Sexual Assault – Bitch Flicks

‘Hooligan Sparrow’ Touches on Topics of Fame and Notoriety in Activism

The documentary, from director Nanfu Wang, follows Chinese activist Ye Haiyan (aka Hooligan Sparrow) as she protests the lack of prosecution in a child sexual abuse case and suffers retaliatory harassment, surveillance, and imprisonment. … ‘Hooligan Sparrow’ is, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the legends that activists build for themselves.

Written by Katherine Murray. | Hooligan Sparrow is screening at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault]

There’s a lot going on in Hooligan Sparrow. The documentary, from director Nanfu Wang, follows Chinese activist Ye Haiyan (aka Hooligan Sparrow) as she protests the lack of prosecution in a child sexual abuse case and suffers retaliatory harassment, surveillance, and imprisonment. The film is full of scenes where strangers who may be plain-clothes police officers threaten to break Wang’s camera, or where the footage shows her running feet, the ground, or the stairs while people shout threatening things in the background. She breathlessly explains to us that she’s had to go into hiding, that she can’t use any form of travel requiring an ID or credit card and that her friends have warned her that the police are asking questions about her.

The issues that Sparrow and her associates (including lawyer Wang Yu, who has been indefinitely detained as of the film’s release), protest are important and well-explained. Sparrow first came to prominence when she began protesting the criminalization of sex work through a stunt where she publically declared that she would prostitute herself for free. In the film, she protests a high-profile sexual abuse case, in which a school principal allegedly abducted several of his female students and forced them to have sex with government officials. After first denying that any sex took place, the defence begins to argue that the girls accepted money in exchange for sex, which would reduce the charge to child prostitution rather than rape, and carry a much lighter sentence. Sparrow and Yu explain that this is a common tactic in Chinese courts – to cover up rape by claiming it was prostitution instead.

Although their cause is just, Sparrow and Wang, who becomes increasingly involved in the action even as she documents it, also carry a certain cloud of ego and drama into their work. It’s the same cloud of ego and drama that follows many full-time activists all over the world, and there have been very few explorations of what it means. It’s entirely possible to both try to make the world a better place and like being the center of attention, but there’s definitely a tension that plays out between those two things.

For example, there’s a scene late in the film where Wang is finally able to interview the father of one of the sexual abuse victims. He reveals that he avoided engaging with them earlier because the only thing he knew about Sparrow was that she’d done a stunt where she said she’d have sex for free. It seems like he doesn’t know or understand what she was trying protest – the protest didn’t draw his attention to the dangers faced by sex workers due to criminalization; it just drew attention to Sparrow. And it actually made him less interested in seeing her as a potential ally, even though they were on the same side.

As Wang narrates the film, after the fact, she also seems to take a certain amount of pleasure in how people were always trying to shut down her film. I don’t doubt at all that she was scared when she was running from violent mobs, or thought she was about to be arrested and detained by the police. But it’s telling that the story, which is supposedly about the persecution that Sparrow is facing, is framed by an incident where someone wrestled Wang’s camera away from her. Definitely scary. Definitely uncool. Kind of throwing the attention on herself rather than either the sexual abuse trial or the activist she’s been profiling.

Hooligan Sparrow is, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the legends that activists build for themselves. It’s about the notoriety that Sparrow receives, the unfair persecution, the harassment, the shunning – being left on the side of the road with her daughter and all their belongings – an incident that later becomes the subject of an art exhibit from Ai Weiwei. But it’s also about why she’s called Hooligan Sparrow. It’s about fame. It’s about glory. It’s about yelling really loud in front of a bunch of other people, and then congratulating yourself and kind of forgetting about it.

It’s not clear from the film whether Sparrow’s protest actually had much impact on the outcome of the trial – it’s not clear whether it made the victims feel supported; it’s not clear whether it changed anyone’s mind. I think it’s important for activists to publicly demonstrate that there are people who don’t agree with what’s going on, even if it doesn’t change anyone’s mind, but the film isn’t focused on whether Sparrow’s work has any impact on anyone else. It also doesn’t delve into the kind of investigative journalism that would uncover what’s happening in China’s rape and sexual assault trials, how systemic government corruption has become, or how the government (allegedly) tries to silence protesters.

On the flip side, the film also doesn’t fully commit to a narrative about Nanfu Wang’s journey as documentarian, even though she becomes a more and more active participant as the story goes on. There’s no strong sense of how this experience changed her, or what the role of gonzo journalism is in helping to bring freedom of speech and expression to China. There’s an interesting subplot in the film, where one of Sparrow’s followers seems to become interested in journalism after meeting Wang and takes up the mantle of “documenting the atrocities” on camera after she’s gone – it’s a subplot I would have like to have seen explored more.

I also wish the film had delved deeper into the subplot about how technology has made it harder for the government to make people disappear. The protesters in Hooligan Sparrow tape messages whenever they fear they’re about to be arrested, explaining that, if they die in custody it will not be because they killed themselves, imploring people to look for them if they go missing, and explaining how their disappearance may be linked to participation in political protests. It’s the same principle that led Ai Weiwei to tweet a photo of himself being arrested, and a form of action that may hold real promise for political change.

Wang’s adrenaline-fueled attempt to get through the summer without losing her camera makes for an engaging story, but it isn’t always clear that what she’s captured on the camera exposes new information or reveals the path to increased human rights in China.

Sparrow’s fellow activist, Wang Yu was arrested along with several other human rights lawyers in 2015 and, as of the film’s release, had been held without trial since. The filmmakers have set up a page with information on Wang Yu’s detention by Chinese authorities as well as suggestions for how to take action. Yu is also one of the women identified in the US government’s #freethe20 campaign.

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

Everything That’s Wrong (And a Few Things That Are Right) with ‘The Magicians’

Watching ‘The Magicians’ can be a lot like watching a real magician. One who’s not very good and keeps using such obvious distraction techniques that you want to rebel by looking at exactly what you’re not supposed to notice. And what we’re not supposed to notice here is an almost total lack of character development, followed by the thought that sperm is magic.

Written by Katherine Murray.

[Trigger warning: Discussion of rape and sexual violence]

Watching The Magicians can be a lot like watching a real magician. One who’s not very good and keeps using such obvious distraction techniques that you want to rebel by looking at exactly what you’re not supposed to notice. And what we’re not supposed to notice here is an almost total lack of character development, followed by the thought that sperm is magic.

The Magicians just wrapped up its first season on the SyFy network (Showcase, in Canada) and it was, overall, pretty disappointing. A TV show is not the same thing as a book series and, even though I was a fan of the books The Magicians is based on, I wasn’t expecting – or even wanting – it to be a faithful recreation of the source material. I did want it to tell a good story, though, and that’s where some of the narrative changes let me down.

