From the Book THE
TERROR DREAM: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America by
Susan Faludi. Reprinted by arrangement with
Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and
company, LLC.. Copyright (c) 2007 by Susan Faludi. All
rights reserved.What made the post-9/11 disappearances of feminist and liberal female voices all the more strange was that, at first, it looked like the terrorist attacks might give the cause of women's equality a new lease oil life. One feminist issue, at least, was deemed useful to the Bush White House: the repression of Afghan women. After months of being snubbed, the Feminist Majority Foundation, which had been trying to call attention to the Taliban's abuse of women since u6, found itself in the astonishing position of playing belle of the capital ball. As did many other feminist groups. At the White House (which had just recently abolished the Office for Womens' Initiatives), director of public liaison Leziec Westine began contacting woman's rights organizations and asking them to seek "common ground" with the administration that had iced them since its inception. "Let's really analyze where we can come together," she urged. Martha Burk of the National Council of Women's Organizations received three or four summonses to the White House and, for a while, was fielding calls from administration officials almost once a week.
Feminist leaders were invited to brief, among others, Karen Hughes, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and a bevy of top State Department officials. "They were anxious to meet with us," Eleanor Sineal, president of the Feminist Majority, told me, "In fact, they apologized" for not having met sooner-and even for not having more women on staff. Both houses of Congress held hearings on women's status in Afghanistan-in which they enthusiastically applauded Smeal's appeal to "make sure that women are at the table" and "not treated as a side issue." And the White House held a "women's-only" conference call with members of Congress on the situation of Afghan women.
The feminist message seemed to be adopted. "The central goal of the terrorists is the brutal oppression of women," Bush pronounced before an audience of women's rights activists as he signed the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act on December 12, 2001. Laura Bush gave the first First Lady presidential radio address "to kick off a world-wide effort," as she put it, "to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaida terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Taliban." Colin Powell announced that "the rights of the women of Afghanistan will not be negotiable," and his State Department issued with much fanfare a 'Report on the Taliban's War against Women," adorned with quotes from Afghan women detailing their oppression and even a poem from anthropologist and activist Zieba Shorish-Shamley's Look into My World. "they made me invisible, shrouded and non-being / A shadow, no existence, made silent and unseeing / Denied of freedom, confined to my cage / Tell me how to handle my anger and my rage?"
The governmental glasnost had a counterpart in the media, where images of burka-clad women became a staple of television news and newsweekly features. Journalist Saira Shah's documentary about women under the Taliban, Beneath the Veil, made for British television and formerly overlooked and underexposed in America, enjoyed multiple airings on CNN and was excerpted on two of the networks. American press correspondents hastened to Afghanistan to write about "a world of ghost women: "blue ghosts," "walking ghosts," "shrouded ghosts," "downtrodden ghosts," and "silent ghosts." The media seemed riveted by that feminine silence and made some effort, albeit generally unsuccessful, to get these women to speak. "Over the last week I've been rebuffed by dozens of Afghan women," New York 'limes columnist Nicholas Kristof regretfully reported. Back home, press inquiries about the Taliban's oppression of women poured into the Feminist Majority, which had previously had so much trouble drawing media interest to the subject that it had been reduced to sending a letter about Afghan women's plight to "Dear Abby."
And then it stopped. As soon as the bombs began dropping over Afghanistan in early October 2001, the White House claims of concern for women's rights came to a halt. The betrayal by the Bush administration, as the national coordinator of the Feminist Majority cast it, came swiftly. One moment the Bush administration was declaring that "the restoration of women's rights" was the centerpiece of its mission in Afghanistan, the next it was busy bartering those rights away. "Right now we have other priorities," a senior administration official told the New York Times when asked, only two and a half weeks into the invasion of Afghanistan, what role women's rights would have in a future government. "We have to he careful not to look like we are imposing our values on them." The Bush administration-sanctioned final government draft of the Afghan constitution did not include an equal rights guarantee. After much protest from women's groups and women delegates to the Loya Jirga council on the constitution in January 2004, a guarantee was inserted, though hardly enforced. In the months and years to come, as Afghan women's lives once again became perilous, there would be no more calls to "kick off a worldwide effort" on behalf of women and no more claims purveyed that women's issues were nonnegotiable*
In the media, too, women's rights in Afghanistan were abandoned as a cause, surviving only in sporadic regurgitations by mostly male voices. The most heralded of the American "feminist" contributions to the women of Afghanistan were beauty, tips. "One of the first dramatic signs of liberation," Afghan Communicator, an English-language magazine, reported, "was the return of Afghan women to beauty salons." Backed by more than a million dollars from Revlon, Clairol, L'Oreal, Mac, and America's leading fashion magazines, "beauticians without borders" made repeated pilgrimages to Kabul to train a new generation of hair and makeup stylists. An American-hacked beauty school even operated out of the new Afghani Women's Ministry, until government officials soured on its presence. Vogue contributed $25,000 to the effort and bestowed the "Anna Wittour Award" (a $500 pair of scissors) on one of the beauty school's graduates, Trina Ahmedi, for her way with a mascara wand. The feature film The Beauty Academy of Kabul was soon playing in American cineplexes. The endeavor was not without a certain utility: in Afghanistan, a beautician could earn more than a doctor and could ply her trade from home, n advantage in a nation where, despite the supposed defeat of the burka, many women were still housebound. But the target audience for this campaign was always here in the United States. The beauty industry was celebrating, as its representatives put it repeatedly, American womens "freedom of choice.
