Gender – Page 2 – Bitch Flicks

The Women of ‘American Ninja Warrior’ Challenge Gender Stereotypes

‘American Ninja Warrior’ may not have had any intentions of connecting to feminism necessarily, but they have created a platform for women to shine in multiple ways and to inspire other women, whether athletically or not.

This is a guest post written by Cameron Airen, who interviewed Joyce Shahboz and Michelle Warnky.

“What!? Shut the front door. She’s about to do the impossible for the second time,” shouted the hosts of American Ninja Warrior as millions of us watched 5’0”, 95lb Kacy Catanzaro become the first woman to hit a city finals course. This meant that she was the first woman to qualify for Mount Midoriyama, the finals in Las Vegas consisting of four stages. Catanzaro’s achievement was led by her being the first woman in the history of the show to beat the warped wall and finish a qualifying course. She made history that year on American Ninja Warrior, but she wasn’t the only one.

2014 of American Ninja Warrior was the year of many firsts for women. Michelle Warnky and Meagan Martin were the second and third women to make it up the warped wall and hit buzzers on their city’s qualifying course following Catanzaro. This was the first time this many women qualified for a city’s finals course in the same season.

There are five women veterans on American Ninja Warrior that particularly stand out. Catanzaro, Warnky, and Martin are three of them. Jessie Graff was the first woman to complete five obstacles and the second woman, besides Catanzaro, to qualify for the Vegas finals. Joyce Shahboz was one of the first women to compete on the American Ninja Warrior course and has been participating since season four. At 44 years old, she is also the oldest woman “to make it to Vegas and to the 5th obstacle.” One of the reasons to love American Ninja Warrior is because it represents athletes of all ages. Shahboz told me, “There are things I can do now that I couldn’t do 3-4 years ago and I’m 44 as of today!”

One of the most captivating aspects of American Ninja Warrior is that the women compete on the same platform as the men, making gender irrelevant. This appeals to Warnky, who said,

“I know many people have made comments to me about having a separate Ninja Warrior for ladies. But for myself and at least several other ladies I’ve talked to, we like that extra challenge, we like the strength that is required, and we enjoy competing with the guys.”

The hosts of American Ninja Warrior, Matt Iseman and Akbar Gbajabiamila, generally do a good job of not making a big deal of gender in relation to one’s performance on the course. During Martin’s run at the 2014 Denver finals, Gbajabiamila exclaimed, “She’s got the athleticism; she’s got the upper body strength; she’s built for American Ninja Warrior — that’s for sure!” This is a testament of how the course, with different obstacles that benefit different athletic strengths, is made for people of all genders.

By participating on American Ninja Warrior, women get to demonstrate their strength and other abilities, challenging the gender stereotypes placed upon them. There’s no doubt that the women have the strength, including upper body strength, in order to finish all of the obstacles. In fact, the upper body exercises are the women ninjas’ favorites to perform. Shahboz pointed out,

“The upper body challenges are appealing to us. In Japan, the Women of Ninja Warrior course isn’t as upper body intensive, and we all felt that was our forte and wanted more of the physical strength challenge instead of the balance challenges.”

On a tougher course with new obstacles, Jessie Graff was the first athlete to get the farthest on the 2015 Venice finals course. Even though she didn’t complete the course, she came close, making it to the second to last obstacle, giving it her best fight. Only the top 15 qualify for Vegas and she finished in sixth. Graff ended up being the woman who made it the farthest in a city finals course across the nation.

There is a huge gender disparity on American Ninja Warrior and that needs to change if we want to see women succeed more than they already do on the show. If there were as many women on the show as there are men, then there would be a greater chance of women making if farther. No woman has made it up the warped wall and hit the buzzer on stage one in Vegas yet in the history of the show. Shahboz believes it’s because of numbers: “We just haven’t had enough of us trying it out or training at the necessary level until now.” In season four, there were four women, Shahboz included, and 96 men competing in stage one in the Vegas finals. Warnky believes that the biggest challenge women face on stage one in Vegas is speed:

“I know Jessie Graff and I had many conversations and really wanted to beat it and knew we both had the ability to. Time plays a big factor in Vegas. In the regional rounds, most of us women play it pretty safe with time and don’t rush ourselves, whereas in Vegas, women are not able to stall much at all and need to go quickly through the obstacles and in-between the obstacles. Also, any time a girl does pretty well, history can be made, so I think we tend to focus on the safer and surer ways to do things, which isn’t really possible in stage 1. But I do think I have the ability to complete it, as do several other girls, we just didn’t make it happen the day it counted. Hopefully we’ll make that change soon!”

Even though the numbers are still low, more women competed in 2015 than any other year. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, executive producer of American Ninja Warrior, Kent Weed, said that the producers want more women competing and doing well, and that we will see more women compete as the show progresses. He doesn’t believe that succeeding at the obstacles has to do with gender and is confident that we will see our first woman to complete stage one in Vegas next year in 2016. Warnky expressed, “Hopefully, the show has encouraged other women to push their limits.” The more women see other women competing on the show, the more they will be inspired to train for it and get accepted.

“Could a woman ever win American Ninja Warrior?” an E! Online interviewer asked Isaac Caldiero after he became the first ever winner of American Ninja Warrior. Without hesitation, Caldiero responded, “Definitely. My girlfriend, Laura, could win it!” Even asking the question shows how far we have come in changing sexist beliefs and attitudes about women’s abilities. When Shahboz competed in season four, she was known for going farther than her husband. She said,

“People who didn’t know me or him would occasionally comment to him about getting beat by his wife. People would ask me, ‘How’d your husband take it?’ It’s still amazing to me that people still have the notion that ‘getting beat by a girl’ is an issue.”

Unfortunately, it is still an issue, otherwise the question of whether a woman could win wouldn’t even have been asked. But, American Ninja Warrior plays a pivotal role in changing all of that.

One way that the show doesn’t reinforce gender distinctions, aside from having women compete on the same platform as the men, is by not referencing gender when discussing an athlete’s abilities. During Martin’s performance at the Vegas 2014 finals, Gbajabiamila said,

“I’ve had a lot of sport heroes in my life: Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson…Oh, add Meagan Martin to the list, what she did was phenomenal.”

Another way American Ninja Warrior doesn’t emphasis gender is that the athletes are all in support and cheer of each other. Shahboz pointed out that her male ninja competitors “have always been encouraging and supportive, it’s never been a guy vs. gal thing.” It’s refreshing to see a friendly community be positive and supportive of one another despite gender and background. This is definitely a rarity for competition shows on TV.

A sense of unity exists among the women of American Ninja Warrior. Even though it is a reality TV show, we don’t see unnecessary drama. It’s a show with friendly competition where the athletes support each other. This is a rarity on TV in general, especially in reality TV where women are often depicted as wanting to tear each other to shreds. It’s quite the opposite on American Ninja Warrior, making it one of those rare athletic competitions where you want everyone to do well. When one ninja falls, the other is sad that her fellow competitor did not make it. The women even travel to other cities to cheer each other on.

This solidarity is powerful and creates a positive influence for women and feminism. We need to see more of it onscreen. American Ninja Warrior may not have had any intentions of connecting to feminism necessarily, but they have created a platform for women to shine in multiple ways and to inspire other women, whether athletically or not. Athletics is often viewed as a metaphor for the rest of our lives. What one learns in being able to conquer a physical obstacle can translate to facing obstacles in other aspects of life. The women on American Ninja Warrior are powerful examples of women coming into and owning their own power, whatever that may look like.

Check out a more in depth interview I did with Joyce Shahboz and Michelle Warnky.

Cameron Airen is a queer feminist with a M.A. in Anthropology and Social Change. She loves to dissect and write about women and gender in film/TV. Cameron is also passionate about vegan cooking and resides in Berkeley, Calif.

Rape, Consent and Race in Marvel’s ‘Jessica Jones’

Marvel’s ‘Jessica Jones’ is the latest, best example of white feminist fiction: excellent on sexism, terrible on racism.

This guest post is written by Cate Young and originally appeared at her site BattyMamzelle. It is cross-posted with permission.

Trigger warning for discussion of rape and rape culture.

Marvel’s Jessica Jones is the latest, best example of white feminist fiction: excellent on sexism, terrible on racism. There are a lot of great things about this series that speak directly to the ills that women face on a daily basis. Kilgrave, the central villain, is chillingly terrifying, specifically because the only difference between him and your garden variety abuser is his total power to enact his will. The examination of male entitlement in ways both large and small (by contrasting Kilgrave and Simpson for example) are excellent and poignant. But as I watched the 13 episode first season, I was struck by how callously black people’s lives were treated on the show, rendered into convenient plot devices in service of the white female protagonist’s character development. As a black woman viewing the show, it was easy to see that the active pursuit of liberation from abuse was not a struggle that this show believes includes me (an ongoing struggle for Marvel). Ironically, the best parts of the show are its treatment with its villain, while the worst are its treatments with its female anti-heroine.

While I do have several critiques of the show, there were a number of things that I thought were handled exceptionally well. Firstly, this is a show driven by women about the fears and terrors that women must navigate in the world shrunk down to a micro-level, enabling us an intimate look at the various levels of abuse women routinely endure. The contrast between Kilgrave and Simpson is genius, as it helps demonstrate the full scale of abuse that men knowingly and unknowingly enact on the women around them. The two men are flip-sides of the same coin. While Kilgrave simply takes what he feels he is entitled to by means of his powers of enhanced persuasion, Simpson initially takes a less forceful but no less sinister approach, exemplified in his treatment of Trish after he realizes that Kilgrave has compelled him to murder her. As Stephanie Yang writes in a Bitch Magazine review:

The warning signs are there early on. Under Kilgrave’s control, Simpson assaults Trish inside her own apartment. Once Kilgrave’s control wears off, he’s wracked with guilt and comes back to apologize. The problem is that Trish doesn’t want Simpson’s apology; she wants him to just leave. Trish doesn’t want to be reminded that she was attacked in her own home, or feel trapped by her own high-end security system while her attacker lingers outside. But Simpson is insistent, sitting in her hallway and talking to her through the intercom. Simpson makes his apology about his needs and his absolution, not about Trish’s needs, safety or mental health. It’s entirely understandable, but it’s still wrong.

Simpson and Kilgrave certainly have different motivation for their destructive actions. But as Jessica points out, intent doesn’t matter. Their actions and consequences are what matter. That’s an important distinction that needs to be made at a time when courts and media alike dismiss many real-life cases of abuse because the abuser “couldn’t know” what they were doing was wrong. Violence is a symptom of a culture that indulges bad behavior as being inherently and unavoidably part of masculinity, or even a romantic expression of desire and protectiveness.

