Misogyny – Page 2 – Bitch Flicks

Misogyny Demons and Wesley’s Tortured Masculinity in Joss Whedon’s ‘Angel’

Not only does the characterization of this violent misogyny as “primordial” imply that violence toward women is the natural state of men, it also implies that gender itself is an essential and natural state of being. Men are men and women are women. In a universe that generally operates in gray areas, such a distinction is uncharacteristically black and white.

This guest post by Stephanie Brown appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

In their DVD commnetary on the season three Angel (1999-2004) episode “Billy” (3.6), writers Jeffrey Bell and Tim Minear explain that the episode has been both “widely acclaimed” and “much loathed.” Admittedly, my opinion of the episode changes almost every time I watch it. During the summer of 2012 when I binge-watched nearly all of Joss Whedon’s oevre, this particular episode stuck out to me with its oddly in-your-face treatment of misogyny, gender, and gendered violence. While such topics are generally treated with nuance and complexity in the Whedonverse, “Billy” ditches the usual complexity in favor of portraying the show’s good guys, namely Wesley, channeling their base (and as the episode seems to argue, natural), violent instincts. Not only do the episode’s final scenes resemble The Shining, with Wesley trying to kill Fred (a character he has had unrequited feelings for) with an ax, they also seems to take a dark pleasure in “allowing” him to act out in such a violently misogynistic way.

Evil Billy, in all his demon smarminess.

In case you haven’t seen this particular episode, the plot revolves around Billy, a demon from a rich and powerful family who has recently escaped from the hell dimension in which he was imprisoned. While Billy himself causes no physical destruction, he “infects” men who come into contact with him with violent misogyny. After handling Billy’s blood, Wesley becomes infected and tries to chase down and kill Fred. Though Fred ultimately forgives him, Wesley fears that Billy revealed a very real and violent part of his masculininty. The incident also sends Wesley’s character down a road of brooding intropsection, acting as a turning point in his series long character arc from a buffoonish Watcher (on Buffy The Vampire Slayer) to a troubled, interesting and complex character at the end of Angel’s run. In my humble opinoin, Wesley’s evolution is one of the most fascinating and masterful character arcs on television, and this episode is a key part of that arc.

Critics of “Billy” may see it as yet another instance of Angel’s problematic treatment of female characters, as this particular episode brings questions of gender and morality to the forefront in an especially unsettling manner. Billy, as Lilah puts it, brings out in men “a primordial misogyny” that causes them to react violently toward the women around them. Not only does the characterization of this violent misogyny as “primordial” imply that violence toward women is the natural state of men, it also implies that gender itself is an essential and natural state of being. Men are men and women are women. In a universe that generally operates in gray areas, such a distinction is uncharacteristically black and white.

“Billy,” of course, isn’t the only episode Angel to be critiqued for its treatment of women and gender more generally. While Whedon’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer is, as you likely well know, frequently heralded as feminist or is at least the topic of much feminist-based discussion (even meriting a theme week from this very site), some critics regard Angel as much more problematic in its portrayal of women. Though to be fair, just as Buffy is often an exploration of the complexities of feminity, Angel can be seen as a similar exploration of the complexities of masculinity, perhaps at times at the expense of its female characters. For instance, every major female character in the Angelverse dies by the series’ end, with Cordelia and Fred both being stripped of their identities and then killed by demon possession (in season four’s “Shiny Happy People” and season five’s “A Hole In The World”.

And while this episode and Billy’s character can be read as a reinforcement of masculinity as both essential and naturally violent, I think Billy’s character can also be read as a device through which the episode demonstrates how essentialist notions of masculinity can be dangerous. As I noted earlier, one of Whedon’s signatures is that he works in gray rather than black and white, and this applies to his villains as well as his heroes. Billy, though, is a notable exception and is one of a few villains that fall short of Whedon’s usual character complexity.

Rather than a fully formed character, Billy acts as an extreme symbol of the The Patriarchy with a capital P, who forces our flawed heroes to rexamine and start to grapple with their underlying ideas about gender and mascunilinty throughout the episode. For instance, the episode opens with a scene in which Angel is teaching Cordelia to fight. In her former life on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Cordelia used to rely on handsome, strong men to protect her from the various demons of Sunnydale, but she is now ready to fend for herself. She faces, however, some resistance from Angel, as evidenced in their exchange about the reason for her defense training.

Angel: Then – just keep moving the line. You’ll be able to keep an attacker busy until, you know.

Cordelia: What? Until he dies of old age or until you swoop in to save me? Angel, I didn’t
ask you to train me so I could stave. I already know how to stave; now I need to learn how to fight!

Angel: You don’t think that I would?

Cordelia: Would what?

Angel: Save you.

Cordelia: Men-folk not always around to protect the women-folk, you know?

Angel is willing to give Cordelia the training she needs to stay alive, but he is more reluctant to give up his role as protector and savior. While this attitude may come from a place of caring, Cordelia rightly mocks him for his antiquated view of gender relations. Throughout much of the episode, Cordelia pushes back against both Wesley and Angel’s paternal concerns about her ability as a women both to fight and handle the violence that comes along with the job. Wes and Angel are both “good guys,” but they nevertheless struggle with predefined notions of what consitutes proper mascunilinty and femininity. While Angel and Wesley come from a place of concern; however, they still tend to treat Cordelia as inferior, unable to give up what they see as their masculine duty to protect her.

More troubling than Angel’s reluctance to trust Cordelia with full demon fighting responsibilities, though, is the ‘infection’ of Wesley by Billy’s misogyny-infused blood. Because Wesley is not only a white man from a wealthy family but also former member of the highly patriarchal Watcher’s Council, he’s prone to inner turmoil about gender, masculinity, and power.

The Watchers Council: Mostly Old White Men

Billy’s demonhood brings these latent issues violently to the forefront as Wes spends the final two acts of the episode first sexually harassing and then lashing out violently against Fred. As his generally affable, fatherly demeanor morphs into that of a terrifying, calculated killer, his once sweet crush on Fred is warped into a violently perverse sexual attraction. In this transformation we can see how seemingly benign characteristics of traditional masculinity and Billy’s twisted misogyny often fall under the same patriarchal umbrella. While they lie on opposite ends of the spectrum, they’re nevertheless symptoms of the same oppressive system.

While Wes is of course not actually a homicidal misogynist, his actions while under Billy’s spell do force him to face his inner demons (pardon the pun) and fundamentally change his relationship with both Fred and the rest of Angel Investigations. In the final scene of the episode, Wes sits alone in his dark apartment, staring at the wall when Fred comes to see him.

Wes: Fred, I tried to kill you.

Fred: That wasn’t you.

Wes: How can you know that? Something inside me was forced to the surface. Something primal, something…

Fred: Do you wanna kill me?

Wes: Oh, God, no.

Fred: It wasn’t something in you, Wesley. It was something that was done to you.

Wes: I don’t know what kind of man I am anymore.

Even though he was posessed by Billy, Wes nevertheless saw something of himself in his actions that he feels he must come to terms with. Wes of course is not only a victim of Billy’s, but also of the patriarchal definitions of masculinity that he was taught both by his father and by the Watcher’s Council. It’s these unresolved issues that Wes is now being forced to face.

Wesley and Fred talk after he is no longer possessed.

At the close of the episode, Fred seems relatively unaffected by the fact that her friend and boss nearly hacked her into little pieces, while Wes sits broken and weeping. His dejection shows us that while we tend to focus on the harm that befalls those who define themselves as feminine within a patriarchal society, rigid gender roles and misogny are just as harmful to those who define themselves as masculine.

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

Seed & Spark: Finding Ourselves In Our Work

We are so quick to label adolescent girls as these terrible, unruly, hormone-driven monsters, but underneath the name-calling and back-stabbing, where do the behaviors originate? It’s easy to say that we, as women, should be holding one another up rather tearing each other down, so why do we lash out so quickly at one another?

the youtube diaries that became the installation, yr a slut (2010) — The *YouTube* diaries that became the installation, *yr a slut* (2010)

This is a guest post by Megyn Cawley.

Sluts, famewhores, gold-diggers – all terms I was encouraged and paid to use while working in the entertainment media industry in my early 20’s. After a long stretch of unemployment post-undergrad in the late ’00s (hello, recession), I gladly accepted a position as an editorial assistant with a somewhat infamous media company. Initially, I was so stoked to have landed the job, but the thrill of “working in Hollywood” quickly wore off. My workdays became a daily exercise in shaming women’s appearances and pitting them against one another. It was difficult for me to digest that my weekly paycheck depended on perpetuating these antiquated stereotypes and gender divisions. Who am I to publicly deface any woman as an “off-the-rails coke whore” or “lezbot”? How is a broke lil’ feminist with minimal job experience supposed to stay afloat in an inherently misogynistic industry without defaulting on her student loans? By turning to art.

Although leaving my job was not a realistic option at that moment in time, I realized if I could make films and videos aligning with my feminist point of view, they would somewhat diffuse the growing pit in my stomach screaming, “WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR MORALS, GF???” While attending the California Institute of Arts for my MFA in Film & Video, I started scavenging YouTube for video diaries of teenage girls for an installation. The first-person videos feature young girls publicly declaring their classmates and frenemies as “sluts” and “whores,” all while giggling, suggesting punishments for the girls who may or may not have wronged them. I felt like I was watching a real life version of the the snark I perpetuated at my job. When cut together in rapid succession, the nonstop string of of these girls publicly humiliating their peers from the safety of their bedrooms quickly turned barbaric. We are so quick to label adolescent girls as these terrible, unruly, hormone-driven monsters, but underneath the name-calling and back-stabbing, where do the behaviors originate? It’s easy to say that we, as women, should be holding one another up rather tearing each other down, so why do we lash out so quickly at one another?

still from girl (2012) — still from *girl* (2012)

I began exploring the psyche of the adolescent female for my graduate thesis film, GIRL. I interviewed women of all ages and backgrounds, asking them a series of the same questions – “How would you describe your teenage self?” “When did you become conscious of wanting to belong to a certain clique or social circle?” “Did you ever feel isolated or depressed?” and so on. Although the experiences varied from woman to woman, the psychology driving their behaviors was almost identical- the desire for validation of self. Surprise, surprise- teenage girls have an inherent desire to be accepted, to have their existence validated by someone outside of themselves. If I feel self-conscious about my appearance, you better be damn sure I’m going to make you feel self-conscious too. I soon realized, through making the film, that being open and candid about our personal experiences in adolescence, our empathy for one another as adults can grow tremendously.

