Cultural Commentary – Page 3

‘Reality Bites,’ ‘Slackers’ and the Movies Made About Underemployed Youth

Occupy Wall Street started a year ago this Monday. The movement came out of a recession and an underemployed youth culture.

So, of course I want to look at a film that follows the frustrations that young people face in an economic crisis. Unfortunately, save for Lena Dunham productions, there isn’t a lot of that coming out right now – and that issue might be for another post. (As in: our economy is being dragged through the dirt, but our high grossing blockbuster hits are still mostly about rich white dudes. Maybe these rich white dudes observe the plight of the poor, but it is still from their vantage point. i.e. The Social Network/Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps/The Dark Knight Rises.)

Surprisingly there’s more films about frustrated-20-somethings in a bad job market from the early 90s. The 90s being the decade where a lot of people were pretty well off. But, there was that recession in the early 90s that influenced music, art and film in a lot of interesting ways.

Two films in particular, Slackerand Reality Bites, came out around the same time to address a youth culture that felt disenfranchised. They both ostensibly sought to delve into the coming-of-age story specific to disillusionment with the American dream. While Slacker is maybe a bit convoluted in its non-narrative narrative, it is far more successful in encapsulating a culture and economic climate that fed into each other. Reality Bites, on the other hand, just sort of bites.

Movie poster for Slacker

Richard Linklater’s Slackerfollows various characters around Austin, Texas. Each person bumps into, or passes another conversation that leads the camera to another story. The characters all seem to share the same sense of detachment from mainstream culture and desire to pontificate in a typical Linklater fashion. There isn’t really an arc to the film, but there is a voice. And, that’s the point. Linklater is trying to capture something while also getting a chance to look at long semi-philosophically titillating tête-à-têtes.

Reality Bitesinstead uses the educated but wandering youth archetype to facilitate an easy-to-consume pop culture-inundated whine-fest where the characters seem a bit more concerned about their love-hate romances than anything else.

When talking about Reality Bites I will be using the abbreviated form of the term “romantic comedy” (i.e. rom-com) as a verb. Here is an example of how I will use this: In Ben Stiller’s directorial debut in the 1994 film, Reality Bites, about 20-somethings trying to get by in a recession-drenched economy, Stiller took what could have been an informative narrative about the emerging 90s youth culture, and instead he went and rom-commed it.

The woefully hip cast of Reality Bites

Reality Bites just about literally fetishizes the economic strife of the young by slapping romantic intrigue on minimum wage and unemployment.

It also seems to miss the mark on what that youth culture was at the time. Did Stiller think grunge meant jerk? Because the male love interest, Troy (Ethan Hawke), is not appealing in any way. He’s a pseudo-intellectual who seems to have plenty of gripes with “the Man,” but nothing much intelligent to say about it. He’s hung up on the female love interest (and yes, that’s how I’m identifying them, since they rarely rise above those archetypes) Lelaina (Winona Ryder), in the most jealous and obnoxious way possible. After he spies Lelaina hooking up with a guy after her date, Troy makes snide comments indicating she’s promiscuous. Lelaina, our primary protagonist, does seem pretty cool sans her narcissistic documentary. But, she’s drawn to the poorly written symbol of her culture, Troy, for inexplicable reasons.

It’s painfully rom-commed. Reality Bites seems so contrived and marketed to a counterculture demographic, but it still relies on lazy plot devices and expects the audience to be intrigued by sexual tension over everything else. Which leaves the audience without much to actually connect with.

These films are both trying to appeal to a specific demographic, but the tone of Reality Bites is one that is perpetuated even while drowning us in unnecessary hormones.

Why "It Was Just the Times" Doesn’t Cut It When Challenging Sexism in Older Films

Here’s something I have run up against repeatedly when challenging sexism in older films and media (for the sake of the argument I will just discuss sexism, but this applies to all shapes and sizes of bigotry):

“It was just the times…”

To be clear about this “the times” theory: in various old movies, blatant sexism percolate and penetrate. But, when these bigotries are pointed out by a riled-up feminist, many distance themselves from the debate entirely. They don’t argue that there isn’t sexism, but that it is irrelevant because the time period in which the film was produced was sexist and ergo all media resulting from it is exempt from criticism on the basis that it could only be un-sexist if it was “ahead of its time.” As in: it is unfair to call out bigotries in an “old” movie because those bigotries were so ingrained in the culture that no media could escape the influence.

Firstly, this presumes that sexism exists in the mythical “back then.” It suggests sexism was a problem in “the times” when women were expected to stay home, weren’t considered for the same jobs as men and/or couldn’t vote. Sexism existed when people still thought ridiculing people based on their gender was funny. Or it was when women weren’t paid fairly for their work. It existed before abortion was legal – when politicians still thought they had more of a say over what a woman did with her body than a woman did. Those nasty generalizations and gender-based misbehaviors belong to our grandparents or parents or older siblings: not us. But, if you noticed: Women still don’t get paid as much as men. Our right to bodily autonomy is regularly challenged by politicians who presume to know what’s best for a person’s uterus. People are still singled out and/or demeaned for their gender. This is a feminist blog, so I don’t feel the need to go into detail. But, here’s a list of sexisms that still flourish today: slut-shaming, fat-shaming, cat calls, assault, sexualization, objectification, old boys’ club disassociation (aka employment discrimination), lack of media representation, gendered interpretations, overall debasement, pink&blue aisles and more and more and more.

Sexism isn’t something that is over. And if we look at contemporary media, we see it there as well. Disney movies didn’t stop featuring childish and passive female characters after Roe v. Wade. Romantic comedies didn’t stop perpetuating the notion that women need to be saved from themselves by a man. Women haven’t stopped being portrayed as sexual conquests in action flicks.

Which ties me into the next point: old film isn’t irrelevant. Some fatalistic viewers may postulate that the media has already been created. Neither the movie nor the culture from which it was created from can be changed at this point, so criticizing sexism is futile.

But, we can’t appreciate contemporary media without understanding what built up to it. Also, viewers don’t stop watching old films after they’ve circulated a certain number of decades. Media lasts, and continues to be a part of the cultural conscience. In many ways, older films can be more relevant than newer ones.

Newer movies are timelier. They play a part in the 24-hour-cycle that automatically elevates import. But, that doesn’t mean they ultimately have more influence than older film, they just have more exposure. Stanley Kubrick’s presentation of women – especially in Clockwork Orange – might be worth noting a bit more than Michael Bay’s presentation – say in Transformers. Both exploit women, but Kubrick’s portrayal comes from a respected and canonized director. Michael Bay’s portrayal comes from a director whose notoriety comes from explosion size.

Another crucial point: critique is not necessarily antagonistic. If anything it’s an expanding of the existing material. Media – like other cultural artifacts – is relative to the culture observing it. Historical context should orient it, but it should not dictate our appreciation of it. And, challenging sexism within it does not devalue it. Instead it can actually make it more worthwhile to talk about. Instead of passively viewing film, we should be active in our consideration.

Calling out sexism gives us a fuller picture of our history. To better understand ourselves, our culture and the film; we need to analyze and point out the flaws. This is why I enjoy focusing on older films: the movies that have been with us a while, and have influenced contemporary directors. I think they are more pertinent the longer they last. Looking back will always give us a chance to reevaluate how culture in “the times” affects culture in these times.

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Erin Fenner grew up in small-town Idaho where she took solace in cult cinema. Her burgeoning feminist ideals didn’t dampen her approach to viewing even the most obviously gender-norm-dependent films, but created another angle of intrigue. She went to the University of Idaho where she grabbed a Journalism degree. There she was a student blogger, radio show producer and self-described feminist activist. Now she lives in Portland, Oregon, and works remotely for the reproductive rights organization Trust Women where she writes about the state of pro-choice-politics for their blog. She also says she is a poet, but refuses to publish, perform or share lest someone offer “constructive” critiques.

Women in Science Fiction Week: Examining Stereotypes with Ursula K. Le Guin

Guest post written by Carissa Harwood.

In the past, the act of writing science fiction has been a traditionally male dominated genre. Women have sought to create their own meanings in the books they read that don’t often include their perspectives and experiences. In recent decades, though, women writers have searched for and taken control over a fiction category that seeks to shrink them, or exploit their gender for some statement, whether intentional or not, about the female body.

While times have certainly changed, and there are many fine science fiction writers, male and female, Ursula Le Guin stands out for me as a writer who has created new meanings for women in science fiction with seeming ease in her writing. She takes a simple concept — the ‘what if’ factor — and creates whole worlds that she populates as she gives us her answer. That’s the big golden key to science fiction writing — exploring the ‘what if’.

Here’s a ‘what if’ from her novel The Left Hand of Darkness — what if there was a planet where gender wasn’t so easily defined? What if there was a planet where men had the children, what would that be like? So often I’ve come across aspiring authors who request that I review their NEW FRESH EXCITING sci-fi novel, even though my blog explicitly states I no longer review new science fiction. And here’s the reason: the submissions (from male authors) I’ve read invariably read like this (I made this up as an example, this is not a direct quote from anywhere):

“Susie laughed manically as she switched Betty’s birth control pills with pez. ‘Now I can have Tommy all to myself’, she smirked.” There is a lot of smirking going on in these novels, and I hate the word smirk. It should be used sparingly. A smirk should be used to indicate a sarcastic smile, an I-know-something- you-don’t-know sing-song smile, and I’ve always associated the smirk with something teenagers like to do. And that is how many writers of science fiction write their female characters: smirking adolescents.

