Misogyny – Page 3 – Bitch Flicks

Not Exactly the New ‘Buffy’: The Many Failings of ‘Supernatural’

The simplistic machismo of ‘Supernatural’ is particularly frustrating because there is so much potential for the show to challenge the norms of conventional masculinity – and yet it just doesn’t.

Written by Max Thornton.

Early in my embarrassingly emotional addiction to Supernatural, a friend pointed out that Supernatural picks up right where Buffy the Vampire Slayer left off – not only chronologically, having begun just two years after Buffy ended, but also in terms of the characters’ ages and stages in life. The Buffy gang took us demon-slaying through high school and college, while the Supernatural boys launch us on a quarter-life-crisis monster hunt as a career.

Both shows use a campy sensibility to explore questions of family, loyalty, and identity through monster metaphors. Both were resurrected after a self-contained five-season run to flounder a bit in seeking direction for continuing. Both have passionate fanbases who love to overanalyze every detail of the show.

Unfortunately, the major distinction between them arguably reflects a disturbing turn in US society at large: from the ongoing war on reproductive agency to the escalating violence against trans women, misogyny seems to be on the uptick.

It would, of course, be disingenuous to claim that the Joss Whedon brand of feminism is above reproach. We’ve covered the issues here at Bitch Flicks many times before, but the fact is, everything we criticize Whedon for – his failings with respect to race, sexuality, gender – is dialed up to 11 in Supernatural.

On the upside, they're really really pretty — On the upside, they’re really really pretty

There’s a certain charmingly riot-grrrl sensibility about the fabled origin of the concept for Buffy, Whedon’s well-documented desire to subvert the horror-movie cliché of the petite blonde victim by turning her into the superhero who punches monsters and stabs vamps. Ongoing critique of the whole “strong female character” trope problematizes the simplicity of this image, but only the most determined of naysayers could deny that Buffy Summers is a truly well-rounded, three-dimensional female character.

Supernatural, by contrast, has absolutely no feminist ambitions whatsoever. It’s a show about two estranged brothers reuniting to spend (at least) a decade working through their vast and multitudinous daddy issues by hunting and killing demons. The hunter substratum in which Dean and Sam Winchester operate is pretty traditionally macho, featuring a lot of roadtripping around the lower 48 in a ’67 Chevy Impala, listening to classic rock, being emotionally unavailable to an identikit parade of conventionally attractive women, and bottling up secrets from each other until they emerge at the most inconvenient possible moment for a melodramatic climax of raw fraternal honesty and man-tears.

The simplistic machismo of Supernatural is particularly frustrating because there is so much potential for the show to challenge the norms of conventional masculinity – and yet it just doesn’t.

After its first few seasons, which were more broadly monster-centered, Supernatural has turned its focus heavenward, to the metaphysical ministries of angels and demons. Now, a show that poaches so liberally from every belief system it’s ever met should be able to have some fun here with sexuality and gender. Angels in much of Christian tradition are ungendered beings of pure spirit, so it would make sense for the show’s angels to routinely transgress gender norms in the human bodies they take on as their vessels. It would be a great way to portray the angels’ non-humanity, showing them unwittingly and uncomprehendingly steamrolling over human gender roles because they simply do not know or care about this petty aspect of human life.

Alas, the show takes the lazy way out, adhering to the most narrowly patriarchal interpretation of angel gender. Most of the important angels are male, the female ones are seductive temptresses, and there’s no crossing or blurring of gender boundaries.

This is especially egregious, because the UST between Dean Winchester and the angel Castiel is off the charts. “Destiel” is Tumblr’s favorite romantic pairing, and it’s not hard to see why.

"NO HOMO" -- The CW — “NO HOMO” — The CW

The chemistry between actors Jensen Ackles and Misha Collins could lay the foundation for corroboration of Dean’s obvious yet canonically unacknowledged bisexuality, for an in-depth exploration of angelic nature, for a thorough dismantling of the gender binary… but of course absolutely none of that has happened. Instead, the show has taunted fans with an ongoing equilibrium of cynical queerbaiting, while acting as though a handful of episodes featuring a nerdy redheaded lesbian femme constitutes sufficient compensation.

Supernatural‘s other greatest sin is its wanton murder of female characters. Buffy may have come under a lot of criticism for fridging a beloved female character, but Supernatural winkingly lampshades its tendency to fridge women as if that somehow makes it okay.

I won’t pretend I don’t love Supernatural – I’m the middle of three brothers, so it always had me on that count alone – but I also can’t pretend that it’s not a profoundly, epically, perhaps fatally flawed show. I’ll watch the forthcoming tenth season, and I’ll hope that it gets better, but I know better than to hold my breath.

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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He wishes he knew how to quit Supernatural.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

The grotesque is enmeshed with sexual pleasure and violent death–all images and storylines that patriarchal cultures have been weaving together for centuries. A woman’s sexual desire and her actions stemming from those desires are often presented as horrifying and punishable: “unwatchable.” Much of what Breillat shows supports the reality that female sexual desire is real, and the societies in which we must function are at best, uncomfortable with that desire, and at worst, violently hostile.

Written by Leigh Kolb as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

“… a person who can find the transfiguration of sex in her life is no longer a person who can be directed.”

– Catherine Breillat

French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has spent her career exploring female sexuality. She hasn’t done so in a comfortable, easy way. When The Woman says to The Man, “Watch me where I’m unwatchable” in Anatomy of Hell, this could very well be Breillat’s message to her audiences as she presents female desire in harsh, jarring narratives that completely subvert the male gaze.

Normally, if we talk about subverting the male gaze and focusing on the female gaze in film, it’s cause for celebration. Finally! We scream. We’re coming!

Breillat’s female gaze is different, though. It pushes us to places of complete discomfort and sometimes disgust, and forces and challenges us to think about the deeply twisted cultural expectations surrounding women and sex.

Sometimes a shock is what it takes to bring us to places of transfiguration. We can’t smoothly transition to the female gaze after centuries of being surrounded and objectified by the male gaze. Breillat delivers shock after shock that serve to transfigure how we see ourselves and our culture. This isn’t comfortable, but it’s powerful.

Breillat’s first film, based off her novel, Le Soupirail, was A Real Young Girl (Une vraie jeune fille). Produced in 1976, it was quickly banned and wasn’t released in France until 1999. The film centers around 14-year-old Alice, who is discovering and attempting to navigate her sexual awakening. A Real Young Girl is avant-garde puberty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FXxS9VevE”]

There are moments in the film that are confusing and grotesque (most notably one of her fantasies that involves barbed wire and a ripped-up earthworm). While I found some of these scenes disturbing, I like being disturbed. The worm scene horrified me at first, but then I realized that when I was in high school, the hit teen comedy involved a dude literally fucking a pie. Teenage sexuality is weird and when we are faced with a teen girl’s sexuality–something we are not used to seeing (unless she is a sexual object)–in all of its confusion and vacillation between intense desire and disgust, we are uncomfortable. Breillat wants us to be uncomfortable; she wants to push us to the edge to that visceral experience that will challenge how we see both female sexuality and film depictions of female sexuality.

Fat_Girl_poster — *Fat Girl* (*À ma sœur!*)

Fat Girl (À ma sœur!), released in 2001, follows two sisters–Elena, 15, and Anaïs, 12–as they vacation with their parents. Elena is conventionally beautiful, and while she likes boys and has experimented sexually, she wants to remain a virgin until she’s with someone who “loves” her. She quickly develops a relationship with a young man who is frustrated with her desire to not have sex. He pressures her into anal sex (which hurts her), tries to force her to have oral sex, and finally convinces her he loves her and she has sex with him. In all of these instances, Anaïs is in the room–feigning sleep, asking them to stop, or, when they finally have sex, crying.

Anaïs’s views on sex are very different than Elena’s. She is starting to feel sexual–she’s not a teenager yet, but she’s not a child. Her desires range from banana splits to having sex just to get it over with. She has sexual desires, and her responses to Elena’s sexual experiences show both naiveté and jealousy. Their ages, their exterior looks, their sexual experiences (or lack thereof) all inform Breillat’s treatment of the sisters’ relationship with one another, with their own burgeoning sexuality, and with a culture that insists on sexualizing Elena and ignoring Anaïs. Their desires–Elena as internalized (and then disappointed) object, Anaïs as frustrated subject–are common categories for adolescent girls to fall into.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHRJRbM2EAg”]

Fat Girl (read Breillat’s commentary on the title here) is disturbing in its depictions of some of Elena and Anaïs’s experiences. However, the end of the film is shocking and violent. After Elena and her mother are brutally killed at a rest stop, the murderer rapes Anaïs in the woods. The next morning, she tells the police she wasn’t raped, and she looks at the camera, in an ending that clearly reflects The 400 Blows. Like the Truffaut classic, we are saddened and disturbed at the life trajectory of our young protagonists, and have no idea where their lives will go from here. We just have a frozen young face staring at us, implicating us in their fate.

Anaïs, at the end, seems to embrace her rape (as her meaningless loss of virginity that she wanted) and deny its violence. This is made even more traumatic since her rapist murdered her mother and sister (her sister who had just become sexually active, and her mother who wanted to punish her for it).

The message here is that girls cannot win. A patriarchal culture–full of boys who think they’re entitled to sex and men who violently rape and kill women–cares little for female desire and agency. This world is a dangerous place for girls. This world treats pretty girls like objects, and unpretty girls like nothing. Their desires are complicated and real, but are eclipsed by toxic masculinity.

Released in 2004, Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie De L’Enfer) is a film that pulls together pornography, misogyny, and female sexuality in a way that shocks and disgusts (male reviewers in particular wrote scathing, condescending reviews of the film). The Woman visits a gay bar and attempts suicide in the bathroom–she is tired of being a woman and being hated by men, and surmises that gay men hate women the most. The Man, however, saves her and she offers to pay him to stay in her home for four days to “watch her where she is unwatchable.” What follows is, for some viewers, unwatchable.

The Woman is naked for most of the film (a body double is used for vaginal shots), and The Man is played by an Italian porn star. His homosexuality serves to completely upend the typical male gaze. He’s disgusted by much of what he’s seeing and experiencing, and the understanding that this primal, visceral, shocking female desire is at the focus of the film (and has absolutely nothing to do with male desire) reflects a culture that typically focuses only on the male gaze and male pleasure. In this culture, female sexuality isn’t a consideration.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbFSZiT2-a4″]

When The Man drinks a glass of water with a used-tampon teabag, certainly the audience is meant to feel disgust. Perhaps some audience members actually gagged at the sight. How many scenes, however, in porn (explicitly) or mainstream film (suggested), feature women swallowing male excretions? Do we blink? Or is it just part of what we expect it means to be a heterosexual woman?

