Bitch Flicks – Page 114 – The radical notion that women like good movies

Sexual Desire on ‘The X-Files’: An Open (Love) Letter to Dana Scully

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.

This guest post by Caitlin Keefe Moran appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

But what about you? Why do we get such a cursory glimpse into your passions? How is it possible that in nine years we only see you go on two dates, Scully? (Three if we’re counting that one weird dinner with the Smoking Man… Lord help us if that was a date.) And when we finally do see you express interest in someone…oh, Lord. Remember him? The guy with the hallucinogenic tattoo? You were pretty into him; plus you felt stagnant in your personal life, and Mulder wouldn’t give you the damn desk. And it was nice to see you let loose a little bit, honestly. You even got a terrible lower-back tattoo of a snake biting its own tail, which… OK it’s not what I would have picked for you, but hey! You were living. All this fun goes sour when this dude’s tattoo tells him to murder you after you slept together. That you slept with him at all is conjecture—the camera pans away before we even see you kiss him, which is much more prudery than the show’s directors ever exercised with Mulder. Tattoo guy tries to put you in his building’s incinerator. It wasn’t pretty.

Did it seem to you that the message you were supposed to get was, “Whoa, rein it in there, girlie! Don’t go flaunting those goods all over town!”? Because that’s what it seems like to me. Expressing your sexuality makes you vulnerable, the message goes, and, if the snake tattoo is any indication, faintly ridiculous. Expressing your sexuality makes you shameful. Expressing your sexuality makes you deserving of punishment.

Or how about Padgett, the writer who stalked you? Remember him? John Hawkes at his most moon-eyed and creepy? He might be the king of the all the men lining up to mansplain your feelings to you (though he’s only slightly ahead of the Smoking Man and his “wall around your heart” speech. STFU, Smoking Man). He has a lot to say (and write) about the way you present or hide yourself as a woman, and it hurts because it’s pretty much all true (and because he’s straight-up bonkers). Padgett watched you for long enough to read your insecurities as if they were typed out in one of his manuscripts—and sometimes they are. He knows that you downplay your femininity as much as possible so your (almost exclusively male) coworkers will take you seriously, because, as Padgett puts it, “to be thought of as simply beautiful was bridling, unthinkable.”

In fact, most of the women on The X-Files only show their sexuality when they are outside of themselves. Sometimes they’re controlled by an unusual alignment of the planets, like Detective White in “Syzygy.” Other times they’re products of a male fantasy (or an artificial intelligence’s approximation of a male fantasy), like the nurses in Kill Switch, or a lingerie-clad Diana Fowley in The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati. It would make sense, then, that you would want to keep your sexuality on lockdown beneath the frumpy blazers (also: it was the 90s). But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating to see you squash any hint of womanhood (let alone sexuality) because any hint would be unwelcome in the testosterone cloud of the FBI.

I wish you had a female friend, Scully. We hardly ever see you talk to another woman, much less confide in one. It’s not like she has to be your bosom buddy or anything. Just a pal you can get drinks with after work, blow off some steam, swap stories about your frustrating coworkers. Maybe you two could talk about what you want, at work, in bed, in life. As people. If only Monica Reyes could have shown up a couple of seasons earlier. I like to imagine the two of you at a drunk brunch, bonding over pumpkin spice pancakes with maple bacon glaze and a gallon-sized bucket of Bloody Marys. There’s strength in numbers, after all. Maybe with the two of you together, everything wouldn’t have seemed so….buttoned-up. Maybe with someone to talk through your anxieties with, you and Mulder wouldn’t have waited seven years to…but never mind, that’s a whole other article.

Let’s talk about Baby William for a second. Your miracle baby. Your super soldier. Your half-alien messiah. The Christ allegory in the Season 8 finale was slathered on so thick we could have spooned it off and eaten it. The lowly birthplace, the star of Bethlehem (which was, what, a spaceship? Do we ever figure that out?), the Lone Gunmen showing up after the fact with gifts like the Three Wise Men. But what does this say about you, Scully? The virgin mother of the miracle child. Immaculate and without sin. Clean. It takes us a season and a half to learn that you weren’t, in fact, visited by the Holy Spirit, or the aliens, or the government; your baby was born of sexual intercourse with another human being, like most other babies. But we don’t get to see this moment, with Mulder, no less, the love of your life—instead we hear it described callously by an NSA agent, who had the whole place bugged. Why is this, Scully? Is it because once presented with the idea that you might be a sexual being, we couldn’t see you any other way? That we wouldn’t be able to take you seriously as a person if we understood that you could, just possibly, desire sex?

It certainly seemed that way in “Three of a Kind,” when the Lone Gunmen snooker you into helping them spy on a Defense Department contractor’s convention in Las Vegas. Of course you remember this, Scully—when a government operative injected you with an anoetic histamine that inhibited your intellect so you would forget the damning results of the autopsy you just finished? You certainly were silly then, trying to push a table bolted to the floor as if it was a rolling cart, tickling strangers at whim. Everyone attributed it to jetlag until you found your way to the hotel lobby and began flirting with the assembled contractors. The sight of you seductively taking a cigarette out of Morris Fletcher’s (admittedly skeezy) fingers so disturbed Lone Gunmen member Frohike that he grabbed you and immediately brought you in for evaluation. Message: a flirting Scully isn’t Scully at all. Sexual desire is something you’re above. You roll your eyes at Mulder’s innuendo and come-ons, because you are a Serious Woman, doing Serious Work. The roles you can play are proscribed by your gender, even as you have greater freedom than many of television’s women, what with the gun-touting and the badge-flashing. But there is a limit to this freedom: sexual desire is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. And in the face of this danger, sometimes it’s just easier to clam up and clamp down. To go quiet. But Scully, I wanted so much more for you.

Caitlin Keefe Moran is an editor in New York City. Her work has appeared on The Toast, in The Iowa Review, and other outlets. She lives in Queens and feels passionately about donuts and splitting infinitives as a form of protest.

Of Phallic Keys and Ugly Masturbation: Let’s Talk About ‘Mulholland Drive’

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.

Written by Katherine Murray as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

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.

Mulholland Drive (2001), more colloquially known as “Mulholland WTF Did I Just Watch?” is a story told in two parts, both of which were written and directed by David Lynch.

In the first part, Laura Harring plays Rita, a woman who escapes attempted murder but ends up with amnesia and doesn’t remember who she is or what’s going on. She stumbles across Betty (Naomi Watts), a plucky go-getter and brilliant actress who’s come to LA to launch her career, and Betty decides to Nancy Drew this thing by helping Rita piece together her identity. Along the way, they discover the body of a woman named Diane, who killed herself, and briefly run across an actress named Camilla who’s cast in a leading role as result of mob-related conspiracies.

Betty and Rita start a sexual relationship and go to a creepy post-modern theatre where everything is a facade. Then, Rita finds a magic blue box, and stuffs a key inside, at which point all of the characters and plot points go through a blender and the story starts again.

This time Naomi Watts is playing Diane, a failed actress who’s in love with her much more successful best friend, Camilla (Laura Harring). Camilla’s dating a man, which makes Diane insanely jealous, and, when she finally can’t take it anymore, she hires a hitman to murder Camilla and then feels guilty and shoots herself.

The most straightforward interpretation of the movie – and therefore, the one I will steadfastly cling to – is that the second story, about Diane and Camilla, is “true,” whereas the first story is a fantasy created by crazy Diane as a way to escape from her pain.

