Women are making strides when it comes to our place in movies, but in comparison to our male counterparts, we’re still just like Superman and Lois Lane. One of us can fly while the other is stuck with the bus.
Heidi Philipsen-Meissner: writer, director, producer and actress
This is a guest post by Heidi Philipsen-Meissner.
When I was a little girl, I had two all-time favorite hobbies. One was to get all the neighborhood kids together to create some sort of production. We didn’t have a film camera back then and video did not yet exist (at least not in my 1970s world), so that narrowed it down to micro-circus performances (the tire swing served as a trapeze act) or Xanadu-inspired roller skate music productions (complete with a ramp).
I was the writer, director, production manager, creative marketing manager, and the lead act. We had all the parents lined up at our very own, homemade, popcorn stand created from cardboard, and we charged 25 cents per bag. The entry fee for the act was a dollar.
My favorite performance included all of us girls and my brother dressed either as Wonder Woman with a lasso or as Sandy from Grease decked out in a “Pinkie” jacket and black leotard. We were fierce in our power to command the stage and demanded attention for our impromptu performance. I felt on top of the world. It never occurred to me that I might not be.
The other all-time favorite hobby of mine also involved performance, but this time as the spectator: going to the movies with my dad.
As I learned from episodes of The Brady Bunch and the occasional trip to my Auntie Neva’s house, most families during the 70s and 80s (when I was in elementary school and middle school) enjoyed a day devoted to the idea of the American family as a unit. They shared the day throwing a football around, playing cards, and eating a ceremonial meal together.
Not my family.
On those days, we split up, mom with son and dad with daughter, hitting the movies and celebrating cinema as if our lives depended on it. (Later in my life, after I had been raped in college, I would watch movies to escape and repress the post-traumatic stress I could not handle and, thus, my life did depend on cinema as therapy.)
It was around the age of 9 that I first started to realize that, as a girl, I might be getting the raw end of the deal in society. I was watching Superman.(Hard to believe that almost 40 years later they are still investing time, energy and money to bring that movie to the box office, but, heh, who am I to criticize?)
I loved the movie Superman. I had dreams of Christopher Reeve dressed up in tights for months thereafter and—I kid you not—every night after watching the movie, I chanted a silent prayer to myself before falling asleep: “Please let there be a real Superman, please let there be a real Superman, please let there be a real Superman!”
Movies with special effects were still a thing of unbelievable magic back then, and as a result of the persuasive productions, people often left movie theatres convinced of realities outside the one we know. I remember the local news aired a report encouraging parents to warn their kids not to jump out of windows or off roofs. Because, unlike what the movie made us believe, humans did not truly possess the mystical, physical power of flight with nothing but a cape to propel them up, up and away.
So here I was, a girl of 9, watching Superman with my dad and taking in this story about a guy who is not just the smartest on the block, but who could also defy the expectations of everyone around him. He ends up the strongest, sexiest, most handsome and genuinely wonderful man when trouble comes into town, and his helpless girl is threatened.
But that is not to say that Lois is completely devoid of talent. She is a smart, beautiful woman with great ambition and courage, going after the best story under the most dangerous of circumstances. Every guy in the movie (and movie theater, most likely) wanted her.
And yet, SHE wasn’t the hero. HE was.
So I suddenly realized, at 9, watching that movie, I came to a realization: “Why couldn’t I have been born a boy?” I thought sincerely, “Boys are able to DO so much more and be taken seriously.”
The rest, unfortunately still, as they say, is “his” story. Skip forward nearly 40 years later: I am still putting together “neighborhood productions,” only this time, on a much larger scale and with more “kids from around the block.”
Currently, I’m producing my second feature film, This is Nowhere, which I’m also co-directing and acting in. Fittingly enough, it is about a teenage girl who’s struggling to match the world of her dreams with the actual, uninspiring world that she wishes she could rise above or escape.
Heidi Philipsen-Meissner
Otherwise, things have changed in the world around me, but not that much. (Remember what I mentioned earlier about the Superman sequel— it’s currently being shot, again, in Detroit – but this time with Batman!) And when it comes to opportunities within film industry— the industry in which I work —men still metaphorically soar above women.
According to an article in the Hollywood Reporterearlier this year, “A new report by the Women’s Media Center finds that women are still underrepresented on screen and behind the scenes in film and television. The report, which is a summary of original research done at USC, San Diego State and elsewhere over the past year, declared that ‘the American media have exceedingly more distance to travel on the road to gender-blind parity.”
Lois Lane still hasn’t gotten her shot at that front-page story.
Don’t get me wrong, women are making strides when it comes to our place in movies, but in comparison to our male counterparts, we’re still just like Superman and Lois Lane. One of us can fly while the other is stuck with the bus.
And though I sometimes miss being 9, I don’t miss the 1970s when there were only a couple of channels on TV and when the Internet did not exist. The latest movies could only be exhibited in controlled movie theatres.
Today, with all of the viable outlets for digital distribution and crowdfunding platforms (like Seed&Spark), we, as women, have our very own special power: the power of numbers and support. Locating content that fills the gender gap in storytelling has never been easier; we’re only a click away from watching films that appeal to us.
And THAT is an amazing power to possess. We can BE the change we want —and need —to see, both on and off screen, earning our wings in “her” side of history.
Heidi Philipsen-Meissner is a producer, writer, actress and director with 15 years of professional experience in international film, television and communications. Currently, she’s producing and co-directing her second feature film, This is Nowhere.
In our culture, where children now watch an average of 35 hours of television per week, much of that formative information that children are rapidly absorbing and storing comes from TV. We must, therefore, consider what kind of programming we’re offering to these hugely malleable young people. What kind of messages are we sharing with our children? Are we giving them lessons of acceptance, diversity, and cooperation? Are we teaching them vital critical thinking skills? Or are we, instead, feeding them gender roles, racial hierarchy, and the centrality of the nuclear family?
Our theme week for June 2014 will be Children’s Television
In our capitalist society, many corporations see children as just another demographic with the power to influence their parents to buy toys. Around the 70s, many children’s TV shows became little more than advertisements for products, such that the FCC mandated children’s programming contain some educational content, which inspired the oft derided, tacked-on PSA (public service announcement) at the end of episodes to meet that regulation. This ruling was struck down in the 90s, so now we must rely on the questionable intentions of the corporations who produce children’s media to provide programming that enriches the lives and expands the brains of children.
Ultimately, we must consider what kind of programming we’re offering to these hugely malleable young people. What kind of messages are we sharing with our children? Are we giving them lessons of acceptance, diversity, and cooperation? Are we teaching them vital critical thinking skills? Or are we, instead, feeding them gender roles, racial hierarchy, and the centrality of the nuclear family? What kind of people, what kind of citizens will these children grow up to be?
We’d like you to examine children’s television shows, analyzing what role they play in the feminist movement as well as the general upbringing of children. Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.
We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.
Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.
If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.
Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).
The final due date for these submissions is Friday, June 20 by midnight.
Sex and sexuality are complicated, whether we believe it or not. Most of us have experienced some type of same-sex attraction or participated in some kinky activity in the bedroom. Movies often help us to make sense of these feelings and experiences. However, too often, female sexual pleasure and arousal are still deemed unfit for viewing by mainstream film and television. America has a bipolar and hypocritical relationship with female sexuality. Our culture consumes copious amounts of porn and then doesn’t hesitate to slut-shame the women who create and act in pornographic films. Is this because pornography can be seen as objectifying women, while mainstream film humanizes them? Why does the marriage of sexuality and human intimacy feel so dangerous?
The biggest question for the show will obviously be, um, what about the sex? Sex is in the title: the opening sequence bathes in it, and every episode features it. As a big proponent of women’s sexuality I’m pretty much all for it; however, I desperately hope that Masters of Sex doesn’t just become cheap exhibitionism driving up late night ratings; I want to know that Masters of Sex is trying to tell us something in all of the orgasmic moaning (fake or real).
In this piece we focus on “Prom” as a densifying trope for teenage female sexual desire in many cultural representations (think of Carrie, She’s All That, My-So-Called Life or Glee to name just a few). We are doing so by complementing John Hughes’ rather classic romantic-comedy and “Brat Pack” movie Pretty in Pink with the horror/torture movie with comedy elements The Loved Ones directed by Sean Byrne – two examples of female desire as imagined by male writers.
Oh Scully. You beautiful, badass, rosebud-mouthed, flame-haired Valkyrie wearing a blazer two sizes too big for you: what do you desire? We know what Mulder desires. He wants to look at porn in his office. He wants to flirt and call the shots. He wants ALIENS. He does not want to give you a desk.
The sex in The To Do List—which comes about for Plaza’s character Brandy Klark after she realizes she has no sexual experience going into college—was utterly joyless; it was as if Brandy was going through the motions. This is hardly surprising considering the premise of the film is to check off a smorgasbord of sex acts over summer vacation in order to be appropriately sexually educated as she becomes tertiary educated.
In addition to telling a great story, Stoker also shows an open and often eerie portrayal of female sexual desire, longing, perception of love and acceptance of one’s self as an autonomous sexual being. The film doesn’t shy away from pure desire and want as justifiable means to actions.
Female viewers may derive psychological pleasure from watching Bridget’s erotic, self-interested shenanigans. It’s exhilarating to see a female cinematic character take sexual control and outwit her male partners. It makes a refreshing change from watching women suffer the pain of romantic love. We know that Bridget will never be a victim. She will never tolerate domestic drudgery or the compromises marriage brings. In fact, it’s pretty much a given that she will always overcome her opponents. Life is a pitiless yet entertaining Darwinian game in The Last Seduction, and Bridget plays it brilliantly.
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a classic movie based on a Tennessee Williams play presents how society shapes, shelters, and shames female sexuality. Williams’ is well-known for writing plays that dealt with the gender-specific issues women faced, sympathizing with the way women were kept from being whole and balanced human beings.