Science fiction is, or should be, a place to examine stereotypes and political and social conventions, not to reinforce them. Before Le Guin came along, we had authors like Piers Anthony (a notorious misogynist, although like most misogynists he denies that he is one) and Ray Bradbury. Now I wouldn’t go so far as to call Bradbury a misogynist — I admire Bradbury’s work, I really do, because many of his themes are universal. But he falls into the same trap that Stephen King does — very few of his main characters are female, and more often than not, men are the decision makers, and the ones that move the plot along. It’s interesting to note that many writers tend to write towards their own gender. In Bradbury’s fiction, like Anthony and King, the female characters often end up in supporting roles as wives, mothers, and crushes that turn into ‘marionettes’ or a controllable programmable robot that can be easily manipulated.

I read these books as a child and teenager, and I experienced a sense of dissatisfaction with the minor roles women were playing in this male literary playground. So I wondered what women writing science fiction would be like, and that’s where I found Ursula Le Guin, who didn’t merit her own displays in the library lobby like the other authors I’ve mentioned. At least, not when I was a kid.

Compare Bradbury’s marionettes and Anthony’s robot women to Le Guin’s character of Sita Dulip in Changing Planes. The main character is a woman who travels alone and fearlessly not only to other cities in the world, but other dimensions and other planets and cultures. She isn’t someone’s ‘female companion.’ She’s not defined by her marital status or her relationships or how many children she can or cannot produce. Not once does she ask anyone’s permission. Not once does she require a male guardian or escort. Not once does she require supervision. She just goes, because that’s what any thinking and curious person should be allowed to do without restriction—go forth and explore and learn and imagine. And she can do all this without one single mention of menstruation, (or mentioning having to pack tampons) or heartlessly abandoning her children in favor of a free life seeing what the universe has to offer. A woman can venture forth into the world (or worlds, in this case) without one single thought for her reproductive capabilities.

What’s so innovative about that? A woman traveling alone, doing what she wants? Because there’s no sense of fear, or intimidation or dependence on anyone else. Sita Dulip is truly a free individual. There’s no sense of loss, or not belonging anywhere. It’s simply a story of exploring and learning, without any literal or figurative baggage.

Let’s look at another comparison of science fiction as a way to explore deeply held social constructs by looking at John Scalzi’s brilliant take on The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula Le Guin. He wrote about this as a lens through which to examine the Penn State scandal, and I had my students read this article when we discussed comparing literature to current events. The world she constructed in the novel goes like this: If you could have a happy wonderful, perfect life, but the price was that one child would have to live his or her life in misery, neglect and starvation for the rest of that child’s life—would you do it? Could you live your life knowing it took someone’s direct pain and misery? What happens to the people who stay? What happens to the people who walk away into an uncertain world?

It’s these kinds of questions that are explored through science fiction that really melt my butter. And I’m not saying–at all–that women can write science fiction better, I just want women to have an active voice, and active participation.

It’s the demand for participation in this world as something other than a reproductive vehicle that I wanted to find. Writing is a mental communication of ideas from the author’s brain to yours, a communication that, hopefully, journeys with you as you read along and create new possibilities and opportunities, challenging our perspectives and allowing us into the hearts and minds of the most diverse cast of characters you can imagine. All writing explores how we think, but fiction provides with a vehicle we can ride in. I just don’t think the vehicles should come in distinct shades of pink or blue with all their incumbent stereotypes. This can only happen if, and hopefully when, more women take up the pen to write their own stories, and seek to answer their own ‘what ifs’.

Carissa Harwood is an adjunct professor and writer of things rich and strange, from aliens to zombies, with some feminism, paranormal romance, and urban fantasy thrown into the mix. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts Degree in Playwrighting and blogs at 3500 Words per Pound.

Women in Science Fiction Week: 21st Century Mammy: Older Black Women Are the Lowest Rung on the Visibility Ladder of Science Fiction

Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) in Star Trek: The Next Generation

Guest post written by Joanne Bardsley.

At some point in the near future, a mass genocide, coupled with a widespread sterilisation programme, occurs. This results in an overwhelmingly white population (genetic preservation orders are been enacted for redheads and natural blondes). Compulsory euthanasia exists for the elderly, although four people at a time are excepted because of their great leadership skills. Babies are raised Brave New World style in farms far away from the public eye but girl children often succumb to a mysterious illness which kills them before they reach adulthood. The women who do survive this mysterious illness suffer changes to their metabolism so that they never need to eat and never put on weight.

The two older black women who have survived the depredations enacted on non-whites, females and the elderly are so relieved to be alive that they devote their whole lives to the service of others.

The Oracle (Gloria Foster) in The Matrix and The Matrix Revolutions

The lack of representation of older black women in science fiction is coupled with a complete lack of interest in developing any kind of independent agenda for their characters. Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Oracle in The Matrix, the only two named older black women that I (or anybody else that I asked) could think of, are recycled wholesale from the stereotypical mammy of the slave era.

Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) in Gone with the Wind

The main features of the stereotypical mammy are grounded in a white fantasy; often these women were wet nurses, bringing up their white charges in a far more intimate relationship than either have with their biological families. It is not Scarlett O’Hara’s mother who fusses about her eating habits, does up her dress, or worries about her relationships. It is Mammy. Scarlett, and the viewers of Gone With the Wind, never consider what Mammy might think of their relationship, or worry that she might have children of her own whom she cannot raise. We are content to construct a fantasy in which Mammy wants nothing more than to feed, clothe and care for her white charge.

Neither Guinan nor the Oracle appear to have any other desire than to help others. Guinan does have hidden talents; she can outwit Captain Picard and outshoot Lieutenant Worf, she is even prepared to take on the omnipotent Q. However, her main preoccupation is serving food, drink and advice to the crew of the Starship Enterprise. The Oracle literally only exists to guide others, she is the matrix’s help programme. Her help comes with a side of cookies and is served in a dingy kitchen.

The preoccupation with food seems to be a particular feature of the mammy and possibly explains her continued presence in our fantasies. She exists to feed us. She alone of all women in the future is allowed to be plump and to wear less than skin tight clothing. Her presence is symbolically and physically maternal, yet her slave status denies her the independent desires of a mother, and removes the rival demands of a father; she exists for us alone.

Joanne Bardsley teaches English and Media Studies in North West London. She is currentlystudying for a Masters in Education.

Women in Science Fiction Week: The Problem with Female Representation in Science Fiction on Television

Falling Skies‘ Margaret

Guest post written by Paul and Renee.

The wonderful thing about science fiction is that the writers have the opportunity to create a world, which while based on ours, can be markedly different. This means that there should be a place for strong female characters who are not restricted by sexism or forced into a situation in which they must perform femininity on a daily basis to be accepted as ‘woman.’ Despite the freedom of this genre; however, nothing is born outside of discourse, which means of course that we end up with the same sexist tropes repeatedly.

Even in shows which readily lend themselves to recurring scenes of violence, because women have historically been framed as delicate and passive, men end up in the leadership roles. This also means that when the action does finally happen, women are placed into nurturing roles like doctors and nurses to aid the wounded men. While some may see this exchange as complementary, it in fact sets up a serious gender divide that is reductive.

We actually see this most strongly and most blatantly in dystopias. In Falling Skies, humanity is locked into a battle for survival against an alien threat. Humanity is nearly extinct, the group is excited at the prospect of a capital that has managed to scrape together 2,000 survivors. The 2nd Massachusetts itself is reduced to a mere 150 people, meaning it has lost nearly half of its already low numbers since the series began. Clearly, this is a series about desperation – every man must be ready to fight, desperately, to survive.

And I said “man” purposefully there. Because, while there are plenty of women in the crowd scenes and even in most of the fight scenes we will find one token, nameless female fighter in a large number of men, the vast majority of the fighters are male. In fact, there’s only ever one named female fighter at a time (Karen, who gets replaced by Maggie after she is captured. She also inherited Karen’s love interest – which did rather make the two women seem interchangeable).

Remember how desperate humanity is here. For most of the show, Jimmy, a 13 year old boy was drafted to fight. As they get more desperate, Matt, a 6 year old boy, starts carrying a gun around and taking part in military action. Where are the women? It’s clearly not a matter of military background with both children and school teachers on the battlefield, why do we only see one or two women standing side by side with their men to hold the line against the alien threat?

By contrast, the most prominent female characters we do see except for the interchangeable-Hal-Love-Interest are, of course, caregivers. Dr. Ann Glass and Lourdes, the medical team for the 2nd Massachusetts. It’s the 21st century, humanity is nearly destroyed, every day is a struggle to survive – I think we can move past men holding guns while women roll bandages.

