#susan faludi

[haggishlyhagging]

The more women are paid, the less eager they are to marry. A 1982 study of three thousand singles found that women earning high incomes are almost twice as likely to want to remain unwed as women earning low incomes. "What is going to happen to marriage and childbearing in a society where women really have equality?" Princeton demographer Charles Westoff wondered in the Wall Street Journal in 1986. "The more economically independent women are, the less attractive marriage becomes."

Men in the '80s, on the other hand, were a little more anxious to marry than the press accounts let on. Single men far outnumbered women in dating services, matchmaking clubs, and the personals columns, all of which enjoyed explosive growth in the decade. In the mid-80s, video dating services were complaining of a three-to-one male-to-female sex ratio in their membership rolls. In fact, it had become common practice for dating services to admit single women at heavily reduced rates, even free memberships, in hopes of remedying the imbalance.

Personal ads were similarly lopsided. In an analysis of 1,200 ads in 1988, sociologist Theresa Montini found that most were placed by thirty-five-year-old heterosexual men and the vast majority "wanted a long-term relationship." Dating service directors reported that the majority of men they counseled were seeking spouses, not dates. When Great Expectations, the nation's largest dating service, surveyed its members in 1988, it found that 93 percent of the men wanted, within one year, to have either "a commitment with one person" or marriage. Only 7 percent of the men said they were seeking "lots of dates with different people." Asked to describe "what concerns you the day after you had sex with a new partner," only 9 percent of the men checked "Was I good?" while 42 percent said they were wondering whether it could lead to a "committed relationship."

These men had good cause to pursue nuptials; if there's one pattern that psychological studies have established, it's that the institution of marriage has an overwhelmingly salutary effect on men's mental health. "Being married," the prominent government demographer Paul Glick once estimated, "is about twice as advantageous to men as to women in terms of continued survival." Or, as family sociologist Jessie Bernard wrote in 1972:

“There are few findings more consistent, less equivocal, [and] more convincing, than the sometimes spectacular and always impressive superiority on almost every index—demographic, psychological, or social—of married over never-married men. Despite all the jokes about marriage in which men indulge, all the complaints they lodge against it, it is one of the greatest boons of their sex.”

Bernard's observation still applies. As Ronald C. Kessler, who tracks changes in men's mental health at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, says: "All this business about how hard it is to be a single woman doesn't make much sense when you look at what's really going on. It's single men who have the worst of it. When men marry, their mental health massively increases."

The mental health data, chronicled in dozens of studies that have looked at marital differences in the last forty years, are consistent and overwhelming: The suicide rate of single men is twice as high as that of married men. Single men suffer from nearly twice as many severe neurotic symptoms and are far more susceptible to nervous breakdowns, depression, even nightmares. And despite the all-American image of the carefree single cowboy, in reality bachelors are far more likely to be morose, passive, and phobic than married men.

When contrasted with single women, unwed men fared no better in mental health studies. Single men suffer from twice as many mental health impairments as single women; they are more depressed, more passive, more likely to experience nervous breakdowns and all the designated symptoms of psychological distress—from fainting to insomnia. In one study, one third of the single men scored high for severe neurotic symptoms; only 4 percent of the single women did.

-Susan Faludi, Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women

[freneticphoneticfanatic]

Hearing other women talk vaguely about how things “used to be bad for women” saddens me. Things were really bad for women in [INSERT TIME PERIOD HERE]. (Not now though.) There’s always a sense of distance and indifference. An impersonality, an underlying sigh of relief, “Not that bad, could be worse.” I think this is a result of disconnection from each other and our histories. And I don’t think it’s totally our faults.

In my experience going to school in the USAmerican Midwest, I was taught the barest bones of women’s history. It was totally impersonal, cold, not engaging for me at all. We pretty much solely focused on legislature, and that did not thrill me. (Did you know Jane Addams had intimate relationships with women?) But then I started doing “independent study” (reading lesbian feminist writing) once I graduated high school and it was like my brain was exploding. I’m reading The Dialectic of Sex and I still feel that way. I just can’t get enough.