I would go a step further and name Simpson’s insistent apologies to Trish as outright abusive on their face, specifically because they prioritize his need for absolution over her need to heal. Trish is the victim in the situation, and yet Simpson manages to find a way to center himself in the story of this trauma. As with Kilgrave and Jessica, Simpson’s abuse is rooted not in a cartoonish hatred of women as we are often led to believe, but rather in prioritizing his own will and desires over Trish’s.

The show’s exploration of rape and consent is also spot-on. Through interaction with Kilgrave’s superhuman abilities, Jessica Jones is able to make plain text of the subtext of rape culture. In one episode, Jessica makes plain that what Kilgrave did to her was rape. She says the word and invokes it over and over, explaining to him that by revoking her ability to consent, he violated her in a profound way that he can never make up for, nullifying any “kind treatment” during that time. For Jessica (and many other victims of sexual abuse) she was raped not only when Kilgrave forced sexual consent by rendering her suggestible, but also by forcing her to display trust and affection for him against her will. We see this idea replicated when Hope demands that she be allowed to abort Kilgrave’s fetus, because “every moment it’s in me is like he’s raping me all over again.”

The other great thing about Jessica Jones is that it is a show ostensibly about rape, that never depicts a rape. It can be argued that the entire engine of the show is powered by the actions of a serial rapist with many, many victims in his wake, and yet the show never feels the need to indulge in crude depictions of trauma to demonstrate how horrifying rape is. Instead, we spend extensive time examining the fallout; following Jessica and Hope as they try to cope with being violated on such a profound level, grapple with their own feelings of guilt and culpability and make it to the other side with their faculties intact. One of the things that made Kilgrave so scary in the initial episodes was the way the memory of him haunted Jessica, always lingering at the edge of her thoughts, out of sight, but never out of mind. It masterfully depicted the way that rape trauma is a burden that doesn’t go away once the act itself is over. In a year that’s been replete with depictions of rape in television, it was refreshing to see a show tackle the true emotional weight of sexual assault without using the violation itself to titillate.

On the other hand, the treatment of people of colour in Jessica Jones is often anti-intersectional and openly anti-black. Vulture‘s year end “Best of Television” list cites the show as demonstrating “a racially diverse cast, heavy on women,” a construction that belies that for many people, diversity means “add black men and stir.” To me, it is borderline disrespectful to call the show racially diverse when the only significant, named woman of colour character is dead before the narrative begins and never speaks a word, while the black male characters are all subjected to incredible violence in service of the white female protagonist. This force frames feminist representation as the representation of white women and yet again, erases women of colour from our popular narratives.

With Reva’s character, this is especially glaring. Her death at Jessica’s hands is essentially the inciting incident of the story; the act that allows Jessica to free herself from Kilgrave’s control. Reva is fridged to motivate Jessica’s escape and eventual confrontation with Kilgrave. As Shaadi Devereaux writes in Model View Culture:

[…] One has to wonder what metaphor is offered, that she has to kill a Black woman in order to finally obtain that freedom. She must literally stop Reva Connors’ heart with a single blow in order to experience her moment of awakening, enabling her to walk away from a cis-heterosexual white male abuser. It brings to mind how white women liberate themselves from unpaid domestic labor by exploiting Black/Latina/Indigenous women, often heal their own sexual trauma by performing activism that harms WoC, and how the white women’s dollar still compares to that of WoC. Like Jessica’s liberation is only possible through the violence against Reva, we see sharp parallels with how liberatory white womanhood often interplays with the lives of WoC. Were the writers consciously aware of these parallels, or was it just the same script playing out in their heads?

It’s disappointing that the show, knowingly or not, replicates the same cycles of abuse that routinely play out within the feminist movement, by positioning violence against black women as the justified cost of white women’s liberation. Jessica eventually enacts the same cycle of abuse against Luke Cage, her main love interest. Shaadi notes:

After killing Reva, Jessica goes on to stalk Reva’s husband, Luke Cage, in a compulsive and boundary-violating cycle of guilt. She finally sleeps with him…without disclosing how she was implicated in Reva’s death. She both withholds and actively obstructs him from finding out information about his own life, so that she can continue to get what she needs intimately from him. In dealing with her own demons, Jessica violates an invulnerable Black man and lays him a blow that no other character in their universe has the power to. Was this another nod to a complex understanding of gender, race and power, or another trope surfacing in insidious ways?

The issue here is that the show does not give any indication as to whether this is commentary or trope, so we are forced to assume the latter, interpreting the text as presented to us. Jessica makes a habit of using the black men around her, in service to her own ends treating them as interchangeable and disposable, a glaring and problematic oversight given the current political climate, and the historical context of black men being subjected to undue violence for the protection of white women. Jessica’s pursuit of Luke despite her knowledge of her involvement in what we are led to believe in the most painful event of his life replicates the same disregard for his feelings that we saw Simpson demonstrate with Trish. To Jessica, her own need to be in Luke’s orbit because of her overwhelming guilt and self-loathing, supersede his right to be fully informed about the circumstances of his wife’s death, and as Tom and Lorenzo astutely write in their review:

[…] Like it or not, she has the capacity to be a bit hypocritical about Kilgrave’s abilities choosing to think that there’s actually a right way to take people’s control away from them.

And Jessica very literally takes Luke’s control away by not disclosing her involvement in Reva’s death. She takes away his ability to choose not to be with the person who murdered his wife. Later, his choice to forgive is later revoked by Kilgrave, as he is forced to reconcile with her under Kilgrave’s control. Again, the invulnerable black man’s pain is not respected, but rather toyed with and manipulated by the narrative to serve the needs of white characters. As Shaadi again points out, the pattern becomes more uncomfortable and glaring as the series continues:

When her neighbor shares how Black people are more vulnerable to others’ perceptions, it invokes not sympathy but an idea of how she can use it for her own ends. The result is several scenes where she pushes Black men into people to create a scene of chaos, using the opportunity to go unseen as she breaks the law. Instead of challenging oppressive systems directly, she uses them to get what she wants and to center her own survival. We see that she has some guilt about it, but sis willing to do it for her survival and the survival of other white characters.

These scenes demonstrate that as people marginalized along a spectrum, we often leverage violence against others for our own survival, sometimes with full awareness. But is awareness enough? Or as long as power remains unchallenged, will we always be lured by self-priority, the hierarchy of own safety and access? Our hero is willing to take on the mindcontrol of Kilgrave, but not those dangers most affecting the two most important men in her life – both Black. She intimately understands that no one will believe her, but capitalizes on the hierarchy of who has enough humanity to be believed – against other marginalized identities. She can finally walk away from the mind of her abuser, but the gravitational pull of racism is still too much.

As a black woman, I’m left to wonder, is Jessica worse than your garden variety racist for acknowledging systems of oppression only to exploit them? And on a real world level, why is this behaviour heralded by viewers as feminist when it actively takes advantage of people that the feminist movement is meant to protect?

My last issue is less a problem with this show specifically and more a general trope in fiction. I expect that very little can be done about this considering the source material, but truly abhor narratives in which a black person’s “power” is that they cannot feel pain or be hurt. It is a direct callback to very pervasive superhumanization bias and stereotypes that still exist and are perpetuated today. As I have written before about this characterization, it feeds into the idea that violence against black people is not traumatic or dangerous as they can withstand the pain, and that this ability positions them as protectors of white characters who often also do them harm. It explains why young black boys are coded by white people as much older than they are, or why they think black people feel less pain. With Luke, we see this reflected in Luke’s fight scenes as person after person escalates the violence against him to no effect. He is easily able to trounce several men at once. Earlier, we also see him take a circle saw to his abdomen in order to demonstrate his power to Jessica. Later still, we see doctors poke and prod him with needles and other penetrating devices ostensibly to save him, but the scenes only reinforce what we have already been told; nothing can hurt him, and so violence against him is justified.

In the end, I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the show. The way Jessica Jones deals with consent resonated with me on a deep level, but it also made me question why the show didn’t identify with me as a black woman, when I so easily identified with it. Hopefully in the next season we will see a more intersectional approach to the struggles that women face that treats its black characters with the same care that it affords the white women in the cast.

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.

‘Supergirl’ Episode 1.2, “Stronger Together”: Boozing with RBG and Saving Snakes

Overall, the show remains a fairly entertaining hour, with a refreshing take on femininity and power. In 2015, a superhero show with a likeable female lead and assorted other strong women characters and a little girl who loves her pet snake should not really be groundbreaking, but the sad fact is, it is, and while it has its flaws, I’m still grateful that it exists.

Supergirl is a hit! Despite a lot of whining from male comic book geeks and MRA types about its SJW attitude, the show had great ratings for its premiere, and pretty decent reviews as well, overall.

This week, the DEO investigated a chemical robbery that turned out to be a feeding, as a Hellgrammite (Justice Leak), one of the aliens that Kara/Supergirl (Melissa Benoist) accidentally brought with her when she passed through the Phantom Zone. It turns out the Hellgrammite eats DDT like it’s going out of style (which it has), which annoys supervillain Astra (Laura Benanti), who wants her alien underlings to keep a low profile on Earth until her plan is in motion. Astra decides to use him as bait to lure her niece Kara to her doom. Kara has other plans.

In fact, after causing an embarrassing oil spill while trying to keep a tanker from exploding, and getting her ass kicked by her sister Alex (Chyler Leigh) in a kryptonite-infused DEO fight room, Kara decides to take a step back and handle lower-level disasters like armed robberies and pets in trees (a little girl’s snake named Fluffy, to be precise). So when the Hellgrammite strikes, the DEO are the ones who go after him, and when Supergirl doesn’t show, he decides to bring Alex to Astra, hoping it will get the alien queen off his back.

Naturally, Kara steps up to rescue her sister. She’s shocked to run into her aunt, whom she assumed died on Krypton, because mom never told her that Aunt Astra was a baddie, and was sent to the Phantom Zone. Alex dispatches the Hellgrammite pretty easily, but things look dicier for Kara until DEO chief Hank Henshaw (David Harewood) shows up with a kryptonite knife and pokes Astra pretty good. Sure, Hank saves the day this time, but a glimpse of him at the end of the show reveals that he has scary red demon eyes. Or maybe they’re cyborg eyes? If you’re a fan of the comic book version of Superman, you might have an idea. In any case, it’s clear that Hank is not the gruff but lovable commander he appears to be.

