Dissecting 9/11

In the six and a half years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, numerous journalists have documented the Bush administration's botched military response to the attacks, but few have bothered to investigate our cultural reaction to that fateful day. Pulitzer Prize-wining journalist Susan Faludi's latest offering, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, attempts to do so by examining the media's response to 9/11 through the lens of gender. The media's prevailing narrative, she argues, was one of "manly men" protecting weak women from the threat of terrorism. Faludi traces this story to what she considers its origin: the captivity narratives that gained popularity in colonial America. Pointing to the similarities between media coverage of 9/11 and its historical predecessors, Faludi indicts American culture for uncritically recycling this clichéd storyline.

But as an investigation of what September 11 revealed about American culture, The Terror Dream's singular focus on gender feels woefully incomplete. Teasing out the gender dynamics of an event as momentous as 9/11 is certainly worthwhile, but Faludi’s silence on the effects of globalization, religious extremism, U.S. foreign policy, and a number of other factors ignores the roles they played in our cultural reactions. Instead of broadening her approach, Faludi attempts to explain away the media's very real promulgation of traditional gender roles after 9/11, linking it to colonial narratives of female captivity—narratives that, like 9/11, deserve a multitextured examination that incorporates race, religion, and economics.

Before Faludi dissects the historical narratives that undergird her thesis, she spends the first two-thirds of The Terror Dream documenting the many post-9/11 media reports that reinforced gender stereotypes, from magazine cover stories to TV news segments. For instance, Faludi cites two New York magazine stories, one that predicted a post-9/11 baby boomlet and another that hailed women's increased interest in marriage, as typical post-9/11 yarns spun from a few anecdotal tales. Such celebrations of hearth and home were more the handiwork of journalists and editors than an honest reflection of the average American’s response to 9/11. Stories of heroic men and submissive women, appearing everywhere from Time and Newsweek to The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, are exposed by Faludi for what they are: gender myths.

Key among them is the story of U.S. soldier Jessica Lynch, a woman who twice enlisted in the Army and suffered serious injuries in Iraq, and whose capture and rescue were perverted into an exaggerated fairytale. Faludi explains that instead of celebrating Lynch’s strength, “The media much preferred the story it ultimately settled on, of Lynch as a little ‘doll-like’ girl who loved pink and just wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, and who may have been raped by fedayeen soldiers.” Over the course of the book’s first 195 pages, Faludi’s muckraking exposé becomes a damning indictment of the media’s post-9/11 histrionics. Her message is clear: The trauma of 9/11 reinvigorated a 1950s notion of manly men, frail females, and doll-house domesticity. In this section of the book, Faludi succeeds brilliantly as a feminist media critic.

But The Terror Dream's argument begins to unravel precipitously when Faludi attempts to connect the media's embrace of traditional gender roles to the United States’ "founding security myth." This myth, Faludi explains, posits that brave male settlers would rescue their women from the "terrorism" perpetrated by Native Americans. Faludi cites as an example Cynthia Ann Parker, a young woman taken captive by Comanche Native Americans in the 1830s, whose story is ultimately rewritten "into a tale of John Wayne derring-do and helpless 'little Debbie' gratitude in the 1956 John Ford Western classic, The Searchers."

Faludi argues that American society recycles these archetypes— strong men providing security to weak women— uncritically.

But this section of Faludi's book fails because she places undue significance on the security myth. This leads to a rather narrow, restricted account. Faludi uses The Searchers and a handful of other, similar examples to argue that the security myth single-handedly explains the media's post-9/11 coverage. When explaining the relevance of captivity narratives, Faludi ignores many factors that are also salient in discussing of 9/11—things like race, religion, imperialism, and economics. In the end, The Terror Dream's laser-like focus on gender leads it to an unconvincing explanation of post-9/11 America.

In an interview for The Nation’s website, I asked Faludi to address the geopolitical and economic factors that have shaped our response to 9/11. But, as in her book, she demurred: "Those are deep subjects and worthy of separate books. But I don't address them in The Terror Dream, which looks at our domestic

response to the attacks and what that response illuminates about our real history and the fictionalizing that marks our culture." But our domestic response was inseparable from our international response—Faludi, at the very least, could have acknowledged as much.

Despite the gaps in Faludi's analysis, her book stands as an important work of cultural criticism, particularly in its immensely well-researched section on the promulgation of traditional gender roles in media coverage of 9/11. But enumerating the media’s clichéd, sexist post-9/11 narratives without providing sufficient cultural context leaves readers with more questions than answers. Why did various media outlets cover post-9/11 America the same way? What effect did xenophobia, governmental manipulation, and neo-conservatism have on America’s cultural response to the attack? Faludi's penetrating focus on gender blinds her to these gaps in her account.

Rashi Kesarwani is an independent multimedia journalist based in Southern California.