The first story shows Diane’s alter-ego, Betty, as being capable, likable, talented, and charming. She totally kills her first audition (even after being placed in an awkward position by her co-star), she lives in a beautiful apartment (owned by her aunt, who isn’t present), and she has a timeless, youthful appearance that invokes the sense of an earlier era.

Diane’s idealized version of Camilla is Rita, who takes her name from Rita Hayworth, also invoking the sense of an era gone by. In contrast to Betty, Rita is vacant and dependent, constantly deferring to Betty’s judgement and praising Betty’s abilities without offering any ideas of her own. She’s also the one who initiates their sexual relationship, which frees Betty/Diane from having to feel responsible for it.

The first two thirds of the movie, then, is a story about the way things should have been, from Diane’s perspective – the way, perhaps, that she imagined they would be, before her youthful optimism was crushed by the film industry. So, what do we make of the fact that Diane’s such a creepball?

Because, make no mistake, now – Diane is a creepball. She behaves in a way that makes Camilla uncomfortable; she pretends to be Camilla’s friend while simmering with hatred, envy, and jealousy from the sidelines; she has Camilla killed (which is creepball enough); and her ultimate fantasy is one in which Camilla’s not even a person, but rather a prop in a story about how great Diane is. To drive it all home, the second story treats us to a long, ugly scene where Diane angrily cries while she masturbates, because that’s what her life has become. She is president of the Friend Zone, but the lesbian aspect adds an extra layer of discomfort.

The first part of the film, with Betty and Rita, feels uncanny and bizarre, like you’d expect from a David Lynch movie. You’re not going to sit there and think, “My, what a beautiful love story that isn’t unnerving at all,” but there’s a sense in which the lesbian romance is not a big deal. You’re just watching two attractive, basically likable people, with no secret, evil agendas, who decide to get it on. It’s a nice change from the way lesbianism was portrayed as sinister and corrupting in Ye Olde Hollywood – and that change lasts exactly as long as it takes for Rita to stick a key in a box and uncover the truth.

I haven’t checked to see, but I bet there’s a paper out there about what it means that one of the lesbian characters discovers her true identity as a straight woman after sticking that key in the box. I’m just saying. I won’t subject you to that kind of symbol analysis, but I do think it’s significant that, after we’re shown such a nice, cuddly picture of lesbian intimacy – like, almost right after – it turns out that Diane is a creeper who’s destined to wind up alone.

The trope of the lesbian friend who weasels her way into your life while secretly creeping on you is something that’s on the way out, but it still exists. You can see it, for example, in Notes on a Scandal, where Judi Dench pretends to be friends with Cate Blanchett while secretly stealing her hair. Somehow, she ends up looking like more of a creep than the woman who’s having sex with a 15-year-old boy.

The question for Mulholland Drive – and I confess that I don’t know the answer – is whether we’re supposed to see Diane’s situation as being universal to the human condition, or as being specifically wrought by her sexual preference. In other words, is this a story about envy and disappointment – the illusions we hold about ourselves, our regret when we don’t live up to our own expectations, our sense of being duped by the images we grew up watching on TV – or is it a story about how lesbians creep on their straight friends? Is Diane’s desire supposed to be creepy because she objectifies Camilla and wants to strip her of agency – because she feels entitled to have Camilla belong to her in a way that is creepy, regardless of gender – or is her desire creepy because she’s a girl?

I think it’s possible that the answer to all of those questions is, “Yes.” Mulholland Drive is a movie that, in many ways, could be about anyone but that, in being about a lesbian, connotes something different than if Diane were, instead, a straight man (or a woman in love with a man – or any other combination there might be). Notwithstanding recent events, as a culture, we’re much more relaxed about men who want to possess women than we are about women who want to possess. The experience of wanting something that doesn’t want you back is filtered very differently, depending on how much privilege we have, and Diane is rejected in a specifically woebegone, Hollywood lesbian way – a way that is, sadly, in keeping with the golden age of cinema she thinks she wants to resurrect.

That said, Mulholland Drive doesn’t feel like its trying to say something really self-reflexive and insightful about the way lesbians have historically been portrayed in film – it feels more like Diane is just creepy. But her creepiness is only one layer in a multi-faceted approach to character that touches on Big Themes of longing, regret, and self-hatred – so, it’s both. It is both a story about our universal humanity, and how lesbian friends are the worst. Complete with phallic keys and ugly masturbation.

Recommended Reading: After Ellen’s review of Notes on a Scandal, AMC’s blog post: Movie History – Why Are There So Few Lesbian Romance Films With Positive Endings?

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

‘But I’m a Cheerleader’: Stripping Away the Normalcy of Heteronormativity

‘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.

'But I'm a Cheerleader' movie poster — *But I’m a Cheerleader* movie poster

This guest post by Abeni Moreno appears as part of our theme week Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

But I’m a Cheerleader literally queers the stereotype of the popular cheerleader going steady with a handsome football player. Natasha Lyonne, who plays the main character, Megan, is confronted by friends and family who suspect her of being the “L” word. That’s right…a lesbian. Megan keeps provocative pictures of women in her locker, despises kissing her boyfriend and sexually fantasizes about her cheermates. It is then that she is sent off to a correctional program called “True Directions.”

But I’m a Cheerleader‘s overt display of oppression over queer sexuality speaks to the dominant patriarchal society that strives to eliminate all non-normative ways of living. In this case, the film focuses on Megan’s experience of discovering her queer sexuality ironically through her participation in “True Directions.” There she meets love interest Graham, Clea DuVull, who is portrayed as the bad girl with a trust fund. It is within their romantic involvement that the film makes painfully apparent conversation therapy fails miserably. Both characters find love and sexual desire in a place that is made to consist of homophobia, stereotypes, and internalized gender roles.

Graham and Megan find love in 'But I'm a Cheerleader' — Graham and Megan find love in *But I’m a Cheerleader*

But I’m a Cheerleader exaggerates gender-“appropriate” color schemes throughout the film, presenting the audience with the ridiculousness of assigned gender roles that people are expected to embody throughout their lives. The Pepto Bismol pink and baby blue uniforms along with the decorated living quarters help illustrate the defined “normalcy” of gender and sexuality often forced upon people by our society. When Megan arrives at True Directions, she is unaware that her sexual fantasies about women and undesirable boyfriend are “abnormal.” The definition of normal is pushed even further when a more tender, intimate, and sensual love scene between Megan and Graham is highlighted as beautiful and loving. In comparison, Megan and her boyfriend are sloppy, awkward, and unaffectionate. But I’m a Cheerleader shows heterosexuality as mundane and unattractive. The film’s focus on a woman sexually desiring another woman is a creative protest of normative sexuality.

The film challenges other forms of gender/sexual expectations. For example, an androgynous character named Jan realizes she is heterosexual during a group therapy session. Her epiphany brings up a vital point that we should not pre-judge and categorize other people’s sexuality based on their gender, whether it be butch, feminine, trans*, etc. Jan states, “Everybody thinks I’m this big dyke because I wear baggy pants …play softball and I’m not as pretty as other girls, but that doesn’t make me gay… I like guys.. I can’t help it.” The other characters believe Jan is in denial because her outer appearance is masculine. Mike (RuPaul) even bluntly suggests, “Who is she trying to fool?” But I’m a Cheerleader uses Jan to comment on the way people label their peers and define their ways of love and sexuality for them even within the queer community.

