Tag: CW

The CW’s ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ and the Pathologizing of Female Desire

I would like to pretend that such crushes stopped once I graduated high school and graduated to full-blown, adult relationships complete with the objects of my affection affection-ing me back. That would, however, be a lie. This is all to say: unrequited female desire is not uncommon.

Let me rephrase: unrequited female desire is not uncommon in real life. It is, however, uncommon in popular culture.

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This is a guest post by Stephanie Brown.

In a few weeks, I’ll be meeting with a Mortified producer in the hopes of having the opportunity to read my diary on stage in front of a bunch of strangers, so I’ve spent many nights pouring through every diary I’ve kept since age 8. While I wish they contained high-minded meanderings, silly but insightful childhood reflections, or at least an angsty Jewel inspired poem or two, my writings from age 8 to age 31 largely center around one topic: boys.

Yes, some of these boys were boyfriends. Boys who I loved who loved me back. Boys I fought with. Boys who broke my heart. About these boys, I wrote to work through the complicated feelings I had relating to our complicated relationships, because they’re always complicated when you’re 19. But the vast majority of the boys who litter the pages of my diaries did not return any of the feelings that filled pages upon pages; they were unrequited crushes. These were the boys I pined over in the halls of junior high, whose houses I walked past every night in case they happened to walk out the door, whose discarded pens I saved in my locker, whose every glance and word I poured over with my friends like a detective searching for clues.

I would like to pretend that such crushes stopped once I graduated high school and graduated to full-blown, adult relationships complete with the objects of my affection affection-ing me back. That would, however, be a lie. This is all to say: unrequited female desire is not uncommon.

Let me rephrase: unrequited female desire is not uncommon in real life. It is, however, uncommon in popular culture.

Why do I bring this up? In addition to reading through my old diaries, the premiere of the CW’s new series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has reminded about how rare representations of one-sided female desire are within our popular culture and how often those representations, when they do exist, tend to pathologize such feelings. This dearth of representations has given me complicated feelings about the CW’s new, oftentimes brilliant, series.

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The show, if you aren’t familiar, is an hour-long musical-dramedy created by and starring funny woman Rachel Bloom, who has written for Robot Chicken and who has created hilariously offbeat music videos like “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury.” The pilot centers on the decision of New York-based, overachieving lawyer Rebecca Bunch (Bloom) to turn down a major promotion and instead move to West Covina, California to start her life anew. She makes this decision after running into Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III), a summer camp boyfriend from her youth, who mentions that he is about to move back to West Covina. While the episode makes obvious that Rebecca is miserable in her current job and life situation and is subconsciously using her crush on Josh as an excuse to make a drastic change in her life, the series has so far focused more on Rebecca’s crush than it has on the other reasons she has for moving. Though, as the series progresses, we have started to get glimpses of her troubled family history and deeper insecurity issues.

The series has a lot going for it. The show’s tone is delightfully off-kilter, veering between dark comedy, upbeat musical numbers, and moments of introspection about friendship, success, gender roles, and family trauma. The jokes are clever and unexpected, the songs are catchy and subversive, and the characters are a lovable bunch of misfits played by a cast of extremely talented, relatively unknown actors. The series is largely written and produced by women, and the casting of Josh is a refreshing choice in a pop culture landscape in which Filipino actors are rarely chosen to play the hot leading man.

For the uninitiated, here is a song from the second episode that is emblematic of the silly, clever and subversive way the show plays with the societal expectations put on women:

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkfSDSfxE4o”]

The series is in many ways complex and nuanced and different, which is why its title and accompanying ad campaign have been frustrating. While the show’s intro theme song winks self-knowingly at the name of the series, (“That’s a sexist term!” Rebecca shouts at the chorus singing about her, “It’s more nuanced than that!”) someone still decided it would be beneficial to play into gender stereotypes that construct unrequited love as a pathology in women. This isn’t new, of course. We have texts like the “overly attached girlfriend” meme and Sandra Bullock’s Razzie winning performance in All About Steve that make fun of women who perform love incorrectly, and we have dark thrillers like Fatal Attraction in which women’s desire becomes deadly.

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While Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a largely wonderful series and while the writers need more than three episodes to develop its characters, two things trouble me about how Rebecca’s feelings have been treated, aside from the title’s blasé pejorative use of the term “crazy.” The first is that Josh thus far does not seem to be Rebecca’s destined love interest. Television couples are often set up from the early stages of a series, and when the set-up is incited by a male character’s crush (ie, Jim and Pam from The Office, Ross and Rachel from Friends, Niles and Daphne on Frasier), the coupling seems inevitable.

However, from what we’ve seen so far, Josh is not Rebecca’s eventual love interest; his cute yet sarcastic bartender friend Greg (Santino Fontana) is. Josh and Rebecca don’t have much chemistry, but Rebecca and Greg do. They banter. They fight. They act toward each other how most eventual television pairs act. Halfway through the pilot episode, we are already cheering for Rebecca to forget about Josh and realize that Greg is the right guy for her. Rebecca is almost immediately set up as a love object, even in a show whose very premise centers on her feelings for someone else.

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Second, the show seems to want to explain Rebecca’s desire for Josh as a symptom of the actual mental health issues from which she seems to be suffering. Honest representations of mental illness are great. Honest representations of female desire are great. What I don’t find great are representations that link female desire to mental illness. The series needs to allow Rebecca to experience both, but without conflating the two.

While some critics are looking forward to she series pivoting off of its initial premise, and while I agree that the show needs to also explore Rebecca’s friendships and family and anxiety and success, I don’t want to give up on the idea that we can have funny, relatable representations of women having crushes. I longed for such storylines as a kid. The girls and women on television always seemed to be the ones being pined after. They never threw parties in hopes that their crush would show up or memorized someone’s class schedule in order to ‘accidentally’ bump into them every day. While I wish the writers on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would modulate Rebecca’s character, I have related on some level to the feelings about which she often sings.

My hopes for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend moving forward are therefore twofold. I want the series to give Rebecca more to do than pine after Josh, but I don’t want the series or critics to pathologize Rebecca for pining after Josh. I don’t want audiences to write off the series because of some rigid definition of feminism that doesn’t allow for crushes, but I want the series to stop constructing Rebecca’s crush as borderline delusional.

In high school, my friends and I designed, printed, and laminated a 12-Step System for getting over our crushes. I still have the certificate I was awarded for successfully completing the program in the middle of the tenth grade. Even then, we characterized our own feelings as an addiction. I labeled myself “ boy crazy.” This language reinforces the idea that such feelings require treatment, however, wanting someone who doesn’t want you is not a mental illness. We need pop culture to stop telling us that it is.

 

Stephanie Brown is a television, comedy, and podcast enthusiast working on her doctorate in media studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. You can follow her on Twitter or Medium @stephbrown.

 

 

How the CW’s ‘The 100’ Is Getting Sex Positivity Right

In fact, it’s the aspect of love and intimacy, rather than lust and sexuality, which makes Clarke’s part in Finn’s demise so difficult–the show plays with the idea that human connection, whether it’s through friendship, family, alliance or romance, is painful because it matters, not because it is fundamentally wrong.

This guest post by Rowan Ellis appears as part of our theme week on Sex Positivity.

This article contains spoilers for the first two seasons of The 100 … be warned!

On the surface, it might seem like we live in a sex positive society already, I mean, I just wrote an article about Channing Tatum’s intimidatingly chilled torso for this very website. We hear things like “sex sells” all the time, meaning it’s clearly viewed as positive for our economy if nothing else. But the tiniest scratch below that oiled up muscly surface shows something more complex and gendered. Women’s sexualities and sex lives are viewed in turn as both precious fortresses and exploitable commodities, by a world which can’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to protect us or fuck us. But then men and boys are being taught not to respect either a “weak” woman who needs protecting, or a “slutty” woman who wants to be fucked. So it came as a ridiculously pleasant surprise to see the portrayal of sex and sexuality in the CW’s teen dystopian show The 100.

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The 100 is one of those shows that snuck up on me; I watched the pilot when it first came out, and promptly dismissed it as an OK series that I might try again if I got bored and it ended up on Netflix. It’s the story of obligatory-CW-beautiful Clarke (Eliza Taylor) and 99 other teenage prisoners who lived on “The Ark,” a collection of space stations which houses all that is left of the human race, floating above the Earth. I say “lived,” past tense, because pretty much as soon as the show opens all 100 of them are blasted down onto the surface of our messed up planet to see if it’s survivable. One-hundred delinquent teenagers alone on a potentially deadly planet. What could go wrong? Honestly, I only gave the show a real chance after Tumblr excitedly informed me that the lead character wasn’t entirely straight, and it came under the radar as a show with increasingly great representation. So I gave it another chance, and by the time half a season had gone by, it was clear they were building a series that wasn’t afraid to give the middle finger to easy outs and happy endings. And yet, none of those difficult choices or moral and physical suffering were linked to the characters’ sex lives.