Jamie Russell astutely observes at the BBC, “For all the shocks, though, this is a stoically serious movie: it’s anti-porn, a transgressive sex movie that’s not against pornography but against the (male-dominated) objectification of women’s bodies.”

Breillat’s complete oeuvre (which certainly demands our attention beyond these three films) delivers continually shocking treatment of female sexuality presented though the female gaze. She wants us to be uncomfortable and to be constantly questioning both representations of female desire and our responses to those representations, and how all of it is shaped by a religious, patriarchal culture.

In an interview with The Guardian, Breillat articulated that her female gaze should directly threaten the male gaze, and that men should examine their own sexuality in the face of female desire:

“It’s a joke – if men can’t desire liberated women, then tough. Does it mean they can only desire a slave? Men need to question the roots of their own desire. Why is it that historically men have this need to deny women to be able to desire them?”

The reporter points out that Breillat had said “that censorship was a male pre-occupation, and that the X certificate was linked to the X chromosome,” and Breillat goes on to discuss the religious and patriarchal reasons to censor female desire, which is directly connected to keeping power away from women.

Breillat’s 1999 Romance was originally given an X rating (or banned in some countries). At Senses of Cinema, Brian Price notes that “Breillat’s statement was echoed in the French poster for the film, which features a naked woman with her hand between her legs. A large red X is printed across the image, thus revealing the source of the trouble: a woman in touch with her own sense of sexual pleasure.”

And that’s always the problem, isn’t it? Breillat’s work pushes boundaries and forces us to live in the intense intimacy and discomfort of a female gaze that we are unused to due to social oppression of women and women’s sexuality (at the hands of patriarchal religious and government systems). The literal and figurative red X over Breillat’s work–and female sexuality–needs to be stripped away to reveal what’s underneath–which isn’t always pretty.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpH-V6kkOwI”]

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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature, and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

How I Met Your Misogyny

Tonight, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ will end its nine-year run with a one-hour season finale. A show that spawned countless catchphrases and running gags, ‘How I Met Your Mother’ will be remembered for its nonlinear storytelling and its portrayals of romance and friendship.

It will also be remembered as one of the most misogynistic sitcoms on TV.

Written by Lady T

The cast of How I Met Your Mother — The cast of *How I Met Your Mother*

Tonight, How I Met Your Mother will end its nine-year run with a one-hour season finale. A show that spawned countless catchphrases and running gags, How I Met Your Mother will be remembered for its nonlinear storytelling and its portrayals of romance and friendship.

It will also be remembered as one of the most misogynistic sitcoms on TV.

Okay, I admit it – I’m exaggerating a little to make a point. I haven’t seen enough shows to determine whether or not it’s one of the most misogynistic sitcoms. But over the years, How I Met Your Mother has devolved into a show rife with anti-woman nastiness, making me grateful that the program is finally coming to an end.

I’m also saddened by the devolution in the show over the years, because once upon a time, I would have considered How I Met Your Mother a more progressive sitcom than most.

Robin (Cobie Smulders) and Ted (Josh Radnor) on their first date

In the first few seasons of the show, I was impressed with the show’s different take on stereotypical gender roles. I liked that Ted was the hopeless romantic who wanted nothing more than to settle down, get married, and have children, while Robin was the more pragmatic, career-minded person who wanted a more casual relationship. I liked that, even in the context of Marshall and Lily’s super-sweet relationship, Marshall was still the more sentimental of the two. I was moved by Lily’s “career vs. romance” subplot in the end of the first season because the show recognized the emotional weight of what she was feeling. I liked that Lily and Marshall’s wedding followed a typical “bride freaks out on a wedding day” plot with an unexpected and very funny “groom freaks out EVEN MORE on wedding day” plot with Marshall shaving part of his head.

Robin (Cobie Smulders), journalist and career woman — Robin Scherbatsky, journalist and career woman

Even Barney, the most problematic character on the show through a feminist perspective, wasn’t so terrible in the first two seasons. Back then, Barney’s womanizing wasn’t the only aspect of his character. Barney was just a person who wanted to make every night legendary no matter what, whether it involved creating elaborate stories to get women to sleep with him, licking the Liberty Bell, paying Robin to say ridiculous things on camera, inventing a drink called the “Thankstini,” setting Ted’s jacket on fire to stop him from drunk-dialing. His treatment of women wasn’t okay, but it didn’t come from a place of showing complete contempt for anyone around him.

Somewhere along the line, all that changed.

Barney became a person whose primary goal was to trick as many women as possible into sleeping with him, and his behavior toward them became increasingly nasty and downright criminal. In season three’s “The Bracket,” he admits to having sold a woman, and in season eight’s “The Fortress,” he shows the feature of a “Ho-Be-Gone” system which wheels one-night stands into a wall. And we’re supposed to be happy that Robin married this man.

Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and his bracket

Unfortunately, the misogyny that has pervaded How I Met Your Mother isn’t just limited to Barney. Here’s a list of just some of the most memorable misogynistic moments from the show’s history:

– Season five’s “Of Course”: Jennifer Lopez appears as a character whose sole purpose is to peddle the “Power of No.” Because we need more characters who affirm the stereotype that women like “playing hard to get.”

– Season five’s “Say Cheese”: Lily, angry that Ted has brought yet another date no one knows to her birthday party, shows him a photo of a previous year’s celebration and asks him to “name that bitch.” Not wanting strangers to attend your birthday party: fine. But what did these women do to Lily to warrant being called “bitches?”

– Season five’s “The Playbook”: All of it. But I’ll get to that later. (/SagetTed)

Barney and his "scuba diver" scam — Barney and his “scuba diver” scam

– Season six’s “Baby Talk”: Marshall worries about having a daughter because he remembers the way he and his high school classmates used to be sexist towards the female students. (Sexual harassment is bad when it’s happening to women you care about, boys, but random bitches are free game and THEN cat-calling is hilarious!)

– Season six’s “Canning Randy”: the men leer at the day-after-Halloween parade of women walking down the street in costumes, guessing at their one-night stands. Could have been a funny gag if it had been the entire gang watching a parade of men and women returning from one-night stands, but as it was, it was just a bunch of guys snarkily judging women.

Ted, Barney, and Marshall (Jason Segel) leer at women

– Season seven’s “The Slutty Pumpkin Returns”: Lily has pregnancy brain and Marshall and Robin treat her like she has the intelligence of a two-year-old, and they prove to be right when Lily gives a stapler to a kid on Halloween.

– Season seven’s “Now We’re Even”: Barney delivers what’s supposed to be a moving monologue about the difficulties of dating a stripper and how it makes him feel to know that Quinn is dancing naked for other men, and we’re actually supposed to feel sorry for him after years of him treating women like dirt.

– Season eight’s “Lobster Crawl”: Robin acts like a simpering idiot when she’s desperate to win Barney back. She continues to be mean to poor Patrice for no reason and it’s supposed to be funny (probably because Patrice is fat).

– Season eight’s “The Final Page”: Barney proposes to Robin after a long con of making her believe that he didn’t want her, and it’s one of the most glaring examples of emotional abuse disguised as romance in recent memory.

Robin reacts to Barney's manipulative proposal — Robin reacts to Barney’s manipulative proposal

– Season eight’s “The Fortress”: Like I said – Ho-Be-Gone.

– Season nine’s “The Broken Code”: Robin realizes she has no female friends and acts astonishingly rude to the women around her, finally confirming that she and Barney really are meant for each other, since she hates women just as much as he does.

And those are just a few.

But the biggest examples of misogyny are, of course, Barney’s two books: The Bro Code and The Playbook. Two books that are actual books that people can now buy.

And The Playbook? Is a pick-up artist’s wet dream.

Before anyone argues that it’s “just a joke,” keep in mind that there are actual websites out there dedicated to coaching men on tricking women into sleeping with them – and some of these sites actually use the character of Barney Stinson as a role model.

How I Met Your Mother isn’t entirely hopeless even at this late stage. The writers handled Robin’s infertility with respect. Season eight’s “The Time Travelers” was one of its best episodes, truly romantic and poignant. Marshall and Lily’s renewed vows were moving. I love everything about the Mother herself and Ted’s relationship with her, proving that this show still has a soul. But the stink of misogyny has tainted what was once one of my favorite sitcoms.

And if, at the end of tomorrow’s finale, it turns out that I dealt with all that anti-woman crap on a weekly basis only to find out that the Mother is dead in the future…if that is the direction the writers have decided to take…then burn it, burn it to the ground.

Ted and the Mother (Cristin Milioti), who had better NOT be dead

Lady T is a feminist blogger, sketch comedy writer/performer, and author of Fanged, a young adult novel available for purchase today.

Pussy Power and Control in ‘Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer’

And it sinks in. We can, half a world away, celebrate Pussy Riot’s name. We can listen to their music and cheer them on. What our challenge as feminists needs to be is to take their cause as seriously as those Carriers of the Cross take it. We must hold on so tightly to our convictions–at home and abroad–that the utter fear and terror of female power that those enmeshed in the patriarchy are emboldened by is neutralized.

Written by Leigh Kolb.

Pussy Riot–the Russian feminist anti-authoritative protest punk band–staged a protest at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour two years ago. Their subsequent arrest, trial, and incarceration has been broadcast to a world both condemning and sympathetic of their cause.

Because of this, we’re hearing the word “pussy” thrown around on the news and in the classroom like never before. Teaching film and journalism, I think I said it in class a half dozen times in the last 24 hours. NPR’s calm deliverance of the word is almost soothing.

It’s hard to not delight in so much “pussy”—the word, as they use it, is threatening, terrifying, and forceful. It’s also a word that is used to belittle women or shame men. There’s power in the word, but there’s also silliness in the reception. The word itself is analogous to women themselves and how we inhabit this world—we often aren’t taken seriously, but us having power (especially sexual power) is terrifying to patriarchal forces. Pussy Riot has shown us this in a loud, brightly colored way.

The documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer–now available on DVD—traces the path of Pussy Riot’s inception and worldwide explosion. The dozen or so women who gathered to form the punk collective in 2011 were galvanized by pro-feminist, anti-capitalist, pro-gay rights, anti-authoritarian, anti-Putin, anti-church/state ideologies. Their guerrilla-style performances with their signature brightly-colored balaclavas became known in feminist circles, but their February 21, 2012 performance was what made them a household name.