My goal is to bring that understanding of commonality of self to my newest project, LIL’ MER (currently crowdfunding on Seed & Spark). The short film is an experimental retelling of the classic Hans Christen Andersen fairy tale, The Little Mermaid, using the framework of the story to explore gender identity and self-actualization. The story centers around Mirabella, a young woman struggling to express her inner self, and turns to a late night infomercial for the solution. The desire to shed our insecurities and feel free be our true selves is one of the hardest struggles we encounter, and by making this film, I think I may be one step closer in my own path to finding her.

Megyn Cawley is a multimedia artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. By channeling nostalgia and camp ethos through the juxtaposition of analog and digital media formats, her work explores the expression of ego, self and gender identity. Megyn holds an MFA in Film & Video from the California Institute of the Arts, and has exhibited her films and multi-channel installations across the western US. She is currently in pre-production and crowdfunding for her latest short film, LIL’ MER.

‘Mad Max’: Fury Road Is a Fun Movie. It’s a Solid Action Flick. But Is It Feminist™?

However, I’d argue that ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ contains more critique of patriarchy and entrenched inequality than critics or even some fans have given it credit for.

Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron in 'Mad Max: Fury Road' — *Mad Max: Fury Road*

This guess post by Rebecca Cohen previously appeared at Rebecca’s Random Crap and is cross-posted with permission.

Many who devote ourselves to the struggle for gender equality want to claim this movie as our own. Others have said feminists need to demand more from our entertainment than Mad Max: Fury Road actually delivers.

To wit:

Feminism doesn’t simply mean women getting to partake in typical badass “guy stuff.” Feminism is about redefining our social value system.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) May 19, 2015

Mad Max‘s villains are caricatures of misogyny which makes overt misogynists angry but does not challenge more prevalent forms of sexism.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) May 19, 2015

A lot of modern feminist readings of media boil down to 1. Is there a lady? 2. Does she do something cool? It’s a weakening of the theory.

— Sarah Argodale (@sarahargodale) May 19, 2015

I really don’t get how anyone could sit through 120 minutes of pure violent spectacle and leave believing they saw a critique of violence.

— Jonathan McIntosh (@radicalbytes) May 19, 2015

They’re right. Our culture glorifies violence, equates strength and power with violence, and attributes that strength and power to men. While violence may sometimes be necessary in self-defense or in rebellion against oppression, the glorification of violence is distinctly patriarchal. We can’t fight patriarchy’s values by adopting them. We can’t simply substitute a woman in the place of a man, giving her strength and power according to patriarchy’s narrow definition, and call it feminist. There’s nothing revolutionary about masculine power fantasies, even with a woman at the center of them.

But. They’re also wrong. They’re wrong about Fury Road and exactly what’s going on in that movie.

I want to say, as a side note, that there’s nothing wrong with fantasies of violent rebellion against violent oppression. When you experience the frustration of being dehumanized and marginalized and discriminated against, you need catharsis. It’s exhilarating. It’s fun. It’s necessary. But, OK – maybe if we want to narrowly define what makes a “feminist film,” we can say it’s not, strictly speaking, feminist.

However, I’d argue that Mad Max: Fury Road contains more critique of patriarchy and entrenched inequality than critics or even some fans have given it credit for.

Yes, the villains are caricatures, or at least, they’re cartoonishly exaggerated – as everything in the movie is. The whole thing is basically a cartoon. But we don’t have to read the movie so literally. To say that a narrative must literally portray the dismantling of realistic social and economic systems is setting the bar too high. A message about social justice, like any message, can be conveyed symbolically or subtextually. Science fiction has always done that. Sometimes a flame-throwing guitar is NOT just a flame-throwing guitar. Well, OK. It’s just a flame-throwing guitar. But some of the other stuff has meaning.

Fury Road depicts a patriarchal society controlled by a small and very powerful elite. It’s not accidental that all the warlords in the movie are older white men. They even have ailments that make them each of them physically deformed and weak – Immortan Joe has visible abscesses all over his back and requires an apparatus to breathe – highlighting that their power doesn’t rely on their own physical strength. Their power is systemic. They control others through religion/ideology (promising the War Boys honor and entry to Valhalla) and hoarding of resources (most obviously water). The 1 percent, if you will, keep the rest of the population in line by forcing them to rely on whatever meager allowance of resources the warlords dole out. Men and boys are exploited for labor and as foot soldiers. Women are exploited for their sexual and reproductive capacities. No, it’s not subtle, but it’s not empty action movie nonsense either.

The narrative is driven (heh) by women exercising their agency. It’s easy to see the central plot as an old, sexist trope: rival characters battling over possession of damsels in distress. But Fury Road turns the trope on its head; it’s the damsels who engineer their own escape. “We are not things” is the memorable line, but their scrawled message, “Our babies will not grow up to be warlords,” is the key to understanding Fury Road’s critique of patriarchal systems. The “wives” want more than just escape from sexual slavery; they want to stop contributing to the oppressive systems around them. The repeated question, “Who killed the world?” implies a larger critique as well – it was a male-dominated society which created this apocalypse and men who are responsible for current conditions.

Another trope that gets turned on its head is the contrast between society and wilderness. Traditionally wilderness is understood as a dangerous place for women, who are too weak and vulnerable to withstand its dangers. They need the protection of society. But in Fury Road, society, i.e. The Citadel, is the dangerous place. The women experience relative safety only when they reach the wilderness. The Vuvalini, Furiosa’s matriarchal tribe, may struggle to survive in a barren wasteland, but they’re still better off than women living under the protection of a warlord, who protects them only from other men. Away from male-dominated society, they’re safe.

The most feminist yet least talked about aspect of the film might be Nux’s story. He starts out happily ready to die in glory on behalf of Immortan Joe, but he learns that there’s another way. When Capable discovers him hiding in the War Rig, she treats him with tenderness instead of vengefulness. Nux discovers something to live for, rather than something to die for. He finds a bit of the redemption Max and Furiosa are also seeking.

Ultimately, Furiosa’s rebellion isn’t just an escape or revenge fantasy; instead we see an exploited people liberated. So the film asserts the need to overturn oppressive systems, and depicts a whole society benefiting from feminism – men and women alike.

Of course, there are problems. Nux’s rejection of warrior ideology might be more powerful if he had been allowed to live. Instead, he simply dies for a better cause, and the movie misses the chance to affirm that death isn’t really glorious. Also the “wives” aren’t the developed characters they could and should be. The narrative revolves around them, yet they barely assert individual identities. It’s hard to accept the claim that they’re “not things,” when they’re beautiful but rather anonymous for most of the movie. The role of the Vuvalini is also a bit disappointing; they appear in the narrative, strong and capable, possessing nearly forgotten knowledge and values… only to die one by one. They might as well have been wearing red Star Trek shirts.

So maybe this isn’t a feminist movie? Fantasy violence probably doesn’t help dismantle patriarchy. It really doesn’t. But then again there is more to Fury Road than that. It offers more than a tough woman killing cartoon misogynist bad guys. There is a narrative about social structures and the nature of power.

OK. In the end, we’re not going to liberate anyone from oppression by driving fast and skeet shooting motorcycles. Action movies are not ever going to be a serious and meaningful way to talk about feminism, in the strictest sense. But perhaps we should differentiate between a feminist movie, and a movie feminists can really enjoy. Fury Road is definitely at least one of those two things.

Rebecca Cohen is the creator of the webcomic The Adventures of Gyno-Star, the world’s first (and possibly only) explicitly feminist superhero comic.

‘Ex Machina’: Scavenging for Parts in a Patriarchal World

For Ava is not naïve; she is about to enter a world of patriarchal capitalism, and in order to survive, she must take from other women, not give. The moment for collectivism is lost as Ava chooses to free herself as a whole woman, gorgeous and nubile.

Two men hanging in the ultimate man cave, drinking beers, talking about how “fucking amazing” the woman in question really is. One lifts weights, pounds liquor, and then detoxes for a few days. The other is invited to be the buddy, the wing man on a journey to encounter women. While watching Ex Machina, I couldn’t help feeling like I was watching a buddy pic like The Hangover–just some bros hanging in their crib, considering women. A few days into the week, a hot Asian woman appears out of nowhere, fulfilling their desires for food and–for Nathan–sex. Kyoko is the perfect woman: she doesn’t speak; she just serves.

But when Nathan and Caleb are discussing the woman of greater interest, Ava, they use coding jargon to analyze her language capabilities. It is not that they are interested in her for her brain; they are interested in her for her “brain,” if her artificial intelligence can pass the Turing Test and convince the men that she is a woman.

Ava looks like a girl child, a nymph. Viewers first see her silhouette, her breasts and ass covered with metal sheeting; otherwise, we can see right through her into her circuits. We watch her through the same glass through which Caleb will watch her. She is encapsulated in the fortress Nathan has made for her, a glass fortress that boasts cracks from unexplained incidents.

When Caleb, invited to visit the research facility as the winner of a (SPOILER–and this will be your last warning) constructed contest, first meets Ava, he is in awe of her language capabilities, the first baseline he uses to determine her viability as a “human.” She tells him, “I always knew how to speak,” then asking if that is odd. They have a heady-ish discussion of linguistics before he has to leave the session.

Caleb soon discovers that the only channel on his TV is the “spy on Ava” channel. At first he is disgusted, but it doesn’t take long for him to have it on while he is dressing. Ava–sweet, constructed, feeling–does not know she is being watched. Nathan takes Caleb on a tour of his workshop where he creates only female models. They spend most of the conversation marveling at her “brain,” the constructed machinery that gives her thought and feeling.

However, the week progresses, and quickly the talk turns away from her intelligence to whether or not she is fuckable after Ava asks Caleb if he is attracted to her. Caleb and Nathan sit next to each other to discuss her gender and sexuality, terms that they incorrectly elide. For men so interested in constructs, one would think they would get these two straight. From this point on, the film focuses on her body and its uses. In his brusque way, Nathan pronounces, “You bet she can fuck,” answering the question Caleb has been pondering but won’t ask. Nathan continues: “I programmed her to be heterosexual.” He tells Caleb that she has an “opening” with “sensors” that allows her to feel physical pleasure. He does not use the word vagina, eschewing her humanity–or questioned humanity–making it all about the hole that they can penetrate.

Meanwhile, Ava is using her body to create power surges that allow her to speak freely with Caleb about her desire to see the outside world. She would spend time on a street corner watching the humans interact with each other. Caleb is taken with becoming her hero. To him she is the damsel in distress; to Nathan she is the daughter. The former chivalrous, the latter paternalistic: both are complicit in her creation and entrapment. Caleb’s determination of her viability will do nothing to save Ava from Nathan’s desire to reboot and update her model.

And for this, they both must die.

