Bitch Flicks – Page 239 – The radical notion that women like good movies

Why We All Need to See Young Adult, a.k.a. How Diablo Cody Shines a Light on the Cost of Beauty

This guest review by Molly McCaffrey previously appeared at her blog I Will Not Diet.

I’m thrilled that it’s finally Oscar season, and I get to see DOZENS of outstanding movies between now and Sunday, February 26th when I’ll walk the red carpet with The Help‘s Viola Davis and The Ides of March‘s Ryan Gosling (also of Feminist Ryan Gosling fame).

Okay, so I won’t really be walking the red carpet, but a girl can dream, right? And who knows? Maybe I’ll spring for a long roll of red tissue paper and unroll it in front of my flat-screen.

I’ve already seen The Descendants (loved it) and Hugo (bleh—too slow for me), and last night I also got to see Young Adult from the Juno writing-directing team of Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman.

First, let me say that Young Adult is an outstanding piece of filmmaking—it’s dark and funny and intelligent and honest in a way that not many films are anymore when they’re this entertaining.

But the reason I want you all to see Young Adult is not only because it’s such a good film, but also because it’s an important film for woman—a film that explores issues central to our identity such as beauty, gender, marriage, motherhood, and family among others.

Of course, the issue most relevant to this blog is beauty, which is one of the main themes of the film. Without giving anything away in terms of plot, I can tell you that the main character, Mavis—played with heartbreaking gravity by Oscar winner Charlize Theron—is obsessed with the way she looks and seems to gather a good deal of her self-worth from her looks.

At one point in the film—and the preview—Mavis tells a Macy’s clerk that she wants an outfit to help her seduce her ex. The clerk says, “You want to remind him of what he’s missing,” and Mavis responds by saying something like, “Oh, he knows what he’s missing. He’s seen me.” The implication is that Mavis’ value is completely derived from her looks: her gorgeous, heart-shaped face and her fit, flawless body.

But though other characters see only the physical manifestation of Mavis’ beauty, the viewer is treated to the lengths Mavis must go to to achieve that beauty.

In fact, Mavis spends a good deal of her time (probably a third of most days) primping in some fashion or another—she spends hours styling her hair, applying her makeup, shopping for expensive clothes, shaving her legs, and visiting a salon where she gets manicures, pedicures, facials, waxing, and various other treatments on a daily basis.

Yes, I said daily.

After all this is done, Mavis looks fabulous—almost as good as the real-life Charlize Theron. But when she doesn’t devote that much time to her looks, she is a disheveled mess—she walks the streets in sweats and a t-shirt, gulping from a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke and pulling at her matted tangle of hair.

The implicit message is frighteningly clear: a woman doesn’t look this good—at least not at the age of 37 like Mavis—without a hell of a lot of help. And money.

I especially love that these two versions of Mavis—the Mavis who takes hours of time and piles of cash to put together and the Mavis who rolls out of bed in the morning—are shown in such stark contrast to each other.

She is both the former Homecoming queen who has held on to her looks as she approaches forty…

and the lonely, depressed divorcee who can’t be bothered to change out of her pajamas…

I greatly appreciate this depiction of the two sides of Mavis because I think it’s incredibly real.

We all know what it’s like to want to spend the day in our pajama pants and favorite t-shirt, and we all know that some days we want to go to the trouble of getting dressed and made up for a night out on the town. Yes, we know the value of both of these extremes, but most of us—unlike Mavis—also understand that our worth isn’t wrapped up in our ability to do the latter. But Mavis, sadly, is obsessed with this aspect of herself.

It’s equally sad—and interesting—that Mavis is also depicted as a fast food junkie who hits what she calls the local “Ken-Tac-Hut” (a combo Kentucky Fried Chicken/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut) whenever she needs an emotional pick-me-up. I’ve known for a long time that many thin women eat as much as anyone else (even those who are overweight), so it was incredibly refreshing to see a thin and beautiful woman depicted this way—well, refreshing and painful.

But it is Mavis’ slavish devotion to her looks that is one of the more alarming part of this film.

In one particularly gruesome scene, Mavis is shown applying her makeup. I like to wear makeup as much as the next girl, but watching Mavis Gary put on what can only be described as a face-altering mask frightened me so much that I still haven’t gotten the image out of my head. Like a particularly poignant episode of The Twilight Zone, her beauty regime is scary enough to make us rethink our own. Her physical machinations are, in fact, so arduous that only a masochist would embrace them.

Clearly that’s what Mavis is—a masochist, a person who tortures herself regularly and doesn’t know how to be happy. She is like this in more ways than one, but I don’t want to give away the whole film.

In this way, she is a perfect role model for the kind of person we should all not want to be—beautiful, successful, and miserable, reminding us yet again that there is more to life than physical perfection.

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Molly McCaffrey is the author of the short story collection How to Survive Graduate School & Other Disasters, the co-editor of Commutability: Stories about the Journey from Here to There, and the founder of I Will Not Diet, a blog devoted to healthy living and body acceptance. She teaches English and creative writing classes and advises writing majors at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

From the Archive: Dude Rules: A Response

This post by Stephanie Rogers first appeared at Bitch Flicks in March 2009.

Glenn Whipp of the L.A. Times wrote a fascinating piece a few days ago titled “Dude rules: leaping into buddydom,” which explores Judd Apatow’s legacy of films, as well as films that imitate the ever-popular prepubescent man garbage that continues to dominate the box office. Whipp lists seven rules on how to nurture on-screen guy bonds, and I offer my response to these rules, highlighted in red below. It’s a good idea to take a look at Whipp’s original article to get the full context of what we’re dealing with.

Rule #1

Sharing fun, challenging and intellectually engaging activities can strengthen friendships.

The point is: Male friendships need not solely revolve around sports and beer. In fact, in today’s movie world, those guys are the losers to be mocked and avoided.

The Real Point is: Male friendships need not solely revolve around sports and beer. In fact, in today’s movie world, male friendships can revolve around exploiting women (the boys’ Flesh of the Stars website in Knocked Up) and living out their 30s and 40s as man-children, sometimes with their mothers (Will Ferrell in Wedding Crashers), while often jobless and perpetually stoned.

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Rule #2

Friends are optimists, not naysayers.

The point is: No one likes to be around negative energy. If the dude doesn’t like Bob Marley, tell him “peace out” and move on.

The Real Point is: Friends are optimists, not naysayers, especially when it comes to getting you laid. Without Kumar, Harold wouldn’t have hooked up with Maria. Without Harold, Kumar wouldn’t have hooked up with Vanessa. Without the sage advice from the gang at SmartTech, Andy would now be a 44-year-old virgin. Without a little prodding, Carl (Jim Carrey) would still be a single guy, watching movies alone in his apartment (Yes Man). If the dude doesn’t help you score, tell him “peace out” and move on.

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Rule #3

Friends carry each other.

The Real Point is: This rule can often be applied when your friend’s adolescent shenanigans go just a little too far. In Old School, when Frank (Will Ferrell) destroys his marriage by acting like a 12-year-old, his friends warmly accept him as their fellow fraternity brother. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, when Andy (Steve Carell) is too freaked out to hook up with the girl he went home with, the token crazy-sex-whore (Elizabeth Banks), Cal (Seth Rogen) does the right thing and steps in to take care of it.

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Rule #4

Friends accept friends for how they are. Even when alerting the authorities might be the more prudent call.

The point is: If your friends are 40 years old and still living at home (Step Brothers), don’t try to change them. Buy them a case of Fruit Roll-Ups instead. If your buddy is a heavily medicated mall cop looking to join the police force (Seth Rogen’s upcoming Observe and Report), you pat him on the head and hand him some pepper spray. And if your wingman gets a fake ID with the name McLovin on it — well, you can tell him he’s an idiot — but then you ask him to go score some beer.

The Real Point is: If your friends are 40 years old and still living at home, that’s totally acceptable. If your friends are 40 years old and still living at home, that’s totally hilarious. It’s funny when Will Ferrell’s character in Wedding Crashers screams, “Ma! The meatloaf!” after saying goodbye to a woman he lied to (at a funeral, no less) in order to get in her pants. In fact, why not just say “fuck it” and live out your 40s in a fraternity, with an entire group of man-children, complete with blow-up dolls, underage girls, and bikini-clad mud wrestlers (Old School).

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Rule #5

Friends make an effort to stay in touch.

The point is: … You don’t wait for buddies to call you. You pick up the phone. Or better: Just show up on their doorstep.

The Real Point is: You don’t wait for buddies to call you. You call them, so you can avoid your wife and kids to hang out with 19-year-old girls all day (Wedding Crashers). You call them, so you can lock them in a room and force them to watch pornography (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) as a way to educate them on what it’s like to score. In fact, why not just show up on their doorstep to lend them your very own giant box of porn. Knowing your friend’s at home, jerking it to your homemade mixed-porn-tape, Boner Jams ’03, surely qualifies as staying in touch.

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Rule #6

Friends remain equally loyal in good times and bad.

The Real Point is: Friends will very loyally do anything to get you laid, including enduring a “midnight rape” by the hilarious token psycho female (Wedding Crashers), accidentally setting you up with a transsexual (The 40-Year-Old Virgin), which leaves room for the always-hilarious and requisite gay jokes, and giving you amazing, hard-earned advice on how to spot the most vulnerable drunk girl to take home (The 40-Year-Old Virgin).

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Rule #7

Friends know it’s OK to say, “I love you.” But they don’t have to, you know, talk about it at length.

The point is: These days in movies, male friendship means never having to say anything more than “I love you, man.”

The Real Point is: These days in movies, male friendship means never having to say anything more than “I love you, man” as long as it’s a way to prove that you’re secure in your masculinity. Of course, you’ve probably spent most of the movie bonding over hot chicks, and ways to go about screwing hot chicks, and fetishizing lesbians (who are most certainly always hot and making out for your pleasure only), and fantasizing about the MILF, and standing around with various nude-for-no-reason background women who you probably never speak to, and throwing in a few gay jokes here and there. Congratulations! By that point, I’d say you’ve proven your straightness to the audience enough to risk just a little hetero-bro-love.