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acMN8xUWqUQ”]

The documentary shows the group preparing for a concert/protest at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow’s Orthodox church. It feels voyeuristic (in a good way) to watch this guerrilla punk group practice just like any other band.

As the film’s exposition builds, the group plans to storm the cathedral (which they say is the ultimate symbol of the relationship between the church and state), go up to the altar (where they point out women are now allowed, and they believe they should be), and perform “Punk Prayer.” The lyrics to the anthem include the lines,

“Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin,/ Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish him, we pray thee!…/ Freedom’s phantom’s gone to heaven,/ Gay Pride’s chained and in detention… /Don’t upset His Saintship, ladies,/ Stick to making love and babies./ Crap, crap, this godliness crap!/ Crap, crap, this holiness crap!/ Virgin Mary, Mother of God./ Be a feminist, we pray thee…”

However, they are only able to perform for less than a minute before being dragged away by security officials and grabbed at by angry cathedral visitors (there was not a service going on at the time). Three of the members were arrested—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (Nadia), Maria Alyokhina (Masha/Maria), and Yekaterina Samutsevich (Katia)–and Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer delves into their lives and the court case that awaited them.

Pussy Riot performs briefly at the cathedral

The film–directed by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin—does an excellent job of letting us into the women’s lives. Their testimonies, their words to the press, and their families’ words, along with the footage of their performances, illuminate their entire story. While it’s clear that the filmmakers are pro-Pussy Riot, their allegiance isn’t distracting. For the first part of the film, as they cut between images of church, state, and protest, Pussy Riot’s performances seem like performance art, not acts of all-out revolution. We viewers think to ourselves as they get dragged off and arrested at the cathedral, “Really?”

And that’s the point. Ms. Magazine says,

“Their actual ‘offending’ performance was a quick and amateurish mess. It was a poorly organized and naïve display by the young women, making the punishments placed upon them—two years in intensive labor camps—appear even harsher by comparison. Out of this, the directors are able to show the growing maturity of the women’s court statements as their ‘show trial’ cage inevitably provides them an international platform on which to express their views.”

When the women are shown speaking (whether in detention or in court), they sometimes smirk and smile and certainly use the platform as activists. At one point, they say to each other that the press will use these photos of them smiling to show that they’re happy, and they say that they are actually laughing at the press. We know that their punishment hasn’t started in earnest yet, and so do they.

I found myself wanting, at times, to judge them for those smiles and testimonies that didn’t defend them sufficiently against the charges (“hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”). I realized, in my judgment, that I am part of the problem. Would I have responded that way to a documentary about young male activists? The rarity of seeing women fight and be punished on a national stage feels too rare. We—around the world—notoriously dismiss young women and find them silly. Our response to their name is indicative of that reality.

From left: Katia, Masha, and Nadia await their sentencing in a confined box in the courtroom.

We find them silly, or we find them terrifying. Rarely do we give them power.

The chilling reality of Pussy Riot’s case sets in when the filmmakers follow the anti-Pussy Riot protesters, Orthodox worshipers, and men who belong to “The Carriers of the Cross.” Women holding images of Madonna and child are disgusted with Pussy Riot, and the men say,

“Those girls really offended me… in the 16th century, they would’ve hanged them, they would’ve burned them.”

“The main one, she is a demon with a brain. She’s a strong demon. She is stubborn, you can tell by her lips, her mouth.”

“There have always been witches who won’t repent.”

And it sinks in. We can, half a world away, celebrate Pussy Riot’s name. We can listen to their music and cheer them on. What our challenge as feminists needs to be is to take their cause as seriously as those Carriers of the Cross take it. We must hold on so tightly to our convictions—at home and abroad—that the utter terror of female power that emboldens those enmeshed in the patriarchy is neutralized.

The disgust for female power is palpable in these scenes, and it is familiar. While America doesn’t have the same history as Russia, that vitriol feels familiar.

In the St. Petersburg Times, mere days before the arrest at the cathedral, a lengthy feature was published about Pussy Riot:

“The group cites American punk rock band Bikini Kill and its Riot Grrrl movement as an inspiration, but says there are plenty of differences between them and Bikini Kill. ‘What we have in common is impudence, politically loaded lyrics, the importance of feminist discourse, non-standard female image,’ Pussy Riot said. ‘The difference is that Bikini Kill performed at specific music venues, while we hold unsanctioned concerts. On the whole, Riot Grrrl was closely linked to Western cultural institutions, whose equivalents don’t exist in Russia.'”

We can watch this documentary and the news reels of Bolshevik Revolution and the footage of the original Cathedral of Christ the Saviour being demolished under Stalin. We don’t have the same history. But we have the same enemies.

Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer is an excellent documentary that reminds us of the threat women pose to the patriarchy–literally and figuratively. And when the women might seem young and naïve at the beginning of the film, we watch them mature, and we realize how serious both their punishment and the society that accepts such a punishment are. We hear Pussy Riot’s performance at the end of the film (footage from an earlier performance) as brilliant and powerful. And we realize, deeply, that we live in a world that needs Pussy Riot.

Kathleen Hanna said, “Anything is possible, if anything, this band has reminded us of that.”

Katia was granted a suspended sentence during the filming of the documentary, but Nadia and Masha went on to serve almost two years in labor camps. They were released in December 2013, which many saw as a false show of amnesty before the winter Olympics began in Russia.

And they haven’t stopped fighting or being fought against, as footage of them being beaten and detained in Sochi was just released this morning.

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Cute Old Ladies Who Talk Dirty in ‘Nebraska’ and ‘Philomena’

But Payne doesn’t seem to give much thought to Kate’s situation. In all but one scene Kate is called on to be testy and not much else. Even though we laugh as she chirps the cause of death of a late, but not lamented relative and we feel satisfied when she cusses out greedy members of Woody’s family, the character is more of an exclamation point than a person.

The women in the films of writer/director Alexander Payne are a mixed bag. I enjoyed his early film, Citizen Ruth but the contempt he seemed to have for most of the women characters seeped into–and made me hesitate to laugh at–the movie’s comedy. I hated Election in spite of a pre-stardom Reese Witherspoon in the lead and the cool, teenaged lesbian character in a prominent supporting role: what some other critics have called misanthropy in Payne’s body of work seemed to me more like misogyny.

I skipped About Schmidt because Jack Nicholson and Alexander Payne didn’t seem like a woman-friendly combination, a hunch confirmed when even male critics used the m-word to describe the film. I thought I’d also avoid Sideways with its manchild protagonist, but when I saw the movie, late in its run, I loved it: the same care had gone into developing the Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh characters as Payne had put into creating the roles played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church. Payne’s next film, The Descendants had a comatose, unfaithful “bad” mother at its crux but also showed her willful, smart-mouthed daughters (Shailene Woodley played the older of the two) at their most vulnerable. So I went into Nebraska, nominated for a slew of Oscars including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Director, hopeful but cautious. But in this film Payne seems to be going not sideways, but backwards.

Will Forte and Bruce Dern in 'Nebraska' — Will Forte and Bruce Dern in *Nebraska*

The film’s focus is on the relationship between two men: addled, alcoholic Woody (Bruce Dern, nominated for Best Actor) and his son David (Will Forte, who many know from his days on Saturday Night Live). David ends up taking his father on a quixotic road trip to collect the money Woody mistakenly and stubbornly believes he’s won through a letter from a company that is very much like Publishers’ Clearing House. We see many scenes that demonstrate the challenge Woody’s drinking and encroaching dementia are for his son (who seems to be around 40 and able-bodied), but David never considers that the trip might be a chance for his own mother to have a break from being Woody’s sole caretaker. Instead, David repeatedly says he agreed to drive his father over two states because the trip might be the last chance for the two of them to spend some time together.

June Squibb plays Woody’s wife and David’s mother, Kate, and is the film’s nominee for Best Supporting Actress (she also played Jack Nicholson’s wife in About Schmidt). She has the kind of face that moviegoers are used to seeing everywhere but onscreen: an 80-something woman who doesn’t appear to have undergone any plastic surgery and doesn’t look like she’s just come from a session with a team of makeup artists and hair colorists.

Anyone who has known an older woman left alone to take care of a husband in declining health will recognize the exasperated tone and facial expression Kate uses whenever she speaks to Woody. David, in contrast, is unfailingly patient and calm, like a cross between a therapist and Mr. Rogers, when he talks to his taciturn and pigheaded father, perhaps because he knows when the trip is over, his father’s care will go back to being Kate’s responsibility and will remain so until he dies–or she does.

We can see that Kate, direct and bereft of tact, is supposed to be a refreshing change from the smiling, always forgiving grandmothers of yore, but seeing her yell and swear reminds me of every role Betty White has played in recent years, the same role that goes to many other actresses once they hit 65. Dern’s character is also often angry and uses crude language, but as limited as his character is we do see other aspects of him, both in Dern’s performance and in exposition from the other characters. So much of our time and focus goes to this character, we think that his opaque and maddening surface will crack so that he can can finally show some affection and gratitude toward his son or to his old girlfriend whom his son encounters in the town where he was raised, but Woody remains selfish, irascible and without redeeming qualities to the end.

A better and more interesting movie would have included more about Kate. In spite of the women all around us who take care of men when they get old and sick (even though these women are often not young themselves) we very rarely see movies about a woman who is a caretaker: off the top of my head the only film I can think of is Marvin’s Room. But Payne doesn’t seem to give much thought to Kate’s situation. In all but one scene, Kate is called on to be testy and not much else. Even though we laugh as she chirps the cause of death of a late, but not lamented, relative and we feel satisfied when she cusses out greedy members of Woody’s family, the character is more of an exclamation point than a person.

That we, in the audience, aren’t as sick of the Grandma Who Talks Dirty trope as we are of the Magical Negro or the Sassy Gay Best Friend shows that the culture either isn’t paying attention or doesn’t care how older women are portrayed. Philomena is another Oscar-nominated film (for Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Score) which features an older woman, and it left me frustrated for slightly different reasons.

Although Philomena is based on a true story about the title character (Best Actress nominee Judi Dench), it’s equally about the journalist, Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), who helps in her search for the son who was taken from her (sold to American “adoptive” parents) when she was a young, single mother. Philomena Lee was sent to a Magdalen laundry (run by the Catholic Church but also supported by the Irish state) to have her baby and afterward forced, along with many other girl and women “sinners”, to work washing clothes for years afterward with no pay–a part of Irish history which receives a more detailed treatment in 2002’s The Magdalene Sisters.