As a result of reading what I’ve read, I feel a stronger connection with women who are different from me because it turns out we have a lot in common. I feel less inclined to say things like “Women had it bad back in the day, but things are better now,” because I know not that much has actually changed, and the concrete changes that have been made are new and fragile. (Women in America only had a constitutional right to abortion for fifty years.)

I think if more women read books like Backlash by Susan Faludi, Loving to Survive by Dee LR Graham, and A Passion for Friends by Janice Raymond, we will have a wider perspective and a better shared understanding of our situation and position in our societies. I also think a lot of women would feel less crazy and alone upon reading women’s accounts of our own lives, what we synthesize from our experiences and observations, and how we can do things differently. That’s the effect feminist work had (and continues to have) on me.

You likely won’t find these books at a bookstore—at least that’s the case where I live—but you can find them online. I use ThriftBooks and Better World Books, and I’ve never received a damaged or illegible copy of a single book I’ve ever ordered, even though they’re super cheap, usually under $10 for a book. (They sometimes have highlighter marks or notes written in the margins, but I like seeing what the previous owner had to say, and I like to write in them too.) Finding and reading these books is well worth the effort. Talking about them and sharing them with other women is well worth the effort, too. I’d like to encourage every woman to get in touch with her intellectual legacy.

[patemi-pk]

Currently reading Susan Faludi's Backlash. To put it mildly, I'm not appreciating Xadhoom's storyarc more.

I'm 100% aware that the way it looks informed by the backlash isn't intentional, but some tropes are definitely problematic.

(I'm tempted to write an article on it)

[leo-fie]

When reading Susan Faludi's Backlash, which you all should do, there was a rerelease a few years ago and it's important to note how nothing has changed since the original release in 1991, ...

Anyway, when reading the hollywood and tv section of this book, there are multiple mentions of a tv executive by the name of Shapiro. That's not too rare of a name and there's a lot of Shapiros in the US, but I can't help but wonder if that Shapiro is Ben Shapiro mother. Ben Shapiro, the founder of the Daily Wire, terrible debater, worse journalist, wrong opinion haver, harbinger of the current fascist movement in the US and inspiration for multiple mass shooters. We know he wanted to be a screenwriter, we know his mother was a tv executive.

Just a thought.

And it will never not be funny that between all the far right assholes who wanted to work in the arts, Ben kinda failed the hardest since he couldn't even make it with nepotism.

[borgqueens]

I’m reading “Backlash” by Susan Faludi right now and as someone who was just a little kid at the time, I had no idea how dystopian things were getting for women in the late 80s and early 90s. The Handmaid’s Tale was literally this close to becoming reality, jfc.

[poniatowskaja]

“This thing is not about designers dictating,” Calvin Klein proclaimed as he issued another round of miniskirts. “We’re taking our cues from what women want. They’re ready.” “Older women want to look sexy now on the job,” the head of Componix, a Los Angeles apparel maker, insisted. “They want men to look at them like they’re women. Notice my legs first, not my appraisals.” One by one, the dressing authorities got behind this new fashion line. “Gals like to show their legs,” designer Bill Blass asserted. “Girls want to be girls again,” designer Dik Brandsma intoned. The lone dissenting voice came from veteran designer John Weitz, who said it was Women’s Wear Daily, not women, clamoring for girlish frocks. “Women change not at all, just journalism,” he said, dismissing High Femininity as “a temporary derailment, based on widespread insecurity. Eventually it will go away and women will look like strong decisive human beings instead of Popsicles.” But then, Weitz could afford to be honest; he made his money designing men’s clothes.

Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women

[360degreesasthecrowflies]

This is honestly why it blows my mind to see terfs standing ardently protesting female spaces being for feminine people of an observable and ‘obvious’ level of femininity only... while they themselves are women with short hair, little makeup, wearing trousers and heavy coats.