Guest Writer Wednesday: A Fine Frenzy: With an Outspoken Anti-Heroine and a Feminist Lens, ‘Young Adult’ Is My Favorite Film of the Year

This guest review by Megan Kearns previously appeared at her blog The Opinioness of the World.

We so often see men as wayward fuck-ups. Ben Stiller in Greenberg, Zach Braff in Garden State, Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets all fill this role. Selfish asshats who do the wrong thing, lack ambition, or screw someone over for their own selfish needs. And yet they’re somehow loveable and charming. You champion them, hoping they’ll succeed and grow…just a little.

Audiences want female leads nice, amiable and likeable. Not messy, complicated, complex and certainly not unlikeable. Heaven forbid! But that’s precisely the role Charlize Theron steps into in Young Adult.

In this witty, hilarious and bittersweet dramedy, Theron plays Mavis Gary, an author of young adult books living in Minneapolis. Mavis’ life is a hot mess. She’s divorced, drinks her life away and the book series she writes is coming to an end. She was the popular mean girl in high school who escaped to the big city. Mavis returns to her small hometown in Minnesota full of Taco Bells and KFCs intending to reclaim her old glory days and her ex-boyfriend, who’s happily married with a new baby. As she fucks up, she eventually questions what she wants out of life.

Young Adult is a fantastic film, the best I’ve seen all year. I seriously can’t say enough good things about it. Diablo Cody’s feminist lens and sharply funny dialogue fuse with Jason Reitman’s knack for bittersweet direction, buoyed by stellar portrayals.

A force of nature, Theron gives both a subtly nuanced and bravura performance. In her Golden Globe-nominated role, she makes a flawed, cranky, bitchy, selfish, alcoholic charismatic and likeable. When she’s doing something despicable (which happens all too often), I found myself cringing yet simultaneously rooting for her. That’s not easy to do. Theron, who’s been called a transformational chameleon, particularly for her award-winning role in Monster, melts into this role. She imbues Mavis with depth, caustic wit, raw anger and vulnerability. It’s hard to see the boundaries where Theron begins and Mavis ends.

Suffering from depression, Mavis tries to drown her sorrows, unleashing a destructive tornado of chaos. Even though Mavis fled her small town, she’s haunted by the prime of her youth. Most of us have moved on from high school. But Mavis hasn’t grown up yet. With unwavering determination and delusion, she thinks if she can recapture the past, all her problems will be solved.

With her popular girl swagger, you can picture how she sashayed down the halls in high school (and probably shoved people into lockers or hurled insults). That same bravado fools her into thinking she can bend the world to her will.

She finds an unlikely ally and confidante in nerdy, sarcastic yet tender Matt (Patton Oswalt), a former bullied classmate in an achingly touching performance. Some of the best scenes contain Mavis and Matt volleying their biting banter.

What made the film brutally funny is Mavis tosses retorts people think but would never dream of actually saying. She says hilariously wrong things. Matt asks her if she moved back to town, she replies, “Ewww, gross.” She shamelessly throws herself at a married man. When Matt reminds her Buddy has a baby, she retorts, “Babies are boring!” And trust me. I’m not doing Theron’s comic abilities justice.

Uncomfortably funny, hilariously heartbreaking, Young Adult passes the Bechdel Test several times. In one scene, the bandmates in the all-female group Nipple Confusion (love that name!), who also happen to be Mavis’ former high school classmates, briefly debate Mavis and her dubious intentions. Mavis confronts compassionate Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), her ex-boyfriend Buddy (Patrick Wilson)’s wife and the object of Mavis’s vitriolic hatred. Also, Mavis confides in Matt’s sister Sandra (Collette Wolfe), who desperately wants to escape small-town life, about the course her life has taken.

I felt a sigh of relief while watching this film. It felt fantastic to have a woman quip snarky comments that maybe she shouldn’t say but she does anyway. Because Mavis doesn’t give a shit what people think. She doesn’t conform to other people’s standards of who she should be. Most movies suppress women’s rage. Not this one. As the awesome Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood wrote:

This film is a fucking bitchy breath of fresh air.

Hollywood purports a double standard that only men can play unsympathetic roles. If a female actor portrays a complex character, she’s too often labeled a bitch. People don’t usually want to see complicated or unsympathetic women on-screen.

Besides the fabulous Kristen Wiig in the hilarious Bridesmaids, Lena Dunham in Tiny Furniture and Julia Roberts in the god-awful My Best Friend’s Wedding (which Young Adult strangely parallels – both contain selfish female protagonists struggling to recapture the past, hoping to break up a wedding/marriage), there really aren’t many examples of women in this kind of unlikeable or flawed role.

In an interview with Silverstein, outspoken feminist (woo hoo!) Diablo Cody shares her inspiration for creating an unlikeable character:

The idea of a cold, unlikeable woman or a woman who is not in control of herself is genuinely frightening to people because it threatens civilization itself or threatens the American family. But I don’t know why people are always willing to accept and even like flawed male characters. We’ve seen so many loveable anti-heroes who are curmudgeons or addicts or bad fathers and a lot of those characters have become beloved icons and I don’t see women allowed to play the same parts. So it was really important to me to try and turn that around.

With female writers comprising 24% of ALL writers in Hollywood and women in only 33% of speaking roles in films (god that makes me cringe), it’s vital to have more women writing scripts to yield women’s diverse perspectives and stories.

Young Adult is entirely told from Mavis’ perspective. As Mavis scribes the last book in Waverly Prep, a Young Adult series, her writing mirrors events and feelings in her own life. It could have easily veered off course to examine how Mavis’ inappropriate flirting (or rather throwing herself at him) affected Buddy. But the film astutely anchors itself to Mavis, a unique female voice.

I often lament the lack of female-centric films as most either feature men in the spotlight or have women as merely secondary characters. If we want more diverse films, including those where women are front and center, we need to support those films by voting with our dollars and going to the box office.

At first, it seems Young Adult might succumb to the same fate as so many other films and end up revolving around Mavis finding love. Men go on quests and emotional journeys. They learn. They grow. Women often stagnate. Or more common, their lives revolve around men. They wait around for love, seek love, find love, and turn themselves inside out for love…and ultimately a man. We don’t often see them doing things for themselves.

That’s the rare beauty of Young Adult. It’s not really about Mavis finding love. It’s about confronting your mistakes, letting go of the past and growing up. Too many movies reinforce the notion careers and friends don’t count. It’s only your love life that matters. Only love can save you. But sometimes, you can save yourself.

Life is messy, complicated and difficult. Women can be too. It’s about time we see more roles reflecting that on-screen.

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Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. She blogs at The Opinioness of the World, a feminist vegan site. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Fem2pt0, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, and A Safe World for Women. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. Megan lives in Boston with more books than she will probably ever read in her lifetime.

Megan contributed reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Something Borrowed, !Women Art Revolution, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Kids Are All Right (for our 2011 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), The Reader (for our 2009 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), Man Men (for our Mad Men Week), Game of Thrones and The Killing (for our Emmy Week 2011), Alien/Aliens (for our Women in Horror Week 2011), and I Came to Testify, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, Peace Unveiled, and The War We Are Living in the Women, War & Peace series. She was the first writer featured as a Monthly Guest Contributor.

From the Archive: The Bechdel Rule, aka Ripley’s Rule

As we near four years (!) since the inception of Bitch Flicks, this week will feature some reprints of early posts. I spent some time in our archive and can honestly say that nothing we’ve posted in the past is now irrelevant. In other words, the same issues with gender representation in movies, tv and other media in 2008 are issues today.

Here’s a piece, originally published on September 30, 2008, on the Bechdel Rule, or, as we like to call it, Ripley’s Rule.

* * *

It seems there should be a test to evaluate the role of women in any given movie.

A comic, from 1985, lays out a simple set of criteria for its characters to choose a movie to see:

1. There must be two female characters (some say two named female characters)

2. Who talk to each other

3. About something other than men.

Check out the original comic below and click on it to visit Alison Bechdel’s blog and learn about the original source of the comic and idea. NPR’s All Things Considered ran a story on the Bechdel Rule and posted an entry on their pop-culture blog, Monkey See, about new Bechdel-like rules.

How many movies actually pass the test?

Thanks to Unapologetically Female for cuing us in!

Where Are the Women in Christmas Movies?

This is a guest post by Anika Guldstrand.

At this time of year, it’s only natural that we pull our favorite holiday films down from the shelf as one way to celebrate the season. Whether you prefer old or new classics, the holiday films are, for me, an intrinsic part of the holiday tradition. However, upon reviewing the many Christmas titles to choose from, I’ve noticed one glaring absence: that of a high quality Christmas film with a sole female protagonist.

Of course, in some ways it seems natural that many films related to Christmas have male protagonists, as Santa Claus and Jesus are the primary characters related to the holiday, but where is the story of Mrs. Claus? She is certainly present in a large number of Christmas films, standing next to Santa, but that’s as much information as we’re ever given. I would love to see a film about where she came from and what her role is other than standing by Santa’s side. Mrs. Claus has an origin story out there somewhere and it would be fascinating to see it told in a high-caliber film.

Even in the older holiday classics like White Christmas and It’s A Wonderful Life, there are no examples of a female protagonist without a male counterpart. For every Rosemary Clooney and Vera Ellen, you have a Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye. For Donna Reed, you have Jimmy Stewart. In modern holiday films, women often play the role of the mother to the younger protagonists, and frequently lack significant character development beyond that role. Just look at the mothers in Home Alone, A Christmas Story, The Santa Clause, or Jingle All the Way. Even the children these films focus on are male. Why shouldn’t a holiday film focus on a young girl rather than a young boy?

It seems like such a glaring oversight. Let’s face it: women make Christmas happen, whether that’s by hosting a fantastic party, shopping for gifts, putting up Christmas lights, carving the Christmas ham, or any other task of the many it takes to prepare for the holidays. With such a huge role in the season, wouldn’t it make sense that women be equally represented in the films of the holiday as well?

That said, here are five examples I was able to find of strong female protagonists (although they are all co-protagonists) in some wonderful holiday films.