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Although we like to talk about characters as if they were independent entities, it is the writers who choose character’s choices and the consequences of their actions; traditionally morality plays and novels had marriages to reward the good and death to reward the bad. Sometimes the only way to tell that an otherwise progressive woman was meant to be perceived as good was the fact she was allowed to marry at the end (Jane Eyre, anyone?). And so it is the consequences of sex on screen, not just the having of sex itself, which can truly show an audience how sex positive a show is. Meta-fictional films like Scream and Cabin in the Woods draw attention to this idea when they comment on the absurdity and sexism inherent in the horror trope “The Final Girl” and the importance placed on virginity, where “pure” women are allowed to survive, and having sex carries a death sentence on screen. Although in a show like The 100 the Venn diagram of “characters who have had sex” and “characters who suffer” has a lot of overlap, this is vitally not a causal relationship; the death of Finn and the horrific struggles that Clarke faces as a leader, are not because of their sexual relationship. In fact, it’s the aspect of love and intimacy, rather than lust and sexuality, which makes Clarke’s part in Finn’s demise so difficult–the show plays with the idea that human connection, whether it’s through friendship, family, alliance or romance, is painful because it matters, not because it is fundamentally wrong.

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Teen shows have in the past been guilty of using sex to drive melodrama, or of using it only sparingly in “very special episodes” to give a warning. But The 100 uses its post-apocalyptic future setting to frame a version of the sexual worldview as a non-issue, suggesting that we as a collective species get the fuck over it when we have stuff to worry about like the end of the world. Is this realistic? Meh, who cares, I don’t watch sci-fi for realism, I apparently watch it for bisexual lead characters and complex moral decision-making with psychological consequences… but we’ll get on to that in a second. This lack of realism, I think, also extends into what makes the show an enjoyable watch for all its tragedy; there are some things that are safe, namely the sex. As a teenage girl being abandoned on an inhospitable planet with a number of teenage guys who all seem pretty invested in violence, gaining control, and hedonism, rape would be an immediate threat in my mind. Yet the CW set up of the show, and the storylines so far, seem to be completely removed from this fear, which gives me as a viewer a sense of security in a lot of ways. Similarly, the way the show pushes back against stereotypical or soap-like storylines, means as a viewer I am also not that concerned with the seeming lack of condoms or birth control going on, because I feel pretty secure that they won’t include “warning” storylines around safe sex with pregnancy and disease based on the tone of the show. At first, I was worried that the relative sexual freedom which the teenagers had found on the Earth’s surface would become a problem once the parents were reintroduced, with apologies and stern looks. But, again, they had more pressing matters to deal with.

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A negativity around women and sex is not just doled out from those in positions of power, the “I’m not like other girls” phenomenon between female peers is rooted in ideas around sexual promiscuity and femininity being lesser. This negativity towards sex is a tool used to pit women, and girls, against each other, rather than being a tool for raising up fellow men or boys because of their perceived sexual prowess. The double standard is hardly new and can be seen in real life as well as being played out on screen in films like Gone Girl, where Flynn criticises the idea of the “cool girl” aesthetic as creating a personality and way or acting based on your desirability to men. This is why it was so refreshing to see the treatment of Clarke and Raven’s relationship, as two women who were interested in the same guy, be secondary to their other connections. There is no passive aggressive MeanGirl-esque in fighting fraught with jealousy; Clarke can’t turn off her feelings for Finn, but immediately understands she can’t be with him, and gets on with what needs to be done. This decision is completely in line with her nature as someone who sees things as they are as far as she can, who is practically minded, who corrects Finn even as he is trying to be romantic when seeing that Raven falling to Earth isn’t a shooting star at all. Clarke is the first person to see Raven on Earth and witnesses her essential rebirth on the planet, they share an interesting relationship in their different ties to Abby, Clarke’s mother, and their friendship is of vital importance based on their respect for each other. The show ultimately rejects the jealous ex paradigm which it seemed to be setting up, and identifies itself as unexpectedly progressive in its portrayal of female friendship.

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The portrayal of bisexual women in society at large, is one of “greedy” girls showing off for the attention of men. They are often viewed as more likely to be unfaithful or “slutty,” and both the straight majority and gay community seem to be wracked with worry that their bisexual partners are secretly monosexual. The portrayal of Clarke (the clear lead of the show) being attracted to and forming relationships with, both men and women, plays away from these shallow stereotypes, while not denying her an active sex life. The tragedy in the storylines with both her partners is not caused by her sexuality, although her very real feelings for them heighten the pain for both her and us as an audience. Killing Finn and having to watch as Lexa betrayed their political alliance, took a huge psychological toll on the teen, but ultimately her hardest decision- to kill the population of Mount Weather- was connected to familial and friendship based bonds that created the community of the 100. However, historically the b-word has been conspicuously missing from the screen, even in forcefully progressive shows like Orange is the New Black, and so it is too for The 100. This can be explained away with the idea that the future is as liberated about sexual orientation as it is about sex, and that labels are no longer used or required. But that reduces the real need for bisexual viewers right now to have representation on screen and arguably contributes to the bi-erasure which it could so easily be combatting.

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Ultimately, this is a show that features some really beautiful humans having sex, and in that way it isn’t unusual. What The 100 is getting right is creating a narrative where the usual toxic cliches are subverted, and the characters are all the better for it, rather than ignoring sex and praising characters for that instead. There are of course ways to improve: I hope that next season we have Clarke voice her sexuality specifically, because that explicit labeling would be a pioneering act in representation. I would also like to see more diversity, particularly in body type, having an active sex life on the show, which is often missing or played for lazy and crude laughs on screen more widely. How likely is that to happen? My experience with shows in the past tells me, not very. But at the start of The 100 I’d never have guessed they would make any characters queer, and look what they did with their lead. So, if you’re reading this writers of The 100, I’d really love for you to prove me wrong again.

 

Rowan Ellis is a British geek using her YouTube videos to critique films, TV, and books from a queer and feminist lens.

“Everything Is Going To Be OK!” – How the Female Gaze Was Celebrated and Censored in ‘Cardcaptor Sakura’

In other words, there was a concerted effort to twist the female gaze into a male one under the belief that CLAMP’s blend of hyper-femininity and action would be unappealing for the male audience it was being aimed at.

Cardcaptor Sakura

 

This guest post by Hannah Collins appears as part of our theme week on The Female Gaze.

With their starry eyes, cutesy costumes, Barbie-esque features, and catchphrases overflowing with dreamy positivity, the magical girls of the shoujo (girls) genre of anime might not seem like the most feminist of heroines upon cursory glance. Yet, the plucky sorceress’ of such cult classics as Sailor Moon can be seen an emblematic of a counter-movement of female action heroes in Japanese culture – the antidote to the hyper-masculinity of the shonen (boys) genre.

Sailor Moon and Goku from Dragon Ball

 

This assessment by no means disregards the problems of the magical girl genre – infantalisation; fetishisation and glorification of hyper-femininity – and shoujo characters with their typically doe-eyed innocence can be easily corrupted to cater to a specific male fantasy of virginal femininity. However, the work of the all-female team of manga/anime creators known as “CLAMP” not only combats these issues, but also, as Kathryn Hemmann in The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Culture writes, “employs shŌjo for themselves and their own pleasure.”

I became a fan of CLAMP – like most people of my age – in the 1990s. As a child, my introduction to the wonderfully weird world of Japanese cartoons consisted of the standard diet for most children of that era: Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball Z. Imported, dissected, re-dubbed, and re-packaged to suit the tastes of a Western audience, and more specifically, a male audience. But amongst the shouts of “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” and “Kamehameha!” there was one show that really left a lasting impression on me. It was about a little girl gifted with great power through capturing and using magical “Clow” cards. She wasn’t muscly; she wasn’t self-assured; and she certainly wasn’t male. She was Sakura Kinomoto, the show was called Cardcaptors (Cardcaptor Sakura in its original Japanese format), and it was my first exposure to both CLAMP and the magical girl or “mahou shoujo” genre they helped to popularise.

CLAMP at the Phoenix Anime Expo 2006

 

Like most adolescent heroes, Sakura seems hopelessly ill-equipped to begin with, and yet her sheer determination to achieve her full potential sees her through to becoming a magical force to be reckoned with without ever surrendering her loving personality. Rather than conforming to the “strong female character” stereotype that implies that women must act more masculine to achieve truly equal footing with male action heroes, Sakura’s power stems from traits considered more conventionally feminine: love, empathy, and pureness. Even her wardrobe changes into unapologetically girly battle outfits aesthetically reinforce CLAMP’s refusal to bow to a male audiences’ preferences.