The lack of recognition that in being themselves they themselves are falling foul of the purity standard they are hoping to establish is to me very reminiscent of an anecdote within Susan Faludi’s seminal book examining challenges to feminism during the 60s through 90s, Backlash. In one chapter, Faludi details early opposition to women working outside the home, on the grounds that it defied the purpose of femininity, and identifies paradoxically that several (white, Christian-led) female community leaders themselves came to take this view as well as men. Well, in pursuit of opposing women working, these female community leaders became heads of charities and organizations dedicated to encouraging women to stay at home and not go out to work. Some wrote books, some travelled across the country and internationally, talking at conferences and interview panels, some became managers and leaders of groups in community spaces in their local area, all advocating for women to stay at home in order to be proper wives and mothers.

None of them seemed to realise the irony that in taking on this advocacy, in getting paid for writing and selling the books, in getting expenses for travel and needing to hire maids and housekeepers to care for their own children while their own purpose was taken up with this mission - they were themselves undercutting the entire principle, ending up spending a large portion of their time outside their own homes, doing what could only be classed as... work... to spread the gospel that women who worked outside the home were monsters, unfeminine, and should be essentially shunned.

it's always so fucking funny to me when terfs are like "how can you say trans women and women are the same thing! being born as a man makes you different!" because like. yes. trans women and cis women are different. so are black women and white women. and straight women and queer woman. and women from different countries and different socioeconomic statuses. there's diversity in the experience of womanhood? what a wild concept

[haggishlyhagging]

In Idaho in 1990, one of the nation's most restrictive abortion bills was vetoed by Cecil Andrus, the state's "pro-life" governor—after pro-choice women declared a boycott of Idaho potatoes. Some feminist leaders argued against such forceful tactics. "Let the governor make his decision based on the seriousness of this issue and the Constitution, not potatoes," National Abortion Rights Action League's executive director Kate Michelman advised. But it was the boycott that clinched it. "Anytime someone threatens one of our major cash crops," Governor Andrus explained, "it becomes significant."

-Susan Faludi, Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women

[itsy-bitsy-sassy-sis]

i recently realized im in my "finding myself" era, which like? I thought i already did that growing up? by apparently i have to do it again? idk fuck being in your twenties

anyways, everything is so tiring, the economy, the misogyny and the overall state of world we live in and for some reason i notice it more. i might blame it on the bubble i chose to live in, but at the same im not mad i get to be aware of those issues. but i think i found the sollution at least.

books. and occasionally some articles, but mostly books.

i say, if those things are going to torment me every day, at least im gonna be educated about them. no more "idk man, i think this thing sucks, but i don't really know what to say or do about it". there are deep social-economic issues behind my suffering and im going to figure out what they are and why they exist in the form they do

[weirdominate]

Archie’s X-mas Anxious Masculinity. (Archie Giant Series Magazine, pencils by Harry Lucey, written by Frank Doyle; 1973.)

[dukeofankh]

I mean, I want to make it clear, while I do personally enjoy more activist-adjacent discussions a la feminism because I am personally interested in that as a topic, a big part of what I want is just a sense of community with men who are not abusive, misogynistic, or obsessed with heirarchical squabbling. Both so that I can have social spaces in which I feel safe, and so that we can see aspects of ourselves reflected and celebrated in others.

Frankly, I don't think men respect each other. And I think progressive men are especially prone to viewing themselves as the sole or vanishingly rare exception to an otherwise bad group.

Are there many ways to be a man? Sure. For example, I have a pretty low tolerance for combative conversational styles, but some men thrive in that environment. I don't think that there is a moral judgment to really be made about that style of communication, even if it is fair to say that it has advantages and disadvantages. I might not enjoy an otherwise moral and positive masculine community if the way the men interacted with each other was too chirpy and antagonistic, even if to everyone else it was clearly meant in good fun.