Don’t get me wrong – I understand why the writers did most of what they did. In adapting the books for a TV series, they faced some difficult challenges:

The first book in the Magicians trilogy, which follows the adventures of Quentin Coldwater and his group of friends, is initially set at a magic school called Brakebills, but the action later moves to the magical land of Narnia Fillory and Brakebills becomes a footnote in the overall story. Because the first few episodes of a new TV show teach the audience how to watch it, there was a danger of setting up the false expectation that The Magicians was going to be about a bunch of students at a magic school.
The second book in the Magicians trilogy backtracks and spends about half its text explaining what Quentin’s friend, Julia, was doing while he was at Brakebills. This is vitally important to the story in book two, but Julia isn’t around that much in book one, and readers could be forgiven for forgetting she existed after she failed her Brakebills entrance exam. On TV, it’s hard to tell a long story in flashback and have it seem compelling.
Let’s be real – it would cost a lot of money to depict things exactly as they happened in the books.

For the most part, the solutions the writers came up with are good. They’ve accelerated the timeline of the original story so that the series hits its major turning points faster; they include action that takes place in Fillory and otherwise outside Brakebills right from the start; they place a lot less emphasis on classes, studying, and other especially school-like activities that take place at Brakebills which stops school from structuring the show; they cut back and forth between Quentin and Julia so that we can see their separate narratives unfold in real time; and they invent a character called Kady who moves between both stories and helps things feel connected.

All of this makes sense in theory – the problem is that, in practice, everything happens too fast.

The Magicians tries to cram all of book one, half of book two, and select revelations from book three into 13 episodes – that’s not even including the brand new plot points, story lines and characters it’s introduced. Some of the narrative choices kill two birds with one stone by collapsing multiple plot points into each other – Quentin needs a reason to be friends with Alice, Penny, and Kady and he also needs to accidentally summon a beast to the school; what if they all accidentally summon the beast together? But things start to fall apart when it comes to character development.

Repeatedly, season one of The Magicians expects us to believe that people undergo major changes in their feelings, perceptions, and relationships with lightning speed. Repeatedly, we’re asked to buy into emotionally-heavy plot developments with barely any time to explore what they mean. Quentin’s friend, Elliot, is torn apart by having to kill his evil, body-snatched boyfriend… whom we’ve known for about forty minutes. Elliot, later has to make a major, life-changing decision about whether to enter into a magical contract that would force him to stay in Fillory forever and never have sex again and he literally has 90 seconds to go on an entire emotional journey that leaves him okay with that idea. Quentin and his sometime-girlfriend Alice seem to be together for about five days before they break up and, in the season finale, she gives him a speech about his character that seems hollow because they barely know each other. The show rushes through a major plot point about how Alice’s older brother turned into a fire monster when he was at Brakebills and then doesn’t deliver the pay-off for that story in the season finale, leaving it as a random thing that everyone got super upset about for exactly one episode.

The most annoying example I remember, though, is a new plot line about how Quentin’s father is dying of cancer and believes that Quentin has wasted his life by being a weirdo. In the space of one episode, we are introduced to Father Quentin and his cancer, and the story of how, when Quentin was a kid, he ruined his father’s favorite model airplane and his father tried to glue it back together and just made it worse. At the end of the episode, Quentin goes back to his father’s house and uses magic to put the airplane back together, proving that he’s not just a weirdo and he’s finally done something with his life. And all of that is great, except that I’m supposed to believe Quentin’s dad just happens to keep that broken airplane from ten years ago in his living room at all times so that he can drag it out to hold a grudge against his son thereby providing an opportunity for metaphorical redemption. The writers know that they need to establish the backstory behind this airplane before the payoff where Quentin fixes it with magic, but the journey between establishing the conflict and resolving it remains too short, direct, and convenient. The same thing could be said for almost every major conflict in the first season.

The characters are also drawn in a pretty shallow way, likely because there isn’t time to develop them more. They always do and feel and say exactly what they need to do and feel and say to lurch from one plot point to another, but there’s no organic sense that these are real people, changing over time.

And that’s not even getting into the stuff with Julia.

Straight up – one of the things that impressed me about the second book in the Magicians trilogy is the way that Lev Grossman deftly, subtly, sensitively handled Julia’s back story, which involves a traumatic assault. Julia is Quentin’s childhood friend, but she fails the exam to get into Brakebills and then he’s kind of a dick to her. She goes off on her own and tries to learn magic on the streets – something that he’s kind of snobby about later on – and she has to do a lot of things that she’s not proud of and face a lot of choices that people like Quentin never have to deal with. Eventually, she makes some friends who become her whole world, and, just as everything looks like it’s finally coming together for her, it all gets blown to pieces.

Spoilers for the books and the TV show, but Julia and her friends try to summon a benevolent god to help them, and instead they get tricked by an evil god who kills most of Julia’s friends and rapes her when she tries to save another woman in her group. The book really conveys how horrible this is, and how it was more than just a physical assault – how it took everything Julia had, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and made her a different person. The book is all about how she keeps trying to deny that anything changed, but how it’s only when she accepts this (horrible, traumatic) experience as part of who she is that she becomes stronger. Learning what happened to Julia and watching how she changes also teaches Quentin that he’s not the center of the universe – he learns to have empathy for others, and appreciate that they’re the heroes of their own stories, taking their own journeys, facing their own challenges along the way.

In the TV show, we don’t have enough time to appreciate all the layers of Julia’s emotional journey. She’s angry for a couple of episodes, hangs out with some ne’er-do-wells, makes friends with some people we don’t get to know very well, and then all of a sudden, she’s like, “I know I haven’t always been a great person, but this is my redemption and I want to help everyone.” Again, only for a couple of episodes before the whole thing goes sideways.

Because Julia is still in contact with Quentin in the TV show, and because it needs to make sense that she would help him move the plot line forward when she should be in emotional turmoil, the writers (pretty cleverly) invent a twist where, initially, it seems like Julia successfully summoned the benevolent god, and the benevolent god gave everyone exactly what they wanted, and they all went away somewhere to be happy, which explains why they suddenly vanished. The flashbacks we see of this beautiful moment all have cold lighting and zero sound, which makes them seem creepy. In the next episode, we learn that this is a false memory that a fellow street magician put in Julia’s mind to protect her from remembering the truth. When the false memory is removed, Julia loses her composure, and we see a terrifying (but simplified) scene of how she was attacked by the evil god.

That’s all okay, up until the part where Julia’s complicated quest to reconcile her memories of trauma and become a stronger person is replaced by a plot point where god spunk gives you powers.

I’m just gonna say that again – in the TV show, having the semen of a god inside your body gives you magical powers. That is why Julia has more power in the final episode. That is why Alice has more power in the final episode, too – Julia was raped and Alice drinks a mason jar of semen.

Also, spoilers for the books again, and spoilers for the TV show if this ends up happening later, but – in the books, Alice is the strongest magician and Quentin’s group of friends, and, when they finally face their nemesis the branch-faced beast (in the show, he is a moth-faced beast) she turns into a fire monster like her brother did. It’s horrible but kind of awesome and heroic at the same time, because she tries to do something good and she’s the only one strong enough to do it. In the TV show, Quentin realizes before they fight the beast that Alice is the strong one and gives her a mason jar full of semen to drink. Then, when they reach the actual fight, Alice doesn’t get to do anything before she (apparently) gets killed. Odds are that this is so she can survive somehow and stick around next season, but it’s still a weak ending.