These themes of romance and friendship are a core part of the story development and instrumental in the viewer’s investment in the characters. Through Cardcaptor Sakura, CLAMP explores the complexities of both platonic and romantic female love – both heterosexual and homosexual – from an almost exclusively female perspective. As Sakura pines over her older brother’s best friend (who unbeknownst to her, is also his love interest) Sakura’s best friend Tomoyo pines over her. Tomoyo, who lives a rich and sheltered life in a female-centric household, seems to live vicariously through Sakura. Upon discovering her secret heroics at night, she begins to capture Sakura’s adventures on camera and even provides her with her signature battle costumes, which cause Sakura huge embarrassment. Yet, at the risk of hurting her friend’s feelings, she grudgingly wears them anyway.

As the show develops, we are shown more and more just how deeply Tomoyo’s feelings run. In episode 11, Tomoyo gives Sakura a rare tour of her impressive mansion home, including a cinema room in which she confesses that she watches her recordings back of Sakura in battle constantly. It seems that Tomoyo is as much a part of the audience to Sakura’s life as we – the viewers – are. It also strikes me that this obsessive behaviour might translate entirely differently if Tomoyo were male.

Tomoyo spying on Sakura

 

Tomoyo’s idolisation of Sakura is far from veiled, and yet it is not revealed to be unmistakeably romantic until Episode 40, in which Sakura must capture a Clow card that makes people dream about their hidden desires. Sakura, Tomoyo, Syaoran Li (Sakura’s rival and love interest) and his cousin Meilin visit a fun fair. Sakura and Meilin team up to play a Whack-A-Mole game and Tomoyo – as usual – picks up her camera to film Sakura in action. Suddenly, the Clow card appears in the form of a glowing butterfly and lands on Tomoyo’s shoulder. Tomoyo falls into a dream sequence, in which we see her deepest desire play out through her eyes. On a pink background of falling cherry blossom, copies of Sakura dressed in Tomoyo’s outfits call her name and dance playfully around her. We are shown a shot of Tomoyo’s face – staring in awe at first, and then relax into a smile. “I’m so happy!” she says to herself, and runs toward the dancing copies of Sakura – still filming.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAx_vfayMTw”]

It seems like an odd moment to be sexually awakened – watching your crush play a Whack-A-Mole game at a fun fair – and perhaps if the show had been targeted at a more mixed audience (or the characters were older) this moment might have been filled with more obvious sexualised content. But through Tomoyo’s own eyes, CLAMP visually summarise the complex feelings of romance, admiration, obsession, and innocent love she feels for Sakura. Not only this, but as Sakura dances continually out of Tomoyo’s physical reach, the implication becomes one of wanting something you know you can never have. Tomoyo knows by now of Syaoran’s feelings for Sakura and like a true friend encourages their romance for the sake of Sakura’s happiness rather than her own.

This “doomed” romance trap seems to be a family curse, as we discover in episode 10 that Tomoyo’s mother appeared to also be hopelessly in love with Sakura’s mother (her cousin). Similarly, Sakura’s mother didn’t return her cousin’s feelings as she was in love with an older man (Sakura’s father) in the same way that Sakura is attracted to Yukito – an older boy. Both mothers are absent from their lives – Sakura’s mother through death, and Tomoyo’s through continual business trips – yet their daughters seem fated to play out their romantic histories.

Tomoyo invading some personal space!

 

Suffering from a bout of nostalgia, I decided to revisit the show as an adult, first in it’s Americanised form, and then the original Japanese version to compare the differences. I was shocked to discover that in an effort to make the show fit the perceived needs of their rigidly defined demographic of young boys, the executives at Kids WB had hacked all elements of “toxic” feminisation from it – romance, homosexuality, and the agency of Sakura has a protagonist (even her name is removed from the title) – dramatically reducing the run-time from 70 to just 39 episodes. In fact, if they had been able to “maximise” their cuts, the show would reportedly have run for merely 13 episodes. In other words, there was a concerted effort to twist the female gaze into a male one under the belief that CLAMP’s blend of hyper-femininity and action would be unappealing for the male audience it was being aimed at. In Japanese Superheroes for Global Girls, Anne Allison quotes this from an executive from Mattel, “[…] In America, girls will watch male-oriented programming but boys won’t watch female-oriented shows; this makes a male superhero a better bet.”

Whilst moaning about all this to my partner recently, I asked him if he had watched the dubbed version of the show as a child. He said that he had, but didn’t realise until he was older that the show had probably been intended for girls. I asked him if he remembered being turned-off that the show’s hero was a little girl as opposed to the ultra-masculine characters of his favourite childhood anime, Dragon Ball Z. His totally undermines Mattel’s assumptions about the show’s gender appeal: “I thought Sakura was really cool. In fact, I loved her so much I begged my mum for roller-skates that Christmas so that I could skate around to be like her.” Even more affirming than this is the fact that whilst the dubbed version of the show ended up being cancelled, the original Japanese one ran to its intended conclusion; spawned two films; and inspired two spin-off series using the same characters – Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle and xxxHolic.

Tsubasa: Resevoir Chronicle and xxxHolic

 

Sadly, by “butching” Cardcaptor Sakura up to be squeezed into the TV schedule alongside Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z, Western children were deprived of the tender and emotionally complex storytelling and character development behind all the magic and swordplay – and even from getting a satisfying ending to the show. It seems that whilst Japanese children are considered mature enough to deal with female superheroes, complex pre-pubescent emotions, and LGBTQ+ representation from a female perspective, Western children are unfortunately not treated with the same respect or intelligence.

Sources

The Female Gaze in Contemporary Japanese Literature, Kathryn Hemmann.

On Writing (Strong) Female Characters, Daniel Swensen.

Magical Girls: Empowered or Objectified? Wiki for SC2220: Gender Studies for University of Singapore.

The Americanisation of Cardcaptor Sakura, Actar’s Reviews.

 

Hannah Collins is a freelance illustrator, writer, Feminist, anime nerd, and Britney Spears apologist. You can read more of her writing on gender in pop culture at Fanny Pack and her on own blog.

 

 

Hell Is a Future We Make for Ourselves: The Many Dystopias of ‘The 100’

As she has an older brother, her birth was unauthorized and when she was discovered she was sent directly to the SkyBox. And so on. While some of the crimes are legitimate, many are the result of children growing up in a totalitarian state. So clearly it’s going to be better here on the ground, right?

Ha!

Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) and Anya (Dichen Lachman) in one of The 100’s many dystopias
Clarke Griffin (Eliza Taylor) and Anya (Dichen Lachman) in one of The 100’s many dystopias

 

This guest post by Deborah Pless appears as part of our theme week on Dystopias.

The first scene of The 100 makes it pretty freaking clear that this is a show about dystopia. We are introduced to a pretty blonde girl drawing a landscape scene using only the dirt and grime of her prison cell. The voiceover narration informs us that this picture, and all of the other pictures that ornament her solitary confinement, is drawn from imagination. She has never set foot on Earth, and she will almost certainly die in space like all the rest of her people.

Cheerful stuff, huh?

The girl, Clarke Griffin (played by Eliza Taylor), is our main character and the voice of reason in The 100, a CW show that came on as a midseason replacement last year to middling reviews, but has continued to improve and now, after the completion of its second season, officially qualifies as a “cult hit.” Based on the novel series of the same name by Kass Morgan, you would be forgiven for assuming this is just another Hunger Games ripoff. It isn’t.

The 100 is a show ostensibly about teenagers falling in love and making poor choices against the backdrop of an ever-changing dystopian landscape, but in reality the show is far less concerned with emotions than with social commentary. The dramas and frivolities of the first few episodes fade away as the show goes on, being replaced instead by a compelling and gripping drama about political power, the ethics of war, medical experimentation, torture, the values of indigenous cultures, imperialism, and, occasionally, hope for the future.

It is also unquestionably a show about dystopia. Though evident in the first scene, it wasn’t until well into the second season that I realized that the show wasn’t just an exploration of one particular dystopian future, however, but instead an exploration of all of them. Really. All of them. Every organized culture or civilization that our heroes encounter in the course of the series is a different exploration of dystopia. And while this can make the show rather bleak and hard to watch, it’s fascinating.

The Ark
The Ark

 

The basic premise of the show is inherently dystopian. Our heroes all live on the “Ark,” a cobbled together mush of space stations in orbit over the Earth. They’ve lived there for 97 years, since a nuclear war wiped out all life on Earth. The people of the Ark know that they are just a waiting generation who will live and die on the Ark with the understanding that in another hundred years their descendants will be able to go down and live on the planet once the radiation levels have decreased.