So any sort of community standard is by definition exclusionary, and I do acknowledge that in my post, but I think the issue at hand is more nuanced than just typical ideological purity testing. Most men need to be able to respect each other in order to respect themselves as singular examples of men.

As for why, and moving to your second comment, it reminds me a lot of conversations in Susan Faludi's Stiffed. She would suggest that manhood is inherently tied to social utility--a sense of self built around being a contributing member of society--and that how to become that has historically been a process inherently tied to the mentorship of older men. Seeing good men model good manhood, learning how to perform it yourself, and then seeing in yourself the traits you associate with a good man. Absent that, manhood is nothing more than ornamental, an arbitrary performance completely severed from any actual relevance to society or the self.

How can someone move from seeing themselves as a good boy to being a good man if we struggle to envision older men who aren't on some level ontologically bad? If we cannot tangibly see what a good man looks like on a day to day basis, then there is no way to look at ourselves and find good manhood there, because the term is empty of a model or meaning.

I want to emphasize this though, even if I personally have a dim view of every man being an island unto himself, I do not think the answer is a monolithic masculine model. Masculinities, plural, is definitely the way forward. A Super Smash Brothers character select screen (complete with customizable Mii for people who don't like any of the models and prefer to do their own thing) is a far better analogy for what I think would actually have a positive effect than one all-encompassing yardstick by which to judge a broad and diverse group. A balance of community and modelled behavior on one side, and flexibility on the other.

Trying to find progressive masculine community is so exhausting.

I've flipped through local men's groups, trying to find places to explore masculinity in a chill, progressive setting. First of all, they mostly seem to be modelled after AA, and like, my gender isn't a debilitating addiction, it's part of my identity actually, but also, the invite and description of the event have maybe a short paragraph tops actually waving vaguely in the direction of what the purpose of the group is, and then ten to twenty paragraphs breaking down the rules. One spent longer talking about the hand signals he would use to direct conversation than he did describing what the conversation would be about. Another had a full paragraph explaining that if the group thought you were evading what they thought your "real" problem was, they'd probably "call you to take accountability". Like...I don't even know who these people are yet and they're already letting me know that they view it as their right, no, their duty, to bully me into seeing things their way. Like, this is in the invite.

...and this warning is there instead of any sort of breakdown of like, I dunno. Whether you should be a feminist to show up. Whether it was a safe space for queer men. What the hell they wanted to talk about. Joining a men's space is on some level inherently submitting yourself to the authority of the leaders of that group, and you don't usually get a particularly clear breakdown of what the values and goals of those leaders are, because on some level the answer is always going to be "whatever I want"

And like, unfortunately you do need to filter men to build a men's space. You do need to remove or chastise men who act in ways that are toxic or disruptive or misogynistic. If you don't things turn into an MRA chapter pretty quick. But the sort of emergency powers that leadership takes on as a result of that...just kind of naturally end up reproducing masculine heirarchies.

MensLib, the only online community of progressive dudes talking about masculinity that I'm aware of, is...on Reddit. So there is a moderator system. In theory, a moderator is there to...moderate. This is a space where people are going to be talking, and mods are there to make sure things don't get too toxic or off topic.

The issue is that, on some level, that is technically a leadership position. In a sub trying to rehabilitate masculinity. So you've got a bunch of folks who view themselves as the leaders of this bastion of goodness standing against the depredations of the misogynistic internet, guiding the hapless smooth-brain neophytes towards The True Way.