Overall, But I’m a Cheerleader shows that there are few safe spaces for alternative sexuality and desire. The characters suppress their identities during their time at True Directions, showing how society often leaves little space for the queer community to be open and out. Megan and Graham hide their relationship, Sinead uses aversion therapy and Andre fails at being butch. These are all common obstacles that many people can relate to. Plus, the film’s 1950s nuance and decor displays the decade’s reputation for the nuclear family and cisgender children as commentary on a time where the majority of the queer community was not out and proud but underground. But I’m a Cheerleader makes it clear that we sometimes internalize discrimination and homophobia to try to fit in. But in the end, we can’t change who are or how we love no matter how much we try to drown ourselves in pink clothes and do our best to throw a football. It’s inevitable that we will break out of the 1950s definition of “normal” that seeks to determine sexual desire and lifestyle.

Abeni Moreno is a Chicana feminist and a recent graduate from California State University Long Beach. She is also a volunteer radio host at Kbeach Radio and KPFK in Hollywood California.

‘The To Do List’: The Movie I’ve Been Waiting For

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.

Let’s get to work, vagina. – Brandy Klark, The To Do List

The To Do List

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

I remember leaving the theater after seeing Superbad and asking my friends if any of us could imagine a film like that being made about young women–quirky best friend teenage girls who were on a quest for those things that so many teenagers are on a quest for.

We agreed that we couldn’t imagine it (and then I probably delivered a lecture on the great harm of stifling female sexuality).

That notion–that those teenage “cumming-of-age” stories are reserved for boys only–has been deeply ingrained in us through pop culture. When American Pie came out while I was in high school, the message was clear: there’s a myriad of ways that teenage boys get to claim and act out their sexuality, but if you’re a woman who does the same, you will be singled out and considered an oddity, a freak or simply a prize.

Even before that, I remember always noticing that young adult novels or films about teenage girls that I enjoyed often de-sexed the female protagonist. Teenage female sexuality was either nonexistent or an anathema, set apart to frighten girls or teach lessons. I never saw myself and my feelings truly and fully reflected back to me.

“Sisters before misters”–best friends Fiona (Alia Shawkat), Brandy (Aubrey Plaza) and Wendy (Sarah Steele).

When I saw the trailer for The To Do List, I started to get excited. Maybe this is it–what I’ve been waiting for all of these years.

It’s set in the early 90s. My heart rate quickens.

I see the soundtrack‘s track list. I just can’t even.

Yes. This is it.

It was everything I wanted.

I especially love how the “To Do List” itself wasn’t borne out of peer pressure. Brandy (Aubrey Plaza) is mildly affected when her peers shout “Virgin!” at her, but what makes her want to explore and understand her own sexuality is twofold: she wants to be able to be comfortable knowing what to do with hot guys (she’s the one who is attracted and drawn to the college guy), and it’s explained to her that college is like a sexual pop quiz, and she needs to study to ace it.

Brandy takes notes as her older, experienced sister (played by Rachel Bilson) talks about sex.

She understands studying. She understands her own blossoming sexual desires. So she opens up her Trapper Keeper, lines her paper into a grid, and makes a list of sexual acts she must complete before the end of summer, with the ultimate goal being “Intercourse.” (The fact that the film was set in 1993 is important not only for nostalgia’s sake but also for the fact that Brandy didn’t have the Internet and couldn’t easily look up the definitions of the “jobs” she was writing on her list.)

Brandy’s “To Do List” replaces buying shower shoes for the dorm with sexual exploits.

Early on in her journey, Brandy reads statistics about how few women achieve orgasm, and she’s incensed. She writes “Masturbation” on her list (and does so wearing a “Pro-Choice Pro-Clinton” T-shirt, which writer-director Maggie Carey said she wore frequently in high school). The masturbation scene is important because, as Carey says, “When you do see women masturbating, it’s usually a male fantasy about a woman masturbating, it’s not what actually happens.”

Brandy voices anger over the virgin/whore dichotomy, referencing Gloria Steinem. And yet as much as this film empowers female sexuality and independence, it does not do so at the expense of the men in the film. (Remarkable, how completely possible it is to have fully sympathetic male and female characters in a raunchy comedy.) Even Brandy’s father, a Rush Limbaugh-reading, overprotective man who is uncomfortable talking about sex, is portrayed in a sympathetic light.

The teenage boys have stereotypical sexual desires, but Brandy’s desire is always paramount. For the first time while watching a teen comedy, I got to reminisce and laugh from my own perspective–and oh, how I could taste that Pucker when I saw it on screen and feel those goosebumps when “Fade Into You” started playing–instead of imagining what life must have been like for boys I knew in high school.

The film also really has a “radical” message about virginity–not panicked, not preachy, but reasonable and realistic. Maybe most importantly, Brandy never has any regrets (“Teenagers don’t have regrets,” she says. “That’s for your 30s”). The To Do List is “nonchalantly” feminist from start to finish.

After she read the script for the first time, Aubrey Plaza said,

“When I read the script, I just thought it was funny, be it female or male, but I love that it was from a female perspective, and I’d honestly never seen anything that had explored the specifics of that time in a girl’s life when they’re experiencing all their firsts.”

This film is a first full of firsts.

And unlike most first-time sexual exploits, writer-director Maggie Carey knew what she was doing and made it really pleasurable for the audience.

“It’s a skort!”
(And who doesn’t want to make out to Mazzy Star?)

A teenage sex comedy that subverts what’s usually “reserved for the boys” and shows female sexuality and agency as, you know, an actual thing (while celebrating 90s pop culture)? Check.

And just as Brandy will want more and more of the final exploit she checks off, I want movies like this to keep coming and coming.

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

The Sin of Sexuality: Desire in ‘Philomena’

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.

'Philomena' movie poster — *Philomena* movie poster

This guest post by Caitlin Keefe Moran appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

Philomena, directed by Stephen Frears, tells a recognizable story: a mother searches for the child she gave up for adoption in her youth. What complicates this recognizable story is that this isn’t the story at all: Philomena’s child was given up against her will by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart at Roscrea Abbey in Ireland, who held her in bondage as a laundry girl until she repaid the debt caused by her sin of sexual indiscretion. 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; the very fact that she gave birth to him at all, unmarried as she was, means she is unfit to be his mother. But we never see any sex—we get the faintest whisper of a flirtation at a county fair, a couple of innocent giggles, a dropped caramel apple, before the camera pans away. The next time we see Philomena, she is pregnant, standing before a firing squad of nuns, answering questions about her virtue.

Judi Dench as Philomena Lee, looking through the gates at Roscrea Abbey

The bulk of the film follows Philomena (Dame Judi Dench) as she tries to find her son after over four decades of separation with the help of journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan, who was nominated for an Oscar for co-writing the screenplay). After being stonewalled by the nuns currently living at Roscrea, Philomena and Martin end up in Washington DC, following a tip from an Irish bartender that most of the Roscrea children were sent to America. I won’t spoil the surprise of what she ends up finding but I will say that we get to hear Judi Dench say the word “clitoris,” which in my opinion justifies just about every endeavor.