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Cindy Lou Who from How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

Yes, the Grinch himself is the primary protagonist of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! However, we all know that Cindy Lou Who is the one who teaches the Grinch the true meaning of Christmas and ultimately saves the holiday. Although she is “no bigger than two,” she makes all the difference for the Grinch and saves Christmas for all the Whos down in Whoville.

Mary Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life

George Bailey never would have made it if it weren’t for Mary Bailey. Of course, yet again it’s the man who is the primary protagonist, but Mary Bailey is the one who keeps their family together and, in the end, saves George from the mistake of his uncle.

Doris and Susan Walker from Miracle on 34th Street

Susan Walker, played by a very young Natalie Wood, is the protagonist of Miracle on 34th Street right alongside Santa Claus himself. Her mother, Doris Walker, is a single mother with a career and a mind of her own. As Fred Gailey pursues Ms. Walker, she shows that she has feelings for him, but never loses her practicality and strength. Particularly for a film from 1947, the portrayal of two strong female protagonists, one of whom is a young girl, is rather remarkable.

Mary from The Nativity Story

Arguably the most important woman of the Christmas season, it only makes sense that Mary would be prominently featured as the protagonist of The Nativity Story. Even so, she is a co-protagonist with Joseph, her husband, as they journey to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus.

Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas

Although Sally is quite literally falling apart throughout much of The Nightmare Before Christmas, she plays a very important role in the film along with co-protagonist Jack Skellington. In fact, it is Sally who foresees that Jack’s version of Christmas will end badly. However, Sally’s primary role in the film is that of the romantic interest for Jack.

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We can only hope that more holiday films with female protagonists will come along in the years to come. Each year, there seems to be a bevy of new holiday films, some of which we may want to watch for years to come and some that we’d just as soon forget. I look forward to a day when little girls will have just as many Christmas movies to relate to as little boys do. After all, I’m certain plenty of little girls have also been warned that they’ll shoot their eye out. So here’s to little girls who prefer air rifles to dolls and women who do so much more than stand by a man’s side. Merry Christmas!

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Anika Guldstrand is a blogger and freelance writer. She writes for T-Shirts.com, which carries a great selection of women’s t-shirts. In her spare time, she enjoys reading comic books, watching Mad Men, and listening to her all-female vocalist playlist on Spotify.

‘War Redefined’ Challenges War as a Male Domain and Examines How Violent Conflict Impacts Women

When we think of war, we often think of soldiers, tanks, weapons and battlefields. But most wars breach boundaries, affecting civilians, mostly women and children. Soldiers, guerillas and paramilitaries use tactics such as rape, fear, murder and pushing people off their land. We need to shift our paradigm of war and look at how it affects women’s lives.

War Redefined, the 5th and final installment in Women, War & Peace (WWP), is the capstone of the groundbreaking series featuring politicians, military personnel, scholars and activists discussing how women play a vital role in war and peace-keeping. Narrated by actor Geena Davis, a phenomenal women’s media activist, written and produced by Peter Bull, co-produced by Nina Chaudry, this powerful film threads stories told in the other parts of the series: Bosnian women surviving rape camps, Liberian women protesting for peace, Afghan women demanding their rights in negotiations and Afro-Colombian women contending with internal displacement. War Redefined, and the entire WWP series, challenges the assumption that war and peace belong to men’s domain.

Zainab Salbi, Founder of Women for Women International, said:

“If you look at the front line discussion of wars, and this is what newspapers report on – the fighting tactics, the troops, the politics, the borders, the weapons, the armies, all of these things – that is a men’s story. The back line discussion of the story is how you actually exist and live and continue on living in war. That’s a women’s story. And that story has never been told.”

Well, I think we’re long overdue for women’s stories to be told.

PROLIFERATION OF SMALL ARMS AND LIGHT WEAPONS

More than 30 armed conflicts, insurgencies and wars are fought each year. Each year?! In past wars, strategic bombing from high altitudes killed thousands. Now, except for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, “wars are smaller in scale and more intimate.” Civilians are no longer separate from battle. Often they’re targeted. In discussing war, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted:

“I think it’s way past time that we redefine what we mean by war because there are no front lines in the wars in today’s world…The primary victims in today’s wars are women and children.”

With “no international treaty regulating the global transfer of small weapons,” war has become simpler and more cost-efficient. Arms dealers supply warlords and guerillas with cheap weapons. It’s extremely difficult to control the distribution of small arms. Rachel Stohl discussed the staggering number of weapons produced:

“875 million small arms and light weapons in circulation today. About 650 million are in the hands of civilians. About 8 million weapons are produced newly every single year. About 10-14 million rounds of ammunition are produced every year. That’s enough weapons to arm 1 in every 8 people and enough ammunition to shoot everyone in the world twice.

Wait, enough ammo to shoot everyone twice?! That’s mindboggling.

Women are attacked in refugee camps and their homes. They face rape and sexual assault. Even when women aren’t the combatants, Stohl says “they’re often the victims of these weapons,” left to contend with the aftermath.

HUMAN SECURITY

Security intertwines with war, taking into account personal safety. Human security, as Professor Kaldor explains, is an alternative to national security. It puts the focus on protecting individuals and communities, not states and borders.

In Afghanistan, women’s rights activist Shahida Hussein said she felt safer during the oppressive regime of the Taliban. Safer DURING the Taliban?! Women were able to go to the market and restaurants. But after the U.S. invaded, along with the proliferation of weapons and “atmosphere of potential violence,” it’s no longer safe, imprisoning women in their homes.

One way to protect women’s security is to engage them. Sgt. Abby Blaisdell leads a Female Engagement Team (FET) in Afghanistan. In many areas, unless they’re related, “women are forbidden from interacting with men.” The soldiers talk with women about their needs, including healthcare and education, “to improve their quality of life.”

Security goes beyond weapons. It includes many basic amenities we take for granted. Professor (and feminist!) Cynthia Enloe questioned:

“When you start thinking about women and war, you really change your idea about what security is. Security becomes, is there water out of the tap? Or, is the well polluted? You begin thinking about electricity or what happens to women’s security when electricity fails. How do they make a living in the middle of war?”

INTERNAL DISPLACEMENT

But how can you begin to think about human security when people are uprooted from their homes? Reaching “epidemic proportions,” the number of people internally displaced by violence conflicts “has increased more than 65% since the Cold War ended.”

In Colombia, guerillas and paramilitaries terrorize Afro-Colombian citizens, trying to drive them from their homes to control the gold-rich land. In 2002, guerillas launched a gas attack against paramilitaries near the village of Bojidar. A bomb landed in a church, killing 119 villagers, mostly women and children. After fleeing the massacre, the survivors joined the other 4 million internally displaced in Colombia, “one of the worst and least reported humanitarian crises in the world.”

Displacement isn’t temporary, usually lasting 5 years or more. Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist Leymah Gbowee was a refugee during Liberia’s civil war:

“Refugee life, displaced life, is one of the most undignified ways of life. It’s horrible. You don’t have a comfortable bed. You don’t have a comfortable place to sleep. Sometimes medical aid is non-existent. You rarely find food to eat. You become frozen in that moment when you left. So wherever you find yourself, your whole mind about your community is about when you left.”

When people are refugees in their own country, when should other nations respect a nation’s sovereignty and when should they intervene?

RAPE AS A WEAPON OF WAR

One of the most horrifying aspects of war is the pervasiveness of rape.

Major General Patrick Cammaert “shocked the U.N with his first-hand testimony” on the rise of rape as a weapon of war:

“It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict.”

Wait, WHAT?! It’s shocking that one’s gender alone could endanger them more than a soldier.

When faced with rape and sexual assault against women and girls, Major General Cammaert said he wasn’t “prepared for that kind of violence.” Used to uproot and humiliate women, he discussed rape’s ramifications on society:

“Any armed group that is using rape as a weapon and a tactic of war is destroying the community. The women are booted out of the community. Husbands are divorcing their wives. They are mentally broken and therefore it is such an effective weapon. You demoralize, you humiliate those people and destroy the fabric of society.”

It took the international community awhile to realize rape during war had become systematic, rather than isolated incidents. But rape as a weapon of war has been used for decades.

Russian soldiers raped 900,000 German women in WWII. When Bangladesh split from Pakistan in 1971, Pakistani soldiers tortured and raped 200,000-400,000 Banglasdeshi women. Ethnic cleansing by Serbs caused an estimated 20,000 Bosnian Muslims to flee their homes. War crimes investigator Fadila Memisevic recorded first-hand accounts of their brutal attacks, compiling a list of over 1300 suspected rapists. Soldiers rounded women up in rape camps and raped 20,000-50,000 Bosnian women. During the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, Hutu forces murdered 1 million ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. It emerged later that “atrocities included the rape of as many as half a million Tutsi women and girls.”

In groundbreaking war crimes tribunals established for Bosnia and Rwanda, for the first time, rape was charged and convicted as “a crime against humanity.” Memisevic’s files were crucial evidence in getting rape recognized as a war crime. “Female prosecutors and justices were instrumental in pushing for and handing down convictions.”

But the passage of laws doesn’t automatically alter behavior. In the eastern Congo, rebel groups battle to control diamond and gold mines. With “nearly 2 million women and children raped…at a rate of nearly 1 every minute,” the DRC has been called “the rape capital” of the world.

WOMEN IN NEGOTIATIONS

Despite atrocities affecting women, they are often shut out of the peace process. Around the world, women’s organizations challenge the notion that “that only those who are the key actors in war should be the key actors in peace.”

In 2000, pressured by female activists, the U.N. Security Council adopted resolution 1325, which mandates women’s inclusion in all post-conflict negotiations and reconstructions. Despite this historic step, women still comprise less than 10% of those involved in “formal peace negotiations.” Secretary Clinton is helping to change that. In Afghanistan, she valiantly advocates women must be included in the peace process.

Sometimes women take matters into their own hands. The women of Liberia, led by Leymah Gbowee, joined together and peacefully protested, helping end the civil war ravaging their country. Their protests led to the ousting of warlord Charles Taylor. In 2005, Liberia elected Africa’s first female president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Under her leadership, Liberia has experienced the longest period of peace and prosperity.