In practice, this looks like 95 percent of the posts submitted for the subreddit being rejected. That isn't hyperbole. On average, the sub has about one new post per day. Almost all posts directly relating a personal experience are deleted immediately, in favour of articles written about masculinity in traditional media publications, which are considered more trustworthy than the sus lived experiences of the guys in the sub. The post I wrote here about the effect of purity culture on male sexual shame that's sitting at about 15K notes was based on a 10K word post I wrote for Reddit that was deleted because "I didn't cite any sources to prove that there is a link between purity culture and male sexual shame, or that my experience was anything more than anecdotal". I get comments deleted on a regular basis, and after paragraphs of protesting in modmail that my comments are both fully in line with feminism and not against the rules, the mods have just finally told me that the rules don't actually drive their actions as a team. They delete anything they feel leads the conversation in a direction they personally feel is unproductive. The rule cited at the time of deletion is really just the broad category of why they decided to hit the button that says nobody is allowed to read what I wrote.

The issue is kind of twofold. First of all, progressive men do not trust other men. A good dude knows that he, individually, is a good person, but literally any other man external to him is on thin ice. Do you really want to tie your wagon to that guy? Do you trust him, really? How do you tell the difference between a guy criticizing an article because it's factually incorrect and criticising it because a woman wrote it? Probably best to play it safe and delete it. Weight of the odds, he's probably a misogynist, right? This is the internet.

And thats the other half of it. If you view yourself as part of the leadership of The Good Guys, and you're getting hatemail from incels and facists all day, you get to the point where most of the time people challenge your authority it's because they're a terrible person. It is very, very easy to get to the point where someone challenging you is seen as evidence that they are a bad person. And now someone is challenging you (and therefore bad), in an environment where you are in charge, and you have a "make your opponent disappear" button.

I know. A Reddit mod was rude to me and now I'm butthurt. It's petty and stupid. I'm just feeling like there's nowhere else to really go, and I'm pretty despondent that literally every space I've seen that even looks like it might be for progressive men has the same deeply hierarchical structure and constant status-oriented squabbling as patriarchal spaces.

[femsolid]

"Feminism has a tendency to trash the past, setting fire to its own legacy in order to start afresh – a process Susan Faludi has dubbed its ‘ritual matricide’. Women who went before us are an embarrassment. In late 2020 a tweet comparing Covid-19 to feminism went viral, declaring both to have ‘problematic second waves’. The young female tweeter gained multiple likes and follows, which may be of less practical use than the equal pay legislation and domestic violence shelters created by second-wavers, but at least they are clean. The longer you live, and the harder you fight, the dirtier your hands become."

- Hags by Victoria Smith

[atavist]

For years, a mysterious figure preyed on gay men in Atlanta. People on the streets called him the Handcuff Man—but the police knew his real name. @atavist issue no. 149, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” is now live:

No one could be certain when the Handcuff Man had staged his first attack. Adamson claimed that he’d been terrorizing Midtown since the late 1960s, that he drove a white Lincoln, was about five foot ten, and had black hair and glasses. A sex worker said that the Handcuff Man had picked him up in Piedmont Park in 1977, asked him to take shots of liquor, then assaulted him. The victim managed to flee with a stab wound to the shoulder, and later saw the man again at the park eyeing other male hustlers. He didn’t report the crime because he was afraid of being outed to loved ones.

In 1984, Susan Faludi, then a twentysomething reporter a few years out from becoming a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, wrote a front-page story about gay hustlers for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She asked her sources about the dangers of their lifestyle and learned that “the greatest fear on the street right now is invoked by the specter of ‘The Handcuff Man,’ a man who reportedly picks up hustlers, offers them a pint of vodka spiked with sleeping pills and then handcuffs and beats them.”

[haggishlyhagging]

Get "power" by "surrendering" and "submitting" to your man's every whim, a leading '80s self-help manual advises in typical feminist-sounding rhetoric. Don't talk back, because a ladylike silence will "enhance" your "self-respect" and "feeling of mastery." "Take charge . . . of your courtship," suggests another popular text. "Overcome obstacles," so you can get married. The pseudofeminist title of one 1989 advice book puts it most succinctly: Women Who Marry Down and End Up Having It All.