The second episode of CBS’s Supergirl had pretty much the same strengths and weaknesses as the first. It’s full of likeable, attractive characters, and even the less likeable characters at least seem to be, well, characters.

Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart) not only eats boozy breakfasts with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she also has pretty solid ideas about how Supergirl might improve her public image, which she unwittingly reveals to Supergirl herself. She’s also a pretty terrible boss, treating Kara like a stooge, and threatening to fire James (not “Jimmy”) Olsen (Mehcad Brooks) if he doesn’t get her an exclusive interview with Supergirl. Flockhart has fun in the role, and for a superhero TV show, the character and our feelings toward her are fairly complex.

Kara’s confrontation with Aunt Astra also has a surprising emotional element to it, thanks to the strength of the two actors. While she’s mostly evil incarnate, Astra seems to feel a genuine connection to Kara. She also claims that she’s trying to save the Earth, after having let Krypton be destroyed, and aside from the fact that her plan involves wiping out humanity, one suspects she may have a point, eventually.

Kara’s pep talk to James, who despairs of ever being able to get out from under the shadow of superheroes, is fairly affecting, too. The writing is pretty standard stuff, but again, the actors are strong enough to put it across with some genuine emotion. And Supergirl’s inclusive approach to fighting for good has a less fascistic bent to it that that lone wolf Superman’s.

On the negative side, the show’s plotting is contrived. The Hellgrammite just happens to grab Alex, and he gets away with it far too easily. Hank is sharp enough to bring a kryptonite knife to face Astra, but for their attempted capture of the superpowered Hellgrammite, the DEO only brings standard handguns. The special effects are far too cartoony, probably partly due to budget limitations, and the action is mostly indifferently choreographed and shot. That heat vision battle between Supergirl and Astra was an embarrassment. The fight between Alex and Kara was an exception, in that at least it didn’t feature characters transforming into animated blobs to fly across the room at each other.

Recommended Reading

Supergirl Premiere: The Enemy of My Enemy Is Super

Call For Writers: Masculinity

Our theme week for June 2015 will be Masculinity.

Masculinity is a pervasive concept in our culture, setting the tone for our entertainment, our politics, and our interpersonal lives. This is because masculinity itself traditionally belongs to men who are, to quote blogger Twisty Faster of I Blame the Patriarchy, “the default human.” Femininity is often defined in contrast to masculinity, as if the two modes were binary. The traits typically ascribed to masculinity (physical strength, aggressiveness, rational thinking, and stoicism) are then seen as absent from the feminine and opposite of the traits typically ascribed to femininity (nurturing, emotional, physically weak, and irrational).

Some examples of different permutations of masculinity include the chivalrous, but monosyllabic type like Luke from Gilmore Girls, the sexually potent, brimming with physical prowess action hero types like The Rock or Vin Diesel from all The Fast and the Furious films, or the destructive hypermasculine types depicted in the dystopian fossil fuels focused Mad Max: Fury Road. In many ways, the toxic embodiment of masculinity is the strong-arm of patriarchy.

While masculinity can often be associated with power and male privilege, the expectations associated with masculinity can be limiting and oppressive just as any prescribed gender role can be oppressive. We sometimes see this in narratives involving gay and/or sensitive men (The Karate Kid) who don’t “measure up” to the expectations of masculinity. However, with the greater visibility of genderqueerness and as more people begin to see gender on a spectrum, the embodiment of masculinity is becoming similarly malleable and open to interpretation (Pelo Malo, Orange is the New Black, etc).

Feel free to use the examples below to inspire your writing on this subject, or choose your own source material.

We’d like to avoid as much overlap as possible for this theme, so get your proposals in early if you know which film you’d like to write about. We accept both original pieces and cross-posts, and we respond to queries within a week.

Most of our pieces are between 1,000 and 2,000 words, and include links and images. Please send your piece as a Microsoft Word document to btchflcks[at]gmail[dot]com, including links to all images, and include a 2- to 3-sentence bio.

If you have written for us before, please indicate that in your proposal, and if not, send a writing sample if possible.

Please be familiar with our publication and look over recent and popular posts to get an idea of Bitch Flicks’ style and purpose. We encourage writers to use our search function to see if your topic has been written about before, and link when appropriate (hyperlinks to sources are welcome, as well).

The final due date for these submissions is Friday, June 19 by midnight.

The Killing

Pelo Malo

Gilmore Girls

The Karate Kid

Outlander

Mission Impossible

Terminator

Beautiful Boxer

Hannibal

Ghosts of Mars

Queer As Folk

Psycho

Boys Don’t Cry

Big Trouble in Little China

Raiders of the Lost Ark

The Fast and the Furious

Mad Max: Fury Road

Death Wish

Orange is the New Black

Game of Thrones

The Shipping News

Life, Death, and Cinema in ‘Benny Loves Killing’

There are plenty of movies about making a movie, to the point where it’s arguably a little passé, and ‘Benny Loves Killing’ is careful not to ever be heavy-handed or obnoxious in its extra layer, addressing it obliquely – by which I absolutely don’t mean obscure or pretentious, but subtle and thought-provoking. This is one of those films where the more you think about it the better it gets.

Written by Max Thornton.

“Why horror?”

“Because I think it’s the most flexible genre…the most malleable genre. You are able to experiment and discuss the text without interfering with the object itself.”

So say Benny and her professor in the first set of dialogue in Ben Woodiwiss’s quietly excellent indie feature Benny Loves Killing, setting the scene for the experimentation and discussion to come. Although it has won at least one award for “Best Horror Film,” Benny Loves Killing isn’t really a horror film as such. Or rather it is, to use Benny’s own words, “a meta-horror film. A horror film about horror film. More importantly, a horror film about cinema.” I think one could argue that, whether or not it’s explicitly meta (and there’s plenty of superb horror that is, from Peeping Tom to Cabin in the Woods), horror is always, to some extent, about cinema. As far back as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, horror films have been self-consciously Jungian, awash with dreamscapes and archetypes, exploiting the visual and sonic immediacy of the medium to inhabit and unsettle the viewer’s psyche.

Notice how her eyes are obscured. — Notice how, in this most visual of media, her eyes are obscured.

But Benny Loves Killing is a meta-meta-horror film, a film about somebody making a film about film. Benny is a French film student in the UK making a horror film for a class, but we don’t actually see very much of her film. There are plenty of movies about making a movie, to the point where it’s arguably a little passé, and Benny Loves Killing is careful not to ever be heavy-handed or obnoxious in its extra layer, addressing it obliquely.

“Oblique” is a good word for most of this film’s approach – by which I absolutely don’t mean obscure or pretentious, but subtle and thought-provoking. This is one of those films where the more you think about it the better it gets. It’s not quite psychological horror, but the narrative does largely follow Benny’s tenuous state: bumming from one friend to another, refusing to take a shower, stealing from those around her, doing way too many drugs, arguing with her mother, having some fantastically creepy nightmares. The direction of the film is gorgeously stylish and evocative, with uses of chiaroscuro and splashes of red that probably deserve scene-by-scene analysis.

There are a few conversations where the characters discuss the film they are making, but the meta-commentary never gets inelegant. In one scene, Benny and her colleague Alex argue about the workings of point-of-view shots: “You sympathize with who you’re looking at, not with the eyes you’re looking through,” Benny insists, invoking the classic killer’s-viewpoint horror shot. If up to this point in the film you had overlooked the subtleties of how point of view is used, from here on you would surely notice how often the camera stays on Benny, with her interlocutor barely in frame – especially when these are men, especially men with power (the professor, the board that controls Benny’s funding, a creeper at a party). The effect is a claustrophobically intense focus on Benny, emphasizing her overwhelming and precarious mental state, but there’s also a complex and nuanced commentary here about gender in cinema.

"You sympathize with who you're looking at" — “You sympathize with who you’re looking at”

The most explicit discussion of gender and cinema occurs in the scene where Benny and Alex are screen-testing an actress who admits that their names had led her to expect two men, and then expresses her wariness of the widespread misogyny in the horror genre. Like any filmmaker who cannot step into the text of the film without thereby becoming a part of it, Benny allows the actress to speak without defending herself. There is no great rush to defend the feminist credentials of horror in general or of Benny’s film in particular, simply the opening of a conversation: is the camera necessarily a male gaze, even when wielded by a woman? Is a camera-on-camera the male gaze doubled or reversed or negated? How do the layers of agency and power operate in a male filmmaker’s film about a female filmmaker’s film?

Benny is surely to some degree an avatar for writer/director Ben Woodiwiss, and the different wigs she dons can be seen as a literalization of the different “hats” an independent filmmaker perhaps inevitable wears, as well as the multiplicity of her relationship to the camera eye. While Benny is not unsympathetic, she is certainly no wish-fulfillment self-insert, either in her personal or her professional life. Her cinematic ambitions are grandiose, but perhaps all talk: she constantly says she’s trying to do something innovative, to make a different kind of film, but nothing we see about the film-within-the-film suggests that it’s anything other than a conventional horror film, with its buckets of fake blood and negotiations with actresses about topless scenes. To what extent, the film seems to be asking, can the filmmaker have mastery over her film and its tropes? Or do film and tropes have mastery over the filmmaker?

The film couldn't work without Pauline Cousty's excellent performance as Benny. — The film couldn’t work without Pauline Cousty’s excellent performance as Benny.

The question is deepened by the mother/child imagery throughout the film. Benny’s fraught relationship with her mother doesn’t precisely parallel her relationship with her film, but it echoes it: despite, or perhaps at the root of, their conflicts, Benny comes from her mother, is shaped by her, inherits her flaws and characteristics. A creative work is its maker’s baby, and the mother gives the baby life but also, in the very life itself, life’s horizon of death, natality and mortality intertwined. The unleashing of the creative work into the world marks the author’s death, but for the auteur, it is also the death of her baby through her loss of control over it, birthed and killed at once in the cutting of the umbilical cord.

If Ben(ny) indeed loves killing, (s)he invites us, with a small smile and a gaze directly into the camera, to confront the lens and its powers of life and death: who, exactly, is being killed? And who, exactly, is doing the killing?

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and tweets at @RainicornMax.

The Layered Danish Pastry Called ‘Borgen’

This is a guest post by Nandini Rathi.