Earlier this year in Cote d’Ivoire, women in the city of Abidjan protested peacefully against President Gbagbo, who refused to relinquish power. Soldiers loyal to him opened fire, killing 7 women. Gbowee organized a 1,000 Women March in solidarity with the women of Cote d’Ivoire. They came together in unity. Gbowee said:

“You can’t sit and say this is one country’s issue when you are a woman and all of the wars in our region now our fought on the bodies of women. These are things that have really made it important for us as West African women to rise up and speak.”

Madeline Albright discussed the need for reconciliation and respect, of women and each other’s differences. Secretary Clinton mentioned the rise of social media in bringing visibility to social issues and fueling activism:

“Women themselves have to empower themselves, it has to come from within. And it has in so many different settings. It’s not only because it’s the right thing to have women’s voices, minority voices, etc., in the room. It’s no longer going to be possible to keep them out of the process.”

While it can certainly be watched alone, War Redefined provides an arc connecting all of the individual stories in the WWP series. A testament to compelling storytelling, I kept yearning for more, particularly coverage of women’s role in the Arab Spring. This powerful film provides an eye-opening global overview of the atrocities and obstacles women must overcome in war.

The film left me with so many questions. How can people commit such atrocities to women? How can I stop rape or end displacement or help raise women’s voices in negotiations? How can we each make a difference?

Women are often forgotten in war. Their voices must be heard. It’s vital we include a gender lens when discussing conflict. In the film, a West African woman protesting said:

“One African woman cries, we cry all over…We are all speaking with one voice.”

I think it’s time we women united globally and started speaking with one voice.

Watch the full episode of War Redefined online or on PBS.

Megan Kearns is a feminist vegan blogger, freelance writer and activist. She blogs at The Opinioness of the World, where she shares her opinions on gender equality, living cruelty-free, Ellen Ripley and delish vegan cupcakes. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Fem2pt0, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, and A Safe World for Women. She earned a B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. Megan lives in Boston with more books than she will probably ever read in her lifetime. She is a Monthly Guest Contributor to Bitch Flicks.

2012 Golden Globe Nominations

Here they are! I don’t have much to say about these (yet), but if we’ve reviewed them or commented on them, I’ll link you up.

Best Motion Picture — Drama

“The Descendants”
“The Help”
“Hugo”
“The Ides of March”
“Moneyball”
“War Horse”

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama

Glenn Close, “Albert Nobbs”
Viola Davis, “The Help”
Rooney Mara, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”
Meryl Streep, “The Iron Lady”
Tilda Swinton, “We Need to Talk About Kevin”

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — Drama

George Clooney, “The Descendants”
Leonardo DiCaprio, “J. Edgar”
Michael Fassbender, “Shame”
Ryan Gosling, “The Ides of March”
Brad Pitt, “Moneyball”

Best Motion Picture — Comedy or Musical

“50/50″
“The Artist”
“Bridesmaids”
“Midnight in Paris”
“My Week With Marilyn”

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Comedy or Musical

Jodie Foster, “Carnage”
Charlize Theron, “Young Adult”
Kristen Wiig, “Bridesmaids”
Michelle Williams, “My Week With Marilyn”
Kate Winslet, “Carnage”

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture — Comedy or Musical

Jean Dujardin, “The Artist”
Brendan Gleeson, “The Guard”
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, “50/50”
Ryan Gosling, “Crazy, Stupid, Love”
Owen Wilson, “Midnight in Paris”

Best Animated Feature Film

“The Adventures of Tintin”
“Arthur Christmas”
“Cars 2”
“Puss in Boots”
“Rango”

Best Foreign Language Film

“The Flowers of War” (China)
“In the Land of Blood and Honey” (USA)
“The Kid With a Bike” (Belgium)
“A Separation” (Iran)
“The Skin I Live In” (Spain)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Berenice Bejo, “The Artist”
Jessica Chastain, “The Help”
Janet McTeer, “Albert Nobbs”
Octavia Spencer, “The Help”
Shailene Woodley, “The Descendants”

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Kenneth Branagh, “My Week With Marilyn”
Albert Brooks, “Drive”
Jonah Hill, “Moneyball”
Viggo Mortensen, “A Dangerous Method”
Christopher Plummer, “Beginners”

Best Director — Motion Picture

Woody Allen, “Midnight in Paris”
George Clooney, “The Ides of March”
Michel Hazanavicius, “The Artist”
Alexander Payne, “The Descendants”
Martin Scorsese, “Hugo”

Best Screenplay — Motion Picture

Woody Allen, “Midnight in Paris”
George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Beau Willimon – “The Ides of March”
Michel Hazanavicius – “The Artist”
Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, Jim Rash – “The Descendants”
Steven Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin – “Moneyball”

Best Television Series — Drama

“American Horror Story”
“Boardwalk Empire”
“Boss”
“Game of Thrones”
“Homeland”

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series — Drama

Claire Danes, “Homeland”
Mireille Enos, “The Killing”
Julianna Margulies, “The Good Wife”
Madeleine Stowe, “Revenge”
Callie Thorne, “Necessary Roughness”

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series — Drama

Steve Buscemi, “Boardwalk Empire”
Bryan Cranston, “Breaking Bad”
Kelsey Grammer, “Boss”
Jeremy Irons, “The Borgias”
Damian Lewis, “Homeland”

Best Television Series — Comedy or Musical

“Enlightened”
“Episodes”
“Glee”
“Modern Family”
“New Girl”

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series — Comedy or Musical

Laura Dern, “Enlightened”
Zooey Deschanel, “New Girl”
Tina Fey, “30 Rock”
Laura Linney, “The Big C”
Amy Poehler, “Parks and Recreation”

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series — Comedy or Musical

Alec Baldwin, “30 Rock”
David Duchovny, “Californication”
Johnny Galecki, “The Big Bang Theory”
Thomas Jane, “Hung”
Matt LeBlanc, “Episodes”

Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

“Cinema Verite”
“Downton Abbey”
“The Hour”
“Mildred Pierce”
“Too Big to Fail”

Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Romola Garai, “The Hour”
Diane Lane, “Cinema Verite”
Elizabeth McGovern, “Downton Abbey” (Masterpiece)
Emily Watson, “Appropriate Adult”
Kate Winslet, “Mildred Pierce”

Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Hugh Bonneville, “Downtown Abbey” (Masterpiece)
Idris Elba, “Luther”
William Hurt, “Too Big to Fail”
Bill Nighy, “Page Eight” (Masterpiece)
Dominic West, “The Hour”

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Jessica Lange, “American Horror Story”
Kelly MacDonald, “Boardwalk Empire”
Maggie Smith, “Downtown Abbey” (Masterpiece)
Sofia Vergara, “Modern Family”
Evan Rachel Wood, “Mildred Pierce”

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Peter Dinklage, “Game of Thrones”
Paul Giamatti, “Too Big to Fail”
Guy Pearce, “Mildred Pierce”
Tim Robbins, “Cinema Verite”
Eric Stonestreet, “Modern Family”

Guest Writer Wednesday: Fairy Tales and Female Sexuality

This guest post by Sarah Seltzer originally appeared at RH Reality Check.

Don’t go out into the woods. Beware ugly older women bearing strange gifts. Only a princely kiss can resurrect you.

The anti-feminist messages in fairy tales, both in their classic forms from the tales of Grimm, Anderson and Perrault, and their sanitized Disneyfied versions, abound. Heroines are frequently passive, resisting even Disney’s “spunkification” and lose their voices or fall into slumbers. They are rescued by princes or kindly huntsmen. Evil befalls them during puberty. Many fairy tales that have permeated the collective unconsciousness are known for these misogynist tropes and particularly for their warnings about female sexuality and its existence as both a threat and as threatened.

Red Riding Hood, which has just been remade into a (by all accounts mediocre) Twilight-esque tale of a dangerous teen love triangle by Catherine Hardwicke, draws on one of the more symbolically rich of these stories. As Hardwicke herself said, “When you have problems when you’re five years old, it’s just like ‘Red Riding Hood.’ ‘I’m scared to go in the woods’…Later on, when you’re 12 or 13, you really notice the sexual implications. The wolf is in bed, inviting her into bed. You start reading it on a different level, once you hit that sexual awakening.”

Charles Perrault, who popularized the “Little Red Riding Hood” story, made it pretty clear from the outset that the “wolf” is a seducer, and the story a metaphor for women staying away from sex.

From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, And it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner. I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable disposition—neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!

It’s quite explicit, isn’t it?

Susan Brownmiller goes even further in her seminal book Against Our Will, writing that “little Red Riding Hood is a parable of rape,” with the main character an utterly passive victim. The story serves as a warning to girls about the menace in the woods and is an early indicator of “rape culture.”

Indeed, as Paul Harris of the Guardian wrote in an article about Hollywood’s resurgent interest in fairy-stories, “Beneath the magical surface of a fairytale, with its castles and princesses, often lurk ideas around sexuality, the dangers of growing up and leaving home, relationships between children and parents, and the threat that adult strangers can pose.” And in particular, he notes, there’s a “conservative” streak about female sexuality in these stories which is one of the reasons they continue to get resurrected, retold and deconstructed.

Along with Red Riding Hood, archetypical tales like Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Bluebeard’s Castle all share concerns about female sexuality. In Beauty and the Beast, the chaste beauty can tame the male beast—even when she’s imprisoned against her will. In Sleeping Beauty a bitter old fairy punishes the heroine with slumber when she pricks her finger, a symbol for menstruation (as is Red Riding Hood’s cloak). In Snow White the lovely young queen also pricks her finger, becomes sexual and has a child. Then suddenly she “dies” and is replaced by a wicked queen, a witch. Every day this queen gets a talk from her mirror who feeds on her jealousy and her obsession with her youth and beauty until she feels compelled to kill the younger, more beautiful and more sexually alluring young woman. Both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty require resurrection by a man. Similar symbolism is at work in The Little Mermaid, in which a young woman, besotted by a handsome prince, goes to an older witch and exchanges her soul for a pair of legs that hurt her to use and even make her bleed.