While the backlash therapy books may be written in feminist ink, they blot out the most basic precept of feminist therapy—that both social and personal growth are important, necessary, and mutually reinforcing. This is a view that was supported, albeit in a rather degraded, commercialized form, in the leading self-help manuals of the 70s; in 1975, The New Assertive Woman issued an "Everywoman's Bill Of Rights" that called for "the right to be treated with respect" and "the right to be listened to and taken seriously." The '80s advice writers, by contrast, seemed to go out of their way to urge women to stop challenging social constraints and to keep their thoughts to themselves—to learn to fit the mold rather than break it.

On no group of women did the self-help authors impress this message more strongly than the ones without wedding rings. The diagnosis was, underneath it all, little changed from the postwar era, when that era's leading advice book—Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg's Modern Women: The Lost Sex—declared all single women neurotics and proposed subsidized psychotherapy to get them married. In the '80s, even advice experts more sympathetic to single women and the pressures they faced touted the same marital party line. In the popular 1988 advice book, If I'm So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?, counselor Susan Page acknowledges in her introduction that unwed women are contending with a social climate that is especially rough on them now; they are burdened by "the specific problems that our times have spawned, such as misogyny," she writes. But she's not interested in helping single women develop the self-confidence and internal strength they need to bear up under these antagonistic conditions. Nor does she propose that single women even question the culture's marital marching orders. "I want to accept certain sociological and psychological factors as given [her emphasis]," she writes. "In this book we will not discuss why [her emphasis] these conditions are as they are, and we will not lament them." What then should single women do to ease what Page calls the "Great Emotional Depression" that she says has descended on millions of them? Just change your single status, she proposes. She dispenses "strategies" only to make women more marketable for marriage.

The '80s backlash therapists firmly rejected another fundamental feminist principle—that men can, and should, change, too. "[L]ately it seems there is a rising tide of utter frustration among women concerning men," Smart Women/Foolish Choices observes, and a lot of women "always end up feeling disappointed by men." But Cowan and Kinder do not go on to consider what men might be doing to inspire such an outpouring of frustration, nor how men might change their behavior to make women feel better. Instead, the psychologists conclude that men are fine and any disappointment women feel is wholly self-generated. It's not the men who are "inadequate," the authors write; it's just that the women's "expectations are distorted." Women are just "hypercritical" of men. All would be well if women only learned to "truly understand men" and their "need for mastery and career success." Women would be happy if they only quit "pushing" the opposite sex to change and learned to "compromise."

Asked later what sort of compromises he had in mind, Kinder says: "Women could have their kids while they are still in college, and then, if they still want a career, they can do that after the kids are grown. You do have to make some sacrifices." What about fathers "sacrificing" by taking some responsibility for their children? Kinder, whose wife stayed at home to raise their children, mulls it over. "Yeah, well that would solve the problem," he says. "But men won't do it. And it's not our place to be saying things like that. We're not social engineers." Not, anyway, when it comes to men.

Confronted with the antifeminist implications of their message, the backlash therapists almost always issue a denial. "We're talking about broadening expectations, not settling for less, and that's not just a play on words," Cowan says. But it is exactly that—unless Cowan has already forgotten his own "Rules for Finding the Right Man" in Smart Women. Rule #8: "Fewer expectations lead to greater aliveness."

Some of the therapists attacking women's liberation most forcefully claimed, in fact, to be proponents themselves. As many media-conscious therapists in the '80s discovered, feminist-bashing "feminists" garnered the most airtime. Susan and Stephen Price, authors of the popular No More Lonely Nights: Overcoming the Hidden Fears That Keep You from Getting Married, were one such "feminist" husband-and-wife therapy team who got a lot of press mileage plugging this backlash diagnosis of modern single women: "androphobia." This "problem without a name," they wrote, shamelessly stealing Friedan's phrase, was a "deep-rooted intense fear of men" shared by most unmarried women over thirty, especially professional women. The cause: "You have been deeply influenced by feminism."