On Bates Motel, the character of Emma Decody (Olivia Cooke) – a seventeen-year-old with cystic fibrosis. In a show where sex is conflated with violence, male desire, and death, Emma is an oasis of sex positivity, female desire, and life.
Today’s media landscape is fuller than ever with queer characters (though most of them are still white and/or male), yet the stories we see are still most commonly either angst-ridden fumbling towards a coming out or pregnancy and adoption dramas. It’s rare to see a fully realized queer character, too old for coming out and too young for children, actually dating and enjoying sexual encounters. It’s rarer still when it’s a woman.
Sex is everywhere and nowhere in Philomena. Sex is the reason that the titular heroine is sent to Roscrea as a young woman, to have her illegitimate baby behind closed doors. Sex is also the reason that Philomena’s son, Anthony, is adopted out to an American family even though his mother is still living.
But I’m a Cheerleader literally queers the stereotype of the popular cheerleader going steady with a handsome football player. The film’s overt display of oppression over queer sexuality speaks to the dominant patriarchal society that strives to eliminate all non-normative ways of living.
However, female desire occasionally lives in the subtext of Mad Men like fire ants fighting to dig themselves out of a mountain of sand. The show’s complex female characters are regularly lusted after, and at times brave leaps are taken into the sea of their cravings. Other times, their behaviors appear inconsistent, and it seems we’ve been cheated out of crucial discoveries that lurk just beneath their surfaces.
The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.
That’s right, you guys. I’m gonna try to analyze Mulholland Drive for sexual desire week. I do this partly out of love for you, and partly out of hate for me. Let’s get this party started.
And then I saw it–a film that extols the importance of female agency and sexuality with a healthy dose of raunch, a film that includes a sexually experienced and supportive mother, a film that celebrates female friendship and quotes Gloria Steinem, a film that features Green Apple Pucker and multiple references to Pearl Jam and Hillary Clinton. Yes. This is it.
In the words for women that have no male equivalent–like “bitchy,” “slut,” and “hag”–we can easily discern sexism, but we can also see it in words and phrases that mean something different when applied to men than when applied to women–or when applied to boys rather than girls. A boy who is “acting out” is often a euphemism for a boy who is physically threatening or harming others or (less likely) himself. A girl, especially an adolescent girl, who is said to be “acting out” is sometimes harming herself (and even more rarely harming others), but is more likely behaving in ways that, in a bygone era, would have been called “unladylike” (when no one ever used the word “ungentlemanlike”). She’s loud; she’s crude; she’s inconsiderate–all things girls and even adult women are rarely allowed to be. When she is seeking out her own pleasure she is “acting out sexually,” another phrase with no male equivalent.
The tension of the spy antics in The Americans really gets my heart racing in the climax of most episodes. Besides that phenomenon, though, there’s another aspect of this show that puts me on edge: I cannot tell if I think the way that The Americans portrays sexual and romantic relationships in a progressive way, or in a, for lack of a better term, creepy and abusive way.
Sex and sexuality are complicated, whether we believe it or not. Most of us have experienced some type of same-sex attraction or participated in some kinky activity in the bedroom. Movies often help us to make sense of these feelings and experiences. However, too often, female sexual pleasure and arousal are still deemed unfit for viewing by mainstream film and television. America has a bipolar and hypocritical relationship with female sexuality. Our culture consumes copious amounts of porn and then doesn’t hesitate to slut-shame the women who create and act in pornographic films. Is this because pornography can be seen as objectifying women, while mainstream film humanizes them? Why does the marriage of sexuality and human intimacy feel so dangerous?
Written by Jenny Lapekas as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.
Sex and sexuality are complicated, whether we believe it or not. Most of us have experienced some type of same-sex attraction or participated in some kinky activity in the bedroom. Movies often help us to make sense of these feelings and experiences. However, too often, female sexual pleasure and arousal are still deemed unfit for viewing by mainstream film and television. America has a bipolar and hypocritical relationship with female sexuality. Our culture consumes copious amounts of porn and then doesn’t hesitate to slut-shame the women who create and act in pornographic films. Is this because pornography can be seen as objectifying women, while mainstream film humanizes them? Why does the marriage of sexuality and human intimacy feel so dangerous?
The depiction of female sexuality and sexual desire in the offbeat romance, Secretary (Steven Shainberg, 2002), is central to its themes of dominance and submission. Lee (Maggie Gyllenhaal) can be read as “sexually uncontrollable” by some viewers and critics, but her sexuality complements Mr. Grey’s (James Spader), which is structured and contained. Lee finds she cannot be sexually aroused or satisfied by the traditional man she’s set to marry; not only is their sex centered on his laughable spasms on top of her, Lee can’t even pleasure herself while his photo sits by her bedside. We may say that he’s so bad in bed, he interferes with Lee’s orgasms even when absent.
Lee gets to better know herself by exploring her body and entertaining erotic thoughts about her inaccessible employer.
Lee has just been released from a mental hospital, and she struggles to gain some independence as she moves back in with a hovering mother and a drunk father. Among her masochistic tools, we find a hot tea kettle and the sharpened foot of a ballerina figurine, a rather melodramatic image as she sits in a bedroom that is reminiscent of early girlhood, rather than that of a 20-something young woman. It’s no mistake that Gyllenhaal’s character has an androgynous name; when we meet her, she is not sexually realized, and the way the camera maneuvers around her small frame and conservative clothing communicates this very clearly.
Lee is giddy over her new title of “secretary.”
When Mr. Grey (50 Shades, anyone?) is “interviewing” Lee, he forwardly observes, “You’re closed tight.” Lee is so willing to do anything and everything Mr. Grey tells her that he cures her of her cutting simply by telling her that she is never to do it again. We may be tempted to label Mr. Grey rude or offensive, but his character is much more complicated than that, and Lee depends on his behavior to further develop throughout the film. He is seemingly cruel as he explains that her only tasks are typing and answering the phone, and yet she is incompetent since she routinely makes spelling errors and answers the phone without gusto. Lee wants desperately to please Mr. Grey. The film contains two masturbation scenes where we watch Lee climax at the memory of doing exactly as Mr. Grey tells her. Considering some of the recent controversy surrounding the censorship of female sexual pleasure on television, it feels daring and refreshing to find these scenes in a film. Gyllenhaal has also received criticism for playing the love interest in The Dark Knight(Christopher Nolan, 2008) since viewers find her “cute,” and not “sexy” enough to take on such a role, which makes her portrayal of a sexually adventurous young woman all the more empowering.
Lee looks like a little girl playing dress-up as we watch her apply the eyeshadow anther woman at work leaves in the bathroom.
While Lee is shown to be a sexually submissive woman–parallel to the sexually dominant Grey–she discovers her own agency as she blossoms into a more complete person. She dramatically leaves her fiancé, Peter, and, while wearing her wedding dress, professes her love to Mr. Grey. She also slaps Mr. Grey across the face as he fires her and successfully fights off Peter when he interrupts her sit-in. Although Lee gets off on being subservient, she makes it clear that she isn’t afraid to let others know what she wants outside the bedroom; Lee literally runs to Mr. Grey and then screams at Peter to get out. Paradoxically, Lee’s emergence as a “submissive” accompanies the forming of her newfound independence.
Upon doing what she’s told, Mr. Grey asks Lee if she’s afraid he’s going to fuck her.
What this film shows us is that sexual submission is a legitimate practice of men and women alike. During Lee’s “sit-in,” we even see a women’s rights scholar (most likely a local graduate student) visit her to lecture about her apparently anti-feminist choice to obey Mr. Grey by sitting and waiting for his return. I think it’s unwise to dismiss Lee’s portrayal of a “sexual submissive” as inaccurate or ineffective since this is not an archetype we see very often on the silver screen. This film is subversive, transgressive, and feminist in its message, its imagery, and its challenging the popular belief that feminist sexuality is a one-size-fits-all cloak we all quibble over and clamber into when it’s time to play academic dress-up. We watch Lee masturbate, fall in love, and cure an alienated man of his debilitating need for space and order, so I think it’s safe to say that the more Lee embraces her desire to be dominated, the more she controls the events of her own life and discovers agency.
Mr. Grey finally admits he loves Lee by undressing her and bathing her.
The desire to be told what to do or to obtain permission to do particular activities is undoubtedly linked to sexual arousal and gratification in both men and women. Although Lee is sexually submissive, she alone pushes Mr. Grey out of his toxic bubble of isolation and shame; she declares her love for the brooding lawyer and kindly informs him that they are a match and can be themselves, together, every day, without embarrassment that their sexual preferences may be considered perverted or taboo by the dreaded status quo.
While this brand of complex female sexuality may not be readily understood by most, it would be reductionist to dismiss Secretary as a misogynistic film, especially when Gyllenhaal’s performance reflects a multi-layered persona and a powerful sexual identity that remains obscure in mainstream cinema. Lee finds sexual agency, and we stand by to watch and enjoy the pleasure she finds, along with the man who becomes her husband. The binary of dominance and submission, along with its negotiation of sexual boundaries, is what makes Secretary work.
Jenny has a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at Alvernia University. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.
Today’s media landscape is fuller than ever with queer characters (though most of them are still white and/or male), yet the stories we see are still most commonly either angst-ridden fumbling towards a coming out or pregnancy and adoption dramas. It’s rare to see a fully realized queer character, too old for coming out and too young for children, actually dating and enjoying sexual encounters. It’s rarer still when it’s a woman.
A typical The L Word promo image, luring viewers with titillation
Written by Elizabeth Kiy as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.
Sadly, it’s still kind of revolutionary to show two women in love having sex or even kissing on TV or in movies that aren’t super niche or ghettoized as pornographic or gay-interest. However, it’s easy enough to see a nominally straight character go gay for sweeps week or two girls making out for male approval in mainstream media. What’s truly scandalous is when the women like it.
