War and conservatism

Review of “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America,” out next week from Metropolitan Books.

clipped from www.nytimes.com An Interview With Susan Faludi Towers Fell, and Attitudes Were Rebuilt Ms. Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of two previous books, was perplexed by the cultural fallout from that day. What she found, she says, was a powerful resurgence in traditional sex roles and a glorification of he-man virility as embodied by Wayne, the ur-savior of virtuous but helpless damsels in distress. The prefeminist thinking was everywhere, Ms. Faludi said: in the media, where female commentators were suddenly scarce after 9/11 and specious trend reports appeared about women nesting and baking; in depictions of that day’s heroes as male and victims as female; and in movies like the 2005 “War of the Worlds,” Ms. Faludi said, with Tom Cruise as a “deadbeat divorced dad emasculated by his wife, reclaiming his manhood by saving their little girl.” “It’s some bizarre, weirdly out-of-proportion fixation,” Ms. Faludi said, “an exaltation of American masculinity in an intergalactic crisis.”