Former Wall Street Journal reporter Susan Faludi devoted a section of her book Backlash to the movie Fatal Attraction, which she says represents and reinforces backlash resentments and fears about women. Susan paints director Adrian Lyne as a sexist bully who badgers and humiliates actresses, and transformed the originally feminist script into a fable in which the uppity single woman is violently put down. In Lyne's movie Indecent Proposal, he takes a shot at Faludi - the camera zooms in on a copy of Backlash in the hands of a blonde and apparently air-headed secretary. In the next scene, the secretary plays like a vampire in front of the movie's hero. So much for feminist enlightenment.

"One could spin out a grand textual analysis of why he assigned the reading of Backlash to some gum-chewing secretary in spandex," says Susan, "but that would be giving more intellectual heft to his reasoning than it deserves.

"What galls Camille Paglia is that she's not on the Top Ten list [of women who are most admired]. We should just stick her there so she'll be happy and stop haranguing us."

Camille Paglia writes: "Susan Faludi's book on men, the project she has been working on since her internationally bestselling paleofeminist creed, "Backlash" (1991), will surely contain much detailed reportage, which is welcome. But on the basis of the excerpts we've already seen -- a nasty piece on the Citadel for the New Yorker (where she naively treated drag-queen bar chat as gospel) or a gloating interview with a fatigued Sylvester Stallone for Esquire -- caveat emptor!

"Faludi has a plodding, pedestrian, grimly literalistic mind. She has no culture and certainly no humor. Her primary motivation seems to be to work out the grudge she's been carrying all these years for the way her father treated her mother -- she made revealing remarks about this in early interviews, though it apparently involved nothing more lurid than a difficult separation or divorce. As a scholar, I find Faludi's facts often wrong and her logic twisted. For a commentator on the sexes, she has a fatal lack of psychological insight. And on the porn front, she's clearly a MacKinnonite Puritan who would have hung all the witches in Salem.

"At least we've been hearing less of Faludi's Harvard designer Marxism since she accepted the $1 million advance for this book. "

Faludi: "As a journalist I'm not in favor of banning pornography or anything that smells of censorship. It's not productive. It doesn't make things go away.

"Just because I feel uncomfortable about banning pornography does not mean I don't think women should be screaming bloody murder about it. The best way to get rid of pornography is to change people's thinking to the point where it doesn't sell anymore.

"Ninety percent of the screenwriters doing TV and movies are men. And certainly in the executive suites, the people who are able to green-light a show are solidly white, middle-aged, panicky, midlife-crisis men. There's this complicated, unconscious tendency for men, especially in Hollywood, to compensate for the fact that it is not a traditionally macho job. This goes back centuries - the anxiety among male writers that what they're doing is sissified, because they're writing, not fighting, and then the compensation for that is to treat writing or filmmaking as if it were some sort of male ritual, and to be more macho and more testosterone-ridden in their approach than a man who's doing a blue-collar or more physical job."

It was a dark and rainy night as a haggard Randy Potes, known to the porn world as Cal Jammer, drove like a maniac through Hollywood Hills in his leased 1994 white Ford Ranger. He was a man on a mission and that mission was death. (N.Smith)

In a 10-30-95 New Yorker article as wise as Cal, Susan Faludi became the first major writer to sketch the problems of the male porn star.

"The man is a paradox in this business because even the most unpalatable man is still a hero to most people," says Bill Margold, "while even the most palatable woman is still held to be a whore.

"Because the man lives by his dick, he dies by his dick.

"Cal was the Sean Penn of porn out of Ridgemont High. He was the dumbest person I've ever met in this business. He had the personality of a sheep dog - always wanting to be petted.

"I saw him come out of Jim South's office his last afternoon. He was upset and I waved to him to talk to me. He kept walking. Who knows whether I could've helped him?"

Ernest Greene: "Though the female performers elicit sympathy for their situation, the male performers' circumstances are probably more trying. They probably need the sympathy more and get it less. Someone always wants to help, save, support, and otherwise come to the aid of damsels in distress in this industry. But the distress of the men is private and does not inspire much sympathy. In fact, it inspires resentment from other men. Other men look at these pictures and say, "Those lucky sons of bitches. They get to f--- all these great-looking girls. I wish I could be one of them." But when I watch them work, the impression is not of men having a good time. It is the impression of men doing a grim piece of work."