Staring Down The Creator...And Enemy — Staring Down The Creator…And Enemy

Through a derring-do of masculinity, the men end up working against each other and orchestrating each other’s death, both at the hands of Ava and Kyoko, part of an A.I. army of sexy female models enclosed in Nathan’s room. Ava benefits from Kyoko’s quickness with her chef’s knife, deftly stabbed into Nathan’s back.

Ava benefits from Nathan’s diabolical need for privacy in his subterranean lair with computer-operated, hermetically sealed doors. Ava has no pity for her knight in shining armor now screaming in panic to be left to die. Those that have constructed her and desired her have been used–she is ready to go out into the world they have denied her. Caleb is not an innocent; he wants to save her so he can have her for himself. He wants her as a partner and lover; he is not simply interested in freeing her for the good of her humanity.

Ava then goes to the other “women.” I thought she would free them all in an act of feminist collectivity, a liberating moment for the women that have been enslaved in sexual service to Nathan in his lair where no other humans visit. He has surrounded himself with “yes”-women, all thin, gorgeous, naked in storage waiting for his needs to call them out.

But she doesn’t free them. Instead, she acts as a scavenger, taking parts from each woman to create herself. An arm from one, hair from a second, a pristine white dress from a third. For Ava is not naïve; she is about to enter a world of patriarchal capitalism, and in order to survive, she must take from other women, not give. The moment for collectivism is lost as Ava chooses to free herself as a whole woman, gorgeous and nubile. She leaves the other women behind, broken and lifeless in their pens. Her artificial intelligence has given her enough knowledge to understand that the world she is entering requires a denial of others’ needs; in that understanding, she is a perfect subject in the capitalist system, and her lack of humanity helps her disavow the compassion that gets in the way of such systems. Ava greets the helicopter meant to airlift Caleb back to his life; she wears stilettos and carries a purse, about to greet the world she has wished to enter, a trace of destroyed souls and “souls” left in the wake of her desire to survive.

‘Ex Machina’s Failure to Be Radical: Or How Ava Is the Anti-thesis of a Feminist Cyborg

Caleb has won a trip to spend time at Nathan’s research-lab/home. While there, Caleb is given the task of giving Ava (the lead robot) a Turing Test to determine if she can “pass” as human. During his stay, Caleb learns of another female robot, Kyoko, who is basically a sex slave for Nathan. Yes, that is right, the males are human, the females are (fuck) machines.

This guest post by Natalie Wilson previously appeared at Skirt Collective and is cross-posted with permission.

I am going to admit: Ex Machina profoundly disturbed me – so much so that at one point I had to leave the theatre and catch my breath. It is very rare for me to walk out of a film. Rarer still for me to walk out not because the film is horrible, but because it is so disturbing that it makes me physically nauseaous and emotionally weary.

The film, with only four characters, poses key questions about artificial intelligence, gender, and sexuality – yet, as noted in the Guardian review, “the guys keep their clothes on and the ‘women’ don’t.” The “guys” of the film are human – Nathan, an egotistical scientist with a god complex (hence the film’s title) and Caleb, a computer programmer who works for Nathan’s Internet search company.

Before seeing Ex Machina, I had high hopes it would be a movie that actually addressed sexism and females as sexualized in profoundly misogynistic ways, especially as the writer and director, Alex Garland, gave various interviews that made it sound as if the film was going to critique such matters. His claim that “Embodiment – having a body – seems to be imperative to consciousness, and we don’t have an example of something that has a consciousness that doesn’t also have a sexual component,” made me envision a film that would suggest alternative, more feminist models of sexuality – perhaps ones not based on power, jealousy, ownership, and control, but ones based on mutual pleasure, desire, and consent.

“…wouldn’t it be so much easier for the real humans (meaning male humans) if their lowly female counterparts could just be sexy in all the ways they desire, obedient, and easily modified, then upgraded or tossed away without fuss when they no longer ‘work.’”

Garland’s claim that “If you’re going to use a heterosexual male to test this consciousness, you would test it with something it could relate to. We have fetishised young women as objects of seduction, so in that respect, Ava is the ideal missile to fire” also gave me hope, given Garland specifically notes woman are fetishized and objectified. Alas, I should have instead latched onto his other suggestion – that Ava is no more than a “missile” that will be used to fire up human male sexuality.

Admittedly, the film does explore sexuality and gender in intriguing ways, but fails to explicitly condemn how the sex/gender paradigm is used as a tool of domination in profoundly deleterious ways. Instead, the film delivers the same message so many movies with female robots/replicants have – namely: wouldn’t it be so much easier for the real humans (meaning male humans) if their lowly female counterparts could just be sexy in all the ways they desire, obedient, and easily modified, then upgraded or tossed away without fuss when they no longer “work.”

Alicia Vikander is excellent in the role of Ava, and I don’t wish my repulsion towards the film to reflect badly on what an obviously talented actor she is. In fact, everyone ACTED the heck out of their roles. The film also had an amazing mis-en-scene, immersing viewers in Nathan’s technological man-cave replete with techno-gadgetry, minimalist design, and, yup, a closet full of female body parts, presumably “out of date” sex slave robots. Nathan’s hangout also has the handy ability to SEE everything, making it rival Hitchock’s vision of the predatory male gaze enacted in Rear Window.

Nathan (Oscar Isaac), as the lead scientist, is your garden variety, bearded intellectual. He is an alcoholic, mega-maniacal ego, with dark skin and hair, subtly cluing the audience to the fact he is a “bad guy” (yes, the film has problematic racial depictions too – not only is the “dark dude” the bad one, Kyoko, the sex slave, is Asian, while Ava is coded as normatively porn-star white).

Caleb, as the nubile male ingénue (with the requisite blonde hair and blue eyes), is a bit too innocent, too ready to fall in love with Ava, too reluctant to quell his male gaze.

On this note, did Ava’s body HAVE to be so sexualized and so transparent, forcing us to gaze inside of her along with Caleb, as if her body has no boundary? Or perhaps this is just the point – we can finally see INSIDE a woman’s body, and she is not that musty, smelly, hairy thing of so many nightmares (Freud’s included), not the vagina dentata or a giver/taker of life – no, she is built like a car of all things – and under her roof her parts sing and hum like a well oiled engine.

“Nathan has PROGRAMMED gender into her system, much the way our culture programs us each day to live within a world defined by a binary gender system.”

As the film continues, it forces the audience to be complicit in the covetous gazing Nathan and Caleb enact, a gaze that is linked to Ava’s sexualization. Indeed, Ava has been built to match Caleb’s porn preferences by Nathan, which prompts Caleb to ask, “why did you give her sexuality?” and “Did you program her to flirt with me?”

The suggestion is ultimately that Nathan gave her sexuality simply because he wanted to and he could (as a “male god/creator”). Garland’s remarks on the subject are telling: “If you have created a consciousness, you would want it to have the capacity for pleasurable relationships, so it doesn’t seem unreasonable that a machine have a sexual component. We wouldn’t demand it be removed from a human, so why a machine?” But, what Nathan/Garland don’t own up to is that they are the CREATORS – they are not REMOVING sexuality from their creations but CONSTRUCTING it in, and doing so in an incredibly heterosexist, misogynist way. (In the film, Nathan notes of Ava “in between her legs is a concentration of sensors”…WTF?)

As noted in a HuffPost review, “Ex Machina is a very smart movie…but it’s not immune to the everyday misogyny of our world.” Arguing that if robots have access to the history of internet searches of all humanity, with “all of its tropes, and all of its prejudices,” it does not make sense that Ava “chooses” to present as female, that when she makes her escape at the end of the film “It’s almost hard to imagine she wouldn’t have grabbed a dick on her way out into the world.” However, I would counter Ava does not have free choice – Nathan has PROGRAMMED gender into her system, much the way our culture programs us each day to live within a world defined by a binary gender system.

“….most films display extreme anxiety around the issue of female empowerment”

Though films about artificial intelligence have the possibility to deconstruct gender/sex norms, most films trade in stereotypes with those featuring female robots according to misogynist memes of women as sex-bots (Blade Runner, Cherry 2000, The Stepford Wives), destructive forces (Eve of Destruction, Lucy, Metropolis), or a combination of the two (Austin Powers). Even Wall-E promotes the idea good robots are male and constructs female robots as useful only in terms of how they can please males and/or be good “seed receptacles” for male (pro)creation (as noted in my review here). To be fair, male robots don’t fair that much better and are also depicted in stereotypically masculine ways (as discussed here).

There are a few exceptions to this stereotypical gendered script, however. For example, Star Wars’ C-3PO was modeled on the female robot from Metropolis, with breasts and hips removed, leading the Guardian reviewer to name him “the first transgender robot.”

Alas, as argued by scholar Sophie Mayer, most films display extreme anxiety around the issue of female empowerment, and as Mayer notes, within their narratives “these empowered women must be punished” so that a happy-patriarchal ending can ensue, or, as she puts it, “The resolution always assures us the status quo is going to be preserved.”

Sigh. When might we see a film that brings Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg to life – a feminist hybrid that eschews binaries; a creature that lives in a post-gender world? “This is the self,” as Haraway puts it, “feminists must code.” It is also the self film’s have – as of yet – failed to code. So come on feminist filmmakers, give us a female cyborg we can root for…

Natalie Wilson teaches women’s studies and literature at California State University, San Marcos. She is the author of Seduced by Twilight and blogs for Ms., Girl with Pen and Bitch Flicks.

‘Marnie’: What We’d Like To Forget About Old Hollywood

With all the talk of ’50 Shades of Grey’ in the past few weeks, boycotts and debates, and a planned re-release of the superior BDSM-romcom ‘Secretary,’ the film that has really been on my mind is ‘Marnie.’ The 1964 Hitchcock outing is about the capturing (through marriage) and breaking of a young, beautiful and damaged con artist, played by Tippi Hedren, the grandmother of ’50 Shades’ star Dakota Johnson. The cinematography is beautiful, the performances are captivating, but the story? Watching it, I keep expecting someone to jump out and scream that it was all a joke, that we weren’t expected to swallow this. Maybe it’s dated, but I want to believe that the relationship in ‘Marnie’ was recognized as horrific and abusive even then.

Written by Elizabeth Kiy.

With all the talk of 50 Shades of Grey in the past few weeks, boycotts and debates, and a planned re-release of the superior BDSM-romcom Secretary, the film that has really been on my mind is Marnie . Since I first saw it several years ago, I’m been intermittently perplexed by the film, a 1964 Hitchcock outing about the capturing (through marriage) and breaking of a young, beautiful and damaged con artist, played by Tippi Hedren , the grandmother of 50 Shades star Dakota Johnson. The cinematography is beautiful, the performances are captivating, but the story? Watching it, I keep expecting someone to jump out and scream that it was all a joke, that we weren’t expected to swallow this. Maybe it’s dated, but I want to believe that the relationship in Marnie was recognized as horrific and abusive even then.