Today’s media landscape is fuller than ever with queer characters (though most of them are still white and/or male), yet the stories we see are still most commonly either angst-ridden fumbling toward a coming out or pregnancy and adoption dramas. It’s rare to see a fully realized queer character, too old for coming out and too young for children, actually dating and enjoying sexual encounters. It’s rarer still when it’s a woman.
While gay men are often portrayed as hypersexual partiers, gay women in movies and TV are more likely to worry about their kids, sit on the couch reading together or have rare sex. They’re more like best friends who’ve decided to move in and raise children together than romantic partners (though Modern Family was notably criticized for the lack of passion between its gay male couple, Cam and Mitchell, who didn’t kiss onscreen until the second season of the series). It’s a distinction most notable in the common description of The Kids are Alright, a movie where a lesbian couple have only unsatisfying sex and affairs as “The Lesbian Brokeback Mountain,” comparing it to a film where a gay male couple have a passionate and enduring albeit tortured love affair.
Though there have been some notable deviations from this pattern.
Last year, Blue is the Warmest Color exploded into mainstream discussion for its long and graphic sex scenes, but many viewers felt the scenes were steeped in the male gaze (descriptions of the director Abdellatif Kechiche’s behavior didn’t help matters). Some felt the sex scenes seemed like more of a break from the narrative than genuine portrayal of the character’s passion for each other.
On Glee, Brittany (Heather Morris) and Santana’s (Naya Rivera) relationship began with sex, as they described regularly scissoring each other and were shown in bed together before any idea was given of their feelings for each other. All the emotional stuff between them was added in later. However, when they became an official couple, supposedly in love, the characters stopped interacting, and viewers had to fight to get an onscreen kiss.
Pictured: Not a Kiss
On Grey’s Anatomy, Erica Hahn (Brooke Smith) was moved to tears after her first sexual experience with a woman, which caused her to reassess the way she had been living her life. She compared it to getting glasses as a child and finally seeing the world clearly, after years of unknowingly looking at blurs and not knowing they were supposed to be leaves.
It also stood out when Emily Fitch (Kathryn Prescott) officially came out in the second generation of British drama, Skins, expressing her sexual interest in women. She didn’t just vaguely “like” girls or want to date them, she wanted to have sex with them and explained, “I like their rosey lips, their hard nipples, bums, soft thighs. I like tits and fanny, you know?”
The L Word, the lesbian drama which ran from 2004-2009 on Showtime, is remembered by queer women for problems like its hackneyed writing, transphobia, and bierasure, or its place in their realization of their sexuality, but it has an important role as perhaps the only mainstream TV series where all the major characters were queer women. It’s also the only program where you can list out its top ten lesbian sex scenes.
Ad for The L-Word comparing it to Sex and The City
The series was promoted as the queer version of Sex and the City(ads proclaimed “Same Sex, Different City”), and it’s a fairly apt comparison. It focuses on the professional and romantic lives of a group of affluent and fairly feminine queer women in their 20s and 30s living in LA’s gay mecca, West Hollywood, where their lives often intersect with celebrities.
Part of Sex and the City’s enduring position in popular culture is the ease by which the characters, even if you loved them and knew all the particulars of their lives, can be explained by types. We’ve all been asked: are you glamor-loving Carrie, traditional Charlotte, cynical Miranda or sexually liberated Samantha? Likewise, The L Word characters, like uptight power lesbian Bette (Jennifer Beals), earthy valley girl Tina (Laurel Holloman), awkward, closeted athlete Dana (Erin Daniels), social butterfly Alice (Leisha Hailey): the main cast’s only bisexual, and Jenny (Mia Kirshner), a confused midwestern transplant turned sociopath, are such clear types, it’s hard to imagine they’re friends. As THE lesbian show, the series is often posed as representative of lesbian life and love, the awful theme song even proclaims, “This is the way that we live!” Therefore the situations and other characters the protagonists run into are also played as typical.
Jenny’s attraction to Marina changed her life
With a cast (excluding male guest stars and short lived series regulars) of women, the show is ruled by female sexual desire and characters’ libidos and sexual pleasure are integral parts of the plot and of the sex scenes. Characters talk sex over coffee, give each other tips, worry about whether their partner orgasmed, fight attraction so strong it’s all-consuming and, in one episode, debate the meaning of female ejaculation. Most are young and single and spend their nights at parties and clubs, a far cry from the stereotype of lesbians staying home with their cats.
It also worked to debunk commonly held patriarchal ideas that sexual intercourse means penetration or requires a penis as women are shown receiving pleasure from different kinds of sex, involving dirty talk, roleplay, toys, hands and mouths.
A typical image of female pleasure from The L-Word
In fact, the series is often viewed as a sexual primer, answering the curiosities of straight viewers and teaching basic techniques to baby queers. While women are often portrayed in the media as having sex only because the men in their lives desire it, The L Word characters enjoy sex and participate in it for their own sakes, without men to pressure them. In fact, sex between women in the show is often portrayed as more satisfying because sex scenes between women are longer, more explicit and more intense than scenes with men. A lot of attention is also given to the idea that a woman has superior knowledge of the female body because she has one herself. Likewise, Shane, the lesbian Casanova, is desired by every queer woman and most straight women she meets.
All the girls (even the straight ones) went crazy for Shane
Right off the bat, lesbian sexuality is taken seriously as the first major plot line follows Jenny, consumed by her sexual desire for a woman named Marina despite all logic. By end of pilot, we see them have sex and see it as an amazing eye-opening and life-changing experience for her.
Still, the series can be accused of titillation, and as a mainstream production, it required the interest of straight male viewers to stay on the air. In a season two plot line, the series attempted to address the idea of the male gaze and rape culture with the inclusion of a straight male character who moved in with Jenny and Shane and filmed them without their permission. All the women are gorgeous and feminine (Shane, the most masculine is still thin and stylish), which led to criticism from queer viewers that the show was making the characters more familiar and digestible for straight audiences. On the other hand, The L Word has also been praised for breaking down stereotypes and teaching audiences that not all lesbians are butch.
Still, knowledge that the series came from lesbian creator Ilene Chaiken and involved several queer actresses, guest stars and episode directors allowed queer women to feel a degree of ownership and (often begrudging) affection toward the program. The community complained about it, but still held viewing parties, all hated Jenny together, and voted the stars on hot lists throughout its run.
In season five, the show even pokes fun at the portrayal of lesbian sex in the mainstream when characters get involved in the production of a movie based on their lives. Jenny has to give the cast, who are mostly straight, lessons on how queer women have sex as they have no idea how to portray it accurately. In another episode, a producer gives the ridiculous suggestion that the actresses could have unsimulated sex in the film as the MPAA wouldn’t consider it “real sex.” His suggestion is made more ridiculous by the fact that MPAA guidelines are actually tougher towards portrayals of queer sex than straight sex, and there are numerous examples of scenes of female pleasure garnering NC-17 ratings (as in seen in the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated).
Though there are examples of movies and TV where lesbian sexual desire and romance are portrayed along with lesbian sex (and I’m sure I’ve missed some), unfortunately, there isn’t another show with an ensemble full of queer women where their sexual desires and sex lives are taken seriously and given consistent airtime. Love or hate The L Word, its portrayal of queer women as sexual beings was, and still is, important.
Female viewers may derive psychological pleasure from watching Bridget’s erotic, self-interested shenanigans. It’s exhilarating to see a female cinematic character take sexual control and outwit her male partners. It makes a refreshing change from watching women suffer the pain of romantic love. We know that Bridget will never be a victim. She will never tolerate domestic drudgery or the compromises marriage brings. In fact, it’s pretty much a given that she will always overcome her opponents. Life is a pitiless yet entertaining Darwinian game in ‘The Last Seduction,’ and Bridget plays it brilliantly.
Written by Rachael Johnson as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.
Bridget Gregory is one of American cinema’s great anti-heroines. Flawlessly played by Linda Fiorentino, she is the amoral yet captivating protagonist of John Dahl’s 1994 thriller, The Last Seduction. Fiorentino’s Bridget is a lithe, beautiful woman, and her look evokes heroines of post-war noir. Her sleek, dark hair has a Golden Age cut and style, and a cigarette is never far from her perfect lips. But Dahl’s neo-noir offers an original, post-modern female villain. She’s a femme fatale for the 90s. Bridget is, at heart, a tough, lone wolf entirely dedicated to serving her own interests and ensuring her self-preservation. A female lone wolf is rare in American movies and one of the pleasures of The Last Seduction is watching her survive and thrive. Bridget is, also, gender-subversive as well as a desiring and assertive erotic subject. It is her sexual subjectivity that enthralls, amuses, and entertains.
Made crystal clear from the very start of the film, Bridget is a colorful piece of work. She’s the manager of a New York telemarketing company, and we first see her taunting and egging on her subordinates with inspirational insults such as “maggots,” “suckers,” “bastards,” and “eunuchs.” Dahl cuts between this scene and another involving a man meeting two younger guys under a bridge. The man, we will discover shortly, is Bridget’s husband, Clay Gregory (Bill Pullman). A medical resident desperately in need of cash, he is presently selling drugs to pay off a loan shark. The dangerous, nerve-wracking deal scores the couple a handsome sum.
Clay and Bridget: husband and wife
Clay is also a piece of work. As acquisitive as Bridget, he is also capable of violence. When Bridget later calls Clay an “idiot” back in their apartment for carrying the money around in broad daylight, he strikes her. He makes the cowardly excuse that he was shaken up by the deal, and Bridget fakes forgiveness. When he’s in the shower, however, she runs off with the stash. Before she quits the city, Bridget takes off her wedding ring. The act signifies a rejection of domesticity and traditional coupling as well as a repudiation of age-old ideas of female subservience and sacrifice. It also signals that she will now drive the narrative. Although the act of abuse serves as a trigger, the viewer is, in fact, encouraged to believe that Bridget is motivated by more than vengeance. She wants total mastery of her destiny and will do anything to achieve it.
