This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name.

With “The Terror Dream,” Susan Faludi has taken the momentous subject of 9/11 and come to the conclusion that it led to ... an assault on the freedom and independence of American women. In the wake of 9/11, she argues, the great American cultural machine churned out a myth meant to “restore the image of an America invulnerable to attack” — “the illusion of a mythic America where women needed men’s protection and men succeeded in providing it.”

She contends that there was a “peculiar urge to recast a martial attack as a domestic drama, attended by the disappearance and even demonization of independent female voices” and that there was a “beatification of the ideal post-9/11 American woman” as “undemanding, uncompetitive, and most of all dependent” — a woman who “didn’t just want a man in her life” but “needed one.”

These efforts on Ms. Faludi’s part to use the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as an occasion to recycle arguments similar to those she made a decade and a half ago in her best-selling book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” (1991) feel forced, unpersuasive and often utterly baffling.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch

1. Irenaeus wrote: “This, sadly, is the sort of tendentious, self-important, sloppily reasoned book that gives feminism a bad name” Susan Faludi has been asking for that. October 24, 5:16 pm | [comment link]

2. Marty the Baptist wrote: I keep hearing from leftists—all over the place—that the freedoms and liberties we’ve lost since 9/11 are just not worth the price. I keep waiting for one of them to be specific about exactly which freedoms and liberties we’ve allegedly “lost”. Still waiting… October 24, 6:42 pm | [comment link]

3. Ruth Ann wrote: When I clicked and found myself on the NYTimes site, I just clicked back.  This is nothing more than pure feminist bull****!  And to get this kind of publicity….............!  How right is Kendall to label it in the Culture-Watch category.  Sadly, it does speak for our culture and the path on which we are on, encouraged by radical feminists. October 24, 7:44 pm | [comment link]

4. ElaineF. wrote: Radical feminism, spearheaded by radical lesbianism, has cut a wide and deep swath of destruction through American society.  Susan Faludi has lapsed into incoherence as becomes instantly clear with a casual perusal of that article. October 24, 8:25 pm | [comment link]

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