Look, the TV show does a lot of things right. Casting Arjun Gupta as Quentin’s frenemy, Penny (which makes Penny a lot more likeable and charismatic), creating the Kady character to bridge the two stories, getting out of Brakebills faster, inventing a time loop that sort of explains why the TV show is different from the books, letting Quentin have his awkward bisexual three-way without having some kind of panic attack in the process, trying to misdirect the audience about who the beast is, trying to mislead us into thinking Quentin is the most important character so that he learns a lesson when he’s not, following Julia right from the start, simplifying some of the story elements to work with a limited budget – there are lots of good choices.

But, amidst all of those good choices, there’s also a sense of anxiety in the first season. There’s a sense that this might not be interesting enough, or people won’t get it, or they won’t think it’s exciting, so we need to pad the story out with sex and violence and rely on shocking plot twists to keep everybody invested rather than building a complex set of characters and relationships that earn their payoffs over time. It’s as if the show fears that, if it takes the time to build something solid, everyone will get bored and leave before it’s done. In that sense, its a lot like How to Get Away with Murder, Orphan Black, and Mr. Robot, in that it just keeps changing direction to throw us off balance. That kind of thing isn’t sustainable over the long term, and it makes me worried that the series won’t ever find its feet.

The Magicians has already been renewed for a second season, and I’ll watch it. But I hope that now that they burned their way through half the source material, they will stop jumping between huge plot points and give the characters more room to breathe. My other hope is that they retcon it somehow so that drinking semen doesn’t give you powers. WTF.

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

‘Spotlight’ on the Wrong People

‘Spotlight’ isn’t the kind of film that just changes some facts (though I never understand “based-on-a-true-story” films that do so: if you’re going to fictionalize their lives why not fictionalize their names too?), it’s one where the most basic plot summary contradicts what happened.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual abuse]

We’re winding down to the Oscar ceremony no thinking person is looking forward to. The Black director who should have been nominated last year, Ava DuVernay, and the Black director who should have been nominated this year, Ryan Coogler, will be in Flint, Michigan with other Black celebrities on Oscar night, raising funds for and drawing attention to the majority-Black community whose water was poisoned as a result of government misdeeds. I see some outlets still trying to pretend this ceremony is like all the others. Among the fluff articles about white nominees are ones that focus on the “real” people behind the film Spotlight, which is nominated as it has been at other galas (it swept last night’s Spirit Awards) for multiple awards, even Best Supporting Actress. (One writer posited that Rachel McAdams got a nomination for a performance that consists of her mostly listening, nodding and taking notes because she “dared” to wear unflattering chinos, just like a real reporter would).

Spotlight centers around the intrepid editors and reporters (the vast majority of whom are male) of The Boston Globe, claiming they are the only reason we know the extent of child sexual abuse perpetrated by Boston archdiocese priests and the cover-up by the archdiocese itself. For those of us who know the facts around this basic premise, the film plays as a long, elaborate, tedious lie. Spotlight isn’t the kind of film that just changes some facts (though I never understand based-on-a-true-story films that do so: if you’re going to fictionalize their lives why not fictionalize their names too?); it’s one where the most general plot summary contradicts what happened.

Instead of the investigation beginning, as it does in the film, with a powerful man looking solemnly into the middle distance and declaring “I know there’s a story here,” it began with a young woman reporter, Kristen Lombardi at the alternative weekly The Boston Phoenix, with the encouragement and guidance of her out, queer, news editor (previously a longtime reporter at Boston’s LGBT paper) Susan Ryan-Vollmar.

As has been reported elsewhere, Lombardi’s story was published nearly a year before the first “Spotlight” story and shares with it a number of “discoveries”. One of these “discoveries” is a turning point we see in the film: Mark Ruffalo’s Woodward-and-Bernstein-esque Mike Rezendes (in one of the few performances that has made me dislike the actor) interrogating an expert on sex-offender priests and inferring from his data that a far greater number of the offenders existed than anyone had previously thought. Not only did Lombardi do the interview with the same expert first, she also literally did the math to come up with the number of probable offenders.

Lombardi has been gracious in interviews, explaining, “I was aware that there was a bigger story that I couldn’t tell because I didn’t have the resources,” and that the ability to stick with the story week after week was something only The Globe could do. But she also wishes she had gotten some credit. Although repeatedly given the chance to acknowledge her contribution, editor Baron, (played by Liev Shreiber in the film: the real-life Baron has moved on to another, larger newspaper as one character in the film “predicts”) has steadfastly refused to do so. With at least one of his colleagues admitting that Lombardi broke the story, Baron’s continued silence seems like a tacit admission of guilt. In the film, Rezendes says that no one in town saw Lombardi’s cover story in The Phoenix, which is laughable considering the very streets we see the film’s reporters endlessly walking up and down would have had, at that time, on every corner big, bright, red boxes full of free copies of The Phoenix. Its cover story, including the one about Law and the cover-up, would be facing anyone on the sidewalk, through the box windows at each intersection.

Tom McCarthy, the co-writer and director, did interview Lombardi as research for the script, but he decided her role wasn’t important enough to include in the final cut of the film. Instead McCarthy decided to focus on white-guy, mainstream newspaper mythology, and that focus not only makes the film untrue, it renders it dramatically inert.

Nearly every scene of this film involves two (or more!) men of a certain age glowering at each other: over a conference table, a golf game or a shadowy bar like in some Saturday Night Live parody while spouting dialogue that could have come from a comic book.

“You’re going to give me their names and the names of their victims!”

“Are you threatening me?”

“They knew, and they let it happen!”

The film suggests, nonsensically, that Rezendes, Baron, and the lawyer who represented many of the victims, Mitchell Garabedian (played by Stanley Tucci) were willing to go against the Catholic Church because they were respectively, a Jewish bachelor who didn’t like baseball, someone from a Portuguese family and someone from an Armenian family: all so-called “outsiders”.

But the real outsiders were those who realized, before the scandal hit, that the Catholic Church was far from the benevolent institution each of the male characters in Spotlight seem to think it is at the beginning of the film. The people with ties to the Catholic Church were (and are) the same ones who shout at women as they enter Planned Parenthood and other clinics that perform abortions in Boston. Six years before the scandal broke, John Salvi had shot and killed people in two of these clinics in Brookline, the town next to Boston, and pointed to his Catholic beliefs as the reason.

Ryan-Vollmar would have seen firsthand, as a reporter for a queer paper, that the Catholic church had tried to block every state law (including, eventually, the one for marriage) that gave queer people the same rights as everyone else. And The Phoenix, like many alternative newspapers with roots in the 1960s was founded because mainstream papers like The Globe did not cover events or politics in ways that confronted the existing power structure.