Dr. Stoller: "Pounding rocks on the chain gang."

Ernest Greene: "Absolutely. And under tremendous pressure, with the knowledge that one or two failures and they're out. There's no mercy. The way the male performers are treated on the set if they fail to perform is chilling. It's as if they've suddenly come down with some terrible communicable disease [when they are impotent]. It's a lot of pressure, just knowing that if it happens on three consecutive pictures, you'll probably never work again.

"The adult industry functions as an asylum for people who refuse to let go of their adolescence, a hideout for arrested development cases. That's why people are trapped, despite what other talents they might have; despite formidable physical energies... There is no place else they can still be called boys and girls until they're 40.

"It's a hideout from the terrible demands of adulthood. It lets them remain forever in a state of overheated adolescent sexuality, the very place their personalities were formed, stuck where they discovered sex." (Coming Attractions)

Women inside and outside of porn usually feel more free to express their negative feelings, but Susan Faludi concentrates on men and extracts their frustrations. Her previous writings such as the 1994 book Backlash testify to her skill at portraying heterosexual men as dolts. In this New Yorker article, every leading male character, except the gay one, comes off as a buffoon.

Faludi's porn essay repeats the theme of Backlash - that men are threatened by emancipated women and are trying to undo the gains of feminism.

"I began to get a glimmer of what the young men of modern porn are struggling to traverse: a treacherous terrain that has more to do with work than sex, more to do with gender identity than genital excitement.

"The young men's how-I-got-here stories are of a piece. They have all bailed out of sinking occupational worlds that used to confer upon working men a measure of dignity and a masculine mantle but now offer only uncertainty."

Lauding porn as "the backstage door to the current American dream and an emergency escape hatch for a capsizing economy," Faludi blames American society for reneging on its promise to such studs as John Wayne Bobbitt, Cal Jammer, Nick East and T.T. Boy. The poor lads faced a brutal choice: "Perform degrading sex acts with people named Tyffany Million, or starve." (Joe Queenan)

Writing in the 11/19/95 Washington Post, commentator Joe Queenan admits he initially felt skeptical of Faludi's thesis that otherwise nice young men poured into porn because good careers in conventional occupations such as the auto industry and aerospace no longer exist. When Queenan investigated, however, he found out Faludi was right. But she missed the main reason for America's degradation of its finest young men: the absurdly high tax on capital gains.

"Confiscatory levels of capital gains taxes drove me into the business," Wade Pierce told Queenan as he prepared to shoot a big scene with Trixie Canyon in the direct-to-video film Gang-Bang Cross-Dressed Biker Nannies. "If the Republican party had been able to push through its program to index capital gains for inflation, I could have liquidated some of my portfolio and paid my bills with the proceeds. Absent the opportunity to unload stocks that have had a healthy run-up in the last 18 months - out of fear that taxes will swallow up most of my profits - I've been forced to freeze most of my portfolio and take a job in porn."

After talking to such stars as Studs McKenzie, Lance Corporal and Rock Hardy, Queenan came away with renewed respect for Faludi. He'd always assumed that men who entered porn were "revolting, low-life, exhibitionist scum bunnies who didn't mind being paid to degrade dozens of women in front of a camera."

As Wade Pierce put it: "If capital gains were indexed for inflation, and you were allowed to deduct capital losses without any limit whatsoever, there's no way I would be appearing in Caged Nurses Meet French Transsexuals in Heat."

James Wolcott appropriately and properly trashes Susan Faludi's awful book Stiffed in the latest issue of The New Republic:

When Elvis Presley died, cynics said, "Good career move." It wasn't for Jammer. His posthumous career went nowhere. Faludi notes that after the suicide of a female porn star named Savannah, who killed herself after a car accident which left her disfigu red, the porn biz rushed out compilation tapes and phony tributes to cash in. But poor Jammer's suicide failed to attract any money-grubbing vultures; and this is conclusive evidence, writes Faludi, that "women were more marketable, even in death."