A subtitled Danish drama about Danish coalition politics sounds rather elitist (if not absurdly boring) and one that, at best, would appeal to a niche audience. However headlines such as “Stop what you are doing and go watch Borgen,” “Why Danish Political drama Borgen is Everything” and “Why the World fell for Borgen” from sources ranging from The Telegraph to the Buzzfeed may make you reconsider that initial assumption. Borgen, a one-hour series about a charismatic politician coming to power as the first woman Prime Minister of Denmark, defies expectations. Now internationally famous, the series has earned precious acclaim from critics and fans alike for its riveting machiavellian politics and strong female characters. The plot skillfully weaves together a fictionalized battlefield of parliamentary politics and journalistic media, without neglecting the exploration of its impact in the characters’ personal lives. Borgen anticipated a number of events — most notably, the election of Denmark’s actual first female Prime Minister (Helle Thorning-Schmidt), which occurred while the show was in its second season.

Borgen is better for a brilliant group of actors cast well for its complex characters. The main character is Birgitte Nyborg (played by Sidse Babett Knudsen), a first-rate politician in her early 40s and the leader of the Moderates, who is unexpectedly elected the Prime Minister. In a parallel story, we meet the 29-year-old Katrine Fonsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen) who is a gifted political journalist dedicated to her work. In addition to featuring strong and compelling female characters, the series dramatizes some of the more universal debates in progress about gender and leadership, for instance, how women are evaluated in roles such as heads of state which have long been men’s exclusive domains.

For an international audience, Borgen’s political drama is edgy and exotic. Produced in the land of relative gender-egalitarianism and environmental consciousness, Borgen’s international charm lies in its progressive difference; it weaves together the qualities of a successful show (a unique, clever plotline and talented actors) with the best of Scandinavian achievements, that is, progressive social and environmental norms.

When it comes to the classic, age-old, question of whether a woman can have both a family and a top-notch career or in other words, can she “have it all,” Borgen offers no easy solutions. Without denying the question’s specific application to women, it also forces the viewer to consider if anyone (in Nyborg’s position – even a man) balancing private life with difficult public responsibilities can have everything. As Vicky Frost states in her article for The Guardian, Borgen’s strength lies in resisting an oversimplification of questions of gender and feminism and addressing them without making them the apparent focus of the show.

Borgen dramatizes the tension between the private and public lives of highly successful individuals, especially that of active, busy politicians. From the very outset, Birgitte Nyborg’s family and colleagues acknowledge her as extremely smart and charismatic, and initially, as a Moderate not expecting much from the parliamentary elections, her political idealism and time for family are well-preserved. In that vein, without expectations and hesitations, she gives an honest, impassioned speech about the difference between being a politician skilled at power play and doing what’s best for the people. The speech is followed by unexpected events that put Nyborg in the position to lead the government. Once she becomes the PM, she is slowly forced to make many compromises with her ideals and sacrifice her family-time in order to continue being in power.

Nyborg’s family life is a fascinating commentary on the social place and perception of working mothers. In a remarkable scene from the first episode, Birgitte’s husband, Phillip, recounts to her that while watching her debate on TV, their little son had asked him if he would grow up to be as smart as his mother. Initially, what is described by Janet Manley on The Frisky as “the most feminist marriage on TV,” drastically changes in course of the season. Phillip, who is initially highly supportive of Birgitte becoming the PM and tackles the lion’s share of child rearing and housework, eventually begins to feel neglected and emasculated as Birgitte becomes increasingly unavailable (emotionally and sexually) and his own job becomes less satisfying. At multiple occasions, Borgen draws the attention of the viewer to the fact that even in societies with greater gender equity like Denmark, neglect of family life by a busy wife is likely to be unpalatable to her husband even though the reverse expectation has long been made from wives.

Phillip encourages Birgitte when she is unsure if she wants to be the PM

Borgen begins with painting an almost-fantasy: a truly gender-equal society where men and women share childcare, women hold the same positions of power in politics and media as men, and everyone achieves the enviable work-life balance. However as the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that in a fundamentally patriarchal society, such feminist fantasies are not truly tenable. However, in spite of hardships, it is heartening to watch smart, driven and flawed characters like Birgitte and Katrine climb the ladder of professional excellence and not get personally punished for being ambitious.

Borgen’s Reception

As an instant watercooler hit in the UK and within the limited, cult following of the US, Borgen has been a darling of critics and fans alike. It has spurred all kinds of debate about progressive gender politics due to its portrayal of nuanced female characters that don’t appear too often on the American TV landscape. Birgitte Nyborg is not super-skinny, but a voluptuous woman in her forties. In Episode 3 of the first season, Katrine Fonsmark’s conflict about aborting or keeping the child from her affair with a married, dead man and her final decision to abort is dramatized with equanimity. Abortion as an issue is not a source of moral ambiguity in Borgen. Katrine gets an ultrasound to confirm her pregnancy and hides it from her employer, because she’s conflicted about being pregnant, and not because she’s worried that she will be fired. Moreover, her mother, who is a practicing Catholic, advises Katrine to avoid keeping the child for the wrong reasons — in grief of the child’s dead father. Katrine is surprised and asks her mother what God would say to that, to which her mother simply responds that God has nothing to do with this. Hope Perlman from Psychology Today, is most impressed that Katrine in Denmark “can get an abortion safely, legally, and with excellent anesthesia, apparently, in a clean and well-run health facility, on national television.”

For Perlman, the calm portrayal of Katrine’s positive experience in Borgen is a sign that Denmark is well ahead of the US, not only in terms of abortion and birth control, but also in equal pay, paid family leave and quality childcare. Nuanced discussions on the subject of abortion are still a rare event on network television shows in the US (Friday Night Lights and Grey’s Anatomy are two notable exceptions), according to Sarah, a columnist for Abortion Gang. Even on Girls, the HBO show, a legal and safe abortion almost (but not quite) took place.

Politically speaking

The aesthetic of Borgen’s sets is spare, and the color palette favors faded tones. It manifests the relatively discreet and toned-down facet of Danish politics as portrayed in Borgen. Birgitte Nyborg is attended with none of the ceremony of the U.S. President. She lives in a comfortable, yet modest family house in Copenhagen, frequently bicycles to work, takes a taxi to the Parliament on the election night and travels on diplomatic missions abroad with just a few aides. The media industry as portrayed in Borgen is similarly stripped down. The interviews often take place around a simple metal table and the news presentation is quite straightforward.

Even watching a drama about the multi-party coalition politics of the Danish Parliament is a breath of fresh air compared to the limitations of a two-party model of the US. In this regard, Borgen has even been commented upon by political scientists. Writing for the Washington Post, U. Connecticut political scientist Stephen Dyson states that “Borgen … is a revitalizing antidote to the ennui of a stymied President Obama and the frustrations of our polarized gridlock politics.” The Danish political system usually produces coalition governments and the TV series reflects this by focusing on the struggle between the “Labor” and the “Liberal” (i.e. like the UK Conservatives) which usually need the support of one or more of the “Moderates,” Greens or smaller parties further to the left or right. For many American audiences, watching this level of collaboration and compromise between the so-called enemy factions and simply having a Green party is an impressive feat in itself. Speaking more generally, Borgen manages to humanize politicians. It is remarkable to watch Nyborg’s earnest and unconflicted apology to the leader of the Right Wing, for unwittingly reminding him of his daughter’s tragic death in the middle of their heated battle over immigration policy.

Critics and “Quality TV”

Many American and British critics have praised Borgen and other Nordic shows for their fearlessness in showing the darker side of characters, unlike American network shows which usually avoid experimenting with the general likeability of their main characters. Borgen can be compared to HBO shows which can afford to experiment with genre-mixing and “edgier” programming due to their independence from commercials and the subsequent concern for show ratings. On one hand, HBO markets itself as an exclusive club for the “risk-loving,” lucrative demographics using the leverage of “original programming” which is more likely to challenge social taboos (compared to its network counterpart). On the other hand, in Denmark (and Scandinavia), shows with themes like in Borgen are featured on national, publicly funded television which is the virtual equivalent of network TV in America in its accessibility to all.

Another thing that makes Borgen a quality drama in the US is its uber-limited legal availability. One may have to spend up to $50 to gain access to one season of Borgen on DVD. Within Denmark, Borgen is probably liked as a successful political drama, comparable to the likes of shows like The West Wing in the US. However, internationally, the show acquires an especially progressive tone due to the surprisingly huge differences between social realities (for e.g. in prevailing gender equity) of two Western, developed nations. The issues that are mobilized with nuance on the national TV of a country therefore tend to be indicative of what is normative within that society.

In its content, Borgen can be seen as a superior example of collaborative, global television. Borgen’s creator, Adam Price, was inspired by his favorite show, The West Wing, as he worked on creating a political drama of his own. In her interviews with Borgen’s writers, Eva Redvall, a Media and Communications scholar at University of Copenhagen, found that the writers took inspiration from many successful shows in the international domain, rather than any Danish or European series. This focus on international series is a sign of how the writers are inspired by quality product from abroad and bring aspects of their favorite series into the national domain.

What is branded as edgy within one society can be devoid of such connotations in other places. The critical consumption of International shows like Borgen therefore reveals the shifting and relative gauge of quality in “Quality TV.”

Nandini Rathi is a recent graduate from Whitman College (Walla Walla, Washington) in Film & Media Studies and Politics. She loves traveling, pop culture, photography and adventures. She wants to be immersed in filmmaking, journalism, writing and nonprofit work to ultimately be able to contribute her bit toward making the world a better place.

The Gaze of Objectification: Race, Gender, and Privilege in ‘Belle’

What does it mean in a young woman’s life to be constantly stared at and treated as “the Other”? ‘Belle,’ directed by Amma Asante and written by Misan Sagay, has a lush, gorgeous look from the costumes to the landscape, and throughout this new film we, too, are invited to “look,” and to understand that “the dominant white male gaze” is related to power in 18th-century England. An actual 1779 portrait currently hanging in Scone Palace, Scotland, credited to artist Johann Zoffany, is at the heart of the complex ‘Belle,’ as is the issue of race.

Movie poster for Belle — Movie poster for *Belle*

This guest post by Laura Shamas, PhD, previously appeared at Huffington Post and is cross-posted with permission.

What does it mean in a young woman’s life to be constantly stared at and treated as “the Other”? Belle, directed by Amma Asante and written by Misan Sagay, has a lush, gorgeous look from the costumes to the landscape, and throughout this new film we, too, are invited to “look,” and to understand that “the dominant white male gaze” is related to power in 18th-century England. An actual 1779 portrait currently hanging in Scone Palace, Scotland, credited to artist Johann Zoffany, is at the heart of the complex Belle, as is the issue of race.

