New York Times: Kakutani

Errors of logic are typical of this ill-conceived and poorly executed book — a book that stands as one of the more nonsensical volumes yet published about the aftermath of 9/11.

Feminism, like a trampoline, has made possible this splendid provocation of a book, levitating to keep company with Hunter Thompson's fear and loathing, Leslie Fielder's love and death and Edmund Wilson's patriotic gore.

Throughout the book, Faludi provides stunning and depressing evidence of a concerted effort to silence women and roll back women's rights in the wake of 9/11 and to transform the attack on a U.S. financial symbol where men and women worked side by side into an assault on family and hearth.

Anyone who blames the weird, conflicted state of contemporary womanhood on the cultural fallout of Sept. 11, 2001, isn't just burning her bras but smoking them.

Her thesis may arouse skepticism, but she marshals provocative evidence, documenting such phenomena as a decline of women's bylines in national newspapers and a forty-per-cent drop in federal sex-discrimination prosecutions.

[The Terror Dream] does not mention Joseph Campbell and his "The Hero With a Thousand Faces," or Robert Bly and his "Iron John," or Carl Jung and his theories, but hers is a work of cultural interpretation on the order of theirs.

Faludi proposes that post-9/11 myth making owes its provenance to the frontier narratives emerging from the Indian wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, especially those concerning abductions...It's an original and audacious thesis, but an oddly unsatisfying and problematic one. Her cultural critique is undermined by a lack of comparability.

Earlier: 9/11 Made Our Men Macho Pigs, Or How To Sell A Book About Gender Roles In Wartime

In yesterday's Los Angeles Times, the awesome Carina Chocano laments the lack of decent female characters in recent comedies and searches for an answer to the issue. "The idea that a girl might play anything other than 'the girl' in a studio comedy is so far out of the mainstream that it's considered an experimental concept, not to mention a major financial risk," Chocano notes. And even more upsetting, she says: "'The girl' and 'the hot girl' have merged to produce a gorgeous, well-meaning, inoffensive love-object devoid of any motivating purpose and quite possibly manufactured in Stepford."

Chocano uses Jezebel obsession Lars and the Real Girl as a major example in her essay. She argues:

"culture has been gerrymandered, labeling as 'male' all movies that don't pander specifically to subjects only women are presumed to care about...The 'likability' of the male hero has become such an imperative in American comedies — even in small, woman-written ones such as 'Lars' — that a movie will sooner make a nice guy out of a dude in love with an anatomically correct Barbie than give us a girl's point of view.

All of which brings me back to Smiley Face. Admittedly it's not the best movie I've ever seen, but Anna Faris's baked-out-of-her-mind facial expressions are worth the price of admission alone. (Though perhaps Faris is not the best lady-in-comedy role model to begin with: she's made her name playing
ditsy blonds and is gearing up to play a a Playboy bunny and a a porn star, but I digress).

Anyway! Back to Smiley Face, which was independently financed, has yet to find a distributor and has only been shown at film festivals (and since the DVD appears to be available in January , it might never get released on the big screen). When I think about my favorite lady comedy moment of the past 15 years, it was in the uber indie Parker Posey movie Party Girl. If the major studios aren't going to finance female driven comedies, writers and directors should look elsewhere for the dough. Any studio comedy with a female protagonist would probably be about recipes and kittens anyway, though I have high hopes for the Amy Poehler/Rachel Dratch/Posey Warner Brothers movie, Spring Breakdown. What forthcoming lady comedies do you have high hopes for?

Film Comedies No Laughing Matter for Actresses [Los Angeles Times]

• A recent study suggests that women who suffer from panic/anxiety attacks [That would be me! -Ed.] have a higher chance of suffering a heart attack or stroke later in life. [USA Today]
  
• Can consensual sex become rape midway during the act? A Maryland court is trying to determine that in the case of a 18-year old woman who allowed a 16-year old boy to have sex with her so long as he stopped when she told him to. She claims she told him to stop and he continued for 5 to 10 more seconds. We know what Cosmo would say! [Baltimore Sun]
  
• Salon's Rebecca Traister reviews Susan Faludi's new book and contrasts it with Springsteen's new album. Just go read it. It's that good. [Salon]

• Did you hear? There's no better way to thank a baby momma for delivering that little bundle of taint-tearing joy than a "push present" in the form of a hideous charm bracelet. [MSNBC]
• Researchers claim that romantic partners copy one another's health habits, from quitting smoking to increasing exercise. Until our boyfriend flushes his pack of Parliament Lights down the toilet and does a downward dog, we call bullshit. [Live Science]
• A woman gave birth to two babies on the same day, but they aren't twins. Seems that she got pregnant twice over the course of two weeks. Mother Nature, you fucking creep us out. [Babble]
• Hooray, the Aurora, IL Planned Parenthood finally opened! [MSNBC]
• Women are more likely to suffer concussions than men playing the same sports, mainly because the way girls "play" is different. Also, helmets fuck up our hair. [ABC News]
• A bunch of breast cancer survivors strutted down the runway for a UK fashion show drawing attention to the disease and the search for a cure. Fierce! [Daily Mail]
• According to a recent poll, women are more afraid of getting Alzheimer's than cancer — umm, maybe because every study contradicts the next and it seems like there's nothing you can do about getting breast cancer... wait, sorry, what we're we saying? [Science Daily]

Ms. Faludi, who lives in San Francisco, said she initially had no intention of writing about 9/11. She was working on a book about Judi Bari, the radical environmentalist, when the planes struck. Within hours a newspaper reporter called to ask her opinion about the attack's effect on "our social fabric" before adding, in what Ms. Faludi calls "a bizarrely gleeful tone," the remark: "Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!

Eh, well, not so much. I mean, obviously the nation has gone to shit since 9/11 and at the same time, our female icons are dumber and more superficial than ever starting with our stiletto-shopping Secretary of State, but I kind of think the economy is more to blame than our idiotic with a culture that holds women in even lower regard than evangelical Christians. But hey, whatever sells books for girls that aren't about weight-obsessed shoe-whore publicists who really thought they'd have a rock by now is okay by us!

Towers Fell, And Attitudes Were Rebuilt [NY Times]