The eighties was the decade of my childhood, a period typified by reading musty vampire comic books in my babysitter's basement, playing touch football, exploring sewers, kids making fun of the way I pronounced "hazelnut" and moving all over the country like we were worried someone would catch up.

Susan Faludi's Backlash put a new spin on the decade of my childhood, and it is scary to me to think about how the anti-feminist backlash she documents could have affected my own socialization. Particularly cutting was her deconstruction of the whole men taking care of babies abandoned by their mothers plot, a film genre that I think I took to heart as a kid and still have a soft spot for.

She also set off all kinds of speculation about how this backlash could have affected my entire generation.

Like I said, I was really struck by the section of her book that deals with pop culture. It's really interesting to see the trajectory she traces from the presence of strong and happy working women in 70s films to the near omnipresence of miserable, lonely working women in the 80s. Beyond that, I was continually shocked by the entire book. The backlash that Faludi describes had major legal, medical and labour consequences for countless women, in addition to potentially far broader implications for the majority of the women living in the decade. She focuses exclusively on the United States, and I am curious now to dig and see if similar trends have been observed in Europe. (Or Canada, given the national obsession with not being the US)

It seems to me that the current climate is not much more friendly to feminism than it was in the 80s. There's the western obsession with the veil, the dramatic cuts to women's programs by the Harper government, and the even more ridiculous notion that it is somehow liberatory for women to have their country bombed back to the stone age and occupied, to name a few examples. In that light Backlash is a very pertinent read.

I've been thinking of the kids I went to school with who react to the word feminism as though it were a disease, not to mention the near ubiquity of the word "gay" to denote stupidity. Or of my 8th grade sex ed teacher who called a girl in class a whore when she asked if she could get aids from giving a blowjob. It seemed to me growing up that misogyny was very much 'in' with my friends, and I wonder if Backlash provides the seeds of an explanation for that.

My feeling is that anyone born or raised in the 80s should read this book. I think it really lays out a very good case for Faludi's backlash, and spurs you to think about how a trend can be constructed by the media and private companies for their benefit.

Evidently she continues to be a very prolific writer. If you are curious to see what she has been writing lately you should check out her site.