The film is based on the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle (poignantly played by Mugu Mbatha-Raw), the illegitimate mixed race child of Captain Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode) and a woman named Maria Belle; her parents met on a Spanish slave ship. Dido’s mother dies before the story begins. The opening images of the film depict a child in a cloak in the shadows, a carriage ride on a rough road in England in the 1700’s, and then, the emergence of Captain Sir John Lindsay, who’s come to claim Belle as his daughter. But he’s unable to raise her, as he must sail away with the Royal Navy. He brings Dido to Kenwood House in Hampstead, the home of his aristocratic uncle, Lord Mansfield (sensitively portrayed by Tom Wilkinson), who is the Lord Chief Justice of England. He leaves Dido in the care of the Mansfields, but before Lindsay departs, he assures the girl that she is loved.

The pastoral Mansfield estate already has a young blonde charge on the premises: Lady Elizabeth Murray (Sarah Gadon plays the older Elizabeth), whose own father abandoned her while he’s moved on to Europe. The young Elizabeth and Dido become inseparable, and as “cousin-sisters” grow up doing everything together: frolicking in the grass, sharing a bedroom, studying music, letters, French, and eventually, the proper mores of society as taught by their watchful aunts, Lady Mansfield (Emily Watson) and Lady Mary Murray (Penelope Wilton). The Mansfields themselves are childless, and truly love their great-nieces. The two girls are raised on relatively equal footing in the home, with some notable exceptions. For example, when visitors come, Dido is not allowed to dine with them, due to being born out of wedlock. She is, however, able to meet and greet guests after dinner in the parlor.

The news of Captain Lindsay’s eventual death is delivered by letter; Dido becomes an heiress, afforded an sizable annuity, and therefore, is set financially for life; this is in direct contrast to Elizabeth, who has no dowry and must marry well, much as in a Jane Austen novel, in order to maintain the standards of her upbringing and lineage.

When male visitors do eventually arrive for dinner at Kenwood House, such as potential suitors James Ashford (Tom Felton) and his brother Oliver (James Norton), they stare and whisper in asides, sizing up “the mulatto”; director Asante aptly depicts the 18th-century concept of women as objects here. In a later carriage scene, Elizabeth directly expresses to Dido that choices facing them, as women, are depressingly limited; they are unable to work, and a good marriage seems to be their only hope for the future.

The motif of “looking” is emphasized further in other sequences in the film. There’s a very touching scene of Dido staring at herself in the mirror, and clawing, in agony, at her own skin, trying to come to terms with her own identity.

But when a painter is commissioned for a family portrait of the two girls, there are several separate shots of Dido holding a pose, gazed upon by not only the painter, but surreptitiously spied upon by another potential suitor, the budding abolitionist John Davinier (Sam Reid).

The film points to the multiple meanings of “gazing” at Dido: yes, due to her remarkable female beauty, as in the title, but also because she is “the Other” in 18th-century British society: aristocratic, educated, and biracial. In one scene, this is especially highlighted. Both Elizabeth and Dido are asked to play the piano for the Ashfords during their first visit to Kenwood House. Lady Ashford (Miranda Richardson) doubts that Dido will be able to play at all. But it is Dido who, between the two girls, is the more accomplished musician. In a later scene, the objectification of Dido in British society is more dire, as misogynistic James Ashford, who once called beautiful Dido “repulsive,” stares at her on a river bank, and then assaults her.

Mabel (Bethan Mary-James), the freed servant in the Mansfield’s London home, is another character connected to “looking.” Dido and Mabel stare at each other upon meeting, a recognition of their shared heritage — and yet their different positions in society. Later, in front of a mirror, Mabel shows Dido how to comb through her hair properly, starting with the ends first. Mabel tells Dido that a man first showed her how to do it.

Courtship becomes a major crucible in the film. Who will get a viable marriage proposal? Dido’s first proposal occurs under the watchful eye of a marble statue of Aphrodite in a bathing pose, seeming to imply it’s a love match. But later, the romance falls apart. Earlier, Lord Mansfield tried to entrust the keys of the house to Dido, offering her the honored place that her spinster Aunt Mary holds — a Hestia position as household caretaker. Hestia is the virginal domestic Greek goddess of the hearth who never leaves home. Worried about her future, Lord Mansfield implies that Dido won’t be able to make a suitable marriage match, due to her liminal societal position: her ethnicity combined with her aristocratic background. But his offer greatly disappoints Dido, and so we know that a romance is in her future; she chooses the way of Aphrodite, not Hestia.

Classism and racism are key parts of a secondary parallel plot involving Lord Mansfield, who must render a judgment on the horrible Zong massacre of 1781, about insurers and the deaths of 142 slaves on a cargo ship. Davinier becomes secretly allied with Dido here, trying to convince Lord Mansfield to rule against the ship’s crew, in favor of the insurers. Although there are several points in the film that seem anachronistic, as if twenty-century sensibilities are in motion instead of the more likely constraints of the time period, it is Dido’s agency in this later part of the film that seems most modern, and perhaps unlikely. Still, it gives Dido an important activist goal, and the two plotlines come together well in the end: Dido’s ability to decide her own future, the verdict in the Zong trial, and romance.

The famous Zoffany portrait of the girls is revealed in the end, highlighting the focus on its unusual qualities: a handsomely gowned, pearl-wearing young black woman touched by a well-dressed white woman, given equal center space at eye line level. In the film, Asante has shown us other pictures of the era, where Africans in paintings are given little space, infantilized, or enslaved, depicted as property. The impact of the independent spirit of Dido in the painting, and the equality in stature of the two girls in the portrait, is evocative and satisfying. Director Asante again reminds us of the motif of looking, gazing, as we ourselves finally stare at the family portrait that our heroine dutifully posed for at Kenwood. And instead of Dido merely seated, she’s smiling and in motion. Symbolically, and in contrast to Elizabeth, she is going somewhere. The theme of “looking,” or gazing upon from a position of privilege as related to objectification, is explored thoroughly in Belle. The film challenges us: what do you really see and why do you see it?

Laura Shamas is a writer, film consultant, and mythologist. Her newest book is Pop Mythology: Collected Essays. Read more at her website: LauraShamas.com.

Gender, Androgyny, and ‘The Dark Crystal’

The primary theme of ‘The Dark Crystal’ is that there should be no opposites, no dichotomies, no binaries. There cannot be balance when we separate out good and evil, ends and beginnings, cruelty and kindness, male and female. These things are truly one and exist together, inseparable.

Written by Amanda Rodriguez.

I’m at it again, reviewing a piece of media from my childhood that powerfully affected me in the hopes of determining what kind of message it imparted to my younger self and how that message helped shape the woman I am today. This time around, it’s Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal. (My blast-from-the-past reviews thus far include: Was Jem and the Holograms a Good Show for Little Girls, Splash: A Feminist Tail Tale?, She-Ra Kinda, Sorta Accidentally Feministy, and “No man may have me”: Red Sonja a Feminist Film in Disguise?) The Dark Crystal, like so many other 80s movies, appealed to me because it was dark, otherworldly, and told a story that was not only unique, but epic in scale. When I look back on The Dark Crystal, what strikes me most is the film’s complicated representation of gender. Most of the film’s characters are overwhelmingly androgynous.

The last gelflings: Jen & Kira — The last Gelflings: Jen and Kira

The heroes of our tale are a pair of Gelflings, the last surviving members of a race the Skeksis genocided to avoid a prophecy foretelling their downfall. In appearance, Gelflings are decidedly androgynous: they are small and child-like with smooth, feminine features and long hair. Both are gentle and soft-spoken; Jen loves to play music on his pipe while Kira sings along. However, being female gives Kira the advantage of flight because female Gelflings have wings.

Kira surprises us by using her wings to rescue Jen

Kira can also speak to animals and plants. Though that is a learned trait from her Podling foster family, women being able to understand creatures of nature is a common trope to denote femininity.

Kira marshals a pair of landstriders to help their quest — Kira marshals a pair of Landstriders to help their quest

Though Kira is physically the least androgynous character in the film, she is brave and sure of herself when Jen is not. Though Jen is the one singled out for destiny and agency with his possession of the crystal shard, he doubts his mission and himself. Kira must spur him to adventure. She also uses her wits and talents to rescue herself when the Skeksis try to drain her essence. Not only that, but in the final scene when the Skeksis are closing in, she sacrifices herself, using her own body to show Jen the path when he is lost. Kira is simply a hero. Her feminine traits don’t make her weak, and her possession of typically coded masculine heroic traits does not make her masculine. At the end of the film when the Skeksis and Mystics are joined together again to form the UrSkeks, one of them says to Jen as he holds Kira’s lifeless form, “She is a part of you.” This is true, especially considering their earlier Dreamfasting scene in which the two touch and share memories. Though Jen is male and Kira is female, their genders do not make them binary. They are stronger together; together they form a single whole. (More on that theme later…)

Kira sacrifices everything to help Jen heal the dark crystal — Kira sacrifices everything to help Jen heal the Dark Crystal

The wise figure of Aughra is also androgynous. She is clearly female with a woman’s voice and large breasts with protruding nipples, but she has a beard and curling ram’s horns along with a removable eye. The companion novel to the film, The World of the Dark Crystal, apparently identifies Aughra as both male and female, the essence and personification of the planet Thra in which our story takes place.

Aughra. Don't mess with her. — Aughra. Don’t mess with her.

Aughra is powerful, ancient, and grotesque. She commands the plants of the earth and holds the crystal shard. She is an astronomer, scientist, and prophetess who can read the future in the stars. She regards the Great Conjunction as “the end of the world…or the beginning,” claiming it’s “all the same.” Like the Gelflings don’t distinguish between self and other when it comes to male and female of their race, Aughra sees ends in beginnings and beginnings in ends. Instead of focusing on how things are different, disparate, and separate, Aughra sees infinite connections, sameness, and harmony in unity.

The entire journey of the film centers around reuniting a sundered shard to make the Dark Crystal whole again. This will reunite the sundered Mystics and Skeksis who were once single beings now separated, embodying binary, dichotomous traits with the Skeksis being evil, selfish, greedy, cruel, and violent while the Mystics are gentle, kind, peaceful, and generous. Interestingly enough, the Mystics and Skeksis are all male, and their combined form continues to be male, but their maleness is not wholly traditionally masculine in its representation.

The Mystics nurture Jen, teaching him the gentle magics of the earth

The Mystics embody more traditionally coded female characteristics: gentleness, nurturing, community building, a connection to the earth: teaching, music, and magic. They’re long-haired and peaceful…the hippies of their planet (one of them even wears a stylin’ do-rag over his hair).

