Who-Stole-Feminism.-How-Women-Have-Betrayed-Women

THE BACKLASH MYTH 229calls Weight Watchers a "cult" and compares its disciplines to those ofthe Unification Church, Scientology, est, and Lifespring. In aerobicsclasses, "robotic" women do the "same bouncing dance . . . practiced bythe Hare Krishnas for the same effect." 7What the backlash "wants" is clear to both Faludi and Wolf. By theseventies, women had been granted a great deal of equality. The primaryaim of the backlash is to retake lost ground, to put women to rout. 8Thesubtitle of Faludi's book is The Undeclared War Against American Women.Backlash itself may be regarded as a feminist counterattack in this supposedwar. As Patricia Schroeder noted in a review of the book, womenare not "riled up enough," and Faludi "may be able to do what politicalactivists have tried to do for years." 9Indeed, she and Wolf togethersucceeded in moving countless women to anger and dismay.Where did Faludi and Wolf get the idea that masses of seemingly freewomen were being mysteriously manipulated from within? A look at theirsource of inspiration illustrates the workings of a law of intellectual fashionthat the journalist Paul Berman calls "Parisian determinism"—that is,whatever is the rage in Paris will be fashionable in America fifteen yearslater. 10Michel Foucault, a professor of philosophy at the distinguished Collègede France and an irreverent social thinker who felt deeply alienated fromthe society in which he lived, introduced his theory of interior disciplinesin 1975. His book Discipline and Punish, with its novel explanation of howlarge groups of people could be controlled without the need of exteriorcontrollers, took intellectual Paris by storm. Foucault had little love forthe modern democratic state. Like Marx, he was interested in the forcesthat keep citizens of democracies law-abiding and obedient.According to Foucault, the individual subjects of contemporary democraciesare not free at all. Instead, democratic societies turn out to beeven more rigidly authoritarian than the tyrannies they replaced. Moderncitizens find themselves subject to the rules (he calls them "disciplines")of modern bureaucratic institutions: schools, factories, hospitals, the military,the prisons. In premodern societies, where power was overtly authoritarian,enforcement was inconsistent, haphazard, and inefficient: theking's minions could not be everywhere all the time. In contemporarysocieties, control is pervasive and unceasing: the modern citizen, havinginternalized the disciplines of the institutions, polices himself. This resultsin a "disciplinary society" of "docile" subjects who keep themselves inline with what is expected. According to the philosopher Richard Rorty,Foucault believed he was exposing "a vast organization of repression andinjustice." 11He regarded the multitude of self-disciplined individuals as