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I have two items for my write-up today on Susan Faludi's 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women:
1. Faludi talks about how the backlash against the advancement of women encourages women to be "forever static and childlike" (page 70)----when the entertainment media lacks assertive women (with some exceptions), when women are objectified, etc. And, according to Faludi, this has occurred under the guise of supporting women, which is comparable to Ronald Reagan appropriating "populism to sell a political program that favored the rich" (page 71).
2. Faludi talks about how the media perpetuates the myth that women are preferring to leave the work place and to come home, even though (1.) the U.S. Bureau of Labor's statistics indicate that's not true, and (2.) the women who do leave the work-place do so on account of discrimination, or their work-places not being flexible in allowing them to work and also to raise their children.
In my last post on this topic, I referred to Faludi's argument that blue-collar males are merely receptors of the backlash against the advancement of women, which is being perpetuated by the elites. In my reading today, Faludi said that the media is a mere receptor of prevailing cultural images. I wonder where exactly the buck stops, in her eyes. Who is not a mere receptor, but an actual perpetuator of the backlash? And what is the motive of the perpetuators? For Faludi, blue-collar men are blaming women because they are economically-insecure, and elites have presented women to them as convenient scapegoats. The media merely reflects the backlash rather than being the origin of it, according to Faludi. So what elites are perpetuating the backlash, and why?