We can see a similar pervasive female passivity in Alphas, reinforced and ingrained by the special abilities the characters have. Two of the characters, Cameron and Bill, have abilities that make them dangerous in a fight. Their physical capabilities make them the team muscle – contrast that with the two women. Well, they have super senses and limited mind control respectively. The women are inherently placed in support roles and set up as support from the very beginning. And I know that someone will say “well, they don’t have combat powers!” true – but why was it written that way? Why couldn’t Nina have the super-strength? Why did the writers choose the women and the disabled character to have the less active, support powers? And that’s not to say their powers aren’t powerful or useful – far from it – but then, so is rolling bandages.

Sanctuary‘s Helen Magnus

Even in shows like Sanctuary where we have female leadership, not all women are created equal. Helen Magnus is the only female of the original scientists to survive. The two most prominent recurring female characters outside of the protagonist are Kate Freelander and Abbey Corrigan. Kate essentially is the replacement for Ashley, Magnus’ daughter who died at the end of season one. She is a woman of colour who seems to exist only for Magnus to reform her evil ways. She disappears for large swaths of time and is barely missed by the team. In this way, they make her quite disposable. There were other options to send to work in hollow earth, but it was Kate that was chosen. Biggie would have made a much more natural choice but because he was a fan favourite, there was no way he would have been sent.

In the case of Abbey, she exists it seems solely to be the Mary Sue of the show. She is just shy of vapid and has no real storyline other than being Will’s girlfriend. Everything that the Sanctuary deals with is far above her pay grade. Kate was also featured in the highly regrettable musical episode which was her only form of communication for a time. So it would seem that to elevate one woman, all of the other female characters must pay a price and it is particularly troubling when it comes to Kate because of the racial dynamic at play. Once again, we have White woman acting as earth mother to a person of colour.

Even when we have strong female characters, they are still not free of damaging tropes. In Continuum, Kiera is strong and is proactive; each week she and her partner Carlos, take turns hunting down the bad guys. Keira is not afraid to get physical if she has to. That sounds great doesn’t it? It would be if that was all I had to say about her, but it seems that once again, a strong female character cannot just be strong. She has to have a vulnerable side and for Keira it’s motherhood. It makes sense that a mother living so far away from her child, would miss her son desperately, but it does not make sense that this sense of loss would turn into her deciding to lecture her grandmother into giving birth and rejecting every legitimate reason she had to have an abortion.

Continuum‘s Kiera

In “The Test of Time,” Lily Jones, is a homeless high school dropout with no parental support, who finds herself pregnant. Obviously, becoming a parent at this point would be absolutely daunting, but Kiera does not even pause for one moment to legitimise a single thing that Lily says. Instead, the entire message of the episode is that marriage is the answer to teenage pregnancy. Marry the father and everything will magically become fixed and you won’t regret the sacrifices you have to make to parent effectively. The writers prove this to us by showing us that when Kiera had her own unplanned pregnancy, she of course married the father and was happy. Ta-da instant fairytale.

If you are going to go to the trouble of having a strong female character, you would think that the writers would then attempt to exclude messages that are obviously anti-woman. The entire episode implied that abortion in and of itself is the wrong choice to make no matter the circumstances and they used the strong female character to send this message. This isn’t empowerment, this is sending us back to the days of the back alley, coat hangers and death.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about this female passivity and women taking an incomprehensible step back in combat is that we should be past this. We have so many shows that have female characters who will stand forward and kick arse – Mutant X had Shalimar, Heroes was willing to have women who were as dangerous as any of the men.

And we have several female protagonists now, taking charge, fighting the good fight with everything from swords to lasers (though often, as we said above, even these characters have to be made vulnerable); so why oh why do we keep doing this? Why do we keep making the female fighters the exceptions? Why is it so hard to have female warriors standing side by side, in like numbers, like skill and like strength to their male counterparts?

Paul and Renee blog and review at Fangs for the Fantasy. We’re great lovers of the genre and consume it in all its forms – but as marginalised people we also analyse critically through a social justice lens.

Guest Writer Wednesday: The Avengers: Are We Exporting Media Sexism or Importing It?

The Avengers movie poster

This is a guest review by Soraya Chemaly and is posted with permission.

The Avengers opened last week and, shattering records, far outpaced all other Cineplex offerings nationally. The movie grossed more than $200 million over the weekend (compared with The Hunger Games $8 millon weekend receipts and seven week total of $380m). The movie has gotten generally good reviews for plot, witty superhero banter and some interesting character representations – not the least of which focus on the central and relatively well-fleshed out (no pun intended) Scarlett Johansson character, Black Widow. Director Joss Whedon get’s major points for featuring her not as the typical sexy sidekick, but as an actual ass-kicking superhero peer.

However, the movie’s domestic success this weekend was surpassed by its sales overseas. The movie had pre-US release openings in Beijing, Rome, London and Moscow raked in more than a quarter of a billion dollars internationally. The overseas market now makes up 70% of US movie ticket sales. It grew 35% during the past five years, compared to just 6% in the US market. This is important information for how Hollywood, already deplorably lacking in gender balanced production, will or will not portray women in films.

Jeremy Renner and Scarlett Johansson in The Avengers

Because it is a blockbuster megacomic book release there has been much discussion about the female audience for comic books and action films. Suffice to say that there are a lot of women, me included, that are huge fans of both. Despite the presence and strength of the Black Widow character however, the ratio of male to females in this movie is predictably Smurfette Principley: one female to six males and probably the same ratio or much worse in disposable character and crowd scenes. In addition, she appears to be the only character without her own franchise.

This movie’s success however illustrates the question: Are we importing or exporting our sexism? According to the Motion Picture Association, in 2009, women were responsible for more than 50% of US movie ticket sales. You might think that this would elicit some interest in the minds of the men who make movies (and yes, they are still primarily men as evidenced by the stats below). But, instead of the profit potential of American female movie goers resulting in more female lead characters (in every genre) or more female-centered stories, we have a completely different framework for estimating what will sell. Namely, the exponential growth and impact on Hollywood of the global market and the demands that growth places on production and development of content.

Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury in The Avengers

Where does this global growth leave characters like Black Widow and movies with female centric stories or leads? What happens when Hollywood produces movies to meet the needs of the world’s fastest growing and most populated countries – which also happen to be those with the most skewed gendercide-based birth ratios? Cultures that habitually accept the elimination of females aren’t going to be that interested in stories about women and girls, especially those that feature powerful, culture-threatening, transgressive characters.

It means more testosterone heavy action films with women as sex-toys, pawns and eye-candy. It’s why G and PG rated movies, increasingly popular in the US, have been outstripped by R rated movies, which are often loud, violent, fight-filled extravaganzas that don’t require complex characters or plots and can translate across multiple cultures. Cross-cultural entertainment product development, in order to work and be profitable, seeks the lowest common denominator—which it seems is a certain-type of language-neutral male aggression, violence, and power. It’s much trickier, not to mention subversive, to present complex characterizations of men and women that include non-traditional representations of women who are sexually liberated and empowered. Entertainers don’t want to rock the cultural boat, they just want to sell more movie tickets. So, basically, whereas a few members of international audiences might care about the travails of a small-town girl dealing with an unwanted teen pregnancy or even an intergalactic, painted-into-her-tensile-tights, justice-seeking female heroine, all members of international audiences can appreciate being swept away in an asteroid-created tsunami from hell from which strong men seek to protect the planet’s weak, which is why a movie like 2012 made $166 million at the US box office, but made $604 million overseas.

Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow in The Avengers

As a result, it is predictable that the US movie market will see an increase in the seasonal barrage of hyper-masculine, violent super-hero and action-hero films that do much to perpetuate out-dated, harmful hyper-gendered stereotypes of both men and women. Don’t get me wrong, I love some of these movies, but there is a gross imbalance in how films are currenty written, produced and made and there is absolutely no offsetting movies like these with virtually any other entertainment portrayals of women. This sexist, dumbing down of content has real ramifications in our culture as we try to develop a more balanced and genuinely equitable society – especially in terms of entertainment and media representations of gender.

“What makes me so sad is that these films are seen as our cultural imprint,” explains Melissa Silverstein, founder of the Athena Film Festival and of the influential blog, Women and Hollywood. “This is a huge problem because we struggle for women’s stories to be taken seriously, and as the worldwide box office continues to be so important it seems that women will continue to be second class citizens.”

A study released by the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism in December 2011, based on a survey of the top 100 grossing movies of 2009 revealed that 67.8% of all speaking characters (in excess of 5000) were male. In addition, female characters, usually isolated by virtue of there just being one speaking role, were consistently depicted in sexualized ways. Twenty-three percent of women versus 7.4% of men appeared in revealing clothes or partial nudity. The fact that only 3.6% of the directors and 13.5% of the writers of these films are women is particularly telling when you consider that the ratios are substantively different depending on the gender of the story teller: in movies directed by women, 47% of characters are female versus 32%. These ratios are the same as they were in, get ready, 1946.

