‘Gilmore Girls’: Rory Gilmore Is an Entitled Millennial

That’s because she’s never had to hustle; everything has been handed to her. She only watched her mother struggle to raise her on her own, and even then it’s established that Lorelai went to great pains not to expose Rory to her struggles. … Despite her flaws, I relate to Rory because she displays all my — and my generation’s — worst characteristics.

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This guest post written by Scarlett Harris appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions.


Like any pop cultural product that features archetypal women, viewers are apparently permitted to identify with only one of the Gilmore Girls: Lorelai or Rory. While there are personality traits from both mother and daughter Gilmore that I recognize in myself, I’ve never been a fan of Lorelai (Lauren Graham), so Rory (Alexis Bledel) it is. Like her, I’m bookish, introverted, and a writer. However, since the premiere of the revival, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, there’s been a backlash of sorts to the original television series as a whole, but particularly to Rory and her entitled millennial status.

We rejoin Rory nine years after her graduation from Yale and her first reporting gig on the campaign trail for Barack Obama. What’s Rory been doing since then? Well, it’s hard to tell but the show definitely wants us to know that she’s a capital-W writer. The problem is, though, that the Gilmore Girls writers clearly have no idea what it’s like to be a journalist in 2016. First, who the hell has three phones? Second, who can afford to flit between London, New York, and Stars Hollow on an on-spec dime (ie. nothing)? And third, who coasts on their lone byline in an albeit prestigious publication like The New Yorker. Luke can get away with proudly printing Rory’s “Talk of the Town” piece on the back of his diner menu, but most writers know it’s all about the hustle and where the next paycheck is coming from. I’ve managed to have a couple of articles published in my dream publication, but from there I was looking to what’s next. There’s a difference between savoring a milestone and resting on your laurels, but it doesn’t appear that Rory knows that.

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That’s because she’s never had to hustle; everything has been handed to her. She only watched her mother struggle to raise her on her own, and even then it’s established that Lorelai went to great pains not to expose Rory to her struggles. But when Rory’s met with what appears to be the first hurdle in her professional career (and we don’t really get a sense of what she’s been doing since covering Obama’s campaign in 2007 and The New Yorker), she goes running to Mitchum Huntzberger (Gregg Henry), a man the show vilified for so long for telling darling little Rory that she didn’t have what it took to be a writer. Though he is an asshole, he was kind of right. And having her suck up to him (through Logan no less: she doesn’t even have the intestinal fortitude to ask him to put in a good word for her at the hallowed Condé Nast personally) after establishing him as the Big Bad for the better part of fifteen years undoes a lot of character development.

To be fair, Rory is largely a product of her upbringing. Until the events of Gilmore Girls as we know it — Lorelai’s reconciliation with her rich parents so Rory can go to an expensive private school and then Yale — Rory was raised by an independent, struggling, small-town single mom. Whatever life lessons she learned there were swiftly erased by the ensuing plot developments: her rich grandparents and then her rich father paying for her education and European holidays, her rent-free accommodations, and breaks in school and work to “find herself” similarly bankrolled by Richard (Edward Herrmann), Emily (Kelly Bishop), and Logan (Matt Czuchry). Judging from social media, while much of A Year in the Life’s audience felt like slapping the painfully unself-aware Rory at several points throughout the revival, who among us would turn their noses up at the privilege to write their memoirs in a stately Connecticut home? Say what you want about her (and I have), but Lorelai is one of the only characters in the show who springs to mind.

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Despite her flaws, I relate to Rory because she displays all my — and my generation’s — worst characteristics. The number one complaint about millennials is that we were raised to believe we were better than everyone else, that we should win the ultimate prize just for trying, and that things should be handed to us. Then the global financial crisis hit and we had to reassess everything we had been led to believe was true. I went to college for professional writing and thought I would have a high-powered career in magazines. Instead, I’ve spent the intervening years hustling for the smattering of bylines I’ve had. I struggle with incredulity when my pitches are rejected because I, like Rory, have been socialized to believe that I am a special snowflake and what I think and feel matters so much that any publication would be lucky to print my words.

But some of us have also had a lot of safety nets put in place for these inevitable failures. Like Rory, I’ve also moved back home (to a house that I won’t inherent as my parents have no assets) to save money for a long-term overseas trip, so I wasn’t really “back,” also like Rory. And what my mum can’t offer in financial support she makes up for in home-cooked meals (sorry, no pizza and Tater Tots) and dog-sitting, so it’s not like I’m at a destitute loss compared to Rory’s multiple financial backers. But it took me a long time to reckon with the fact that my parents couldn’t support me financially if I took a misstep like Rory has and, as a single woman with no designs on getting into a relationship anytime soon, I don’t have the emotional and financial support of a partner. The Emily to my Rory has six children, twelve grandchildren and countless great-grandchildren, so there’s likely no inheritance coming my way. And I’m fine with that now. I know that anything I do or have is because I worked for it. The rare things I achieve through luck make me uncomfortable: am I entitled to them if I didn’t work for them? Can Rory Gilmore say the same?

It’s unlikely that the inevitable second/ninth season of Gilmore Girls will address Rory’s privilege: her pregnancy (#LastFourWords) is a convenient scapegoat for her to escape her floundering writing career and throw herself into being a mother. Not that women can’t have both, as Lorelai did, but it seems more like an excuse for Rory to give up than a challenge for her. And we all know what happens to women (again, women who aren’t Lorelai) that teeter outside the guidelines society/Stars Hollow prescribes for them: pregnant with twins the first time they have sex, thus informing their negative opinion of the act, or pregnant with a child they didn’t want because they thought our husband had a vasectomy. Like other shows that depict millennials (and particularly millennial women) as entitled layabouts, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life does nothing to dispel this stereotype.


See also at Bitch Flicks:

Why Lorelai Gilmore from Gilmore Girls Is a “Cool Girl”

Emily Gilmore and the Humanization of Bad Mothers

The Kims Next Door: Korean Identity on Gilmore Girls

Pop-Tarts and Pizza: Food, Gender, and Class in Gilmore Girls

The Paradox of the Gilmore Diet in Gilmore Girls


Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer based in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter @ScarlettEHarris and read her previous published work at her website The Scarlett Woman.

Why Lorelai Gilmore from ‘Gilmore Girls’ Is a “Cool Girl”

The Cool Girl is positioned as being so because she’s not like other women. You’ll notice that apart from Sookie St. James, Rory, and the select few townswomen that put the Gilmore Girls on a pedestal, Lorelai doesn’t play nice with other women. In fact, I would go as far as to say she disdains them.

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This guest post written by Scarlett Harris appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions.


We all know the famous “Cool Girl” screed from Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel, Gone Girl. But since it’s been four years since the book’s release, and two years since its big screen adaptation, here’s a refresher:

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.”

Watching Gilmore Girls for the first time in the lead up to the revival because, even though I was in its target demographic, somehow I missed it the first time around, it hit me that Lorelai Gilmore was a Cool Girl long before Flynn, and Buzzfeed writer Anne Helen Petersen, popularized the term and Jennifer Lawrence became the living embodiment of it. Let me count the ways.

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Not Like Other Girls.

The Cool Girl is positioned as being so because she’s not like other women. You’ll notice that apart from Sookie St. James (Melissa McCarthy), Rory (Alexis Bledel), and the select few townswomen that put the Gilmore Girls on a pedestal, Lorelai (Lauren Graham) doesn’t play nice with other women. In fact, I would go as far as to say she disdains them. While the problems between Lorelai and her mother Emily (Kelly Bishop) are for another article, one of Lorelai’s many criticisms of her mother is that she’s concerned with manners, proper presentation, and social acceptance, all traditionally feminine markers. Lorelai — and the television show as an extension of her — vilifies other women who share traits similar to her mother, such as Sherry (Madchen Amick) and Lindsay (Arielle Kebbel), for catering too much to others, particularly men. For example, Lorelai mocks Sherry for being excited for her baby shower and Dean’s (Jared Padalecki) new bride, Lindsay, for bringing baked goods to his workplace and wanting to be a good wife. But in Lorelai’s cultivation of her Cool Girl persona, she also makes a covert effort to appeal to men in just as damaging ways, placing herself as different from and therefore better than those other girls. Even the long-suffering Michel (Yanic Truesdale) displays too much femininity for Lorelai’s taste, making him the butt of her jokes. Gilmore Girls creator and showrunner, Amy Sherman-Palladino, said that the character “was pretty tough, made her own money, but she also liked men. She wasn’t demonizing them.” Because Cool Girls love men while other girls don’t.

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All About Lorelai.