Women, especially in the past, were much more likely to listen to and believe allegations of rape and sexual abuse perpetrated by men in power than… men in power were. One of the many omissions the film makes is that women, usually relatives of the victims, were among the very first whistle-blowers on the church’s cover-up of sexual abuse–and were ignored for years.

Spotlight goes so far out of its way to make its story all about white guys it should have all of us questioning every “based on a true story” film from now on. Let’s not let another smarmy white-guy writer-director shrug his shoulders, smile, and say he would have loved for women to play the leads in his film, but the “facts” got in his way.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg5zSVxx9JM” iv_load_policy=”3″]

Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing, besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

Let’s All Calm Down for a Minute About ‘The Hateful Eight’: Analyzing the Leading Lady of a Modern Western

In an action movie, violence is due to befall all characters. Is violence against any female character inherently woman-hating, inherently misogynist? … It’s possible that subconscious sexism makes people quick to see her as a victim, and then criticism of the trope of women as victims may be getting in the way of seeing the agency and complexity of a character like Daisy Domergue.

This guest post is written by Sophie Besl.

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape, sexual assault and graphic violence] | Spoilers ahead.

When the only female character in Quentin Tarantino’s new film, The Hateful Eight, appeared on promotional materials, and eventually onscreen, with a black eye and chained to a male character, the hair on everyone’s backs was already up. A Tarantino fan and writer I admire went so far as to post on Facebook, “…What I saw tonight in 70 millimeter was a woman-hating piece of trash.”

In this analysis, I ask viewers and readers to take a new perspective. In an action movie, violence is due to befall all characters. Is violence against any female character inherently woman-hating, inherently misogynist?

The Hateful Eight Is a Western.
This male-centric genre, like many others, is guilty of shackling a limited number of women into stereotypical roles such as: a) emotional, submissive frontier wives completely at the mercy of men’s decisions, b) hyper-sexualized sex workers, or c) exoticized depictions of Native and Indigenous women. Of course, there are still standout roles for women (Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles, Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the role of Mattie in True Grit), but these roles are difficult to etch out. I would like to submit that Daisy Domergue, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, is one of these strong roles. Tarantino gets as close as he can to putting a woman in a leading role (which he has shown is his preference in Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Death Proof, and Inglourious Basterds).

The primary message of The Hateful Eight is about the Civil War and what it meant for America and the men, white and Black, who fought it. Thus, the main characters fought in the war. While a small number of women disguised themselves as men and fought, the overwhelming majority of veterans were men. So since the main characters had to be veterans, these were male, but Tarantino made the “next available” lead character female. Domergue is essentially the third lead, the highest level available that is historically accurate for a woman, given Tarantino’s primary goal exploring race relations (her Golden Globe nomination is for supporting actor, but it’s okay, those decisions are not a science!).

Play the Movie in Your Mind with a Male Actor in the Role.
In my opinion, one test of whether a character is feminist or not is if you ask, “Does this character’s gender play any part in the character’s actions, fate, or treatment?” If the answer is “no” or “not really, not essentially,” then that is a very feminist character. Insert a male actor in place of Jennifer Jason Leigh. Think about it — the plot would play out exactly the same. Not only that, but almost no lines of dialogue would need to be changed. “This woman” would be replaced with “this man,” “sister” with “brother,” etc. The only outlier is the dreaded “b” word, but Tarantino has plenty of colorful insults for all manner of characters.

Domergue Is Never Viewed in a Sexual or Objectifying Way.
This is rooted one of my favorite things about Tarantino as a filmmaker. In a world riddled with rape, the last thing we need is gratuitous, titillating visuals, filmed from a male point of view, of sexual violence against women.¹ The closest Tarantino ever comes to this is with the Bride² — but the sexual violence is implied not shown³ — and Death Proof, where the revenge equally or far outweighs the initial gender-based homicide. On the flip side, Tarantino has no problem showing rape and sexual assault against men onscreen, such as in Pulp Fiction and The Hateful Eight.

Shosanna in Inglourious Basterds is one of the best examples of Tarantino writing for women as if they do not live in danger of sexual violence from men. This suspension of disbelief onscreen is refreshing and empowering for viewers, such as me as a woman who does somewhat live in daily fear of sexual violence. Shosanna repeatedly, assertively turns down advances from Zoller quite at her own peril throughout the entire film. Her fearlessness is astounding, and respected. Here are the ways that Domergue is written in similarly feminist ways:

[Spoilers follow.]
• She is walked into a log cabin in the middle-of-nowhere Wyoming to spend the night with 9 or 10 men, one of whom she is chained to, and it never seems to the viewer that she might be in danger, of sexual violence or even significant other harm.
• There is no implication that her captor has raped or sexually assaulted her.
• Her looks are never commented upon, neither that she is pretty nor looking haggard. The comment-ability of her appearance intensifies over time based on the chaos that occurs inside the cabin, yet no one comments. This is impossibly refreshing and almost unheard of for women in film. Even the looks of the strongest women characters in other Westerns are usually remarked upon or up for discussion among the men.
• Domergue is not a love interest of any of the characters.*
• Men are willing to risk their lives to save Domergue due to familial or gang ties, not out of love, affection, or sexually driven motives.*
• The camera never rests on her in an objectifying or gazing way that is different than the other characters or unique to her as a woman.

*Note: Major Marquis Warren does imply this in one line of dialogue, but it is quickly dismissed. Compared to most films where men only act out of love for women and sex is a major motivator, this is still a major step in terms of feminist film.

Okay Yes, We’ll Talk about the Violence.
I’m no fool — I’m not going to pretend that it’s all butterflies and rainbows for Domergue in The Hateful Eight. As Leigh told The Daily Beast, she took a photo of herself and sent it to her mom when her only makeup was a black eye and a few scratches and bruises and said, “This is as good as it’s going to get. This is the beauty shot from the movie. … Then it just got more and more insane as it goes on.”

My initial question was: Is any violence against a woman inherently misogynist? Leigh said in an interview:

“I think it’s actually more of a sexist response [to say that]… I think it’s easy to have a sexist response. ‘Hitting a woman? Sexist.’ It’s a natural go-to place for people. But [Tarantino]’s actually taking the sexism out of it.”

Another argument about the violence is that Domergue has almost full agency over it. She has been arrested by an officer of the court, and he has made it clear what the consequences are for what actions. She purposely violates his rules, knowing what the consequences will be, and chooses the risks of receiving an elbow to the face for getting in some fantastic jabs at Kurt Russell’s character John Ruth, such as that his intelligence may have suffered from taking a high dive into a low well.

Also, while many would argue that Domergue gets the worst of the violence, mostly marked by her lack of wiping blood off of her face, it should be noted that part of the lead protagonist Major Warren’s genitals are separated from his body by a gunshot wound, an injury he viscerally suffers from until the end of the movie, so it’s not like Tarantino spares his lead male actors.