Because they have limited supplies, the Ark is run as a totalitarian dystopia. There is never enough food, water, air, or medicine. All food is rationed, all parents may have only one child, and medicine is reserved only for cases when the alternative is death. Even their shoes and underwear are handed down from one generation to the next. Break a law on the Ark – and there are many – and you die. No trial, no reprieve, just a sad farewell to your loved ones, the removal of all shoes and useful clothing, and then a swift death being shot out the airlock.

If a minor commits a crime, then they are sent to the “SkyBox,” a holding detention center where they await turning 18. Once 18, they face a panel, and that panel will decide if they should be “floated” or returned to the Ark’s main population.

Our story starts when Clarke and her fellow inmates in the SkyBox are hustled out of their cells and onto a dropship. Confused and terrified about what is happening, the teenagers (and children) soon realize that they are going down to Earth. Why? Well, as they and we learn, because the Ark can no longer support life and they must find out if the Earth has healed enough to sustain them. In other words, Clarke and all of her friends, 100 of the most vulnerable members of this society, are used as canaries in a coal mine.

The Ark kids reach the ground.
The Ark kids reach the ground

 

So obviously the Ark is a dystopian place. As the show goes on – obviously the kids survive their trip to the Earth’s surface – it become increasingly clear that the governmental situation on the Ark is hellish at best. One child was incarcerated for hitting the guards who held her back as her parents were executed. Another character, Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos), committed no crime but being born. As she has an older brother, her birth was unauthorized and when she was discovered she was sent directly to the SkyBox. And so on. While some of the crimes are legitimate, many are the result of children growing up in a totalitarian state. So clearly it’s going to be better here on the ground, right?

Ha!

As the kids quickly learn, the ground is no more hospitable than the Ark was. While there is no totalitarian rule, their society quickly devolves in a Lord of the Flies situation. A hundred teenagers and children who have been locked up in prison and forced to live in a police state their whole lives suddenly have complete freedom? Yeah, it goes pretty Lord of the Flies. Then, just when they’re starting to get their act together, it becomes clear that the Ark children are not the only ones alive on the ground. There are others.

That brings us to the Grounders, as the people of the Ark come to know them. The Grounders represent another form of dystopia, this one more similar to Mad Max. The Grounders are the humans who developed an immunity to the radiation poisoning the Earth and so rebuilt society.

Grounder leader Indra (Adina Porter) and her warriors
Grounder leader Indra (Adina Porter) and her warriors

 

They hunt with bows and arrows and spears, wear an amalgamation of clothes they found and animal leathers, paint their faces to look scarier, and even speak a completely different language. Heck, they even have a village called “ton DC” built in the bombed out ruins of Washington DC. In other words, they appear at first to the Ark kids as “savages,” a dystopian view of who they could become if they lose all of their “civilization.”

Fortunately, the truth turns out to be much more complicated than that. While the Grounders are genuinely savage, they also have an artistic and healing tradition that is complex and beautiful, as well as a culture that is distinct and clearly quite functional. Though tribal and very divided by factions, the Grounders quickly become the least dystopian society on the show, and the Ark kids even cease their war and try to make a truce.

Unfortunately for our heroes, though, the Grounders are the least of their problems. As the story progresses, the kids run into another dystopian hellscape, this one called “Mount Weather.” Mount Weather is a bunker, or system of bunkers, hidden inside a mountain and home to a large population of seemingly nice, decent people. They’ve lived inside the mountain, sheltered by its radiation shields, for the past hundred years. They have abundant food, shelter and safety, and even flourishing art and culture. It’s the first place the kids go that is, well, beautiful.

But that beauty covers over the horrible truth that Mount Weather is just another dystopia. This time it’s a medical one, where the people of Mount Weather are basically vampires, kidnapping Grounders and draining them of their blood in the hopes of building up a radiation immunity. When the scientists at the mountain discover that the Ark kids have an even better immunity, they decide to harvest the kids’ bone marrow, whether they consent or not.

Inside Mount Weather’s medical research facility
Inside Mount Weather’s medical research facility

 

Not to be outdone, by this time the bulk of the Ark’s population has reached the ground and formed a camp called “Camp Jaha,” which operates under the same dystopian rule as the Ark did. And across the mountains we discover a desert wasteland of outcasts and landmines and pilgrims searching for the “City of Light.” That City of Light? Turns out to be just another terrifying technological dystopia.

What’s the point of all of this? Well, aside from the writers of The 100 clearly enjoying the bleakness of their world, these competing dystopian futures actually manage to form a cohesive picture not of dystopia but of how we ought to respond to it.

Like I said above, our main character for the show is Clarke. Clarke is smart, caring, incredibly pragmatic and kind of scary. She quickly becomes the leader of the kids she came down with, but goes on to become the leader of all of the people of the Ark, a symbol of resistance for Mount Weather, and more. While there are other characters whose lives we follow, the story revolves around Clarke, particularly around how Clarke reacts to dystopian societies. Namely, how she never reacts well.

On the Ark, Clarke was locked up in solitary confinement for the crime of treason. She and her father discovered that the life support of the station was failing and tried to warn everyone. He was executed; she was locked up. At the dropship, when the kids go all Lord of the Flies, Clarke is the voice of reason, foraging for food and medicine while the others let the world burn.

Clarke and her mother, Abby (Paige Turco)
Clarke and her mother, Abby (Paige Turco)

 

When captured by the Grounders, she resorts to diplomacy. When captured by Mount Weather, she speaks out against their propaganda and escapes, taking a former enemy with her. She quickly establishes herself as the real power of Camp Jaha and, with the help of her friends, brokers a deal with the Grounders to go to war against Mount Weather. Not bad for a 17-year-old girl. Not bad for anyone.

Clarke clearly believes in the values of a good society, but what makes her a fantastic character is how strongly she believes in speaking out against a bad one. She has no qualms about speaking truth to power. And she will not abide a dystopia. By showing Clarke butting heads with so many different kinds of failed societies, we’re given a look at what it means to stand up for our own rights and the rights of others in any situation. I’m not saying that the show is perfect or completely unproblematic, but I do think that it has something very interesting to say when it comes to how we ought to react to dystopian landscapes.

It says that we should react with understanding. We should figure out what’s wrong, what about the society is making it so unbearable, and then seek to fix that. Clarke doesn’t believe necessarily in blowing up bad societies, though she does sometimes do that. Literally. It’s more that her arc is about seeking the good and using these visions of failed places to figure out what will work and what should be.

This is especially meaningful considering that Clarke is, well, a teenage girl. She’s the demographic of our society that we pay the least attention to and give the least credence. And yet the whole show is centered around proving how much value Clarke and the other kids that society originally deemed expendable actually have.

Maya (Eve Harlow), Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos), and Monty (Christopher Larkin) fight together in Mount Weather
Maya (Eve Harlow), Octavia (Marie Avgeropoulos), and Monty (Christopher Larkin) fight together in Mount Weather

 

It’s not just Clarke, either. The show centers on the kids the Ark sent down, the ones society had abandoned, as they explore different kinds of dystopias. They’re a pretty diverse bunch and their reactions to these different situations give us a wealth of commentary on those dystopias.

So while Clarke’s not perfect and neither is the show, they’re clearly trying. Clarke sometimes falls into white savior behavior, and the show occasionally tries to force storylines that feel disingenuous and frankly kind of weird. But whatever. I don’t need a perfect show or a perfect heroine. I’d rather have this, a meta-commentary on the different types of futures we envision for ourselves as a species. Even better, it’s a meta-commentary where each future is torn down and reassembled by the children who will actually inherit it.

As The 100 shows us, the point of dystopia isn’t to look at the future and weep. The point of dystopian landscapes is to give us a vision of what our future could be and then to explore how to make sure it never is.

 

Deborah Pless runs Kiss My Wonder Woman and works as a freelance writer and editor when she’s not busy camping out at the movies or watching too much TV. You can follow her on Twitter and Tumblr just as long as you like feminist rants, an obsession with superheroes, and the search for gluten-free baked goods.

 

Hate to Love Her: The Lasting Allure of Blair Waldorf

In an interview with the ‘New York Times,’ Gillian Flynn says, “The likability thing, especially in Hollywood, is a constant conversation, and they’re really underrating their audience when they have that conversation. What I read and what I go to the movies for is not to find a best friend, not to find inspirations…It’s to be involved with characters that are maybe incredibly different from me, that may be incredibly bad but that feel authentic.”

This guest post by Vanessa Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.

Blair Waldorf, the spoiled, plotting socialite of the CW’s Gossip Girl, is not your typical high school student. This Upper East Side Queen Bee is not a relatable character, nor as literary critics would say, a reliable narrator. Competitive by nature, Blair moves through New York City’s elite social world with the shrewd cunning of a cutthroat and cynical business titan. Despite her poised exterior, Blair is initially presented as the eternal underdog to her best frenemy, the free-spirited Serena van der Woodsen.