In the mini-series Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, during an argument with her daughter — because what would a revival be without at least one? — Emily says, “Nothing ever matters to Lorelai Gilmore except what she wants, what she feels,” a recurring theme for Lorelai throughout the show. One of her paramours, Digger, picks up on this on their first date. “Does everything have to be fun for you?” he asks when Lorelai expresses restlessness with an intimate dinner in a private room of a happening club. Lorelai doesn’t care that she shows up to Rory’s first day of Chilton in cowboy boots and tie-dye, or about the parade of on-again off-again men affecting her daughter’s life, or about Luke’s (Scott Patterson) obvious discomfort with the workmen renovating their house seeing her naked because she’s just one of the guys except, you know, one they want to fuck. There are no gay men in Stars Hollow, a fact the revival makes light of when the town struggles to find LGBTQIA residents to march in its first ever gay pride parade. Lorelai’s a cool mom who just wants to have fun and [insert whatever other pop cultural stereotype about women here].

Food. Oh, the Food.

If Gilmore Girls can be associated with one thing, it’s food. Cherry danishes, coffee, pizza, Pop Tarts, Tater Tots and Red Vines. As we read above, Cool Girls are all about eating the food that other, not-as-Cool Girls would shun in favor of their diets. Though Lorelai and Rory hate exercise as much as they love junk food, at least Gone Girl’s protagonist Amy Dunne had the decency to expose the lie that eating junk food while movie marathoning and seldom exercising won’t get you the lithe bodies of the Gilmore clan.

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Gilmore Girls, Indeed.

Though Lorelai raised a child on her own as a teenager and the Cool Girl is more than capable of handling day-to-day inanities and complex hijinks herself (hello, Amy Dunne), the archetype is imbued with a certain childlike quality. Despite her propensity for playing 40-year-old mothers, Hollywood Cool Girl Jennifer Lawrence (who’s 26) certainly has that carefree youthfulness about her. As does Emma Stone and Anna Kendrick (you’ll notice that Cool Girls are almost always white). Because Lorelai’s childhood was cut short, plus the fact that her best friend is her teenage daughter, her immaturity often shows through. She doesn’t care that she disturbs the sleep of Rory during exams or Luke when he has to get up for an early delivery: it’s snowing in the middle of the night, damn it, and Lorelai will frolic in it because she’s quirky like that.

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What a Difference A Year in the Life Makes…

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life does make some strides in dismantling the Cool Girl stereotype. When Rory tells her mother that she’s writing a book about their relationship, Lorelai is displeased, asserting that, “I went to all this effort for many, many years making sure that people only knew what I wanted them to know.”

Cool Girls are supposed to not give a fuck, cultivating an air of carefree- and go-with-the-flow-ness. In actuality, a lot of effort goes into the artifice of the Cool Girl, just like the no-makeup look. Lorelai drives a beat-up old jeep because a less conspicuous car just won’t do, but as season seven draws to a close we saw it starting to sputter and, ten years later in the revival, she’s still hell-bent on keeping it, if much of her other Cool Girl traits have dissipated with age. Because as Flynn writes, the Cool Girl doesn’t exist effortlessly: a lot of work actually goes into maintaining her air of apathy leading us to wonder what even is a Cool Girl and why is Lorelai — and by extension, us — holding on to her so dearly?

Lorelai Gilmore and Gilmore Girlsitself were products of their time. Seldom would television shows of today get away with the homophobia, ableism, and racism of the original series except, you know, in its Netflix revival, which was just as blatant, if not more crafty, in its bigotry.

Ten years have passed since husband and wife team Amy Sherman-Palladino (creator, showrunner) and Daniel Palladino (producer, writer, director) departed the series but you wouldn’t know it from the stagnant feel of the revival. Their vice-like grip on the penultimate season and their apparent bitterness that Gilmore Girls continued without them meant that Rory regressed while Lorelai tried desperately to find some meaning after her father’s death while reckoning with her fading Cool Girl persona.

Maybe a modern-day Lorelai would be more informed, and thus, angrier at the feminine ideal she and the women around her have been forced to embody. Angelica Jade Bastién writes of “the particular brand of anger that blooms in intelligent women when you realize how hard it is to live by your own definition of being a woman,” in a piece about Gone Girland the femme fatale. Lorelai left a stifling home for a just-as-stifling small town that equates her worth as a woman with what she can offer the town (’s men), of which the Stars Hollow basket auction is just one example. Perhaps a thoroughly modern Lorelai would be forging her path through single motherhood in the big city, as Rory attempted in her career as a journalist. We may never know, even if there is a second/ninth season of the show, because Lorelai Gilmore’s creators seem intent on upholding archetypes instead of examining what it actually means to be a woman — and not the titular Girls — today.


See also at Bitch Flicks:

Emily Gilmore and the Humanization of Bad Mothers

The Kims Next Door: Korean Identity on Gilmore Girls

Pop-Tarts and Pizza: Food, Gender, and Class in Gilmore Girls

The Paradox of the Gilmore Diet in Gilmore Girls


Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer based in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter @ScarlettEHarris and read her previous published work at her website The Scarlett Woman.

The Rise of Women with Mental Illness in TV Series

With the sleeper success of ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,’ the increased focus on Kimmy Schmidt’s PTSD this season on ‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,’ and Rachel Goldberg’s mental illness on ‘UnREAL,’ there seems to be a rise in depictions of mental health — in particular, women’s mental health — on television.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, UnReal, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris.


With the sleeper success of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the increased focus on Kimmy Schmidt’s PTSD this season on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Rachel Goldberg’s mental illness on UnREAL, there seems to be a rise in depictions of mental health — in particular, women’s mental health — on television.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend deals perhaps most explicitly with mental health. Unfortunately, the series has an awful, ableist title. Unhappy in her high-powered career as a New York lawyer, Rebecca Bunch bumps into her summer camp boyfriend Josh Chan in the street and decides to follow him to West Covina, California, though she repeatedly claims that’s not the reason for her sea change. There we see her transition through depression, anxiety, and “smidges of [obsessive] compulsive disorder” in her quest to win back Josh, as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s co-creators Rachel Bloom (who plays Rebecca) and Aline Brosh McKenna told Vulture.

The hormones in play when you’re falling in love — increased dopamine levels and a decrease in serotonin — mirror those released when taking a hit of cocaine and having obsessive compulsive disorder. Not only is Crazy Ex-Girlfriend a commentary on Rebecca’s mental health struggles but it covertly examines the general absurdity of romance in our society. Romantic comedies, the glorification of violent couples such as Sid and Nancy and Harley Quinn and The Joker, and excusing playground bullying as affection all equate intense passion, and at times even abuse, with true love. Bloom and Brosh McKenna told Vulture that many characters in rom-coms exhibit extremely unhealthy or destructive behavior and they differentiate Rebecca’s behavior from this.

That brings us to UnReal, created by Marti Noxon and Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, which finished its second season on Lifetime. Despite its welldocumented problems this season regarding race and its depiction of people of color, the show is another that portrays a woman living and working with mental illness to varying degrees of success. As Alyssa Rosenberg writes at The Washington Post:

“The most interesting element of UnREAL, though… is the idea that mental illness is an appropriate response to certain social conditions and expectations for modern women. The Bachelor-style show Rachel works for pushes the women who appear on it to their absolute limits, forcing them to adopt artificial personas and suppress their feelings to compete for the affections of a man who’s appearing on the show only to boost his business. Being the person involved in manipulating other women is a highly unpleasant task. And an on-air meltdown Rachel suffered shortly before the events of the first season of UnREAL may actually be the sanest and most humane possible reaction to the job.”

Though UnReal hasn’t done Rachel — nor most of its other characters, for that matter — justice this season, she manipulates people to get what she wants and struggles with mental illness internally in equal measure, showing that a woman with mental illness doesn’t have to be a traditionally sympathetic character.

On the other hand, though, Kimmy Schmidt is a character we can more easily empathize with due to her jovial, almost childlike (which is another trope of women with mental illness in itself) demeanor. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt took us by surprise this season as it dealt savilly with the fallout from Kimmy’s imprisonment by Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne. Bread crumbs like Kimmy’s stress burping, her behavior around war veteran Keith, and her involuntary responses to getting intimate with Dong are scattered throughout the earlier parts of season two, which lead to Kimmy seeking therapy from Dr. Andrea (Tina Fey, who also co-created the series) in later episodes. Kimmy’s reluctance to see a psychiatrist is realistic, as is the turmoil she increasingly sees her life devolve into as she ignores her problems. For so long, Kimmy played the role of therapist in her friends’ and fellow captives’ lives that she can’t see how much she herself needs one.

By bringing mental health issues to the forefront — along with other complex portrayals, such as those in Being Mary JaneYou’re the Worst, Bojack Horseman, Girls, Lady Dynamite, and Homeland — television is changing the perception of women with mental illness from fetishized objects to more nuanced and realistic portrayals, at once granting greater representation to women with disabilities and hopefully reducing the stigma of mental illness.


Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer based in New York City. You can follow her on Twitter @ScarlettEHarris and read her previous published work at her website The Scarlett Woman.

‘Neighbors 2’ May Not Be Feminist in Name, But It’s Feminist in Nature

‘Neighbors 2’ doesn’t explicitly state that sororities are misogynist, but the goal of the alternative sorority (essentially an all-female share house, right?) at its center to create a space where the women can make their own fun outside of the patriarchy — that wants them to be well behaved and perform their sexuality for men — is feminist, whether the movie states it or not.

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This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris.


Andi Zeisler, founder of Bitch magazine and author of the new book We Were Feminists Once, criticizes “choice feminism” in which every choice women make is deemed feminist. This could also be extended to Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising and movies that marginally pass the Bechdel test: they don’t openly hate women, therefore they’re feminist, right?

The premise of Neighbors 2 centers on a trio of rebellious female college students played by Chloë Grace Moretz, Kiersey Clemons, and Beanie Feldstein who start their own, party-hardy sorority in the formerly vacant mansion next door to Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Byrne) with the help of the original antagonist, Teddy (Zac Efron). Much is made of the Greek system allowing frat houses to host parties while sororities need to remain chaste, which doesn’t fit with the increasingly progressive notions of today’s teens and, particularly, Shelby (Moretz), Beth (Clemons) and Nora (Feldstein). They are skeeved out by the obvious attempts of fraternities and their members to get young women drunk enough to possibly sexually assault at parties, invoking memories of the University of Virginia’s rape scandal and The Hunting Ground, amongst many other instances of rape on campus. To attend these parties, they are pressured to wear skimpy outfits instead of the hoodies they’re more comfortable in. Their male dorm supervisor berates them for smoking weed in their dorm rooms and if they can’t do it there, they sure as hell wouldn’t be able to if they successfully rushed a traditional sorority.

Neighbors 2 doesn’t explicitly state that sororities are misogynist, but the goal of the alternative sorority (essentially an all-female share house, right?) at its center to create a space where the women can make their own fun outside of the patriarchy — that wants them to be well behaved and perform their sexuality for men — is feminist, whether the movie states it or not. Mac and Kelly frequently utter the word sexism and ponder how hard it is to navigate being a woman in the world as they realize (spoiler alert) that taking down the sorority is antithetical to how they want their daughters to grow up in a world that already treats them differently from men. In addition to Neighbors 2’s central premise, these plot points add more checks to the feminist column. Could Byrne’s encouragement of hiring women writers for the sequel be to thank? Possibly. Although it’s awful that co-writers Amanda Lund and Maria Blasucci, as well as other women writers who worked on the film, are not even credited.

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Furthermore, feminist principles are evident in the newly crowned sorority Kappa Nu’s party themes, such as sad movie night in which they cry into their jumbo sized tubs of ice cream, feminist heroines including Oprah, Joan of Arc, and Hillary Clinton (both Senator and future President iterations), and a celebration in honor of Shelby’s impending virginity loss, commemorating the shedding of something many young women see as a burden these days as opposed to a gift or virtue.

Neighbors 2 acknowledges femme feminism and that some women enjoy putting a lot of effort into their appearance while Shelby and her besties prefer a more relaxed style.

There’s also a scene in which Shelby, Beth, Nora, and their friends are so distracted and turned on by a dancing, oiled up Zac Efron (and if you’re attracted to men, who could blame them?) that they allow the large amount of weed they’re selling in order to raise money for their sorority to be stolen. While the celebration of young women’s sexuality isn’t seen in a lot of comedies (more often young women are portrayed as sex objects, not subjects), one of the opening scenes in which Shelby reveals she’s a virgin did feel like an excuse to get a joke in about “everything but” being about eating out a guy’s butt instead of being truly revolutionary.

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In that way, why make it about sexual experience at all? The above-mentioned dancing scene was enough to establish that young women are sexual beings but, crass and overt sex jokes take priority. I suppose it could also be seen to be an effort to show that women can be just as badly behaved as men (which isn’t necessarily a good thing), but surely the selling of weed, the trashing of their neighbors’ home, and the trapping of Mac, Kelly, and Teddy in order to protect their right to party is testament enough to that. (In an earlier scene Teddy’s bestie and roommate Pete explains to him that there is no legal right to party.)

Speaking of Teddy, Meg Watson at Australian pop culture website Junkee writes, in her review of the movie, of the covert discomfort with showing male affection exhibited by Mac and the gay acceptance shown in Pete’s engagement and subsequent wedding:

“This same-sex relationship is used as an integral part of the plot and is never once exploited for an uncomfortable #nohomo joke. This shouldn’t be a big deal, but for a Rogen/[Evan] Goldberg production (which regularly use gay sex as a punchline), it’s enormous. At one point Mac’s mild anxiety around male intimacy is even diffused on-screen as Teddy explicitly asks for a hug because he ‘needs to feel valued’. The laugh isn’t on Teddy’s over-sentimentality; instead it’s on Mac’s initial reluctance. The hug is good! They feel better! It’s silly guys don’t do it more!”

So, while movies have been made about far more feminist things than creating a new sorority — an archaic, hierarchical relic in itself — Neighbors 2 is important because it introduces a different audience to a topic they may not have thought about before or, like Teddy, have noticed rumblings of gender inequality but don’t have the language to discuss. The Neighbors franchise is still created by and for men but it’s important to give praise where it’s due, and Neighbors 2 tries with all its might to address sexism and misogyny, almost painstakingly.


Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter @ScarlettEHarris.

Attachment Mothering in ‘Room’

While both the novel and the film are sure to point out Ma’s anguish, ‘Room’ can be seen to paint a romanticized, sometimes insensitive and propaganda-esque…fantasy of immersive, attachment motherhood in which nothing else matters but the child.

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This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris.

[Trigger Warning: discussion of rape, and sexual assault]


I remember a friend telling me that she fantasized about being in prison for a year as it was the only way she would have time to complete all her projects uninterrupted.

This anecdote immediately came to mind at a panel discussion after a screening of Room. The female audience member who asked the question recalled a book club talking point scribbled in the back of her copy of the 2010 novel by Emma Donoghue wondering if the author (who also adapted her book for the screen, and was nominated for an Oscar) idealizes the solitude of imprisonment. While both the novel and the film are sure to point out Ma’s anguish, Room can be seen to paint a romanticized, sometimes insensitive and propaganda-esque — later parts of the book, particularly Ma’s post-escape prime-time interview, politicize things like breastfeeding, the prison industrial complex and abortion — fantasy of immersive, attachment motherhood in which nothing else matters but the child.

When I reached out to panel member and Melbourne Writers Festival program manager Jo Case to expand further on her thoughts about Room, she said that the story “explores that mythical ideal of motherhood: all-encompassing, fully present, hyper-attentive. Completely child-focused. It’s our culture’s impossible (and usually untenable) ideal.”

Further to this, I found Room to be a pretty obvious metaphor for attachment parenting. Jack is still being breastfed at age five — though with a lax diet born out of captivity, breastfeeding makes sense. Ma is always there with Jack, relentlessly threading eggshells onto Egg Snake, fashioning Labyrinth out of toilet rolls, and encouraging Jack to use his imagination because what else is there to do in a 10 x 10 soundproofed shed. Attachment parenting can induce in parents the loss of their sense of self if and when the child goes off to school — or in Room’s case, Outside — and makes a life for themselves independent of the close knit parent/child union. Despite Ma’s relish at re-entering the world and thus, finding a semblance of her former self separate from Jack, their intense bond noticeably loosens the moment they arrive at the clinic (more so in the book than the film). Jack is then the one to look back at Room through rose-colored glasses and in the way the story is told post-escape, with the added impetus of being from Jack’s perspective, who can blame him: “Ma was always in Room” while he is often left to fend for himself “in the world” while Ma tries to make sense of her resentment (“Do you know what happened [to my high school friends]? Nothing. Nothing happened to them.”), depression and PTSD.

All we have to do is look at Jack’s heightened intelligence and his being placed on a pedestal in “saving” Ma to understand that he could be viewed as the ultimate fantasy for all those parents (all parents?) who claim their child is “special,” “gifted,” and “advanced for their age.” You know the ones.

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I certainly do: my day job is at a cultural institution where I often hear from parents who insist that their children experience things aimed at kids twice their age and, in some cases, even at adults. Jack is familiar with stories well above his age level, such as The Count of Monte Cristo, told to him by Ma. His memory is impeccable and his literacy skills are strengthened by rereading the few books permitted in Room by Ma’s tormenter, Old Nick, and playing “Parrot,” a game that consists of repeating what Jack hears on talk shows and soap operas. In a society that often foists iPads and smartphones into its children’s hands, Jack’s upbringing is romanticized, especially in the early stages of the story when he is blissfully unaware that anything exists outside of Room and the make-believe world of TV (though Jack is permitted half an hour or so of screen-time, Ma is reluctant to grant more as “TV turns your brain to mush”) is real.