Still, ever since there have been fairy tales, there has been feminist re-appropriation of fairy tales. As with the myths around creatures like vampires and werewolves which sometimes intersect with fairy tales, the moral of the story often shifts with the mores of the time. From Anne Sexton’s twisted fairy tale poems to Angela Carter’s brilliant stories to the new tumblr meme which turns Disney heroines into glasses-wearing, irony-spouting hipsters, fairy tales have been fertile ground for re-imaginings and inversions.

As Catherine Orenstein wrote in Ms. magazine about the re-appropriation of Red Riding Hood:

Storytellers from the women’s movement and beyond also reclaimed the heroine from male-dominated literary tradition, recasting her as the physical or sexual aggressor and questioning the machismo of the wolf. In the 1984 movie The Company of Wolves, inspired by playwright Angela Carter, the heroine claims a libido equal to that of her lascivious stalker and becomes a wolf herself. In the Internet tale “Red Riding Hood Redux,” the heroine unloads a 9mm Beretta into the wolf and, as tufts of wolf fur waft down, sends the hunter off to a self-help group, White Male Oppressors Anonymous.

Orenstein went to the origins of the “Riding Hood” myth and discovered that in its original incarnations, the heroine is much less passive and more of a trickster who ends up outwitting the wolf without the aid of any huntsman. She is just one of many writers who devote an entire book to analyzing Red Riding Hood from a gendered lens, while Carter is one of many artists to re-write the story with an entirely new agenda.

Fairy tales will always be with us, whether being sugarcoated and Disneyfied or fed to us as subversive fare. Feminists should continue to embrace the retelling and transformation of these tales as part of our ritual for contending with the myths and tropes of patriarchy. Even if Catherine Hardwicke sexualizes the story in a muddled way, she’s taking part in a proud tradition.

—–

Sarah Seltzer is an RH Reality Check staff writer and resident pop culture expert based in New York City. She’s an Associate Editor at AlterNet and her work has been published in The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and the LA Times and on the websites of The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, The Wall Street Journal and Jezebel. She formerly taught English in a Bronx public school.

Afro-Colombian Female Leaders Defy Death Threats to Hold Onto Their Land in ‘Women, War & Peace’s ‘The War We Are Living’

This review by Megan Kearns previously appeared at her blog The Opinioness of the World.

Imagine you walk into your home. An eviction notice awaits you. The government demands you relocate in order to dig up your land. If you choose not to leave, you receive death threats. This is the reality many Colombian civilians face. While a notorious drug war has been waged, another war ravages the South American country’s land and its people. I had never known about this struggle.

In The War We Are Living, Part 4 of Women, War and Peace (WWP), Colombian women grapple with displacement as their country is torn apart. Co-written by Oriana Zill de Granados and Pamela Hogan, WWP co-founder and executive producer, the chilling yet inspiring documentary is narrated by actor Alfre Woodard. Fueled by greed and a gold rush, guerillas and paramilitaries destroy homes and ravage bio-diverse lands. The government remains silent, failing to protect its citizens. Amidst this chaos, two female community leaders and activists, Clemencia Carabali and Francia Marquez Minas, admirably fight to hold onto their homes and save their land.

Beginning as a class struggle between the rich and poor, civil war erupted in Colombia. 40 years ago, armed guerillas fought for the poor, seizing land and attacking the government. Wealthy landowners created private militias, or paramilitaries, to protect them. Both the guerillas and paramilitaries funded their war through cocaine trafficking. “By the 90s, the guerillas and paramilitaries had turned Colombia into the most violent country in the Americas. Civilians were caught in the crossfire.”

After Alvaro Uribe was elected president, he “doubled the military,” “cracked down” on guerillas and forced “30,000 paramilitaries to turn in their guns.” Colombia pushed tourism to change the country’s notoriously dangerous image and garner income. “But today, there are two Colombias.” Claiming the paramilitaries demobilized, President Uribe declared the war over. And for wealthy urban residents, it was. But for the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities living in the rural Cauca Department, or municipality, the war rages on.

One of the most bio-diverse regions on the planet, Cauca’s land yields vast deposits of gold. Multinationals and paramilitaries force civilians off the land to excavate natural resources. Cauca is also home to over a quarter of a million Afro-Colombians. The land’s lucrative diversity has endangered the Afro-Colombian population. Civilians have faced massacres, kidnapping and continually receive death threats.

Human rights activist Clemencia Carabali has been forced to move 5 times due to displacement by armed paramilitaries. She belongs to the Municipal Association of Women (ASOM), a network of women’s groups. Carabali, who “wonders how she’s not dead,” found that “in war time, women could organize more freely than men:”

“In my zone there is a network of African women…When the paramilitaries take control of the territory, men are killed, accused of being guerillas so women develop a key role because they’re able to move around.”

Activist and community leader Francia Marquez Minas, also works closely with ASOM. She lives in La Toma, a mountain community of Afro-Colombians in Cauca who rely on mining to survive. But investors want to open large-scale industrial operations to extract the gold from La Toma, destroying the residents’ subsistence.

Marquez serves as Vice-President of La Toma’s community council, spearheading the fight to protect their land. Raising two sons, Marquez works in the mines part-time to put herself through college, not only to educate herself but to empower her community:

“So I told myself I have to study law because that gives you the tools to teach your community how to demand their rights.”

Carabali, Marquez and other community leaders organize to protest eviction. Colombian law states that permits to mine gold on Afro-Colombians’ land “requires consultation with their community councils.” But with a government plagued by corruption, numerous illegal permits exist. Hector Sarria, who received a license from the Institute of Geology and Mining (Ingeominas) 10 years ago to excavate La Toma’s gold, never met with La Toma’s council. But he claims his license states no Afro-Colombians live in La Toma. In March 2010, the court granted Sarria’s eviction request. Eviction would “uproot” 1300 families.

How can the government pretend no Afro-Colombians live in La Toma? How can they erase an entire ethnic community?? Carabali said:

“Colombia is one of the countries with the best laws to protect Afro-Colombians. Nevertheless those rights exist only on paper.”

Over the course of the last two decades, at least 16 million acres of land have been violently taken from Colombians. In the last 8 years, over 2 million have been displaced. Colombia has the second largest number of internally displaced people in the world after Sudan. With no jobs and contaminated water, displacement traumatizes civilians and rips families apart. Under international law, internally displaced citizens don’t receive the same protections that refugees do. Their government is supposed to address their rights. But in this case, how are Colombians supposed to obtain justice when their own government condemns them?

Afro-Colombians make up one quarter of Colombia’s population. In May 2010, coinciding with Afro-Colombian Day, which commemorates the end of slavery in Colombia, Sarria’s eviction was set to commence. People took to the streets, barricading the road to halt the eviction. Marquez said:

“The 21st is when we celebrate Afro-Colombianism in this country. The gift the government was giving us was a threat of eviction for our community. The message that is being relayed is that in this country the black communities don’t matter.”

In a meeting between community leaders and the Ministry of Mines, who issued Sarria his license, Marquez boldly declared:

“You cannot ignore us just because the government thinks more about the riches that can be extracted from this country, than it thinks about the lives of the people in this country…The community of La Toma will have to be dragged out dead. Otherwise we are not going to leave!”

In June 2010, the eviction was put on hold for political elections. Corruption plagues Colombia’s government. Former paramilitaries revealed ties to President Uribe and the Alto Naya Massacre (a 2001 killing spree in Cauca where paramilitaries dismembered and decapitated civilians with chainsaws and 4,000 survivors fled in terror). “1/3 of Congress was either in jail or under investigation for their links to the death squads.” Carabali insists that paramilitaries forced people to vote for Uribe, threatening them with death. Worried the rest of the world doesn’t know the truth, Carabali said:

“I get chills hearing all the positive things that are said about President Uribe. And I get chills because people don’t know all the damage he did especially to indigenous communities and black communities.”

The U.S. has given over $7 billion of assistance to Colombia. In order to continue receiving aid, Colombia must meet certain requirements, including military protection of the Afro-Colombian population. If human rights violations occur, foreign aid is supposed to stop. But the U.S. continues to provide funding, despite Colombia’s numerous human rights atrocities.

In September 2010, for the first time ever, the State Department, in its human rights report to Congress, highlighted La Toma’s land dispute in order to monitor the situation. It’s a step but the battle is far from over. Talking about the war she faces, Marquez said:

“The never-ending conflict in this community helps us remember what is important in life. My grandparents always say a soul without land is navigating without destination…I start thinking – and I believe the whole world needs to start thinking – what do we want for the future? Because if we continue this way, humanity will come to an end. “

Most documentaries tell stories in the past. But events in The War We Are Living continue to unfold. The story isn’t over. Sadly, the La Toma case isn’t isolated. Other communities face eviction and death threats from paramilitaries. While President Santos recently signed a bill into law that would “return 5 million acres to landless peasants,” he believes paramilitaries don’t pose a real threat. But Carabali and Marquez still fear for their lives.

Echoing concerns of Occupy Wall Street protests about the elite 1% controlling resources, Colombia contends with massive class inequality and a war fueled by greed. Afro-Colombians and Indigenous Colombians confront discrimination and concentric layers of oppression including racism and classism. Facing death threats to themselves and their families, female leaders like Clemencia and Francia bravely negotiate for peace and demand justice. They refuse to be intimidated. They refuse to leave their land. They refuse to be silenced.

Watch the full episode of The War We Are Living online or on PBS.

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Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. She blogs at The Opinioness of the World, a feminist vegan site. Her work has also appeared at Arts & Opinion, Fem2pt0, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly, and A Safe World for Women. She earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. Megan lives in Boston with more books than she will probably ever read in her lifetime.

Megan contributed reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Something Borrowed, !Women Art Revolution, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Kids Are All Right (for our 2011 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), The Reader (for our 2009 Best Picture Nominee Review Series), Man Men (for our Mad Men Week), Game of Thrones and The Killing (for our Emmy Week 2011), Alien/Aliens (for our Women in Horror Week 2011), and I Came to Testify, Pray the Devil Back to Hell and Peace Unveiled in the Women, War & Peace series. She was the first writer featured as a Monthly Guest Contributor.

Animated Children’s Films: The Roundup!