She Kills Her Captor.
While: a) being chained to Ruth, b) Ruth is poisoned and thus vomiting on her, and c) Ruth is still managing to beat her up, Domergue manages to grab his gun and blow him away. Any one of the “hateful eight” could have easily killed Ruth plot-wise, but Tarantino gives this murder to Domergue, who deserves it and has truly earned it. (Note: She also deftly and matter-of-factly saws his arm — which she’s still handcuffed to — off of his corpse to facilitate her mobility later that night.)

The Fates of Four Men Rest on Her in the End.
Speaking of her being a total badass, after Jody’s murder, she goes from being the #2 to the #1 leader of one of the most dangerous gangs in the land. In the final act of the film, she just about single-handedly negotiates the lives (and deaths) of the two protagonists and her two remaining gang members. She is unarmed, and yet commands full power over the four men’s actions and decisions until the very last moment. Her brilliance —“She’s very, very smart,” Leigh tells The Daily Beast — causes her to outshine all of the other characters and almost “win.” “…She’s a leader. And she’s tough. And she’s hateful and a survivor and scrappy,” says Leigh in an interview with Variety, all traits that give Domergue power in the frenetic, desperate situation in which all the characters find themselves.

The Death Scene.
This is arguably the most problematic scene of all. Let’s present what I’m up against before I present my counterpoint. Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com writes:

“The film’s relentless and often comical violence against Daisy never feels truly earned. Saying, ‘Well, they’re all outlaws, including her, and that’s just how women were treated back then’ feels like an awfully thin defense when you hear audiences whooping it up each time Russell punches Leigh in the face, and it dissipates during the final scene, which lingers on Daisy’s death with near-pornographic fascination. In a movie filled with selfish, deceptive and murderous characters, hers is the only demise that is not just observed, but celebrated.”

Well this is where I’m going to go way out on a limb and repeat what Leigh herself (the woman who had to sit around in 30 degrees in the fake blood and brains, and pretend to be hung) said, “I think it’s actually more of a sexist response [to say that].” Why is watching a villain get what’s coming to her “near-pornographic fascination?” There’s nothing sexual about the act of killing her, or its filming/gaze. Also, after her death, her body is sometimes held in the same shot with the two protagonists, as if her character still lives on in a way.

• Did this reviewer feel the same way when Tarantino’s three protagonists were kicking the living bejesus out of Russell’s character in Death Proof?
• What about when Elle is sitting over Bud’s snake-poison-filled body in Kill Bill Vol. 2 and calmly reading to him? If anything, that is more tortuous and sick, plus the camera is looking up at Elle (murderer) and down at Bud (victim). These camera angles are reversed in Domergue’s murder, with an upward shot on her and downward at the murderers.
• If I recall correctly, the audience also “whooped it up” each time significant discomfort befell almost any of the characters: O.B. getting really cold, Ruth and O.B. throwing up from poison, Mannix getting shot and passing out, etc.
• If I recall correctly, the audience pretty clearly celebrated or enjoyed the shorter-in-duration but also gristly murders of Bob and Jody. This violence was also slated as comical.
• Maybe I was the only sick person in the theater, but I also found it pretty enjoyable and hilarious that Tim Roth’s character didn’t die right away, and he was crawling around in the background while a bunch of other stuff was going on, with no one paying him any mind.
• May I take a moment to reiterate the violence to Major Warren’s genitals? This was extremely comical to the audience — why is his violence earned but hers is not?
• There are only a few murders in the film that are decidedly not celebrated and those are of three women (and two men, one of whom is an older man in his 70s).

I see the temptation to look at what happens to Daisy Domergue on-screen and denounce, “You sexist, you’re destroying a woman, how misogynist!” I even did it for moments myself. However, I encourage everyone to move past this knee-jerk reaction. It’s possible that subconscious sexism makes people quick to see her as a victim, and then criticism of the trope of women as victims may be getting in the way of seeing the agency and complexity of a character like Domergue. I’d rather we not take this as an opportunity to put down Tarantino, but as an opportunity to celebrate Leigh’s nuanced and powerful performance – she even took time to learn to play guitar to perform a song in the film — as film critics are doing this awards season.

I’ll close with a quote from Tarantino:

“Violence is hanging over every one of those characters like a cloak of night. So I’m not going to go, ‘OK, that’s the case for seven of the characters, but because one is a woman, I have to treat her differently.’ I’m not going to do that.”

Notes:

[1] See my view on the only acceptable treatment of sexual violence in film in “I’ll Make You Feel Like You’ve Never Felt Before”: Jennifer’s Power in I Spit on Your Grave

[2] See a thoughtful exploration of the Bride’s rape revenge in Revenge Is a Dish Best Served… Not at All?. I agree with Rodriguez’s interpretation that Buck is “at the bottom of the barrel” as the first to die, but I disagree that Tarantino sees this is a means of empowerment that enables her to find liberation. I see it as another brutalization by Bill (indirectly) that further justifies her revenge. The Bride’s revenge against Bill feels very “tit for tat” in the way historically all-male cast movies are written, yet by working in the rape and the losing of her baby, he makes them more true to the realities of what a female character would face (again without showing sexual violence). Writing a female character with completely equal respect as a male character, yet with these realistic modifications based on gender, is the most feminist thing I can imagine.

[3] This argument of “implied not shown” was used to justify a reason why Mad Max: Fury Road is a feminist film.

Sophie Besl is an exploitation film fanatic with a day job in nonprofit marketing. She has a Bachelor’s from Harvard and lives in Boston with three small dogs. She tweets at @rockyc5.

Pollution, Energy Crisis and… Sexism? A Feminist Look at the ‘Soylent Green’ Dystopia

The film’s female characters seem to have accepted their fates and although they may not be okay with it, they don’t do much to fight against it. Today, women’s voices are constantly silenced, even (and especially) when conversations and arguments are about our own bodies.

This is a guest post by Maria Ramos.

Trigger warning: discussion of rape and sexual assault

Soylent Green, Richard Fleischer‘s 1973 classic sci-fi film, makes huge statements about class division, overpopulation, and global warming. Many have drawn parallels between the future depicted in the movie — where the greenhouse effect has taken its toll and much of the world’s wildlife is extinct — to the course of environmental destruction that humanity is currently on in the real world. While the movie’s message about the environment is much needed, its treatment of women makes an even bigger statement.

The dystopian future shown in Soylent Green is downright miserable for everyone but a handful of people — the lucky few aren’t actually seen in the film, but are noted as living away from the chaos of the city in heavily guarded country estates. The movie’s opener lists the population of New York City in the year 2022 at 40 million. Charlton Heston‘s character, Detective Frank Thorn, can’t go to or from his dilapidated apartment without seeing throngs of homeless people in the streets while law enforcement disperses crowds with a garbage truck that literally scoops people out of the way. Food is so scarce that folks take to primarily eating soy and lentil blocks — Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow — while the more popular Soylent Green is in short supply. It’s clear that poverty and overpopulation are major themes in Soylent Green, but the biggest victims of this are the women seen in the film.