Donoghue is quick to deny this, though, telling Katherine Wyrick of BookPage:

“Nobody wants to idealize imprisonment, but many of us have such complicated lives, and we try to fit parenting in alongside work and socializing… We try and have so many lives at once, and we run ourselves ragged.

“Today parenting is so self-conscious and worried, so I wanted to ask the question, how minimally could you do it? … [Ma] really civilizes and humanizes Jack. … She passes along her cultural knowledge to him, from religion to tooth-brushing to rules.”

Room may be a very successful literary and filmic thought experiment for Donoghue. But it’s also a fantasy in which one of the biggest luxuries for parents — time — reigns supreme. In a recent parenting column on Jezebel, Kathryn Jezer-Morton writes:

“Time is one of the most valuable commodities in post-industrial capitalism. It’s valuable because it’s scarce; we run around acting so busy all the time, partly because our jobs are squeezing us for it, and partly because there are so many competing entities constantly vying for our time and attention. […]

“Spending the first 10 months at home with each of my kids was enormously empowering. By the time I returned to work, I was ready for the company of adults again; work even seemed easy compared to caring for a nonverbal person all day. The time we’d spent together absolved me of a lot of the guilt that many people feel when they first put their kids in the care of others. It also gave me the privilege of feeling confident — even a little cavalier! — about my parenting choices.”

Donoghue discusses similar ideas in an interview for The Independent upon the release of the book:

“It may sound outrageous, but every parent I know has had moments of feeling as if they’ve been locked in a room with their toddler for years on end. Even 20 minutes of building towers of blocks can feel like a lifetime. I’m not saying that Ma’s experience is every mother’s experience, not at all. … But there’s a psychological core that’s the same: the child needs you so much that you don’t fully own yourself anymore.”

Utilizing time for things other than child-rearing is often deemed the height of selfishness, for parents and the child-free alike. With Ma’s characterization comes a certain selfishness (or self-preservation) voiced by the post-escape prime-time interviewer who asks Ma whether she ever considered relinquishing Jack to Old Nick to drop off at a hospital in the hopes of giving him a better — freer — life. While I can see where the interviewer is coming from — and maybe in a perfect world, sure, Jack would have grown up under different circumstances — but he’s a five-year-old who challenges his mother’s assertion that there are two sides to everything (“Not an octagon. An octagon has eight sides.”) and can spell feces, for crying out loud! How many “gifted” children of a similar age but very different circumstances can we say the same of?

Ma may conceive of the great escape in order to get Jack out of Room but, as the Nova panel discussed, she’s also hoping he’ll be savvy enough to lead his rescuers back to her. Again, putting so much faith in a five-year-old could be considered delusional, but that speaks to the trauma of an abductee who’s been raped almost every day for the past seven years; a trauma that I couldn’t even begin to imagine and is for another article.

Conversely, when I watched Room for the third time with my own mother, she found Ma’s “gone days,” her forcefulness in preparing Jack to escape Room, and her depression and disengagement from her son upon release to “not be how a mother should act.” Brie Larson’s Ma is far more assertive and fleshed out in the film, whereas on the page she’s ineffectual, agreeing with Jack when he calls her “dumbo” when things don’t go to plan. As an intimate partner violence survivor herself, I was expecting from Mum more empathy towards Ma. But that’s the beauty and curse of storytelling, particularly in a narrative as controversial and emotional as Room — everyone responds to it differently.

I think Room can best be summed up by Case’s description:

“It’s a horror story not just because of the awful circumstances of [Ma’s] imprisonment — rape and kidnapping — but because it dramatizes one of the hardest aspects of motherhood: feeling trapped by routine and the demands of everyday parenting [and] feeling separated from the outside world in your own mother-child universe.”

In the case of Room, though, “this kind of motherhood saves the mother from her prison rather than trapping her in a domestic [one].”


See also: ‘Room’ for Being More than “Ma”


Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

‘Suffragette’: The More Things Change the More They Stay the Same

In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace. … I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period ‘Suffragette’ is set. …It made me realize we need [feminism] more than ever.

Suffragette movie

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris. | Spoilers ahead.

I went to see Suffragette at the culmination of a day spent feeling utterly depressed at the state of women in the workplace and the world at large. As you can imagine, Suffragette did nothing to assuage my feelings. In fact, it made me even more upset at the fact that one hundred years later, we may have the vote but women are still facing inequality, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and poor conditions in the workplace.

The day in question saw my Twitter timeline full of defenses of cricketer Chris Gayle, who hit on a female reporter as she was trying to interview him after a game; Jamie Briggs, the minister for cities and built environments, who sexually harassed a young female staffer on an international trip; Peter Dutton, the minister for immigration and border protection, who called reporter Samantha Maiden, who stood up for the staffer in question, a “mad fucking witch” in a text message clearly not meant for her but somehow sent to her anyway (and this is the guy in charge of Australia’s borders!); and the two men who murdered their families as “good guys” suffering from mental health problems (an important issue in its own right but not at the expense of the safety of women and children).

So, heading into Suffragette I shrunk into myself as a form of protection from all the microaggressions I’d faced that day but I raged internally at the depictions of workplace inequality, sexual harassment and assault and the general placement of women as second-class citizens and, behold, this piece was born.

Suffragette movie

Workplace Rights.
In the laundry that protagonist Maud (Carey Mulligan), her husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) and friend and fellow suffragette Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) work, women toil away over steam and hot fumes. Maud herself was born at the laundry to a mother who was killed when a vat tipped on her only four years later. When Maud gets home, she washes her family’s own laundry and fixes her husband and son dinner. She endures sexual harassment and, it is implied, survived rape by the manager of the laundry, Mr. Taylor (Geoff Bell). All of this is viewed as inconvenient at best, a workplace hazard at worst.

After a day spent reading about the above-mentioned modern day examples of workplace harassment I couldn’t help but see the similarities. While the Gayle and Dutton incidents came to light because they happened in full view of the media, Briggs’ sexual harassment accusations are the exception to the rule: how many other countless examples of sexual harassment and assault have occurred but are swept under the carpet in an effort not to jeopardize positions or be looked on unfavorably by colleagues?

You Don’t Get a Cookie.
When Maud reveals these labor conditions (her standing up to her rapist happens later) in a votes for women hearing, the men on the board seem genuinely shocked. Prominent British politician and statesman David Lloyd George (Adrian Schiller) seems sympathetic to Maud’s plight however her testimony doesn’t convince him of her right to vote.

Maud’s husband, too, seems initially merely inconvenienced by her newfound interest in suffrage but, as the movie progresses, Maud’s feminism gets stronger and she spends more time in prison for demonstrating, he kicks her out of the house and adopts their son out to a rich family. He says he can’t be expected to work, run a household and look after their son — what Maud’s been doing this whole time — in a stark example of male privilege.

These are some of Suffragette’s more sympathetic male characters compared to anti-suffrage policeman Inspector Steed (Brendan Gleeson) and Mr. Taylor but, like men today who express astonishment when women reveal they’ve been harassed and assaulted and the belief that women do, in fact, deserve basic human rights, they don’t get a cookie for it.

Reproductive Rights.
As attacks on reproductive rights threaten to return to pre-Roe V. Wade levels, which is to say non-existent, in the U.S. and pap tests and STI blood tests will come at a price in Australia, they are mirrored in Suffragette. Abused spouse Violet steps down from the suffrage movement when she discovers she’s pregnant again, citing exhaustion at not being able to “take care of the [kids] I’ve got.” Maud is force fed in prison in a harrowingly triggering scene echoing rape, mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasounds for women seeking to terminate their pregnancies, forced sterilization and any manner of other violations against women’s bodies. She asks Steed, when he expresses disdain over her disobedience of the law, “Why should I obey a law I had no hand in making?”

Black Lives Matter.
Much has been made about Suffragette’s whitewashing and rightfully so. There were literally no women of color in the film, despite the real-life involvement of Indian suffragettes, for example. And, in perhaps the most offensive portion of the film that was parlayed into a tone-deaf marketing campaign, suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep in a two-minute cameo) says in her famous speech:

“We do not want to be law breakers; we want to be law makers. Be militant, each of you in your own way. Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can further attack the sacred idol of property, do so. We have been left with no alternative but to defy this government. If we must go to prison to obtain the vote let it be the windows of government not the bodies of women which shall be broken.”

First of all, slavery is not a choice. Secondly, the above-mentioned use of this 1913 speech for a Time Out cover featuring the all-white cast illustrates just how far white feminism has to go in the inclusion of women of color.

