Hi, did we get stuck in 1995? I’m about to offer an excerpt from a book by Suzanna Danuta Walters called Material Girls: Making Sense of Feminist Cultural Theory, which was published in 1995. I’m honestly trying to figure out how this entire excerpt (hell, book?) was written sixteen years ago as opposed to five minutes ago. The chapter “Postfeminism and Popular Culture: A Case Study of the Backlash” focuses mostly on Hollywood films like Baby Boom, Pretty Woman, Fatal Attraction, and Basic Instinct, and looks at how those films portray women and motherhood (where applicable) and violence perpetrated by women. Walters compares the Hollywood backlash of the 1940s and 50s with the current Hollywood backlash–and by current I mean the Hollywood backlash from the 90s that we’re still somehow in, even though sixteen years have passed. I’m excerpting from this book on one hand because I think it’s hilarious that Hollywood has completely given up on even trying to portray women like human beings, and on the other because it makes me want to curl up in a ball when I think about how So Not Far we’ve come, especially since this book (have I mentioned it was published in 1995?) spends a significant amount of time discussing how So Not Far we’ve come. In fact, it might be fun for someone to “rewrite” this passage using current examples from film/television/politics/pop culture. Any takers? We’ll totally publish it.
The recent backlash is somewhat different, however. Whereas the backlash in the late 1940s and 1950s carried an explicit message–get out of the workforce and into the kitchen–this time the backlash is couched in the language of liberation, made to seem trendy, even mildly feminist, as in the film Working Girl. In addition, this backlash is more clearly antifeminist: it responds directly to the women’s movement and often pits one woman against another (Fatal Attraction, Working Girl, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle). This backlash is different because it has to push motherhood; it must sell motherhood and domesticity after those ideologies have already been so soundly critiqued by feminists (unlike in the late 1940s). Furthermore, this backlash contains real violence, as evidenced by the vehemence with which film audiences urge the deaths of femme fatales.
The current period is thus not one of simple backlash (such as that of the late 1940s and 1950s) but is characterized by a rewriting of the women’s movement to define our era as postfeminist, creating an image of a movement both victorious (the myth that we have achieved equality) and failed (look what feminism got you: double duty, burnout, and the explosion of your biological clock).
These media images did not, of course, arise in a vacuum. They emerged in a historical period marked by the rise of the New Right and by the governments of Reagan and Bush. These years have seen a growth in antichoice activism (to the point of terrorism and murder), cutbacks on civil rights and equal opportunity legislation of all kinds, and an epidemic of violence against women. The backlash was supported and perpetuated by a government and presidency that spoke to the assembled throngs at the annual Right-to-Life demonstration in Washington, D.C., but maintained a stony silence toward the millions of women who are battered, raped, denied accessible and affordable child care, and paid consistently less than are men. It is disturbing that we see numerous films in which women are depicted as crazed killers when women are more likely to be terrorized by men: the sad irony of Fatal Attraction, and the rash of news stories that emerged confirming the “reality” of killer ex-girlfriends, is that it is women not men who are most likely to be hurt at the hands of an ex-lover or ex-spouse.
It is in this climate that we witness the popularity of both Fatal Attraction and Pretty Woman. These movies are indeed two sides of the same coin: the coin of male control over women’s lives, the equation of work for women with death and prostitution. One of the classic ways Hollywood tells a woman to get back in the kitchen and obey her master is by punishing her for wayward behavior. Hollywood films include countless examples of single women, working women, women who are not fulfilled as wives and mothers, sexually active women, and just plain feisty women being summarily killed, humiliated, or simply beaten down. Hollywood has always maintained its support of oppressive social roles for women by refusing to acknowledge that women are both sexual beings and potential parents at the same time. . . .
Is it not premature to declare a social movement/social theory over when it has yet to achieve even a modicum of egalitarian goals? How can we possibly speak of “postfeminism” when a woman is still raped or beaten every twenty seconds? When women earn roughly half of what men do? When decisions about our bodies are decided by courts and legislatures that are filled with male voices? When the inclusion of women into the academic curriculum is still a piecemeal and embattled process? When fetal rights (really male rights) still assert themselves over the rights of women? When feminist is still a dirty word, designed to deny self-determination, power, and legitimacy?