Jeremy Renner, Scarlett Johansson, and Chris Evans in The Avengers

In reviews of seventeen “Must See” Holiday Movies for families recommended by Common Sense Media in December, only one had a female lead character—Breaking Dawn. The other sixteen feature boys or men in lead roles. The others primarily adhered to the Smurfette Principle. According to The Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media, the ratio of boys to girls becomes more extreme as they age. In the Institute’s study of the 50 top grossing family movies, females were 32.4% of speaking roles for G rated movies. That number declined to 27.7% for PG-13 movies. Boys outnumber girls in movies three to one. In addition, as in adult movies, girl characters are consistently presented with less clothes and hyper-gendered physical characteristics, like tiny waists. Almost every movie on the list for the past holiday season was told from a male perspective and reviews of these movies did nothing to systematically address the messages sent by their collective presentation.

And I saw no mention, during the reviewing process, of the impact of international ticket sales on product development. But, this is how Chris Dodd, Chairman and CEO of the MPAA put it in regards to overseas sales: “These numbers underscore the impact of movies on the global economy and the vitality of the film-watching experience around the world. The bottom line is clear: people in all countries still go to the movies and a trip to the local cinema remains one of the most affordable entertainment options for consumers.”

Selected portions of this article appeared on the Huffington Post and The Good Men Project.

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Soraya Chemaly writes feminist satire. She is a regular contributor to Fem2.0, The Feminist Wire, Alternet, Role/Reboot and The Huffington Post. She is also the creator of the retired blogs: Poog, a Goop Spoof and The Guide to Manic Moms.

Reproduction & Abortion Week: ‘Roseanne’s’ Discussion of Abortion Nearly Twenty-Five Years Ago Highlights the Current Feminist Backlash

The cast of Roseanne

I grew up watching Roseanne. The show first aired in 1988—when I was ten years old—and it ended after 9 seasons, around the time I graduated high school. The fact that the show now appears in reruns on various television stations, during all hours of the day and night, often makes me feel like the Conners have never not been a part of my life. I saw myself (and my family) in that show, and I identified with the characters and their struggles, particularly surrounding financial issues and social status.

Unfortunately, families like the Conners just don’t exist on TV now, which is extremely problematic considering families today—and women in particular—continue to feel the never-ending effects of Wall Street tanking our economy. We simply no longer see the realities of women’s lives accurately reflected back at us in the media. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that Roseanne, a television show starring a fat, working-class, unapologetically outspoken matriarch; a television show that effectively dealt with racism, classism, feminism, gay marriage (depicting the very first gay marriage in the history of television); a television show openly addressing sexism and misogyny, and yes—a woman’s right to choose; and finally, a television show that first aired nearly 25 years ago, is a far more progressive television show than anything currently gracing the network airwaves in 2012.

I grew up in Middletown, Ohio—a small town that very recently made the Forbes’ Top Ten List of Fastest Dying Towns—and the characters on Roseanne appeared all around me in my day-to-day life in the form of factory workers, cashiers, fast-food employees, friends and family members who lived in trailer parks, those of us graduating from high school who had no idea how we’d ever pay for college, and those struggling to pay bills in a community that didn’t offer much in terms of employment opportunities aside from the local steel mill, where a majority of our parents worked. I especially identified with Darlene, who I watched morph from a snarky young tomboy who played basketball and had a close relationship with her father, into a successful young woman with a college degree who fought for animal rights, never let men control her life (unlike her older sister Becky), and who ultimately ended up with the same strong personality traits as her mother Roseanne, even though their relationship suffered through serious rough patches over the years.

Roseanne working as a server

While I managed to leave Middletown, Ohio and attend college, (by taking out a shitload of student loans) most of my family still lives there, and over the years I’ve been forced to watch my hometown crumble (literally, businesses are falling the fuck apart) like so many other Midwestern cities that’ve been ignored by our government and taken advantage of by big banks and Wall Street tycoons. I suppose my inability to identify with most characters, families, and storylines on current network television led me to begin my Netflix marathon of Roseanne last year. I craved seeing the reality of a family (and a woman!) negatively impacted by the economy doing their best to make ends meet. While vampire and zombie TV creates a nice little escape (and interesting metaphors, for sure) from the bullshit most of the country is experiencing right now, I wanted to watch a show that didn’t merely offer escape but reminded the world that these families exist; this is a serious crisis; and we are not going to ignore it.

And so that’s how my love affair with Roseanne and the Conner family re-began.

Darlene Conner

Most of the time I played it in the background while I ate dinner or washed the dishes, because, for the many reasons I stated above, I found the hilari-dysfunction of the Conner family comforting. Then one night while I surfed the net, barely paying attention to the show, I heard Roseanne’s sister Jackie say, “Do you think you might have an abortion?” I honestly don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment—I looked up from my computer in shock, like, Did someone just fucking say the word “abortion” on TV?

Many writers gave wonderful examples during Reproduction & Abortion Week of how abortion—both the portrayal of abortion and the word itself (see Knocked Up)—have been all but avoided in recent films and television, although current shows like Friday Night Lights and Grey’s Anatomy certainly offer hope. But Roseanne’s two-episode arc about a woman’s right to choose—which aired in 1994 (almost 20 years ago)—discussed abortion so openly and unapologetically, especially in its acknowledgment of men’s role in the decision-making process (hint: it’s the woman’s decision, always), that it honestly floored me.

Roseanne taking a pregnancy test

The premise goes like this: Roseanne and Dan want to have another baby, and she becomes pregnant. They find out from a nurse after Roseanne’s amniocentesis (to determine the sex of the baby), that there might be complications in her pregnancy. They can’t get in touch with the doctor to find out the exact problems (because it’s Thanksgiving!), and that sets up the catalyst for a long, two-episode discussion about whether Roseanne—depending on the extent of the complications—would want to have the baby or have an abortion. Roseanne feels as though Dan is pushing her to have an abortion, whereas she’s leaning toward having the baby, regardless of the circumstances. The two episodes illustrate the problems that arise when several characters weigh-in on Roseanne’s decision.

One of the first conversations about Roseanne’s pregnancy happens between Roseanne and her sister Jackie:

Roseanne [talking about her husband Dan]: All’s he thinks about is himself, you know. He’s worried that a sick baby might be an inconvenience to him, so he’s trying to hint around that I should have an abortion.

Jackie: Oh, I’m sure he knows it’s your decision. I mean, he must respect your right to choose.

Roseanne: Yeah, as long as I choose to agree with him.

A few minutes later, Dan enters the kitchen, interrupting their conversation, and Roseanne asks him to start painting the baby’s crib. He suggests that they wait to paint the crib until they hear back from the doctor. Roseanne gets angry, and after he leaves the kitchen (presumably to begin painting the crib), Jackie and Roseanne pick up where they left off:

Jackie: You’re right, you know, he was pushing you. I thought Dan was better than that.

Roseanne: Why? He’s a man. You know, this is the only area in the world [circles stomach with her hand] that they can’t control, and it drives them crazy ’cause it doesn’t come with a remote. [audience laughter]

I particularly like this interaction between Roseanne and Jackie because it shows two women talking about a woman’s right to choose (using that exact language!) as if it’s obvious that it’s her right. And neither of them lets Dan off the hook for putting pressure on Roseanne, however subtle it may be, to have an abortion. We find out later though, during a discussion at a bar between Fred (Jackie’s husband) and Dan, that Dan does seem to understand that the decision about the baby ultimately resides with Roseanne:

Fred: I just don’t think you’d be a terrible person if you demanded some control over what Roseanne’s gonna do … Look, having a kid, it’s half yours, this is a 50/50 proposition.

Dan: Yeah, when it finally comes out. You gotta admit, Fred, this is different.

I like this interaction between Dan and Fred, too, because it illustrates a larger cultural problem in the conversation surrounding abortion and a woman’s right to choose: where do fathers fit into the equation? Even though Fred thinks men have the right to “demand some control” (yikes, current War on Women!) over what a woman does with her body, Dan, regardless of his personal feelings about abortion, understands that he—and men—should not exercise control over women’s bodies.

DJ Conner

The most compelling conversation about Roseanne’s right to choose surprisingly occurs between Roseanne and DJ, her twelve-year-old son. After hearing so much yelling and whispering between his parents over the course of several days, DJ becomes concerned that his mom might be sick. Roseanne decides to tell DJ the truth about the situation.

Roseanne: Okay, I’m gonna tell you the truth because you’re not a little kid anymore. I’m okay, but, um, there’s a chance that something’s wrong with the baby.

DJ: Oh.

Roseanne: Yeah. So I have to, uh, make a decision whether to have it or not.

DJ: You mean you might have an abortion?

Roseanne: Uhh, yeah, that. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s just a very, very complicated decision, DJ.

DJ: Why?

Roseanne: Because I have wanted to have a baby for a long time.

DJ: Well if you decide not to have the baby, when you come back from the hospital, we can take care of you.

Roseanne: Hey, I know you’re gonna be a man someday, but see, you cannot do this.

DJ: Do what?

Roseanne: No man has any right to tell any woman what she should do in a situation like this.

DJ: I’m not, I’m just saying that if you do have the baby and it’s sick, we can take care of the baby too.

Roseanne: So you mean you’re saying like, uh, saying what—that you would support any decision I make?

DJ: Yeah.

Roseanne: Oh, well [audience laughter] … thanks. Thanks a lot, DJ. It really makes me feel better that you can handle the truth.