Yet during its six-season run, fans of the show rooted for Blair as though she were Scarlett O’Hara—a stubborn anti-heroine with grandiose dreams that often clashed with self-destructive desires. In order to catapult Blair from an emotionally flat, cardboard-cutout Mean Girl into a multi-faceted character, she is someone whose deep insecurities and anxieties are nearly equal to her undeniable beauty and privilege. Unlike Serena, who seems to always benefit from some higher source of convenient luck, Blair struggles with her looks, most notably her body image.

Cecily von Ziegesar, author of the series used for the basis of the show, says in a profile with New York Magazine, “I always resented books that tried to teach a lesson, where the characters are too good: They don’t swear, they tell their mothers everything…I mean, of course I want to be the responsible mother who says, ‘Oh, there are terrible repercussions if you have sex, do drugs, and have an eating disorder!’ But the truth is, my friends and I dabbled in all of those things. And we all went to good colleges and grew up fine. And that’s the honest thing to say.” Gossip Girl may exude the flamboyance of a melodramatic soap opera but the character of Blair Waldorf still manages to embody the familiar woes and hangups of a recognizable teenage girl.

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Like many teenage girls who feel that they are never enough as they are, Blair constantly searches for a version of her best self that always eludes her grasp. It’s fitting that Blair’s role models are Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. These iconic actresses, with their regal beauty, trademark style aesthetics, and air of worldly sophistication, reflect Blair’s need to merge her perception of femininity with a quiet yet commanding power. Does she pull this off? Her friendship with Serena, which can easily swing from loving to toxic, exposes her vulnerabilities. Her perfectionism merely functions as a coping mechanism. In season one, episode nine, “Blair Waldorf Must Pie!,” viewers learn that Blair is bulimic. After facing a dysfunctional and stressful Thanksgiving, she resorts to binge-eating and then making herself throw up. She may not be able to control every aspect of her life as though she were a Hollywood director, but she can control her relationship to food. As the seasons progress, Blair’s bulimia is not treated as her defining characteristic or the foundation of her identity.

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When discussing the role of the unlikable female protagonist in an essay for Buzzfeed, Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay notes, “These novels [Gone Girl, Dare Me] depict women who are clearly not participating in their narratives to make friends and whose characters are the better for it. Freed from the constraints of likability, they are able to exist on and beyond the page as fully realized, interesting, and realistic characters.”

In the case of Blair Waldorf, her narrative begins with a power struggle between herself and Serena, her childhood partner in crime. When Serena returns home to Manhattan after attending boarding school in Connecticut, Blair’s natural instinct is to panic. Her relationship with Serena is bound by equal parts jealousy and mafia-level loyalty. Serena’s return means that Blair will be stripped of her title as Constance Billard’s Queen Bee. Blair learns that Serena slept with her boyfriend, Nate Archibald, right before Serena shipped out of Grand Central Station. She turns against Serena and commands her newly-appointed court to do the same. Blair is not depicted as the Girl Next Door; in fact, it’s a label that Blair would find a bit insulting due to its implications of commonality. If anything, Serena, with her heart of gold and It Girl charm, is the one who is pushed as likable. Blair is a character that is free from the constraints of likability, but her power-hungry and slightly paranoid motivations, however selfish, do not make her lifeless or cartoonish. Blair’s rocky relationship with Serena prevents her from serving as the resident villain. On the contrary, it emphasizes her weaknesses.

The social pecking order of Gossip Girl revolves around class, rather than outright wealth. Echoing the conflicts of an Edith Wharton novel, the female protagonists exist in a familiar yet distorted version of New York. Blair’s vulnerabilities include her see-sawing feelings toward Serena and her tendency to make decisions shaped by the promise of social-climbing or revenge. Ultimately this pushes her into the arms of Chuck Bass, Nate’s best friend. For some viewers, Chuck and Blair’s courtship of mindgames and manipulation were reason enough to call the pairing and Blair unlikable, to say the least. But unlikable doesn’t have to constitute unwatchable or monstrous.

In an interview with the New York Times, Gillian Flynn says, “The likability thing, especially in Hollywood, is a constant conversation, and they’re really underrating their audience when they have that conversation. What I read and what I go to the movies for is not to find a best friend, not to find inspirations…It’s to be involved with characters that are maybe incredibly different from me, that may be incredibly bad but that feel authentic.”

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Despite the extremes of Chuck and Blair’s battle tactics, which include marrying a Prince (Blair) and a deep-seated aversion to commitment (Chuck), their relationship has the same Will they or won’t they? curiosity in the same vein as Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights or Carrie and Big in Sex and the City. Blair and Chuck breakup only to reunite, both infused with a sense of fragile pride that is also a vice. Their antics aren’t aspirational. At one point, Chuck “sells” Blair in order to keep his father’s hotel empire. In a conversation with the New Yorker, Margaret Atwood, in response to the question of the likable female character says, “This does still come up. It is indeed a ridiculous question. The qualities we appreciate in a character are not the same as those we would look for in a college roommate.”

None of the characters are exactly the type you’d want for a college roommate. Even Dan Humphrey, the Brooklyn “Outsider,” is not as morally pure as he’d like to believe. He’s just as snobby and self-righteous as Blair, thus making it a surprising yet believable turn of events when they later get together in season four. Regardless, it’s Blair, with her determination, her ability to swiftly flip the switch from charming to threatening, who makes a much more interesting and compelling character than Golden Girl Serena. Edan Lepucki writes for The Millions, “But what if a character isn’t Unlikeable, but unlikeable? What if you just didn’t like him or her? That’s a valid personal response, and certainly a good a reason as any to stop reading. But it’s such a personal response that it’s irrelevant to the critical gaze.” We don’t have to like Blair in order to root for the success of her schemes or even feel sympathy for her self-induced conflicts.

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What made Gossip Girl and Blair Waldorf interesting was not the character’s attempts to achieve role model status. The fact that fans of the show that identified with Blair may have even misinterpreted the message or lack thereof. Emily Nussbaum when writing about The Mindy Project observes, “Female viewers, especially, have been trained to expect certain payoffs from romantic comedies, vicarious in nature: the meet-cute, the soul mate, and, in nearly every case, a ‘Me, too!’ identification. Without ‘Me, too!,’ some folks want a refund.” Blair, in all of her messy contradictions and complexities, would lose what makes her fascinating if she were written to be likable.

 

Vanessa Willoughby is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared on The Toast, The Hairpin, Thought Catalog, and other print and online publications. Find her @book_nerd212.

 

 

On ‘Reign,’ Rape, and Sexual Assault as Plot Device

The show expertly demonstrates how the show’s female characters find ways to move through a world that refuses them power or autonomy. Because of this, I’m very surprised and disappointed that the show chose to have its title character violently raped as a way to advance the plot.

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This guest post by Cate Young previously appeared at her blog, BattyMamzelle, and is cross-posted with permission.

Trigger Warning: This post contains discussion of rape and sexual assault.

Let me start by saying that Reign is a great show. I started watching during the break between seasons one and two and haven’t turned back since. In a lot of ways, Reign is typical CW fare: pretty people’s pretty problems, but in others, it’s a very progressive and feminist look (even if wildly historically inaccurate) at the life of one of history’s most notorious and fascinating women.

One of the show’s biggest strengths is that Reign deals quite openly with the struggles that women faced at the time–from their inability to own property to their inability to guide the very direction of their lives. The show expertly demonstrates how the show’s female characters find ways to move through a world that refuses them power or autonomy. Because of this, I’m very surprised and disappointed that the show chose to have its title character violently raped as a way to advance the plot.

I am not as plugged into this show’s online fandom as I am with other shows that I watch, so I was not aware that the details of this particular plot had leaked online a few months ago, and consequently did not see it coming. I will admit that even as it happened, I thought Mary might escape. After all, this would hardly be the first time that Mary has been under threat of rape in the show. Additionally, Reign had previously tackled rape (poorly) when Catherine de Medici, Mary’s mother-in-law, admitted that she had been gang-raped as a child in a season one episode. A petition started back in October to persuade the showrunners not to go through with the storyline nicely sums up many of my issues with this episode:

Many of us have come to love this show for its portrayal of strong female characters and the unflinchingly feminine light it shines on the dynamics and pitfalls of power in a world that is dominated by men. Much of the series has focused on Mary’s womanhood and how she has learned to utilize it, manipulate and weaponize it, even as the outside world has looked upon it as her greatest weakness. After persevering through so much adversity and triumphing over those who have fought so hard to silence her, to have her suffer through this violent assault sends the message that the world will only punish–crushingly and humiliatingly–those women who dare to assert their places within it. It is a message jarringly out of tune with everything we have come to admire about this series, and it has no place in a show geared toward young women who dream of a future in which they may rise without fear of retribution at the hands of men.