I understand why the film makes Sixsmith an equal player in the story (the film is, after all, based on his book and was brought to the screen by Coogan), and the culture clash between romance-reading Philomena and Oxford-educated Martin is mildly entertaining, but this film reminded me a little too much of films from the 1980s like Mississippi Burning and Cry Freedom, in which stories about Black people were told through a white-guy main character and savior. I had the feeling if Sixsmith’s character had taken his rightful place as a background figure no producer would have put up the money for this film.

In Philomena, we again have an older woman with a surprising vocabulary: I guess I should be grateful that a mainstream movie features a lead actress (especially one of Judi Dench’s stature) saying the word “clitoris,” but I wish the scene weren’t played for a cheap laugh. Philomena Lee embodies contradictions that many of us have seen in our own families: women who remain devoted to the Catholic Church after years of being mistreated by it (with the people now around them pointing out that mistreatment), whose ideals are also more liberal than the church’s dogma.

I wanted to see more of the women I knew in Dench’s performance, but she’s miscast. She doesn’t sound any more Irish than…Judi Dench (and though some Irish people of Lee’s generation who moved to England made sure to lose their brogues–Lee wasn’t one of them–they didn’t then adopt Dench’s Received Pronunciation). Dench doesn’t speak in the same rhythm as someone from Ireland, or even as someone whose parents are from Ireland (though Dench’s mother was Irish). So Dench’s portrayal of Lee’s faith and forgiveness also fall flat. I have not seen any other review that notices how wrong Dench (as great as she has been in other roles) is for this part, the same way straight critics never seem to notice when two women playing lovers in a film have zero chemistry together. We’re supposed to be sated by seeing these women characters in a film at all. We aren’t supposed to want older women in films to do what they do in our lives outside movie theaters: to charm us, to move us, to sustain us.

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing has appeared in The Toast, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.

‘The Great Beauty’ of Little Temptations

‘The Great Beauty’ (‘La Grande Belleza’ in its native Italy)–winner of Best Foreign Language Film at The Golden Globes (and nominated in the same category for an Academy Award)–could easily have been an example of what the great film critic Pauline Kael called “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties”: European films in which very wealthy, attractive people are depressed in spite of their beautiful homes, expensive clothes, and jet-set lifestyles. These films, especially to contemporary audiences, can seem like at any moment they will cross the line into parody, with one of the characters spoofing an old Weill/Brecht tune, “Oh no, not another opulent location! Oh no, not another expensive, tailored suit! Oh no, not more sex with gorgeous, unhappy people!”

The Great Beauty (La Grande Belleza in its native Italy)–winner of Best Foreign Language Film at The Golden Globes (and nominated in the same category for an Academy Award)–could easily have been an example of what the great film critic Pauline Kael called “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties“: European films in which very wealthy, attractive people are depressed in spite of their beautiful homes, expensive clothes, and jet-set lifestyles. These films, especially to contemporary audiences, can seem like at any moment they will cross the line into parody, with one of the characters spoofing an old Weill/Brecht tune, “Oh no, not another opulent location! Oh no, not another expensive, tailored suit! Oh no, not more sex with gorgeous, unhappy people!”

Superficially, The Great Beauty resembles these films with a dissatisfied main character at its center: Jep (played by the director, Paolo Sorrentino‘s longtime star, Toni Servillo) a celebrity journalist who wrote one acclaimed novel forty years before and has been dining out on his reputation ever since. Servillo, after making a delayed appearance in the film (in a great entrance, he steps out of a line dance at his own chaotic, noisy birthday party to light the first of countless cigarettes) is in nearly every scene that follows, framed in the middle of the breathtaking scenery and lush interiors of Rome. The film makes us want to visit, but as one great visual outdoes another we realize outside of the cinematographer, Luca Bigazzi’s, lens the city could never live up to this ideal.

Beautiful Scenery and Beautiful Suits — Beautiful scenery and beautiful suits

The man who has every social and material advantage but remains unhappy is a staple in every art form: Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “Richard Cory” (also a Simon and Garfunkel song), The Kinks’ “A Well Respected Man,” the Jack Nicholson character in Five Easy Pieces and Shakespeare’s Hamlet are just a few examples. The character is always a man: women exist in these works to either support him, betray him, or both. The popularity of “the people who have everything but really have nothing” can also be seen, in TV shows like Downton Abbey and, back in the 80s, Dallas and Dynasty, as an attempt at social control. The message in these works for those without money or power is: “Even if you had what you want, you still wouldn’t be happy.”

Sorrentino avoids these pitfalls, in part because the energy and fantasy-level luxury that make up the characters’ lives are allowed to dazzle us: even Jep’s mid-rise apartment and well-tended garden overlook the ruins of The Colosseum. We understand why Jep would spend forty years in this world, but after a few parties we come to understand why he is sick of them. We see Jep is a thoughtful and decent man, but weak, like Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth who said, “We resist the great temptations, but it is the little ones that eventually pull us down.”

Servillo’s charming, insinuating performance also saves the film from becoming a chorus of “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me”: in spite of his discontent the character never raises his voice: his life is easy and enviable so he never has to. The movie is also a portrait of Italy at a critical juncture. Not just the main character, who often thinks back to his first love, but others in the film, like the country itself, are trapped in the past: a “princess” rents herself and her husband out to parties where her bloodline will add some social cachet, even though they live in a cramped, ugly apartment–underneath the glittering museum her childhood home has become.

Instead of positing that the characters will find some missing and essential part of themselves by revisiting their memories (as so many films have posited before it) The Great Beauty sidesteps that possibility: Jep sees an opportunity to find out why his first love left him when her husband mentions she kept a diary, then in the next breath he tells Jep he threw it away. The princess’s empty, pristine old bedroom in the museum will never be her room again, just a backdrop for taped audio about the history of her family the museum-goers listen to.

The film avoids disaster in other ways. I was afraid the little person we first see as part of the raucous, debauched party at the beginning, who then regains consciousness the morning after at the now empty site, might be the art-film trope Peter Dinklage’s character in Living in Oblivion described as “Make it weird. Put a dwarf in it!” But blue-haired Dadina (Giovanna Vignola) turns out to be Jep’s editor–his boss–at the magazine where he works. She regularly eats with him at the dining table inside her office and is one of his closest–and in one scene, most tender–friends.

Some scenes had the potential to devolve into the misogyny that often accompanies this type of storyline, as when Jep interviews a Marina Abramović-like performance artist and gets her to admit she doesn’t know what her quasi-mystical pronouncements mean, or the scene when, after a fellow-partygoer provokes him, he dismantles her illusions point by point. But Jep is quiet and matter-of-fact in these scenes: he has none of Jack Nicholson’s relish in denigrating women. He asks the partygoer several times to stop asking him to analyze her before he lets her have it. When he does, we see, like Truman Capote before him, Jep’s sojourn in the world of celebrity hasn’t dimmed the novelist’s gift for observation.

At one point Jep makes a stripper (who is the daughter of an old acquaintance, the strip club’s manager) his companion, but she’s in her 40s, 20-something years younger than Jep, but not the 25-year-old we’ve come to expect in these roles. As other partygoers gossip over her spangled catsuit, he treats her as an intelligent apprentice in the art of negotiating the highest social circles. They don’t have a sexual relationship. Earlier Jep falls into bed with a woman–again much more age-appropriate than she would be in an American film–and we can see these encounters don’t have the same appeal for him as they might have when he was younger. But the film is devoid of the hostility toward women we’ve come to take for granted in similar films. He’s playful with the woman, asking, “What did you say your job was?”

She answers, “Me? I’m rich.”

“That’s a good job!”

Sorrentino criticizes the vanity of Jep’s circle, showing a botox party (which makes looking at some of subsequent close-ups of middle-aged actresses in the film difficult–something Sorrentino might have done intentionally) but later Sorrentino exposes Jep’s vanity as well, when we see his torso usually covered by a smart suit jacket (often in a primary color) wrapped in the velcro equivalent of Spanx.

In this film Sorrentino also focuses on nuns and clergy who wander in and out of the frame like birds–or aliens: the young nun at the botox party wants the shot so her hands will stop sweating, and a Mother-Teresa-like figure collapses on the bare floor of Jep’s elegant apartment to sleep. Sorrentino’s interest in religious figures reminded me of Luis Buñuel’s obsession, though Sorrentino seems to see them as clueless and out-of-step (during a party one cleric can speak only about recipes) and not, as Buñuel did, an active harm to the culture. That difference may be a statement about the Catholic Church’s disappearing relevance as much as about the two directors’ style and tone.

As much as I loved the film: at two hours and 20 minutes it’s about a half an hour too long. We could use fewer of the parties. We get it: they’re not as fun as they might seem. The film also falters in a brief scene in which a delegation from Africa (who come to see the Mother Teresa figure) are dressed as if they were extras in a Tarzan movie. I’m a little disappointed that the film won The Golden Globe over Blue Is The Warmest Color (which isn’t nominated for an Oscar, because of a technicality). The Great Beauty is a worthy film, but it’s also one that I recommended to my mother, which I most definitely would not with Blue. I’d love if the “Best Foreign Language Film” reflected how exciting and innovative the greatest films from non-English speaking countries are these days.

Still, film is a tricky medium: a movie about a character without redeeming qualities (like The Wolf of Wall Street) can seem like a paean to outrageously bad and sometimes criminal behavior (especially when its real-life protagonist continues to make money from his misdeeds) no matter how much the filmmakers disavow those intentions. Movies about obtuse misanthropes like Nebraska and Inside Llewyn Davis can seem obtuse and misanthropic themselves. The Great Beauty is about a bored, jaded man but doesn’t leave its audience bored–or jaded which is itself an achievement.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxWdwx5Hkiw”]

Gillian Anderson, Feminism, and BBC’s ‘The Fall’

The most important thing The Fall is doing, though, is calling out misogyny. Yes, Gibson gets to hand it to Spector, the serial killer, labeling him a “weak, impotent” misogynist, but we already knew that. What I find more intriguing is the way the show implicates the police force and the audience itself for the casual misogyny, assumptions, and stereotypes that perpetuate victim-blaming.

Spoiler Alert

The Fall is a BBC2 crime series starring Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame as Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson in charge of a serial killer case in Belfast. In a lot of ways, The Fall reminds me of the show The Killing because both feature female leads who are strong, capable, and dogged. The way in which The Fall differs, though, is that it impressively wears its feminist agenda on its sleeve.

