Susan Faludi is the author of two important books, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999), a study of men and the culture of masculinity, and Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991), a national bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. That book and her subsequent appearance on the cover of Time magazine made Faludi a household word and a national feminist spokesperson. Faludi has worked for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, where she won a Pulitzer for labor reporting. Her articles have appeared in numerous magazines including The New Yorker, Ms. and Mother Jones.

How did writing for newspaper inform your writing of longer form non-fiction – like books and magazine articles?

It made me feel frustrated enough that I wanted to write longer pieces, because there’s so little you can say in a short newspaper article. Both length-wise and struggling with complexity of any issue you’re writing about. It’s hard to get all the subtleties and grays, not to mention one’s deeper opinions in a news form. On the other hand, writing for newspapers taught me all the essential nuts and bolts of how to go about getting information and being reasonably accurate. So it was good training, but ultimately it felt confining.

When you released Backlash, it seems from the press I’ve read, it seems like you became America’s most wanted feminist writer.

(Laughter) In which way?

You can take it either way, depending on which side you’re coming from. Can you tell me about the experience of fame, of becoming the spokesperson for millions of women?

I don’t really consider myself a spokeswoman. First of all, fame is a very relative term when applied to a writer since, by the mere fact that you’re writing a book, you’ve eliminated a huge percentage of the country. But beyond that, it’s one of the frustrations about the public process that operates in the American media: you’re putting an idea out there, and if it at all catches people’s imaginations, you’re overnight appointed a spokeswoman and then attacked for the gall. And you didn’t ask to be that in the first place. You just wanted to get people to think – which seems to be anathema.

How did your life change?

You know, in all the rather uninteresting ways of being asked to do a lot of things, only some of which you were very interested in doing. I think this is the whole question for writers who are also activists -- where they come down on that division, because if you’re just a straight-forward activist, then this is your platform to leap into public – sustained public advocacy where everything you say is reduced to a sound byte. If you’re single-minded in that way and that’s what you want to achieve, then that’s very useful. But for me, I’m as interested in the writing aspect and in figuring things out and looking at the gradations as I was in making a political point. So I was always personally torn between those two poles. I still am. Whereas I think for others who are more straight-ahead “movement” people, it’s a golden opportunity.

I’m not complaining. (Laughing) The worst thing is if you write something and nobody responds to it. But I think it’s tricky terrain to navigate, and something I still grapple with to some degree.

I think it’s very apt that you said “you became the most wanted,” because what happens over and over again with feminist writers, going back to Mary Wollenstonecraft… Look what happened to Kate Millett, after she was on the cover of Time. She was immediately attacked. Anybody you want to name who is a feminist writer has gone through this set ‘em up, knock ‘em down experience, and I think it happens a lot faster for women who are encouraging other women to be outspoken and to challenge the system. That sends off the alarms in a way that, I mean it’s sort of a longer breathing time for people who belong to other causes before they’re hung out to dry. It’s a lot of the reason why feminism keeps getting slammed down in this country. It’s not a gentle business to go out there and speak your mind for anybody, but particularly feminism immediately invites this hostile response.

Even among some women.

Oh yeah, and also women learn that if they want to extend their time in the lime light then it behooves them to attack them. Then they get to be quote unquote famous without suffering the, if I can use the word backlash, on themselves personally. People like Ann Coulter, or there’s a whole gross of Republican women who have made a career out of attacking feminists.

It’s like the Little Red hen who does all the work while the other barnyard animals just sit there, and in the end they all want to eat the bread. That’s the story of the Ann Coulters and the Christina Hoffsummers, and this whole passel of right-wing women who would still be sitting in the kitchen making bread if it weren’t for the feminists that they’re attacking.

Moving forward to Stiffed, your book about men… It seems as if Stiffed was the logical next step from Backlash. What was your thinking when you were putting together these main ideas?

I did think it was the next logical step. Changing societies view of women and changing women’s own view of themselves is only half the battle. Probably the easier half -- not that it’s very easy. The other tall order that must be filled if women are going to live free lives is to free up men from social obligation – from social straight jackets. It’s a question of how you lift off that mold of constrained masculinity. I thought it would be a really important and deep and perplexing question that I wanted to explore. And I think it’s still sort of the unknown, the dark side of the moon.