Mark dominates Marnie and breaks her down to reveal her weakness

If you didn’t already think Alfred Hitchcock was a horror movie villain , Marnie sure makes this clear. For starters, James Bond himself, Sean Connery plays Mark Rutland, is misogynist and unrepentant rapist who is the movie’s hero. Yes, he’s the hero. A wealthy industrialist and armchair zoologist, who discovers the young woman who just robbed a business acquaintance and blackmails her into marrying him.

As a con artist, Marnie slips and out of identities and hair styles, though blonde is always the constant, the “real” her. The one constant presence in Marnie’s life is her mother, who lives in a poor area down by the docks of an unknown town. She acts as the breadwinner for her mother, painting her as “unnaturally” masculinized. One of the things she brings her mother is a fur coat, a typical gift given by a rich lover at the time.

While Hedren was being abused by Hitchcock off-screen, on-screen Mark finds his new wife is cold and disinterested in sex. In Hitchcock world, this must mean there is something wrong with her. She is after all, the classic ice blonde taken to extremes. She holds her head high and meets men’s gazes and pulls her skirt down over her knees if she feels she is being gawked at. She’s disgusted and afraid of the thought of Mark touching her and extolls her hatred and mistrust of men, which lends the film to queer readings.

He rapes her on their wedding night when she refuses to have sex with him. It is not at all ambiguous. She screams and tries to fight him off but he keeps going. It’s as explicit as it could be at the time. Never are we told that what Mark did was wrong, or that it makes him a bad person. Instead, we are meant to sympathize with his urges. He is a red-blooded American man, he can be patient about other things, can treat Marnie as an animal, a case study to be analyzed at arm’s length, but on his wedding night? Moreover, as he is presented as normal while Marnie is damaged, his actions are represented as markers of his psychological superiority. He know Marnie better than she knows herself, he can tell it’s what she wants even when she says no; the standard defense of the rapist, only we’re meant to take it seriously here. Even when Marnie attempts suicide the next morning, it’s portrayed as a symptom of the things that were already wrong with her, not a reaction to being victimized.

In married life, Mark continues to hold Marnie under this thumb. He tells her how to dress and act and forces her to attend parties and act as his supportive partner. She must live in his house, trapped like a captive animal and studied, by her husband, zoology or Freudian text in hand. Privately she screams how much she hates him, how much she wants to get away from him, but he owns her, both as a husband and blackmailer.

And though she puts up a strong act, she seems to need him. The slightest flash of the color red or crash of lightening send her into hysterics and Mark’s arms. She seems to get a sense of sexual release from riding her horse (a hamfisted Freudian touch) and it’s his death that finally breaks Marnie’s spirit, like she is indeed the wild horse in need of taming that Mark viewed her as.

Marnie is only truly happy with her horse

This all leads up to the final confrontation with Marnie’s mother, wherein Mark blames her for “ruining” Marnie. It begins when he literally drags her to her mother’s house, crying and weak from the earlier trauma and ends with the heavy-handed revelation that of repressed memories of a near sexual assault in her childhood. Hearing this, grown up Marnie regresses back to her childhood, a little girl crying for her mother’s love and leaning on her husband’s strong shoulder.

In the last scene they walk out into an uncertain future but it seems like things might be all right for these crazy kids. They’re ready to love each other. Mark is our hero, he’s fixed this girl and she can now have a normal sex life. She can be a wife, like a woman is supposed to be.

Marnie is forced to stand by Mark’s side as his society wife

Of course this is crazy and nauseating and its rightfully a lesser Hitchcock. But the film is beautiful and seductive, dressed up in Classic Hollywood glamour and its easy to be lulled into ideas of the unilateral superiority and wholesomeness of old films. But not everything a great director touches turns to gold. For all the ills of contemporary filmmaking and modern culture, at least you couldn’t make a film like Marnie anymore.

At least, I hope so.

Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and journalist living in Toronto, Ontario.

You May Meet Alex and Hedy As You Progress Through Life

Though we might sympathize, mostly we reflect on them, after escaping them, with awe and terror. They are not good. They are not our lovers nor our friends; they do not have our best interests at heart.

This is a guest post by Stephanie Brown.

“‘I won’t be ignored, Dan.'”

As a new friend and I got to know each other during the past couple of years, this became our shorthand joke. We’d say it when we worried we were calling or texting too often. We used that line because the character Alex Forrest, who says the line (actually “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan!”) in the film Fatal Attraction is the symbol for a person who doesn’t take a hint, let alone an outright declaration that a person doesn’t want an involvement. She’s a person who becomes a stalker because she’s delusions about her relationship with a married man. She becomes as destructive and vengeful as a witch in a fairy tale.

No one wants to be the person who has no common sense about other people. No one wants to be Alex Forrest, or Hedra “Hedy” Carlson in Single White Female, another film that gave us a character so needy and envious, she puts Snow White’s stepmother to shame. When someone “goes all Single White Female” on you, you know you’re dealing with someone who can suck the life out of you by copying your moves and destroying you in the process. Viewers, like the victims who surround an evil witch in a fairy tale, learn that it’s almost impossible to outwit these two, as their nasty feelings manifest into destructive actions, but outwit them we must.

Both films are misogynistic. They depict women we hate and would hate to be like. If we knew more about them we’d probably feel compassion for what made them so evil–but like figures in fairy tales, the backstory is irrelevant to the action and to the victims facing their wrath. Alex and Hedy are symbols for those hatable people who are normal-on-the-surface-but-crazy-underneath. They are hatable because they are impossible to like once you get to know them. Their big, destructive personalities can be glimpsed in people we know, as we can glimpse Snow White and her stepmother, Cinderella, and her sisters, or Jack-in-the-Beanstalk’s father-son rivalry in families we know. Male screenwriters and directors developed these characters, and they can be dismissed as depictions of exaggerated, baseless male fears. But hatable women exist, be they one’s partner, relative, or friend. Like fairytale archetypes, Alex and Hedy harken back to significant relationships–and by being sort of preposterous they are kept at a safe remove. Alex is not our own wife or nightmare ex, she is only a one-night stand who lied to us and herself about having sex with no strings attached. Hedy is not the mother, sister or co-worker who envies us, she is someone we randomly met to share expenses on an apartment. We can displace our hatred on the fictional character, while we might not be able to admit hatred for those we are close to due to fate or necessity.

I saw Fatal Attraction by myself when I was living by myself, an SFW (single white female, in the shorthand of classified seeking-roommate ads of the day) in Oakland, Calif. The theater was packed and the audience’s shout-outs to the screen funny and raucous as Alex’s behavior became increasingly bizarre.

By the climax–where she is shot in the bathtub by the wife, Beth Gallagher–I was laughing out loud. The movie seemed ludicrous to me. Soon after seeing it, I tuned into the end of a radio show. The person speaking was animated about her subject, the movie Fatal Attraction, which she said was a hot conversation topic between men and women because the story reflected anxieties about feminism and working women. To me it seemed to be a cautionary tale for men about how the wages of sin (adultery) can lead them to ruin, but it was hard for me to believe that a person like Alex could even exist. But then, I lived alone (and was lonely) and had no one to really talk to about the movie, whether it was ludicrous or should be taken seriously, or about feminism or anything else.

What I did know about living alone was that it might make you go crazy. You forget how much you have been with your own thoughts when you finally talk to someone. Not having a romantic partner made me unhappy and disappointed with life, which are probably the feelings Alex and Hedy had, being alone in the world, looking for a connection. Why they did not have connections is only hinted at, and we can only guess why. I was in my 20s when I saw these films, the time of life when most people have temporary living arrangements, like the characters in Single White Female. I had lived in five different places by the time I was 26. You took chances on roommates and places and living alone in safe or unsafe neighborhoods. I had lived anonymously in two large cities. Like city dwellers Dan and Allie, in a city one has to take a person at her word when looking for a living arrangement or when meeting in the workplace. You don’t have a small town’s generational history to inform you that someone has been damaged by their childhood or was outcast by everyone. That’s also the reason why the city appeals to people–it’s a place to reinvent oneself, where no one really knows you, and where most relationships are friendly but safely superficial. This is the same in the large workplace, where one can observe another’s eccentric or charming or moody behavior at a distance. You only know what someone is really like by working closely with them. It’s amazing how personality deficits and disorders are revealed when one is in daily contact with someone else in the workplace. In all cases, your relationships are left mostly to chance.

At that time I still kept in touch with childhood friends and still felt close to them. Though we only saw each other a few times a year, we talked on the phone for hours sometimes, at long-distance expense, which I budgeted for; it felt so necessary to me. However, every time we got together I could feel us drifting apart.

The friend I was closest to called me soon after Fatal Attraction was released, and asked me what I thought of it. It had really struck a chord with her. She saw it by herself and then took her boyfriend to see it, because she wanted him to see her resemblance to Alex; she thought it would help him understand her better. In particular, the scene where Alex sits alone in her apartment and turns the light on and off is what she wanted him to see. She wanted him to understand how she felt–I suppose how she felt when she felt desperate? They were not in a cheating relationship and were not married, but she related to the character’s personality. I don’t remember if I told her this, but I found that very disturbing. I could not imagine relating to Alex at all, and I still don’t. Had I not known her for as long as I had, I would have dropped the friendship then and there. As it was, our friendship did not last and for me is was because of coming behaviors that did indeed evoke Alex’s. I also knew by that time that I ought not to live alone with few connections. It might make me into an Alex or a Hedy. I also knew that I had the capacity to be like Allie or Dan, using people and expecting them to not care, and I knew I had experienced envy from others, and I did not like how it felt.

These films were released within a few years of each other: Fatal Attraction in 1987, Single White Female in 1992. They are sometimes seen as mirrors of the era, especially as responses to ascending feminism. But to me, feminism had already ascended and was accepted–I suppose I was naive, but to me they were about women with damaged psyches whose gigantic wells of neediness and envy were so mythic they created tragedies because they did not know how to do anything else. In the 30 years or so since these films were released, I’ve come to know many women like both of these women–not that they’ve come to bloody conclusions, but they have created nightmares, migraines and heart attacks, for instance, as well as fear and anxiety and frustration. I wish we had had the characters’ back stories in the films. In the years since, I’ve become fascinated by what breaks people and makes them behave in such ways. I have learned compassion for them while still keeping them at arms’ length. The stories’ plots, however, depend upon us identifying with Dan in Fatal Attraction and Allie in Single White Female. It is possible to find yourself at a point in life where you must obtain a restraining order against someone. At that point, it is not hard to identify with these victims.

