In the current neurotic American climate of unrivaled power but rampant insecurity, my evil knows no bounds. I am a social liberal, a former employee of academia, currently a member of the left-wing media, reporting on popular culture. But at least I’m not a woman. They brought us 9/11.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a certain segment of the neoconservative punditry asserted that one reason they happened was the perception among America’s enemies that the nation had become weak due to the rise of the women’s movement. Thirty years of gender integration in the armed forces, the emergence of the “sensitive male,” and rampant Oprahfication had somehow sent the world an image of an America that had lost its bellicose edge, the biggest but no longer the toughest kid on the global block. In other words, 9/11 happened because America wasn’t butch enough to discourage it.

Forced to reassess its manhood, the United States, fortuitously endowed with a Texas rough-rider in the White House, managed to rediscover the fire in its belly and responded in the only way it could: we locked and loaded, circled our wagons, sent our military to kick some towelhead ass, and made a superstar out of Toby Keith.

While America was growing a pair, however, the scrotally challenged portion of the population suddenly found themselves hurtling back in time. Not only did feminism take a hit in the popular media for opening us up to terrorism, womanhood itself was hijacked into the cowboy myth, because a nation of John Waynes needs a ready supply of cowering frontier wives to protect from the savages. That’s the central theme of Susan Faludi’s book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Henry Holt, 2007). Faludi, who made her bones with the bestselling feminist manifesto Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, asserts that, in the rush to come to grips with the devastating blow 9/11 dealt to the national psyche, we retreated into the comfort zone of popular fiction, movies and comic-book morality.

Time and again, Faludi points to post-9/11 images of women cast, by an administration with a war to push and a media with papers to peddle, into the roles of frightened domestics, chaste widows and helpless little girls. Lisa Beamer, wife of United 93 passenger Todd Beamer (“Let’s roll”), became an election-year poster girl by dutifully wearing her widow’s weeds for Larry King. Meanwhile the “Jersey Girls,” four widows of husbands lost in the World Trade Center, were repeatedly attacked in the press for their campaign before Congress to hold the national intelligence community accountable for its failure to prevent the attacks, most notably by Ann Coulter, who called them “witches” and “harpies” who were “enjoying their husbands’ deaths.” The widows of New York firefighters lost in the collapse of the towers found themselves in the same position, pilloried if they resumed dating, called for an investigation into the failure of radio equipment that cost their husbands their lives, or otherwise stepped outside their implicit jobs of grieving bravely for our benefit.

Most telling, there is the matter of Private Jessica Lynch, the soldier whose capture and recovery in Iraq in 2003 became a cause celebre for the administration and the country. The reality of the Lynch situation, as Lynch herself and others who were there have repeatedly asserted, was that after she was injured, she was taken to a hospital where the staff kindly and professionally tended her injuries and sent word to the U.S. military of her location and condition. The strike force that swarmed the hospital, assaulting and arresting nurses and orderlies, needed only to have asked for her at the front desk.

There are a few flaws in Faludi’s book, most notably a couple of chapters devoted to the shaping of one of America’s founding myths, the Indian-captivity narrative, and the ways in which the narratives of capable women who fought the natives, or worse, joined them and were happier for it, were systematically bowdlerized in favor of heroic male saviors in bloody buckskins. Faludi maintains that the male-centered frontier myth has too much resonance to take lightly, and there is something to her argument, but it feels like a digression, especially the shots she takes at the popular image of Daniel Boone in particular. And as an influential and popular feminist scholar, Faludi has a certain axe to grind with those people who hold herself and her colleagues at least partially responsible for 9/11, and she lets it show more than perhaps she would have liked.

At its best, however, The Terror Dream does exactly what a pop-culture study is supposed to do. It gathers signs and portents, from the speeches of the president to newspaper fluff-pieces about rise in the marriage rate since September 2001, and puts them together to show a larger picture of the current state of American feminism. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Faludi’s conclusions, it’s hard to argue that there aren’t people out there who have a vested interest in maintaining our collective sense of victimization. In other words, little girls, if you want to win the War on Terror, kindly shut up and cower.

John G. Nettles