Word: faludi
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...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...
More broadly, Faludi's feminist critics view her book as flawed and condescending because it treats women as victims, passively accepting what the culture imposes on them. Chicago Tribune columnist Joan Beck argued that "for all her feminist tenets, Faludi sells women short. The millions of women who are rethinking their full-time commitment to a job and are finding their primary satisfactions in family are, in her view, silly sheep being pushed back into the kitchen and the bedroom by men who want them to stay subordinate...
Conservative critics charge that Faludi falsely conjures up a junta of antifeminists who conspired to force women to buy lacy underwear, watch reactionary movies, quit their jobs, mind the kids and do the laundry. "She chooses to invent a malevolent conspiracy instead of railing against God and the facts of nature," says author George Gilder, who describes himself as "America's No. 1 antifeminist." On the contrary, Gilder argues, the media and politicians are all in the ideological thrall of the feminists, "because feminism and sexual liberation are the religion of the intellectual class in America." The reason more women...
...Faludi, in fact, takes pains to make her targets more subtle. "The backlash is not a conspiracy, with a council dispatching agents from some central control room, nor are the people who serve its ends often aware of their role," she explains. "Some even consider themselves feminists...