Sadly, she has failed to achieve irrelevance. “The great hope of a j’accuse is that it won’t be reprinted decades later, for the simple reason that by then you want it to be obsolete,” Faludi wrote in an introduction to the 2020 edition. The reaction has been a backlash that is in many ways more brutal and angry than what Faludi described, even if the fragmentation of American culture means it’s less all-encompassing. America nearly elected a feminist president in 2016, and when it didn’t, women all over the country threw themselves into politics and into the movement to dethrone sexual abusers. ![]() Shes the last of the great 1980s pop stars. Weve lost Whitney Houston, Prince and Michael Jackson. ![]() Western nations agreed on a conference call not to let President Vladimir Putin of Russia blame them for. 42 minutes ago &0183 &32 Madonnas hospitalization is a reminder that we cant take the 64-year-old for granted. It’s a “preemptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finish line,” she wrote. and its allies had ‘nothing to do with’ the rebellion in Russia, Biden says. One of Faludi’s central insights was that backlashes rear up not when women have achieved equality but when they seem to be on the brink of achieving it. See, for example, the right-wing pundit Candace Owens, who boasts about her domestic prowess and questions whether women’s suffrage was really a good idea, or the swaggering misogynist Andrew Tate, the idol of many adolescent boys who is facing charges of rape in Romania. She was writing at a time when mainstream publications, often with no feminist representation, had far more agenda-setting power than they do today, and they helped drive the anti-feminist backlash in concert with conservative politicians.īut online, the sort of reactionary narratives Faludi wrote about are thriving, often in a newly concentrated and vicious form. Consider the violent end to Reconstruction: While progress is often at the heart of the story America likes to tell itself, the backlash to that progress is just as central, if not more so.Ī lot has changed since “Backlash” came out, especially in the media, one of Faludi’s prime targets. Still, Faludi’s analysis of how conservative forces mobilize together to turn back challenges to traditional hierarchy is useful for understanding more than just feminism and anti-feminism. These aren’t the subjects of “Backlash” its neglect of race feels glaring today. It’s also a furious response to political assertiveness and incipient gains by racial and sexual minorities. ![]() Of course, today’s backlash, like the one in the 1980s, is about more than women’s rights. In the wake of Trump’s “Lock her up” campaign for president in 2016, it’s simply text, with gender emerging as a central fault line of American politics. This was a subtext of Republican politics in the 1980s.
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