One of the main points that I came to in working on Stiffed is this shift from a utilitarian society to a society dominated by a commercial culture -- and that men were as caught up in that crossover as women. The whole idea of masculinity as being rooted in skilled craft work or tangible contributions to supporting your family or to being an engaged civic actor—that has been utterly eclipsed by the idea that you have to quote-unquote play a man. That appearance is all-important and image and branding and this whole constellation of new values that comes out of a commercial culture that are crippling to men now.

In the writing of Stiffed you spent a lot of time with Citadel Cadets and Promise Keepers and the Spur Posse – these hyper-masculine groups, supposedly. Did any of these groups pose a particular challenge to you as a writer – in how you interacted with them, in how receptive they were to you?

The funny thing about reporting is that, by and large, people will talk to you. I suppose it helps that I’m soft spoken and fairly innocuous or at least seem that way. (laughing) That’s one part and then the other part is that – these were all men who really wanted somebody to talk to. They were all struggling with these questions, and then here comes this woman who wants to talk to them about these questions. Even Promise Keeps, which is supposedly based on the idea that men should meet alone, once we got over the hurdle of there being a woman in the room, those men were actually very eager to bounce ideas off of me. It became one of those observational problems where you wanted to be a fly on the wall, and they wanted you to be more of a facilitator. You know, if I said I was going to be away, they were rather disappointed. I think there is a great need to talk about this elephant in the living room. And they were equipped with very few words to talk about it. So if somebody comes in and says “what about this and what about that?” they really responded to that -- and the same with the Spur Posse.

I would say that the one group that was really shut down was the Citadel cadets. They had – it was a bit like trying to get George Bush off his sound byte. They had a script, and they were sticking to it. They had this need for iron clad certainty about everything, and everything had one answer.

How did you end up breaking through that?

I’m not sure that I did. I ended up talking to people around them. As they got older they became more open, so the alums I talked to were more forthcoming. The 18-year-old cadets were -- I think the most revealing thing about them was their resistance to revealing themselves.

At Etude, we’re interested in how writers write. Would you talk to me a little bit about your writing process?

I’m not sure I have a process other than hitting my head against the keyboard until something comes out. I’m always very suspicious when I read these accounts of writers who get up at 5 a.m. and have their 3000 words for the day done at 9, then go contemplate nature.

I’m doing non-fiction and there are certain rituals of non-fiction that work for me – the process of going over my notes again, and then I index my notes. I’m anal-retentive. I number the pages of my notebook, then I index within pages. I think this is really an exercise in getting the elves in my brain -- who are often just sitting around snoozing -- to start thinking about what are the key aspects that I’ve learned from my reporting that are in the shape of the larger landscape. So by the time I start writing, there’s something formed in my head. I find I really have to go over everything I’ve collected to come up with a game plan and begin to figure out what is it I’m actually thinking about here.

You say you’re suspicious of people who are so regimented. Do you put yourself on a schedule?

I certainly am not somebody who works between 5 and 9 in the morning. (laughing) I did read the other day that Graeme Greene, before 9, always wrote 800 words. But there aren’t that many Graeme Greens in the world. Graeme Green, the rest of the day, was having wild love affairs and having some kind of espionage life. My life’s not that thrilling. (laughing) I stretch it out like taffy all day long. I tend to work in very long stretches which maybe is not an approach I recommend, but once I get myself to sit in front of the computer, I’m down for the day.

Do you think that writing is a gendered endeavor?

I think maybe it’s more a way to escape the binds of gender. Unlike public performance or public speaking or even radio addresses, you don’t really know the gender of the author unless… Well you obviously do by looking at the cover. But there’s a freedom from a lot of gender stereotypes in writing. In the process of writing you’re not defined by your physical voice or your appearance. Or how do I come at people from a position of strength when I’m wearing a dress? Or the sort of questions that come up when you’re confronting the world with your body as well as your mind. Those limitations burn away to a certain extent when it’s just you and the written word. For me, I found that freeing at a very early age. The first time I started writing for my junior high school newspaper, I realized there was an immense amount of power and authority in writing about the world. I was certainly in no position to exercise that in any other form. I’m trying to avoid using that terrible term “empowerment,” but through the ages women have picked up the pen to assert themselves in that ways they were less likely to be able to pull off in the public square. It was one way of being a public woman without having the other meaning of public woman, i.e. “prostitute” applied to you.