Very quickly, women's rights went from being a reason to invade Afghanistan to an irrelevancy. The conservative media, which had never really supported a feminist campaign oil behalf of Afghan women, saluted this turn of events. "Liberals should not support the war because the Taliban is hostile to feminism," the National Review instructed on November, 2001, in an article titled "What We're Not Fighting For." The magazine's list of nots, which included "short skirts, dancing, and secularism" and the right to an abortion, was illustrated with a photograph of Britney Spears with a bared midriff. "They should support it because they are patriots." In the Washington Times, Cliff Kincaid, president of America's Survival, railed against U.S. feminist involvement in Afghanistan's reconstruction. "The Afghan people need food, water and shelter, not social experimentation directed by the National Organization for Women," he said. "This feminist interference in Afghanistan's future could give the term 'Ugly American' new meaning."
Giving new meaning to "damned if you do, damned if you don't," conservative writers simultaneously harangued feminists for abandoning women's concerns in Afghanistan. "At the very moment feminists should be finishing the battle that they began, they are nowhere to be found," Sarah Wildman claimed in the New Republic. "As news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where are the feminists?" Manhattan Institute's Kay Hymowitz demanded to know. "Where's the outrage?" After a dismissive one-sentence nod to the Feminist Majority's long-standing campaign for Afghan women's rights, she went on to insist: "You haven't heard a peep from feminists. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they, have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams."
Nicholas Kristof of the New York limes echoed that same bizarre claim in a somewhat different context. One of many journalists to become fixated on the scourge of "sex-slave trafficking" in the post-9/11 period (to the neglect of work-slave trafficking, a far more common problem), Kristof famously launched a one-man crusade to buy two Cambodian prostitute girls from their keepers. (His effort boomeranged when one of the girls fled her liberation and returned to the brothel.) In the midst of that campaign, the columnist rounded on the very feminist groups that had been fighting for women's rights in the Third World for years. Organizations like the Feminist Majority were complacent on trafficking" and "shamefully lackadaisical about an issue that should he near the top of any feminist agenda,' he wrote."
Why would some pundits who were themselves sympathetic to the plight of Afghan women be so hostile to the American women combating that selfsame evil? That conundrum revealed a subtle yet profound distinction: the pundits were caught up in a separate drama that didn't have much to do with the feminist cause. If anything, feminists were seen as rivals who threatened to hijack the drama's starring roles. Behind the media fascination with Taliban oppression lay a desire to promote not women's rights but American chivalry. Which may explain why so much of the post-9/11 media coverage revolved around rescue fantasies instead of female liberation. Story after story seemed to confirm that America was "saving" women, if only from their burkas.
Dozens of dispatches reported with smug self-congratulation on the morning the U .S. troops took Kabul and a handful of women on the street celebrated by casting aside their floor-length veils. A condescending Newsweek article described a "giggling and babbling circle of women who were so grateful they sprinkled a reporter with confetti and offered to wash her hair. The media made much, too, of the U.S. military's supposed "rescue" of two American women who were among eight aid workers jailed by the Taliban for three months for preaching Christianity. "I want to thank our military for rescuing these girls," Bush said of Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry, who were, in fact, adult women and who had been freed by Northern Alliance soldiers, not American troops. Newsweek's headline announced that these two women had been Delivered from Evil," and the accompanying story took pains to note that Curry (who was thirty years old) was known as a "real girl" who "likes to wear cute clothes and fix her hair." CNN correspondent Tom Mintier enthused that the "girls'" story sounded like the script from a Hollywood movie, but this was real life." That same week, CNN rushed to air Unholy War, the sequel to the documentary Beneath the Veil, which narrowed its focus to the attempted media rescue of three motherless little girls who had appeared in the first film. In an interview with Larry King, Beneath the Veil director Cassian Harrison said the concentration on the girls was warranted because their "image" was "a metaphor for the entire situation inside Afghanistan.
Or maybe Afghanistan was a metaphor for the girl, the nation as female captive abducted by molesting desperadoes and waiting passively for virile America to save her from degradation. The captivity-and-rescue metaphor underlay Bush's declaration on the first anniversary of 9/11 that we had raised this lamp of liberty to every captive land." It was evident, too, in the words of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who crowed in an interview with National Public Radio, in February 2002, that the United States had saved Afghan women: Women have stopped being repressed. They can actually walk out in the street and not have their entire faces and bodies covered by burkas. They can laugh on the street." Whether they could actually wield power, he didn't say. The persistence of the rescue language was a sign of an insidious differentiation that had prevailed from the start. Coming to the rescue of women was a cause to he celebrated, as long as the rescuers were men and as long as the women acted as if they needed rescuing. Interestingly, the initiative for Afghani women that the Bush administration most adamantly opposed was financing for women-run NCOs in Afghanistan. For all the talk about women being pivotal to democracy, the only proposal by feminist leaders that the White House seriously pursed was an office to monitor sex trafficking. if women proved capable of fending for themselves, if they laid claim to agency instead of violation and dependency, the rescue drama fell to pieces."'
A couple of years later, the administration was again claiming to coming to the defense of women's rights-this time in Iraq. The State Department unveiled the Iraqi Women's Democracy Initiative, a grant program to help become full and vibrant partners in Iraq's developing democracy." That this pledge was less than heartfelt might be deduced from the announcement made that same day, identifying one of the first grant recipients: the antifeminist Independent Women's Forum. Once more, the narrative of female captives and male saviors prevailed over the lip service to female independence. Once more, a nation became the metaphor for the girl. As the December 17, 2001, cover of National Review cast it early on. Iraq was a violated country diii need of rescue from its regime." Bush spoke incessantly of avenging Hussein's 'rape rooms" but rarely of safeguarding Iraqi women's status as one of the most emancipated female populations iii the Muslim world (a status they would soon lose, following the American invasion). In the years to come, the same sex-coded rescue language would be invoked to justify the quagmire. America would never abandon Iraq or any nation, President Bush vowed, that wasn't "capable of defending herself."