People like Alex and Hedy are people who feel dead and empty and hopeless; they can’t be helped, they push too hard, they want the impossible and don’t give up when they should. Someone who seems fun and lovely at first but who is impossible once the mask is taken off her face. We saw a few glimpses of Alex’s scrapbook in the film, but were not given enough to speculate about her background or what made her the way she was. We don’t know why they lack connections with others.

But maybe that is beside the point: the Alexes and Hedys I’ve known have few connections because everyone has left them behind and wants nothing to do with them. No one can stand them for very long. It’s hard to believe, because when you meet them, they are friendly and fun and have good heads on their shoulders. But after a while the mask slips and one finds oneself growing annoyed at giving the same advice to their requests for advice, or hearing the same complaints about the same person again and again, or finding out something that makes the hair stand up at the back of your neck: that the person was let go from a job because, you’re now told, the principal of the school did not understand how to discipline kids properly, the way she did. When your work acquaintance becomes your boss and you discover she yells and screams until you feel like you are living with an abusive mother in a tiny house where you are never fed or looked after, you know why she has gotten stuck at this particular rung in their career, and why you are likely to pass her as she drifts downward. People like her fake it by using buzzwords and speaking aggressively and sounding smart, while there is no substance to back it up. To mask their incompetence, they need to steal your ideas, block your ideas, exhaust your ears, or take on your mannerisms and demeanor because they see how others have a positive response.

Fairytales tell us how to make practical choices when faced with another’s envy or wrath. Children are instructed on what to do when faced with Snow White’s envy (leave home) or Cinderella’s sisters (wait it out–they will destroy themselves) or how to fell a jealous father-giant (be clever and nimble and you will cut him down eventually). There are people who wish us ill and mean us harm. There are people so envious and angry of those around them (usually those who are competent, gifted or kindhearted) that their satisfaction comes from seeing the envied fail and flail. As Jeanette Winterson wrote of her mother in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, a book that uses fairytales tropes as a way to understand a destructive, cold mother: “She filled the phone box. She was out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable. She loomed up. She expanded. Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself.” [1]

When we’ve escaped from an Alex or Hedy, we can look back and see how someone who destroys others is sad or desperate or lonely or feels small. I think Winterson is right–destructive women loom large, change size, extend themselves by loud voice, by taking things from you, by holding weapons because they feel small and overlooked. Though we might sympathize, mostly we reflect on them, after escaping them, with awe and terror. They are not good. They are not our lovers nor our friends; they do not have our best interests at heart.

Because I’ve known them, I value my new friend all the more, the one with whom I can use a shorthand joke from Fatal Attraction. She also has known these kinds of people, who actually may be men or women.

1. Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, p. 2-3. New York: Knopf, 2011.

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. She’s published work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry series. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in 2001 and a Breadloaf Fellowship in 2009. She has taught at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California.

‘MasterChef’ and Internalized Misogyny

Examining my sexist reaction to this season of ‘MasterChef’ made me realize the pervasive role of gender expectations in the series. ‘MasterChef’ distinguishes itself from other cooking reality competition shows by focusing on “home cooks” without any formal training.

This repost by Robin Hitchcock appears as part of our theme week on Reality TV.

Being a feminist can be hard, like when it interferes with my god-given right to irrationally hate reality TV contestants. The “love-to-hate” feeling is basically the entire point of watching reality television. There is no room for guilty consciences. And yet, this past season of MasterChef USA forced me and my partner to wrestle with why we were hating on our least favorite contestants, because the obvious answer was that we’re sexist jerks.

Contestants from Season 5 of 'MasterChef USA' make shocked faces. — Contestants from Season 5 of *MasterChef USA* make shocked faces.

Examining my sexist reaction to this season of MasterChef made me realize the pervasive role of gender expectations in the series. MasterChef distinguishes itself from other cooking reality competition shows by focusing on “home cooks” without any formal training. Between traditional gendered work divisions regarding who cooks at home (somehow persisting even in the era of the “foodie”), and the rampant sexism of the professional culinary industry, the line between “home cooks” and “chefs” is undeniably gendered.

But the MasterChef producers have done their best to obscure this dynamic: there are a roughly equal number of male and female contestants at the start of each series; and over five seasons, the collective male/female breakdown between the top ten, top five, and top three contestants stays close to 50-50 (26-24 women-to-men in the top ten, 12-13 in the top five, and 8-7 in the top three). This steady equality might be the result of some producer meddling, but MasterChef contestants are never explicitly separated into gender ranks (whereas on the long-running Hell’s Kitchen, also hosted by Gordon Ramsay, has a “boys team” and “girls team” for the bulk of each season, but not necessarily a steady rate of loss from each side as one team is generally made safe from elimination in each episode).

'MasterChef' season 5's top three (from left): Courtney, Leslie, and Elizabeth — *MasterChef* season 5’s top three (from left): Courtney, Leslie, and Elizabeth

This hasn’t stopped the MasterChef contestants from breaking into gendered ranks. A recurring theme is for male contestants to look down on creating desserts and baking as lesser talents, and to dismiss their female competitors’ successes in those challenges. The quintessential example is the first-season elimination of would-be front-runner Sharone, a cocksure Finance Dude, by Whitney, the Personification of Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice, in a challenge to bake a chocolate souffle. Sharone’s attempts to “elevate the dish” (the second most liver-damaging item on the MasterChef drinking game, after Gordon Ramsay using “most amazing” to describe an ingredient) with sea salt backfired, and Whitney’s straightforward but perfectly executed souffle carried her forward to become the first US MasterChef winner. In his exit interview, Sharone expressed lament that “the pastry princess” had the chance to knock him from the competition in a baking challenge.

Season 1's "Pastry Princess" Whitney — Season 1’s “Pastry Princess” Whitney

The High Cuisine Pretenders of MasterChef, who scoff at “rustic” challenges to make comfort food and awkwardly attempt molecular gastronomy, have been nearly exclusively male contestants. They are not there to be crowned “the best home cook in America,” they are there to be discovered as culinary geniuses. These guys usually flame out before the top 10. But notably, even the more grounded male competitors usually say they will use their winnings to open a restaurant, while the women in the competition often focus on the opportunity of the winner’s published cookbook, and see the $250,000 prize as a financial break rather than a seed investment.

The “this will change my life” reality TV cliche applies neatly to the MasterChef Season 5 HitchDied Hateoff. My most-hated contestant, season-winner Courtney, leaned on this trope with all her weight. My husband’s most-hated contestant, Leslie (second-runner up), was notably privileged and “didn’t need” the winnings.

Man-who-looks-naked-without-a-yacht-under-him Leslie — Leslie, no doubt dreaming of his yacht

But this is not just a matter of haves and have-nots, because of what Courtney and Leslie each do for a living. Leslie is a stay-at-home father with a very successful wife. Or, as fellow contestant Cutter put it, “an ex-beautician house bitch.”

Courtney, per her talking head caption, is an aerial dancer. But in her own words, she frames her work as the desperate choice of a woman struggling to make ends meet: “I’ve done things I’m not proud of. No being able to pay my rent, I made the difficult, embarrassing decision to work in a gentleman’s club.”

Courtney shown with her job title, "aerial dancer" — Courtney shown with her job title, aerial dancer

And so the HitchDied Hate-off for MasterChef Season 5 became mired in dueling accusations of antifeminism. Collin would insist it is not that Leslie is a metrosexual stay-at-home dad that makes him unlikable, but that he’s haughty phony. I would insist that I don’t judge Courtney for her job, just her attitude about it. (Neither of us could get away with saying we hate them for being untalented chefs or cruel competitors, they both clearly deserved their success on the show.)

Runner-up Elizabeth says "if Courtney wins this... I will stab kittens" — Runner-up Elizabeth says, “If Courtney wins this… I’m going to stab kittens”

But I also made fun of Courtney for her aggressively performed femininity (her kitchen uniform is poufy dresses and towering heels) and breathy baby voice, and I can’t deny the sexism in finding these “girly” traits annoying. Especially because I’m a big fan of poufy dresses myself, and might wear towering heels if I weren’t so clumsy. (I thought maybe the heels were to “keep in shape for work,” but aerial dancers perform barefoot, right?) MasterChef‘s narrative didn’t let me feel alone in my hate: other female contestants (including runner-up Elizabeth) complained in their talking heads that Courtney benefited from favoritism from the judges, something we never heard when former Miss Delaware Jennifer came out on top of season 2. So why is Courtney so specially hate-able? Do we hate her because she’s beautiful? Do we hate her because she does sex work? Do we hate her because she’s a girly girl? Is there some other answer here that doesn’t make me a bad feminist for hating Courtney?

Gif of camera zooming in on Courtney's glittering high heels — Gif of camera zooming in on Courtney’s glittering high heels

And is my internalized misogyny to blame, or the MasterChef producers for exploiting it? I couldn’t tell you what any of the other contestants in four seasons of MasterChef wore on their feet, because they didn’t cut ShoeCam every time they walked their dish to the judges. Judge Joe Bastianich bizarrely wears running shoes with his super fancy suits, and I think that took me three seasons to notice. But we saw more of Courtney’s shoes than we saw of some contestant’s faces. It seemed like a sneaky way for the producers to remind us “Courtney is a stripper!” in between her self-shaming confessions, because reality TV producers would see a woman being “saved” from sex work the greatest possible form of the “this will change my life” narrative.

So it goes. Courtney gets her trophy and cookbook, the producers get their “provocative” storyline, Leslie probably has enough money to do whatever he wants anyway, and the HitchDieds will continue irrationally hating reality show contestants despite our feminist misgivings.

Have you ever hated-to-hate a reality TV contestant? Have you caught yourself hating people on TV for sexist reasons?

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town and slightly-better-than-mediocre home cook.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Suck

So, you just saw a terrible movie and you want to tell the world about it – not so fast. How we frame our discussions about sucky movies depends on who’s listening, and whether we’ve got common ground.

Written by Katherine Murray.

There’s no such thing as a movie that’s universally hated, or a movie that’s universally loved. No matter how awful something is, there’s always somebody who likes it and, no matter how wonderful something is, there’s always somebody who thinks it’s garbage – that is the wondrous variety of human taste.

That said, if there’s one movie that almost everyone agrees is bad, it’s Neil LaBute’s 2006 re-make of The Wicker Man.

