The radical notion that women like good movies
It’s fascinating that all four of Shonda Rhimes’ protagonists have strained relationships with their mothers… Shondaland’s shows work to combat the stereotype that if you don’t have a functional family unit, replete with a doting, competent mother, you’re alone in the world.
In the haze of her Shondaland television production empire, many people forget—or aren’t aware at all—that Rhimes’ success began in 2002 when she wrote the screenplay for a little movie called ‘Crossroads,’ which also happened to be Britney Spears’ silver screen debut.
Check out what we’ve been reading this week–and let us know what you’ve been reading/writing in the comments!
Check out all of the posts for our Unlikable Women Theme Week here.
As people, no matter what gender, it is seemingly second nature to want others to like us and to portray our best selves to them. Just look at the ritual of the date or the job interview. That Cristina defied this action (though we have seen her star-struck when meeting surgeons like Tom Evans and Preston Burke) made her not just a feminist character, but a truly human(ist) one.
As you can see from the image above, there’s nothing wrong with the way either of the women in the sketches look. And as reality shows are wont to do, everything is tied up in a nice little bow by episode’s end, with Eva realizing she has issues that she needs to work on. “I’m a normal girl who has her own insecurities,” she says.
So while Nikki is a successful wrestler (she’s the current Divas Champion in real time), actress (she’s been in outwardly scripted productions as well as “scripted reality” TV), real estate agent and businesswoman in general, she apparently can’t be trusted to make choices that are best for her personal life at the age of 31.
In order to keep producing these girls that terrify the status quo, more adults need to take that position and not freak out when they catch their children—and particularly their girls—doing things they apparently shouldn’t. It’s only once we start adding adult meaning to children’s actions that they couldn’t possibly fathom that they start to take a sinister shape.
Check out all of the posts for our Demon/Spirit Possession Theme Week here.
When Phoebe is taken over by the deadly sin lust in “Sin Francisco,” she sexually assaults her professor and has sex with a policeman on the job, while Piper dances on her bar during her high school reunion when she’s possessed by an evil spirit. And almost all the evil women in the show are sexualized: the succubus, shapeshifter Kaia, the Stillman sisters in “The Power of Three Blondes,” the seer Kyra, etc.
Morello’s abovementioned childlike room, her harping on about how her and Christopher’s romance is “meant to be,” like something out of ‘Notting Hill,’ ‘Pretty Woman’ or ‘Cinderella,’ and her psychotic break that sees her stealing the prison van to break into Christopher’s marital home, shows just how damaging society’s “wedding industrial complex and… [its] need to infantalise grown women,” as Nicky puts it, can be. It’s also an all-too-common one drummed into Western women everywhere they turn.
The ‘Scream’ franchise, after all, is about the women. It could be argued that most horror movies are about the women; female victims make for easy targets and garner more of a reaction from the audience. But ‘Scream’ was one of the first mainstream horrors to advocate for equal-opportunity killing: where the men are as fair game as the girls, and two out of the seven killers have been women. More than that, they’ve been the masterminds of the whole operation; using the clueless and fame-hungry men as pawns in their bloody chess game.