Before I get into all the amazing things that The Fall is doing right, I want to get out of the way the biggie that I think it’s doing wrong. While this series is taking huge strides to turn a particularly sexist genre on its head, The Fall, like many crime shows, exploits the bodies of the women who are victimized. The camera lovingly caresses and lingers upon these women’s terror, their struggles, their bound limbs, their exposed flesh, and finally their corpses. The excuse can be given that it’s all in the name of “getting into the killer’s head”, but the camera’s gaze goes too far into the realm of prurience, ultimately becoming gratuitous and indulging in fantasies of rendering women helpless and objectified. This is a dangerous trope that threatens to dehumanize its female characters (and women in general), which is the OPPOSITE of what The Fall is trying to do.

Granted the objectification and sexualization of victimized women is disturbing (to say the least), but conversely The Fall provides its lead heroine a strong, unapologetic sexuality. Stella Gibson picks out a sexual partner at a glimpse (fellow officer James Olson who seems to be working the Irish equivalent of Vice), openly propositions him for a one night stand, has sex with him, and then refuses to engage with him afterwards because he can’t keep it casual. Gibson takes on the traditionally ascribed male role as sexual pursuer as well as the one who dictates the terms on which the encounter occurs.

Superintendent Stella Gibson is a woman who knows what she wants.

Due to an unexpected turn of events, Gibson is repeatedly questioned by her police force colleagues about her relationship with Olson, each interrogator is male, and each is accusatory and incredulous at Gibson’s behavior, judgmental of her unapologetic sexuality, her unwitting role in Olson’s infidelity to his wife, and her lack of remorse for her actions as well as her lack of attachment to a man with whom she spent a single night. In a way, these men even go so far as to heap some measure of blame on Gibson for Olson’s death. With a self-satisfied smile, one of her questioners asks, “When did you first meet Sergeant Olson?” Gibson replies,

That’s what really bothers you, isn’t it? The one night stand. Man fucks woman. Subject: man. Verb: fucks. Object: woman. That’s ok. Woman fucks man. Woman: subject. Man: object. That’s not so comfortable for you, is it?

DSI Gibson seems to always have to hold her ground when it comes to her male colleagues. — DSI Gibson has to hold her ground when it comes to her male colleagues.

My jaw dropped when Gibson delivered this speech. She simply and elegantly exposes all the sexism inherent in everyone’s attitude toward her private sexual relationships. She unearths the wider cultural misogynistic discomfort with female sexual agency. I wanted to clap or call someone and say, “It’s happening! Feminism is hitting mainstream TV with a brutal right hook!” Yes. Yes. YES.

Inherent in Gibson’s self-assurance about her sexuality is an even greater independence and self-possession. Gibson is the shining star of a cast full of strong, capable women who take charge when necessary and are very professionally accomplished. In fact, the serial killer solely targets women he finds threatening and emasculating due to their career success (we may or may not learn more about this in the as-yet unproduced Season Two). Not only are many of the female cast members strong, but they’re well-developed AND friends with one another. First, we’ve got the up-and-coming Constable Dani Ferrington played by Niamh McGrady.

Ferrington deeply regrets not taking the break-in at the house of future victim Sarah Kay — Ferrington regrets not taking seriously the break-in at Sarah Kay’s home.

Ferrington very casually comes out as gay to Gibson, her commanding officer. Gibson takes the information just as casually, which is refreshing. Ferrington also strives to protect Gibson by cleaning up her hotel room of its evidence of “male company”. Gibson doesn’t hide her encounter with Olson, but Ferrington’s effort to shield her friend and superior’s private life is admirable. Not only that, but Ferrington comes clean about having responded to a break-in call from one of the serial killer victims and admits that she may have been knocking on the victim’s door while the murder was occurring. Though this admission means Ferrington may face potential charges of incompetence and blame, she behaves with integrity, putting the case above her personal stake in the matter. Ferrington is ambitious, honest, and loyal, and Gibson recognizes and appreciates those qualities and promotes her onto the serial killer case.

Another example of powerful women not only liking each other but working together (and not competing) is the relationship between Gibson and the case’s pathologist, Dr. Tanya Reed Smith, depicted by the talented Archie Panjabi (Panjabi also adds a bit of much needed diversity to the cast).

Chief Medical Examiner Reed Smith & DSI Stella Gibson — Pathologist Tanya Reed Smith & DSI Stella Gibson

Reed Smith is a highly respected police medical professional…who arrives at a crime scene on her motorcycle (badass).

Together, Reed Smith and Gibson examine crime scenes, review the details of the case, and talk about their personal lives. We find out Reed Smith has two daughters and is deeply troubled when she has to perform exams on live victims. With Reed Smith, Gibson lets down her guard and is far more open and honest than she can be with her male co-workers about her transient lifestyle and the duality she finds necessary to separate her professional and private lives. The women bond, sharing coffee and alcohol in friendship and as an important release from the stress of the case.

Strong female characters: Reed Smith & Stella Gibson.

In an unexpected turn of events, Reed Smith shares with Stella a bit of information gleaned from a college friend about an old abusive boyfriend who may match the killer’s M.O. Gibson interviews the victim, and we see this as a potential break in the case. This plot development is crucial because it illustrates the power in the unity of women. Though the old abuses went unreported, this network of women remembers the crimes. Gibson is then able to use her new-found knowledge against the serial killer (Paul Spector played by Jamie Dornan).

The most important thing The Fall is doing, though, is calling out misogyny. Yes, Gibson gets to hand it to Spector, the serial killer, labeling him a “weak, impotent” misogynist, but we already knew that. Even other misogynists can probably recognize that murdering women for sexual pleasure is over-the-top. What I find more intriguing is the way the show implicates the police force and the audience itself for the casual misogyny, assumptions, and stereotypes that perpetuate victim-blaming.

Gibson must insist that the victims not be identified as “innocent” because it implies some women, especially ones coded as sexual, might then be more deserving of brutal murder. Gibson refuses to indulge the media in the virgin/whore dichotomy, and she also declares that no judgements against the victims or their life choices are allowed. With the early blunder in which Ferrington and her partner didn’t take the break-in at victim Sarah Kay’s house seriously, we begin to see that this kind of stereotyping and victim-blaming can be deadly. It takes the emphasis off the perpetrator, and it increases the likelihood of repeat occurrences of crimes against women while also making those crimes less likely to be solved. The Fall is then exposing institutional sexism and misogyny in a radical and important way.

I’m excited to see what Season Two of The Fall will have in store. I trust it will continue to depict its female characters with integrity while ferreting out corruption within the police force and illuminating the nuances of institutional misogyny. It’s wonderful to have a well-produced, well-written, and excellently performed TV show that really strives to advance a feminist agenda. Though this approach seems revolutionary, it’s bizarre that we have so many crime shows that focus on the victimization of women that somehow do NOT employ a feminist lens. I hope The Fall is the first of many crime shows that don’t use the abuse and murder of women as a punchline or an empty premise, but as a means to expose a great inequity in our world that must be corrected or else women will continue to be beaten, abused, raped, and murdered at an alarming rate.

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

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

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

This guest post by Katherine Murray appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

Ja’mie: Private School Girl features a drag performance from Australian comedian Chris Lilley that’s sometimes funny and sometimes uncomfortable to watch. Join me as I do the least funny thing in the world, and try to explain how a joke works.

Currently airing on HBO, Ja’mie: Private School Girl has plenty of funny moments as well as plenty that seem more mean-spirited, and the combination creates an uncomfortable viewing experience. Ja’mie, portrayed by Lilley, is a narcissistic and socially tone-deaf villain who was previously featured in We Can Be Heroes: Finding the Australian of the Year and Summer Heights High. Like The Office’s David Brent before her, Ja’mie craves admiration from others, but rarely does anything commendable. Instead, she inadvertently reveals herself to be racist, snobbish, bullying, and homophobic, while trying to sing her own praises. Private School Girl is the first series to focus exclusively on Ja’mie, following her through her day-to-day life as she prepares to graduate from the exclusive Hillford Girls Grammar School, and attempts to win the coveted Hillford Medal.

Ja’mie is one of Lilley’s most popular characters, and it isn’t hard to see why. A quick YouTube search returns some really funny clips from Heroes and Summer Heights High, where most of the comedy comes from Ja’mie’s hypocrisy. In Heroes, Ja’mie tries to gain recognition for her charity work—sponsoring African children through a World Vision analog—but reveals herself to be shallow and racist as soon as she tries to explain the project. She admits that she doesn’t know the names of any of the children she sponsors, because their names are “weird,” but she sings to their pictures “in their language” by making up words and clicking her tongue. When she learns that most of the children she sponsors were killed in a horrible flood, she’s devastated by the idea that this might hurt her chances at winning Australian of the Year, and calls the charity to make a customer complaint.

In Summer Heights High, Ja’mie is an exchange student at the titular public school, and she continually insults her classmates for being poor and ugly under the guise of finding common ground. She introduces herself by giving a prepared speech about how private school students are more likely to go to university and earn more money, whereas wife-beaters and rapists are statistically more likely to come from public schools. “People always go, ‘Private schools create better citizens,’”she says, “But I would say they create better quality citizens.” Later, when she campaigns for an end-of-year dance, she begins by telling everyone that dances give poor people (or “povos”), like them, something to live for. Under her leadership, the dance then becomes so expensive that no one can afford to buy tickets.

As of this writing, four of Private School Girl’s six episodes have aired, and the funniest moments rely on the same type of humour—scenes where Ja’mie congratulates herself for being nice to everyone, juxtaposed with documentary-style footage of her bullying other students. Fittingly, her nemesis at Hillford is an unpretentious girl named Erin who seems genuinely nice, and cares about helping others. Ja’mie recoils in disgust whenever Erin says or does anything heartfelt, and hypocritically accuses her of faking kindness in order to be admired. Though one might wish there were more characters for Ja’mie to play against, those scenes work really well, as do most of the scenes where we see Ja’mie whiplash between the falsely humble face she wears around people she wants to impress, and the vicious, Eric Cartman-like monster within.

Unfortunately, there are other scenes in Private School Girl where it seems like the joke is just “Ha! She’s a girl!” which makes things a little uncomfortable. Chris Lilley also gave this cringey interview where he said that straight guys love the show, because “The show is sort of like making fun of girls. It’s doing all the annoying things that our girlfriends do.” Unless the annoying things their girlfriends do include grossly misusing charity outreach programs and tyrannizing strangers at school, I’m not sure that “annoying things girls do” is an awesome target for a grown man’s comedy—especially when the annoying things aren’t otherwise hurting anyone else.