Starring Nicholas Cage at his Nicholas Cage-iest, The Wicker Man is a two-hour exercise in casual misogyny, featuring a confusing and unsuspenseful plot. It’s so bad that the YouTube videos designed to make fun of it literally do nothing but show scenes from the movie, exactly as they played out.

It isn’t hard to find people who agree that The Wicker Man was terrible, and it isn’t hard to find people who agree that it was misogynist – what’s weird is that discussions of misogyny in the film usually begin and end with the statement, “Nicholas Cage dresses up as a bear and punches women in the face.” And, while that is entirely terrible on multiple levels, it’s not the most offensive thing about the movie. The most offensive thing about the movie is that it takes for granted that there’s something disturbing and sinister about women who don’t take orders from men.

Billed as a horror story, The Wicker Man follows a detective who’s investigating a case outside his jurisdiction. That means that, when he travels to the remote community where the mystery’s taking place, he doesn’t have the power to make any of the citizens of that community – who are predominantly female – cooperate with him. Instead of adjusting his strategy and approaching them in a friendlier way, he starts off by screaming at everyone he meets, and then acts surprised when they don’t want to help him. Yet, the fact that the female characters recoil from him rather than scrambling to follow his orders is treated, by the movie, as though it’s a sign that Something Is Wrong.

The movie also features a large number of sequences where Nicholas Cage asks a woman a direct question, and the woman a) gives a vague answer that doesn’t help, b) answers with a total non-sequitur, or c) pretends not to understand what he’s talking about in a deliberate attempt to make him feel crazy. In other words, it’s just like talking to your wife – please, take my wife!

At the very end of the movie, when All Is Revealed, it turns out that Nicholas Cage’s ex-girlfriend purposely got pregnant so that she could guilt him into taking an interest in the welfare of their child, and use that as leverage to lure him to the freaky matriarchy she lives in, so that she and her womyn friends could sacrifice him to their pagan god, ‘cause women be bitches like that.

There’s no shortage of angles to take when you’re discussing the misogyny in this film, but the one that seems to resonate most with mainstream audiences is, “Nicholas Cage dresses up like a bear and punches women in the face” – which he does, for the entire final act – because we have achieved a state of gender-awareness in our culture where dressing up as a bear and punching women in the face is almost universally seen as a bad thing to do. Presenting a worldview in which powerful women are inherently threatening, women’s reasoning ability is suspect, and women use sex and pregnancy as a way to trap and manipulate men is actually more misogynist to me than having a guy dress up like a bear and punch women in the face, but that puts me out of step with the general discussion.

In other words, it’s really easy to get buy-in for the idea that The Wicker Man sucks, but we might not be adding much to the discussion of misogyny when we do that.

In fact, the truth is that I find myself not wanting to argue about exactly why this movie is misogynist, because I’m afraid that, if I start disturbing the soil around that one, I’ll quickly uncover the truth that most people don’t understand that misogyny is more than punching someone in the face. I’m afraid I’ll discover that most people hate this movie because it offends their sense that men should be chivalrous toward women – that they would be totally fine with everything else, if only he didn’t dress up like a bear and start punching.

I’m also afraid that the only reason people are really willing to criticize the content of The Wicker Man is because it’s also poorly made from a technical standpoint. If they were enjoying themselves more – if it were a little better-looking, and, technically, more well-crafted, I’m not sure it would be so easy to toss out this level of scorn.

Sin City is a film that is technically well made (so, one step up from The Wicker Man) and still completely blatant in its misogyny (with racism added to spice things up). I can tell you from personal experience that it’s a lot harder to have a conversation about why you hate Sin City than it is to make fun of The Wicker Man.

The first thing that Sin City’s defenders will tell you is that it is hateful on purpose (as though doing it on purpose makes it better). Frank Miller and the movie are imitating film noir – that genre where dames were dames and the hero was a hard-luck, working class guy who was awesome at bare-knuckle boxing, and gay people arrived in a cloud of evil smoke. I get that that’s on purpose, but all it means is that Sin City did a really good job of mimicking something sexist. If it’s not challenging, or examining, or interrogating the sexist thing in any way, then I need another reason for why someone thought that was a good idea.

The problem with criticizing Sin City is that it gets us into a discussion about whether a work of art can be both technically proficient and fundamentally unworthy in some other way. In other words, it gets us into a discussion of what we mean when we say a movie is “good.” Given the history of moral censorship in the United States and Canada, people are rightly cautious of the idea that we should declare things good or bad based on whether or not we agree with their values. At the same time, completely removing yourself from the meaning of a movie, or the ideas it’s trying to express, and focussing just on whether the camera was in the right place, and the pixels were coloured correctly, seems to be missing the point.

Sin City is a staggering technical achievement, and the tone I use when I criticize it is different because of that. It’s not like The Wicker Man, where you can just write it off, and be satisfied that everyone agrees with the broad-stroke message, “This movie was totally bad.” People have passionate feelings about whether or not it’s possible for a misogynist story to be good if it’s also well-executed. They have passionate feelings about whether it’s even appropriate to consider a story’s misogyny (or racism, or homophobia, or other ideological content) in rendering a verdict about it. The truth is, philosophically, I don’t know if it should be possible for a misogynist movie to be “good” – but I know that I can’t quite hear myself saying, “I found this completely hateful and, oh my god, it was the best!”

Just to be clear, for anyone who doesn’t remember the film, Sin City is about three tough, underworld men who interact with subservient women – mostly prostitutes and exotic dancers. The women have no power, no ability to look after themselves, no ability to make decisions – whenever they try to act, they just make things worse. The Black one is “wild” and she thinks it’s sexy when a guy hits her in the face. The Asian one doesn’t talk and carries samurai swords. The one who’s a stripper is told that she’s “strong” because she can really take a beating without screaming or crying about it. All of the women are sexually available to the men at the centre of the story. At one point, the prostitutes tie up one of the men, and it seems like they have the upper hand, but he reveals that he could have escaped at any time and was just humouring them.

It is horrible.

And yet, unpacking the horribleness of Sin City requires a deftness and care that isn’t required for The Wicker Man. You don’t have the automatic buy-in that comes from Nicholas Cage in a bear suit. You have to start talking about what you mean when you say something’s “good.” Imagine how difficult it would be if the misogyny were just a shade less obvious.

Gone Girl is the reason I’m writing this post because, holy shit, it is hard to talk about Gone Girl.

Megan Kearns did an admirable job of explaining what’s wrong with this movie, and I won’t re-tread the same criticisms, but my reaction, watching it opening weekend, was one of total shock. I could not believe the dedication with which this script was trying to score misogynist bingo. Like, I thought it was written by an MRA hate group. The overriding message, intentionally or not, is that, when a woman says a man attacked her, you should never, ever believe her, because it’s probably part of a nefarious scheme she cooked up just to get revenge on him for something, and women are crazy like that.

Unfortunately, we already live in a world where, every time a woman says a man attacked her, a thousand people who don’t even know her rush forward to call her a liar. We live in a world where guys I actually know said this Jian Ghomeshi stuff was probably a lie before any of us even knew what it was. We live in a world where one of the same guys said that whether you need a girl’s permission to punch her in the face during sex is “kind of” a murky issue (it’s not).

Watching Gone Girl spin out a misogynist fever dream about the lying liars we call women was unsettling enough, but a cursory search of the internet also revealed that this has been a longstanding argument since the novel came out, and that things seem to have settled in a place where it’s not cool to be annoyed by this story. In fact, trying to have a conversation about why you don’t like Gone Girl is like walking through a mine field that calls you a misandrist bitch. Don’t you believe that some men are trapped in abusive relationships? Don’t you believe that some women lie about rape? Don’t you think that people manipulate each other sometimes? Or can you just not handle the idea that any woman in a movie isn’t perfect? Does every woman in every movie that you deign to like have to be a role model? Can you handle the idea that some women aren’t very nice?

Honestly, it just makes me more entrenched in my original assessment that this wasn’t a very good movie.

Gone Girl is, I think, less well-made than Sin City, but worlds beyond The Wicker Man. What makes it difficult to talk about is that the problems with the story – as I’m choosing to call them – are much less concrete than dressing up like a bear and punching someone in the face. In order to talk about Gone Girl we have to talk about the much more abstract question of whether it seems appropriate, given the current political climate, and the rate of violence against women, and the difficulty women have in being believed when they report being assaulted by men – in that climate, do you think it’s appropriate, or do you think it necessarily constitutes a hostile act, to tell a story where the moral is that women are crazy liars and no one should ever believe them?

That’s harder to deal with than Nicholas Cage in a bear suit.

I don’t know the proper way to talk about movies that suck – or the proper way to determine whether they suck at all – but the answer might be that, instead of deciding whether or not something sucks, or how many stars it should have on a scale of one to five, we should talk about movies not as wholes to be judged, but collections of various elements, some of which are great (or fine) and some of which are problematic.

Don’t get me wrong – I love to say “suck,” and I doubt that I’m going to stop – but it occurs to me that I’m less prepared to argue for why any of these movies sucked than I am to argue for why I found particular elements troubling. I think that might be what I’m talking about, when I talk about suck. And I think I might be more eloquent, if I paid more attention to that.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Because Being Female is Frightening Enough: #YesAllWomen and ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’

In the film a young girl, Emily Rose, perishes following a protracted period of “attack” by demons while under the protective care of Father Moore, a Catholic priest. Female attorney Erin Bruner is chosen to defend Moore against charges of negligent homicide in Emily’s death. Through the two’s connection to the girl throughout the film, each undergoes what I’ve called here a “conversion experience,” as they learn more about the possibility that demons really do exist—demons that can be read to correspond to the challenges that women face in culture every day. Even before the advent of #YesAllWomen, a film like ‘The Exorcism of Emily Rose’ shows us how to overcome skepticism and create a connected community of individuals committed to sharing troublesome experiences in the service of awareness and activism.

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Demon and Spirit Possession.

Elliot Rodger’s killing spree in Isla Vista, California in May of 2014, incited much controversy, as did the Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen, which subsequently emerged as a forum for women to share experiences of sexism and misogyny in everyday life. Yet, attitudes of skepticism persisted: many Twitter users seemed resistant to the idea that ALL women, at one time or another, experienced circumstances and situations that made life difficult, if not downright annoying or even unbearable.

What’s frightening is that some of the most prevalent types of experiences women reported using the hashtag could be considered normal, everyday occurrences. But female Twitter users describe these moments as uncomfortable, and sometimes terrifying. Perhaps this is why it seems useful to examine the hashtag within the context of the horror film, particularly possession films, which tend to emphasize women’s bodies being acted upon by external forces. The use of the supernatural—specifically, the presence of demons— in Scott Derrickson’s The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) can be illustrative of the horror of #YesAllWomen’s sexist experiences, and the skepticism with which they are sometimes met. The film’s unique combination of courtroom drama and horror film emphasizes its investment in skepticism and seems to allow the film to ask: how can we, as viewers, ever really believe this might be “based on a true story”?