She flees north. Stopping in a small, characterless town in “cow country,” she drops into a run-of-the-mill bar. A gorgeous, svelte yet foul-mouthed New Yorker, Bridget is perceived as an exotic figure in these parts. A young, attractive man with a pleasant personality and the very ordinary name of Mike, is drawn to her. Mike (Peter Berg) buys her a drink when her ungracious demand for a Manhattan is, quite understandably, ignored by the bartender.
Bridget at a dive bar
Their first encounter serves as an amusing, outrageous antidote to the saccharine meet-cutes of 90s romantic comedies. Bridget initially refuses Mike’s quite ordinary advances in inimitably impolite fashion: “Go find yourself a nice little cowgirl and make nice little cow babies and leave me alone.” But when Mike good-humoredly makes the claim that he’s “hung like a horse,” Bridget offers him a seat. She proceeds to unzip his pants, fondle his dick, probe him about his sexual history, and, then, smell her fingers. Inspection over, the newly acquainted couple head off to his place and spend the night together. The morning after, she heads off without telling him her name or saying goodbye.
Their next meeting, at Mike’s place of work, is pure coincidence. Deciding to lay low in the town, Bridget secures a managerial position at the same insurance company as her new lover, and takes on the name of Wendy Kroy. She wants distance from Mike at work and warns him: “Don’t fuck with my image.” She is, however, more sociable when she meets him again at the bar.
They soon have sex near the dumpster behind the bar. Bridget directs their love-making and plays the more sexually dynamic part. Hanging onto the rails, in an elevated position, Bridget fucks Mike against a fence. With his pants down to his ankles and knees bent, he looks the more vulnerable partner in this al fresco erotic episode. He is also the emotionally vulnerable lover. “Where do I fit in?” Mike asks Bridget. “You’re my designated fuck,” she replies. She later rides him in her car.
Bridget is the femme fatale
Bridget, for the most part, assumes the traditionally dominant position in her love-making sessions with Mike. The filmmakers’ characterization of their female protagonist’s desire is unusual for American cinema. Bridget’s physical beauty is certainly not obscured, but she cannot be characterized as a classic Hollywood sex object. She is, instead, presented as an assertive, dynamic sexual subject. Intense physical pleasure is not bound up with the self-abandonment of romantic love. Nor does it signify psychic self-annihilation. Reproduction, furthermore, does not play a part in Bridget’s world. She and her husband are childless. Love has an ideological import, and it has often, let’s face it, been a trap for women in patriarchal society. Bridget, however, is not confined by love. Sex, for her, is about control, pleasure and play.
Mike, however, falls in love with Bridget and craves a more emotionally intimate relationship. He is flattered that she has chosen him, as he believes himself to be “bigger than this town.” Although he bemoans, in a somewhat boyish way, her arrogance and dominance. Mike realizes, a little late, that Bridget is a dangerous, amoral woman. He calls her “sick” and “deranged” when she suggests they “sell murder” to people (for example, to women who have been betrayed by their husbands), but he is ultimately ignorant of her true intentions. She becomes increasingly calculating with her lover, and he just can’t keep up. Although Mike is horrified when Bridget (falsely) tells him that she has successfully sold murder, he is eventually manipulated into agreeing to kill Clay. Note that Bridget has lied to him about the identity of his target. Mike is unaware that he has been sent to New York to murder Bridget’s husband; he believes his target to be a man who’s been driving old ladies out of their homes. I will not tell you what happens when Mike encounters Clay.
Bridget is winning at her game
Bridget’s treatment of people, particularly men, remains consistently appalling throughout the film, but it goes beyond crude invective and exploitation. Bridget admits to Mike that she enjoys “bending the rules, playing with people’s brains.” She exploits both society’s moral codes and prejudices and takes advantage of the kindness of others. She espouses a certain moral relativism. When Mike says, helplessly, “Murder is wrong,” Bridget counters, “Unless the President says to do it.” In fact, Bridget gains an almost sexual pleasure plotting her clever moves. She screws men both literally and metaphorically.
Bridget’s unbound sexuality and gender-subversive behavior make her evil more interesting and radical. She knows how to manipulate the gender order and succeed in a phallocentric world. She is unfailingly resourceful and supernaturally resilient. In a way, this amoral female protagonist functions to strip patriarchy bare. Her cynical, manipulative words and acts serve to expose the weaknesses and wickedness of men: their insecurities, secrets, and vulnerabilities as well as their aggressive, acquisitive traits.
Bridget, as we have seen, does not conform to culturally constructed norms of femininity. She also manipulates and mocks conventional expectations of gender. Her parodic skills are neatly demonstrated in one short, entertaining scene when she offers cookies to a local detective her husband has recruited. Wearing a lace apron and a smile, she delivers the sweet gift to the man watching her movements in his parked car. He does not, however, see her placing a plank of nails by his tires, and he has only himself to blame when she drives off to an unknown destination.
The Last Seduction does not, of course, endorse a reversal of domination, but the movie makes for a playfully, and knowingly, subversive viewing experience. Although Bridget’s actions should not be read in a literal, man-hating way, female viewers may derive psychological pleasure from watching Bridget’s erotic, self-interested shenanigans. It’s exhilarating to see a female cinematic character take sexual control and outwit her male partners. It makes a refreshing change from watching women suffer the pain of romantic love. We know that Bridget will never be a victim. She will never tolerate domestic drudgery or the compromises marriage brings. In fact, it’s pretty much a given that she will always overcome her opponents. Life is a pitiless yet entertaining Darwinian game in The Last Seduction, and Bridget plays it brilliantly.
An in-control Bridget
Fiorentino’s interpretation of our deeply sexy, whip-smart anti-heroine is supremely persuasive. The casting is perfect; the actress should have won an Oscar for her performance, but the movie was shut out of the nominations because it was first shown on cable television before being given a cinematic release. Rules may be rules, but it’s nothing less than a sin that both Fiorentino and John Dahl’s smart, stylish film were deemed ineligible.
The Last Seduction is elegantly shot, well-paced and cleverly constructed. Bridget is the dominant sexual and narrative subject. The story is primarily shaped by her sensual, self-interested needs. If she can be characterized as a feminist cultural icon, she’s an amusing, distinctly anti-humanist one. One thing that’s certain is that watching her at work and play is the cinematic equivalent of an empowering Manhattan cocktail.
The tension of the spy antics in ‘The Americans’ really gets my heart racing in the climax of most episodes. Besides that phenomenon, though, there’s another aspect of this show that puts me on edge: I cannot tell if I think the way that ‘The Americans’ portrays sexual and romantic relationships is progressive, or, for lack of a better term, creepy and abusive.
This is a guest post by Joseph Jobes as part of our Representations of Female Sexual Desire week.
There is something about the experience of watching The Americans that I find really uncomfortable. I don’t mean this in a negative way, it is kind of the appeal of the show, but the tension of the spy antics really gets my heart racing in the climax of most episodes. Besides that phenomenon, though, there’s another aspect of this show that puts me on edge: I cannot tell if I think the way that The Americans portrays sexual and romantic relationships is progressive way, or, for lack of a better term, creepy and abusive.
Here’s what I mean by this: Many critics have proposed that the appeal of the show is not in its espionage storyline, but rather in the marriage dynamics between Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings. This is true; the romance between the two is certainly just as tense and dynamic as the “adventures” that they are going on in the week’s episode. What makes me unsettled about it, though, is that their marriage is very hard to define. Elizabeth and Phillip are sleeper KGB agents, and their marriage was an arranged front to make them seem more traditionally American (mom, dad, son, daughter). What is so unsettling about this is not the fact that it is an “arranged marriage,” but that they have to pretend it was not.
Faking it in The Americans
Really, what The Americans is about is faking emotions, and how, through faking those emotions, one can produce authentic experiences, for better or worse. This is best exemplified in episode six from the first season (also, we are going to focus the plot discussion here on the first seven or so episodes, which form the first big story arc of the show). In the sixth episode, Phillip and Elizabeth are captured and tortured, with the captors trying to get them to give up information on the KGB. At the end of the scene, they realize that the man interrogating them is KGB, not CIA; their agency was worried they may have defected, since they have found out that there is a Russian double agent.
Before this, Elizabeth had told their higher-ups that Phillip was thinking about defecting. In the pilot episode, the couple realizes that their new neighbor is an FBI agent, and Phillip thinks that the FBI knows who they are. He suggests they pro-actively switch sides. This is a huge source of tension between him and Elizabeth, who is a much more devoted spy. After they leave the interrogation room in episode six, Phillip realizes Elizabeth must have shared his concerns with their boss, and he confronts her about it. Her response is, “You like it here too much!” This is exactly what I want to talk about. Phillip’s job as a sleeper agent is to seem American, and not just complacently American, but actively American. Of course when he started, Phillip was loyal to the Russian cause, but now by pretending to be a patriotic American and by raising American kids in an American house, Phillip has gone past his original intent. By him “performing” as an American, he has become an American.
This is really problematic to me as related to the sexual relationships in the show. Again, remember that when Elizabeth and Phillip first came to America they were young spies, willingly faking a marriage in order to advance the cause of their country. It would be a different situation if they had ended up falling in love due to their shared goal, but that is not the case. Elizabeth reminds Phillip, and the audience, multiple times in the first few episodes that “it never really happened” for them; they never really had the romantic connection that they had to force for so long. This is expanded upon when Phillip finds out that Elizabeth has had an affair with Gregory Thomas, which upsets him. After their fight, Elizabeth tells her husband she is beginning to feel actual love for him for the first time in two decades.