This scene in particular moved me. DJ—a young boy who hasn’t yet been negatively influenced by the Mass Cultural Ownership of Women’s Bodies—reserves all judgment regarding his mother’s decision about the baby. He says the word “abortion” in a matter-of-fact way, as if he’s asking his mother what time it is. He offers to support her, no matter what she decides, and he makes it clear that he understands the decision is only hers. This scene also represents the first time Roseanne says outright, “No man has any right to tell any woman what she should do in a situation like this.” Admittedly, DJ can’t fully comprehend the complexity of such a decision, or how life might change for the entire family if a new baby needed special attention; however, it never occurs to him to try and influence Roseanne’s choice. Again, I attribute that to DJ’s innocence, specifically surrounding his ignorance of the dominant cultural narratives. (See the recent all-male birth control panel and the mostly male-dominated GOP’s attack on Planned Parenthood and, you know, women’s healthcare in general.)

Roseanne and Dan eventually find out that their baby is healthy. Roseanne decides to give birth to her. But that isn’t the point of this episode arc at all. The discussion of choice, especially when 1 in 3 women chooses abortion, matters. The media, including television and film, needs to accurately reflect the realities of women’s lives because it matters. The more we see what women truly struggle with, depicted in an honest way, the more we can erase the stigmas associated with abortion and women’s reproductive rights in general. These episodes aired 25 years ago, and—amid the absolutely embarrassing and unacceptable War on Women—puts the current (undeniable) feminist backlash in perspective.

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.

Why Facebook’s "Occupy a Vagina" Event Is Not Okay

Last week, a Change.org petition urged Facebook to remove pages that promote sexual violence. Some of the offending pages included, “Kicking Sluts in the Vagina,” and “Riding your Girlfriend softly Cause you dont want to wake her up.” The following passage from the petition explains the overall goal:

First, Facebook needs to clarify that pages that encourage or condone rape–like the ones mentioned above–are in violation of their existing standards. Secondly, they need to make a statement that all pages that describe sexual violence in a threatening way will be immediately taken down upon being reported. Finally, Facebook must include specific language in their Terms of Service that make it clear that pages promoting any form of sexual violence will be banned.

Jessica Bennett wrote about the petition and the #notfunnyfacebook Twitter campaign for The Daily Beast in an article called, “Should Facebook Ban Sexist Pages?” She writes:

In some ways, misogyny on Facebook is just a newer version of the same old problem. Indeed, there are enough stories like Sierra’s for Danielle Citron, a cyber law professor at the University of Maryland, to compile a whole book of them—she’s hard at work on a text about online harassment that will be published by Harvard University Press in 2013. She notes more recent cases that have made headlines: the women smeared by AutoAdmit, the law school discussion board; the case of Harvard sex blogger Lena Chen; and the dramatic story of 11-year-old Jessi Slaughter. “I talk to women every day who’ve been silenced, scared, and just want to disappear,” Citron says. “It’s easy to dismiss these things as frat-boy antics, but this isn’t a joke.”

Then, on November 5th, ZDNet published an article called, “Facebook Finally Removes Pro-Rape Pages,” and the writer goes into detail about Facebook’s “massive problem with sex”:

With zero tolerance for porn and a refusal to define it, Facebook has deleted breast cancer survivor communities (labeling one breast cancer survivor page as “pornography”), retail business pages, individual profiles of human sexuality teachers, pages for authors and actors, photos of LGBT couples kissing (for which Facebook just apologized), and even the occasional hapless user’s profile who has the misfortune of having someone else post porn on their Wall.

With no comprehensible or clear methodology around sexual speech, we see pages deleted that discuss female sexuality, while pages that joke about and encourage raping women and girls rack up the likes.

So, yes, Facebook complied (finally) and removed some of its pro-rape pages, but as Shelby Knox noted on Twitter, “… #notfunnyfacebook isn’t a victory until they clarify the pages violate their terms of service.” We’re still waiting, Facebook …

In the meantime, I’d like to talk about the Occupy a Vagina Facebook event. When it first appeared a little over a week ago, the page was bombarded with offensive and violent rhetoric targeted at women (all in the name of “comedy” and “fun” of course), but when many women and men got angry about the event–and pushed back by leaving comments on the event wall asking the creator to remove the page (because it promoted rape and violence against women)–the creator deleted the comments. Now, the Occupy a Vagina event page says this:

(Edit for all the trolls)

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To all of you people who want to assume this event has anything to do with rape, you are completely wrong… This event was created by a WOMAN as a JOKE!!! If you don’t think it is funny, then click not attending and move on… I will be deleted any trolling ass messages about “promoting anything” other than comedy so don’t waste your time……

I mean, where in the fuck do I even begin? (Seriously, I keep starting and re-starting paragraphs because I don’t know where the fuck to begin.) With outrage? Okay, look: I don’t give a shit if a woman created the event, or if a man created it, or if I created it when I was passed out drunk in my bathtub–if it promotes rape, then it promotes rape. The author basically makes the ridiculous assertion that women can’t possibly participate in the perpetuation of rape culture (e.g. “this event can’t even contribute to rape culture because a woman created it to be funny.“) No. See, the thing is–and people still can’t seem to successfully grasp this in Sexual Harassment 101–intent is irrelevant. Do I believe the creator intended to invite a bunch of people to an Occupy event sponsored by rape culture? Or that the “attendees” honestly believe they’re engaging in anything that might directly or indirectly cause women harm? Not really. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the event is out there, and it’s seriously problematic, and it isn’t just “harmless fun”; it’s another permanent fixture in (omg, is she gonna say it again?!) rape culture. Here’s a primer:

According to the rape culture theory, acts of sexism are commonly employed to validate and rationalize normative misogynistic practices. For instance, sexist jokes may be told to foster disrespect for women and an accompanying disregard for their well-being. An example would be a female rape victim being blamed for her being raped because of how she dressed or acted. In rape culture, sexualized violence towards women is regarded as a continuum in a society that regards women’s bodies as sexually available by default.

It’s important to note that even the language–occupy a vagina–divorces women from their own bodies. It’s a form of dismemberment, and I’ll say it again: we live in a rape culture, a culture that reduces women to body parts, whether it’s to sell a product, to promote a film, or for nothing more than reinforcing (and getting off on) patriarchal power. When we use language that prevents us from seeing a person as a whole human being, language that encourages us to view women in particular as a collection of body parts designed for male pleasure (e.g. occupy a vagina), then she exists as nothing more than an object, a fuck-toy, sexually available by default. It might not have been the intent of the event creator to participate in women’s subjugation, but it’s certainly the fucking reality.

It’s also important to talk about the Occupy a Vagina event within the context of the recently reported rapes and sexual assaults at several Occupy camps. The founders of the valuable Web site Occupy Patriarchy wrote a piece that highlights many of the incidents. In response to the assaults, several women’s groups have moved forward in creating safe spaces (like women-only tents) so that women can fully participate in the Occupy movement without fear, although safer sleeping areas don’t necessarily mean women will experience less groping and invasion of personal space in general. Obviously, we need to address the underlying (and pervasive) privilege in the movement that allows violence against women to occur in the first place, but these are all positive first steps to ensuring women can, you know, Occupy.

Now, let’s talk about what it means, in the context of the movement, to “occupy.” The original organizers of Occupy Wall Street proposed the following: We show up at Wall Street on September 17th, with tents, and we fucking move in. Why? Because it’s ours. You can hear it in the chants and slogans at every rally: “Whose Street? Our Street!” Even the Occupy Times Square protest was often described as, “taking the square.” This, my friends, is a campaign that involves moving into public spaces; it involves taking back, or reclaiming, our cities and reminding the very small yet powerful group in charge that it’s really the people who own this shit. And, perhaps most importantly, it involves resisting when we’re told to leave. [Note: the problematic “occupy” language, as it pertains to Native territory, has been written about far more elegantly and intelligently than I can do here, so please read those pieces as well.]

If we read the Occupy a Vagina event in the context of the other Occupy events (and why wouldn’t we), it’s easy to immediately see the problems: vaginas are not public spaces; they don’t belong to a collective group; they can’t be owned or reclaimed; and resisting when a woman tells you to get the fuck off her vagina–well, that’s rape. It isn’t funny. It isn’t harmless. This isn’t a cute little “event” that’s upsetting a small minority of angry feminazis who can’t take a joke. It contributes to rape. To narcissistically quote myself from a previous piece about rape culture:

…This constant, unchecked barrage of endless and obvious woman-hating undoubtedly contributes to the rape of women and girls.

The sudden idealization of Charlie Sheen as some bad boy to be envied, even though he has a violent history of beating up women, contributes to the rape of women and girls. Bills like H. R. 3 that seek to redefine rape and further the attack on women’s reproductive rights contributes to the rape of women and girls. Supposed liberal media personalities like Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann showing their support for Julian Assange by denigrating Assange’s alleged rape victims contributes to the rape of women and girls. The sexist commercials that advertisers pay millions of dollars to air on Super Bowl Sunday contribute to the rape of women and girls. And blaming Lara Logan for her gang rape by suggesting her attractiveness caused it, or the job was too dangerous for her, or she shouldn’t have been there in the first place, contributes to the rape of women and girls.