In the film a young girl, Emily Rose, perishes following a protracted period of “attack” by demons while under the protective care of Father Moore, a Catholic priest. Female attorney Erin Bruner is chosen to defend Moore against charges of negligent homicide in Emily’s death. Through the two’s connection to the girl throughout the film, each undergoes what I’ve called here a “conversion experience,” as they learn more about the possibility that demons really do exist—demons that can be read to correspond to the challenges that women face in culture every day. Even before the advent of #YesAllWomen, a film like The Exorcism of Emily Rose shows us how to overcome skepticism and create a connected community of individuals committed to sharing troublesome experiences in the service of awareness and activism.

Skepticism in possession films, or films about [usually female] mental instability certainly isn’t unusual. One of the best examples may come from classical Hollywood, in the form of George Cukor’s 1944 classic, Gaslight, wherein the heroine is convinced by her con-artist husband that she is going crazy, when in fact he is manipulating her environment. Bitch Flicks guest writer Elizabeth Brooks usefully points out that possession films, specifically, often make a point of “gas lighting” female protagonists. While audience members may begin to share the heroine’s perceptions and doubts about her reality, often other characters in possession films are skeptical: the parish priest, the victim’s family, boyfriend, sister, you name it. Emily Rose and Erin Bruner exemplify an oppressive truth: that violence, misogyny, and sexism experienced by one woman—represented in the film as demonic attacks on Emily—initially divides these two women from any sort of communication concerning those issues. In fact, in the film the two never meet. By the end of the movie, however, Erin’s own trials have linked her physically and emotionally with Emily via several terrifying incidents.

The first occurrence of otherworldly forces and their attack on Emily look a lot like a rape. Emily is alone in her dorm room at night, smells something burning, and goes to check it out. We see Emily alone at the end of the long hallway, and we’re startled along with her when a door slams at the end of the corridor; she latches it and returns to her room. She gets back into bed, and suddenly her blankets begin to slip off. Indentations appear in her mattress on either side of her body, and she is forced down onto her back. Her night-shirt is slowly lifted up toward her midriff. As she tries to force it back down, she grapples with an invisible assailant, but her hands are forced to her sides. Then, suddenly the weight is lifted, and she vaults out of bed and onto the floor, screaming. It reads like a rape to me, even if a spiritually-coded one. Weirdly, no one on screen involved with Emily’s case voices this opinion as a possibility. Instead, the lawyers, doctors, and other professionals involved in Emily’s case collectively move right from superstition and spiritual attacks to illegal drugs to epilepsy and psychosis.

The film vacillates between having viewers believe that Emily’s trials are the machinations of the spirit world, and entertaining the possibility that Emily may be psychotic and epileptic. This balance alone, along with the combination of horror film tropes with courtroom drama, makes the film unusual. Additionally, a wide range of female types populate the margins of this film, leaving viewers with perhaps an atypically rich tapestry of female experience. We see a female judge, and a madam fore-woman of the jury. We see Emily’s traditional, devout housewife mom, her encouraging and faithful sister, the female family doctor, and a female anthropologist expert witness. Professional women and homemakers; average citizens and hopeful youth, even with a reasonable range of representation of racial and ethnic backgrounds. In other words, the population of #YesAllWomen in a microcosm, all represented in a world with flaws Emily’s possession calls stark attention to.

Dr. Briggs, a medical expert witness for the prosecution, provides a glaring example. While under cross-examination, he asserts that he would have tranquilized Emily, force-fed her, and administered electro-shock treatment (against her will if necessary) to save her life. Certainly such a course of action would have completely deprived Emily of dominion over her own body—as the “demons” do. “Possession” in this film is not only a spiritual, but physical term: Emily’s welfare and control over her own treatment is repeatedly assaulted by the prosecution and the (usually male) representatives of the medical community. Though Emily aims to become an educated, professional woman herself, her choices are frequently disparaged, and anyone who supports them—her father and Father Moore specifically, are—forgive the pun—demonized.

Father Moore allows Emily to reject the traditional, patriarchal view that medical illness must be treated with drugs and doctors. Additionally, he chronicles her resistance to these oppressions in the form of a tape of the exorcism, which eventually finds its way to Erin. This archive serves as evidence of Emily’s experience that can be shared with a wider community, making it more difficult to refute. Like Twitter archives, Father Moore attempts to preserve and disseminate proof of Emily’s attacks, just as #YesAllWomen serves as proof of the multitude of challenges women face in everyday existence.

To rebut the over-zealous doctor witness and his extreme stance on Emily’s treatment, Erin locates an anthropologist studying contemporary cases of demon possession in the third world. Erin believes this woman may “see possession for what it really is. Maybe we’ve taught ourselves not to see it. Maybe we should try to validate the alternative.” This alternative is learning to see Emily’s plight as what Dr. Sadhira Adani calls a “basic human experience,” which we might read as the situations and circumstances of #YesAllWomen.

Sadhira Adani believes Emily is “hypersensitive,” which we may see as a positive framing of Emily’s resistance or sensitivity to the flaws of patriarchal culture. In other words, Emily’s “problem” is NOT hysteria, psychosis, or epilepsy, but rather clear vision. Further, while it’s certainly a production decision not to use extensive special effects in the film, a lack of effects may also indicate that what happens to Emily is all the more “realistic.” Without what reviewer Liese Spencer calls “Linda Blair fright makeup” Emily’s plight is more relatable to the average audience member—especially female audience members who might more readily pick up on the alignment of Emily’s possession with a more universal women’s issue.

Two sequences from the film tie Erin to Emily through their experiences of fear. After learning that a man Erin previously helped to acquit has killed again, she rushes into a restaurant ladies’ room to compose herself. Visual parallels to Emily’s rape scene abound: the doors of the stalls echo the dormitory doors lining Emily’s hallway, and square mirrors mimic the hallway’s bulletin boards. As Erin splashes her face with water, we hear another door slam—a woman emerges from a stall to check her makeup.

At Erin’s home, the clocks stop, she smells something burning, lights go out when she tries to investigate, she breaks a glass, and finally the door to her apartment seems to open on its own. The significance of the open door should not be missed: like the unlatched door in Emily’s first attack—which this scene also closely mimics—it could mean an intruder has entered Erin’s apartment, intending her harm. She is alone, as Emily was.

Finally, as Erin recounts her experience of finding a locket to Father Moore, she describes a moment after these events which seems to push her to the realization that she and Emily may be more connected than Erin initially imagines.

We see Erin in flashback as she recounts the experience of finding the locket. She considers what it might mean if “demons really do exist.” But just then she finds the locket on the sidewalk, coincidentally inscribed with her own initials. At this moment, she does not feel alone. Instead, she says, it made her feel as if “no matter what mistakes I’d made in the past, at that moment, I was exactly where I was meant to be; like I was on the right path.” This is the purpose of female community, of which #YesAllWomen is a prime example. Erin’s conversion experience is underway after she’s been made to feel some of the same fears as Emily, to be made to feel lost, alone, and even under “attack,” and also after finding this talisman that acknowledges these feelings and knits her to something larger than herself.

However, Erin’s conversion is not so simple; her privilege and ambition run deep. Soon she is back to her power-hungry and results-oriented self, speaking in purely legal terms and seeming to ignore the communicative experience she’s just recalled. One last frightening experience seems to be what is needed to get Erin fully on board with the female community Emily signifies.

Erin awakes late at night, alone in her bedroom. We hear whispering, which quickly turns into a distant-sounding scream. When she gets out of bed to investigate, she finds that the tape of Emily’s exorcism is in her living room playing, having turned on by itself. She turns it off, mouthing Emily’s name. Emily’s story has now become her focus.

Emily’s final vision of the Blessed Virgin (the ultimate female symbol of sacrifice) is recounted in a letter that Father Moore gives to Erin once he’s sure her conversion is complete. In it, Emily tells of a dream she has the day after her exorcism. In another flashback, an unseen force leads Emily through a mist. Viewers see Emily have an out-of-body experience. As she leaves her physical body behind, THIS Emily looks beautiful and healthy, not battered, twisted, and weak. Yet the Virgin gives her two avenues of action: she can relinquish her body and die, achieving peace; or stay in her body and suffer. It seems a simple choice, but the Virgin assures Emily that if she stays, her suffering will mean something; her story will help others.

It is for this reason that Father Moore has risked his freedom, for this reason that Erin jeopardizes her powerful position to help in sharing Emily’s experiences—but only after she’s had frightening experiences of her own. Their exposure to Emily’s case initiates a conversion experience by which they are both then unable to deny the pitfalls of women in patriarchy, even from their privileged positions.

In the final scenes of the film, Erin and Father Moore appear vulnerable and displaced, if satisfied. He says he cannot go back to his parish, and Erin has refused her law firm’s offer of partnership. Where will they go now? What will they do? They appear at Emily’s grave, as if on a pilgrimage, observing her epitaph, which reads “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”

Ostensibly the goal of any horror film is for the viewer to experience some fear and trembling; the combination of these goals with the framework of logic and justice found in the courtroom drama allows The Exorcism of Emily Rose to achieve a broader aim. We can read Emily’s “hypersensitivity” as vulnerability, a vulnerability that she must summon the courage to share in order to communicate a broader, societal concern that would otherwise remain in the shadows. Spiritual trials aside, Emily’s plight is indeed the plight of all women. Father Moore and Erin Bruner may be the first who achieve symbolic salvation through describing and disseminating Emily’s fear and trembling to others. The Exorcism of Emily Rose and #YesAllWomen illustrates that communication, supportive community, conversation, and awareness are often the first step to activism.

Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University. She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is currently a lecturer in Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

‘MasterChef’ and Internalized Misogyny

Being a feminist can be hard, like when it interferes with my god-given right to irrationally hate reality TV contestants. The “love-to-hate” feeling is basically the entire point of watching reality television. There is no room for guilty consciences. And yet, this past season of ‘MasterChef USA’ forced me and my partner to wrestle with why we were hating on our least favorite contestants, because the obvious answer was that we’re sexist jerks.

Have you ever hated-to-hate a reality TV contestant? Have you caught yourself hating people on TV for sexist reasons?

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town and slightly-better-than-mediocre home cook.