Here, as in much of her book, Faludi is letting her thesis do her thinking for her. Jammer faded from the porn shelves not because he was a man in a woman's realm but because, unlike Savannah, he was a utility player, not a star. If Jammer had been as famous as John C. Holmes, one of the first major porn stars to die of aids, he might have gotten the same tacky sendoff. (Holmes, a.k.a. "Johnny Wadd" and "the human tripod," was the model for "Dirk Diggler" in Boogie Nights and is the subject of a documentary recently shown at the Toronto Film Festival.)

Faludi falls for the hype that because women are more visible in adult video, they are the ones in control. (She quotes a producer who complains about porn being infected by "the feminization of Hollywood.") It is a distinctly odd notion, that porn is an expression of female power. Yes, porn actresses are glossy "cover-box girls" who develop their own fanclub followings, but the turnover in porn starlets is rapid and brutal, while men in the business--such as Randy West, Peter North, Ron Jeremy, Ed Pow ers, even a grizzled geezer like Jamie Gillis--not only continue working long past their first paunch and prostate problem, but also front their own lines of tapes where they "break in" new girls to the business. Still others, such as John Leslie and Paul Thomas, hang up their socks and graduate to the director's chair where, through the prudent use of dry ice and flashbacks, they become "auteurs." When it comes to the men, old porn stars never die, they just chip away.

As for the younger bucks, two of the most prominent male stars today are Rocco Siffredi, a sexual swashbuckler who presides over a series of Eurotrash-orgy tapes with titles such as Never Say Never to Rocco Siffredi and Rocco: Animal Trainer, and has reached such notoriety that he recently appeared in the very explicit art film Romance; and Max Hardcore, who dresses up porn actresses in Lolita outfits before he manhandles them. The mistreatment of women in Siffredi's and Hardcore's tapes is so raw, gagging, and physically intrusive that even the seen-it-alls in the porn world have expressed qualms.

The upscale erotica ("X-rated versions of Victoria's Secret ads") that may have prevailed when Faludi was visiting the San Fernando Valley has been overturned by a much meaner variety. Moreover, the introduction of Viagra into the porn scene has removed most of the existential angst of "waiting for wood" that Faludi charges with such significance. On many porn shoots today the problem isn't getting it up, the problem is getting it down so that everyone can go home. Some male performers have turned into battering rams, wearing the poor women out. No, in porn, cock remains king.

Far from mirroring the moribund status of men, the current porn scene crudely reflects the resurgence of male bravado and male prerogative in popular culture.

Susan Faludi's Stiffed

Here's a review of Susan Faludi's book Stiffed on FirstThings.com:

But the contrast between Miss Faludi’s mocking and uncomprehending treatment of the Promise Keepers’ search for meaning and her sympathetic depiction of a male porn actor’s struggle to stay afloat financially indicates both her unacknowledged political allegiances and her moral numbness. Porn actors are portrayed rather like unemployed corporate workers, their choice of career unquestioned, their difficulties blamed on the system in which they work rather than on any internal emptiness.

It seems that what males are hired for in pornographic films is to ejaculate on camera for what is called the "money shot," which is the crucial event of the film. The ability to perform this task on demand with a machine–like indifference to external circumstances or internal feelings is not widely distributed even among the willing male population. Thus males, whose performance is unpredictable and who are in any case secondary attractions for the heterosexual audience of the films, earn far less money than female porn stars, whose appeal is largely visual and whose standard of performance can be counted on. Miss Faludi elaborates on the plight of the male porn star in a long section focused mostly on his limited earning capacity and the disrespect with which he is treated, rather as if she were decrying workplace discrimination against blacks and women.

Homosexual activists like the playwright Larry Kramer and the writer Gabriel Rotello, author of Sexual Ecology—an important weaving together of ecology theory, epidemiology, and sexual politics—have been ferociously attacked by their fellow gay activists for publicly acknowledging that AIDS results as much from human behaviors as from specific microbes.

Faludi’s support for gay liberation, denying so much of its reality, is grounded, it appears, in her enthusiasm for destabilizing sex roles. Such a program has as its ultimate consequence a lessening of interest in human reproduction and thus a rending of the intergenerational bond that is the essence of civilized society. In our culture of narcissism, feminists have joined with gay activists in rebelling against this bond, and their rebellion is the key to the betrayal of the American man.