Word: faludi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...readers talking about why women starve themselves, have breast implants, apply acid to their face to peel off the wrinkles, and why fashion magazines came to favor photo spreads of women wearing dog collars and chains and penciled-on bruises. It is on issues of symbol and representation that Faludi and the newly bred backlash theorists have the most fun and start the liveliest arguments over who really represented the Image of Woman in the 1980s...
This insidious new image, Faludi claims, was Hope Steadman, the exalted, blissful, breast-feeding mother of thirtysomething, who provided a postfeminist contrast to the "neurotic spinster ((and)) ball-busting single career woman." Or Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction, the crazed professional temptress -- beautiful, successful and mad as a hatter, thanks to the deafening tick of her biological clock. Or the Dress for Success models who, in Faludi's lethal description, "trip down the runway in stiletto heels, hands snug in dainty white gloves. Their briefcases swing like Easter baskets, feather light; they are, after all, empty...
...Faludi acknowledges the presence of strong female figures in films, but she notes that their strength is often directed at protecting their young, which even in a backlash era is an acceptable female preoccupation. This takes care of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, Jessica Lange and Sally Field in Country and Places in the Heart. Overall, Faludi finds that female characters were more likely to be portrayed as obsessed with career at the expense of family (Broadcast News), burning out from the rat race (Baby Boom), abandoning their children (Three Men and a Baby) or exploring...
...makes an interesting parlor game for contrarian readers to provide the counterimages, ones that dispute Faludi's thesis by showing that women were also often portrayed as strong and fulfilled. Was Hope Steadman any more an archetype of the '80s than Murphy Brown? The fashion press may have lauded Christian Lacroix's baby-doll dresses, but real women ignored them in favor of Donna Karan's comfortable professional clothes, or the Gap's gender-neutral everyday wear. For every virulent misogynist, such as Andrew Dice Clay or rappers with songs about mutilating "bitches," there was a Sandra Bernhard, a Lily...
...Faludi dispatches Roseanne and Madonna in one subclause of a sentence, which deprives readers of what would surely have been a lively discussion of two of the decade's most influential symbols. Writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich have praised Roseanne for helping root feminism in the family and give it a raw eloquence. "Roseanne gave working-class feminism a face," says Ehrenreich. "The typical image of a feminist in the media has been the Murphy Brown type -- the very successful, very slender, very perfectly organized professional woman. And we didn't have a media image of another kind of feminist...