“We Stick Together”: Rebellion, Female Solidarity, and Girl Crushes in ‘Foxfire’

In the spirit of ‘Boys on the Side,’ along with a dose of teen angst, ‘Foxfire’ is perhaps the most bad ass chick flick ever. Many Angelina Jolie fans are not aware of this 1996 phenomenon, where Angie makes a name for herself as a rebellious free spirit who changes the lives of four young women in New York. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel by the same name, ‘Foxfire’ is the epitome of girl power and female friendship, a pleasant departure from the competition and spitefulness often portrayed between women characters on the big screen (see ‘Bride Wars’ and ‘Just Go with It’). However, it does seem that Hollywood is catching on as of late, and producing films that cater to a more progressive viewership (see ‘Bridesmaids’ and ‘The Other Woman’). When I first saw ‘Foxfire’ around 16 years old, I stole the VHS copy from the video store where I worked at the time.

This post by Jenny Lapekas appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

In the spirit of Boys on the Side, along with a dose of teen angst, Foxfire is perhaps the most bad ass chick flick ever. Many Angelina Jolie fans are not aware of this 1996 phenomenon, where Angie makes a name for herself as a rebellious free spirit who changes the lives of four young women in New York. Based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel by the same name, Foxfire is the epitome of girl power and female friendship, a pleasant departure from the competition and spitefulness often portrayed between women characters on the big screen (see Bride Wars and Just Go with It). However, it does seem that Hollywood is catching on as of late, and producing films that cater to a more progressive viewership (see Bridesmaids and The Other Woman). When I first saw Foxfire around 16 years old, I stole the VHS copy from the video store where I worked at the time.

Angelina Jolie’s shaggy hair and tomboy style in the film, along with her portrayal of the rebellious Legs Sadovsky, play with gender expectations, challenging our assumptions pertaining to clothing, gait, etc. Legs’ biker boots and leather jacket highlight the general heteronormative tendency to find discomfort in these roles and depictions. An androgynous drifter, Legs oozes sex appeal and promotes the questioning of authority. She teaches the girls to own their happiness, to correct the injustices they encounter, and to assert themselves to the men who think themselves superior to women. Legs’ appearance in Foxfire is paramount; she’s even mistaken for a boy when she breaks into the local high school. A security guard yells, “Young man, stop when I’m talking to you.” We see this confusion repeat itself when Goldie’s mother tells her daughter, “There’s a girl…or whatever…here to see you.”

How can we resist developing a girl crush on Angie in this role?

The film’s subplot involves a romance of sorts between artist Maddy and Legs, the mysterious stranger, while Maddy feels a large distance growing between her and her boyfriend (a young Peter Facinelli from the Twilight saga). The intensity of the “girl-crush” shared between Maddy and Legs is akin to that of Thelma and Louise; while we come to understand that Legs is gay, Maddy’s platonic love is enough for the troubled runaway. Legs also assures Maddy after sleeping on her floor one rainy night, “Don’t worry, you’re not my type.” Similar to my discussion of the reunion between Miranda and Steve in Sex and the City: the Movie, the two young women coming together on a bridge is heavy with symbolism, especially when Legs climbs to the top and dances while Maddy looks on in horror and professes that she’s afraid of heights: a nice precursor for the unfolding narrative, which centers on Legs guiding the girls and easing their fears, especially those associated with female adolescence and gaining new insight into their surroundings and how they fit into their environment.

This scene may not be aware of itself as being set up as another Romeo and Juliet visual, but we realize perhaps Legs is a better suitor than Maddy’s boyfriend, whose male privilege hinders his understanding of what Maddy needs. — While this scene may not be aware of itself as being set up as a nice Romeo and Juliet visual, we realize perhaps Legs is a better suitor than Maddy’s boyfriend, whose male privilege hinders his understanding of what Maddy needs.

In a somber and almost zen-like scene involving Maddy and Legs, they profess their love for one another outside the abandoned home the gang has claimed as their own. Maddy says, “If I told you I loved you, would you take it the wrong way?” Obviously, while Maddy doesn’t want Legs to think she’s in love with her, she wants to make clear that the two have bonded for life and are now inextricably linked in sisterhood. Maddy indirectly asks if Legs would take her with when she decides to move on, and Legs hints that Maddy may not be prepared for her nomadic lifestyle. The platonic romance shared by both young women culminates in tears and heartache when Legs must inevitably leave.

Almost as if to kiss Legs, Maddy tenderly touches her face atop the gang’s house.

Legs is the glue that binds these young women, and she literally appears from nowhere. Her entrances are consistently memorable: she initially meets Maddy as she’s trespassing on school property, she climbs to Maddy’s window asking for refuge from the rain (another Romeo and Juliet moment), and eventually takes off for nowhere, leaving the girls stupefied and yet more lucid than ever. Legs is something that happens to these girls, a force of nature, a breath of fresh air. When she tells Maddy that she was thrown out of her old school “for thinking for herself,” we can safely assume it was just that–refusing to conform to the standards of others. The unlikely friendship that forms amongst this diverse group of girls clarifies the idea that this gang dynamic has found them, not the other way around; the pressed need for the collective feminine is what brings the girls together, rather than some vendetta against men.

Although Legs tattoos each of the girls in honor of their time together, they know they won't need scars to remember Legs. — Although Legs tattoos each of the girls in honor of their time together, they know they won’t need scars to remember Legs.

Legs sports a tattoo that reads “Audrey”: her mother, who was killed in a drunk driving accident, and we clearly see in the film’s final scenes that Legs suffers from some serious daddy issues, when she angrily announces that “fathers mean nothing.” Delving briefly into Legs’ painful past, we discover that she never knew her father. The quickly maturing Rita explains to Legs, “This isn’t about you.” Each of the girls has their own set of issues within the film: Rita is being sexually molested by her scumbag biology teacher, Mr. Buttinger, Goldie is a drug addict whose father beats her, Violet is dubbed a “slut,” by the school’s stuck-up cheerleaders, and Maddy struggles to balance school, her photography, and her boyfriend, who is dumbfounded by Legs’ influence on his typically well-behaved girlfriend.

After the girls beat up Buttinger, Legs warns him to think before inappropriately touching any more female students.

In an especially significant scene, the football players from school who continually harass the girls attempt to abduct Maddy by forcing her into a van. The confrontations between the groups progressively escalate throughout the movie, and climax after Coach Buttinger is apparently fired for sexually harassing several female students. Legs shows up donning a switchblade and orders the boys to let her friend go. Of course, the pair steal the van and pick up their girlfriends on a high speed cruise to nowhere, which ends in an exciting police chase and Legs losing control and crashing, a metaphor for the gang’s imminent downfall. The threat of sexual assault dissolved by a female ally, followed by police pursuit and a car crash has a lovely Thelma & Louise quality, as well. The motivation here is to avoid being swept up in a misogynistic culture of victim-blaming. What’s interesting about this scene is that another girl from school, who’s in cahoots with these sleazy guys, actually lures Maddy to the waiting group of boys, knowing what’s to come. Meanwhile, Maddy tells Cyndi that she’d escort any girl somewhere who doesn’t feel safe, highlighting the betrayal at work here. Cyndi, the outsider, exploits Maddy’s feminist sensibilities, her unspoken drive for female solidarity and the resistance of male violence to fulfill a violent, misogynist agenda and put Maddy in harm’s way. Later, in the van, Goldie excitedly yells, “Maddy almost got raped, and we just stole this car!” as if this is a source of exhilaration or a mark of resiliency. Perhaps we’d correct her by shifting the blame from the “almost-victim” to her attacker: “Dana and his boys almost raped Maddy.”

Legs says, “Let her out, you stupid fuck.”

Obviously, these are young women just blossoming in their feminist ideals, on the path to realization, and just beginning to question the patriarchal agenda they find themselves a part of in this awkward stage of young adulthood. It’s in this queer in-between state, straddling womanhood and adolescence, that we find Maddy, Legs, Violet, Goldie, and Rita, on the cusp of articulating their justified outrage. We may also question, how does one almost get raped? While the girls of Foxfire are young and somewhat inexperienced, with Legs’ help, they quickly obtain this sort of unpleasant, universal knowledge that males can perpetrate sexual violence in order to “put women in their place.” Dana announces, “You girls are getting a little big for yourselves.” We can’t have that. Women who grow, gain confidence, and challenge sexist and oppressive norms can make waves and upset lots of people. While the girls are initially hesitant in trying to find their way and make sense of their lives, Legs is the powerful catalyst for this transition from the young and feminine to the wise and feminist. While the high school jocks attempt to reclaim the power they feel has been threatened or stolen by this group of girls, Legs continues to challenge gender expectations by utilizing violence as well.

As she hitches a ride, Legs tearfully says, “You’re my heart, Maddy.”

Not only does this film pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, it almost feels as if it’s a joke when the girls do manage to discuss men–like the topic is not something they take seriously or that boys rest only on the periphery of their lives. While Maddy suffers silently in terms of her artistic prowess and boyfriend drama, Rita–seemingly the prudest and most sheltered of the gang–talks casually about masturbation and penis size. However, it’s important to note that when men do make their way into the conversation, it’s at rare, lighthearted moments when the girls are not guarded or suspicious of the tyrannical and predatory men who seem to surround them. The penis-size discussion between Rita and Violet, we must admit, is also quite self-serving and objectifying. Rather than obsess over their appearances or the approval of boys, the girls’ most ecstatic moment is when Violet receives an anonymous note from a younger girl at school, another student Buttinger was harassing who is thankful for what the gang did. The fact that Violet is so pleased that she could help a friendly stranger who was also a target of the same perverted teacher says a lot about the gang’s goals and identity.

Thanks to Legs, Maddy overcomes her fear of heights.

Maddy and Legs recognize something in one another, and although theirs is not a sexual relationship, it is no doubt intimate and meaningful. With an amazing soundtrack that includes Wild Strawberries, L7 (wanna fling tampons, anyone?), and Luscious Jackson, and boasting a cast that includes Angelina Jolie and Hedy Burress, Foxfire is undeniably feminist in its message and narrative. With the help of Legs, the girls find agency, and with it, each other. Although most of the girls have been failed by men in some way, Legs offers hope in female friendship and lets her sisters know that male-perpetrated violence can be combated with a switchblade and a swift kick to the balls. Legs arrives like a whirlwind in Maddy’s life and leaves her changed forever. The lovely ladies of Foxfire will make you want to form a girl gang, dangle off bridges, and break into your old high school’s art room just to stick it to the man.

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Jenny holds a Master of Arts degree in English, and she is a part-time instructor at a community college in Pennsylvania. Her areas of scholarship include women’s literature, menstrual literacy, and rape-revenge cinema. She lives with two naughty chihuahuas. You can find her on WordPress and Pinterest.