Is their love real?
The next few episodes show the Jennings being a romantic, sexually active husband-and-wife. Though it may seem that they are finally having an open, consensual relationship, I fear something else could be at play here. If Phillip can act American for so long that he becomes American, can Elizabeth have acted like a loving wife so long that she has truly become one? To put it in another way, is her desire and affection for her husband now authentic, or just a learned routine? And, assuming it is as genuine as she claims it is, is it troubling that this emotion had to come from a forced place? If she had not had to live with Phillip for so long, and pretend that she loved him, would she have ever grown a real love for him? It seems troubling to celebrate that Elizabeth has finally accepted the situation she is being forced into; yet as viewers, we want our two protagonists to love each other.
I think there are two separate ways to read their relationship, and I do not know that I am satisfied with either. The first is to view the Jennings as a sort of “odd couple,” a duo forced together out of peculiar circumstances that is now finally learning to live with each other and accept one another’s differences. This is a pretty standard romantic plot, but I think it is a little too easy. The second option is that we are watching the story of two people who have essentially brainwashed themselves into loving each other, and now are fighting to protect and reify the very facade they had created. This reading seems too harsh, though, as Elizabeth and Phillip do seem to share real love in a few scenes. The complexity of their relationship, and the blurred lines between real and forced desire is what makes The Americans such a complex show. Even when things are going great for the couple, I am never completely satisfied with Elizabeth and Phillip’s situation. At best, they are a man and woman who are trying to “make it work,” and at worst, they are two people forced to pretend to love someone they view as a complete stranger. All of this, mixed with the very well done espionage/thriller storylines, makes for very enjoyable, tense television.
Joseph Jobes is a graduate student pursuing his MA in English Literature at Kutztown University. His research interests include depictions of gender, sexuality, race, and class in postcolonial and postmodern texts. Besides reading and writing about literature, Joseph also writes criticism and commentary on cigars, pipes, and the hobby in general.
In this piece we focus on prom as a densifying trope for teenage female sexual desire in many cultural representations (think of ‘Carrie,’ ‘She’s All That,’ ‘My-So-Called Life,’ or ‘Glee,’ to name just a few). We are doing so by complementing John Hughes’ rather classic romantic-comedy and “Brat Pack” movie ‘Pretty in Pink’ with the horror/torture movie with comedy elements ‘The Loved Ones’ directed by Sean Byrne – two examples of female desire as imagined by male writers.
This is a guest post by Ingrid Bettwieser and Steffen Loick for our Representations of Female Sexual Desire week.
Girls want relationships, boys want sex. The notion that adolescent girls don’t act on their own sexual desires (and just look sexy) still seems to be a prevailing cultural organizing principle perpetuated by many media illustrations. For us the concept of “Prom” brings together – in a pop-cultural genealogy – diffuse notions of (predominantly) heterosexual teenage desire, depictions of romantic love and binary coupling combined with teen-horrors of social exclusion, acknowledgement and coming-of-age. Prom epitomizes the time and place where sexual subjects/objects of desire are ordered normatively. Individual freedom (not to go to prom but fall out of the place of acknowledgement) and social force (go to prom but subject to normalizing scripts) are negotiated accordingly.
In this piece we focus on prom as a densifying trope for teenage female sexual desire in many cultural representations (think of Carrie, She’s All That, My-So-Called Life, or Glee to name just a few). We are doing so by complementing John Hughes’ rather classic romantic-comedy and “Brat Pack”-movie Pretty in Pink (1986) with the horror/torture movie with comedy elements The Loved Ones (2009) directed by Sean Byrne – two examples of female desire as imagined by male writers.
Pretty in Pink: Prom and female heterosexual desire economized
In Pretty in Pink we follow Andie Walsh, a white working class high school student, whose symbolic entrance into upper class is negotiated in a romantic Cinderella narrative. As the story unfolds it becomes evident that Andie is motivated by economic desire that she can only satisfy through a makeover. In this process she turns from quite independent but socially marginalized teenager to coupled with a “richie” but silenced.
Due to a scholarship Andie attends a private high school and falls for yuppie Blane. The two start dating despite Andie’s geekish best friend Duckie (also a so called “mutant” e.g. working class member), who follows her around quite intrusively and whose love for her is unrequited since she doesn’t show any romantic interest in him. Duckie even warns Andie of the potential sexual motives Blane might have: “He is gonna use your ass and gonna throw you away!” But regardless of any peer skepticism, Andie assumes that hating people because of their money would be some kind of reversed injustice.
Duckie is no object of Andie’s desire
After a disastrous date, where Blane’s rich friends humiliated Andie at a party, Blane asks Andie to go to prom with him. This important question leaves Andie utterly speechless and she kisses Blane right away in front of his BMW. Only as soon as she enters her house she screams out loud and tells her father, “I can’t believe it happened!” As if Andie is not entitled to have sexual feelings on her own, she uses a passive voice without seeming to be involved in any action. Being asked to prom and the couple’s first kiss intermingle to a single event that alludes to the sexualization of prom.
But in due course Blane stops answering Andie’s calls and freezes her off because of peer pressure and out of his own doubt in the relationship. After dramatic events, Andie decides to go to prom nonetheless to prove that “they didn’t break” her. Moreover Andie bonds with her elder friend Iona, a strong and creative record store manager, who advises Andie to go to prom in the first place when she questions the necessity of it being a “stupid tradition.” Iona stresses it would be essential in later life: “It was the worst, but it’s supposed to be, you know, you have to go.”
Lamenting her wasted creative talents, Iona asks Andy in another situation, “I am good in bed, should I be a whore?” It becomes clear that sexual abilities are to remain outside the realm of economic usability. In the course of events Iona goes through a transformation from punkish and outstanding to “mom-ish” in order to progress in her own cross-class relationship. When she is dating a “yuppie” she aligns the criteria for her happiness: “He is so nice, he is employed, he is heterosexual.”
Andie cares for her part-time working father
The desired combination of nice/employed/heterosexual is combined with a degrading of working class masculinities in homophobic modes as inefficient and therefore undesirable throughout the movie–Andie’s father, who hangs around the house during the day, is taken care of by Andie herself as he doesn’t get over the abandonment by her mother; Duckie, who doesn’t seem to be interested in finishing high school is mistaken for a male sex worker in one scene (the character’s sexual orientation/gender is still speculated on as supposedly “effeminate” or “gay”). Iona has an argument with her obviously incapable partner who demands not only house-work and sex but also transportation services and even Blane is “degraded” by his upper class friends as a “faggot” when seen with Andie.
Not-so-decent Benny and Steff
Andie’s sexually decent behavior is contrasted by upper class Benny, who is obviously sexually active and in one scene tells her boyfriend Steff that she would be “one more step away from virginity” for which he labels her a “slut.” Andie’s character, however, doesn’t seem to be sexually motivated at any time and instead rather marked by protestant chastity. Female sexual desire is not absent here; it is told as economized and rationalized desire that can be satisfied through expressive self-entrepreneurship and working – even on a prom dress. Material wealth as represented here is therefore fetishized but corrected in its moral degeneration via Andie’s display of female sexual decency and DIY diligence. In order for her not to be labeled a “slut,” she cannot display sexual agency.
Andie’s father gives her a pink prom dress
In the end Andie creates herself an outfit out of two pink prom dresses–one of them given to her by her father, the other one being her friend Iona’s old dress. After days of working Andie goes to prom alone where she is met by Duckie and they walk in together as friends. As soon as Blane spots Andie he comes along and tells her he would’ve always believed in her whereas she didn’t believe in him. (Which is pretty implausible considering his behavior.) With Duckie’s approval, Andie finally follows Blane to the outside parking lot without many words. The movie ends with their final uniting kiss.
Final kiss
Prom and the monstrosity of female sexual desire: The Loved Ones
The Loved Ones (1999) could have been the ultimate feminist revenge-fantasy I have long craved. I imagined the film to be an utopist notion against the always similar plot-narrative of prom night as a heterosexist spectacle of the male desire. The heroine does not transform into a beautiful “swan,” the mandatory happy ending does not occur, and the anticipated couple does not find each other. Instead, a nerd-stereotyped boy experiences in a subplot that the reality of actually going to prom with the female object of desire is sad, awkward, and leaves a hollow feeling.
The film torpedoes the classical structure of the prom night narrative from the beginning: The female main character Lola, who is orchestrated to appear as unimposing and weird in her first scene, asks her crush, the melancholic school-bad boy Brent, to the ball herself. She is active and autonomous and waiting for a boy to ask her seems not to be an option. After Brent rejects her request, she secretly observes him having oral sex with his girlfriend in a car. Lola’s face is rigid and empty. In the next scene we find her sitting in her pink-colored room, gluing Brent’s yearbook-picture into her scrapbook. She even paints a heart around his face. While doing this Lola listens to a song of the singer/songwriter Kasey Chambers, which might become the hymn of the next generation of sad teenage girls: “Am I not pretty enough? Is my heart still broken? […] Why do you see right through me?”
One finally realizes that this self-dramatization as the sad outsider girl is just a performance when her father gives her a pink dress with matching shoes as a present. Unlike in Pretty in Pink, the dress scene takes places in a very early stage of the storyline, but it’s also one of the most important scenes of all. Thrilled Lola tries on the dress in front of her mirror, while her father – whom she tells to stay – watches her from the door. This two-sided lustful action, posing and watching, marks Lola via the insinuation of father-daughter incest, one of the most far-reaching narrative taboos, as sexually monstrous.
The moment of transformation: Lola and her dress
The pink dress simultaneously initiates her transformation: Lola shifts to a bloody prom queen and anti-heroine who acts out sadistic desires in a series of violent acts against Brent’s body. They are all bizarre persiflages of prom rituals. She carves her initials into Brent’s chest, after the obligatory posing and picture-taking and pretends to dance with the enamored boy, whose feet are nailed to the floor while her father showers them in glitter.