As with the HBO drama Game of Thrones the argument can certainly be made that the threat of rape is a historically accurate concern for women of the time. But Reign makes no pretense at accuracy and never has; this rape is a fictional concoction inserted into the story solely to create controversy and advance the plot. They cannot even hide behind the defense that they simply bungled the retelling of a true story.

This development is also particularly jarring considering the context of the rest of the episode and the tone of the show in general. Mary and her four ladies have dealt with the conflicts of finding love and honouring their duty to marry well and ensure the financial future of their country and families. In this episode, Francis’ younger sister Claude spends most of the episode plotting to purposely destroy her reputation in order to prevent her mother from marrying her off. Claude refuses to stop fighting for autonomy even as she remains caught between the needs of the crown to create a political alliance, her mother’s desire to get her out of the castle and her own desire to remain young, free and in control of her own destiny.

When Mary proposes a Protestant suitor for Claude in an effort to help quell the growing religious unrest in France, and reminds her that Francis can compel the marriage if he chooses, Claude defiantly declares to both Mary and her mother: “Tell the king, my brother, that I’m not a brood mare to be bartered and sold. By any of you!” Clearly, the show is no stranger to the themes of female empowerment, independence, and the struggles of retaining either in such a strictly patriarchal society.

And this brings us to Mary’s rape. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Reign showrunner Laurie McCarthy essentially confirms that Mary was brutalized as a way to advance the plot:

It really started from the end of last season when we made the choice to have Francis kill his father. Even though it was a righteous action, I always felt like it would be something that just had to haunt him, and we obviously played that in many different iterations. But it really felt like it should be something that should haunt his rule as well. It seemed like something that he couldn’t tell Mary, that he wouldn’t tell Mary, and then we looked at, “What if the wrong person found out and he became a compromised king and it made him make choices that he wouldn’t otherwise have made?” And then since we’re playing the civil unrest in the nation, which is historically accurate, we thought, “What could be one of the worst things that could happen that would really affect the person he loves the most?” And that’s Mary. So we looked at it originally through the prism of Francis, and then we looked at it through the prism of Mary, and I couldn’t imagine any other character—other than Catherine—who could experience something like this and that we would be able to then take on a journey of healing, somebody who could truly rise above this but who also would be in the worst possible situation to have something like this happen to her as a queen, as a woman, as a new wife.

Reign raped Mary to punish Francis. Reign raped Mary to motivate Francis. Reign came as close to fridging its own main character as it is possible to do without actually killing her.

I have been vaguely cognizant of how much Mary had been sidelined this season in favour of Francis dealing with the repercussions of murdering his father last season, but seeing as avoiding charges of treason seemed like a fairly realistic concern given the situation, I didn’t think much of it. But to now know that strong, independent, star of the show Mary, Queen of Scots was brutally raped as a way to better raise the stakes for her husband’s actions and deepen his guilt, makes the situation completely unacceptable.

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Once again, we’re left with a woman whose sexuality is demeaned as a way to diminish the men around her. Once again, her terror, pain, and suffering is used as a bargaining chip between the men who actually hold power and those who seek to take it. Once again, a brilliant woman is reduced to the act of violence that is committed against her.

What upsets me most about this scene is that even in the aftermath, the show demonstrates that it deeply understands the politics that make this scene in such poor taste, making the choice even more infuriating. When Catherine finds Mary running through the halls after she manages to get free, she takes her into her chambers and asks her point blanks if she has been raped. When Mary collapses in tears, Catherine offers a rousing speech of support:

I know you don’t want to be touched. That’s all right. But you’re safe. I don’t know how you managed to escape but you did. You are alive. You will survive this. I know this, because I survived, you know that. They tried to destroy you by taking your pride and your strength but those things cannot be taken, not from you. Not ever. We’re going to change your clothes, fix your hair, erase any mark of their hands on you. We are. We are going to do this for you and for Francis and for Scotland and for France. They tried to diminish a King tonight by degrading a Queen and they will not succeed because the world will never know what they did to you. It is, because you will walk out of here and you will face your court as if this never happened. Yes, you can. You have to. Mary your guards saw you. You must put to rest any rumours immediately. These next moments of your life will either define you as a victim or a powerful Queen untouched by a failed assassination attempt. They will define who you are perceived to be. Your place in history. Do not let them win. Trust me. Trust me and let me help you. Trust that I can get you through this because I swear to you that I can.

But even here there are problems. Even as Catherine seeks to support Mary in her most vulnerable moment, she also encourages her to bottle up her emotions, to lie about her trauma and to pretend it never happened. TVLine‘s Eleni Armenakis said it best:

What could possibly be gained from this? More strife between Mary and Francis as Francis copes with the guilt that his wife was raped while he was murdering an innocent man—and not, as she thinks, pleading with the Vatican for religious tolerance? It would be another failing on Reign’s part to turn an attack on Mary into yet another crisis for her husband.

Does it make Mary a stronger, harder queen? She already was—and reducing her to a crumpled, crying ball on Catherine’s floor only undercuts that. Powerful speeches that force her to hide both her inward pain and her outward bruises don’t make her strong. They make her yet another woman who’s learned to keep things like this hidden so she won’t be seen as less than. For a series that has done so much for young women, this is one “lesson” they don’t need to hear again.

Reign failed big time with this episode and undid much of what made this show so progressive to begin with. It took a show and a character defined by her independence and willingness to push back against social mores in order to do what is best for her people and herself and reduced her to a pawn in her husband’s story. It’s unforgivable, but especially from a show that made a point early on of celebrating female sexuality and sexual liberation. To turn around and use that sexuality as a weapon against its own protagonist even after being begged by the show’s fans not to do so is something I’m not sure it can bounce back from.

Rape is a very real and very traumatic event that millions of women are forced to deal with every day. Reducing it to a plot point that doesn’t even serve to further the assaulted woman’s story is reprehensible and using said plot to reinforce the code of silence that surrounds sexual assault as a means of reclaiming strength is a damaging precedent to set for a show with such a young audience.

 

Cate Young is a Trinidadian freelance writer and photographer, and author of BattyMamzelle, a feminist pop culture blog focused on film, television, music, and critical commentary on media representation. Cate has a BA in Photojournalism from Boston University and is currently pursuing her MA in Mass Communications so that she can more effectively examine the symbolic annihilation of women of colour in the media and deliver the critical feminist smack down. Follow her on twitter at @BattyMamzelle.

 

Rape, Lies, and Gossip on ‘Gossip Girl’

Her banishment by Blair when she finds out what transpired between Jenny and her on-again, off-again lover is typical of the punish-the-woman mentality ‘Gossip Girl’ is so fond of. Instead of shaming her partner for taking advantage of a teenage girl, Blair blames Jenny for ruining her proposal. And when Jenny returns the following season to help Chuck take down Blair (keep up, people!), she should really be seeking revenge on her rapist, wouldn’t you say?

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This guest post by Scarlett Harris appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

There are multiple rapes that occur in the “scandalous lives of Manhattan’s elite” of Gossip Girl lore. In the pilot episode alone, there are two instances of rape.

Newbie to Upper East Side society, Jenny Humphrey, is sexually assaulted on the rooftop whilst a high school dance takes place below. Her assailant, the reprehensible Chuck Bass, who has wormed his way into the zeitgeist as the ultimate bad boy, had earlier forced himself onto Jenny’s brother Dan’s date, Serena van der Woodsen. Whilst Chuck’s entitlement is highlighted here, the way Gossip Girl later paints him as a wolf in sheep’s clothing sheep in wolf’s clothing worthy of a happy ending with the show’s just-as-culpable heroine, Blair Waldorf, is careless. There are plenty of other ways the consequence-free lifestyle of Serena, Blair, et al. could be portrayed that wouldn’t reward misogyny.

But that seems to be Gossip Girl’s calling card: Chuck later goes on to rape Blair by posing as someone else in the season two episode “The Dark Night.” He cuts her face when he smashes a window in rage. He pimps her out to his uncle for a piece of real estate. Said uncle tries to force himself on his dead brother’s widow, Lily. And, in probably the most blurred (story)line involving sex and consent in the CW series, Jenny, years after her violent debut into Manhattan society, shows up on Chuck’s doorstep, dejected and lonely, and the two find objectionable comfort in each other’s sex organs. Cathryn writes about this more extensively than I ever could here.

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Chuck’s (not-so-distant) rapist past serves as a plot point to show how far he’s allegedly come as a reformed bad boy. Jenny’s rape and subsequent ousting from Manhattan at the hands of Blair, however, positions her storyline as a cautionary tale of what gossip, money, and lack of boundaries can turn a person into. Granted, Jenny caused a lot of trouble for her former friends and family, but rape is never a fitting punishment. Her banishment by Blair when she finds out what transpired between Jenny and her on-again, off-again lover is typical of the punish-the-woman mentality Gossip Girl is so fond of. Instead of shaming her partner for taking advantage of a teenage girl, Blair blames Jenny for ruining her proposal. And when Jenny returns the following season to help Chuck take down Blair (keep up, people!), she should really be seeking revenge on her rapist, wouldn’t you say?

