Reading Backlash (again) As A Man: (One) The Introduction

The book that made me a feminist, twenty years later.

Blame It On Feminism

I have a habit of reading the introduction of nonfiction books last. Consistently reading books in the wrong order feels like it shouldn’t be allowed, and when I tell people about it I get the same looks I get when I tell them about how I behave in art museums (I hurry to my favorite section, carefully avoiding looking at the art on the way, and only after I’m satisfied do I branch out slowly). In my defense, most book introductions are boring and slow, and they were usually written after the rest of the book was written anyways. I’ve never felt that I particularly benefited from an author telling me what they were going to tell me ahead of time, and few things suck the joy out of cracking open a new book more than phrases like “in this edition, I’ve made several changes.”

So on my first read through of Backlash, it’s very unlikely that I started with the intro, but I did for the re-read.

Here, Susan Faludi lays out her premise. The book was published in 1991, so it was already out of date when I read it in the early 2000s, and is almost 30 years old in 2020. This is going to come up a lot. Faludi explains the popular idea that feminism was to blame for women’s unhappiness, that equality itself had made women miserable, and then promptly debunks it with facts and statistics in order to show that women had not, in fact, achieved full equality by 1991, and therefore that couldn’t be the thing making them unhappy. The majority of her stats are from the 80s. I was born in 1985, so what she is doing is describing with numbers what the world was like when I was a baby. In terms of gender equality, the numbers she shares look very bad. They come from a few different sources, including a 1990 Virginia Slims poll? Times sure have changed!

There are two things that she does not mention that jumped out to me immediately, I almost certainly wouldn’t have noticed their absence as a teenager.

The first is the impact of race on women’s experience of both sexism and feminism. There is only one mention of race in the whole introduction, a mention of a 1989 New York Times poll in which “more than half of black women and one forth of white women put it into words. They told pollsters that they believed men were now trying to retract the gains women had made in the last twenty years.” Faludi does not make any comment on the racial disparity, and continues to treat the idea of women as a raceless monolith. It’s like she only mentioned black women at all to be able to use the larger number, more than half! Interestingly, 1989 is also the year Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality,” but there’s no evidence of it here. Did Susan Faludi know about Crenshaw’s work? We don’t know.

Faludi also does not mention transgender people. She does not mention that transgender women face a greater threat of violence when discussing violence against women, in fact she doesn’t mention that trans people exist at all. It seems like she’s writing about a world in which two kinds of people exist: cisgender women, and cisgender men. Actually, she seems to be writing in a world in which everyone is heterosexual, as well.

It’s worth mentioning here that one of my biggest fears in cracking open this book again was that it would contain awful transphobia. Not all second wave feminists are transphobic, of course, but still, I worried. After reading the introduction, I googled Susan Faludi. Her father transitioned in his 70s, and that she wrote a book about it, called In The Darkroom, which came out in 2016. I was not out in 2016, but I thought that by that year we were all sick of cis people writing about their transgender relatives, and I thought we had more or less abandoned the term “transsexual” (except for use in a joking context amongst friends the term might be applied to). But according to the Wikipedia article about the book it got great reviews, including from The New York Times, which said that it “challenges some of our most fundamental assumptions about transsexuality.” There was no mention of transphobia in that Wikipedia article, or on her website. But a review on Lilith.org had this to say:

“By the end of the book, Faludi has grown to understand and accept her father, but not transgender identity. Her penultimate chapter equates the growing respect for trans identity in the U.S. with the rise of Hungarian neo-fascist nationalism and its enforcement of a factitious “Hungarian identity”: “Back in my father’s motherland, as in the U.S. media, questions of identity were in full flower…. [T]he Hungarian Supreme Court had issued a ruling in support of the identity prerogatives of the political right…. The court’s…words could have been lifted from the identity-sensitive speech codes of a college campus or the ‘Preferred Gender Pronouns’ directives of the blogosphere.” Faludi’s rhetoric suggests that promoting respect for preferred gender pronouns is akin to the takeover of Hungarian legal and political institutions by the anti-Semitic nationalists who admire fascism.”

So that seems kind of bad? It seems like Faludi doesn’t see herself as transphobic, she isn’t celebrating TERFs as far as I was able to find, but she still peddles in some transphobic nonsense. It will be interesting to see if trans people get any mention in this book.

Anyways, back to the cis women this book is about.

The introduction does bemoan that, when the book was written there were only three female state governors, and two female U.S. Senators. Today it’s nine state governors and twenty-six Senators, one quarter of the Senate. Those numbers show some progress since 1991, but still aren’t what I would call equality.

At the end of the introduction Faludi gets to her real point: the backlash against feminism. She argues that despite the fact that women haven’t achieved equality, there is a social, political, and economic backlash against those gains. The backlash isn’t a coordinated conspiracy, but it doesn’t have to be. The point is that there’s a backlash against feminism not because of what women have achieved, but because of what they might achieve. The backlash is about stopping progress before it happens.

So to recap:

1. Many believe that women’s equality is making them miserable.

2. But women haven’t actually achieved anything like equality.

3. It’s actually their inequality that is making them unhappy, and…

4. There has been a massive backlash against feminism to prevent women from achieving greater equality.

Tune in next week for chapter one! Which is actually apparently chapter two because maybe this was chapter one? Oh well!