For example, there are lot of scenes where Ja’mie and her friends talk over each other excitedly, dissolving into a wall of noise and screeching for seemingly endless minutes. In the first episode, there’s a scene where they goof around, taking a long time to say goodbye to each other, yelling back and forth about how they’ll miss each other SO MUCH, and how they’re best friends, before running back for hugs. There are scenes that are just about Ja’mie being excited because a cute boy accepted her friend request on Facebook, or because she gets to throw a party. In most of these instances, the events aren’t exaggerated to the point that they become absurd and therefore funny — instead, they feel like a fairly true-to-life impression of a certain type of teenage girlhood, and it feels like the show takes for granted that it’s OK to just make fun of that.

From a practical standpoint, the scenes aren’t particularly funny — they feel too much like watching a real reality show, where people you don’t particularly like have conversations that aren’t particularly important. At the same time, there’s an uncomfortable undercurrent, since the inclusion of most of these scenes tells us that they were supposed to be funny—that there’s supposed to be something inherently laughable in the way that (some) teenage girls talk to each other, or the way they express their emotions—so laughable that you don’t even need to make up a joke for the scene; you just have to show it. As satire, it’s a far cry from the wicked hypocrisy of Ja’mie’s charity mission in Africa.

There are other jokes, though, that cut a little closer to the bone, and most of them involve Ja’mie’s brazen but awkward sexuality. Mistakenly believing herself to be a good dancer, she repeatedly tries to gain attention by performing sexually charged (or “slutty”) choreography and undoing the top buttons on her uniform to show her bra. She flirts with her school principal and, when a boy stays over at her house, she makes sure to casually pass by his room wearing only a towel. She constantly seeks reassurance that she’s not fat, while obsessing over the idea that her breasts are too small, and there’s an ongoing plot about the etiquette of sexting. Internet spoilers assure me that the ongoing discussion of Ja’mie’s breasts, and whether or not she should flash them, is building toward conflict in the final episodes, but, as others have pointed out, it isn’t always clear whether the show is making fun of Ja’mie or of the culture that’s placed her in this position.

When it comes to sex, teenage girls are at a disadvantage. They’re subject to conflicting demands, telling them both that the need to be sexually available and that sexual availability is not OK—they inhabit a world where developing a sexual identity is a Choose Your Own Adventure that always ends in scorn. Although I’ll withhold judgement about the finale until I’ve seen it, there’s an uncomfortable sense that Private School Girl has so far treated Ja’mie’s conflicted sexuality as another instance of her personal hypocrisy—that she’s pretending to be modest when really she’s the kind of girl who wants to flash her tits, or she’s pretending to be sexually experienced when really she’s too frigid to get it on—rather than a relic of a culture that would shame her both for wanting and not wanting sex.

Altogether, Private School Girl works really well when its satire is aimed at racists, bullies, and snobs, but significantly less well when it’s aimed at the more diffuse target of “girls.” Watching it, you come away with the sense that Chris Lilley has gotten a little bit too good at playing this character; that he’s revelling in his ability to imitate a certain set of mannerisms, while the point of the joke has been lost.

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

‘Puella Magi Madoka Magica,’ Declaration Feminism

Immortality is not what makes a world better. Hope, friendship, and love do, and love is not limited by sex, gender, ethnicity, or race. Women like Homura and Kyoko can fall in love with other women like Madoka and Sayaka respectively. We have the responsibility to stand up with people like them. This series is part of the reason I try to do that and more. I hope that many others to do the same.

caption — Promotional material for *Puella Magi Madoka Magica*, featuring (left to right): Kyoko Sakura,
Sayaka Miki, Mami Tomoe, Homura Akemi, and Madoka Kaname.

This guest post by Matthew Abely appears as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

It has been said over and over again that “Religion is the opiate of the masses;”[i] that is just not fair. It is not the masses, it is the privileged and powerful, and it is not just religion that is their opiate, it is anything that provides a perpetual escape from the reality that with power and privilege comes responsibility. Today a lot of people use anime for this. Beloved anime like Studio Shaft’s spring 2011 series, Puella Magi Madoka Magica (Madoka Magica for short), among others, are heavily feminist. Go online and even suggest something remotely like this, however, and a virulent few will inevitably rise to shut such thoughts down.[ii] Not this time.

Madoka Magica has a sequel film premiering in theaters,[iii] and it is high time the series’ social criticism and advocacy were recognized. It is high time many an anime received such praise. Madoka Magica, however, is the right place to start. Why is rape and violence against women such a common cross-cultural occurrence that such a term as “rape culture” exists?[iv] Why is male supremacy likewise just as common that there is a term called “patriarchy”?[v] Why does patriarchy inevitably stratify along class, race, and related social lines (this is called “kyriarchy”)?[vi] Why would anyone institutionalize evil like this?

Madoka Magica is not a perfect response. It does answer all of the above; however, it is in its subtext only. The merchandise its creators license also objectifies the teenage cast horribly.[vii] The series, however, is still a good place to start. It may only answer these aforementioned fundamental questions of feminist theory through symbolism and allegory. It however also does something few others works of popular fiction seem to do. It gives an idea of what to do about its answers.

Madoka Kaname sees herself as nothing more than average and plain.[viii]

Until the day an entity named Kyuubey informs her that she has dormant superpowers. Magic is real, and everywhere there are invisible monsters called witches instigating traffic accidents, suicides, natural disasters, and more. Kyuubey explains that he and his species, the Incubators, search endlessly for people with dormant magic in order to offer them a contract. He will grant a person any one wish, and in return they must let him awaken their magic and pledge to do battle with witches as magical girls. Madoka finds out, however, that Kyuubey is not telling the whole truth.[ix]

He awakens magic by placing a person’s soul in a gem, thus making each magical girl the undead. Magical girls’ powers have limits. Should they exhaust all the magic of their soul gem, they die. Witches are born whenever a magical girl dies from soul gem exhaustion. Magical girls themselves can also transmogrify into witches should they succumb to madness, despair, or choose evil. The birth of a witch releases a lot of energy; the transmogrification of a magical girl even more. The Incubators use this energy to fuel the multitude of civilizations across the Earth and universe that they rule from behind the scenes. They do not, however, use everyone as a battery. The Incubators indirectly institutionalize it so that only pubescent girls must be sacrificed.[x]

It is the most efficient way; it is all for the greater good, Kyuubey claims.[xi]

He is not the only one who does. In the United States and Canada, a man rapes a woman every minute; another man hits a woman every nine seconds; men murder 1,000 women via domestic violence a year.[xii] The law prosecutes less than 10 percent of these men, convicting and sentencing even fewer.[xiii] Who cares? Steubenville and Pennsylvania State have football games to win.[xiv] Roman Polanski has too many great films to make and Julian Assange too many great secrets to reveal.[xv] Society simply cannot afford to have any of these rapists waste away in prison. People kill or sexually enslave at least 200 million women in and around China and India since the One Child Policy began.[xvi] No matter, class warfare—the population boom—must be stopped.[xvii] Besides, if Senator Hilary Clinton became president of the United States of America[xviii] or Doctor Wangari Maathai a member of the Kenyan Parliament[xix], their “PMS and mood swings” would destroy progress.

It is all for the greater good. It is building a better, immortal, world, Kyuubey repeats over and over again.[xx] In this better world, however,all four of Madoka’s friends die more horribly than the last.[xxi]

Mami Tomoe, weighed down by the guilt of her parents’ death, attempts to atone by being the perfect school girl, perfect host, perfect warrior, perfect mentor, and perfect leader. She stretches herself too thin; a witch gores her to death.[xxii] Sayaka Miki, upon finding out that her contract made her a zombie, thinks herself too tainted to deserve the love of her secret crush, especially when it turns out he already loves, and is loved in return, by a much more conventionally feminine girl than she. Sayaka resolves to repress all her passion and desire. She transmogrifies into a witch.[xxiii] Kyoko Sakura uses her magic to help her preacher father convert people to his new strand of Christianity. Ashamed to have needed magic’s help, he murders Kyoko’s sister and mother, and attempts to kill Kyoko as if they were property, before hanging himself. Kyoko becomes so belligerent and cynical that her attempt to befriend Sayaka Miki, whom Kyoko finds she may actually love, backfires. Kyoko commits suicide, battling the witch she helps push Sayaka into becoming.[xxiv]

Homura Akemi comes to love Madoka Kaname. The first time they meet, Madoka is a magical girl. Madoka dies in battle. Homura wishes for the power to change this. She travels back in time, over and over again, trying to save Madoka by any means necessary, including murder. No matter whom she kills, however, Homura makes Madoka’s fate worse with each loop. Madoka dies in battle. Madoka dies and give birth to a witch. Madoka dies and gives birth to a witch that destroys the earth.[xxv]

The Incubator’s desire for immortality and demands for perfect maximum efficiency affects more than just children’s attempts to find happiness. Only the relationship between Madoka’s parents is based on collaboration and equality.[xxvi] Every other adult relationship shown is based on competition and hegemony. Madoka’s teacher is constantly dumped for being an imperfect wife.[xxvii] Madoka’s mother Junko must constantly prove her worth as a business executive by drinking hard with the big boys.[xxviii] Their neighbors and community forced Kyoko’s family into starvation and destitution when her father’s preaching diverted from Christian dogma.[xxix] Sayaka breaks and transmogrifies when she encounters two men on a train waxing loudly about the importance of physical and emotional abuse.[xxx]

There are beautiful walkways, malls, cafes, schools, apartment complexes in this better world the Incubators have built,[xxxi] yet there are few if any signs that there is community. The streets are usually deserted.[xxxii] The cafes full of empty chairs at empty tables.[xxxiii]

Pedestrians do not interact.[xxxiv]

Only Madoka notices it when a witch’s curse induces a mass hypnosis in the middle of a street.[xxxv] Sayaka and Kyoko have two loud battles, one that breaks a water pipe and one on a bridge over a crowded freeway.[xxxvi] Nobody notices them. When they die, no one realizes that Mami and Sayaka are even missing until days later.[xxxvii] No one ever noticed that Kyoko still existed after her father’s suicide.[xxxviii] Three characters (Mami, Homura, and Sayaka’s crush Kyouske) all suffer from traffic accidents. No one explains them, and likewise few people notice how common suicides, accidents, natural disasters, and general strife seem to have become.[xxxix]

This better world the Incubators have built may be immortal, yet there is no reason to live in it. There is no companionship nor trust nor love. Madoka sees this; Kyuubey however, continues to insist that short of returning to being naked in caves, there is no other way to live.[xl] He, again, is not the only one. Even in the face of impending environmental catastrophe, President George H. W. Bush stated: “THE American way of life is not up for negotiation.”^[xli] This same American Life has made its people less and less happy since the 1950s, while the amount of time they work has more than doubled.[xlii] “Let some people get rich first,”[xliii] Chinese Vice-Chairman Deng Xiaoping declared this to be the way to build a modern China. No one suffers from as much smog as the Chinese.[xliv] Still, men like this and Kyuubey continue to insist: it is foolish to think that there is another way live well. Madoka comes to disagree.

