pounding your chest and acting like a gorilla, which personally I think sounds like it could be perfectly healthy for getting away from civilization and letting loose once in a while if it weren't framed as some sort of "women have neutered us and made us soft with their jobs-having and not wanting to be raped and stuff" New Age masculinity crap. The best interviews, for sheer irony, are with the little Phyllis Shlafly copycats, such as Beverly LaHaye from Concerned Women from America. These women are clearly living the "having it all" feminist dream--they have jobs that they love, and their husbands stay home a lot to take care of the kids and cook dinner while mommy write books and travels. Apparently, the trick to making your dude not pitch an overgrown temper tantrum about making dinner twice a week is to have a job that is totally about pimping male supremacy. (I think this is a brilliant strategy and that more women should just pretend that whatever their job actually is, it is TOTALLY about upholding male supremacy. Any dude dumb enough to think his dick'll fall off if he changes a diaper should be dumb enough to buy that, right?) Then there are personalities I am more familiar with, like Camille Paglia, who became an antifeminist-who-calls-herself-a-feminist in order to get media attention because she was upset that her brilliance wasn't properly recognized doing regular literary criticism, so became pointlessly contrarian instead. (By the way, I have read some of Camille Paglia's regular literary criticism, and if she was being recognized
at all it was too much. She writes exactly the sort of crap people talk about when they are disparaging literary criticism as being pointless and about nothing. She wrote a piece on
Moby Dick that was basically just a long list of concave shapes versus pointy shapes throughout the whole novel; it was like the jokes we would all make before getting down to serious business in the class at 8:55 in the morning, except not funny.) Sadly, it appears that Betty Friedan backtracked a lot during the 80s, because she was pissed about not "owning" what she saw as "her" movement anymore. (She also said mean things about Gloria Steinem.)
Part 4, for me, was the scariest, because Part 4 covers the rise of extreme pronatalism. I also found it informative because there's a lot of matieral there about women in blue-collar occupations, which is a thing I don't know all that much about because I am from a professional-class area and have been on college track my entire life and don't know a whole lot of working-class people. Also, one of the hallmarks of rich white professional-class people like me is that the fact that I even
know that there are other people whose lives are not like mine, and I mean really not like mine at all, is the direct result of an unusual amount of history reading and years of extremely long lectures from my father drilling family history into my head so I would appreciate how privileged I am. As I result, I have what is apparently a completely fuckin' unique amost my peer group ability to realize that we don't know everything about everything about everybody, particularly people unlike us whom we don't interact with at all. This rare and magical ability, in addition to being missing against stuck-up college-track white boys like my asshole ex who say things like "I don't
see a lot of women trying to get into construction" like they were looking or something when they really weren't, was sadly ALSO missing amongst the totally smart white dude lawyers and judges that handled a number of court cases concerning employment discrimination in blue-collar jobs during the Reagan Administration. The least scary court case concerns employment discrimination amongst saleswomen at Sears, who were barred from the big-ticket commission jobs, which were the ones which made a lot of money. The excuses the white-collar professional-class dudes came up with to explain why women just didn't want and didn't apply for those jobs were pretty much the exact opposite of the testimonies of the large numbers of women who did want and were trying to apply for those jobs (which is why they brought the damn lawsuits). Sears also was using some really odd ways to screen women from jobs, such as giving applicants for big-ticket sales jobs a "vigor test", which contained questions like "Have you ever played on a football team?" and "Do you have a low voice?" (Apparently, high scores on the vigor test were loosely associated with *lower* success as a salesman.)
The most scary case concerns American Cyanamid, an industrial chemicals plant. Chemical and electronics plants were like ALL OVER the new "fetal protection" laws that had become so fashionable lately, and applied them unscientifically and with extreme prejudice. Record numbers of women had been enrolling in --and acing--trade schools, but had been having trouble finding jobs, by which I mean companies would flat-out refuse to hire them unless they were being threatened with government audits, and when they did get the jobs their co-workers were violently, VIOLENTLY hostile to them. I'm talking hit them in the head with a 2-by-4, smear feces on things they had to clean, deliberatly train them to do things incorrectly so they would fuck up and get fired VIOLENTLY HOSTILE. When "fetal protection" became popular, all the chemical and industrial companies had to do was identify whatever substances they were working with as fetal hazards and boom, they could fire all the ladies of reproductive age! American Cyanamid did this with no care whatsoever for actual scientific research on what does and does not constitute a reproductive hazard. They correctly identified lead as a reproductive health hazard for women, but ignored that it was also a known reproductive health hazard for men. (Several years later, OSHA would force them to reduce their lead exposure levels anyway.) They also basically decided that most of their other chemicals, being chemicals, were probably hazardous. They pulled some weird bullshit seniority thing that caused them to be able to layoff twenty-eight of their thirty-five female employees, then told the remaining seven that they could only keep their jobs if they got sterilized. (YES, THERE WERE WOMEN IN THE 1980S, WHICH WAS NOT VERY LONG AGO, WHO WERE REQUIRED TO GET
STERILIZED AS A
JOB REQUIREMENT. YOU WANT TO TELL ME AGAIN HOW YOU "JUST DON'T SEE" MANY WOMEN APPLYING FOR BLUE-COLLAR CHEMICAL PLANT JOBS?) Five of these women actually did get sterilized; in the next few years, the company found ways to lay them off eventually. When this case went up to the Supreme Court, the judge decided that there was nothing wrong with this because the women had "a choice." Forced back into the world of low-paying "women's work," now made more difficult by their reputation as troublemakers, and bombarded with an onslought of doofy 80s media messages about "cocooning" and "new traditionalism" and other retro fifties bullshit defining their womanhood as their ability to have children, the plaintiffs all developed depression problems. And pretend-well-meaning rich guys continued to go around being all "Well, I guess ladies are just too ladylike to do industrial work. I'm sure it's all 110% solely and completely due to the nature of the work itself, because we're all post-feminist and shit now."
If that's not an argument for making sure you know something about what you're spouting on about before you decide to have a really strong opinion on it, I don't know what it. But apparently admitting that you don't know something just because it has nothing to do with you and you've never learned a damn thing about it is, like, not manly and things. This was also a thread underlying a lot of anti-feminist sentiment amongst younger guys in the 80s, who were apparently incapable of paying any attention to economic factors such as the government's economic policies in evaluating their economic stagnation, and decided to blame it all on underpaid secretaries.
Faludi didn't particularly go into this but it seems relevant to a lot of other stuff I've been reading lately about US culture war politics/politics of resentment, and this is the issue of class, and particularly our country's history of pretending we totally don't have class at all because it's not strictly codified like in England. This leads to mixing up economics with identity politics in a bad way--namely, poor dudes don't think of themselves as poor dudes, they think of themselves as rich dudes who haven't gotten all their money yet. They don't think of guys with so much money that they couldn't imagine what it's like to be anything like the working-class men as
different, as
other, the way they think women or black people or homosexuals are other. They think the spoiled trust fund baby men are just
themselves, in the future. And they wouldn't fuck
themselves over, would they? It must be somebody else fucking them over. Somebody that they're never going to be. Like women; they'll never be women. Of course, this is exactly how obscenely rich spoiled dudes like Reagan want it--divided and conquered, different classes of paeons keeping each other defeated, scared, and in line by misguided horizontal attacks instead of facing off against the actual problems. This is why women were specifically excluded from the Fourteeth Amendment, forcing a nasty split between the black civil rights movement and the women's movement that has never completely healed. It worked, and it keeps fucking working, and we keep fucking falling for it.
And this is why we need to teach economics and labor history in, like, eighth fucking grade.