Soylent Green stays true to the handling of women in the book on which it is based, Harry Harrison‘s Make Room! Make Room!. Several key details, some names, and the ending change, but one thing stays the same: women are screwed from beginning to end, literally and figuratively. Few women in the film get a break, not the poor or the ones who are “lucky” enough to have access to real food and a place to stay. The latter are actually referred to as “furniture,” and they’re basically attractive women who come as a package deal with the upscale apartments being rented out. A Craigslist ad for such an apartment might read, “Condo comes with a refrigerator, dishwasher, 23-year-old, slim, blonde furniture, and access to a concierge.”

Just like a chair or a hat rack, the women who are considered “furniture” don’t get to choose who uses them and must obey men’s commands, including visitors off the street. They’re routinely subjected to rape, violence and abuse from their renters and any men with whom they come in contact. Leigh Taylor-Young plays the film’s female lead, Shirl, who is at the mercy of the men who rent out the apartment where she lives. She sees her fellow “furniture” friends being beaten up by the building’s owner. Shirl is told, rather than asked, to have sex with Detective Thorn, and has very little control over her own destiny. She displays no anger at her condition and has clearly accepted her lot in life, as have the other women in the movie.

Aside from the sexist treatment experienced by the “furniture,” other women in Soylent Green are treated as disposable. Homeless women are shown being shot in the streets and in a homeless shelter while simply trying to survive. They are picked up by the scooper trucks while struggling to get food and are left to fend for themselves on the streets as they hover over their children.

While overpopulation is the big problem presented in this film, the solutions are rather absurd. No one in the movie thinks to punish the men who rape women and have stripped them of their reproductive rights, as women have no control over their own fertility and bodies in this world. The society depicted in Soylent Green is an extreme patriarchy, and an incompetent one at that. No women have positions of power and none are depicted as heroes who display courage. The men have all the employment opportunities and men make all of the social, political, and economic decisions.

As the film was released in 1973, a time when more women than ever were claiming their own destinies and demanding equal treatment, Soylent Green didn’t depict women’s place in the real world. However, it makes sense in a dystopian setting where political corruption and social chaos run rampant — history shows that women and children typically get the worst treatment in such situations.

One thing that made Soylent Green such an influential movie is that is seems to depict the possibilities if people continue on at their worst. The political system would become a nightmare, police would become defenders of corporations rather than people, and advocating for the rights of women and protecting nature would become afterthoughts. These are all things that have happened in one way or another, especially when it comes to the environment. As the EPA has reported, human fossil fuel consumption in the U.S. alone is adding between 5,000 to 6,000 million metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere each year, which is thought to be driving temperatures upward. Global warming and climate change are real, and we’re spurring it on.

But would the country’s young women be forced into accepting rape and degradation if our society slips into mayhem in the future? The film’s female characters seem to have accepted their fates and although they may not be okay with it, they don’t do much to fight against it. Today, women’s voices are constantly silenced, even (and especially) when conversations and arguments are about our own bodies. Although definitely not ideal, a future where patriarchal ideas and control over women’s bodies and rights could be a frightening possibility, as seen in the debates around abortion in current political headlines. As for the homeless women being trampled and shot in the streets, that could definitely happen to a significant portion of the female population, especially as violence like this does happen now, particularly to Black women. If we ever see social unrest like that in Soylent Green, women’s rights and social justice would deteriorate as people struggle to survive and men fight to keep their power.

Instead of being outraged at how dreadfully Soylent Green treats women, let’s take it as a forewarning and a lesson. We should think of what we can do to secure the future of women in our society if we ever get to a point where our civil liberties and legal protections are gone. We can either be proactive now, or resign to a life of furniture-like serfdom later.

Maria Ramos is a writer interested in comic books, cycling, and horror films. Her hobbies include cooking, doodling, and finding local shops around the city. She currently lives in Chicago with her two pet turtles, Franklin and Roy. You can follow her on Twitter @MariaRamos1889.

‘The Red Card’: A Short Film that Treats Young Adults with Respect

Trigger warning: rape and sexual assault | Watching a young adult have to navigate the social stigmas of rape and sexual assault in a small high school community is what pushes this film past the danger of falling into a trope that some filmmakers use as an easy way to tell women’s stories.

Trigger warning: rape and sexual assault

When I took fiction writing as an undergrad, the male grad student teaching the course complained that all girls ever wrote about was rape, that he was tired of it. “Wasn’t there anything else to write about?” he asked as he looked at the women in the room. As he ranted, I curled the page edges of my story I loved — which was about rape. I remember the power of writing a sentence about grass between my toes, the first time my imagery sang in my own head. My story was a young writer’s story as she tried to make sense of power dynamics and gender restrictions.

When I watched Dana Brawer’s short film The Red Card, I had two responses. First, I thought to myself, ANOTHER film that relies on the trope of rape? And then I checked myself. Why on earth would I think that? As if the world doesn’t need to hear another story about rape? My second response was to remember that blustering idiot teaching my class and shutting down my voice as I started to dip my toes into an art, much as Brawer is doing now with her thesis film. So I am grateful there’s a new film about rape. Let’s keep making them and ensuring the stories of rape survivors aren’t silenced.

Sam is a semi-geeky, comic-book-reading girl on the periphery of the highly charged sexual popular clique at a private school. She speaks to the young adult for whom this film was intended, and I certainly would have connected with her as teen. Brawer writes:

“Too often, stories about high school fall into cliché. They’re campy, corny, romantic, perhaps inspiring, but few of these films touch upon the deeper and secretive pains felt by high school students. These formulaic scripts about both boys and girls chasing an unrealistic ideal of love don’t begin to show the truth about the confusion and exploration of self that signifies such an important developmental time, and I’ve grown tired of coming of age stories that can be misleading to teens and young adults.”

And she’s right. The saccharine crap fed to young adults in the theaters is demeaning to the experiences of that population, and a film that speaks to them on a mature level is greatly needed.

Sam gets ~~invited~~ lured to a party in the woods where girls are hunted. If they are caught, they belong to the group of drunk teenage boys hoping to get laid, with or without consent. The party scene in the woods is an eerie red, making me wonder if there was going to be some kind of horror element.

When Michael begins to kiss Sam, she likes it. Then when he pushes further, she doesn’t and expressly says so. I wondered if there was going to be an element of Teeth, a vagina dentata or some other kind of intercession. But there isn’t. Her knee does the work to get him off of her.

The most interesting part of the movie is the set of scenes after the assault scene. Sam has to return to school where Michael attempts to apologize — perhaps — by giving her the sweater she left in the woods. All of the other students are looking at her. She has to figure out how to live in this new world where everyone is talking about her — after living a quiet teenage life of library work and comic books. Watching a young adult have to navigate the social stigmas of rape and sexual assault in a small high school community is what pushes this film past the danger of falling into a trope that some filmmakers use as an easy way to tell women’s stories. By complicating Sam’s response, Brawer offers something new, which is what we should be asking our younger filmmakers to do.