Catholic ideology hangs over the film like an incense-scented altar cloth. All discussions of sex, or sin, or pleasure, are tied to each other and connected in a messy tangle. When the nuns interrogate a pregnant Philomena, they don’t focus on what she did; they interrogate her agency and her gratification. “Did you enjoy your sin?” they ask. “Did you take your knickers down?” Sexual pleasure, in other words, makes an already execrable sin that much worse. Philomena herself buys into this logic; after she and Martin travel to Roscrea together for the first time, she speaks frankly about her first sexual experience. “And after I had the sex,” she tells Martin, “I thought anything that feels so lovely must be wrong.” To which Martin, a lapsed Catholic and former altar boy, replies, “Fucking Catholics.”

Philomena and Martin on the way to America—and answers.

Religion and sexuality were, and remain, uncomfortably coupled, not only in Ireland but in Catholic countries everywhere. In the climax of the movie, when Martin and Philomena confront Sister Hildegarde, the nun who purposely withheld information about Philomena from her son when he was dying from AIDS and searching from her, Sister Hildegarde lays it out for them: “I have kept my vow of chastity my entire life. Self-denial and mortification of the flesh. That’s what brings us closer to God. Those girls had no one to blame but themselves and their carnal incontinence.” (To which Martin, lapsed Catholic and former altar boy, replies, “I think if Jesus were here right now he’d tip you out of that fucking wheelchair.” Go Martin!) In Sister Hildegarde’s world, sexual purity is the only thing women possess that makes them valuable, worthy of both earthly and divine love. Once that purity has been lost—and especially if the losing of it was enjoyable—then women also lose the right to be treated like human beings. When Philomena was in labor, Sister Hildegarde was the attending nurse who refused to call a doctor or administer pain medication when it became clear that the baby was breach. “Her pain is her penance,” she says to another nun as she stood over a screaming Philomena. An exercise in sexuality may start out pleasurably, but it can only end in pain. Martin, too, learns this when he discovers old graves in the back of the abbey, all anonymous, for the women who hadn’t survived labor at Roscrea. Mother and child, in childbirth.

Philomena Lee was one of thousands of girls between the mid-18th century and the late 20th century who worked in the Magdalene laundries (named for Mary Magdalene, who in early Christian tradition was suspected of being a prostitute). Sometimes they came, like Philomena, pregnant and unwed. Others came from state-run hospitals and psychiatric wards, or were simply plucked from the street and delivered up to the nuns. Once in the control of the nuns, the women and girls worked for no pay doing backbreaking labor until they expunged their sins. But for women like Philomena, this was impossible. Her sexuality was her sin. Many of the Roscrea girls came from backgrounds rife with sexual abuse and violence. In 2013, the Sydney Morning Herald published interviews with women who had survived the laundries; one of them, named Mary Currington, described her three-decade marriage after incarceration in the laundries thusly: “I’m afraid I was a failure in the bedroom department. It was all tied up with the abuse as a child. I tried to be a good wife, but every time it felt like rape… It was a humiliating, degrading, shaming life and it doesn’t leave you.”

Young Philomena with Anthony, before he was taken away

The last of the Magdalene laundries closed down in 1996 (let that sink in for a moment). In 2011, after sustained efforts from survivors’ groups and the United Nations Committee against Torture, the Irish government officially recognized its role in the operation of the laundries and apologized. The religious orders that had run the laundries, however, refused to pay restitution to the surviving victims (justifying the note I scrawled in the margins of my notebook while watching the movie: “Damn, nuns are cold”). These were absolutely not the sins of the father being visited upon the son; the Church was still benefitting from the laundries only 15 years before the government’s formal apology, so they should have been held accountable. But the rhetoric of sexual indiscretion allowed them to escape culpability for their abuses. These were damaged women, irredeemable women. The fallen. If they had committed any other crime, any other sacrilege, then perhaps they would be worthy of an apology. But not these women. Not Philomena. After all, she took her knickers down.

In the end, Philomena finds it within herself to forgive the nuns of Roscrea for what did to her; Martin, ever the cranky atheist, can’t. As a viewer, I tended to side with Martin on questions of faith and forgiveness. If I were Philomena, the world could have pried my bitterness out of my cold, dead hands as I was lowered into the ground. But even more important than Philomena’s forgiveness of a wretched old nun is that throughout the movie she maintains an open heart and a loving soul in the face of incredible loss. She lives not as a woman afraid but as a woman mourning what was lost, who nevertheless keeps going. She maintains a love of the world, of things and of people, of cheesy romance novels that she continuously narrates to Martin and free booze on airplanes. She marries and has more children, who are good to her. In spite of a world that would have gladly consigned her to the anonymous headstones in the abbey’s graveyard, she lives.

Caitlin Keefe Moran is an editor in New York City. Her work has appeared on The Toast, in The Iowa Review, and other outlets. She lives in Queens and feels passionately about donuts and splitting infinitives as a form of protest.

‘Stoker’: Love, Longing, Desire, and Acceptance

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.

This guest post by Shay Revolver appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

A good psychological thriller pulls its viewers in like a spider web. The director and cinematographer work together like a couple of spiders, the actors and their performance become the web. If all of these elements come together as they should, a trap is set and the viewer becomes a fly. There is a sense of magic in Chan-wook Park’s Stoker. The story is compelling, the stage wonderfully set , the camera work is intense and the actors are amazing. If you haven’t seen the film yet, I urge you to check it out for these reasons alone. I will warn you, however, that there is an attempted rape in the film, and some of the other scenes might be a bit disturbing to watch. The beauty of the film isn’t the only thing that makes this film amazing. 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. Seeing such an open portrayal on screen is refreshing.

Virginal India Before the Sexual Awakening

Stoker tells the story of the newly 18 India Stoker, played by a very stoic and introspective Mia Wasikowska. India is coming to terms with the recent death of her father, Richard. He died in a tragic car accident on her birthday, leaving her alone to enter young adulthood with her cold and often irrational mother, Evelyn, played by Nicole Kidman. As if all of these feelings and emotions weren’t enough on their own, the funeral brings India’s uncle, Charlie, into the mix. The women have never met him because he has spent his life traveling the world and he offers, and by offers, I mean tells them that he is going to stick around and help out.

This is the point in the film where female desire starts taking shape and bringing itself to the forefront as a real theme of Stoker. Evelyn is a woman with needs and desires. With her husband now gone she finds herself in need of someone to connect with, someone to take care of her and make her feel wanted, desired, and loved. Her husband devoted himself to their daughter India, which gave India a sense of under-the-surface confidence and stripped away Evelyn’s “value” as a sexual, desirable woman. Because of this shift in the marriage you get the sense from the very beginning of the film that Evelyn has been alone in a sense for a very long time. With her husband now out of the picture, she finds herself alone with her daughter to lean on. However, India has just turned 18 and is trying to figure out who she is as a woman and what she wants. This leaves Evelyn vulnerable and hurt. This desire for a connection and to be needed that exists inside of her makes her easy prey for Charlie’s charm. She welcomes him into the home and her life to fill the hole inside of her.

India, on the other hand, is far more skeptical of her uncle and his motives. While she is mourning the loss of her father, she is not in such a rush to have another male figure come in and take his place. Having recently turned 18 and trying to figure out her place in the world, she’s already begun separating herself from her mother and her father’s death, while hurting her deeply, gave her an added sense of freedom. She also finds herself drawn to her uncle in an odd way. Having never met him she finds his gaze strange and his seduction of her mother even stranger. She watches him with equal parts curiosity and annoyance.