* * *

"These obsessive androphobic fears are a major ingredient in women's resistance to marriage today," Stephen Price is saying in his Manhattan office, a few weeks after his appearance on the "Today" show. "Now that we've reached the end of the women's movement, which is where our culture is today . . ." Here he hesitates, then says, "We both, of course, feel very pro the gains of the women's movement."

His wife, Susan, seated in the office's other therapeutic armchair, nods vigorously. "We're both feminists," she says. "In fact, it was almost me being a feminist that kept me from seeing these hidden fears developing. As a therapist I encouraged women to pursue careers. But what happened is, women escaped into their careers and they didn't put their energy into their relationships. Their feminist viewpoint became a trap." But if careers hurt women psychologically, then why do professional women consistently rank highest, as we've seen, in virtually all measures of mental health? The Prices have no answer.

In spite of their pro-feminist claims, the Prices seem to oppose every feminist tenet, from economic independence to sexual freedom. In their book and in their counseling sessions, they advise women to refrain not only from initiating sex but from having sex at all before marriage. "If the woman is sexually aggressive, the man might put her in the category of someone to go to bed with, period," Susan Price says. Evidence? "Fatal Attraction may be overdrawn in some ways, but you can really see that operating there," she says.

Unlike authentically feminist therapists, the Prices don't consider, much less confront, other forces at work in women's lives. They reinforce the era's isolation of single women by encouraging their female readers to see themselves as defective units, alone and isolated only by their own aberrant behavior. They advise women to "deal with your own personal crisis: What might you [their emphasis] be doing to make intimacy with a man impossible? What attitudes are keeping you [their emphasis] unavailable for marriage?" The primary offending attitude that the book singles out: an insistence on respect and equal treatment from one's mate. "The desire to avoid a submissive status in relationship to men can lead you into a loveless life," they assert. Again, there is no analysis of the attitudes of men, much less proposals for altering them. If a man mistreats a woman, she probably asked for it. "A resistant woman picks a resistant man," Susan Price says. "What we help single women to see is how what they think is a problem with the man is really something inside them." Don't men play any role in difficult relationships? "Probably it is a fifty-fifty proposition," Stephen Price concedes, shrugging. "But this book is focused on women—for the purpose of clarity."

While they don't actually support a feminist vision, the Prices are happy to appropriate the movement's activist language to promote their own agenda. They urge women to "take control" of their love lives by scaling back their career aspirations and to "gain power" over potential husbands by remaining celibate. "It's Up to You to Get Married," the manual instructs, this being the only arena, apparently, in which it's okay for women to take the initiative.

Androphobia may have a scientific ring, but it's not based on scientific research—or any research at all. "We just knew it was a phobia," Stephen Price says flatly. How? "Well, because there's an avoidance there." Pressed to explain what that means, Stephen Price falls silent. Finally, he says: "A lot of the dynamics of phobia are hidden. That's how we know it's a phobia. It's very hidden." This invisible phobia turned the Prices into very visible "marriage gurus," as they now call themselves. "We are inundated," Susan Price says happily. "We've been doing three radio shows a week. Women are calling up saying, what's your [marriage] success rate? We do sessions by phone. We have women flying in from out west. And we get so many letters from women saying they read our book and they realize now how they did it to themselves. They are grateful."

It turns out that Susan Price does actually support feminist principles in one way—for herself. "When we first married, Steve couldn't understand my need for my own career and not wanting to be a homemaker," she recalls. "I got jobs [to support him] while he was in graduate school. He was being groomed for a career and what was I doing?" First she became a schoolteacher, but she didn't find it fulfilling enough. "I decided I wanted to be a therapist. So I went back to graduate school. The kids were still babies at the time. We hired a lot of baby-sitters and put them in a lot of nursery schools." Was any of this a mistake? "Oh, no. I love what I do."

-Susan Faludi, Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women