Look at those lovely locks flowing in the wind. Think he conditions?

In many ways, the Skeksis are more overtly masculine in their desire to subjugate others, the grotesque way they eat, their trials by combat, and their quickness to anger and violence. On the other hand, the Skeksis are obsessed with fashion. Their clothing defines them, and the disrobing of our lead Skeksis, Chamberlain, is the height of dishonor and humiliation. They disrobe him before casting him out after he loses the trial-by-stone competition to be emperor.

The Skeksis are serious about their opulent robes.

Chamberlain himself is very androgynous with his high-pitched voice, slight build, and his preference for manipulation over force. The Skeksis are also obsessed with looking youthful. They drain the “essence” of Podlings, turning it into an elixir that they drink in order to temporarily rid themselves of wrinkles. This obsession is reminiscent of our own female-dominated beauty and fashion culture.

A disrobed Chamberlain trying to beguile the naïve Jen

The primary theme of The Dark Crystal is that there should be no opposites, no dichotomies, no binaries. There cannot be balance when we separate out good and evil, ends and beginnings, cruelty and kindness, male and female. These things are truly one and exist together, inseparable. The film’s representations of gender give preference to a more androgynous, non-binary mode of being, insisting that gender and human nature are too rich and complicated to be “this or that,” “one or the other,” “either or.” As a child, this de-coding of masculinity and femininity that allowed characters to be so much more than a simple gender formed a piece of the bedrock of my lifelong questioning of gender roles, gender hierarchy, and the entire binary system of gender. Thanks, Brian Froud and Jim Henson!

Bitch Flicks writer and editor Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes all about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys.

There Are Roles and There Are Roles: Reminders and Expectations from 1992’s ‘Orlando’ (and the “Boo Box” in ‘Hook’)

Despite our limited options and scope in the world of movies, many cinematic characters get their fair share of explorative opportunities. But most of these characters, as many of us know, are male, right down to who we see standing in the frame. This is why for me, the core question of potential is most intricately entwined with female characters in popular movies. Although there have been many great female roles out there, there is much to do nonetheless, and this in turn reminds me of the progress that needs to be made for both sexes and all gender identities.

This is a guest post by Ian Boucher.

Drama is an incredible thing, and it is universal. It provides humans with opportunities to experience a myriad of journeys within themselves through the journeys of others. These journeys can be serious or comedic, grounded or nonsensical, yet they all have the potential to demonstrate the reflections and rabbit holes of humanity.

Unfortunately, in Western culture, due to the now largely industrial nature of storytelling, it’s all too easy to forget about that potential. The film industry represents one of the largest sets of conveyor belts, delivering the same handfuls of story and character elements over and over again in its scramble to stay ahead above the cacophony of story products. Even many of the best movies, whether produced by a studio or independently, largely use archetypes, and many film studios pour the majority of their efforts into blockbuster films, which are generally even simpler in nature.

These are not completely new developments. Rather, they are a result of Western culture’s evolution over thousands of years. The majority of drama has always been produced as entertainment for commercial purposes, and our ideological journey, our cumulative human story explored over thousands of years, has simultaneously been going in wide thematic circles. These developments have also created inherent expectations for the films we watch.

This article, however, isn’t about originality. This is about potential.

I’m a student of the field of communication. I embrace the fact that the perceptions of humanity evolve like a meandering brook, naturally and gradually through time. We do make progress. It just takes us a while. Also, as a film scholar, I understand and love familiarity as well as freshness.

As a Padawan librarian, though, I can’t help but think that we can be more self-aware about how we go about all of this—that, like any activity, the results could be much better if more of the parties involved were conscious about what they were doing, whether creatively or administratively.

Take the recent trailer for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, for instance. Like many of our outings in the Marvel Cinematic Universe so far, the trailer told me that what I need to know about Zoe Saldana’s character Gamora—one of two females I noticed in the trailer—is that she can fight and that she might be a romantic interest, in this case for Chris Pratt’s Star-Lord.

Guardians of the Galaxy will be an action movie, and there are a lot of humans out there who love violence and sex, but female characters are very much utilized within those two categories for male characters to experience more often than vice versa, or focusing on the internal experiences of those involved. After all, Hollywood wants its movies to appeal to the most people possible, and this is what has largely worked so far. It is well known that the film industry is very averse to risk-taking.

To make female characters appear more dimensional in recent years, the violent part has been more prominently emphasized, marketed to us as something that makes current female characters different. Hollywood actresses in interviews across the board cite “toughness” as the primary character trait for their roles, even when their roles hold more than that. These roles and the statements about them very much reinforce the larger culture.

And yet, not only are humans three dimensional, but they also like variety, whether they agree with it or not. Just look at the ratings for any national news channel in the United States, where “controversy” abounds.

This is why, when I think about all of this, two movies especially come to mind. For me, they represent the tip of the iceberg where female characters are concerned—the hint of humanity’s dramatic potential. They vividly remind me both of the strength of expectations and the excitement of what movies can work toward. Each film occupies a vastly different place on the filmmaking spectrum—one on the fringes and the other a blockbuster, one a drama and the other a comedy, one a critical success and the other more on the infamous side, but for a few moments, they are inextricably connected, and their different places on the spectrum is precisely the point. They balance each other out.

These movies are Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) and Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991).

Stay with me here.

Both movies starkly demonstrate just how far we have to go with our roles, for they each contain a character that transcends the idea of gender, and I don’t mean because these characters are women playing men. Changing gender and sex in the arts is nothing new. The characters I am about to explore represent a great deal of potential for both women and men in storytelling, because they are just about humans playing humans. They both represent the further possibilities of that journey that we are all always taking, and, more inspiringly, do not fall into convention in the process. Additionally, neither is about gimmick, novelty, or even agenda. They are just drama and comedy.

They each fulfill the promise of characters in cinema.

“We are joined, we are one with the human face.”

Orlando is based on the Virginia Woolf novel Orlando: A Biography. The film follows the experiences of a young man named Orlando for about 200 years until one day, he is a woman, and lives out the next 200 years as such. The role of Orlando—for it is one character—is played with perfection by Tilda Swinton, and the movie is strikingly superb from beginning to end in every possible filmmaking dimension, both as a work of art and in legitimate entertainment value. It somehow manages to be abstract and full of reality at the same time, and expertly addresses numerous complicated themes, making them look incredibly simple to explore. This film profoundly captures Orlando’s vast and variegated experience of life as a man and a woman in dramatic and comedic moments as Orlando searches for the understanding of it all along many nuances of human connection. The movie is of course not perfect, but it is moviemaking at its best.

Orlando is a film that can, and has, been viewed in many different ways, especially and understandably so about sex and gender roles, and especially on the feminine side of things. But I see this movie as being about more than sex or gender, whether female or male. Although the film is certainly about all of that, I see it more as being about humanity and the larger human experience. The character of Orlando brings that home in spades, and Tilda Swinton brings it out wonderfully.

On one hand, Orlando certainly is subjected to new injustices from society when she becomes a woman. But although Orlando may finish the film as a woman (with a companion), who is to say that she (or her companion) will stay that way? The film visits the journey of one person experiencing and exploring the whole spectrum of humanity through changing perspectives. Orlando herself says it all when she first becomes a woman: “Same person. No difference at all. Just a different sex.”

Orlando and the movie itself are grand poetry that push our journey forward. They take what Marilyn Monroe’s Roslyn Taber in The Misfits (1961) started saying over half a century ago and bring it to the next level. Both Roslyn and Orlando are indeed misfits, and Orlando hits the humanity that Roslyn is still trying to tell us all about. Orlando does so by being able to transcend sex, gender, mortality, and time, so that we can look at life with a greater amount of understanding.

Orlando is about destiny for men as much as it is for women. The last shot is the most striking of all, because it forces us to face that truth and leave the theater with it. It allows us to look past the lines of gender and just see a human as an adapting organism. As the music says at the end of the film, Orlando really does come “across the divide.” By the end of the film, she is more than male or female. We can move productively toward the future and forget the different kinds of cultural shackles that keep us all down.

It’s so full of possibility.

And yet! Not all movies can or should be so deep all the time. Do all female roles have to so completely change our views?

That’s why my next point in this article is Hook.

“NOT THE BOO BOX!”

One of the elements of Steven Spielberg’s Hook that has proven to best stand the test of time is Glenn Close’s cameo as Gutless the Pirate. (Let the discussion ensue if you just realized this!) Regardless of where many opinions fall when it comes to Hook as a whole, this scene on its own is nevertheless widely regarded as comedy gold.

It is the scene in which we first get to see Captain Hook in the flesh. The “Bad Barracuda,” as he is sometimes evidently known, zeroes in on the one person who doubted his plan to bring Peter Pan’s children back to Neverland. Just one pirate. This pirate is Glenn Close’s Gutless, who seems to hold some kind of shockingly defiant, petty disdain for Captain Hook. Almost immediately after displaying this, Gutless hilariously breaks down into tears, and is subsequently thrown into the dreaded “Boo Box,” or for those uninitiated to Neverland, a treasure chest where they drop scorpions on you.

This is not a scene about the novelty of a woman playing a man, because, before the Internet anyway, most people didn’t even know that Gutless was a woman playing a man. I still see new articles popping up all the time celebrating this realization—each of these realizations not only has clear respect for it, but also enthusiasm. It’s not because Close’s role is about a statement, nor is it because of an agenda on anyone’s part. Gutless’ scene doesn’t particularly mean anything—although I’m sure people can come up with some great analyses for it. It’s just a funny scene. The character is hilarious. Glenn Close’s performance is hilarious. The term “Boo Box” is hilarious. It all just ties together into good comedy.

The grand majority of people love this scene, and they love it even more when they realize it’s Glenn Close. It’s a good actor bringing a character to life that supports and augments the rest of the movie’s sense of humor.

And I know there is more room for this kind of thing in other movies, regardless of genre. Why shouldn’t anybody be able to play any kind of part? (There’s a mouthful.) That is the journey.

Reminders and Expectations

Reminders can go a long way. Business and creativity can move hand in hand. But regardless of what movies do or the power they hold in cultures around the world, what it all comes down to is the stories we tell each other—what we tell each other is what counts.

Orlando and Hook are wonderful reminders that so very little has been explored in storytelling. They both can remind us of the journey that not only women, but humans, can take. Despite what all of the prophesies in movies may tell us, none of us need be, as Orlando put it, “trapped by destiny.” The possibilities for looking at each other as just people are endless.