Wow. The response to our Call for Writers was so intense that we extended our series on Animated Children’s Films an extra week. Here are links to the reviews, all in one location. Thanks so much to the writers who contributed. This was a FUN two weeks, and–as Megan Kearns notes on her blog–an important theme, too.

Mulan: The Twinkie Defense by Karina Wilson: If you buy into the movie’s ethos, you’ll believe that Mulan is a truly border-crossing story, bringing the best of classic Chinese culture to a global audience with – gasp! – a female action hero at its center. You can quit the revolution now, kids, ‘cos Disney says that post-colonialism and post-feminism are here to stay.

How to Train Your Dragon by Jason Feldstein: In the past decade Hollywood seems to have grown fond of girls like Astrid. The most likely reason is that they still consider female protagonists to be a liability, but they don’t want to be seen as backwards. So what do they do? Simple. Write a male protagonist who is gentle and silly and have a female character that is tough and feisty but only second in command.

The Lion King: Just Good, or Feminist Good? by FeministDisney: It basically boils down to the fact that an entire group of strong female characters are unable to confront a single male oppressor; to do so, they need to be led by a dominant male. It almost sucks more that Nala is such a strong, independent, intelligent, savvy female character and still ends up constrained by this plot device.

Onions Have Layers, Ogres Have Layers: A Feminist Analysis of Shrek by Rhea Daniel: Shrek is chock-full of uglies, reviled and feared, who find each other and embrace their alternate halves. The one who refuses to embrace his shortcomings, no pun intended, is punished and gets swallowed by a dragon. Shrek speaks to the gulf within the self – to have the courage to embrace oneself or change/hide part of it to feel accepted (or feared). Its motley cast of social rejects make their choice, dashing the conformity of the feature length fairy tale to pieces.

Megamind: A Damsel Who Can Hold Her Own by J. Lee Milliren: But even now, when Hal is about to take down the entire building, Roxanne still tries to reason with him. This is the very essence of what it means to be a strong character. It is not actually about being physically strong, or incredibly intelligent; it is about still trying to accomplish your goal even when there is no hope.

The Princess and the Frog by Janyce Denise Glasper: Our characters: Tiana (originally to be Mamie–uh oh!), a two job hustling sassy twang lady with a lifelong dream of becoming a chef/owner of a fine restaurant. The leading man: disinherited, shallow, but very good looking, Prince Naveen. Tiana’s best friend since birth, Charlotte: a rich, apple-cheeked blond with ample curves to die for and a strange obsession with calling her sole parent “Big Daddy.” The villain: a top hat wearing, African mask collecting, voodoo havocking witch doctor with a smooth, seductive albeit evil voice, Dr. Facilier.

Magical Girlhoods in the Films of Studio Ghibli by Rosalind Kemp: These characters owe a great deal to the prototypes of European fairy tales and Japanese folklore and in many ways are traditional versions and depictions of femininities, but there’s an underlying sense of joy for feminist viewers in that these girls and women are active, subjective and thoroughly engaging.

An Open Letter to Pixar by T. Bookstein: Please, I beg of you: hire a consultant – someone experienced in noticing sexism, racism, heterosexism, and ableism – to look at your scripts and make sure that you are aware of the impact of your throwaway jokes. You need SOMEBODY on your payroll who can look at each story in the earliest phases, scripts and storyboards, and who can say, “that’s sorta sexist. Do we really need it?”

Nightmare Revisited by Jessica Critcher: I’ve probably seen this film a hundred times. I know all of the songs by heart. I remember watching it on VHS when it first came out, which is making me feel increasingly old. But as is the case with several things from my childhood, some of the nostalgia wears thin when subjected to critical analysis.

Is Smurfette Giving It Away? Let Your Kids Decide by Soraya Chemaly: ‘Cause we’re at the stage in this country where the true hard work of equality has to take place. This is the land where culture’s destructive and dangerous messages about gender hierarchies and power are not delivered with blunt force trauma (like stoning a young girl for being raped, which is so obviously wrong), but rather through fun and entertaining games and movies. Why would I let my children play culture-shaping games involving the commoditization and sale of the only girl in the land without explaining it?

101 Dalmations! by Sade Nickels: Cruella is a single, loud, independent woman who is bad, bad, BAD! We know this because of her older, androgynous appearance, misandry and verbal harassment of men, poor driving skills, disinterest in the nuclear family, obsession with material items…oh, and her love of skinning helpless, small animals. We know she is especially bad when she is compared to her “school chum” Anita (the owner of Perdita–the mom dog).

James and the Giant Peach by Libby White: From a feminist perspective, my favorite thing about the film is that it doesn’t pay any attention to sex at all. At no point are the Aunts’ criticized for being a disappointment to the name of maternal women. At no point is Miss Spider treated differently because she is female. No, almost every character has an inner and outer struggle, each reaching a defining moment in the plot where they must test themselves to save those they love.

Cinderella by Olivia Bernal: Cinderella does not believe she can affect change in her own life. She will wait with faith and something good is bound to happen. Of course, as Disney shows us, it does; Prince Charming really does come and all is happily ever after. It negates a choice and, above all, this is the importance of the feminist movement – to allow the Cinderellas of the world to say “Fuck you” to all the evil power-mongers and be on their way – Prince or no.

Why I’m Excited About Pixar’s Brave & Its Kick-Ass Female Protagonist … Even If She Is Another Princess by Megan Kearns: Inspired by Chapman’s relationship with her daughter, Brave also features two parents, a mother and a father. It’s rare for an animated movie to have a loving mother, considering too many Disney films kill off mothers, demonize stepmothers and solely focus on both daughters’ and sons’ relationships with their fathers.

WALL-E: The Flick-Off by Amber Leab: While the beginning of WALL-E is a lovely silent film (and would’ve been a fantastic short film), when you brush away the artifice and the adorable little robots, all you have is standard Disney fare: a male protagonist and a female helper, told from his perspective. Why the robots are gendered at all isn’t clear; the movie could’ve been about their friendship–and far more progressive than the heteronormative romance that ensues.

The Secret of N.I.M.H. by Katie Roussos: The Secret of N.I.M.H. is not free from gender stereotypes or tired portrayals of women. But The Secret of N.I.M.H. has one thing that many children’s films don’t have: a female protagonist. A main character who is a hero because of her strong will, intelligence, and heart.

Spirited Away by Jason Feldstein: The values that Chihiro learns, once all is said and done, do not seem particularly revolutionary: a sense of identity, a belief in herself, the courage to face what lies ahead. These are hardly new concepts to be put into a children’s film. What makes Spirited Away so different is the journey that Chihiro takes in order to obtain these values. She does not gain self-respect by defeating an enemy, but by surviving a situation and teaching others to question themselves. Liberated storytelling, feminist narratives, and progressive politics make Hayao Miyazaki one of our most important filmmakers, and Spirited Away is one of his best films.

Lilo & Stitch by Sarah Kaplan: Aside from the strong female characters and the far-from-sexist behavior of every male character in the movie, it’s worth noting that the core themes of Lilo & Stitch are about as feminist as they come. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but it highlights the importance of family and the concept that biology is not destiny, though admittedly the latter is applied to alien genetic experiments rather than sexual differences.

Fantastic Mr. Fox by Amber Leab: Meryl Streep voices the only female character in the entire cast. Okay, there’s a love interest to bat her eyelashes at the boys, but I don’t even think she had a line. Not only is the lone female character a wife and mother—seen cooking and husband-scolding more than any other activity—but also is a waste of a talented actress.

Anthropomorphism and Sexism in Disney’s The Aristocats by Rhea Daniel: As I watch Marie reinforce her weakness again and again, falling off an automobile, falling into the water, I feel it necessary to point out that her brothers are as the same level of maturity and motor-skill development, so it’s obvious that Marie is chosen to be the weakest link—an essential quality for the lady-in-training.

Howl’s Moving Castle and Male Adaptations of Female Work by Emily Belanger: The movie and the book are both about a young woman who only finds herself after losing her youth. How feminawesome is that?? Also, the characters are interesting and fleshed out in both mediums, and the movie’s approach to war is interesting. And the animation and music – just incredible. So if you love the movie, I hope you keep on loving it. But take the time to read the book too so you can appreciate the powerful side to Sophie’s nature.

The Two Leading Women of The Muppets Movie by J. Lee Milliren: I personally loved it. But, I’m also very sad that there still isn’t more to the female characters. When a movie is this good, I’m personally disheartened when a little bit more effort wasn’t given to flesh out the leading women. What kind of message is this sending to a whole new batch of little girls who are meeting the Muppets for the first time, when there are only two leading ladies in a BIG cast … who both want to be married?

Ferngully: Last Rainforest and Great Gender Equalizer? by Emma Kat Richardson: In spite of their differences, the movie’s climactic sequence finds the two female protagonists dovetailing in strength of character, each embarking upon a courageous suicide mission of self-sacrifice for the benefit of all. In Magi’s own parting words, “We all have a power and it grows when it’s shared,” the sort of sentiment that lends vocal credence to one of Ferngully’s most prominent tropes: we all have the ability to make positive change, but that power multiplies when there is community cooperation readily at hand.

The Tale of Despereaux by Robert Poteete: The story centers on rescuing a princess, and in a fairly banal way—there is no self-conscious humor at the fact that the passive princess isn’t much of a character, but rather an object of rescue. Oddly, while the princess-rescuing contains the climax, the central conflict of the story resolves through largely unrelated means. This begs the question as to why have a rescue the princess plot at all.

The Land Before Time by Juniper Russo: Although, like many films, this 1988 classic has a male protaganist, Littlefoot defies stereotypes of masculinity. He is sensitive, crying at several points in the film, and plays an almost maternal-role to the younger, less experienced members of the gang. Petrie the pteranodon and Spike the stegosaurus also defy all stereotypes associated with male heroes–Petrie is awkward and not particularly bright; Spike is cumbersome and strangely mute.

Tangled by Whitney Mollenhauer: In the end, I think it makes a good case for women’s “proper place” NOT being just in the home, but out in the world/public sphere! I’m not sure how you could get any other moral out of it. Even in Mulan, after she saves China, she ends up returning home, and (we suspect) marrying the army captain guy, instead of taking a job with the emperor. In Tangled, the movie’s premise is centered around the idea that it’s wrong and horrible to expect a woman to spend her whole life at home.

