Susan Faludi.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Feminist author - Interview

Susan Faludi, author of the best-selling Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, recently gave a speech to a standing-room-only audience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Afterwards she appeared on "Second Opinion," a radio program hosted by The Progressive's Editor Erwin Knoll, and then she spoke with me in the studio for an hour or so. I've incorporated some of her remarks from Erwin's show here, and some she made when we talked again on the telephone after she returned to California, where she is a visiting lecturer at Stanford University. Throughout the interviews, she spoke softly but intensely about her book, her mother, her sudden rise to stardom, and feminism in post-Bush America.

Susan Faludi grew up in New York City and graduated from Harvard in 1981. She went to work as a copy girl at The New York Times, and then as a reporter for The Miami Herald, the Atlanta Constitution, the San Jose Mercury News, and The Wall Street Journal. In 1991, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her exposed of the Safeway leveraged buyout. Since Backlash was published last year. Faludi has become a media star, dubbed the torch-bearer for a new generation of feminists. Yet, she says, she's more comfortable when she's out of the public eye, working as an anonymous reporter, poking holes in the myths that constrain American women.

One powerful section of Backlash is devoted to the movie Fatal Attraction, which Faludi says both represented and reinforced backlash resentments and fears about women. Faludi paints director Adrian Lyne as a sexist bully who badgered and humiliated actresses, and went to great lengths to transform the originally feminist script for Fatal Attraction into a fable in which the uppity single woman is violently suppressed. In Lyne's most recent movie, Indecent Proposal, he takes a passing shot at Faludi - the camera zooms in on a copy of Backlash in the hands of a blonde and apparently air-headed secretary. In the next scene the secretary is shown vamping in front of the movie's hero. So much for feminist enlightenment.

Q: Did you see Indecent Proposal?

Susan Faludi: Yeah, I did.

Q: What did you think of it, and of Backlash's little cameo in it?

Faludi: Well, I actually heard a reporter who had talked to Adrian Lyne explain that Lyne said he wanted to "tweak me," because I had been so hard on him about Fatal Attraction. To which - I don't know - I say tweak away. I think he just threw it in. I don't think there was much thought behind it. I suppose one could spin out a grand textual analysis of why he assigned the reading of Backlash to some gum-chewing secretary in spandex, but I think that would be giving more intellectual heft to his reasoning than it deserves.

Q: The reviewer for the Village Voice called Indecent Proposal "the Zeitgeist shocker for the 1990s." (In the movie, Robert Redford's character offers a couple $1 million to let him sleep with the wife.) The reviewer says you won't be able to catch this one in "such easy feminist pincers" as you did Fatal Attraction, because it's the wife's choice - it's very subtle and complex. What do you think of that?

Faludi: I didn't find that so subtle and complex. That's one of the standard hallmarks of a lot of backlash cultural artifacts, that they take feminist rhetoric about choice and use it to attack the whole agenda of feminism.

Q: Do you think it was a backlash movie the way Fatal Attraction was?

Faludi: Sure. I mean it's not the same movie. I'd have to read this review, but I guess what I find irritating is the assumption that anything that is subject to feminist analysis is "easy," that there are only certain reductive feminist ideas. The fact that this movie might have a slightly different spin to it or shows a woman who supposedly is choosing to have an affair doesn't mean it's not open to feminist analysis.

Anyway, you have to see this movie in the context of all these new movies that are coming out about the bartering of women. I see it as more a movie about masculine anxiety. A number of movies out in the last year - from Falling Down to Mad Dog and Glory (which I actually liked for other reasons) - all seem to express extreme anxiety over men's ability to attract women, hold onto them, support them. And this movie seemed to me to be more about that kind of economic male fear. It seems that it was a struggle between two men, and the woman was really irrelevant. She's the object that's being traded. She has no personality. The movie's about who is going to claim this piece of property. Then there's this very calculating insertion of a scene in which she says, "No, I made the choice to do this." Which I think was just Lyne's attempt to get the feminists off his back.

Q: Do you think there's some hostility there - that the movie is really lashing back at Backlash?

Faludi: I think the way he dealt with it in the movie, by dismissing it - and in his mind, I'm sure, trivializing it - by putting it in the hands of a dippy blonde secretary is an expression of hostility, sure. That's often how we dismiss what we fear. On the other hand, usually feminist theory is equated with some beast with an SS outfit. I mean that's generally how men who are hostile toward feminists like to portray them.

Q: That brings me to my next question, which is about Camille Paglia.

Faludi: Speaking of dominatrixes.

Q: What do you think of Paglia's claim that the backlash isn't against women, it's against doctrinaire feminism? I think you've used the phrase "the heiresses of Puritanism" to describe the way feminism is often portrayed. Is there any grain of truth in that?

Faludi: Well, that assumes that most people are so familiar with feminist doctrine that they would find it pervasive and overwhelming. I mean, she's speaking from within the academy, which is a very different brand of feminism than the average woman on the street is exposed to. Having now spent a year in academia, I can to a degree understand the point she's driving at. I mean, sure - not just in feminist studies but in academia in general there's this sort of narrowing specialization and use of coded, elitist language of deconstruction or New Historicism or whatever they're calling it these days, which is to my mind impenetrable and not particularly useful.

But I think to claim that the backlash was inspired by doctrinaire feminism in the world at large is to make the false assumption that people are that deeply steeped in feminist theory, and that so-called doctrinaire feminism has that much sway in the general popular culture, which I don't think it does. I don't think the average American woman was turned off by feminism because of the effect of French feminism in the academy.

Q: But Paglia also has a lot of snappy...