Three queer Black women formed the #BlackLivesMatter movement after the death of Trayvon Martin at the hands of police as “a response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society.” Meanwhile, white ranchers are allowed to demonstrate “peacefully” — albeit armed — on seized government land (which let’s not forget was originally stolen from Indigenous peoples hundreds of years ago). Much like the attempts to bar people of color from demonstrating peacefully without militarized police forces (see above tweet) threatening them or mowing them down, Suffragette excludes women of color from its depiction of the suffrage movement by denying them a voice. But on the other hand, consider Pankhurst’s words above and some of the film’s early scenes in which demonstrators are attacked by policemen in the streets: Suffragette could also be viewed as an allegory for racist police brutality.

I’m Not a Feminist, But…
Upon Maud’s first arrest, she insists she’s “not a suffragette.” Where have we heard that before? Modern women’s baffling insistence that they, too, are not feminists seems to be in the news every other day. The online campaigns about why women don’t need feminism and celebrities being asked whether they are feminists have dominated the discussion in recent years reminded me of Maud’s colleagues at the laundry turning their backs on her when she’s outed for demonstrating and when she finally takes her revenge on her abuser. Internalized misogyny is as hard at work today as it was 100 years ago.

White women who do call themselves feminists, such as Emma Watson and Lena Dunham, are seldom met with much push-back, whereas Black women’s (those who do identify with a movement that has often ignored the contributions of feminists who are women of color and not with another movement such as “womanist”) feminism comes with a whole host of caveats. Despite Beyoncé’s spectacular embrace of feminism at the MTV Video Music Awards flanked by an emblazoned erection of the word, she’s still asked to qualify it. Black feminists such as Janet Mock, Roxane Gay and Amandla Stenberg are increasingly having their voices heard by the mainstream media while Kate Winslet refuses to talk about “vulgar” pay inequities in Hollywood and Patricia Arquette urges other marginalized groups to support women — and, let’s be clear here, she was talking about white women in the über privileged world of Hollywood. That’s not to say that Jennifer Lawrence, a fellow champion of closing the pay gap, doesn’t deserve to get paid as much as Bradley Cooper, but it partially ignores the struggles of women like Viola Davis and men like John Boyega to get paid as much as their white counterparts. And to intersect the two, all we have to do is look at this week’s Oscar nominations which resulted in no actors of color being recognized in the four main acting categories. Oscar noms = $$.

I wasn’t expecting to be as taken aback by just how little has changed since the period Suffragette is set. Sure, sexism and misogyny may not be as violent and blatant and we’re more likely to get up in arms when it is, but just because a few high profile women enjoy privileges far removed from what Maud and Violet in Suffragette and countless other women around the world face, doesn’t mean that we don’t need feminism. In fact, it made me realize we need it more than ever.


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Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

‘Jessica Jones’: A Discomforting Yet Real Portrayal of Abuse

If ever there was a personification of this psychological abuse that goes along with physical abuse, it’s in Kilgrave. … He gaslights Jessica, telling her it’s her fault he uses his powers to make people do things they don’t want to do, namely kill others and themselves.

Jessica Jones

This guest post is written by Scarlett Harris.

[Trigger warning: discussion of intimate partner abuse] Spoilers ahead.

There’s TV that, when you watch, makes you feel all warm and fuzzy and can be likened to a hug. For me, it’s Grey’s Anatomy. And then there’s TV that doesn’t necessarily fall within this category that I still love, such as Orange Is the New Black, with its focus on crime, drug addiction, broken families and poverty, and that upon marathoning makes you ache to get back to the trials and tribulations of Sophia, Taystee, Poussey, and Red.

Despite binging Jessica Jones over my Christmas and New Year’s break, I almost dreaded sitting down for a few hours every afternoon to check into Jessica’s world. I guess that’s what a series directed so heavily at abuse is wont to do.

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In the six weeks or so since Jessica Jones was released in full on Netflix, the internet has been abuzz with its brilliance. Many feminists asserted that this is what it feels like to watch content created for women, by women, while others marveled (pun intended) at the show’s gritty portrayal of New York City and an actually villainous villain, a departure from some of Marvel’s other offerings.

Jessica Jones’ emphasis on abuse was also heavily discussed. Kia Groom at The Mary Sue wrote about her experience in a similarly abusive relationship as the one central to the TV series. Stassa Edwards at Jezebel wrote:

“If Jessica Jones is a feminist show, as many critics have said that it is, it’s not simply because it presents a complicated woman, but rather because it understands how strength and control play out in the lives of women.”

To return to OITNB, for example, the fellow Netflix offering isn’t necessarily littered with likable characters (*cough* Piper *cough*), but there are enough peripheral characters whose backstories come ‘round every now and then to tide you over while the story pivots back to Piper, Alex and the more boring inmates. Despite a couple of likable characters in Jessica Jones (I can only think of Malcolm and Trish), they weren’t enough to get me excited to come back to the rollercoaster of emotions. This is understandable: pretty much all of the characters are victims of some kind of abuse, whether it be villain Kilgrave’s mind control or otherwise, so if anyone has an excuse to be pissy, it’s them.

Edwards writes:

“…[Jessica Jones’] expression of anger — her inability to contain it — is what makes Jones deeply unlikable. But then, being unlikeable is part and parcel of being a woman on the edge. The emotional expression of anger has always been coded as an indelible marker of trauma and of difference.”

But what even are “likable” characters? Roxane Gay, a couple of years ago almost to the day, wrote about this phenomenon at Buzzfeed, touching on points from unlikable female characters being perceived to be suffering from mental illness, being inconveniences and coming across as having more humanity than likable ones. (Gay, as a survivor of sexual assault herself, has also written about the futility of trigger warnings, however this piece makes the case for them in Jessica Jones.) Jessica Jones works so well because most of its characters reek of humanity, however unflattering.

Jessica Jones_Jessica and Trish

What’s more important than likable characters, though, are relatable ones and Jessica Jones has that in spades. We get impressions of this when Jessica tells Trish she can’t comfort her when she’s tased in an attempt to capture Kilgrave and when Jessica pushes those close to her away.

Perhaps the most human character, despite his villainy, is Kilgrave. We are first introduced to him through Jessica’s perspective as a cold and calculating abuser, which he is. But as the season progresses, we see glimpses of Kilgrave’s humanity and that he himself was embroiled in the cycle of abuse perpetrated by his parents who performed experiments on him as a child in an attempt to understand his mind control powers. While Jessica Jones seems to want us to believe that Kilgrave’s parents were trying to protect him and others from his “gift,” to me it was unclear as to who was abusing whom.

As I started to fathom Kilgrave’s past, I was reminded of an article written in 2014 for White Ribbon, an Australian campaign for the prevention of violence against women (which has its own problems), by Tom Meagher whose wife Jill Meagher was raped and murdered in Melbourne in 2012. He asserted that, despite the attack perpetrated against Jill by a known criminal, rapists, murderers and abusers of women aren’t “monsters” lurking in dark alleyways and behind bushes in the dead of night: they’re most often known to, trusted and/or loved by those they choose to abuse. Meagher wrote:

“By insulating myself with the intellectually evasive dismissal of violent men as psychotic or sociopathic aberrations, I self-comforted by avoiding the more terrifying concept that violent men are socialised by the ingrained sexism and entrenched masculinity that permeates everything from our daily interactions all the way up to our highest institutions… 

“The only thing more disturbing than that paradigm is the fact that most rapists are normal guys, guys we might work beside or socialize with, our neighbors or even members of our family.”

Groom echoes this at The Mary Sue:

“Yes, Kilgrave is a rapist, but his sexual abuse is not of the kind we often see represented on television; he abuses in the context of relationships that seem, to the outside observer, consensual, and it is this — his psychological abuse of his victims, his absolute and total control and manipulation of them, his dominance over their agency and their free will — that make[s] him so utterly terrifying.”

Edwards further expands on this at Jezebel, asserting that Kilgrave is a different kind of villain — and a more terrifying one — from your typical Marvel fare in that:

“…The mundanity of control he exercises over Jones, over nearly every woman who crosses his path, is what makes him so evil, even more menacing than the typical villain. Kilgrave is every woman’s worst nightmare: he is a rapist, an unrepentant stalker, a man who, at any moment, can exercise his power and does.”

This “monster myth” and the cycle of abuse can also be seen in Officer Will Simpson, who begins a relationship with Trish after he tries to kill her whilst brainwashed by Kilgrave. Cate Young at Batty Mamzelle (cross-posted here at Bitch Flicks) explores this in depth. The fact that the actress who plays Trish Walker, Rachael Taylor, also survived abuse by her high profile ex-partner in 2010 adds yet another layer to the series.

As these examples attest, what Jessica Jones arguably has more of than relatable characters is relatable situations.