The other thing I wanted to say about women and journalism is that at least 2/3 of journalism school graduates and the majority of entry and interning journalists are women. However their presence has been basically frozen. I mean, the proportion has been frozen since 1982. I think a lot of women are attracted to journalism for the reasons we were talking about -- to both have a voice and to do some social good, to feel like you’re contributing to society. But the degree to which women wind up being in positions where they can really make a difference in journalism is severely reduced compared to men.

Then there’s the larger question of what journalism is really doing these days anyway. What does it mean to get to get to the top of your profession if that means you’re a talking head on television? There are very few meaningful outlets to practice your craft.

Of all the media forms, which do you think is the most meaningful?

The longer thinking forms, like the New York Review of Books. But is it meaningful if everyone is getting their news from Fox News? This is something book writers, non-fiction book writers struggle with all the time. I’m spending all these years working on this book, and with most people, their only impression of your book will be your five seconds on some “Good Morning America” show schilling for it. And all they’ll come away with is how your hair looked that day.

So why do you keep writing?

I think ultimately you have to keep writing -- I don’t want to say for yourself -- but because there is an idea in the world that you want to struggle with. And the belief that if you struggle with it strongly enough there might be some people out there who will be affected. I think the other, the comforting thing about books, is that, 100 years from now, somebody might take it off the shelf. It’s unlikely that somebody 100 years from now is going to go watch your 10 seconds on Good Morning America -- at least I hope not.

And there’s the experience of writing which is really fulfilling. It’s agonizing and hard, but being able to work out an idea on paper is a kind of mental muscularity that I find really satisfying. That isn’t to say that you don’t want people to hear you and read you and think, but I think that’s a very overlooked part of the whole experience.

Do you feel right now, at this point in your career, that you’re more mainstream or do you think that you’re more on the fringe than when you released Backlash?

I’m more established in the writing community than when I started. But I think my ideas, I don’t know that I’d call them fringe, but I’ve moved from a position of making a pretty straight-forward political argument to being, as I get older, being much more interested in that whole ambiguous gray area -- which I happen to think is the direction that an aging writer should be heading toward. People who get more dogmatic as they get older should probably have their writing utensils taken away.

Do you think that society shifted in relation to you? Do you feel like in 15 years there has been a shift?

I’m afraid you’re talking to a very gloomy Eeyore, at least the day after the second presidential debate. I want to believe, and there of course are signs, that feminist ideas are relatively accepted or tolerated more in some ways than 30 years ago. Women are in stronger positions, just by the numbers, than 30 years ago. But frankly, I look back at the 80s, which I had defined as a period of backlash, and think well, at least back then there were a lot of us who were outraged by that. What I see absent now is any kind of moral uprising over the way that women’s concerns have been utterly sidelined.

In thinking about the presidential debate last night, where were the questions about women’s right? There was one question about abortion, which Kerry utterly soft-balled. But you look back to ’92 -- a lot of it was women speaking up in large numbers and forcing that onto the agenda. Here we are in a much more dangerous position for losing abortion than we were 8 years ago and yet there was almost no discussion throughout the whole political process.

There’s this whole slipping backwards, and what’s even more troubling to me is the lack of consciousness about the need to fight this. I don’t know, in the end, what is the greater enemy of social progress, and in particular women’s progress. Whether it’s right-wing political push or if the turbo-charged consumer culture that’s pushing everything in the direction of superficiality. Like I said, I’m like Eeyore, but I know also that things can change. People can wake up. Part of my talking about it is my hope that people are out there feeling the same way.

My last question is: where does Susan Faludi go from here?

Sweden? (Laughing) Where do I go writing-wise? I’m in the middle of writing a book on feminist environmental activists. I’m not thinking much beyond my book now, but…

You’re in labor now, apparently…

Right, exactly… and hating it until it’s over, at which point I’ll think back on it fondly.