You Say Princess Like It’s a Bad Thing by Myrna Waldron: I knew it would be a difficult and thankless task to write a feminist defense of the pre-1960s Disney Princesses. But part of my personal definition of feminism is to celebrate and empathize with all kinds of women, especially if they are portrayed in a positive light.

Aladdin by Lia Gallitano: “Ugly” women, then, are used as comic relief. In one of the first scenes, when a woman opens the door and says of Aladdin, “Still I think he’s rather tasty!”, everybody in the audience is supposed to laugh. Aladdin looks at the woman (who is quite large) and jumps in surprise and disgust. Oh, silly fat woman, you can’t have feelings because you’re ugly! We’re supposed to laugh at how ridiculous her thinking Aladdin is “tasty” is—because fat women and ugly women are not supposed to have sexual desires. Only when the sexy women do this is it okay—nobody is laughing at Jasmine’s proclamations of love for Aladdin, because it doesn’t seem ridiculous now. Aladdin is attractive, she is attractive, so they can be in love.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Caitlin Moran: Unlike Ariel in ‘The Little Mermaid,’ whose tribulations are almost exclusively caused by her own narrow-minded pursuit of a dreamboat she’s never spoken to, Esmeralda is street-smart and clever; her eventual capture is facilitated accidentally by Phoebus and Quasimodo, who both see themselves as her male protector and likewise rush to save her, though she was doing perfectly well on her own, thank you very much.

Monsters vs. Aliens: Animation Finds Girl Power by Amanda Krauss: The biggest innovation in this movie is its (fairly successful) attempt to be girl-friendly. After she saves San Francisco, Susan returns home to fine that her career-obsessed fiancé can’t handle the potential threat to his own fame and leaves her. Eventually, she decides that’s fine. Besides, she has other fish to fry: in the second half of the movie, Susan and the monsters must battle Gallaxhar on his spaceship, and through various quantonium-sucking plot machinations Susan is briefly returned to her normal size. Importantly, she chooses to suffer re-giantization in order to save her monster friends.

Third Time Still Not the Charm for Toy Story‘s Female Characters by Natalie Wilson: While the girls in the audience are given the funny and adventurous Jessie, they are also taught women talk too much: Flirty Mrs. Potato-Head, according to new character Lotso, needs her mouth taken off. Another lesson is that when women do say something smart, it’s so rare as to be funny (laughter ensues when Barbie says “authority should derive from the consent of the governed”), and that even when they are smart and adventurous, what they really care about is nabbing themselves a macho toy to love (as when Jessie falls for the Latino version of Buzz–a storyline, that, yes, also plays on the “Latin machismo lover” stereotype).

The Evolution of the Disney Villainess by Rebecca Cohen: I’m not the first to note that the female protagonists of Disney animated features tend not to have mothers. When adult women do appear, they are evil wicked stepmothers, as in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella, or evil sorceresses, as in Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid. Indeed, it almost seems as if Disney “princess” movies simply don’t have room for two sexually mature women to coexist.

Despite an Intelligent Heroine, Beauty Obsession, Sexism & Stockholm Syndrome Taint Disney’s Beauty and the Beast by Megan Kearns: Yes, Belle is intelligent, courageous, curious, opinionated…all the things I admire in female protagonists. Disney was painfully aware of the criticism against The Little Mermaid’s Ariel giving up her family, her life, hell even her voice all for a stupid prince. Linda Woolverton, Beauty and the Beast’s screenwriter, drew inspiration for Belle from tomboyish, book-loving, outspoken Jo in Little Women. Belle’s feisty independence heralded a new kind of Disney heroine, paving the way for Jasmine, Pocahontas and Mulan. And yes, we often see the world from her vantage point, another plus. Although the film begins and ends with the Beast, who also happens to go through the biggest transformation (literally and figuratively) in the film. Despite her awesomeness, there’s still a huge problem with Belle.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by Rebecca Cohen: The Queen is even something of an intellectual. When she disguises herself as a crone, she does so in a laboratory-like dungeon replete with test tubes, flasks and burners, not to mention shelves lined with books. She’s certainly the only character in the film ever seen reading a book. And her final attempt to kill the dwarfs involves use of a lever device, with which she tries to dislodge a boulder and crush them. But her resourcefulness and application of basic physics are to no avail. It’s no coincidence that her cleverness is foiled by a lightning bolt, a stroke of random luck. This anti-intellectualism is of a piece with the conservative American values suffused throughout the film.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The History and Legacy of Disney’s Original Fairy Tale by Stevie Leigh Cattigan: As is the case in many of the Grimms’ tales, the prince is barely even a character, he just shows up at the end in order to whisk the princess away to his castle. In Disney’s version however, the prince has a more prominent role. As discussed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their seminal work ‘The Madwoman in the Attic,’ women’s stories are often framed through male discourse and they are, ‘(enclosed) in his texts, glyphs, graphics’. Disney’s prince is the beginning and the end of Snow White’s story; he literally frames her narrative.

Up by Travis Eisenbise: Up is a kid’s movie, but because we live in a world where movie writing/directing are 99.9999999% dominated by men, Up is set in a man’s world. It’s a boy’s story, for boys, about boys, where mute girls die off early. But for all the times I cringed at Up’s blatant disregard for women, I will say that I practically drooled on myself because the movie was so damned visually stunning.

Animated Children’s Films: Up

This guest review from Travis Eisenbise first appeared at Bitch Flicks in March 2010.

If Pixar shit into a bucket, it would still be box office gold. Fifteen years ago Pixar catapulted itself into a movie-making monopoly with Toy Story. Since then they’ve continued to rehash the same predictable (and often adorable) story lines about the secret lives of bugs, monsters, cars, rats, and superheroes. They are the main reason movie theatre parking lots continue to fill up with dented minivans and half-crushed McDonald’s milkshake containers. But still, no matter how annoyingly formulaic their stories are, I am a sucker for them. Confession: I was in line to see Up before many ten-year-olds in my neighborhood and am not ashamed to say that I cut right in the middle of a group of 15 kids to make sure I got better seats than they did. I have also been known to hush children during Pixar films. I’m that guy.

Up came in the aftermath of Wall-E (last year’s Oscar winner for Best Animated film), though Up takes a decidedly safer route. At Pixar, like most movie houses, there are A and B movies. The A movies at Pixar are written and directed by Andrew Stanton (Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Toy Story) and Brad Bird (Ratatouille, The Incredibles). Up is a B movie (only produced by Stanton and Bird), and pulls out many Pixar tricks to throw something together in time for a summer release date (Pixar Trick #1: Summer release date).

Up tells the story of widower, Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner). The movie begins with Carl as child, donning explorer goggles, and ogling over a film about his explorer idol, Charles Muntz (voiced by Christopher Plummer). Muntz, the captain of The Spirit of Adventure (PT #2: Name everything with vague, idyllic names), claims he’s found a new beast in a far-off part of South America. When scientists debunk Muntz’s discovery as a fabrication, Muntz floats off back into the wild to prove the scientific community wrong. Carl, still a boy, travels home from the theatre and is stopped by Ellie, a young, rambunctious child with, let’s face it, WAY cooler explorer garb than Carl. She inducts him into her own explorer club and within a 5-minute musical montage they are married, live their life together, save money for a future trip they never take, and lose a child. (PT #3: Emotional montage where characters gaze at each other instead of speak.) Ultimately Ellie dies, leaving Carl alone and curmudgeonly.

Insert Pixar dilemma: Pixar has a girl problem. I don’t want to dwell too much on this, as the blogosphere has already run Pixar through the dirt (as it should). Noted in Linda Holmes’ blog on NPR, after 15 years of movie making, Pixar has yet to create a story with a female lead. Ellie is the only female voice in this entire movie and she is dead and gone within the first ten minutes. She’s not even allowed an actual voice as an adult. (see PT: #3). The entire story is told by a male octogenarian and a boy, Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), who is seventy years Carl’s junior, and who—instead of being a real-world boy scout—is a Wilderness Explorer (see PT: #2). It is devastating to watch this movie in a theatre of mothers and young girls who are forced to stretch their own experiences into the identities of these stock male characters. (PT #4: Employ an inordinate amount of male writers.)

There is a mother bird character that is quirky and loves chocolate, flitters around on the screen as the comic relief, and who, as the film progresses, becomes the desire of Muntz in order to prove to the scientific community that he’s not crazy. But even this bird’s identity is wrapped up in her overly compelling (sarcasm) storyline to return to her bird babies. When she is returned, the world apparently rights itself on its axis and all sense of justice is restored. (PT #5 – Everything in Pixarland turns out alright in the end.) But enough is enough. Fifteen years with no female leads is an embarrassment. I’m sure all the male writers at Pixar (see PT #4) might have noticed what a shame it was had they not been so busy shooting their wads into each others’ over-inflated male-dominated story lines.

Enough about wad-shooting; here’s a quick summary. When Carl faces eviction from encroaching developers, instead of being taken to Shady Oaks retirement home, he fills his house with thousands of balloons and (much like Australia’s Danny Deckchair) takes to the sky. (PT #6 – Shiny, colorful screenshots make the best advertisements.) While in the air, Carl realizes that Russell is with him. The goal is to get the house to Paradise Falls (see PT #2), so that Carl can fulfill a life-long promise he had with his dead (mute) wife, Ellie. They land on the wrong side of the falls and spend much of the movie carrying the house (PT #7: Every character has some burden they have to overcome.) to the opposite side of the rocky crag. They encounter talking dogs (PT #8: Every animal can talk.) that use them to catch the mother-beast-bird thing. Chaos ensues, dreams are crushed, lives are rebuilt (see PT #7), and Muntz falls off the dirigible to his death. (PT #9: Kill off the bad guy.)