Jessica Jones

Not everyone can relate to being in an abusive relationship, and thank god. I haven’t personally been abused by a partner, but I grew up in a violent home as well as abuse being a big part of my life in recent years in reading about it, watching it take place on screen and in the news, and working towards changing attitudes about it through my writing and in everyday conversations (though I could be doing more; we all could). One of the more pervasive attitudes surrounding intimate partner violence is asking why the survivor “doesn’t just leave” without paying mind to the isolation from loved ones and external support systems by the abuser; the abuser’s reinforcement of worthlessness in the survivor; the depletion of their resources, such as money and their ability to make a living; and the threatening of children, pets and other loved ones. If ever there was a personification of this psychological abuse that goes along with physical abuse, it’s in Kilgrave.

Kilgrave preyed on a once vibrant and happy young Jessica Jones, glimpses of whom we see in a bar scene with Trish in episode five, “AKA The Sandwich Saved Me,” trauma which caused her to suffer from paranoia and alcoholism. Even after she manages to escape him, her life in tatters and suffering from PTSD, Kilgrave infiltrates himself back into her life, turning even the most tenuously connected people to her into his pawns, such as Malcolm, her — again — once vibrant and now drug-addicted neighbor. In a metaphor for the disbelief domestic violence survivors often face, Kilgrave manipulates Jessica’s allies into helping him, as seen with Jeri Hogarth assisting him in his escape, partly of her own free will but also under his mind control. He gaslights Jessica, telling her it’s her fault he uses his powers to make people do things they don’t want to do, namely kill others and themselves. He tries to win back her affections by buying her childhood home and restoring it to its former glory, another allegory for entrapment and, frankly, is just plain creepy. He tells her he can’t live without her and how much better she makes him, exemplified in their short-lived foray into tandem superheroism in episode eight (“AKA WWJD?”) when they save a family from another, perhaps more archetypal domestic abuser. This is also a pitch perfect portrayal of the hope an intimate partner violence survivor might face in seeing the “good” side of their partner and is transferred onto the audience: maybe Kilgrave can be good, I wondered.

Jessica Jones

Hope is a guiding force in Jessica’s pursuit of Kilgrave, embodied by the character of the same name. Jessica resists the easy way out — killing Kilgrave — for much of the thirteen episode arc as she needs him alive as proof of Hope’s innocence in her parenticide charges, committed under Kilgrave’s control. Proof is also something intimate partner abuse survivors are perpetually demanded to demonstrate — by law enforcement, the criminal justice system, society, even friends and family — even when it’s on their bodies in the form of blood and bruises and, in Hope’s case, in her uterus. Also, as previously stated, not all abuse is physical and society should believe, rather than disregard or dismiss, intimate partner violence survivors.

Despite Kilgrave’s rape of both Jessica and Hope, and his intention to do the same to Trish (and who knows how many others), showrunner Melissa Rosenberg was very conscious of depicting rape and abuse differently from a lot of other media that uses it as a “titillating” plot device, telling The Los Angeles Times:

“With rape, I think we all know what that looks like. We’ve seen plenty of it on television and I didn’t have any need to see it, but I wanted to experience the damage that it does. I wanted the audience to really viscerally feel the scars that it leaves. It was not important to me, on any level, to actually see it. TV has plenty of that, way too often, used as titillation, which is horrifying.”

Despite the influx of shows dealing with abuse, such as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Game of Thrones and mainstay Law & Order: SVU (which Emily Nussbaum and Lindy West discuss on The New Yorker Radio Hour), how often do we actually hear the confident pronouncement of the word “rape” that Jessica spits at Kilgrave in other media? Jessica Jones succeeds in depicting sexual abuse in a more harrowing and real way than shows that throw it around willy-nilly for shock value and not much else.


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Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

Meredith Grey’s Woman Problem

Now that Dr. Meredith Grey’s husband, Dr. Derek Shepherd, has dearly departed ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ we can focus on the real relationships that drive the show: Meredith and the women in her life.

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This is a guest post by Scarlett Harris.


Now that Dr. Meredith Grey’s husband, Dr. Derek Shepherd, has dearly departed Grey’s Anatomy, we can focus on the real relationships that drive the show: Meredith and the women in her life.

Of course Dr. Cristina Yang was Meredith’s one true love, not McDreamy. Cristina was there for her when she broke down over the execution of a death-row patient even though they were fighting about the intern self-suturing debacle of season five. Cristina helped Meredith with newly-adopted Zola when Derek left her for tampering with the Alzheimer’s trial even though Cristina was having her own relationship and motherhood issues. She was there for her again in season 10, despite Cristina’s resentment toward Meredith for leaning out of work to focus on family. Cristina supports Meredith through her tumultuous life which includes multiple near-death experiences, the death of her husband and mother and sister. (Seriously, how many tragedies can one person handle?!) Despite the actress who plays Cristina, Sandra Oh, departing the series in season 10, she left an indelible mark on Grey’s Anatomy and its title character.

In addition to Cristina’s impact, you’ll notice a recurring thread throughout Meredith’s most trying times: women were involved.

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Meredith’s very existence is in the shadows of her famous and brilliant mother, Ellis Grey, to whom she was never good enough. Her dementia colors the first season of the show and how we come to know Meredith. Ellis’ death in season three also throws Meredith for a loop and reverberates throughout the following seasons, culminating in the arrival of Meredith’s previously unknown half-sister, Maggie Pierce, in season 11, bringing with it a whole host of sister issues Meredith has to work through.

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Which brings us to Lexie Grey, yet another half-sister, this time on Meredith’s father’s side. Introduced at the end of season three as an intern at Seattle Grace (now Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital) before her aforementioned death (and one of the reasons for renaming the hospital) in season eight, Lexie had her fair share of tragedies that in turn affected Meredith.

While Meredith was working as her doctor, Lexie’s mother died which put further strain on her difficult relationship with her estranged father. Lexie also struggled with the Seattle Grace Mercy West (yes, yet another formation the Grey’s hospital took!) massacre that claimed the lives of several fellow surgeons and threatened Derek and Alex’s, Lexie’s partner at the time.

The repercussions from Lexie’s death in a plane crash made the following season one of the most emotionally interesting. Meredith became known as Medusa for her ruthless treatment of her interns while Cristina took off to Minnesota to work at the Mayo Clinic. Meredith also discovers she’s pregnant, without her sister and best friend there to support her through what’s supposed to be one of the happiest times in her life.

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And let’s not forget the most recent woman to shake up Meredith’s world: Callie’s girlfriend, who also happens to be the doctor who treated Derek prior to his death and is a new resident at Grey Sloan to boot! In one of the best episodes of the show’s 12-season run, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” Meredith attempts to swallow her grief over her surprise dinner guest and not tell Amelia, Derek’s sister, or Callie that the new woman in the fold is actually one of the last people to see Derek alive.

If these examples aren’t enough to convince you that women influence Meredith and the trajectory of Grey’s Anatomy as a whole, remember the season one cliffhanger that succeeded in throwing Meredith’s life even more off course than her mother’s illness had?

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Addison Shepherd’s—that’s right, Derek Shepherd’s wife!—arrival set the tone for many of the aforementioned women’s introductions into Meredith’s life. They sneak up on her unawares, throw her already messy life into total disarray, but are then accepted into the fold. In a community as close knit as the doctors at Grey Sloan it’s not really surprising that enemies soon become friends.

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What is surprising is how close women like Lexie and Maggie have become to Meredith despite the fact that she kind of treats people like shit. Yeah, we know she’s “dark and twisty” to say the least but, apart from Cristina and sometimes Callie, the interactions she has with these women are usually tense, when she’s speaking to them at all.

But can you really blame her? Everyone she’s ever gotten close to, with the exception of Alex and Dr. Weber, has left her. Meredith doesn’t easily open up to people, but there is some disconnect between how she’s portrayed and the characters she’s supposedly written to be close to. She’s the quintessential unlikable female character.

Grey’s Anatomy, like all of Shonda Rhimes’ creations, is a lesson in depicting people from all walks of life, warts and all. Meredith and her relationships to the women in her life can be tense at times, but Grey’s succeeds in portraying them as the result of many strong personalities and highly skilled surgeons attempting to coexist in a high pressure environment, not because women can’t be friends. The women Meredith does get along with passionately she makes “her person” and will go to bat for them under any circumstances, as we saw in recent episodes when she supports Cristina’s ex Owen in his vendetta against new doctor Nathan Riggs because she told Cristina she would.

Many new small screen offerings, such as Orange is the New Black, Broad City and Playing House, take a page out of Grey’s Anatomy’s book and center on the close and complex relationships between women. Sure, Grey’s may have started out as a romance gone awry but, as in real life, relationships evolve and sometimes the most intense and long-lasting ones can be between female friends.

 


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Scarlett Harris is an Australian writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she muses about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter here.

 

 

‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’: Is Kris Jenner a Bad Mother?