It contributes to rape because it normalizes violence against women. Men rape to control, to overpower, to humiliate, to reinforce the patriarchal structure. And the media, which is vastly controlled by men, participates in reproducing already existing prejudices and inequalities, rather than seeking to transform them.

It’s unfortunate that I need to add to this:

Facebook’s refusal to ban all pages that condone sexual assault and violence against women, and their refusal to acknowledge that these pages violate their already existing standards, contributes to the rape of women and girls.

See, at Bitch Flicks, we believe more than anything that the blind and uncritical consumption of media portrayals of women contributes to furthering women’s inequality in all areas of life. And as we all learned from The Social Network, one of the most misogynistic fucking movies I’ve ever seen, Facebook is a form of media that’s defining a generation. (Thanks so much for your contribution, Fuckers.)

The Madwoman’s Journey from the Attic into the Television – The Female Gothic Novel and its Influence on Modern Horror Films

The Mysteries of Udolpho, the first female gothic novel

This guest post is written by Sobia.

The very words “Gothic heroine” immediately conjure up a wealth of images for the modern reader: a young, attractive woman (virginity required) running in terror through an old, dark, crumbling mansion in the middle of nowhere, from either a psychotic man or a supernatural demon. She is always terminally helpless and more than a bit screechy, but is inevitably “saved” by the good guy/future husband in the nick of time.

– from “The Female Gothic: an introduction”

Described in such a way, it’s easy to see why scholars have speculated that the “female gothic” novel is what gave rise to both the modern horror film and the modern romance novel. While the gothic form itself is attributed to Walpole, who collected all the possible tropes of the narrative and populated his “Castle of Otranto” with them, Anne Radcliffe is credited with popularizing the form. At the end of the 18thcentury, Radcliffe employed a female heroine as the protagonist of her novel, giving birth to what Ellen Moers later described and defined as the “female gothic,” which is considered a subgenre of Gothic literature. Novels, and gothic novels in particular, were consumed and written primarily by women during this time period, which made them a reviled form of fiction, generally depicted as the source of problems such as women’s vapidness, hysteria, nervous disorders and such. Twentieth century, however, saw scholars like Gilber, Gubar, and Moers starting to deconstruct the gothic form, which emerged as a unique battleground for the metaphoric struggle between women and the patriarchal structures/institutions that confined and limited them.

In their landmark study, “Madwoman in the Attic,” Gilbert and Gubar embraced the figure of Bertha Mason (the insane, ghostlike previous wife of Jane Eyre’s hero, Mr. Rochester, whom he has locked up inside the attic…apparently for her own good and out of the goodness of his heart!) as somewhat of an alternate literary heroine, and started to analyze exactly what was at work in the common themes found in the literature that women were writing during that time period. As women attempted to write themselves into the purely patriarchal forms of literature that they had grown up reading, they faced the limits of the representation of women in heroic roles. So the gothic heroine emerged as somewhat of a compromise: a heroine who is perpetually endangered and perpetually courageous in the face of that danger. This is the precursor of the modern horror movie heroine who, against all logic, insists on checking out that pesky sound in the middle of the night or following the creepy voices outside of her room. In the female gothic, the haunted castle emerges as a prison that the woman cannot escape, where she’s often being held against her wishes. Given this subtext, it’s easy to see why the castle was commonly used as a metaphor for patriarchal institutions, where the domestic sphere to which women were socially confined became a stifling prison that drove them insane.

Bertha Mason, the original Madwoman in the Attic, from the 2006 “Jane Eyre.”

Ellen Moers further identified the two concerns of the gothic novel which deal with sexuality and child birth in the form of metaphors, where women are constantly confronted with the threats of living in a patriarchy disguised as the supernatural. It is noteworthy that while male writers of the time were tackling subjects like rape and sexual assault head on, the women were using complicated metaphors to confront these issues I would argue that for the male writer, given the distance they already have and maintain from these topics, it was easy to tell the story of the assault happening to an Other, where the assault is experienced by someone other than the male hero that the writer and the readers identified with. For women, however, there are different things at stake. Primarily, they were not allowed to write about sexuality in a straight-forward manner in a time when just the act of writing had male writers of the day calling these women tradeswoman, the implication being that they were not much better than prostitutes. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, women, for whom these things were a real concern (within and without marriage), needed to cultivate the distance that male writers already had from these subjects, and they did so by wrapping the horrors in layers of metaphor.

In order to understand exactly how the gothic formula works almost as feminist deconstruction, it’s important to understand the gothic heroine and her unique struggles. It’s been said that the act of creating a work with a female heroine alone is feminist because it recognizes that women can exist in important stories without needing to be part of a man’s. The female gothic, however, goes a step further in portraying the dangers of confining women to the domestic sphere, confining them to enforced social roles, and the dangers of the kind of insanity that emerges from the kind of isolation and limitations.

The gothic heroine is almost always isolated, and isolated from female companionship in particular. The usual formula (which Jane Austen later deconstructed/parodied in her “Northanger Abbey”) has the mother of the heroine die either giving birth to the heroine or shortly afterward, ensuring that the heroine is an only child. The heroine is brought up under her father’s care, who is a benevolent, loving male figure who dies promptly when the heroine reaches maturity. At this point, the heroine comes under the guardianship of a sinister male figure and is removed to his castle, to which she is confined. This is the pattern Radcliffe’s “Mysteries of Udolpho” follows, and it’s one that’s still common to see in gothic slanted horror movies like “Skeleton Key,” wherein the heroine’s mother left when she was young, she was close to her father, and the father’s death is what indirectly leads to her coming to live in her own gothic manor with its secrets. One of the things that Gilbert and Gubar address in their book is the woman author’s lack of connection to female writers because the literary canon is made up of male writers alone. So perhaps the birth of a heroine who knows she had a mother, but one that she’s unable to connect to is a reflection of the gothic writer’s lack of connection to her own literary foremothers.

Once locked inside this castle, by the men or circumstances, the heroine usually goes exploring, and often finds secrets having to do with the death/imprisonment/insanity of another woman. It is worth noting that her primary motivation often has to do with saving herself by trying to figure out what became of the woman who occupied this place before her. Essentially, this can be seen as her search for female companionship/connection. This is where the other big theme of the gothic emerges: the theme of insanity and fragmentation of self. The heroine, surrounded by men who wish to keep the fate of the women before her secret, comes to doubt her own sanity as everyone around her questions her. So the entire structure of the gothic became an elaborate metaphor for the perils of women living in confined spaces and being controlled by men. Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” which has famously been referred to as a love story, features a young woman marrying much above her social class and moving into another mansion with its own secrets. Du Maurier herself said that the book was about the imbalance of power within a marriage. Written to reexamine the figure of the insane wife locked away in the attic, “Rebecca” recreates this figure into an alluring, haunting portrait of a woman whose death and whose life echoes in every corner of the house. Unlike the Bertha Mason of “Jane Eyre,” who needs to be hidden and never talked about, Rebecca is all anyone in Manderley talks about, until the unnamed narrator finds herself falling under her spell, too. Even though Rebecca is a much more alluring take on the Madwoman concept, she has one thing in common with her precursor, which is that she, like Bertha Mason, challenges patriarchal notions of what a proper woman should be like.

The second Mrs. de Winter being forced to confront the ghost of Rebecca by Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s 1938 “Rebecca”

Gilbert and Gubar offer the following analysis of the Madwoman figure and her prominent appearances in 19th century women’s literature:

We will find that this madwoman emerges over and over again from the mirrors women writers hold up both to their own natures and to their own visions of nature. Even the most apparently conservative and decorous women writers obsessively create fiercely independent characters who seek to destroy all the patriarchal structures which both their authors and their authors’ heroines seem to accept as inevitable. Of course, by projecting their rebellious impulses not into their heroines but into mad or monstrous women (who are suitably punished in the course of the novel or poem), female authors dramatize their own self-division, their desire both to accept the structures of patriarchal society and to reject them. What this means, however, is that the madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage.

The idea of doubles remains a major theme in gothic themed horror films of today. The heroine’s doppelganger is often the quest object of her journey, where salvation often comes by discovering the story of this woman who can be seen as a darker or more otherworldy version of the heroine. Gothic stories have, arguably, at their center the idea of women trying to form bonds with each other, while resisting the influence of the men around them. Horror remains, to this day, one of the very few genres where it’s more common to find a female heroine than a male protagonist, and it’s no wonder that it’s primarily consumed by women and considered to be the other major women’s genre, besides romance. It’s also a genre that often easily passes the Bechdel test because of the relationships it portrays between the women. Horror genre, however, seems to have split into two separate branches. There’s the gothic themed stories where women are at the center of them and the threat is supernatural/psychological, and there’s the torture/slasher horror where women mostly run for their lives. Admittedly, I am a lot more interested in the former kind, and will mostly be exploring how they’re the literary successors of the female gothic.