Charlie continues his seduction of Evelyn, which delights Evelyn because she has wanted to be desired for so long. However, the closer that the two of them become the further India pushes both of them away. Soon India’s great aunt arrives to visit and check up on India and Evelyn. This visit and subsequent conversations with her great aunt solidify India’s distrust of her uncle and his motives. Evelyn, on the other hand, believes that great aunt Gwendolyn is just continuing her pattern of being judgmental towards her and ignores her subtle warnings. Evelyn is finally feeling like a woman again, and she refuses to have this feeling ruined.

One of the interesting things about Stoker is that while it doesn’t shy away from female desires or awakenings, it doesn’t exploit them either. It treats them as part of the story. Both female leads are experiencing a sexual awakening of sorts but from different ends of the spectrum. Evelyn is finding a second life through her intimate interactions with Charlie. She’s starting to feel alive again, wanted. Her needs are being met. India is experiencing an awakening as well. She’s exploring her sexuality and figuring out what excites her. After a rather violent day at school where she stabs a bully in the hand with a pencil, she returns home to witness Evelyn and Charlie exploring each other. This drives her from the home and into fellow classmate Whip. Wanting to explore her own sexual feelings she goes with him into the woods, they make out for a while and she begins to discover where her desires lead. As the make-out session gets more exploratory she bites Whip. Not in the playful coy way–in a violent way. A way reminiscent of the stabbing of the bully at school so much so that a correlation can be seen between the penetration of the male bully by the less-than-helpless India as the catalyst to her sexual awakening. This awakening is confirmed by her interaction with Whip.

This interaction with Whip starts to take a turn for the worse and Whip attempts to rape India; this interaction ends with Whip being buried in India’s garden. Her Uncle Charlie shows up at the last minute and breaks Whip’s neck with his belt buckle. This tragic experience doesn’t mortify India like such an horrifying back-to-back interactions would mortify most young women; instead, it excites her. So much so that her awakening comes to a head while she masturbates in the shower and climaxes to the memory of Uncle Charlie breaking the neck of her would-be rapist.

India Stoker masturbates in the shower — India masturbates in the shower

By this point in Stoker, Evelyn has begun to feel alive again and like a vital wanted woman and India has realized that her uncle is a murderer. While going through her dead father’s office, she finds letters from her uncle and realizes that her suspicions were founded–he’s crazy and she shouldn’t trust him. She confronts her uncle and you discover that not only is he delusional and probably in love with her, but he also killed her father. She covers her anger well and plays along nicely when Charlie steps in to save her again by giving her an alibi when the sheriff comes around to find out what happened to Whip, whom he believes has disappeared. As a thank you, India uses her new-found sexuality and seduction techniques on her eager uncle just in time for her mother to catch them before things go too far. Evelyn is hurt. Her need to be desired and to feel like a woman and sexual being seems to be on the verge of yet again being taken away by India. Evelyn begins to verbally attack India in a very cold way before confronting Charlie with the truth–something she plans to use to keep Charlie around as her lover and separate him from her daughter.

Evelyn and India have a mother-daughter talk

Her plan goes awry, and after an intense seduction by Charlie, he attempts to do what he does best and kill her. His plan doesn’t quite go as planned because the very capable India shows up and kills Charlie before he can kill her mother. She buries her uncle in the backyard and decides to follow her original plan and move to New York to start a new life.

As India drives off into to sunset in her/Charlie’s car, you can tell something is different about her. No longer the same unsure little girl she was at the beginning of the film , India had evolved into something altogether new. She experienced her awakening; she discovered the art of seduction. She knew what turned her on, what excited her, and you get the sense that she was going forth to find it. One of the great things about this film is that there is no judgment. Charlie’s character, while prominent, is more of a supporting role than a lead. His sole purpose in the film is to facilitate the awakening of Evelyn and India. His violent actions open the gateway for India to explore her masochistic , violent and dominating desires and his charm facilitate Evelyn’s return to being a sexual being after what the viewer can assume has been an 18-year void.

The film doesn’t ever fully punish the women as they go through their sexual transformations or subject them to a gratuitous male gaze-focused sex scenes like most films would have done. It treats their desires, needs, and curiosities as matter of fact and a part of life. It acknowledges that all women are, at their core sexual, beings just as much as men are, and they have needs and wants. Stoker never once shies away from these needs and desires. It even shows how these desires and awakenings can come on slowly over a period of time, like India’s, or can be latent and come on quick and all at once like Evelyn’s. It gave an actual unapologetic portrayal of women coming alive and actually wanting to be sexually and physically satisfied without condemnation or shame placed upon the act or their desire for it. And that makes Stoker not only an amazing psychological thriller with a gripping story, but also a representation of being a woman: discovering what turns you on and what you need from other people and from yourself, going for it, and being unapologetic for what you want.

Shay Revolver is a vegan, feminist, cinephile, insomniac, recovering NYU student and former roller derby player currently working as a New York-based microcinema filmmaker, web series creator and writer. She’s obsessed with most books, especially the Pop Culture and Philosophy series and loves movies and TV shows from low brow to high class. As long as the image is moving she’s all in and believes that everything is worth a watch. She still believes that movies make the best bedtime stories because books are a daytime activity to rev up your engine and once you flip that first page, you have to keep going until you finish it and that is beautiful in its own right. She enjoys talking about the feminist perspective in comic book and gaming culture and the lack of gender equality in mainstream cinema and television productions. Twitter: @socialslumber13.

‘Wish You Were Here’: Sex and Obscenities by the English Seaside

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.

This post by Ren Jender appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

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.

Emily Lloyd’s Lynda, the main character of 1987’s Wish You Were Here is a textbook example of a girl (Lloyd, like her character, was 16) “acting out” in every way in a sleepy, English seaside resort town. The film is set in the early 1950s, and though the town has a postwar patina contemporary audiences have enough distance from to find picturesque, the sun barely breaks through the clouds over grey sea walls and piers, and the salty wind from the ocean has faded all the building signs. Wide shots show the dinky dance hall and rollerskating rink even at their busiest, are never really full. Against this backdrop Lynda rides her bike, has a penchant for colorful language (or the 50s British version of it: her favorite phrase is “up yer bum”) and likes to show off her underwear to boys her age–and to men.

She can barely wait to lose her virginity, making out with a boy in full view of an older man who threatens to tell Lynda’s stern father, a World War II veteran, hairdresser and “Freemason.” We can see Lynda become disenchanted with the boy when he runs scared. She wants someone who has as little use for propriety as she does.

She seems to find a good match in the young bus conductor, Dave (Jesse Birdsall), who takes her dancing and then to his grandmother’s house–empty while she is away. Lynda waits for him in bed, and he comes out of the bathroom in bright yellow pajamas and smoking a cigarette with a holder. He asks,”Do you fancy me?”

She laughs, “Not half as much as you fancy yourself.” Because it’s the early 50s Lynda has no knowledge of birth control and doesn’t even know what condoms are (or how they work) until her boyfriend informs her that he’s wearing one. We see both Lynda’s and Dave’s faces as they have sex, a study in why the sexual revolution and feminism couldn’t happen soon enough: Lynda, at first wide-eyed and then unimpressed at how quickly it’s over, and Dave pumping, straining and sweating but not really paying much attention to how much pleasure Lynda is getting out of it. But Lynda, taking another condom out of the package, tells him that they have all night to practice.