Up is a kid’s movie, but because we live in a world where movie writing/directing are 99.9999999% dominated by men, Up is set in a man’s world. It’s a boy’s story, for boys, about boys, where mute girls die off early. But for all the times I cringed at Up’s blatant disregard for women, I will say that I practically drooled on myself because the movie was so damned visually stunning. (see PT #6). When those balloons come out of Carl’s chimney and his house begins to lift off the ground, I think it doesn’t matter who is in the movie theatre, everyone’s mouth is open and everyone is ready for the ride. Pixar has a pulse on what makes a good movie, and they are artistically capable of pulling it off, but they rely on storylines that readily neglect female roles. (PT#10: No female leads.) As far as I’m concerned, they can toss that trick in the trash.

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Travis Eisenbise works at a non-profit environmental organization in New York City. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in (super small) journals, so it’s okay that you’ve never heard of him. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner who likes to make bread in a bread robot.

Animated Children’s Films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The History and the Legacy of Disney’s Original Fairy Tale

This is a guest review by Stevie Leigh Cattigan.

‘Hell, Doc … we just make a picture and then you professors come along and tell us what we do.’ – Walt Disney, Time Magazine (1937)

With the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as their first feature length film in 1937, The Walt Disney Company began negotiations for the complete buy-out of the fairy tale genre. Their venture paid off with profits in excess of $66 million. They capitalised upon this success adapting no fewer than seven more fairy tales to the big screen, and built an entire theme park empire around the idea of their enchanted kingdom whilst making a bomb through the marketing of princesses to little girls. Unsurprisingly, given the seventy year monopoly on fairy tales afforded Disney, many forget the original source tales for these works. Straparola, Basile, Perrault and Madame de Beaumont go unmentioned while Disney still hog the spotlight.

As for the Brothers Grimm, whose tale ‘Schneewittchen’ provided the source for Disney’s adaptation, they fare slightly better in popular culture. In many ways Disney are the natural successors to the Grimms, sharing many of the same conservative values and imparting similar messages about good girls and heroic boys to their audiences. But there are also several differences between the two versions, especially concerning the role of the prince. As is the case in many of the Grimms’ tales, the prince is barely even a character, he just shows up at the end in order to whisk the princess away to his castle. In Disney’s version however, the prince has a more prominent role. As discussed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic, women’s stories are often framed through male discourse and they are, ‘(enclosed) in his texts, glyphs, graphics’. Disney’s prince is the beginning and the end of Snow White’s story; he literally frames her narrative. Then there are of course the dwarfs, so much more prominent in the Disney version than the Grimms’ that they are included in the title. Snow White’s character is so massively one dimensional and underdeveloped that she needs seven little men as a supporting cast (and the Evil Queen) in order to make the film even remotely interesting.

But of course, Snow White is not supposed to be an interesting character. She is a template; a parable for how girls should behave. In the Grimms’ version she is just seven years old. I’m presuming she is older in the Disney version, but the point is irrelevant really. No matter her age she is supposed to be childish, innocent, naïve, unknowing. But most importantly she must be domesticated. In the Grimms’ version the dwarfs tell Snow White, ‘If you will keep house for us, cook, make the beds, wash, sew, knit and keep everything neat and tidy, then you can stay with us, and we’ll give you everything you need’, to which Snow White replies, ‘Yes, with pleasure’. In the Disney version she offers to ‘keep home’ if the dwarfs let her stay with them. She also shows that cleaning is darn good fun, and I imagine it really would be if you had a troop of woodland creatures doing most of the work for you. Disney’s Snow White is good and obedient, she does what she’s told and she says her prayers before bedtime. Her only act of disobedience occurs when she ignores the strong warning given to her by the dwarfs: ‘beware of strangers!’ She is tempted by the old hag’s red apple, and we all know by now that there are always disastrous consequences when it comes to disobedient women and apples. Unable to bring themselves to bury her in the ground, the dwarfs creepily decide to display her dead body in an ornately decorated glass coffin, so they can always enjoy her beauty. In the Grimms’ tale the prince, who has searched high and low for a dead chick in a glass coffin, says to the dwarfs, ‘Let me have the coffin. I will give you whatever you want for it… Make me a present of it, for I can’t live without seeing Snow White. I will honour and cherish her as if she were my beloved.’ Note how she is simply referred to as an ‘it’ here; she is a mere possession for the prince. In the Disney version Snow White is then awoken by ‘love’s true kiss’, another deviation from the Grimms’ tale and presumably an element borrowed from Sleeping Beauty. Perhaps it appealed to Walt’s romantic side – his creepy, bordering-on-necrophilia romantic side. As a reward for her unrelenting submissiveness Snow White gets to spend the rest of her life in a giant castle with a man she barely knows who calls her ‘it’. Believe it or not the evil Queen’s fate is far grizzlier.

Despite the pervasiveness of the ‘evil step-mother’ as a stock character in popular culture, it is actually the biological parents who play the villains in many fairy tales. Often the Grimms would alter certain tales they had collected, substituting birth mothers for step-mothers, so as not to shock their readers and tarnish the image of the motherhood. In Snow White, her good biological mother dies in childbirth at the beginning of the tale, paving the way for a truly monstrous step-mother. In Disney’s version they go even further by eradicating Snow White’s birth mother from the narrative all together, leaving us with just the good, pure and passive Snow White contrasted with the evil, jealous and powerful Queen. The whole virgin/whore dichotomy thing, which Western culture still cannot get enough of, is prominent in the original tale but is amped to the max by Disney. In versions of the tale pre-dating the Grimms, most notably Giambattista Basile’s ‘The Young Slave’, much is made of the Queen’s jealousy of Snow White’s suitors. Once fairy tales became more exclusively aimed towards children sexual themes began to be repressed, and although The Grimms and Disney still focus on Snow White’s step-mother’s jealousy in their tales, the psycho-sexual undertones are far more subtle. Competition for male approval could be seen to be the most prominent theme of the story. Whether it be for the affection of young suitors, or for the attention of the absent father (In the Grimms’ tale Snow White is not an orphan, but her father is only mentioned once in the text. Child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim suggested that the rivalry between Snow White and the Queen was oedipal.) Or, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest, for the approval of the patriarchal voice of judgment in the mirror ‘that rules the Queen’s – and every woman’s – self evaluation.’ The Queen’s obsession with beauty merely reflects patriarchal society’s own obsession with it. This is still relevant today, and it is still an issue which pits women against each other. Again, Gilbert and Gubar highlight this, ‘female bonding is extraordinarily difficult in patriarchy: women almost inevitably turn against women because the voice in the looking glass sets them against each other.’ Of course, for the Queen there is no happy ending, and she meets a sticky end in both tales. In the Grimms’ far more horrific version she is forced to dance in red hot iron shoes until she drops dead. In the Disney version the violence is more sanitised, with her death taking place off-screen. However, her treatment is still harsh and she is pursued by the dwarfs onto a cliff where she falls to her death, destined to be pecked at by wild vultures.

2001 welcomed an alternative to the Disney fairy tale with the release of Shrek, an animated comedy which made fun of the old classics. To date there have been three more Shrek films, as well as other similar animated features such as Hoodwinked and Happily N’Ever After. Even Disney jumped on the bandwagon with the release of their live action feature Enchanted, which tells the story of a fairytale princess transported to modern day New York. In these films fairy tale tropes are lampooned and mocked for being old fashioned and out of touch. In one scene in Shrek the Third the princesses find themselves trapped in prison. Their solution to this problem is to ‘assume the positions’, which means sit around and wait to be rescued. And there is of course the scene where Snow White, accompanied as always by her posse of cute creatures, enchants two guards with her beautiful singing voice, only to then take them surprise by unleashing her song birds as weapons, all to the tune of Led Zeppelin. In Disney’s Enchanted they mock their own little Snow White with a city version of the ‘Whistle While You Work’ scene. This time it is a host of vermin, clusters of cockroaches and swarms of flies that help her with chores. Despite these films making fun of old fairy tale clichés, and trying to create a more modern outlook, they tend to reinforce the same values. They still end happily ever after with a wedding, and they continue to focus on hetero-normative plot points.

After gaining little success with The Princess and the Frog and Tangled, Disney announced in 2009 that they would no longer make fairy tale adaptations. Which I’m guessing they are starting to regret right around now as it seems fairy tales are once again en vogue. There are two new TV shows, Once Upon a Time and Grimm, which deal with the genre, and a whole host of new movie adaptations on the horizon. These include the Shrek spin-off Puss in Boots, and not one but two new Snow White adaptations. The first, Snow White and the Huntsman, seems far grittier with Snow White in armour and a supposedly more active role. Despite this, not one line of dialogue does she get to speak in the trailer. The other adaptation, Mirror, Mirror takes its cue much more from Disney and seems more whimsical and light-hearted. Yet in this trailer Snow White actually gets to speak, and fairytale clichés are made fun of with the prince needing to be rescued instead. However, both trailers still fixate on the monster/angel dichotomy of the two female characters, with no one seeming to understand that this is the most outdated idea of all in the tale. These trailers have prompted much debate over both films’ lack of racial diversity. Considering the wealth of different variations of fairy tales available, from a multitude of different cultural backgrounds, it is completely ridiculous that the only versions we still pay any attention to are those that have been manipulated by upper-class, white guys from the 18th and 19th centuries to suit their own religious and social morals. It would be so easy to put a real spin on the tired old tales, using a more diverse cast and less passive women, because these tales already exist. They are there in the form of traditional folk tales that collectors and publishers chose to ignore, and in the form of post-modern fairy tales, where authors have written out the elitism, racism and misogyny in order to create more exciting tales. Fairy tales are meant to be adapted, manipulated, toyed with and allowed to evolve and to grow. They have travelled from the workrooms of peasants to the literary salons of Paris. They have settled in the nurseries of children and have been adapted to the big screen. They are not meant to be left to stagnate, tracing the same old stories in the same old style. It’s time for change.

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Stevie Leigh Cattigan lives in Glasgow, Scotland and has just graduated with a degree in English and Comparative Literature. Tired of ranting at anyone who would listen about the lack of decent female characters in films, she decided to start at blog about just that called Calm Down Dear (which currently no one reads so take a look if you can!)

Texts used:
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, ‘Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother’ and The Brothers Grimm, ‘Snow White’ both contained in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. by Maria Tatar (New York; London: W.W. Norton, 1999).