A Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist discussed the unseen backlash of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America.

Susan Faludi, author of three books, discussed her most recent book “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America,” Monday night in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union. The speech was part of the 30th anniversary of the women’s studies program at Iowa State.

“On 9/11, individual Americans responded reasonably and courageously, but the nation as a whole reacted in ways that on reflection are truly strange and disturbing and begged for explanation,” she said.

As an example, she said political figures had been using “vigilante rhetoric.”

The media was claiming that the attacks would bring back the “traditional family arrangements,” Faludi said.

She said she had an “early warning” that feminism was going to suffer after the 9/11 attacks when a reporter called her for her reaction on the events and said “‘Well,’ he said, ‘this sure pushes feminism off the map.'”

“Why, when the hijackers aimed the planes commercial symbols of power, were we acting like there was an attack on hearth and home?” Faludi said.

The reaction to 9/11 was characterized by both the media and the political powers, as being something that had never happened on America’s soil before.

“It’s not a nation that’s vulnerable to an assault on home soil,” Faludi said, recounting the reports by the media.

However, she said, in recent history this is true, but in America’s early history there were actually many attacks that happened at home. These attacks, she said, were an integral feature to the “formation of the American character.”

“For the first 200 years the main feature of colonial American life was being attacked on home soil,” Faludi said.

The cultural myth of “triumphant rescuers” was developed in the 18th century, and continued into the Victorian era as a response to the perceived emasculation of men, who were helpless to protect their families from outside attack, Faludi said.

“Roughly more than a quarter of the women who were taken captive were never rescued,” Faludi said. “A whopping 60 percent of girls where never rescued.”

She said that more than one-third of the women who were captured chose to remain with their captors.

The attacks on Sept. 11, she said, unearthed the gender stereotypes that had been created in early colonial times.

She said she had counted four articles in The New York Times that said the attacks were going to cause single women to “rush to the wedding altar.”

It was said that “9/11 would take a deep mental toll on the unmarried people because they would have no one to call if their plane was hijacked,” Faludi said.

She said directly after the attacks women began disappearing from public discussion.

“Women’s voices began vanishing,” Faludi said. “The number of women guests on early morning news programs shrunk by 40 percent.”

She said at the same time, certain male leaders were being “inflated.”

She cited such examples as President George Bush being labeled “America’s dragon slayer” and his cabinet members receiving titles like “The Magnificent Seven.”

The magazine responsible for these titles gave individual cabinet members names like “The Rock” for Dick Cheney and “The Heat” for John Ashcroft.

This led, she said, to the presidential campaign in 2004 being affected by gender stereotypes and the “macho-man” image.

She said that both President Bush and Senator John Kerry where shown hunting and clearing brush as part of their campaign images.

“The candidates seemed to be competing for the title of Davy-Crockett-in-Chief,” she said.

She said there were all of the pieces of the myth of strong men and weak women.

“All that’s missing is the rescue of the girl, preferably one who’s in danger of being violated,” Faludi said.

This led to a focus on the story of Jessica Lynch, which provided the media a story to focus on that involved a supposed dramatic rescue of a female soldier by strong male soldiers.

“There are real consequences for acting according to a made-up script, and real people paid them.” Faludi said.

It was revealed afterwards, she said, that there had been no actual battle to rescue Lynch.

“We as a people finally may be ready to begin asking some hard questions about our response to 9/11.”