Lola experiences lust through torture
These tableau viands of violence begin with the annexation of Brent: The drugged and kidnapped boy wakes up wearing a smoking jacket in a kitchen tied to a chair. The room is decorated with balloons, there’s even a disco ball at the ceiling. Lola moves close and injects him something that suppresses his ability to talk. Brent, by the way the actual hero of the story, becomes a victim; he has to remain silent and subject to Lola’s haphazard power. This increases Lola’s lust and her desire to put him at the center of her enactments of torture, pain, and degradation.
A grotesque version of prom night pictures
Unfortunately this is not about taking revenge for all the rejected high school girls. The film points out clearly that father and daughter have done this before and that especially Lola is a sheer monster. Not because her violence seems to have no boundaries–Lola is finally portrayed as completely monstrous when she becomes less sexually devoted to Brent, who starts to resist her. In the course of them dancing together, she admits to her overwhelmed father: “Your are the prince, that’s why I can’t find what I want. It’s you, it has always been you, Daddy.” The indicated kiss between them is stopped by Brent, who escapes and kills Lola’s father, what finally marks the restoration of sexual normativity and social order respectively.
Monstrous desire: Lola and her father
In the end Lola represents abnormity, because she has violently abandoned her family. She not only cut the ties to her mother, like Andie does in Pretty in Pink, she also lobotomized and killed her. Lola’s sexual desire toward her father led to his death by Brent’s hand. When she is eventually killed by Brent and his girlfriend, it seems like the only plausible solution: disappointment. Not only is The Loved Ones not a feminist film, it’s also not a revenge-fantasy or even a film about a cool, crazed, pink female killer. It’s about a path of ordeals of a young man, who finds – after rightfully killing his sexually deviant female torturer – his long lost place in society with a more or less silent girlfriend.
Steffen Loick is doing his PhD on the relationship between gender identity and body optimation at Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, German. Ingrid Bettwieser just finished school and works as an extracurricular educator at a memorial in Berlin, Germany.
‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ (1951), a classic movie based on a Tennessee Williams play, presents how society shapes, shelters, and shames female sexuality. Williams is well-known for writing plays that dealt with the gender-specific issues women faced, sympathizing with the way women were kept from being whole and balanced human beings.
A Streetcar Named Desire poster
This guest post by Nia McRae appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire
For better or worse, sexuality can be deeply influenced by social expectations. Even with the independence women have gained, it’s been reported that one of the top fantasies women have involve being dominated by a man in the bedroom. There’s nothing wrong with that, but what does it say about our biology, or social conditioning, or both? A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a classic movie based on a Tennessee Williams play, explores this question. It presents how society shapes, shelters, and shames female sexuality. Williams is well-known for writing plays that dealt with the gender-specific issues women faced, sympathizing with the way women were kept from being whole and balanced human beings.
Stanley Kowalski is probably the best remembered character Marlon Brando played in the early part of his acting career. The female gaze shows up in different forms regarding the character of Stanley Kowalski. Stan’s body is the one that is objectified. Kim Hunter’s Stella exhibits whatever the female equivalent is of “thinking with your penis,” because she’s both excited and hypnotized by his ruggedness and looks. Blanche, played by Vivien Leigh, isn’t unaware of his physical charms either. When Blanche first meets Stan, the camera operates as Blanche’s eyes, admiring the way muscle-bound Stan looks in his tight, sweat-stained clothing. It is unmistakably not love at first sight but lust at first sight, which is surprising because a woman being depicted as having the same carnal desires as a man was unheard of in the 1950s.
Blanche and Stanley: lust at first sight
Marlon Brando’s performance is the main aspect that gets talked about (understandably so), but the way female desires are acknowledged is impressive too. Movies during Hollywood’s Golden Age usually catered to the stereotype of only men being sexual creatures. Women were only shown as using sex to receive gifts or money or marriage, never enjoying sex for the sake of sexual gratification. Marilyn Monroe is a great example of this. She is considered one of the most famous sex symbols of all time but as was expected of women in her time, she was always shown as the object of desire and never the person desiring. In movies, her characters were typically ogling material things a man had, never the man himself. Of course, maybe if her leading man was Marlon Brando, it would have been different.
A topless Marlon Brando as Stanley
Before the audience can become too transfixed by Stan’s looks, the movie wisely demonstrates that what works as a lustful fantasy may backfire in real life. Stan doesn’t keep his wildness contained like Stella prefers which leads to devastating consequences by the end of the movie (I’ll revisit this later). At a card game with his friends, he smacks his wife on the butt and she chastises him. She tells Blanche afterwards that she doesn’t like when he does that in front of company, implying that she only approves of spanking when they are alone. It can be deduced that, like a lot of women, Stella wants “a gentleman in the streets and a caveman in the bedroom.” In an example of life imitating art, Marlon Brando explained in an interview once that many of his paramours requested he be “Stanley” during intercourse.
The problem with Stan is that he isn’t playing the part of a caveman simply to titillate his wife. He really is a caveman; he’s emotionally stunted, he’s insecure. and he’s short-tempered.
Stanley loses his temper. Stella and Blanche cower.
He’s everything patriarchy tells him a “real man” is supposed to be and Stella is both seduced and repulsed by it. Whenever he goes too far, she runs away but she always returns back to him. It can be argued that the wife keeps running back to Stan because she is blinded by love. But realistically, love involves respect, which she doesn’t have for him. Stan seems to be viewed by his wife as only good for two things: love-making and money-making. She laughs at his attempts at being smart. For example, when Stan tried to explain to her what a “Napoleonic Code” is, she responds like someone who is humoring a baby’s nonsensical ramblings.
Along with her sister, Blanche can be condescending to Stan too. Her condescension is more obvious than Stella’s and in one scene, Stan blows up at Blanche for talking down to him. This type of dynamic is usually gender-flipped. Stan is the male equivalent of the bimbo archetype; he’s eye candy that the sisters enjoy looking at and possibly sleeping with and not much else. He’s not too bright but that doesn’t matter because the wife clearly didn’t marry him for his mind. She’s the one with the brains, which is evidenced again in one scene where she explains to him what rhinestones are. She’s married to a man who doesn’t respect her and who, honestly, she doesn’t respect either. Their marriage seems to be based on carnal feelings only. So, the more accurate description of what Stella feels for Stan is lust.
Stella is living in a bodice-ripper fantasy gone awry. There’s a part in the movie where, after a night of seemingly amazing make-up sex with Stan, Stella regales Blanche about her and Stan’s wedding night, explaining that he broke all the light bulbs and how that “excited” her. Blanche tries her best to talk sense into her, reminding her of the importance of valuing civilization and gentleness over barbarism. Just when it seems like Blanche is getting through to her, in walks Stan with something that is framed as more powerful than reason–animal magnetism. The camera works as Stella’s eyes, admiring how he looks in grease-stained tank top, sweaty from his mechanic work. Stella ogles him and jumps into his arms as if to suggest she’s ready for another round of make-up sex.
But even if Stan is treated like a sex toy, he’s not willing to be quiet like one. He’s boisterous, rude, entitled, and disrespectful to both Blanche and Stella. Much like a child who is willing to either scream or cry to get his way, Stan is not above resorting to theatrics to win her favor which is evidenced in the iconic scene where Stan drops to his knees, tears his shirt open and screams “STELLA!” which is followed by her walking sensually down the stairs and embracing him.
Stanley and Stella sensually embrace
While it’s great that female sexuality is being presented, it can be argued that this movie is doing the time-honored tradition of only presenting female sexuality in order to condemn it. Does this movie want us to use Stella as a lesson on why it’s wrong for women to embrace themselves as sexual creatures?
I think the answer can be found in the scene where Karl Malden’s character, Mitch, finds out that Blanche has a past. He slut-shames her, likening her to damaged goods even though, up until now, he had been depicted as a nice and understanding guy. But even though Malden shames her, Blanche is never framed as the bad guy. It’s easy to sympathize with her character as someone who wasn’t given the proper tools in life to handle tough situations. Her sexuality isn’t the enemy, it’s her naiveté that is. A Streetcar Named Desire makes an important point about the importance of teaching your daughters to be self-sufficient. It is hinted at that the sisters grew up sheltered and privileged, causing them to be immature and emotionally undeveloped. Once her husband committed suicide, Blanche looked for love in all the wrong places. And in a society that teaches women to be fantasies, Blanche unquestioningly avoided being true to herself.
Stella, on the other hand, rebelled in an unhealthy way. She embraced the cruelties of life in the form of Stan. Neither sister found balance because men and women weren’t conditioned to be whole people. When Stan criticizes Blanche, Stella defends her and explains she’s fragile and broken from mean people being so harsh to her. This scene gives us further insight into Blanche. She enjoys creating a fictional world rather than facing the harshness of reality. As many middle to upper class white women historically were, she was babied and it kept her from learning how to be a stable adult. By the end, adding to the theme of barbarity smothering gentleness, Blanche is raped by Stanley, which utterly destroys any mental stability she had left.
Stanley did it because he resented Blanche thinking she was smarter and better than him. Finding out about her soiled past made him feel entitled to harming her. After all, traditionally, an unmarried woman who is impure is worthless. The sexual assault is his twisted way of reclaiming manhood by destroying her spirit–this confirms he is patriarchy personified. Blanche’s ending line is one of the most often quoted: “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Part of Blanche’s tragedy is that she was too dependent on other people taking care of her. She was never allowed to grow and take care of herself. That’s why I don’t think the movie is condemning female sexuality but more so showing female sexuality as a reality in the lives of two sisters whose sheltered upbringing and gendered socialization influenced them both to make questionable life choices.