So where are we now? Where do we want our culture to be? What stories do we want to tell ourselves? What do we want to expect? What do we want to be aware of?

I’m going to go out on a limb here, but it seems to me that the gutlessness of Western culture will only serve to keep us inside the box.

Eh???

We all know the journeys are still out there. Whether you’re a filmmaker or in the audience, why not do something about it today?

What stories remind you?

Trained in communication, film, and television theory and production, Ian Boucher is developing his interests in library science with a focus on information literacy. He enjoys reading, writing, watching movies, exploring the outdoors, and endlessly contemplating the psyches of comic book characters. Feel free to get in touch with him anytime on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Ian_Boucher) — he can talk about this stuff all day!

“Yes, You Can’t!”: The Happy Failures of Jerri Blank

‘Strangers with Candy’ (Peter Lauer, et al., 1999-2000) is one of the most wildly subversive shows I’ve ever seen on television (most subversive shows are canceled before long–see ‘Wonder Showzen’ (Vernon Chatman and John Lee, 2005-2006, which features segments with David Cross), and it feels like I’ve waited a long time for an opportunity to rave about its hilarious characters and its clever writing. When this delightfully dark show aired on Comedy Central, I was old enough to understand that it appealed to a somewhat alternative audience, yet I was too young to fully comprehend or appreciate the satirical wit and unyielding sense of hopelessness the show conveyed to audiences. Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) tirelessly strives for the acceptance of her “peers” in high school, from the snooty cheerleaders and the lusted after jock to the kooky assortment of teachers, which includes Mr. Noblet, played by the wonderful Stephen Colbert, and Jerri’s ironically unsympathetic guidance counselor, Ms. Pines, played by the always funny Janeane Garofalo.

Written by Jenny Lapekas.

Strangers with Candy (Peter Lauer, et al., 1999-2000) is one of the most wildly subversive shows I’ve ever seen on television (most subversive shows are canceled before long–see Wonder Showzen (Vernon Chatman and John Lee, 2005-2006, which features segments with David Cross), and it feels like I’ve waited a long time for an opportunity to rave about its hilarious characters and its clever writing. When this delightfully dark show aired on Comedy Central, I was old enough to understand that it appealed to a somewhat alternative audience, yet I was too young to fully comprehend or appreciate the satirical wit and unyielding sense of hopelessness the show conveyed to audiences. Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) tirelessly strives for the acceptance of her “peers” in high school, from the snooty cheerleaders and the lusted after jock to the kooky assortment of teachers, which includes Mr. Noblet, played by the wonderful Stephen Colbert, and Jerri’s ironically unsympathetic guidance counselor, Ms. Pines, played by the always funny Janeane Garofalo.

After Jerri’s father is eaten by rabid dogs, a doctor tells Jerri, “Your father was dead on arrival. No matter what I did, he just kept getting deader.”

I learned rather recently that Jerri Blank is based on a real person: Florrie Fisher was a motivational speaker in the 60s and 70s who traveled to high schools and discussed her history as a prostitute and heroin addict. The series was inspired by Fisher’s public service announcement “The Trip Back,” allowing the birth of Strangers from a fairly dark origin. The “uglification” of Sedaris as she transforms into the recovering addict, Jerri Blank, is possibly most noticeable to new fans of the show. Those who worked on the show’s costume and aesthetics seemingly left no stone unturned in their attempt to make Sedaris as hideous and repulsive as possible. Jerri is a middle-aged woman who returns to high school with a sordid past of drugs and crime–much of which is left to the imaginations of viewers. With a ridiculously exaggerated overbite, strategically placed padding, and several layers of heavy makeup, Jerri is all teeth, hair and hips. Sedaris has done much in the way of writing, feminism, and DIY projects, and she has even been featured on the cover of Bust magazine.

Mr. Noblet talks with his class about the historical role of the clown, a catalyst for Jerri overcoming her grief.

Any fan of the show who is somewhat cognizant of LGBTQ visibility in television and media studies will undoubtedly pick up on the deeply closeted homosexual relationship between Mr. Noblet (Colbert) and Mr. Jellineck (Paul Dinello–whom Sedaris dated for several years). Chuck Noblet is cold, disconnected and married to a woman he loathes while Geoffrey Jellineck, Flat Point’s caring art teacher, is sensitive, sweet, and vulnerable. Although the pair are desperately in love, Chuck continually disappoints Geoffrey in a variety of twisted and unimaginable ways throughout three seasons of absurdity. Besides his refusal to publicly recognize their love, Chuck flees a romantic picnic planned by his lover as Geoffrey is hit by a car, rendering him a faceless monster for the majority of the episode. What we take away from this stagnant relationship is a model for the most dysfunctional gay romance I’ve encountered in a comedy series.

Jerri befriends a blind boy at school and blindfolds herself in an attempt to better understand him.

After exploring all her riveting career options upon graduation, Jerri tells us, “If you’re gonna reach for a star, reach for the lowest one you can.” Jerri lacks the support of her family; her flippant mother would gladly throw her middle-aged daughter under a bus, and Jerri’s closeted brother Derrick is fueled by teen angst and the desire to somehow disparage a woman who has already been defeated a thousand times over by life’s difficulties. Like most protagonists of TV dramas, Jerri is supposed to learn a significant life lesson at the end of each episode, yet the obvious message is forever lost on Jerri. In a two-part episode entitled “Blank Stare,” Jerri joins a cult that has infiltrated Flat Point. After Jerri’s teachers and principal rescue her from the brainwashed gang who are lodging at “Safe Trap House,” they force the 46-year-old high school student to look into a mirror and admit that the cult is merely a group of liars because they’ve told Jerri that she’s beautiful. Furthermore, I don’t think Strangers fans actually want Jerri to evolve and become a better person, because then she simply wouldn’t be Jerri Blank anymore.

Jerri tries out to be a cheerleader but is taunted once the squad discovers that she's illiterate. — Jerri tries out to be a cheerleader but is taunted once the squad discovers that she’s illiterate.

What’s difficult to admit about Sedaris’s character is that Jerri is truly a bad person; she hurts animals, she demonstrates the pinnacle of racist and sexist ideologies and behaviors, and she has clear predatory tendencies toward the high school girls we encounter throughout the show’s run. Jerri is obviously bisexual, and the aggressive fashion in which she proves this to us may cause more conventional viewers some discomfort. In short, Jerri violates gender roles. Sitting outside of Principal Blackman’s (Greg Hollimon) office, Jerri asks a pretty redhead, “Hey Red, carpet match the drapes?” Due to her ability to play a genuinely likable character with such transgressive traits, Sedaris is an important figure for the evolution of women and comedy; we root for Jerri even as we’re hoping she falls. Fans of the show may find themselves disliking her racist behavior, such as calling her best friend Orlando, a sweet Filipino boy, a “monkey,” while also finding that this behavior works for the character and situates her as a feminist anti-hero on Comedy Central. Sedaris successfully satirizes the traumatic high school experience–cliques, bullying, and tough teachers–and de-stigmatizes the negative “sexually aggressive woman” archetype while boasting an identity that has been socially constructed around sex, drugs and alcohol. While Jerri expects us to believe that she’s better for experiencing this depressing lifestyle and then recovering from it, the show’s writers trust us to believe that Jerry is actually a static character throughout Strangers with Candy. How, then, can a television show maintain viewership when a character fails to learn or grow? Simple: we tune in to Strangers to discover the new and twisted ways in which Jerri will fail, sink, and back-pedal; Jerri’s failures are her triumphs. This observation then points up the question: Are we sadists for watching this show? No, because I think we recognize our own flaws in the caricature nature of Jerri, and we find comfort in the onscreen marriage of these flaws and the hilarity of brilliant writing and acting talents like Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, and Paul Dinello.

Recommended reading: Baking Amy, Tony’s “Strangers With Candy” Companion

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Jenny has a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at Alvernia University. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. You can find her on Pinterest and WordPress.

“A Bit Of An Evolution”: On Louis C.K.

It’s exhausting to consume any media as a trans* person. It’s not really a matter of if I will become a punchline, but when. This goes triple or quadruple for comedy, and Louis C.K., for all his good qualities, is no exception.

Written by Max Thornton as part of our theme week on Male Feminists and Allies.

It’s exhausting to consume any media as a trans* person. It’s not really a matter of if I will become a punchline, but when. This goes triple or quadruple for comedy, and Louis C.K., for all his good qualities, is no exception.

Louis C.K. is a very funny guy, and for a white straight cis man he is often a great ally. The webpage www.arewhitepeopleraciallyoppressed.com uses one of his bits as its only explanation for its giant, bolded, all-caps “NO!” He’s pretty excellent at using his tragicomic sensibility to draw attention to inequalities in a way that might make other white straight cis men think as well as laugh. But he still has a ways to go, and I hope that he will learn and improve.

Louis CK on a rare happy day — Louis C.K. on a rare happy day

What’s interesting about being a fan of Louis C.K. is that he does learn and change, and we have watched him evolve his understanding of some things. His 2008 album Chewed Up opens with a tiresome bit about “Offensive Words,” which surely must have seemed as embarrassing five years ago as it does now:

Faggot. I miss that word… Faggot didn’t mean gay when I was a kid. You called someone faggot because they were being a faggot, you know? Someone was just being a faggot. … But if one of them took the dick out of his mouth and was being all faggy and saying annoying faggy things like, ‘People from Phoenix are called Phoenicians,’ I’d be like, ‘Hey, shut up, faggot! FAGGOT! Quit being a faggot and suck that dick.’

As we used to say when I was a kid, it’s so funny I forgot to laugh.

I’m pretty sure this bit is still being used by douchebros to justify their bigotry, but hopefully at least some of those douchebros have seen the poker scene from a 2010 episode of C.K.’s semi-autobiographical FX sitcom Louie. In this scene, the Louis C.K. character and a group of his comedian friends discuss homosexuality with their one gay friend, who winds up steering the conversation in quite a serious direction. C.K. has explained that this scene was intentional redress for his casual excusing of slurs in the past. “What does it do to a gay man when I say the word ‘faggot’?” was not merely a rhetorical exercise, but a question he raised with a gay friend and thought about deeply in the writing of the poker scene. C.K. says, “I think that the discussion of the word faggot that I did in the poker scene was a bit of an evolution. I pretty much never say faggot on stage anymore.”

His mea culpa over last year’s Rapeocalypse debacle – an incident (don’t they seem to be almost weekly these days?) where an unfunny comedian’s rape “joke” sparked a raging internet debate about comedy and offensiveness – also proves that he can learn from his mistakes, to the point that he now actively tweets against offensive jokes.

louis-ck-tweet — Has anyone tried this? Does it work?