“Pan’s Labyrinth” is a classic gothic tale where the young heroine coming under the domain of a powerful and sinister male figure forms bonds with another woman and finds salvation in her own discoveries and the story of an exiled princess, who serves as both a double and the supernatural presence on the other side of the mirror. The mother, while a significant part of the story, is in no position to protect Ofelia, who is left under the rule of her step-father, as she discovers hidden passages and lost worlds in order to save herself.

As I mentioned before, the female gothic split into the genres of modern horror narratives and modern romance novel. Divorcing the romance plot of the gothic novel from the rest of it has arguably left us with narratives where the heroines are left to save themselves, with no strong and benevolent male figure coming to help them. However, I should mention that the gothic romance wasn’t as clear cut as the above quote makes it out to be. In a gender-reversed reflection of the Dark Heroine/Light Heroine dichotomy that male-centered narratives seem to be obsessed with, the gothic romance is the one major genre where the male characters are split off into their own versions of Madonna/Whore. The Shadow Male figure is the sinister, powerful man who rules over the heroine’s life but with no benevolent intentions towards her. She’s sometimes sexually attracted to this figure, but also fearful of him. While the man that she’s actually in love with is often powerless to defend her despite his desire to protect her.

In taking out this benevolent male figure, the modern horror leaves the heroines to their own discoveries. “The Skeleton Key” is an especially subversive example of these tropes. The heroine, isolated from her native element, comes to live inside the old manor presided over by a powerful yet sinister seeming woman. As noted before, the heroine of the movie, Caroline, has a very gothic background, but in a gender reversal of the usual tropes, she forms a bond with the powerless male figure residing inside the house, while coming to suspect the powerful Violet as his abuser. In converting the Shadow Male figure to a woman, the movie lets the men become the Other presence in the attic, who are silenced, ghost-like, and pushed into the background as the women fight their battle of wills in the foreground of the movie. Violet can, however, also be read as a more corporeal version of the Madwoman, the doppelganger who perhaps embodies the character’s more rebellious urges, while existing outside of Caroline as a force to be struggled against. The ending is especially interesting if we choose to read Violet as a metaphorical version of Caroline’s fragmented self.

“Silent Hill” is another movie that seems to get rid of the sinister male figure, populating its world entirely with powerful women with agendas and various motivations. Rose, the heroine of the movie, travels to a ghost town in an attempt to discover the cure to her daughter’s nightmares. Once inside the town, Rose is trapped inside a haunting alternate verse that seems to have enveloped the entire town. In order to escape the tainted reality of Silent Hill, Rose must discover the origins of the taint, and that leads her to discover the stories of various women who were responsible for the genesis of the new reality. This act of discovering the stories and secrets of the lives of women in the past seems to run through most gothic horror movies, in an echo of the attempts of the gothic writers who searched the past to find literary foremothers and of their heroines who attempted to decipher their own future by discovering the pasts of other women. This movie is especially relevant to gothic themes because the idea of fragmentation of selves is the foundation of the premise and leads to the genesis of Silent Hill as it currently exists, with two sets of doppelgangers.

There’s also “Beneath,” perhaps the most underappreciated horror movie of all time, that brings back the themes of “Rebecca” and “Jane Eyre” wonderfully by dealing with the theme of menacing husbands and women who live on even after their deaths. Its heroine, who is the sister of the Madwoman in the Attic figure of the movie (again, the theme of a darker self/mirror), comes back to the town where her sister died and gets pulled into a web of secrets and deceptions that lead her to have visions. She becomes obsessed with discovering exactly how her sister died, while the men around her doubt her sanity. The theme of the heroine’s sanity being doubted is probably the biggest common denominator in these. serves further to isolate the heroine, to push her to do things on her own for the fear that she will be labeled as insane. Historically, the fear of being mislabeled as insane has had a unique significance for women, many of whom were driven to brinks of insanity by what was referred to as “the rest cure.”

Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a gothic themed look inside just such a madness, brought on by lack of mental stimulation. “The Ring,” while populated with more men than is common for these types of movies, still has at its center the idea of a woman deconstructing the story/life of another woman. Rachel’s search for answers is triggered by the death of a woman and it leads her to discover the lives of Anna and Samara, both of whom have elements of the Madwoman figure. Samara, in particular, is reminiscent of the “creeping, crawling” woman trapped behind the Yellow Wallpaper. Interestingly enough, Samara is kept isolated in a room with yellow wallpaper that Rachel is forced to tear off before she can uncover the truth behind Samara’s story.

The second aspect of the female gothic was identified by Ellen Moers as dealing with the fear of giving birth/creating life, and the modern birth horror genre definitely echoes the themes Moers identifies. My knowledge and viewing experience of this type of horror is not nearly as vast as my knowledge of the haunted house/insanity type of horror, but I will identify some movies that deal with this type of horror, in case someone else is interested in watching/analyzing some of these. According to Moers, Mary Shelley reinvented the female gothic with her “Frankenstein.” Shelley, unlike most women writing during that time period, who tended to be unmarried, had had experience with child birth. Moers’ essay here more fully explores how Shelley’s own experiences led to the creation of her monster, but it’s worth noting that Mary Shelley chose to make her protagonist and her monster both men in a step away from the female-centered gothic novels of years past. However, I am pleased that the modern birth horror tends to place women at its center, and perhaps, it’s more relevant to women’s reproductive rights issues today because a lot of it deals with women losing control of their bodies/identities/agency in the course of the pregnancy. “The Clinic” deals with several pregnant women trapped inside an unsanitary clinic, waking up to find that they’re no longer pregnant. The rest of the movie follows them as they attempt to find their babies and discover how they got there. One of the major themes, I would say, is the idea of women’s bodies and reproductive systems as commodities.

There’s the famous “Rosemary’s Baby” that perhaps better echoes Mary Shelley’s novel because the fear of the baby being a monster runs through the entire movie. Rosemary’s rising anxiety and fears for her baby as she discovers the existence of the cult and its plans are very in with keeping the Gothic heroine’s general mental state. “Blessed,” starring Heather Graham, is similar in its themes to “Rosemary’s Baby,” where the heroine is used as an incubator for a cult needing to bring about the birth of a demonic child. The 2009, “Grace,” deals with a mother who decides to carry her baby to term despite the heartbeat having stopped following a car crash, and when the time comes, the baby is miraculously born alive. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that there’s something wrong with the baby, and our heroine has created a monster. The recent “Splice” deals with a female scientist who creates a new species by combining her own DNA with the DNA of various animals.

While the first subgenre of gothic horror deals with the metaphor of women being trapped inside patriarchal institutions and being forced by them to question their own sense of reality, the birth horror genre, arguably, deals with and plays into women’s fear of patriarchal control over their bodies and the lack of agency that comes with that control. The fate of the birth horror heroine, however, is often worse than the earlier gothic heroines, who, while often up against great odds, are fighting a monster/institution that exists outside of themselves. In the birth horror genre, the woman is fighting a more personal and internal battle. Women today still struggle to control the fate of their own bodies in a largely patriarchal world.

Gilbert and Gubar, too, identify a fear of creation in their study, specifically, the fear of creating a literary text in a canon that’s made up of patriarchal and male-centered texts. The female author learns to see the act of creation as a male one because she’s learned to see herself only in passive roles from the literature she’s consumed. Gilbert and Gubar refer to this as “anxiety of authorship,” and since the gothic heroine is often an artist of some kind (in fact, Jane Austen, in her parody of the form, goes out of her way to assure the readers that her heroine, Catherine Morland is not at all inclined to the arts and furthermore, is really bad at them) this anxiety of authorship can always be called an anxiety of creation. And the birth horror movies that do not fit under Moers’ definition of the birth horror story with the fear of creating a monster certainly deal with the anxiety of giving birth and creating life. Returning to the mental health side of it, since insanity and anxiety remain major themes of any sort of a gothic story, post-partum depression is another side effect of living in a patriarchal society that expects women to be mothers, and most women get conditioned into thinking that that is what they want for themselves. Given the cultural subtext, motherhood can become just another patriarchally enforced institution, one that patriarchy values over most other social obligations/interests of a woman. Birth horror genre is the perfect medium to deconstruct some of those expectations and institutions.

“To be trained in renunciation is almost necessarily to be trained to ill health, since the human animal’s first and strongest urge is to his/her own survival, pleasure, assertion,” write Gilbert and Gubar. Studies have linked mental illnesses commonly found in women such as agoraphobia, anxiety disorders, eating disorders to the effects of patriarchal conditioning and socialization. Girls get conditioned to be pleasing at the cost of disowning their own pleasures, they learn to place a high value on physical beauty, which is fleeting, and they learn to see themselves through the male gaze from early on, whether it’s through reading literature in the 19th century or through media and advertising portrayals of themselves in the current one. Women learn to see themselves as men see them while struggling with their own conflicting points of view of themselves and this fear of conflicting with the dominant paradigm enforces a culture of silence and repression that locks women into their own metaphorical castles of terror. This may be why horror films continue to resonate with modern women. Many horror films today take place in suburban homes, which can be just as stifling as the castles in the gothic novels. Films may no longer need dark and crumbling castles to be scary, but the ideas those castles represented are still alive in the horror genre. As long as women’s stories and voices are suppressed, the horror genre will continue to be the metaphorical battleground for women to fight against the patriarchal institutions that dominate their lives.