In the morning Dave’s uncle comes by for an unexpected visit, grilling Dave (“I heard you brought a girl here”) while Lynda hides under the bed, stifling laughter as she watches the man’s dog snatch a used condom from the floor. When the uncle leaves they watch from the window as he discovers what the dog has in its mouth–and he sees the two of them looking down at him. In the small town where everyone knows each other and each other’s business, the uncle informs her father–who then warns off the boyfriend for good.

Lynda’s father takes her to a psychiatrist, for whom Lynda proves a challenge. When he asks her to recite every obscenity she knows going through each letter in the alphabet, she pretends she’s stumped at “f” as he becomes increasingly impatient. Her father, wary of the expense, doesn’t schedule her for any more visits. Lynda’s encounter with psychiatry and the powers that be could have been a lot worse: “promiscuity” was a condition that could get young women committed to mental hospitals in those days, or, just across the water in Ireland, to lifetimes of unpaid labor.

From the earliest parts of the film we notice the bookie friend of Lynda’s father Eric (Tom Bell) looking at Lynda. Lynda refers to him as “Long John Silver” because of his lopsided (perhaps war-injured) gait: he is a tall, hatchet-faced, rail-thin, middle-aged man in a suit. One day he asks to come into the house even though her father is out, and while they are alone in the parlor, he mocks her, tells her she’s all talk and gets ever closer until he works his hand into her underpants–and we see her eyes grow wide again. She doesn’t say yes and she doesn’t say no, but she also doesn’t try to get away from his touch. When they are interrupted (but not caught) he whispers to her to meet him in the backyard later that night.

At first she’s determined not to go, but she’s starved for attention and affection; her boyfriend is with someone new, her mother is dead and her father, absent for much of the war, barely knows her. In spite of Lynda’s modern attitudes to sex and swearing, she’s a creature of her time (and of the movies she goes to see) when she asks Eric if he loves her. He tells her no, and also confirms that her father wants to be rid of her. She stays anyway.

Lynda is given to telling off (or showing up) the stodgy, older, often hypocritical people around her, and in some of those scenes we can see how, a decade early, other people in small-town England are primed for the rebellion of the sixties: the tea room waitresses in their black-and-white-uniforms (along with a 60 -or 70-something woman pianist) applaud her outburst, and, after Lynda causes a commotion at the bus company where her father has arranged for her to work, the other workers boo when the boss tells her she’s fired–and cheer when he tells them that they’re fired too.

Lynda’s tirades (like the song “Take This Job And Shove It”) are the sort most people fantasize about but never actually follow through with. But unlike in fantasies we see the aftermath, where Lynda is staring out her bedroom window in the dark or crying over tea, distraught. She’s in the wrong time as well as the wrong town, so her victories over the hypocrites around her are Pyrrhic ones, and we see her actions have consequences.

Her father catches her coming back from sex with Eric in the backyard shed and tells her that she can’t continue to behave this way because he’s “respectable.” His concern has nothing to do with her own well-being but with her reflection on him. He does not think to confront his friend about the affair. When his daughter asks about his own sexual relationship with a woman he brings to the house, he says, as if he need give no further explanation, “I’m a man.”

Lynda leaves home and tries to move in with Eric in his room above the movie house, but Eric is no comfort to her, taking off her clothes on the unmade bed that takes up most of the space as she sobs about her confrontation with her father. Later she informs Eric she’s pregnant, and following the lead of shitty men throughout history, he asks, “How do you know it’s mine?” Lynda, instead of being hurt, the way we expect women in movies to be, parries right back, “If it walks with a limp and thinks with its prick, I’ll know it’s yours!” Lloyd is fantastic in this scene as she is in the rest of the film. The script by director David Leland was the perfect vehicle for his young star who is alternately hilariously rude and vulnerable, an unusual mixture for a woman or girl character in films, TV or literature even today.

Lynda, at the end, has a kind of triumph over the town’s insularity (and the woman on whom the story was originally based went on to become a famous madam) but after a few high profile projects (and even more high-profile firings) Lloyd’s career shrank to very occasional, very small roles. The film industry continues to not have much tolerance for women and girls who “act out” in real life no matter how talented they are.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJY1Koru_Fs”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane, and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

How Is The Sex, Masters and Johnson?

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’ 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).

Written by Rachel Redfern as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

: Provocative, even now

Although Masters of Sex had its season finale in December, now is the perfect time to do a series re-watch to prepare for the season 2 premiere on July 13. Beyond that, the Showtime star powerfully, and singularly, discusses the topic of female desire and female sexuality, without becoming pornography.

While the show was not perfect in its first season, understandable since it was still trying to find its stride, by the season finale it had fulfilled a lot of hopeful expectations. Its main star, Lizzie Caplan (Virginia Johnson), chooses provocative projects and usually plays fascinating, complex characters: a sociopathic hippie in True Blood, a relationship-squeamish woman in Save The Date, and an emotionally damaged party girl in Bachelorette. The show makes a big deal about Johnson being a unique, sexy, fascinating woman and showing her interest in being a scientist, but I’m still curious as to what’s driving her. Hopefully in season 2 her character’s development will begin to grow and we’ll get more of a peek into what’s helped her become such a confident woman, as well as fostering her fascination with scientific studies.

But, 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 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).

: Don’t lie, you would have looked too.

One thing I’m loving though, it’s two women picking all the material, which is fantastic for a show that is portraying the way that society’s view on sexuality, especially female sexuality, is changing. And I think that a lot of people were curious, and maybe a bit worried, wondering how Masters of Sex was going to be dealing with sex, women, and stereotypes. There are still so many myths and legends, images and dichotomies, and pop psychology and moral sermonizing that happens anytime women and sex are placed anywhere near each other, that it was very possible for Masters to become another fluffy, giggle-fest of boob shots and phallic jokes.

Masters of Sex showrunner, Michelle Ashford, discussed the staff’s perspectives on the show’s sex scenes, and how much they’ve chosen to include; turns out, they’ve been selective and thoughtful—sifting through hours of scenes, trying to ensure that they’re engaging and fulfilling the narrative, instead of just becoming pornographic. In fact, Ashford admitted that she finds many sex scenes boring without any real relevance to the story; in the case of Masters, they’ve tried to take a different approach: “We knew we had to figure out a new way to do sex so that there was always story pulling through it. And there had to be a point of view to the sex, so it’s either tragic or it’s funny or it’s confusing … but it could never be showing sex just to be sexy.”

: Intimacy tells their story

Are they successful in telling the story of sex in their scenes? I would argue that yes, they are: Masters and his wife, Libby (Caitlin Fitzgerald), have terse, dutiful sex, while Virginia is direct and free-spirited, and the young Dr. Haas (Nicholas D’Agosto) is controlling, searching, experimenting. Each character’s experiences (not necessarily their proclivities) reflect their relationships with each other and themselves. Perhaps, at this point, the sex scenes are where the story is, and it’s where we learn the most about each character.

So what do you think? How is the show evolving? Are the sex scenes merely exhibitionism? Is the show helping the way we think about sex? How do you think it’s portraying sex?

See also at Bitch Flicks: “Why You Should Be Watching Masters of Sex,” by Erin Tatum

Enjoyment Isn’t an Item on ‘The To Do List’

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.