[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/JVwoHWuYSYA”]

Colleen Lutz Clemens is a Bitch Flicks staff writer and assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her two-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.

‘The Violators’ and ‘Wildlike’: Two Films Deal with the Trauma of Child Abuse in Different Ways

[Trigger Warning: for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault] To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways?

This is a guest post written by Holly Thicknes.

Trigger warning for discussion of child abuse, incest, rape, and sexual assault.

Wildlike and The Violators: two independent films released on festival circuits to rip-roaring acclaim. Both are debut features from Frank Hall Green and Helen Walsh respectively, and both deal with the uncomfortable subject of the sexual abuse of teenage girls. Yet the two films left me with very different impressions.

To what extent are filmmakers obliged to depict scenes of rape and the sexual assault of women and girls — a pandemic-sized problem in real life — in accurate and illuminating ways? If ever we are to believe that films can influence society for the better, surely we must look for critical self-awareness along with satisfying storytelling (where abuse is more than just a tool of the narrative that progresses the story). The guise of the art house genre has a history of being perceived as absolving films of the representational issues of rape as spectacle, as if the festival-to-independent-cinema distribution package amounts to an automatic stamp of approval (perhaps anyone seeing Gaspar Noé’s Love will take a moment to cast their minds back to the bitter experience that was his Irreversible, shown at Cannes in 2002). But explicitness — or as some might view it, uncut realism — in representing the sexual exploitation of women in itself is problematic if it serves no purpose other than the pleasure of spectacle. And so it is a delicate balance which filmmakers must strive to strike: an honest representation, made — crucially — for the right reasons.

Green’s Wildlike premiered at the Hamptons Film Festival in October 2014 and was the winner of over 40 Best Film awards at various other festivals. The film promises a scenic hike across Alaska, an unlikely friendship of substitution between a teenage girl and an older man and a tense chase by an abusive, ominously unnamed uncle. It delivers all three with invigorating authenticity: the photography and performances meld together to perfectly tow the line between documentary-inspired art house flick and melodramatic Alaskan road movie. The script and Green’s direction soar in moments of transition, where all the action is embedded in the faces of the characters (articulated with faultless performances all around, namely by Bruce Greenwood as male lead Rene) or else the gruff, ever-changing landscapes, and the contemplative essence of the story feels overwhelmingly all-encompassing. There is an endearing sweetness in the father-daughter friendship being cultivated with very little words but plenty of weighted glances. All the substance is there, evidently so, affording it its success and status as a breakthrough debut.

But for all of Wildlike‘s strengths, what I simultaneously can’t forgive it for nor realistically expect of it is the fact that the guesses feel clumsy around the depiction of the central female character’s abuse. They feel second hand, peripheral, flat.

In blatant contrast, The Violators is uncompromisingly captured from 15-year-old female protagonist Shelly’s perspective, and centered around the effects of the sexual exploitation she suffers. It is a film lovingly cultivated by acclaimed novelist and writer/director Walsh, who turned her hand to filmmaking for the first time with the kind of surety that relevant experience for the subject at hand affords you. She reached back into her childhood, where she grew up on the periphery of Cheshire, England, on the same streets and dockland walks we see depicted in the film, and drew out a story about a community of people suffering from the cyclical nature of abuse that forever seems to renew until someone or something finds the strength to break the cycle.

Through the eyes of Shelly, played by acting revelation Lauren McQueen, we see the people of this community play a daily game of chance with the hand they have been dealt. Exploring, as the story does, violation, no one person is made to claim all the blame and no one is absolved entirely, epitomized in Shelly’s complex character role of both sensible mother figure and misled, reckless child. Walsh hints at the details of an abusive father, in jail but possibly being paroled soon, to her and her self-sufficient siblings, and the prospect of it hangs like a spectre over everything so that current moments of violence feel grounded in her damaged past. True as the film is to real life, abuse does not change the centre of gravity of anyone else’s world, but instead informs the path that particular victim takes for the worse.

This perspective is where Wildlike falls down on the representational front, making it into a paternal film about a father-and-daughter-type friendship ever blooming in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness that sidelines the protagonist’s abusive experiences. To be fair, there is nothing insensitive about Green’s portrayal of MacKenzie (Ella Purnell), whose angsty teenager status is drawn onto her face with the filmic trope that is black eyeliner, but beyond this rightfully possesses no superficial traits that simply pigeonhole her character. The scenes of abuse are deliberately not treated as spectacle, but with impressive restraint and disgust-inducing visceral sound effects that imply rather than show (a storytelling technique that Green applies with great success throughout). But the effects of the incidents are observed from the outside, in manner of a concerned father who might look on at his daughter going through her troubled teenage years with genuine concern but bafflement. We are never invited into MacKenzie’s personal space to understand her motivations, and are instead left to second guess how messed up she must be from her experiences. Consequently, when she does break her sullen silence in a burst of emotion, the dialogue feels clumsily roped together in a bid to sound spontaneous but which comes off as whiny.

Unsurprisingly it is much easier to sympathise and identify with Rene, the recently widowed middle-aged male hiker that MacKenzie latches onto, firstly at the whiff of a meal ticket but then being tentatively drawn towards a kind and understanding father figure. Bruce Greenwood is a dream in the role, who we are introduced to in a moment when his defenses are down, in the rue of privacy whilst lying in bed, reminiscing about his late wife, without knowing that MacKenzie is actually hiding under his bed having snuck into his hotel room to nap for the night during her journey to Seattle. His male vulnerability in the wake of the manipulative uncle figure from whom MacKenzie is running is an instant catch: he is afforded an intimate look that we never get to see of her. A few silhouetted crying scenes do not cut it by any stretch.

Green has never claimed, as far as I know, to have made a film directly commenting on the lasting effects of sexual abuse on an underage girl in the hope of enlightening his audience. The meeting point of the two films is their examination of the resilience of vulnerable people in the face of attack. Wildlike does this beautifully — arguably more successfully than The Violators. But having seen both films at film festivals this year with directorial introductions, the contrast between representational intention is blatantly stark. Should films ever sideline child molestation? Should the primary victim’s account ever feel viewed from a distance? And should the issue even ever be used in a film by a male writer/director, one with undeniable storytelling skill, which gets the film into a bunch of festivals with its indie look, but uses the sensitive issue to invoke drama? It’s for everyone to individually make up their minds, but for my part I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling of having watched a film about teenage molestation and incest told superficially from the perspective of the female victim but in reality from the perspective of a man.

Holly Thicknes is a freelance film critic and editor of female-focused film blog Girls On Film. She lives and works in London, studies printmaking, and helps organise themed short film events for Shorts On Tap. She is particularly interested in the ways in which films help people carve out spaces for themselves in an increasingly lonely society. You can follow Girls On Film on Twitter at @girlsonfilmLDN.