When their lives are out there for all the world to see, it’s easy to judge the Kardashians.

Keeping Up with the Kardashians


This guest post by Scarlett Harris is an edited version of a piece originally published on The Scarlett Woman and is part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.


She’s constantly on Khloe for her weight, Kim to prioritise her money-making appearances with family and love, and Kourtney to get married before she has another child. Not to mention that she neglects, according to them, Rob (who hasn’t been seen on the show in or public with the family for a while), Kendall and Kylie in favour of her older daughters. (Although with Kendall’s earning power as a supermodel and whatever it is that Kylie now does, Kris may have an increased interest in her younger offspring.)

But is Kris Jenner a bad mother because of this?

One could argue that she spent her early days of motherhood raising her six kids (not to mention step-parenting Bruce’s four other children from previous marriages), and is rewarded by earning 10% from their business endeavours as their momager.

But some of the things Kris says and does arguably aren’t in the best interests of the well being of her children. Or is that just how they/she choose/s to portray her/self on Keeping Up With The Kardashians?

In the first season of Khloe & Lamar, Kris berates Khloe for her size, saying it’s not cohesive with her other sisters’ frames, nor with QuickTrim, the diet supplement the Kardashian sisters promoted at the time. In other episodes of the KUWTK franchise, Kris was on Khloe’s back to have a baby during her marriage to Lamar.

Kris also doesn’t approve of Kourtney’s boyfriend and baby daddy Scott Disick, and in earlier seasons of the show, who could blame her? But even after Scott made a 180° turnaround in his behaviour after his children were born, Kris still struggles to accept him.

Kim, the head moneymaker of the Kardashian clan, can usually never put a foot wrong in her mother’s eyes, but every now and then Kris will get upset with her for being so uptight. So do her sisters, for that matter.

In a damning article published by The New York Times a couple of weeks ago, the dichotomy of Kris as mother and businesswoman is dissected:

“… in The New York Times review of the show’s first episode, Ginia Bellafante wrote: ‘As a parent, Ms. Kardashian’s mother, Kris Jenner, was concerned for her daughter, she explains. But as her manager, she thought, well, hot-diggity.’”

The article goes on to assert that the lack of public comment from the Kardashians/Jenners regarding Bruce’s transition isn’t about being respectful to the family patriarch’s privacy, but to milk Bruce’s coming out for all the world to see… on their E! special, of course.

I’d like to think I’m less cynical about Kris and her cohort of children’s success, but we also know that reality TV is far less rooted in actuality than it purports itself to be. Kris says:

“‘It doesn’t mean that we’re always looking for more or that we’re greedy… There’s a lot of people that have great ideas and dreams and whatnot, but unless you’re willing to work really, really hard, and work for what you want, it’s never going to happen. And that’s what’s so great about the girls. It’s all about their work ethic.’”

When their lives are out there for all the world to see, it’s easy to judge the Kardashians. If Kris is guilty of one thing, it’s working her children too hard and not allowing them to make mistakes. Kim’s sexual escapades were caught on film in a way that might mortify many people, but she and her mother took them to new famous-for-being-famous heights. Kendall and Kylie have had cameras in their faces since they were 12 and 10, respectively, and have been working on book, clothing and beauty lines for almost as long, so it’s no wonder Kylie behaves older than her 17 years. The controversy surrounding her lips and relationship with an older man who also happens to be a father are begrudgingly touched on this season, scarcely shedding light on the family dynamic that would allow and encourage a 17-year-old to do these things. It remains to be seen if such actions mean Kylie’s heading off the rails, but other young stars could stand to have such a strong work ethic instilled in them.

Say what you want about Kris and the Kardashians, but they’ve managed to carve out an entire genre of entertainment that Paris, Nicole and the Osbournes could only have dreamt about. Their money shouldn’t protect them from criticism, but I do think the Kardashians cop a lot more flak for capitalising on their existence in a world that we watched them influence than other, arguably worse, public figures. The Kardashians seem to be relatively happy, healthy and challenge the notion that your past defines you. Whatever the case, Kris and company are laughing all the way to the bank while we labour over thinkpieces about them.


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

Bad Mothers Are the Law of Shondaland

It’s fascinating that all four of Shonda Rhimes’ protagonists have strained relationships with their mothers… Shondaland’s shows work to combat the stereotype that if you don’t have a functional family unit, replete with a doting, competent mother, you’re alone in the world.

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This guest post by Scarlett Harris is part of our theme week on Bad Mothers.


If ever there were a TV universe replete with bad mothers, it’s Shondaland.

Of course, not all Shondaland shows exist in the same fictional world, which allows bad mothers such as Ellis Grey on Grey’s Anatomy to be reincarnated as a reprehensible Vice President of the United States on Scandal. (But don’t let the different fictional worlds fool you: Grey’s Anatomy spinoff Private Practice consistently used actors from the former to play different characters in the latter.)

It’s fascinating that all four of Shonda Rhimes’ protagonists have strained relationships with their mothers when Rhimes herself (from what we commoners can see) couldn’t be any further from that trope, having adopted three daughters as a single (and seemingly awesome) mum.

The first, and most obvious, of these Mommy Dearest connections is Meredith Grey and her aforementioned mother, Ellis. Throughout 11 seasons of Grey’s, we see Meredith’s internal struggle with the distant mother she simultaneously strives to live up to while resenting her for putting her career above her daughter and her early onset of Alzheimer’s which resulted in her death in season three. Ellis continued to haunt Meredith from beyond the grave when it was revealed that Meredith had yet another sister, Maggie, who Ellis put up for adoption when Meredith was a child.

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With the sustained appearance of Meredith’s copious family members and the adoption (shout out to Shonda!)/birth of her own three children, the struggle to be a good mother and, thus, a good person is at the forefront of Grey’s Anatomy, whether it’s always palpable or not.

The somewhat forgotten Shondaland creation, Private Practice, also featured a strained mother-daughter relationship between Addison Montgomery and her mother, Bizzy, who committed suicide when her partner died. Of course Rhimes painted a more nuanced picture than this, but I imagine it’s pretty hard to forgive your mother for committing suicide and leaving you to fend for yourself, no matter your age. (Ellis also tried to kill herself when Meredith was a girl, right around the time she found out she was pregnant to Richard Webber with Maggie.)

Scandal, perhaps the crown jewel in the Shondaland empire, has a truly evil mother (and father!) in Maya Lewis/Marie Wallace, an alleged terrorist and murderer. Proving some people are never meant to be parents, last week’s season four finale showed Olivia continuing to be used as a pawn in her parent’s power games, with Maya/Marie choosing freedom over helping her daughter and Rowan/Eli thwarting Olivia’s attempts at revenge at every bloody turn.

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Mellie is another Capitol Hill resident that struggles in her motherhood. Sometimes portrayed as ruthless and vindictive, it is Mellie who expresses sensitivity when daughter Karen has a compromising video taken of her and who wallows in grief after son Jerry is murdered. Mellie is perhaps a less rigid characterisation of motherhood than Maya/Marie as she is permitted to express a range of emotions that I imagine one would experience as a mother.

Finally, we see the mother of Annalise Keating rear her head towards the end of this year’s first season of How to Get Away with Murder. In what I think is arguably the most fascinating dynamic since Meredith and Ellis, Annalise’s mother Ophelia (played by Cicely Tyson) first comes across as rigid, unfeeling and old school, guilting her daughter (formerly Anna Mae) into remembering her humble beginnings and the sacrifices Ophelia made for her. Annalise resents Ophelia (someone write a thinkpiece unpacking that naming choice!) for not protecting her from being molested by her uncle and, while Ophelia is combing her daughter’s hair, she reveals that she did indeed seek revenge by burning their house down with Annalise’s uncle inside. Talk about protecting your children!

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Like her fondness for mistresses, you have to wonder whether Rhimes is dealing with some mommy issues of her own when she writes bad mothers so often. (Even her debut screenwriting gig featured a bad mother.) What Rhimes really excels at, though, is writing real, nuanced people who happen to be mothers. On the season 11 finale of Grey’s Anatomy, Maggie finds out her adoptive parents are divorcing while Amelia, the black sheep of her family, is still struggling with the death of her brother. Meredith, already a mother to three, takes Maggie and Amelia by the hands in a rare demonstration of something other than contempt, with the final scene being the sisters three dancing at Richard and Catherine’s wedding.

While we all have mothers in some incarnation, Shondaland’s shows work to combat the stereotype that if you don’t have a functional family unit, replete with a doting, competent mother, you’re alone in the world.


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

‘Crossroads’ Was a Dry Run for ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

In the haze of her Shondaland television production empire, many people forget—or aren’t aware at all—that Rhimes’ success began in 2002 when she wrote the screenplay for a little movie called ‘Crossroads,’ which also happened to be Britney Spears’ silver screen debut.


