Susan Faludi, the US journalist who foresaw the right’s reaction: “There’s very much a ‘Lord of the Flies’ feeling here”

It hadn’t happened to her in months, but Susan Faludi, 66, experienced the mirage of feeling “marginally okay about life” a few days ago. “I realized it was because I happened to be out and away from my computer and I hadn’t checked the news in a while. But I’m somebody who writes about women’s rights, so I can’t unplug,” the celebrated journalist says during a video call from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in mid-September.

The false sense of happiness evaporated with a quick scroll on her phone. “Our adult institutions have been torn apart, and everybody’s acting like an adolescent. And there’s a feeling like there are no grownups at home. There’s very much a Lord of the Flies feeling here," she says, citing the William Golding classic novel. From tech bros to Trump’s embarrassing Cabinet press conferences, from women romanticizing ‘girl stuff’ to the ”manosphere" of men on steroids hitting the gym, it feels like there isn’t a single responsible adult in the room, she says. People feel insecure and vulnerable because the idea of progress has stalled. ”There’s immense amounts of fear.”

A Harvard graduate, a longtime contributor to all the major American newspapers, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for a story in The Wall Street Journal on the human cost of the leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores, Faludi achieved global fame that same year — and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award — with her investigation titled Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. “I wish I had been wrong,” she cautions about her cult classic of progressive thought. The 657-page review of the undeclared war on modern women presented a compelling accumulation of evidence to show that, far from what was being preached in the early 1990s, feminism had not consolidated institutional or social change, but rather had regressed in its objectives. “When I published it, people were like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize this was going on.’ These days, it’s impossible for anyone to say that because ”now it’s just completely in your face — it’s blatant, it’s shameless, and it’s cruel,” she notes.

Considered a prophetic text for revealing the political and cultural mechanisms used to fight progressive ideals, Backlash proved that no glass ceiling was broken in the 1980s and 1990s. What actually happened was a cultural, social, and political counterattack to ensure a retreat of women’s rights and the establishment of a new mental framework thanks to the spread of a false myth: the idea that the feminist movement, far from liberating women, had made them unhappy.

Films like Fatal Attraction and alarmist headlines of the type “Childless Women Are Depressed and Disoriented, and the Numbers Are Getting Worse” (as reported by the likes of The New York Times) blamed women’s liberation for poisoning women with career ambitions. The press talked about a “man shortage,” citing a study that turned out to be false, and the idea took hold that women would never find husbands or become mothers because they had set their sights too high for emancipation. This yearning, moreover, was driving them crazy. Faludi’s research was such a bestseller that the screenwriter Norah Ephron gave it a nod in the 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle, when Meg Ryan’s character (Annie) retorts to a man who says, “It’s easier to get killed by a terrorist than it is to find a husband after 40.” “That statistic isn’t true!” she’d respond. “There’s practically a whole book about why that statistic isn’t true!” There was no need to name it because the entire country knew the book she was alluding to was Backlash.

In some ways, we’re experiencing a repeat of what we experienced in the 1990s, but the current reaction is much less subtle, Faludi notes. “Back in the 1980s, backlash wore a velvet glove. That reaction was like, ‘We’re just here to help.’ That’s not what’s going on now. It’s an attack that is depriving women of basic bodily autonomy, reproductive freedom, drumming women out of the workforce, gutting every law, policy and agency that serves women’s rights and women’s wellbeing,” she says, listing as an example drafting bills to make a woman who seeks an abortion eligible for the death penalty. “We’re arresting mothers for purchasing abortion pills for their daughters, not to mention filling the U.S. Cabinet with alleged rapists, sex traffickers and wife beaters. And there are even calls to repeal women’s right to vote.”

For Faludi, the current situation is alarming. “I think there’s still a left. It’s just everyone has a great deal of fear. And rightly so, because the minute you stick your head up, you get it chopped off, or ICE shows up, or it’s just the fear that ICE will show up. It’s basically how the system operated under the Third Reich, where people were afraid of being reported, being turned in by others. Once that gets into your system, it’s paralyzing.”

The reporter is critical of the advances of fourth-wave feminism in her country. The paradox, she says, is that it has become very popular thanks to celebrities like Taylor Swift, but women’s living conditions have actually worsened. The Great Recession of 2008 was more long-lasting for women, who found themselves unable to meet their ordinary needs. “And we have a feminism that’s all caught up in plastering banners that say the future is female on corporate websites. That is not helpful.”

It’s just terrible how everything that either feminism or the left comes up with, we seem to end up using it to police each other ourselves internally. The right grasps this and is so good at being the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Faludi is horrified by the clash between feminists on gender issues. “I hate that it’s become us versus them or trans versus TERFs [an acronym that stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist]. Nothing is resolved by that approach; feminists and trans rights activists have a lot in common. We’re both up against the punitive constraints of gender.”

Two decades ago, Faludi received an email from her father, whom she hadn’t spoken with in years, revealing a new identity: her father now identified as a woman and went by the name Stephanie after undergoing gender reassignment surgery in Thailand. Her father was raised Jewish in Germany-allied Hungary and disguised himself as a fascist to save his parents from death. Thanks to his photography skills, he adopted a new identity in the U.S. under the name Steven Faludi to work as an image retoucher. He met Susan’s mother, they married, and when she left him, he stabbed her new boyfriend several times before returning to Hungary and embracing the antisemitic and misogynistic ideals of the far right. She would later tell this story in a book titled In The Darkroom, which earned her the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.

“When my father first wrote to me, in 2004, trans was almost an exotic notion to the average person, but by the time I published my book in 2016, Newsweek was talking about the transgender tipping point in the advancement of rights for trans people. And then all that turned,“ she says, noting that certain feminists have joined far-right positions and show sympathy for people who de-transition and underscoring the dangers of this type of alliance. “It’s just terrible how everything that either feminism or the left comes up with, we seem to end up using it to police each other ourselves internally. The right grasps this and is so good at being the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Just about every anti-abortion bill or executive order against trans rights has been headlined ‘women’s equality.’ It’s a farce, but it’s an effective one.”

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