The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America by Susan Faludi (2007)

I just realized I also failed to mention that I'd read a book. A whole book. Of non-fiction no less.

It's a fairly quick easy read for non-fiction of the critical gender theory sort. We're not talking Judith Butler by any stretch of the imagination. The book is broken into halves. The first is a very interesting look at post-9/11 media: it's exclusion of female voices, it's placement of women back in the home, it's villainization of feminism, it's applause for the return of the "manly" man, it's insistence that men be heroes and women victims, men virile family protectors and women silent homemakers. This gets incredibly interesting when Faludi exposes some out and out lies manufactured by the media. The whole Jessica Lynch story, for example. The second half is an exploration of the origins of this gender myth and why we employed it post-9/11. She traces it back to captivity narratives in early America. All of this is interesting but I think she loses sight of the goal of the book in the second half. While it is of incredible importance to explain the origins of such a myth, she barely mentions 9/11 in the second half--calling it to the forefront only in an introductory or closing paragraph of a chapter--so quite a bit of it seems tangential.

Regardless, worth a read if you have reason or are just a bit curious.