Louis C.K. makes me laugh a lot, and he says some really on-the-ball things about a lot of subjects (“two guys are in love and they can’t get married because you don’t want to talk to your ugly child for five fucking minutes??”), but watching his sets or his show still makes me clench in the pit of my stomach.

It’s not that his material on gender relations is uniformly bad. Some of it is excellent, and some of it is downright feminist. The trouble is, he does it in a really essentialist way. Men and women are defined as poles of a biologically determined binary. And he talks about men as though we’re utterly captive to our hormones. Sometimes it almost sounds as if he’s saying, “Men have treated women really poorly for millennia, because biology.” Testosterone, contra certain trans men who will tell you otherwise, is not a misogyny potion. Neither (although I don’t have personal experience with this) is a Y chromosome.

Obviously I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t talk about relationships between men and women. It’s hugely important to recognize and challenge the ways in which gendered oppression and violence are performed specifically by men against women; but we need to do this in a way that acknowledges that these categories are imperfect and fluid and not immutably predestined or tied to biology.

C.K. is pretty solid on that first part, but he’s still not mastered the second. And it’s frustrating because he’s so clearly someone who’s spent time engaging with other intersections of oppression, especially race and sexuality, and it’s made him a better person, a better comedian, and a better artiste; so I wish he’d bother to do the same with trans* concerns.

I do worry that Louis C.K. is too much the leftist darling who can get away with anything. On the one hand, it’s not unreasonable to laud people when they learn and change for the better; on the other, fawning over straight white cis dudes for showing the slightest modicum of basic human decency is pretty gross. It’s hard to balance the discourse in response to allies, but at least we know this one is thoughtful and self-aware. If we hold Louis C.K. accountable for his failings, we can generally expect that he’ll listen and learn, and that’s perhaps the most important quality in an ally.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax.

Margaret Cho: On Topping Trans* Queer Political Correctness

Let me begin by saying I’m queer-identified. I have trans* family, but it’s impossible for me to speak for trans* people of experience. I can share concepts, however. Too, my general line of thought in terms of sexuality, gender identity or personhood is that no matter how often your definition changes, you “are” what you tell me that you are.

“I refer to myself as gay, but I’m married to a man.”

– Margaret Cho

I’m the One That I Want: Can Queer and Trans* Folks Really Reclaim the Word “Tranny?”

Along with Stephen Fry, I feel that language and politically correct linguistic constructs can at times become as bullying, domineering and “victimizing” as those who claim to be victimized by language. What with people being as individualized and fluid as language is, sometimes experience does indeed trump the words we use to describe and protect it.

All Margaret Cho Everything

Margaret Cho (“Drop Dead Diva,” “I’m The One That I Want”) is as scrappy as she is electric.

She’s “scrappy” because she’s taken so much guff, sharing her multiple talents on and off-screen (she acts, sings, directs, writes, designs clothes, and is a walking-tattooed work of art and standout standup comic, for starters). Cho’s speech can transition from elegant purrs to lioness’ growls without hesitation. She’s electric because she sings the body electric: she’s sensual, naughty, flirtatious, often bawdy and ultimately playful.

If you’ve seen her comedy flick “I’m The One That I Want,” the efforting in her journey to long-term success is palpable. You get the sense she’s had to claw her way all the way up to the glass ceiling, brace herself with her back up, and kick the glass away with a pair of steel-toed Doc Martens just to disappear the whole damn thing. As she unfolds her own narrative in this cathartic and she-larious comedy film, we discover that now she’s not even in the friggin’ building. So, damn a glass ceiling anyhow.

Cho doesn’t “play the queer card” or the race card. Rather, she is always and forever queering play. She is queering entertainment. When cameras roll as you share minute details of your open relationship on morning chat shows, segue seamlessly into outing fellow celebs, put the world on notice that you will happily eff anything that moves as you like/when you like (just like men do), and always leave ‘em laughing…if anything, you could say Cho plays “the laugh card.”

Yes. We’re laughing. But to what end?

Well, they don’t call it “gender wars” just because.

Margaret Cho’s comedic M.O. doesn’t feel like a manipulation. Rather, it’s a weapon.

As she’s currently promoting her latest comedy project The MOTHER Tour, thoughts and themes come to mind about Margaret Cho’s presence in the world.

Yes, We Recruit: She’s All About Her Funny Business

Cho is forever quotable (damn skippy, and Bitch Flicks knows it) and impossible to ignore.

Case in point: In Conan O’ Brien’s documentary Conan O’ Brien Can’t Stop, the uber-successful talk show host and fellow comedian makes it a point both to “ignore” and dismiss Margaret Cho. On film.

An ever-irrepressible social sharer and networker, Cho was waiting to have a little comedic kiki with O’Brien as he slunked away, cheating to camera as he let us know he had to ditch her because he didn’t “want to get Cho’d.”

This sarcastic film bit could have been classified as gag reel material if O’Brien hadn’t spent the rest of the film kiki’ing it up with cameos by Jim Carrey, John Hamm and Jon Stewart, along with his cast and crew. (He preferred to be Carrey’d Hamm’ed and Stewarted.)

No doubt, comedy is a cutthroat business: Cho and O’Brien still work together and socialize, but O’Brien’s production choice and life decision in his own docu-pic is a telling one. So-called avoidance and disgust is attraction’s twin. C’mon Conan, fess up! Fully-embodied and empowered women carry with them a transformative energy that cannot be controlled. People can often find that to be at-once infuriating and hot.

There’s Some Tranny Chasers Up In Here

“ A few words about ‘trannychasing.’ I am not a trannychaser. Ok, actually I am a trannychaser. No I am not. I am a trannycatcher! Just kidding!”

– Margaret Cho

As a self-confessed “tranny chaser,” Margaret Cho’s taken a good amount of flak for expressing her trans* chasing feelings and affirmative desires without too much apology. It’s a tough concept to think about, as she’s done so much brilliant work and she’s really been out there on the road, touring with Ani DiFranco and Lilith Fair, indie all the way for decades on end, fearlessly advocating for trans* and queer rights, feminist and race equality, and respect of her own in the entertainment industry.

Making Visibility Sexy

Margaret Cho and Ian Harvie — Ian Harvie and Margaret Cho – Promotional Photo by Kevin Neales

There’s no doubt Cho is sex positive (she’s on the Good Vibrations board, and her activist and fund-raising work is notable).

She is queer-identified and trans* inclusive: she directed the highly acclaimed “Young James Dean” video by Girlyman, featuring trans* peers and allies covering lyrics about coming up in the world as genderqueer.

Her comedy routines, filmic work, creative projects and writing boast a high trans* visibility ratio, including her clearing the floor for trans* folks, often guys, to speak and co-create with her. These men need to be mainstreamed, as success for trans* persons of experience is exceptionally important and more common than we’re led to believe. Trans* folks face harrowing odds when attempting to begin any new business or creative venture, even if that enterprise was something they’d become successful at and mastered pre-transition.

Margaret Cho big-ups trans* men regularly, and we don’t see this enough elsewhere in the world in terms of proactive, high profile allies doing so. Cho supports fellow trans* comics and entrepreneurs and leverages her celebrity to help folks earn a steady income who might not do so otherwise, or as quickly. She will tweet, promote, and help to encourage business ventures for others—often tirelessly so. Her podcasts likely do much more for her regular indie artist guests than other shows whose DJ isn’t a comedy diva who reigns supreme.

Community leaders and others have voiced concern about Cho’s humor and “tranny chaser” (or catcher) jokes and statements. Cho has formally explained her views, stating these are just jokes based on reverence and respect, and that people are taking things out of context—too seriously.

Writer/filmmaker Tobi Hill-Meyer states Cho is objectifying trans* men like cis gender men often do with trans* women, fetishizing them and changing people into “things.”

“Trans IS a legitimate gender” is one trans* man’s defense against such an idea, posited by Cho’s comedic peer and BFF, Ian Harvie. Harvie wrote, “ If you believe Transgender IS a legitimate gender, how can you argue that it’s wrong to eroticize Trans people? If you do not see Trans as a legitimate gender, then what’s wrong with you?! I’m Trans, I’m Butch, and identify as a Trans man, regardless of my given biological sex. I absolutely believe it’s okay to be attracted to, exoticize, fetishsize, and eroticize any and all Trans people. After all, a fetish is something that we desire or that turns us on.”

Too, RuPaul penned the song “Tranny Chaser” as a declaration of sexuality, desirability, and a playful take on the concept. “Do you wanna be me?” That’s how the song’s bridge begins. Fully aware of the seduction in the words, RuPaul goes on, “That don’t make you gay. Or do you wanna [beep] me? That don’t make you gay….”

It’s hard to laser-focus down to one “right take” on topics like trans* and queer sexuality when so many folks in-community with so many different experiences feel empowered by erotic aspects of being queer or trans* as well as desired. Other bloggers and commenters have called Cho’s tranny chaser phraseology disgusting. Meanwhile, she is blowing heteronormative minds open simply by sharing these concepts, matter-of-factly and without shame. No one has accused RuPaul of anything similar.

Seemingly pointless rhetorical questions arise: is it better to be vilified or romanticized? Dehumanized, or eroticized? If we’re all “in on the desire,” is it wrong? Is there a happy medium that requires no context or linguistic boundaries and protections when you’re speaking to heterosexual or heteronormative folks?

Cho grew up in San Francisco, which could better explain matters somewhat. In the City (at least in most LGBT circles), you are what you say you are. Period. Middle America doesn’t quite resonate with such a mindset (yet?).

Issues of class and power can’t be ignored. Though they all had challenging beginnings in their careers, now relatively better-paid or well-paid performers Cho’s, Harvie’s and RuPaul’s experiences differ by definition from that of a queer or trans* man or woman who doesn’t have the same means or sense of empowerment to feel okay leading with sexuality or identity. Harassment is much more difficult, to say the least, when you don’t have financial or social resources to work your way out of it or away from it.

When these issues and conundrums arise, I consider them to be a gift: because they grant us the opportunity to be honest with ourselves about them, regardless of political correctness.

We have to name and claim the final word(s) about our experience. We have to find our own ways to survive and to thrive in the world.

“Bitch,” Please

In a previous Bitch Flicks Quote of the Day update, Margaret Cho waxes fantastic about the word “bitch.” Have a look: you don’t want to miss it.

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The first draft of this post appeared at Gay Agenda online.