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Note: While Gilbert and Gubar introduced ideas that have been used to analyze gothic fiction, they did not specifically deconstruct the genre itself. For further reading on that, I recommend “Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic after Thirty Years,” which explores the effects of their study on feminist lit critique. There’s an essay within that collection that specifically deals with the gothic form by Carol Margaret Davison entitled “Ghosts in the Attic.”

Sobia spends her free time consuming media and thinking a lot. She uses her English lit degree for little else than critiquing media’s portrayal of gender and race, which is possibly just another excuse to consume more media with awesome women.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Geek Girl Con: Feminism, Race, and Geek Culture

This cross-post from Jarrah Hodge previously appeared at Gender Focus.

This is the first in a series of posts about Geek Girl Con, which was held in Seattle October 8-9.

While some Canadians were celebrating Thanksgiving (or not out of protest or ambivalence), I was attending the inaugural Geek Girl Con in Seattle, Washington. The weekend was full of interesting panels and discussions and I took a bunch of pictures and notes, so will be writing a series of posts on the various issues that were covered.

The first full panel I attended was called “Feminism, Race, and Geek Culture”. It was moderated by Regina Buenaobra, community manager for ArenaNet for Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. On the panel were Sociology student Michelle Hu, BreadPig employee and ROFLCon co-founder Christina Xu, and web developer Nina Reyes. Unfortunately the awesome Racialicious blogger Latoya Peterson wasn’t able to make it.

The panel talked about their own experiences with discrimination and stereotyping in geek communities.

Talking about organizing ROFLCon, Christina recalled that the first year they ended up with a huge majority of white male speakers because they were just going with who they’d seen before at other conventions. Talking more generally about conventions, Christina said she’d encountered a lot more awareness about lack of women’s representation than that of people of colour: “People bring up lack of women on stage very frequently but hardly anyone brings up lack of people of colour.”

But Nina Reyes noted the intersections between race and gender in geek culture are more complicated. As a coder, she said she felt a lot more singled out as a woman than as an Asian, since Asians were stereotyped as being good at coding and computer careers.

Another question that came up for the panel was on representations of women and people of colour in geeky fandoms.

“It’s important as a person of colour to see yourself well represented in these types of media,” Michelle Hu argued.

“If you are a white male reading comic books you have a choice of who you want to be. Me, I’m stuck with Jubilee all the time,” Christina added. They both noted that just casting some people of colour or making a token reference to other cultures isn’t enough, using the short-lived but much loved Joss Whedon show Firefly as an example. The show often featured characters speaking Mandarin poorly.

Xu pointed out this “race-bending” is insulting and causes anger because studio’s don’t seem to care enough to try and find someone to play a part who actually speaks the correct language or belongs to the race that will be portrayed. It’s similar to ending up with an all-white convention lineup because you’re just going with who you’ve heard of before.

A question from the audience that I was particularly interested in was about white people role playing characters of other races in RPGs. In response, Christina Xu referenced Lisa Nakamura’s article: “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet” as a good resource for learning more about why this is problematic.

“As somebody who comes from a place of privilege you have the ability to …fulfill your identity as an exotic other,” Christina said, “But it leaves others less room to live their own identities and it perpetuates creepy stereotypes.” She said she wouldn’t say no one can role-play another race, but white people taking on other races need to realize it’s a weird exercise in privilege and need to try to prioritize character over racial stereotypes.

Finally, the panel addressed how geek communities, especially online, can exclude women and people of colour. The panelists said they felt like when they or others raised objections to sexist or racist language or behaviour guys would rally to defend the sexist and racist games, attempting to make the argument that somehow criticizing the language or behaviour was against their geek allegiance.

But the panelists had tips for audience members looking to deal with these types of situations effectively.

Christina recommended using your audience’s vernacular to raise the issue to show you’re part of their community. She also recommended making it clear it’s not a personal attack on a player: “Make it clear you are hating the game and not the player. And understand no one has read Judith Butler as nursery rhymes. There’s a learning process.”

On the other side, the panelists also had some advice for those getting critiques:

“The person on the other side, just f-ing listen,” said Michelle.

“We critique because we enjoy these things. The people who complain the hardest care the most,” said Regina, emphasizing that critiquing something doesn’t mean hating on it.

Jarrah Hodge is the founder of Gender Focus, a Canadian feminist blog. Jarrah also writes for Vancouver Observer and Huffington Post Canada and has been a guest blogger on “feminerd” culture for Bitch Magazine Blogs. Hailing from New Westminster, BC, she’s a fan of politics, crafts, boardgames, musical theatre, and brunch.

Mad Men and the Role of Nostalgia

The cast of Mad Men — aren’t they lovely?

There are two significant moments in Mad Men when nostalgia is overtly discussed. The first comes in season one, episode thirteen (“The Wheel”). Don/Dick has just learned that his brother committed suicide, and he brings his feelings about his own past—particularly his strong desire to construct a past that erases the Whitmans—to sell a product. In a pitch to Kodak, for a campaign to sell a storage device that holds slides and allows you to click through them, he says,

Technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job, I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter–a Greek, named Teddy. Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is “new.” It creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion. But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product: nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards… it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels – around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.

It’s a lovely pitch (which sends Harry, who was recently kicked out of his home for cheating, out of the room in tears) and an effective one: Don seals the deal. (Watch the clip here.)

In season four, episode six (“Waldorf Stories”), Don–drunk on booze and ego after his CLIO award win–recycles his “nostalgia pitch” for Life Cereal and the proposed “Eat Life by the bowlful” campaign.

But I keep thinking about, you know, nostalgia. How you remember something in the past and it feels good, but it’s a little bit painful. Like when you were a kid.

One can surmise, if at all familiar with Don’s state of mind and lifestyle at this point, that this pitch doesn’t go as well. The meeting is a mess, and Don inadvertently pitches someone else’s idea as his own. (I couldn’t find this clip available online.)

These are two brilliant, meta moments in a show that is, in some ways, all about nostalgia. If we think of the show itself as a product, it works on both levels described in Don’s eloquent pitch. For viewers who didn’t live through the sixties, the show provides a uniquely detailed window on an era we never experienced and may only vaguely know, and the culture has produced plenty of “calamine lotion” for this group. For those who lived through the sixties, the show itself can be the Kodak carousel–taking viewers to that place they may ache to go again: their own past.

Surfaces are everything in Mad Men. In response to Mad Men’s critical and popular success, Brooks Brothers and Banana Republic have launched “Mad Men” clothing collections, so you can dress like Don or Betty. If you’re a woman with curves, you can buy the “Mad Men-inspired” bra to “banish those unsightly bulges” (not that the model pictured has bulges anywhere). You can style your hair like the characters of Mad Men and go retro. You can serve Mad Men-inspired cocktails or have an entire Mad Men-themed party (if you’re a guest, you can buy the host a Mad Men-inspired gift). If it’s the interiors that excite you, Woman’s Day magazine–which finds “the show’s visuals even more spectacular than its storylines”–will help you out with its “Mad Men-Inspired Home Decor,” and if you have money to burn, you can buy CB2’s Draper Sofa. If you’re the bookish type, here’s a Mad Men-Inspired Summer Reading List. If you really can’t get enough of the era, tune in this fall to The Playboy Club or Pan-Am.

The above barely scratches the surface of the cultural and commercial impact of Mad Men. You could virtually live your life as a Mad Men character. But why?

A major theme in Mad Men is gender, and it is one of the few shows on television that overtly critiques institutionalized sexism—and we can even, justly, call the show feminist. Here’s what I fear may also be happening: in a culture that claims to be post-feminist, post-ironic, and even post-racial, in which social justice movements lack unity, and even many educated people believe women have achieved “enough” equality (enough, at least, to no longer fight for our basic rights like access to health care and equal pay), aren’t people also maybe a little bit, even unconsciously, nostalgic for a time of clearer definitions? While I would never argue that anyone would want to return to gender and/or racial dynamics of the early 1960s, shouldn’t we attribute at least some of the show’s success to the conservative desire to ‘return to a simpler time?’ Is it not possible that we have an unconscious (or even subconscious) desire to return to a place where we can clearly point to a behavior and call it like it is: Sexist. Racist. Homophobic. Wrong.

In a culture where third-wave conflicts with second wave, where there is a conservative-led war on women’s access to health care and bodily autonomy that the liberal party largely ignores, in which the celebrity status of a couple of female politicians (who happen to hold extremely regressive positions on issues affecting women) passes as achievement of gender equality, in which women have suffered greatly in a recession dubbed the “Mancession” by media, wouldn’t it be nice if things were a bit clearer? Doesn’t our society wish we could call it in real life like we call it on that show? And don’t we also enjoy that feeling of superiority–that we’re oh-so enlightened compared to the barbarous behavior of those characters–when in reality things haven’t changed as much as we’d like to think?

In a show that quietly argues that sexism and misogyny severely harm women and men, what do we make of all the damn cultural imitation? Where and how do we draw the line between admiring and desiring the surfaces (the clothes, the decor, the general air of coolness), and wanting what’s underneath?