Caitlin Keefe Moran – Bitch Flicks

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

Oh Scully. You beautiful, badass, rosebud-mouthed, flame-haired Valkyrie wearing a blazer two sizes too big for you: what do you desire? We know what Mulder desires. He wants to look at porn in his office. He wants to flirt and call the shots. He wants ALIENS. He does not want to give you a desk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Philomena' movie poster — *Philomena* movie poster

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

Philomena, directed by Stephen Frears, tells a recognizable story: a mother searches for the child she gave up for adoption in her youth. What complicates this recognizable story is that this isn’t the story at all: Philomena’s child was given up against her will by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart at Roscrea Abbey in Ireland, who held her in bondage as a laundry girl until she repaid the debt caused by her sin of sexual indiscretion. Sex is everywhere and nowhere in Philomena. Sex is the reason that the titular heroine is sent to Roscrea as a young woman, to have her illegitimate baby behind closed doors. Sex is also the reason that Philomena’s son, Anthony, is adopted out to an American family even though his mother is still living; the very fact that she gave birth to him at all, unmarried as she was, means she is unfit to be his mother. But we never see any sex—we get the faintest whisper of a flirtation at a county fair, a couple of innocent giggles, a dropped caramel apple, before the camera pans away. The next time we see Philomena, she is pregnant, standing before a firing squad of nuns, answering questions about her virtue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Young Philomena with Anthony, before he was taken away

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

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

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

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The Sin of Sexuality: Desire in ‘Philomena’