Madoka wishes for the power to stop all witches throughout space and time from being born, and save all magical girls from transmogrifying into them. It works. Madoka ascends to godhood and recreates the universe into one where Kyuubey cannot transmogrify anyone into a witch.[xlv]

Though she sacrifices her own mortal existence and all memory that she ever existed in every mind, except Homura’s,[xlvi] she opens a door. Kyriarhcy and its ilk seem to continue to exist in the new universe that Madoka creates.[xlvii] Homura and the now reborn Mami, Kyoko, and Sayaka, however, now have the freedom and so the responsibility to fight back. The same has been true the viewers this whole time.

Madoka Kaname is not the only one who found another way. Those people so often scored as too effeminate to lead: like Wangari Maathai, Hilary Clinton, and more–they often have as well. Doctor Maathai and the Green Belt Movement toppled a 30-year dictatorship in Kenya. Their first move: empowering communities of impoverished women to plant trees.[xlviii] They did not win it alone.[xlix] Those who have the privilege to experience art and anime, can choose to use them like drugs, and attempt to escape from reality. We can all stay individuals relating primarily by competition, pretending this will stave off environmental collapse,[l] or we could choose to become communities, and continue to prove to everyone, human or otherwise, that there are always other ways to live well than violent sacrifice.

Immortality is not what makes a world better. Hope, friendship, and love do, and love is not limited by sex, gender, ethnicity, or race. Women like Homura and Kyoko can fall in love with other women like Madoka and Sayaka respectively.[li] We have the responsibility to stand up with people like them. This series is part of the reason I try to do that and more. I hope that many others to do the same.

Matthew Abely is a recent college graduate, longtime nerd, and novice ally to intersectional feminists. When not researching, writing, or working, he can be found attending comic book conventions with friends on the United States’ Pacific Northwest and Central Coast, or exercising.

[i] Marx, Carl. “The Communist Manifesto.” ‘The Communist Manifesto’ and Other Revolutionary Writings. Dover, 2003. Print.

[ii] Chapman, Hope. “Anime Derby: Summer 2013 Season: Round 1 (Part 1).” That Guy with the Glasses. 3 September 2013. BlipTV, 2013. Web, 08:55-11:25.

[iii] Magica Quartet. Madoka Movie Project Rebellion. Aniplex, 2013. Web.

[iv] McEwan, Melissa. “Feminism 101.” Shakesville. 29 June 2012: Blogger, 2009. Web.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Puella Magi Madoka Magica Silk Printing, Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica Anime Fabric Wall Scroll Poster

[viii] Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Akiyuki Shinbo. Aniplex: Studio Shaft, 2011. Film, Episode 10.

[ix] Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Akiyuki Shinbo. Aniplex: Studio Shaft, 2011. Film, Episodes 1-3.

[x] Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Akiyuki Shinbo. Aniplex: Studio Shaft, 2011. Film, Episodes 4-11.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Sonlit, Rebecca. “A Rape a Minute, a Thousand Corpses a Year.” Mother Jones. 25 January 2013: Foundation for National Progress, 2013. Web.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] McEwan, Melissa. “Rape Culture 101.” Shakesville. 9 October 2010: Blogger, 2009. Web.

[xvi] Hvistendahl, Mara. Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. Public Affairs, 2012. Print.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Miss Representation. Jennifer Siebel Newsom. GirlsClub Entertainment: 2011. Film.

[xix] Maathai, Wangari. Unbowed: a Memoir. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print.

[xx] Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Akiyuki Shinbo. Aniplex: Studio Shaft, 2011. Film, Episodes 1-11.

[xxi] Ibid.

[xxii] Ibid, 1-3.

[xxiii] Ibid, 4-8.

[xxiv] Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Akiyuki Shinbo. Aniplex: Studio Shaft, 2011. Film, 5-9.

[xxv] Ibid, Episode 10.

[xxvi] Ibid, 1-12.

[xxvii] Ibid, 1.

[xxviii] Ibid, 1-6.

[xxix] Ibid, 8.

[xxx] Ibid, 8.

[xxxi] Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Akiyuki Shinbo. Aniplex: Studio Shaft, 2011. Film. Episodes 1-11.

[xxxii] Ibid.

[xxxiii] Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Akiyuki Shinbo. Aniplex: Studio Shaft, 2011. Film, Episode 8.

[xxxiv] Ibid, 5.

[xxxv] Ibid, 4.

[xxxvi] Ibid, 6-7.

[xxxvii] Ibid, 11.

[xxxviii] Ibid, 5-9.

[xxxix] Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Akiyuki Shinbo. Aniplex: Studio Shaft, 2011. Film, 1-11.

[xl] Ibid, 11.

[xli] Bush, George H. W. Earth Summit. Rio De Janeiro, 1992. Speech.

[xlii] The Story of Stuff. Leonard, Annie. Free Range Studios, 2007. Film.

[xliii] Deng, Xiaoping. Speech.

[xliv] Peralta, Eyder. “Chinese City Of 11 Million Paralyzed By Off-The-Charts Smog.” The Two-Way. 21 October 2013: NPR, 2013. Web.

[xlv] Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Akiyuki Shinbo. Aniplex: Studio Shaft, 2011. Film, Episode 12.

[xlvi] Ibid.

[xlvii] Ibid.

[xlviii] Maathai, Wangari. Unbowed: a Memoir. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print.

[xlix] Ibid.

[l] The Story of Stuff. Leonard, Annie. Free Range Studios, 2007. Film.

[li] Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Akiyuki Shinbo. Aniplex: Studio Shaft, 2011. Film.

‘The Quiet Girl’s Guide to Violence’: The Manic Pixie’s Perspective

Written by MaxThornton.

“I have made a resolution. … People should not be allowed to get away with things.”

The Quiet Girls’ Guide to Violence poster

Actually creating matter by naming it might be the prerogative of the gods, but there’s a certain generative power in naming even the most mundane things. When something is named, it gets a categorization, a way for us to conceptualize and talk about it as we couldn’t before.

This happened memorably in early 2007, when then-A.V. Club reviewer Nathan Rabin coined the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” for a pop-culture phenomenon we didn’t know we needed a name for. Since, then the MPDG has been discussed extensively (not least on this very site), parodied extensively, and – as Amanda noted a couple of weeks ago – pronounced dead. All of this discourse proves, if nothing else, that (1) the MPDG is definitely a trope, and (2) we sure do like to talk about her, even though she irritates the heck out of us.

If the protagonist of Rafael Antonio Ruiz’s short film The Quiet Girl’s Guide to Violence can be considered a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, then she’s certainly my favorite example of the trope.

Holly (Jennymarie Jemison) wears a hideous Christmas turtleneck, a cardigan, a bow-shaped barrette, and thick-rimmed glasses. She’s a librarian and a barista, two quintessentially MPDG occupations. She speaks without using contractions and expresses an awkward naivety in her interactions. In a different movie, she would be a perfect storm of quirk, but both the superb acting and the stylish direction make it quite clear from the get-go that we should not expect cloying indie-pop adorkableness.

Jemison plays Holly with a chilly, staring intensity whereby every frame of her face can be frozen to show only a soulful, sorrowful thoughtfulness, but in motion her seething desperation is palpable. Holly’s flashbacks to an incident of harassment are heralded by a rhythmic pounding noise, signaling that her titular quietness is certainly only surface-deep.

Jennymarie Jemison as Holly.

The plot follows Holly’s revenge on two men who were responsible for a deeply scarring incident of harassment in her youth. Chance encounters with the men at her two places of employment spur flashbacks to the boys’ misogyny and sexual harassment, compelling her to take violent action.

Arguably, the film functions as a powerful feminist response to the MPDG trope. It is, of course, characteristic of the MPDG that she have neither agency nor personality of her own, existing solely as a corollary to the male main character. Holly upends that completely: She is a woman whose quiet, unthreatening quirkiness has been molded by misogynistic male dominance of her world, but she explodes that dominance and the identity it is has forced upon her. In a nifty stylistic touch, Holly’s glasses have lenses only in the scenes where she perpetrates violence. She can only see clearly when meting out her brand of vigilante justice; in the daily grind of her life, she is trapped in a role as false as any hipster’s empty frames. “I am seeing the world again, for the first time in a long time,” she declares to her coworker, a performance artist heavily influenced by Karen Finley.

In fact, this same coworker offers a rather blistering commentary on MPDG/boy relations: “No, I don’t think he likes you. I think he has a morbid fascination with you because he’s a fucking idiot.” It’s harsh, and motivated by her jealousy of the guy’s interest in Holly, but it’s not an unfair assessment of the usual trajectory of such films (heck, Joseph Gordon-Levitt said as much about his character in 500 Days of Summer). Holly herself seems to realize this, stepping back from harming the other woman too much. In a patriarchal society, other women are not the enemy.

Holly with a bat

My sympathizing with Holly is not a matter of condoning her violence, but of understanding its roots. A frightened Jeff can hardly believe that Holly is still so profoundly affected by one incident from years before, but he is overlooking the context. What seems to him an isolated instance of an awkward kid lashing out at a girl because he doesn’t know how to tell her he likes her is, to anyone with experience of being read as female in our society, the beginning of a lifetime of harassment and threats and abuse, a collective welter of misogyny that tries to force women to exist only in relation to male subjectivity. Beating men’s heads in is probably not a helpful real-world response, but it’s a cathartic fiction, and it is certainly not an unfathomable reaction to the pressures of being a woman in a sexist world.

The Quiet Girl’s Guide to Violence presents female rage with a nuance and sympathy rarely if ever seen in mainstream media. Holly’s actions are unsettling precisely because they are so understandable. It’s a brutal lesson, but one we men really need to learn: Women – even cute quirky MPDG-type women – do not exist for us.