So while Jenny is a metaphor for the toxicity of Manhattan society and the good girl gone bad, her fellow Chuck-rape-almost-victim, Serena, is the opposite: the bad girl striving to make amends.

The parallels between the two blondes closest to “the ultimate insider” and *spoiler alert* the man revealed to be Gossip Girl, Dan Humphrey, are apparent in the first few seasons. In the pilot, Serena returns from boarding school after being embroiled too deeply in the debauchery of the Upper East Side as Jenny is just being introduced to it. They are both romantically interested in Chuck’s bestie, Nate Archibald.

By season three the actress who portrays Jenny, Taylor Momsen, was the quintessential bad girl, sporting thick eyeliner and a negligee as outerwear, and fronting a rock band. Think a modern-day Courtney Love. Meanwhile, golden girl Blake Lively (Serena) was covering magazines, starring in The Town and filming Green Lantern, and dating such high-profile men as Leondardo DiCaprio. Gossip Girl mirrored this metatextually by showing Jenny reading a copy of Nylon magazine with Lively on the cover, breaking the fourth wall.

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Speaking of art imitating life, season two threw shades of Steubenville. Dan is embroiled in a sex scandal when it’s claimed that he had been sleeping with his teacher. The allegations turned out to be fabricated by Blair, who was then expelled from school and had her acceptance to Yale revoked. Dan’s stepmother, Lily, is sympathetic to Dan’s relationship with Serena being put in jeopardy and his female teacher being branded a sexual predator, but wonders, “Should Blair lose Yale over this? It’s her future.” This is reminiscent of the utmost concern shown to teen Steubenville rapists Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond and their bright sporting futures after being found guilty of the crime whilst the welfare of the anonymous victim who’ll be dealing with her assault for the rest of her life went by the wayside.

Whereas Steubenville occurred in real life and the myriad assaults and questionable sexual and gender politics of Gossip Girl take place in a fictional world far removed from many of our own, they both help to colour the way we treat victims of sexual assault. And unfortunately, this is nothing new.

 

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

 

Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists: The Roundup

Check out all of the posts for Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists Theme Week here.

Almost 20 years later, we need more of what My So-Called Life gave us a taste of. We need teenage girl protagonists to be sexual, not sexy. We need honest portrayals of what it is to be a teenager–not only for teenagers who need to see themselves in faithful mirrors, but also for adults who are still trying to figure themselves out.

Are You There, Hollywood? It’s Me, the Average Girl by Carrie Gambino

The expectations for girls in film and television are incredibly mixed. It is naïve to say that girls nowadays are just expected to be a sexy sidekick or afterthought. With more strong female roles popping up in bigger budget films such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, there is the expectation that girls should also be intelligent and incredibly clever (while also being visually pleasing)… There isn’t really a place for the all-around average girl. The first two examples of strong female protagonists that I could think of are in fantasy franchises. Are real female characters really that difficult to come up with? Real female characters are often created with good intentions but tend not to work on a larger scale.

Six Lessons Lisa Simpson Taught Me by Lady T

…Lisa takes a stand against the sexism spouting from the mouth of the new talking Malibu Stacy doll. Frustrated with the doll’s collection of sexist catchphrases that include “Let’s bake some cookies for the boys,” “Thinking too much gives you wrinkles,” and “My name’s Stacy, but you can call me *wolf whistle*,” Lisa collaborates with the creator of Malibu Stacy to create their own talking doll, Lisa Lionheart. When Malibu Stacy outsells Lisa Lionheart, our creator feels temporarily dejected, until she hears her own voice speaking behind her: “Trust in yourself and you can achieve anything.” She turns to see a girl her age hold a Lisa Lionheart doll in her hand and smile.
Delightful Tina. Shy, painfully weird, butt-obsessed, quietly dorky, intensely daydreamy Tina. Tina is a little bit like all of us (and–cough–a lot like some of us) at that most graceless, transitional, intrinsically unhappy stage of life that is early adolescence. She is also a wonderfully rich and well-developed character, both in her interactions with her family and in her own right, and she’s arguably the emotional core of the whole show.

It’s common wisdom that maintaining relationships requires constant work, but there’s often an assumption (in TV, movies, and real life) that this only applies to romantic relationships. Platonic relationships are rarely the focus of a story, and when a storyline deals with issues in these relationships, they’re often easily dealt with, and the friendship goes back to being simple. Exceptions to this are problems that are caused by romantic relationships. Veronica Mars is an exception to this; for its first two seasons, it depicts many platonic relationships, and explores the many issues involved in navigating them (some of these problems are related to romance, but many are not, showing platonic relationships have their own complexities, separate from romance).

My Sister’s Keeper is a story about growing up, identify, family, death, and life (how can we truly tell any story about life when death isn’t the costar?), but its uniqueness is that it is told primarily through two young girls.

So, these are the important things in Sixteen Candles: Samantha’s family forgets her birthday; she’s in love with a hot senior who’s dating Caroline (the most popular girl in school); and there’s a big ol’ geek (Farmer Ted) from Sam’s daily bus rides who won’t stop stalking her. Oh, and Long Duk Dong exists [insert racist gong sound here]. Seriously, every time Long Duk Dong appears on screen, a fucking GONG GOES OFF on the soundtrack. I suppose that lines up quite nicely with the scene where he falls out of a tree yelling, “BONSAI.”

Since the entire movie is like a machine gun firing of RACIST HOMOPHOBIC SEXIST ABLEIST RAPEY parts, the only way I know how to effectively talk about it is to look at the very problematic screenplay. So, fasten your seatbelts and heed your trigger warnings.

The 80s were quite possibly a nightmare.

 

My main issue with the film is that it is speckled with meaningless platitudes and clichés about girl empowerment when the film simply isn’t empowering. The women in the film are portrayed as oversexualized, helpless, damaged goods. Though there are metaphors at work that symbolize abuse or objectification of women, nowhere does the film stress an injustice or seek to dismantle its source. It is just like any other formulaic action movie complete with boobs, guns, and explosions, but it has a shiny, artificial veneer of girl empowerment. The false veneer is the aspect of the film that truly infuriates me, along with the side of artsy pretentious bullshit.

On Milk-Bones, Toothed Vaginas, and Adolescence: Teeth As Cautionary Tale by Colleen Clemens

Early in the film, Dawn is a nymph-like virgin committed to “saving herself” until marriage. She is the poster child for the “good” girl: a loving daughter who obeys the doctrines of the church and spends her time spreading the gospel of virginity. Everything Dawn knows about the world and herself changes when her falsely pious boyfriend Tobey takes her to a far off swimming hole and tries to rape her. A confused and terrified Dawn reacts by screaming and then—much to everyone’s surprise—cutting off his penis to interrupt the rape. Little does Dawn know that her lessons about Darwin in her biology classes are taking hold in her own body.

The Horror of Female Sexual Awakening: Black Swan by Rebecca Willoughby

What disappointed me most, I think, was that Black Swan could easily have been a progressive film with a positive, young woman-centered journey out of repression at its center. It could have recouped that gender-centric childhood ballerina dream of so many little girls into a message about determination, hard work, personal strength, and emotional growth. Instead, Darren Aronofsy has produced an Oscar-winning horror film. That’s right: I said HORROR. While that might seem like a stretch, it seems clear to me that the horror I refer to is the possibility of changing an age-old story. The horror of Black Swan is the absolutely terrifying idea that a young woman might make it through the difficult process of maturation, develop a healthy, multi-faceted sexuality, and be successful at her chosen career at the same time.

While most teen movies revolve around coming-of-age stories, gang movies reveal the extreme side to adolescence—the misfit, criminal, and violent side. Gang movies are rather simple, either focusing on episodes of gang debauchery, or revolving around rivalry and jealousy. Usually the viewpoint is that of the ring leader, or the “new girl,” who is initiated into the gang but is still an outsider. Yet, among the plethora of girl gang movies, every decade has produced stories involving specific issues and specific types of teenage girls.

Kiki’s Delivery Service carefully constructs a world where a girl’s agency is expected, accepted and supported, while Disney movies typically present a girl’s agency as unusual, forbidden, and denied. The difference between these two messages is that Kiki’s world anticipates and encourages her independence, while the women of Disney are typically punished for this.

For example, in The Little Mermaid Ariel wants to “live out of these waters,” but her father forbids her exploration of the human world and punishes this dream. Sea witch Ursula exploits Ariel’s desire to discover another world beyond her own as well. This is hardly an isolated incident.

