Backlash
Skillfully Probing the Attack on Women's Rights "Opting-out," "security moms," "desperate housewives," "the new baby fever"--the trend stories of 2006 leave no doubt that American women are still being barraged by the same backlash messages that Susan Faludi brilliantly exposed in her 1991 bestselling book of revelations. Now, the book that reignited the feminist movement is back in a fifteenth anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author that brings backlash consciousness up to date. When it was first published, Backlash made headlines for puncturing such favorite media myths as the "infertility epidemic" and the "man shortage," myths that defied statistical realities. These willfully fictitious media campaigns added up to an antifeminist backlash. Whatever progress feminism has recently made, Faludi's words today seem prophetic. The media still love stories about stay-at-home moms and the "dangers" of women's career ambitions; the glass ceiling is still low; women are still punished for wanting to succeed; basic reproductive rights are still hanging by a thread. The backlash clearly exists.
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What Hacker News says
- Rich sex pests engaged in a coordinated effort to destroy #metoo and protect themselves basically as soon as the movement started. You can even see a lot of this in the Epstein files. The backlash to #metoo was larger than the movement ever was (while not referring to the same event, Susan Faludi's Backlash is a great discussion of this).
The effect is that a ton of these guys either experienced no consequence whatsoever or were able to lay low for a couple years and return to their positions of power.
- > She started a "geek feminist" website, so that didn't help...
This comes across similar to the excuse: "well of course she got raped - look at how she was dressed".
Feminism only became a "dirty word" during President Reagan's term. Susan Faludi wrote a very good book titled Backlash explaining how the backlash against feminism started, who did it and what motivated them.
http://www.amazon.com/Backlash-Undeclared-Against-American-W...
> Stop trying to 'get more women in technology'. Why is this seen as a serious problem that needs fixing?
I used to be a member of SWE (society of women engineers) back in college. One of their large studies (done in the mid 90s, which I think was jointly done with NSBE - national society of black engineers) revealed 3 important things about engineering education in the US:
1. It appears that high school guidance councillors were discouraging women from enrolling in engineering programs. It might have alternatively been that they were encouraging men to enroll in engineering and just not encouraging women. There wasn't enough data to support either conclusion. The M/F ratio among the population is very close to 0.5. The M/F ratio among engineers is well over 10. That there is such a difference points out that there is a problem. We don't run around with guns and blow stuff up - we sit in chairs all day - so the arguments that people use to justify excluding women from combat are worse than useless when you're considering technology.
2. That women in engineering drop out of engineering at twice the rate that men drop out of engineering. The folks doing the study didn't have an answer for that, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was because so many of us are jerks.
3. Engineering is seen as "uncool". Movies and TV shows portray engineers as nerds - and that nerds are uncool and unpopular.
- I'm going to add that Susan Faludi wrote about "Backlash" in 1991
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlash:_The_Undeclared_War_A...
and she wrote "Stiffed" about the problem of men in 1999,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiffed:_The_Betrayal_of_the_A...
There is a case study in that second book about Stanley, a brand that represented masculinity and how it's trajectory reflected the decline of men, in recent years Stanley has become a symbol of female-gendered consumerism.
- The stories about the backlash against the diversity efforts at Stanford, circa 1994, are what Susan Faludi was talking about in her book "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women" which was published in 1991. That era saw a turning point, as various important factions in USA society withdrew their support from the project of advancing the role of women in society. The encouragement given during the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s disappeared in the 1990s.