"The To Do List" poster — *The To Do List* poster

This guest post by Scarlett Harris appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

I was moved to watch The To Do List after seeing Emily Nussbaum tweet about it over the Christmas break. It was a stinking hot Saturday afternoon in my corner of the world, so I thought I’d watch along with her as she tweeted her disillusion with the Aubrey Plaza vehicle.

Nussbaum’s main complaint was that 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.

"The To Do List" list — *The To Do List*

It’s not a wholly ineffective idea: Brandy understands studying and academic excellence better than she does social mores, so making a project out of a desire to know what to do come college (pardon the pun) prepares her for the next chapters in her life: more academic aptitude and more sex.

Previously on Bitch Flicks, Leigh Kolb wrote in praise of The To Do List, asserting that in the film, “Brandy’s desire is always paramount,” but I don’t think this is the case. While Brady’s parents—well, at least her mum, played to scrunchie-wearing perfection by Connie Britton—and sister, Amber (Rachel Bilson) are portrayed as pretty sexually progressive, their dialogue doesn’t seem to connote “the joy of sex,” so to speak. For example, upon giving Brandy a tube of lube, Mrs. Klark tells her daughter, “As you move forward on your sexual journey, promise me one thing.” “To have fun?” Brandy asks. “No, to use lube,” Mrs. Klark replied. Here, enjoyment seems an afterthought.

A joyless kiss in "The To Do List" — A joyless kiss in *The To Do List*

Brandy’s sexually active sister, Amber, doesn’t seem to enjoy the copious amounts of sex she’s had, either. Though she does tell Brandy to “have fun getting your cherry popped” in the penultimate scene of the movie, it’s said with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

It’s important to note that part of the reason Brandy decides to cultivate a “sex manual,” as the objects of her attractions are wont to call it, is due to peer pressure. She’s called a virgin during her valedictorian speech, and her friends insinuate that Brandy can’t go to college as inexperienced as she is. The tipping point in Brandy’s decision to do her… erm… The To Do List ultimately lies in her lust for shirtless guitar player/lifeguard Rusty (Scott Porter), but even that turns out to be about what other people will think of her landing a college guy. At the end of the movie, she tells Rusty, “Am I going to regret losing my virginity to you? No, you are going to be an awesome story to tell my friends.”

So while The To Do List appears as part of the recent cannon of sex positive “chick flicks,” which includes For a Good Time, Call…, not everything is as it seems. The To Do List is more about peer pressure and the sexual experiences you should be having at that age than it is about actual young female desire.

Scarlett Harris is a Melbourne, Australia-based freelance writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about feminism, social issues and pop culture. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Room for One: A Positive Representation of Female Sexuality on ‘Bates Motel’

However, there exists an antidote of sorts in the character of Emma Decody (Olivia Cooke) – a 17-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.

This guest post by Rachel Hock appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

Conventionally, horror films punish women for their sexuality. This is particularly evident in the slasher films of the 70s and 80s such as Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But the grandaddy of them all is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho. The classic suffered three sequels in the 80s and early 90s and an ill-received shot-for-shot-remake by Gus Van Sant in 1998. Most recently, proto-slasher Norman Bates has been reincarnated in the pre-Psycho A&E TV series Bates Motel.

Bates Motel is both prequel and reboot. Set in the present day, it depicts Norman’s violent psychosexual development. Norman’s formative years are alluded to in Hitchcock’s film – an uncomfortable codependency with his mother – but the show’s creators have free reign to imagine what happened to Norman Bates to make him Norman Bates.

The iconic shower scene from 'Psycho' — The iconic shower scene from *Psycho*

To put it lightly, there is plenty of fodder for a discussion of what is wrong with Bates Motel when viewed through a feminist lens. The series is garish in its use of sexual violence. There are instances of rape, sex slavery, and, as in its source material, women being punished for having sex. Even when there are consensual sex scenes, the narrative purpose is usually to forward the story or character arc of a male character. (Bitch Flicks writer Amanda Rodriguez explores the rape scene in the first episode of the series and its implications in her post “Rape Culture, Trigger, Warnings, and Bates Motel.”)

Emma Decody played by Olivia Cooke — Emma Decody (played by Olivia Cooke)

After being friend-zoned (if you’ll excuse the expression) by Norman (Freddie Highmore) in favor of troubled popular girl Bradley (Nicola Peltz) in the first season, the second season presents a new love interest for Emma – small-time pot dealer Gunner (Keenan Tracey). When the beach-side memorial that Emma plans for ill-fated Bradley turns into a kegger, Emma gets drunk and asks Gunner to “make bad choices” with her.

What does it mean for Emma to want to “make bad choices”? By “bad choices,” she means doing those things that adults pretend teenagers don’t do: sex, drinking, and drugs. She is a level-headed character with good judgment and prone to doing the right thing; she is a Good Girl. For Emma to want to get a little bit wild, the valuable emphasis is on “choices.” The “bad” is coy and ironic. She doesn’t want to do bad things, she wants to make bad choices, or rather, she wants to make choices. She wants agency.

Drunk on the beach in this episode, Emma tells Gunner, “We’re not dead, OK. So we should live. But we’re going to die, y’know?” For her, with a stated life expectancy of 27, agency – and sexual agency in particular – is very much tied to the act of living.

Emma wakes up at the Bates Motel, which is more than can be said for its more famous occupant, who never made it out of the shower.

The next episode finds Emma waking up in Gunner’s bed the next morning, unsure what had transpired the night before. When she finally confronts him to ask if they had sex, she is relieved to find out that they did not. (Gunner’s response – “Not that I didn’t want to sleep with you, just I prefer when the girls are conscious. Besides, if we did sleep together, you’d remember.” – makes me wince. He’s a real charmer, this one. But at Emma’s age I would have eaten it up.) Emma does in fact want to have sex with Gunner, which he senses, so later he finds her to ask her why her reaction was one of relief. “I was relieved because it would have been my first time,” she reveals.

Despite his preference for girls who are conscious, it escapes him that having sex with a blotto Emma would have been rape. Although she does not recognize this directly, she does indicate that the significance of her first time having sex is not derived from antiquated and romanticized notions of virginity and purity. Her first time is important to her because having sex is proof of being alive: “Just think how much pressure people put on their first time knowing that they’re going to have like a million more. Mine could be my only time, so I just, I want to make it count. Or at least be something I can actually remember.” Her life has been given an expiration date, and she’s more than halfway there. Having sex, and having the opportunity to consent to it, is literally a vital experience.

Emma asks Norma for advice. "I tried googling it, but what I read just scared me." — Emma asks Norma for advice. “I tried Googling it, but what I read just scared me.”

But sex isn’t merely symbolic for Emma. She wants to have sex. As Gabrielle Moss points out in a piece for Bitch Magazine about Bob’s Burgers‘ Tina Belcher, “the teenage girls of TV are typically portrayed as only capable of responding to sexual overtures – with varying degrees of disinterest, disgust, or enthusiasm, sure, but their sexuality almost exclusively exists in response to the overtures of male characters.” Emma doesn’t entirely break this mold. She waits for Gunner to make the moves. But just because she doesn’t take action first doesn’t mean that she isn’t an active participant. In anticipation of a date with Gunner, Emma asks Norman’s mother Norma (Vera Farmiga) what it’s like having sex for the first time. Emma confides, “There’s someone that I met and every time I’m with him that’s pretty much all I think about.” By thinking about and preparing for sex, she is represented as being in control of her sexuality.