Maybe if she lived in today’s America, Blanche could have learned to be self-reliant and to engage in sexual activity for gratification rather than self-esteem. Unfortunately, slut-shaming would still be a reality but at least she could be empowered enough to better handle it and stand up for herself. And maybe if raised differently in a more enlightened era, Stella could live out her bodice-ripper fantasy with a man who behaved properly outside the bedroom. The men suffer too. Stanley’s insecurity is driven by being the product of an unhealthy definition of masculinity. By the end of the movie, it’s obvious that Mitch still cares for Blanche but his sexist ideas about female purity stifles his chance with her. Maybe if he lived in a more enlightened era, his knee-jerk reaction to Blanche’s past promiscuity wouldn’t have been so rash and backwards.
Overall, Streetcar is showing the downfalls of letting lust eclipse your reason while doing the rare thing of showcasing female sexuality in the context of a society that dismissed and condemned it. Tennessee Williams was a gay man who is noted for having a great deal of empathy toward women. He also knew the frustration of living in a time period that demanded his sexuality be repressed (except in his case it wasn’t due to his gender but due to his sexual orientation). That’s why A Streetcar Named Desire shouldn’t be dismissed as another cautionary tale that warns women not to embrace desires. On the contrary, this is a story that condemns society for keeping women from being stable, whole, and sexual human beings.
However, female desire occasionally lives in the subtext of ‘Mad Men’ like fire ants fighting to dig themselves out of a mountain of sand. The show’s complex female characters are regularly lusted after, and at times brave leaps are taken into the sea of their cravings. Other times, their behaviors appear inconsistent, and it seems we’ve been cheated out of crucial discoveries that lurk just beneath their surfaces.
The women of Mad Men
This guest post by Danielle Winston appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.
The glossy backdrop for AMC’s Mad Men is the high-stakes Manhattan advertising game, namely the office of Sterling Cooper. Set right smack dab in the feminist revolution, when season 1 takes off, it’s 1960: the year birth control pills received approval by the FDA.
Mad Men’s stylized universe revolves around the Jagger of the ad world: the ever-enigmatic Don Draper (Jon Hamm).
Fascinating women surround Don at Sterling Cooper. And sometimes just looking at Mr. Tall Dark and Dreamy can steam up their Ray Bans, but more often, he’s so exasperating they struggle with the urge to whack some sense into him with their clutch purses.
The infamous Don Draper
In between writing copy for Lucky Strike, pitching the Cool Whip clients, and lunching at the automat, the men of Sterling Cooper swig scotch and flirt so unabashedly with the secretaries, their actions often cross over into sexual harassment territory, which is totally cool, since it hadn’t been invented yet. Meanwhile, the lucky ladies at the receiving end usually proffer demure smiles, and make sure to reveal just enough ankle real estate to warrant their attentions. As these women partake in the flirtation-dance, their longings are kept under wraps, not unlike the tattered copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which magically opens to the “good parts by itself,” and is tossed around amongst the giddy secretarial pool behind closed doors.
Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) arrives at Sterling Cooperfresh out of Miss Deaver’s Secretarial School with a bouncy ponytail and can-do attitude. Given the demanding position of Donald Draper’s latest secretary, Peggy is uneasy when she finds herself flooded with salacious stares from countless male coworkers. Soon Peggy becomes so distressed by an unwanted sexual advance from a copywriter, she can’t do her work. When she confides in her supervisor, Joan, instead of being met with empathy, Joan tells her that a plain-Jane like Peggy should enjoy her “new girl” status, considering the extra attention surely won’t last. What Joan doesn’t realize is, however naïve Peggy may appear, she is far more clever than her facade suggests, and will zoom up the corporate ladder like no woman ever has at Sterling Cooper.
A young and eager Peggy
The first hint into Peggy’s sexual attitude is her visit to a gynecologist, where she hopes to procure a prescription for birth control pills. But with sexual freedom comes the price tag of humiliation. While in the stirrups, the smarmy male doctor advises Peggy that pills are “$11 a pop,” so she shouldn’t become “the town-pump just to get her money’s worth.” And if that’s not enough to scare the sexy out of Peggy, he adds with a smirk that if she dares to “abuse the privilege,” he will revoke her prescription.
Peggy doesn’t scare easily. She’s highly complex. In perhaps in the first glimpse into her private desires, while alone in the office with Don, Peggy places a warm hand atop his, and lets it linger a beat too long. Put off by the advance, Don tells her, “I’m not your boyfriend,” and sends her a strong message to never to veer into this territory again. Don’s reaction is tricky to comprehend, especially since he’s established as a philanderer. Is this sudden bout of professionalism sincere? Is Peggy simply not his type? Or is the mere fact that Peggy made the first move such a turnoff it immediately labels her as undesirable?
Peggy doesn’t scare easily
Even more curious is Peggy’s experience with another maddening man: Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser). When she first meets the engaged but overly flirtatious account man who is known for his poor manners with women, Pete’s overtures makes Peggy so uneasy she refuses to wait alone with him, even for a few minutes. The encounter takes an unexpected turn when later that evening, Pete shows up at Peggy’s apartment door, drunk, and confesses he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Instead of sending him away and/or slapping the sleaze out of him, Peggy takes him to bed. Was Peggy so flattered by Pete’s desire it awoke her own? Perhaps Don’s rebuff caused Peggy’s powers of sexual reasoning to be muddied. Then, when the liaison leaves her pregnant, Peggy hasn’t a clue. She believes she’s merely gotten fat. It’s not until the startling episode where she gives birth that Peggy discovers the truth. Afterward, she gives the baby to a relative to raise and resumes her life as a single woman.
Soon Don recognizes Peggy’s creative talents, promotes her, and she becomes a successful copywriter. As Peggy evolves, she rises through the ranks on merit, and along the way has a potpourri of unsatisfying boyfriends and love affairs.
Fast-forward to season 6: Peggy’s new boss, the earnest (and married) Ted (Kevin Rahm), confesses romantic feelings for her. During this time, Peggy’s desire is illustrated, as she longs for the man she can’t have. Unable to resist Ted, Peggy falls hard for him. In a love scene where she finally surrenders to her feelings, we witness Peggy’s intense burn. Sadly, instead of finding love, her hopes are dashed the next day when a guilt-ridden Ted leaves New York and decides to stay with his wife. More insight into her desire: Peggy can’t shake lingering feelings for Ted, and they carry over into season 7. So passionate is Peggy when she believes Ted has sent her long-stemmed red roses, she all but shreds them in front of her secretary, Shirley (Sola Bamis), only to discover that they were never hers in the first place, much like dear, old Ted.
The commanding Joan Holloway
When we first meet the head secretary, Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks), she’s the scarlet-haired bombshell showing Peggy the ropes. Joan’s girlish tips to Peggy include that she should reveal more ankle and put a paper bag with eyeholes over her head. Peggy should then stand in front of a mirror naked and assess the plusses and minuses. Joan has learned to use her womanly wiles to her advantage but it’s her keen intuitive sense and expert problem-solving skills that make her an indispensable asset in the workplace.
Carefree about her sexual persona, Joan often dresses in red to accentuate her ample curves, and early in the show’s run, she enjoys an affair with her married boss, Roger Sterling (John Slattery), and chooses to keep a no-strings-attached vibe. This woman has lovers, flirts with ease, and when she doesn’t feel like paying for lunch, allows the men in the office the privilege of treating her.
After playing the field with finesse, Joan falls in love with a handsome medical student, Greg Harris (Gerald Downey), and it looks as though she’ll have the American dream, something we never dreamed she ever wanted. But all goes sour when Greg discovers that Joan has been intimate with a host of other men before him, and in a fit of rage, he rapes her. Instead of leaving him, as we would expect from the strong-willed, take-no-bullshit Joan, she does the unthinkable… and marries him. And then, even though she is unfulfilled in her marriage, with the exception of a quickie with her ex-lover Roger after they’re both mugged (this is less about desire and more about comfort), Joan is faithful to her husband the whole time he is away in the army.
Later in the series, in a rare scene, Joan and Don play hooky from work, and over cocktails at a bar, Joan asks him if he was ever interested in her. With a whiskey buzz, Don confesses when he met Joan that she scared the pants off him. Not surprising. Even though Joan is a portrayed as a highly sexual being, her longings are mainly alluded to, leaving very little of Joan’s desires reflected on screen. Instead we are given a few heated sighs and eyebrow-raises in Don Draper’s direction, and left to wonder about what might have been. Perhaps Joan is just too much woman for even the writers who created her to deal with, and the notion of a scene that fully realizes her sexual persona would scare the pants off them, too.
In season 7, Joan turns down a chance to settle into a loveless marriage with her gay friend before her “expiration date” at age 40. Joan confides to him that she wants more, and intends to hold out for real love. Vixen façade aside, it would seem Joan is a romantic at heart.
A tousled Betty
At the beginning of the series, Betty Draper (January Jones), a passive aggressive former model, is Don’s wife. Betty, devoid of self-awareness, lies in bed after making love, stares at her gorgeous sleeping husband, her entire universe… and doesn’t understand why he is not just enough. Betty’s longing goes far beyond the sexual realm; she aches to have a sense of self, submerges her feelings, and overeats to fill the void. When very pregnant, Betty meets the distinguished Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley), a local politician, at a charity event; Henry makes it clear that he’s attracted to Betty while he caresses her belly. The incident causes Betty’s desire to spike in a new way: afterward, she fantasizes about buying a decadent rose satin chaise lounge, even though it clashes with everything in her home. And romantic daydreams of Henry haunt her married life. Finally, when he doesn’t appear at a function in her home, Betty storms into Henry’s office. Flushed with white-hot rage, she throws papers at him and demands to know why he didn’t show up. Then Henry confesses that he was waiting for her to make the first move because she is married. What follows is a kiss that uncorks the bottled-up longings Betty has squelched throughout her relationship with Don. At that moment we see Betty as a sensual creature, hungering for a man other than her husband.
