A newsroom’s cameo in the war on women
“Sleepless in Seattle” is as unavoidable around Valentine’s Day as naked cherubs flying recklessly with sharp sticks.
The 1993 film is on basic cable, Amazon, iTunes, even on the big screen at Edmund Town Hall in Newtown. For most people, the movie conjures images of the leads finally meeting in a last scene that could have been sponsored by Kleenex.
For me, though, it’s a journalism movie with a feminist subtext.
The Baltimore Sun features writer played by Meg Ryan (who grew up in Fairfield and Bethel) challenges two male colleagues clinging to the fake news that “it’s easier to be killed by a terrorist than it is to get married over 40.”
“There is practically a whole book about how that statistic is not true,” Ryan’s character, Annie Reid, fires back. “Did you even read that book?”
“Did anybody read that book all the way through?” one of the men counters.
The book — Susan Faludi’s “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” — goes uncredited. It doesn’t need to be named because it shows up in early 1990s Zeitgeist more than “Whoomp! (There It Is)” and that newfangled World Wide Web. It has cameos in everything from Demi Moore’s film “Indecent Proposal” to the comic strip “Brenda Starr.”
About the only thing that showed up even more often was that myth about women being unable to marry after a certain age.
I was walking back to the Stamford Advocate’s newsroom with a colleague about 20 years ago when we paused to check out a table of used books for sale. I held up a copy of “Backlash.” My fellow journalist recognized it immediately, but had never read even the first pages.
So I started reading aloud, which he responded to like it was a magic trick. Faludi traces the foundation of her 550-page bible of late-20th century feminism to a single news article.
“Valentine’s Day 1986 was coming up, and at the Stamford Advocate, it was reporter Lisa Marie Petersen’s turn to produce that year’s story on Cupid’s slings and arrows. Her ‘angle,’ as she recalls later, would be ‘Romance: Is It In or Out?’ She went down to the Stamford Town Center mall and interviewed a few men shopping for flowers and chocolates. Then she put in a call to the Yale sociology department, ‘Just to get some kind of foundation,’ she says. ‘You know, something to put in the third paragraph.’ ”
The subsequent article is a textbook example of daily journalism as the first draft of history. Yale and Harvard were collaborating on a study that suggested unwed college-educated women at 30 had a 20 percent chance of getting married, a figure that dropped to 5 percent by age 35.
The story went viral. In 1986, pre-www speak, that means it was rewritten by the Associated Press and distributed around the globe. Faludi traces its journey to front pages, talk shows, greeting cards, the small screen’s “Designing Women” and the big screen’s “Fatal Attraction.”
It got Faludi’s attention when it landed in a Newsweek cover article. She debunked the data and exposed the media’s insatiable thirst to marginalize women. She quoted Petersen, who lit the fuse, explaining that “We usually just take anything from good schools. If it’s a study from Yale, we just put it in the paper.”
Faludi was writing another revised draft of history. Having worked as an editor on the Harvard student paper, she didn’t hesitate to challenge Ivy League data.
I bought the used copy of “Backlash” and brought it back to the newsroom. Whenever I need to offer a cautionary tale of accepting “facts” at face value, I take it off the shelf.
Thirty-six years later, the original story is far more measured than its offspring. It’s nestled along the bottom of the front page, below news about Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca, cyanidelaced Tylenol in neighboring Westchester County and local urban renewal initiatives.
Petersen notes up front that the report was not yet released, and resists the tortured hyperbole of subsequent publications by merely stating that women had “a slim chance of tying the knot” as they grew older.
The study is just one piece of the article, which bears the bizarre headline “They’re fallin’ in love again, say marriage counselors.”
Clearly, someone at the AP barked “Rewrite!”
In today’s kinetic news cycle, the story probably wouldn’t have lingered long enough for an outlet to wait a full four months to weigh in. Newsweek’s “Too Late for Prince Charming?” feature that June bungled its second draft of history, even creating the wince-worthy “terrorist” crack. It doesn’t even carry the weight of its own reasoning, which suggests a ludicrously high 2.6 percent of the population is killed by terrorists on a regular basis.
In pointing to a “man shortage,” Newsweek ignored both Census data and the reality that not all woman want a male partner.
Newsweek did own up to its 3,000-word error (which carried the names of six contributors) by retracting the story 20 years (not a typo — that’s twenty) years later. I like to think it gave the last laugh to Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed “Sleepless in Seattle.” Ephron offered her talents to the magazine when she was starting out in 1962, only to be told “Women don’t become writers at Newsweek.” She worked there instead as a “mail girl” until becoming a general assignment reporter for the New York Post.
Faludi paid her dues as a reporter as well. Eight months after the Valentine’s Day misfire in 1986, her byline makes its only appearance in the Advocate on the fluffiest of wire stories, a Q-and-A with Miss Manners showing “she was hip to the times by releasing her first video on how to arrange the perfect wedding.”
She kept taking notes until “Backlash” hit the shelves in 1991, a primal scream of a book that still needs to be heard.
I think of it a lot this time of year. Over the past several days, my inbox has been pinging with pitches to do stories about Connecticut’s most romantic getaways, top Valentine’s gifts and fave rom-coms. They just become pink noise.
Here’s one: “In Connecticut, fewer people are getting married. Our team of analysts found that the marriage rate in Connecticut has dropped by 33% since 2009.”
How fitting — it’s from Seattle.
They all find audiences somewhere. But not here. I just want to deflate them all with cupid’s arrows.