The Book Thief: Stealing Hearts and Minds by Natalie Wilson

Liesel, unlike so many young heroines, resists romance—from her friend Rudy’s early problematic insistence and then throughout the remainder of the movie. Instead of being positioned in relationship to romantic partners, she has three male best friends—Rudy, Max and Hans (Papa)—as well as two females of great importance to her life, Rosa (Mama) and Ilsa Hermann (the mayor’s wife who, transgressively, supplyies Liesel with books). As for Liesel, like her futuristic counterpart, Katniss Everdeen, she is a life-saving heroine and inspirational rebel.

Terri sets out to explore the luxury of male privilege disguised as a young man. Just One of the Guys smacked us straight in the face with the unspoken universal knowledge that sexism was real, it existed and the film gave us tangible proof. Terri decides to use her parents’ trip out of town to switch things around for herself by getting another shot at the newspaper internship with another article, an expose of sorts. She switches high schools and uses her brain, and as much as she can, is herself.

Troop Beverly Hills: What A Thrill by Phaydra Babinchock

Initially the girls of Troop Beverly Hills are portrayed as clueless and privileged, but they are allowed to grow and transform themselves over the course of the movie. The film writers don’t do it unrealistically by turning them into tomboys overnight or at all. The girls retain their femininity, which they are made fun of for by the Red Feathers, throughout the film.
Immortality is not what makes a world better. Hope, friendship, and love do, and love is not limited by sex, gender, ethnicity, or race. Women like Homura and Kyoko can fall in love with other women like Madoka and Sayaka respectively. We have the responsibility to stand up with people like them. This series is part of the reason I try to do that and more. I hope that many others to do the same.
Is Wanda a girl/teenage female protagonist? Technically she is not “young” as she is 1,000 years old and seemingly immortal, but she is new to Earth so that makes her young in some sense. Also, why would the Souls even have genders that mirror that of humans or have genders at all? The Souls look like beams of light and they probably aren’t even a carbon based species and yet somehow Wanda is a female? So. Frustrating. Nonetheless she is controlling a person’s body who identifies as a teenage girl and is thus somewhat restricted to her occupied body’s feelings, emotions, and categorizations.

Ten questions between filmmaker Morgan Faust and 13-year-old actress Rachel Resheff.

Morgan: The truth is when I was growing up in the 1980s, the child actresses were often given pretty syrupy roles (with the exception of Journey of Natty Gann and Labyrinth). It was the boys who got to have the cool movies–Goonies, Stand by Me, even The NeverEnding Story and E.T., which did have girls, but the boys were the heroes. That is why I write the movies I do–adventures films for girls–because that’s what I wanted to do when I was a kid, go on adventures, be the hero. I still do want that. I mean, who doesn’t?

The Hunger Games, saturated as it is with political meaning (the author admits her inspiration for the trilogy came from flipping channels between reality TV and war footage), is a welcome change from another recent popular YA series, Twilight. As a further bonus, it has disproven the claim that series with female protagonists can’t have massive cross-gender appeal. With the unstoppable Katniss Everdeen at the helm (played in the films by the jaw-droppingly talented Jennifer Lawrence), perhaps the series will be the start of a new trend: politically themed narratives with rebellious female protagonists who have their sights set on revolution more than love, on cultural change more than the latest sparkling hottie.

The CW: Expectations vs. Reality by Nicole Elwell

The CW is a rarity among the many networks of cable television. Its target demographic is women aged 18-34, and as a result has a majority of its original programming centered on the lives of young women. On paper, this sounds like a noteworthy achievement to be celebrated. However, the CW produces content devoid of any sense of the reality of its young audience, and as a result actually harms its most devoted viewers. The CW creates an unattainable archetype for what a teenager should look like and fails to maturely handle issues of murder and rape.

Defending Dawn Summers: From One Kid Sister to Another by Robin Hitchcock

OK, sure, my big sister didn’t have superpowers, and as far as I know she did not save the world even one time, much less “a lot.” But from my perspective as her bratty little sister, I felt like I could never escape her long and intimidating shadow. I could never be as smart as her, as special as her; I couldn’t hope to collect even a fraction the awards and accolades she racked up through high school. And she didn’t even properly counteract her super smarts with social awkwardness: she always had a tight group of friends and the romantic affections of cute boys. She was the pride and joy of my family, and I always felt like an also-ran. Trust me: this makes it very hard to not be at least a little bratty and whiny.

Why Alex Russo Is My Favorite Fictional Female Wizard by Katherine Filaseta

The protagonist of Wizards is a girl who acts like girls really act: she has boyfriends and broken hearts, but isn’t overly boy-crazy or dependent on them; she’s curious and smart enough to ask questions when other people are telling her not to; and throughout the series she faces a lot of the struggles women really do face throughout their lives.

Ja’mie: Mean-Spirited Impression of a Private School Girl by Katherine Murray

Power dynamics mean something in comedy. Making fun of someone less powerful than you is sort of like beating up someone who’s small, or taking advantage of someone naive. It’s not very sporting, and it makes you look mean. The problem is that the same person can be powerful in some contexts and not in others. A rich, white 17-year-old girl, for example, might be very powerful in contexts where she’s bullying her classmates at school, but less powerful in contexts where she’s trying to meet the demands of a sexist culture. If you’re an adult man nearing 40, it’s hard to make fun of the way a teenage girl dresses, flirts, and moons over boys without starting to look kind of petty.

True Grit: Ambiguous Feminism by Andé Morgan

Mattie wears dark, loose, practical clothing. She climbs trees and carries weapons. She shows utter disdain for male privilege or La Boeuf’s pervy allusions to sexual contact. She has no interest in the older men for romance or protection. She is only concerned with their usefulness to her task, and she uses her will and her reasoning rather than seduction to convince them. Steinfeld’s Mattie emanates competence and confidence.
Not since Megan Follows played Anne of Green Gables in the 1985 adaptation of the novel with the same title have girls had a young protagonist on screen who fights against social conventions that are designed to limit her because of her age and gender. Mattie’s similarity to Anne doesn’t end at their indignation and fearlessness, they both also share a love of long braids, both can be found wearing ill-fitting clothes, both of their stories are set in a similar time period, and finally, both girls are orphans.

Granted, Ashitaka (voiced by Billy Crudup) is an important character. Even so, it is a bit disconcerting when the IMDb blurb about this movie only mentions him, and almost none of the female characters who are equally, if not more, important to the story. Princess Mononoke (voiced by Claire Danes) is the title character, but is only mentioned toward the end of the blurb. This movie is so much more than yet another “save the princess” quest!

In Pretty In Pink, Andi is a self-sufficient, seemingly self-aware teenage girl who lives in a little cottage with her single father. Andi isn’t the type of girl who goes gaga for cocky, linen suit-wearing Steff (James Spader). She’s too busy at home sewing and stitching together her latest wardrobe creations. To her fellow girl students, she’s just a classless, lanky redhead who shouldn’t dare be caught dead at a “richie” party. So, she spends her time at TRAX, a record shop she works at, and a nightclub that showcases hip new wave bands like Ringwald’s real-life fave, The Rave-Ups. Her best friends Duckie (Jon Cryer) and Iona (Annie Potts) admire and envy Andi.
What is clear is that Campion is interested in the strategies women use to survive in patriarchy. But she is not only interested in the fate of women. She is also interested in how girl-children negotiate their way in a male-dominated world. It is through Ada’s daughter as well as Ada herself that Campion explores the feminine condition in the 19th century. Her rich, multi-layered characterization of Flora is, in fact, one of the most remarkable features of The Piano. She is as interesting and compelling as the adult characters and, arguably, the most convincing. The little girl also has huge symbolic and dramatic importance. This is, of course, unusual in cinema. There are relatively few films where a girl plays such a significant, pivotal role.

Temporary Tomboys: Coming of Age in My Girl and Now and Then by Elizabeth Kiy

However, the tomboy was a prominent figure in two well-loved films of the period aimed at young girls, though both presented her as a transitional stage in development. My Girl (1991), is the story of precocious 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss (Anna Chlumsky) who grew up in a funeral parlor and is obsessed with death, while in Now and Then (1995) four childhood friends reunite as adults and remember (in flashbacks) the summer they were 12.

Basically, Brave isn’t really that brave of a film. It’s traipsing through a well-established trope that, though positive, is stagnant. Don’t get me wrong; I love all the prepubescent female power fantasy tales I’ve listed, and I’m grateful that they exist and that I could grow up with many of them. However, we can’t pretend that Brave is pushing any boundaries. It sends the message that little girls can be powerful as long as they remain little girls. The dearth of representations of postpubescent heroines who are not objectified, whose sexuality does not rule their interactions, and who are the heroes of their own stories is appalling.