Megan and Don
By season 5, Don has split up with Betty and is married to Megan Draper (Jessica Pare), who seems the polar opposite of Betty. A French Canadian, willowy brunette in her early 20s, Megan represents the new generation of women. She is free-spirited enough to reject a successful career in advertising alongside Don to pursue her dream of being an actress, much to the bafflement of those around her. Unlike passive aggressive Betty, Megan knows what she wants, and possesses the drive to get it.
Naturally, Megan’s uninhibited attitude translates to her sexuality. In the much talked about season 5 episode, “A Little Kiss,” Megan throws Don a surprise 40th birthday party, and invites his coworkers. As a romantic gift, she sings Don the French song about love and kissing, “Zou Bisou Bisou,” and dances coquettishly in his direction, dressed in an elegant black chiffon mini-dress. Megan’s performance is far more sweet than salacious, and yet the gesture serves as such an aphrodisiac, consequently men’s throats go dry, and overheated couples flee the party. And Don? He becomes so embarrassed he can hardly look at his lovely wife. After a playful and refreshing display of feminine sexuality, Don is left feeling so raw and exposed that he refuses to have sex with his wife as punishment for her unladylike actions. Interestingly, Don wasn’t the only one who overreacted. The episode’s aftermath caused the twitterverse to go bizerk. #ZouBisouBisou erupted with such Nascar speed, anyone who hadn’t seen the show simply had to know what all the fuss was about. Meanwhile, on HBO, scads of Dawn Age women were lounging around naked on Game of Thrones, and sadomasochistic vampires were having unsafe vamp sex on True Blood, not causing half the stir. How is this possible? Is female longing really that shocking? Or, are we so desensitized to the objectification of women and simultaneously starved for a glimpse into real female desire that when a moment finally makes it on screen, it proves intensely provocative.
Megan sings and dances at Don’s birthday party
In another bold move by Megan this season, after she discovers Don has been lying to her for a year about his job, she stands up to him and tells him, “This is how it ends.” Then, in a perplexing following episode, not only is there is no mention of their breakup, it’s as though a Stepford-Megan has stepped into Megan’s heels. No longer assertive, she appears wilted and insecure, when under the guise of kindness, she pays off a pregnant quasi-relative of Don’s to leave town, worried he might be attracted to her. And if that’s not enough for us to wonder where the actual Megan Draper has gone, she invites her girlfriend over and convinces Don to have a ménage a trois with them, even though Don seems rather bored with the whole idea. Sadly, instead of a display of desire, this appears a last ditch act of desperation to spice up her marriage by acting out a cliché male fantasy.
Many of Mad Men’s most compelling moments exist in the quiet, and that’s part of its brilliance. However, female desire occasionally lives in the subtext of Mad Men like fire ants fighting to dig themselves out of a mountain of sand. The show’s complex female characters are regularly lusted after, and at times brave leaps are taken into the sea of their cravings. Other times, their behaviors appear inconsistent, and it seems we’ve been cheated out of crucial discoveries that lurk just beneath their surfaces.
Danielle Winston is a Manhattan-based freelance writer, screenwriter/director. Her latest project is a psychological thriller called Hands of Fate. Find her on twitter @winstonwrites @Handsoffatefilm.
The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.
Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.
“… a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed.”
– Catherine Breillat
French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has spent her career exploring female sexuality. She hasn’t done so in a comfortable, easy way. When The Woman says to The Man, “Watch me where I’m unwatchable” in Anatomy of Hell, this could very well be Breillat’s message to her audiences as she presents female desire in harsh, jarring narratives that completely subvert the male gaze.
Normally, if we talk about subverting the male gaze and focusing on the female gaze in film, it’s cause for celebration. Finally! We scream. We’re coming!
Breillat’s female gaze is different, though. It pushes us to places of complete discomfort and sometimes disgust, and forces and challenges us to think about the deeply twisted cultural expectations surrounding women and sex.
Sometimes a shock is what it takes to bring us to places of transfiguration. We can’t smoothly transition to the female gaze after centuries of being surrounded and objectified by the male gaze. Breillat delivers shock after shock that serve to transfigure how we see ourselves and our culture. This isn’t comfortable, but it’s powerful.
The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.
A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille)
Breillat’s first film, based off her novel, Le Soupirail, was A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille). Produced in 1976, it was quickly banned and wasn’t released in France until 1999. The film centers around 14-year-old Alice, who is discovering and attempting to navigate her sexual awakening. A Real Young Girl is avant-garde puberty.
There are moments in the film that are confusing and grotesque (most notably one of her fantasies that involves barbed wire and a ripped-up earthworm). While I found some of these scenes disturbing, I like being disturbed. The worm scene horrified me at first, but then I realized that when I was in high school, the hit teen comedy involved a dude literally fucking a pie. Teenage sexuality is weird and when we are faced with a teen girl’s sexuality–something we are not used to seeing (unless she is a sexual object)–in all of its confusion and vacillation between intense desire and disgust, we are uncomfortable. Breillat wants us to be uncomfortable; she wants to push us to the edge to that visceral experience that will challenge how we see both female sexuality and film depictions of female sexuality.
Fat Girl (À ma sœur!)
Fat Girl(À ma sœur!), released in 2001, follows two sisters–Elena, 15, and Anaïs, 12–as they vacation with their parents. Elena is conventionally beautiful, and while she likes boys and has experimented sexually, she wants to remain a virgin until she’s with someone who “loves” her. She quickly develops a relationship with a young man who is frustrated with her desire to not have sex. He pressures her into anal sex (which hurts her), tries to force her to have oral sex, and finally convinces her he loves her and she has sex with him. In all of these instances, Anaïs is in the room–feigning sleep, asking them to stop, or, when they finally have sex, crying.
Anaïs’s views on sex are very different than Elena’s. She is starting to feel sexual–she’s not a teenager yet, but she’s not a child. Her desires range from banana splits to having sex just to get it over with. She has sexual desires, and her responses to Elena’s sexual experiences show both naiveté and jealousy. Their ages, their exterior looks, their sexual experiences (or lack thereof) all inform Breillat’s treatment of the sisters’ relationship with one another, with their own burgeoning sexuality, and with a culture that insists on sexualizing Elena and ignoring Anaïs. Their desires–Elena as internalized (and then disappointed) object, Anaïs as frustrated subject–are common categories for adolescent girls to fall into.
Fat Girl (read Breillat’s commentary on the title here) is disturbing in its depictions of some of Elena and Anaïs’s experiences. However, the end of the film is shocking and violent. After Elena and her mother are brutally killed at a rest stop, the murderer rapes Anaïs in the woods. The next morning, she tells the police she wasn’t raped, and she looks at the camera, in an ending that clearly reflects The 400 Blows. Like the Truffaut classic, we are saddened and disturbed at the life trajectory of our young protagonists, and have no idea where their lives will go from here. We just have a frozen young face staring at us, implicating us in their fate.
Anaïs, at the end, seems to embrace her rape (as her meaningless loss of virginity that she wanted) and deny its violence. This is made even more traumatic since her rapist murdered her mother and sister (her sister who had just become sexually active, and her mother who wanted to punish her for it).
The message here is that girls cannot win. A patriarchal culture–full of boys who think they’re entitled to sex and men who violently rape and kill women–cares little for female desire and agency. This world is a dangerous place for girls. This world treats pretty girls like objects, and unpretty girls like nothing. Their desires are complicated and real, but are eclipsed by toxic masculinity.
Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer)
Released in 2004, Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie De L’Enfer) is a film that pulls together pornography, misogyny, and female sexuality in a way that shocks and disgusts (male reviewers in particular wrote scathing, condescending reviews of the film). The Woman visits a gay bar and attempts suicide in the bathroom–she is tired of being a woman and being hated by men, and surmises that gay men hate women the most. The Man, however, saves her and she offers to pay him to stay in her home for four days to “watch her where she is unwatchable.” What follows is, for some viewers, unwatchable.
The Woman is naked for most of the film (a body double is used for vaginal shots), and The Man is played by an Italian porn star. His homosexuality serves to completely upend the typical male gaze. He’s disgusted by much of what he’s seeing and experiencing, and the understanding that this primal, visceral, shocking female desire is at the focus of the film (and has absolutely nothing to do with male desire) reflects a culture that typically focuses only on the male gaze and male pleasure. In this culture, female sexuality isn’t a consideration.
When The Man drinks a glass of water with a used-tampon teabag, certainly the audience is meant to feel disgust. Perhaps some audience members actually gagged at the sight. How many scenes, however, in porn (explicitly) or mainstream film (suggested), feature women swallowing male excretions? Do we blink? Or is it just part of what we expect it means to be a heterosexual woman?
Jamie Russell astutely observes at the BBC, “For all the shocks, though, this is a stoically serious movie: it’s anti-porn, a transgressive sex movie that’s not against pornography but against the (male-dominated) objectification of women’s bodies.”
Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.
In an interview with The Guardian, Breillat articulated that her female gaze should directly threaten the male gaze, and that men should examine their own sexuality in the face of female desire:
“It’s a joke – if men can’t desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?”
The reporter points out that Breillat had said “that censorship was a male pre-occupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome,” and Breillat goes on to discuss the religious and patriarchal reasons to censor female desire, which is directly connected to keeping power away from women.
Breillat’s 1999 Romance was originally given an X rating (or banned in some countries). At Senses of Cinema, Brian Price notes that “Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.”
Romance
And that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Breillat’s work pushes boundaries and forces us to live in the intense intimacy and discomfort of a female gaze that we are unused to due to social oppression of women and women’s sexuality (at the hands of patriarchal religious and government systems). The literal and figurative red X over Breillat’s work–and female sexuality–needs to be stripped away to reveal what’s underneath–which isn’t always pretty.