This is a guest post by Scarlett Harris.


Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal showrunner and How to Get Away with Murder executive producer Shonda Rhimes recently tweeted the following:

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In the haze of her Shondaland television production empire, many people forget—or aren’t aware at all—that Rhimes’ success began in 2002 when she wrote the screenplay for a little movie called Crossroads, which also happened to be Britney Spears’ silver screen debut. Spawning the coming of age anthems “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” and “Overprotected,” Crossroads may have been a critical flop but it drew $61 million internationally and will forever remain a cult classic for many millennials, myself included.
Another of Rhimes’ success stories that allowed her to go on to produce some of the hottest dramas on TV was Grey’s Anatomy. Originally sweeping the Golden Globe and Emmy nominations (with a few wins here and there) in its early years, the general consensus about Grey’s today is consternation that it’s still airing after 11 seasons. What originally began as a dramatic look at the lives of a diverse cast of surgical interns arguably devolved into a shark jump of epic proportions with Izzie’s cancer-induced hallucinations and a musical episode. As a lifelong Grey’s fan, I’ll defend it to the death and contend that it has corrected course in the past few years while not being afraid to take risks.
At first glance, two of Rhimes’ early successes might not look so similar, but I’m here to argue that Crossroads acted as a dry run for Grey’s Anatomy. Let me count the ways…
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First, both center on a somewhat boring white woman whose less conventional friends turn out to be much more interesting. Crossroads (along with Center Stage) introduced us to Zoe Saldana, the well-to-do popular girl to Spears’ awkward valedictorian and Taryn Manning’s pregnant teen from the wrong side of the tracks, subverting stereotypes of race in the small Georgian town where the movie is set, which has become Rhimes’ calling card.
In Grey’s, Meredith finds immediate kinship with Cristina Yang, and later brings Latina Callie Torres and mixed race half-sister Maggie Pierce into a fold that’s more fucked up than their Crossroads counterparts. Like Orange is the New Black (in which Manning also stars), Meredith and Lucy act as Trojan horses to introduce audiences to the lives of other, more diverse women.
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There’s also the awkward, bumbling love-interest-that-wasn’t. In one of Crossroads’ opening scenes, we see a lingerie-clad Lucy about to have sex for the first time with Justin Long’s Henry, who’s pined after Lucy for the three years they’ve been lab partners. Over in Shondaland, it was Meredith who drunkenly succumbed to George’s subtle advances, but it was not to be–she started crying during sex and damaged their friendship, working relationship, and housemate dynamic for a long time. (The one aspect in which Grey’s differs to Crossroads is that Anson Mount’s Ben is certainly no McDreamy.)
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Crossroads is a road trip flick whereas Grey’s primarily takes place inside a hospital, but make no mistake: there have been plenty of outings away from the four walls of Seattle Grace/Mercy West/Grey-Sloane Memorial Hospital. These include the men’s camping trip in which Alex and George get into a “slap-fight” (“open-handed combat” to protect their surgeon hands); the residents’ sojourn to San Francisco to take their boards where April and Jackson finally get it on; Cristina’s fellowship at the Mayo Clinic sees her isolated in icy Minnesota; and the car accident involving Callie and Arizona which spawns the abovementioned musical episode, “Song Beneath the Song.”
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Speaking of music, Crossroads is a film that utilizes it quite heavily and with Britney Spears as your leading lady, you’d be (“Drive Me) Crazy” not to. In addition to the songs I mentioned above, there’s also the requisite karaoke scene in which Spears, Manning and Saldana sing “I Love Rock & Roll,” also released as a single for Spears. Like The O.C. before it, Grey’s is one of those TV shows that has become better known perhaps for its music than its melodrama. In 2006, the show won a Grammy for best compilation album featuring two of the songs the show is perhaps best known for: “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol and “How to Save a Life” by The Fray. Both have the requisite Madonna singalong while Grey’s has made famous the “five second dance party” and drunken boogie sessions Meredith and Cristina frequently engage in.
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Finally, both protagonists have strained family lives. Lucy in Crossroads grew up with her father (Dan Aykroyd) after her mother left them to start a new family; this is part of the reason Lucy tags along on the road trip in the first place. The titular Meredith Grey rivals Lucy in the dysfunctional family department: in addition to her father walking out and her mother’s cold and distant demeanour, Meredith discovers later in life that she has not one but three half-sisters spawned from her parents’ subsequent dalliances (spoiler alert: these sisters three don’t all share the same DNA).
Crossroads’ Mimi (Manning) begins the movie pregnant but miscarries at the culmination of the road trip, while Grey’s Izzie gave the product of her teen pregnancy up for adoption. Where Crossroads doesn’t deal with abortion, Grey’s certainly does, with Cristina undergoing an abortion and a miscarriage for her two pregnancies. For a teen movie, Crossroads isn’t afraid to deal with rape, either, which is how Mimi came to be pregnant in the first place.
At first glance the two Rhimes productions couldn’t be more different, and while Grey’s is far more sophisticated, Crossroads is evidence that Rhimes began her progressive storytelling long before Meredith, Olivia, Annalise and co. hit our TV screens. Who would have thought that Britney Spears would be involved?

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Scarlett Harris is a Melbourne, Australia-based freelance writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she writes about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter.

Cristina Yang As Feminist

As people, no matter what gender, it is seemingly second nature to want others to like us and to portray our best selves to them. Just look at the ritual of the date or the job interview. That Cristina defied this action (though we have seen her star-struck when meeting surgeons like Tom Evans and Preston Burke) made her not just a feminist character, but a truly human(ist) one.

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This guest post by Scarlett Harris is an updated version of a post that originally appeared on The Scarlett Woman and appears now as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women. Cross-posted with permission.


When it comes to “likable” female characters on TV, up until she departed Grey’s Anatomy last season, Cristina Yang probably wasn’t one of them.

She was abrasive, unfeeling, career-driven, ruthless and selfish. Everything a woman shouldn’t be, according to patriarchal norms.

Perhaps she could’ve been more like the ousted Izzie Stevens, who was bubbly and sexy and baked cookies. Or the virginal and highly strung April Kempner, whom Cristina praises for having “virgin super powers,” enabling her to be super-organized.

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But I, like many Bitch Flicks readers, loved Cristina just the way she is. She had her eye on the prize, wouldn’t compromise her personal beliefs or goals to be liked by her peers or loved by a man, and she had “tiny little genius” hands that enable her to roll with the big guns.

This is why Cristina Yang is one of an increasing cohort of “feminist”—or “strong female”—characters on television.

For one thing, she refuses to rely on her looks or her feminine wiles to get ahead. In “This is How We Do It” in season seven, she rejects Owen’s compliment about her beauty, saying, “If you want to appease me, compliment my brain.”

And in season seven’s final, we saw Cristina exercise her right to choose and schedule her second abortion on the show, after much (mostly solo) deliberation. While excluding the opinion of her significant other and biological contributor to the fetus wasn’t the most respectful thing to do, ultimately it came down to her choice, and she chose to terminate the pregnancy.

In season two, Cristina divulged that she was pregnant to Dr. Burke and, again, made the decision to get an abortion on her own. Whereas a character like Izzie seemed to serve the anti-abortion agenda (she gave up her own baby for adoption when she was a teenager growing up in a trailer park, and convinced a HIV-positive woman to carry her pregnancy to term), Cristina resisted the societal pressures to tap into her maternal instincts and give birth to a child she does not want. Shonda Rhimes has since proved that she’s one of the only truly pro-choice producers in television, and I have written further about her stance here.

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Regardless of whose agenda could be seen as being served by Cristina’s character, she acted without fear of what other people will think of her.

As people, no matter what gender, it is seemingly second nature to want others to like us and to portray our best selves to them. Just look at the ritual of the date or the job interview. That Cristina defied this action (though we have seen her star-struck when meeting surgeons like Tom Evans and Preston Burke) made her not just a feminist character, but a truly human(ist) one.

When Grey’s Anatomy first debuted, it seemed that Cristina Yang was positioned to challenge and grate on the audience, with Meredith or Izzie being more palatable to viewers. As the seasons continued (some would say dragged on), the women of Grey’s Anatomy were proven to be anything but likable, cheating on their spouses, meddling in medical cases that would see them lose their licenses and be sued for malpractice, grieving, quitting, and just dealing with the challenges that being a surgeon and a person throws at you. Though Seattle Grace/Seattle Grace Mercy West/Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital/what the hell is that hospital called now?! is a fictional medical institution, it’s one of the realest portrayals of not just women but people on TV today. Like Cristina’s departure last season, it will truly be a sad day when those doctors leave our living rooms for good.

 


Scarlett Harris is a Melbourne, Australia-based freelance writer and blogger at The Scarlett Woman, where she writes about femin- and other -isms. You can follow her on Twitter.