And so Emma and Gunner have sex. They laugh and joke together as they undress and it seems every bit as lovely as Emma had hoped it would be. She is not punished for it. In fact, nothing comes of her tryst with Gunner. (In the next episode she does have a scary experience jumping off of a rope swing into a river, but there is nothing to suggest that this would not have happened if she had not had sex.) The other characters are unaffected. The plotline stands independently; Emma’s sexuality remains her own.

Does Bates Motel deserve a pat on the back and a job-well-done for including one positive representation of female sexuality? Not really. But a character like Emma in a show like Bates Motel is worth paying attention to.

Rachel Hock is a theater producer and arts administrator in Boston. She received a BA in English from the University of Rochester in 2009, and dreams of someday going to grad school to continue studying film theory and racking up student debt. She tweets mostly about food and TV at @RachelCraves

Dude Bros and ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’

With a running time of two hours and 11 minutes, audience members are subjected to some thematic repetition, gratuitous gags, and an unnecessarily meandering plot. That said, there’s no shortage of amazing costumes and make-up to bolster a ton of sweet action sequences depicting mutants kicking serious booty. ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past,’ though, is disappointing in its general dearth of female characters and its under-utilization of the ones it does have.

Huh. No ladies are shown on the movie poster for 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' — Huh. No ladies are shown on the movie poster for *X-Men: Days of Future Past*

Written by Amanda Rodriguez.

It’s no secret that I’m a tremendous fan of superheroes nor that I am on a mission to expose the ridiculous lack of superheroines on the big screen. The X-Men movie franchise has been relatively so-so with regard to its general quality: some hits, some misses, some overwhelmingly mediocre films. It’s also been pretty hit-or-miss with its representations of female characters. The latest installment, X-Men: Days of Future Past, is no exception. With a running time of two hours and 11 minutes, audience members are subjected to some thematic repetition, gratuitous gags, and an unnecessarily meandering plot. That said, there’s no shortage of amazing costumes and make-up to bolster a ton of sweet action sequences depicting mutants kicking serious booty. X-Men: Days of Future Past, though, is disappointing in its general dearth of female characters and its under-utilization of the ones it does have.

Blink, a member of the future's mutant resistance. — Blink, a member of the future’s mutant resistance.

Despite the film featuring four female characters, X-Men Days of Future Past fails to pass the Bechdel Test. We have Blink (Bingbing Fan), a mutant in the future reality who has the power to teleport and create portals through which others can teleport. I’m not sure if she speaks at all…maybe a single line. Then we have the classic Storm (Halle Berry), who controls the elements via weather. The talents of Berry, an Academy Award-winning actress, aren’t showcased at all what with her having maybe two lines throughout and, much like Blink, zero character development. The “phasing” and walking-through-walls Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) is back with a slightly more substantial role than Storm, but her character is also static with very few lines. Finally, we have Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique/Raven, the shapeshifting martial arts expert who has the most screen time and the most depth of the bunch.

A sentinel gets the drop on a stoic Storm

Despite the fact that these women aren’t given nearly as much airtime as the dudes in the film, it’s no secret that they’re all seriously badass. In fact, the entire plotline revolves around the sheer power of two of these women’s mutant abilities. Kitty Pryde has managed to hone her phasing ability to allow others to pass through consciousness and time much the way she would pass through a wall. It is her ability that allows Wolverine to travel back in time to prevent a dystopian future fraught with mutant genocide and mutant-sympathizer wholesale slaughter. Kitty’s strength holds Wolverine’s mind in two places at once despite physical and emotional trauma that he may suffer while traipsing through time. In the original comic book storyline, Kitty, herself, travels back into her past consciousness in order to avert disaster, which firmly places her in the position of agent and heroine in an epic tale. In the film, however, her power, though vast, is incidental to the real drama of the story: setting a lost and bitter young Charles Xavier back on the path of hope and mutant/human unity.

Kitty Pryde phases Bishop's consciousness into the past — Kitty Pryde phases Bishop’s consciousness into the past

The entire film itself details the chain reaction the decisions and actions of Mystique set off. Her murder of anti-mutant weapons innovator, Dr. Bolivar Trask (performed by Game of Thrones favorite Peter Dinklage), followed by the synthesis of her shapeshifting capabilities into mutant-hunting sentinels, sets the stage for mutant genocide and a post-apocalyptic Matrix-like future. Mystique’s agency is so influential that she defines the future in a single act. Not only that, but her mutant ability is so powerful that it is coveted by the government and used to create an unstoppable weapon.

I'd watch the hell out of a solo Mystique movie — I’d watch the hell out of a solo Mystique movie

Despite the importance of Mystique not only to the plot of the film but also to the fate of mutants as a species and the world as a whole, her agency is full of negative consequences. The choices she would make on her own lead to destruction and despair. This echoes a generalized fear of the power of female agency and the belief that, if left to their own devices, women can’t or won’t make the right choices. That is why we have the two warring patriarchal, paternalistic forces seeking to shape her: Magneto and Professor X. Professor X evokes her familial bond with him and urges her towards unity and peace while Magneto uses their past sexual relationship, the allure of unfettered power, and the rage inspired by the persecution of fellow mutants to appeal to her. Professor X calls her “Raven,” a name that makes her his, while Magneto dubs her “Mystique,” asserting ownership over her identity.

Raven is Professor X's creature, while Mystique is Magneto's. — Raven is Professor X’s creature, while Mystique is Magneto’s.

An either/or dichotomy is formed in which she must choose to be either Raven or Mystique. Charles’ or Eric’s. There is no third option that allows her to be her own person, to make a choice outside of the ones presented to her by these two men. She is nothing but a symbol of the fight between our two great, male adversaries and their disparate philosophies. Yet again, a woman’s body (in that her DNA is pivotal to the extinction or survival of all mutantkind) is the grounds on which a man’s war is fought. Boo.

Mystique kicks serious as but, in the end, is a pawn — Mystique kicks serious ass but, in the end, is a pawn in a male ideology battle

The representations of race also inspired a “What the hell??” in me with Bishop (Omar Sy) being divested of his time traveling role (in the cartoon TV show version, if not the original comic storyline, Bishop travels back in time, not Wolverine) as well as the lotta people of color being killed off. The use of Peter Dinklage, a little person, to play Trask, a man obsessed with the threat mutants pose, to carry out prejudice and the genocide of those who are simply different from him rang a bit hollow as Dinklage/Trask, himself, is part of a marginalized group who likely knows firsthand what oppression looks like.

Trask, an oppressed little person, seeks to kill all mutants because they're different and scary — Trask, an marginalized little person, seeks to kill all mutants because they’re different and scary

It’s a step in the right direction that there are powerful, pivotal women in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but it’s not enough. Why isn’t this a story about Mystique’s internal landscape, her struggles, and how she learns that she’s not only powerful enough to change the world but powerful enough to change her mind? Why is her story a proxy to tell the tale of the men who seek to shape her? I hoped for better from X-Men: Days of Future Past, but I can’t say I’m surprised. Hollywood keeps churning out sub-par superhero movies with shitty plotlines, an over-reliance on explosions and action sequences, and a general all-about-the-dudes vibe. The X-Men franchise places a lot of emphasis on evolution; it’s time to do more than pay lip service to that notion. It’s time to evolve to the point that we’re telling the heroic arc of women and superheroines with the knowledge that that story is every bit as important as those of their male counterparts.

Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.