The Quiet Girl’s Guide to Violence premieres online tomorrow at Fangoria.com as part of their “Screamers” program. More info at http://www.quietgirlsguide.com/.

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

Anna Gunn Breaks the Fourth Wall in a ‘New York Times’ Op/Ed

Skyler White (Anna Gunn) sheds a light on our society’s misogyny.

It isn’t rare to see an actor or actress to take to the op/ed pages to pen support or disdain for political issues and candidates or to come forward with personal stories to enlighten and advocate. The actor or actress, however, typically speaks as an individual, removed from his or her fictional life.

However, Anna Gunn (Skyler White on Breaking Bad) took to The New York Times opinion page to tackle an issue that brings the fictional world that Skyler inhabits into Gunn’s personal world. She weaves in the cultural causes and implications of the vitriol directed at Skyler’s character, at Gunn herself, and at certain kinds of women in our society.

In the beautifully written and poignant “I Have a Character Issue,” she describes how she expected, and even understood, that her character was not going to be well-loved at first. After all, she is Walt’s antagonist, and Walt is the protagonist–the greedy, depraved, meticulously drawn anti-hero.

In her analysis of the horrible response Skyler received from Breaking Bad fans (including Facebook pages that we’ve written about at length), Gunn briefly touches upon her fulfillment in playing the role, and her fear for her own safety when online threats and death wishes devolved from using Skyler’s name to actually singling out Anna Gunn–the real person, not the character she played. Her focus, however, is that this response to Skyler is part of a much larger problem in our culture.

Gunn writes,

“My character, to judge from the popularity of Web sites and Facebook pages devoted to hating her, has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women.”

And with that, she nails it. Feminists have spent a great deal of time suggesting that the hatred of Skyler White (and other notable anti-heros’ wives) is rooted in misogyny. Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator and writer, acknowledged this in a Vulture interview last May. He said,

“…I think the people who have these issues with the wives being too bitchy on Breaking Bad are misogynists, plain and simple.”

For those of us who already knew that, this was a refreshing sound byte. However, there is much more to audiences’ reactions to Skyler, and Gunn’s piece takes that simple reflection on misogyny and unpacks it, giving meaning to our reactions to the fictional world as being indicative of our society as a whole. And she’s right.

Gunn says,

“…I finally realized that most people’s hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives. Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.”

The Skyler White Rorschach test has certainly revealed a great deal of hideous, blatant misogyny and hatred toward women who don’t conform.

Gunn’s New York Times op/ed breaks through a glass fourth wall. Not only is Skyler White one of the most complex female characters on television, but Gunn also uses her real voice in a national publication to lend force to the idea that the hatred and violence directed toward her character, and toward her, reveals much more about our society than most would be willing to admit.

Art imitates life. Life imitates art. And how we feel about that art tells us a great deal about ourselves. In the case of how much hate is directed at characters like Skyler White, it’s no wonder that the work of women’s equality activists–whether they are fighting for proper representation in the media or working for pro-women legislation–is not nearly done.

________________________________________________________

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

‘Breaking Bad’ and the Power of Women: Skyler, Lydia and Marie Take Control

Skyler is calling the shots now.

Written by Leigh Kolb

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

Throughout the last five seasons of Breaking Bad, the female characters have played key roles–from playing adversaries to aiding and abetting–yet they are often overlooked as secondary characters. In fact, a recent article in The Atlantic doesn’t even mention any of the female characters (save for a passing mention of Jane being a “lovely” secondary character in an infographic). While Walt and Jesse are the focus of the series, and they operate in a largely masculine and man-centric world, without Skyler and Lydia, they would have been stopped long ago.

Skyler thought of the car wash. She got the car wash. She laundered the money and kept it safe. She kept the IRS away from her boss and her household. She is consistently rational and protective of her life and her family.

Lydia provided an “ocean” of methylamine. She had threats to the business taken care of. She expanded the operation overseas, and won’t settle for disappointed customers. She is fiercely in charge of her business.

Marie figured out the details of Skyler and Walt’s deceptions quicker than Hank did. She’s willing to attempt to steal–baby Holly this time, not a spoon–to punish Skyler and protect her niece.

Is there a new holy trinity in Albuquerque?

We can’t help but think about the juxtaposition of scenes in last summer’s “Fifty-One” when Skyler submerges herself in the pool and we cut to Lydia at an electrical grid. Each episode, these two become increasingly invested in and in control of producing and protecting Walt’s legacy. Skyler confronted Lydia at the car wash, but that was her home turf. Surely they’ll meet again–and that meeting (like the water and electricity) could be deadly.

(It’s important to note that this most recent episode, “Buried”–perhaps the most woman-centric of the series–was also directed by Emmy-nominated Michelle MacLaren, who some critics consider the show’s “best director.” Another fun fact? A female chemistry professor is the show’s “lead meth consultant.”)

However, the male characters (and audience members) habitually underestimate the women. Hank assumes Skyler is an innocent victim. “Ladies first,” Declan says to Lydia.

In “Buried,” Skyler and Lydia are rising to the top of their prospective enterprises.

Skyler covers a sickly Walt with a feminine quilt, comforting him, and nursing him back to health. “Maybe our best move here is to stay quiet,” she says, acknowledging that to keep the money and keep all of them relatively safe, they need to not talk. She reassures Walt that Hank seemed to have “suspicions, but not much else.” (She knows this because Hank corners her in a diner and tries to get her to talk and give him something–she refuses, screaming “Am I under arrest?” to get out of the situation.) Hank calls her a victim. By the end of the episode, it is clear that Skyler’s no victim. How far could Walt have gotten without her?

The feminine is highlighted in “Buried,” and given great power.

Lydia visits the meth lab in the desert, where Declan and company are making meth that is not up to her or her Czech clients’ standards. “It’s filthy,” she says of the lab. “What are you, my mother?” Declan responds. They underestimate Lydia. If they would have listened to her and followed her pure-meth protocol, perhaps they would have survived. She covers her eyes as she walks past the carnage that she ordered (she was brought to the desert blindfolded, and chose to leave blindly). She steps next to corpses with her feminine, red-soled Christian Louboutins.

If the cooks had listened to Lydia, things would have ended differently.

Lydia often isn’t focused on as a main character, but those Louboutins are carrying her into a pivotal role. But will she be taken seriously? A critic at Slate said, “Her girliness is annoying—calling Declan’s lab ‘filthy’ was sure to make him reference his mom—but she also happened to be right. The man had no standards.” Would Walt have been “annoying” if he had critiqued the way a lab was run? Probably not.

Even with Skyler and Lydia’s power plays and scheming, too many are still focused on the likability of the female characters. (In a thread on Breaking Bad‘s facebook page right now, hoards of people are calling for Skyler to be beaten or killed.) Lydia is too “girlish.” And Marie? “She is so annoying that she deserves to die.”

Critics and audiences wring their hands over who we’re “supposed” to like in Breaking Bad. If we operate in high-school superlative absolutes of “most likable” and “most hated,” how would Vince Gilligan have us categorize the characters? Are we truly supposed to feel good about liking anyone but Jesse?

In reality, we’re allowed to like male characters who maim, kill and hurt children. We’re allowed to root for male anti-heroes and revel in their dirty dealings. The women? Well, if they’re not likable, Internet commenters want them dead.

In “She Who Dies With the Most ‘Likes’ Wins?” Jessica Valenti argues,

“Yes, the more successful you are—or the stronger, the more opinionated—the less you will be generally liked… But the trade off is undoubtedly worth it. Power and authenticity are worth it… Wanting to be liked means being a supporting character in your own life, using the cues of the actors around you to determine your next line rather than your own script. It means that your self-worth will always be tied to what someone else thinks about you, forever out of your control.”

And while I’m fairly certain Valenti wasn’t cheering on money launderers, murderers, or meth dealers, the women of Breaking Bad have appeared to break bad. Their moves will undoubtedly decide the course of the rest of the series.

Audiences, though, too often want to box female characters into “likable” and “hate and kill” categories. While Skyler populated the latter category for years, it seems as if people are now–to an extent–trying to wedge her into the “likable” category. (This critic lauds her as the “best character” on Breaking Bad, and describes her as a wife and mother and extols the virtues of her as a moral center–why does she have to be moral to be a good character? Is it because she’s a woman?)

The Breaking Bad social media team coined #Skysenberg after “Buried,” showing that Skyler has crossed over and fully enmeshed herself with Heisenberg. (This is awfully and misguidedly close to her taking her husband’s name and adopting his characteristics. Because Skyler isn’t necessarily doing what she’s doing to protect Walt.)

This symbolic move into Walt’s court, though, won her some new fans:

Ugh, awful women.

High five, bro!

Heisenberg is sacred–no girls allowed!

And that’s what’s most important.

Yes. You’re right. Everything he did was for her.

Ding ding ding!

Skyler doesn’t care if you like her. Neither does Lydia. Or Marie. Gilligan himself recognizes the hatred and has said, “I think the people who have these issues with the wives being too bitchy on Breaking Bad are misogynists, plain and simple.” Skyler, Lydia and Marie are poised to decide the outcome of Breaking Bad. Skyler is calling the shots instead of Heisenberg. Lydia is decimating–and will certainly replace–a drug cartel. Marie desperately wants to see Walt and Skyler punished; her desire for revenge seems to overshadow Hank’s desire to protect his career.

In the excellent “I hate Strong Female Characters,” Sophia McDougall points out that

“If Strong-Male-Character compatibility was the primary criterion of writing heroes, our fiction would be a lot poorer. But it’s within this claustrophobic little box that we expect our heroines to live out their lives.”

Skyler and Lydia especially are clearly breaking out of these boxes, and Marie isn’t very far behind. But aren’t women supposed to be moral centers? Aren’t their roles as “wife” and “mother” supposed to define them? Aren’t they supposed to not get their hands dirty? We are so accustomed to enjoying and eagerly watching male antiheroes, but watching female characters embody the same traits has been, until now, incredibly rare.

At this point in the series, though, these complex female characters are calling the shots. (“The men are basically just sitting around diddling themselves,” my husband said.)

We don’t need to like female characters for them to be well-drawn and powerful (just like we don’t need to like Walt). We need to get over that. Skyler, Lydia and Marie aren’t just wives and/or mothers anymore. The are characters–not just female characters, or worse yet, “strong female characters.” They are effective and compelling, just how characters who happen to be women should be.

Skyler isn’t Skysenberg. She’s Skyler. And she’s got this.

Are we done here?

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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.