‘Monster’: A Telling of the Real Life Consequences for Violent Women

Throughout her life, Wuornos experienced horrific instances of gendered abuse, which eventually lead to a violent outlash at her unfair circumstances. ‘Monster’ vividly documents the life of a woman whose experiences under a dominant patriarchal culture racked with abuse, poverty, and desperation led to a life of crime, imprisonment, and eventually death.

This guest post by Danika Kimball appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

American film audiences love the idea of violence, especially in regard to justice. From Bruce Wayne’s masked forays as Batman, to Frank Underwood’s signature House of Cards sneer, pop culture and media landscapes are bombarded with the image of a vigilante bringing matters into their own hands to enact justice. But what is almost more widely revered is the concept of a woman taking matters into her own hands, as it defies societal norms on numerous levels.

We see this depiction in numerous films. To the audience’s delight, heroine Beatrix Kiddo takes vengeance on her abusers in the Kill Bill series, and Furiosa defiantly defends her right to redemption from evil doers in Mad Max: Fury Road. But sometimes, females who resort to violence aren’t celebrated, and there is perhaps no greater depiction of this than Charlize Theron’s embodiment of Aileen Wuornos in the widely acclaimed dramatic film, Monster.

Monster is a film based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, who was one of the first female serial killers in the United States. Wuornos, an impoverished former prostitute, was executed in Florida in October 2002 for the murder of six men, each of whom were her former customers. She was only the second woman in Florida and the tenth women in the United States to receive the death penalty since the landmark 1976 Supreme Court decision that restored capital punishment.

The film made an impact on most for its graphic depictions of murder, but upon re-watching the film 10 years later, the portrayal of Aileen’s life in Monster was a cruel visualization of the impacts of patriarchy, poverty, and the ways in which the criminal justice system fails violent women.

In the opening scenes of Monster, we see Aileen as an adult sitting under a busy highway overpass, replaying her life story. We see her as a young child, dreaming of being an icon like Marilyn Monroe, wealthy, loved, and the center of attention.

Her fantasy fades as she walks into a gay bar with the five dollars she had just earned from a John which she was determined to spend before she ended her life. It’s here she meets a woman named Selby, a person she would later devote to protect at any cost.

The pair eventually find solace in their shared loneliness and fall in love, which pushes Selby out of her compulsory heterosexuality. Aileen, finally having someone to care for, takes it upon herself to be a provider for Selby. The film follows Aileen’s struggle to support her newfound family, her efforts in making sure that Selby is happy, and the struggle to maintain her own dignity.

After being raped and brutalized by a client, Aileen kills him in self-defense, vowing to quit prostitution. She confesses her crime to Selby, as Selby has been angry with her for not supporting the two of them.

Aileen’s efforts to find a job prove to be difficult she has no marketable skills, and no job history outside of her years of prostitution. Any prospective employers reject her, some openly volatile, accosting her for wasting their time. We see throughout the film that everyone in Aileen’s life believe that no man will ever pay her for anything aside from her body.

With nowhere to turn, Aileen returns to a life of prostitution, each time killing and robbing her Johns more brutally than the last, as she is convinced they are all trying to harm her.

In this context, it becomes difficult for a viewer to see her actions as evil. Aileen’s actions almost appear to be rational, even moral decisions, when viewed through the lens of extreme gender and class oppression. We see this in her explanations to Selby later, where she implores that she is helping to protect the other women in the world, who might also be victimized these men. She says,

Who the fuck knows what God wants? People kill each other every day and for what? Hm? For politics, for religion, and THEY’RE HEROES! No, no… There’s a lot of shit I can’t do anymore, but killing’s not one of them. And letting those fucking bastards go out and rape someone else isn’t either!

Eventually Aileen’s murders catch up with her, and she is arrested at a biker bar. While speaking to Selby on the phone, Selby reveals incriminating information over the phone while the police are listening in. As her last display of protection, Aileen admits she committed the murders alone. During the subsequent trial, Selby testifies against her in the courtroom hearings. Aileen is executed by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.

Part of what makes Monster so honest and relevant to feminists is the way that it recognizes and points to the patriarchal conditions in place that frame and constrain women’s choices, sometimes leading to a life of crime.

Throughout her life Aileen has been victimized, raped, and violence is a part of her day-to-day existence.

Emily Salisbury, a professor at Portland State University’s Criminology and Criminal Justice Program, suggests that patriarchal conditions are often a huge part of the reason for women’s participation in criminal activity and subsequent incarcerations. She remarks,

With the work of feminist scholars such as Mita Chesney Lynn, Kathleen Daly, Regina Arnold, Barbara Owen and many others, new ideas about female offending were established. The qualitative life history interviews that these scholars conducted with girls and women suggested that their lives leading up to criminal justice involvement were extremely complex and disadvantaged, with unique daily struggles…such as struggles with child abuse, depression, self-medicating behavior, self-hatred, parenting responsibilities, domestic violence and unhealthy intimate relationships. It’s argued that these problems create unique pathways to crime for women.

Many of the struggles listed are applicable to Aileen’s incarceration. In a documentary called Aileen Wuornos: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, director Nick Broomfield speaks to the infamous murderer, where she expresses that if her life leading up to adulthood had been more ideal, she wouldn’t have entered a life of crime in the first place. Family members and close friends remark throughout the film that she was the product of homelessness, violence, abuse, prostitution, poverty, incest, rape, and mental illness.

Throughout her life, Wuornos experienced horrific instances of gendered abuse, which eventually lead to a violent outlash at her unfair circumstances. Monster vividly documents the life of a woman whose experiences under a dominant patriarchal culture racked with abuse, poverty, and desperation led to a life of crime, imprisonment, and eventually death.

Though on-screen depictions of violent women are portrayed as empowering, as is the case with vengeful Furiosa in Mad Max, or the cathartic revenge plot for Beatrix Kiddo in Kill Bill, Aileen Wuornos’ story tells a different story for violent women. Monster illustrates that all too often, violent women’s pasts are rifled with oppression, and in defending themselves, they face consequences from legal systems that have proven to fail them in the past. For Aileen, violent self-preservation ended in demise.

Danika Kimball is a musician from the Northwest who sometimes takes a 30-minute break from feminism to enjoy a TV show. You can follow her on twitter @sadwhitegrrl or on Instagram @drunkfeminist.

The Violent Vagina: The Real Horror Behind the ‘Teeth’

It’s a conundrum, one that Dawn faces head (or vagina) on. She is forced to confront these opposing views, and her body reacts the only way it knows how, it bites the penis of society, it castrates the men that want to turn her into something she doesn’t want to be: a sexual young woman.

I get the imagery, but this movie poster doesn’t really have a horror vibe to it.

This guest post by Belle Artiquez appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Teeth (2007) is a horror film that was directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein based on the story of a young girl who finds out she has teeth inside her vagina. Mind blowing stuff, I know. It was not a good movie, it was not even a good story, in fact it was quite the opposite and anybody who has seen it will tell you that it was pretty much one of the worst movies ever. However, I’m one of those people who may hate watching a movie, may even feel bored during it, but will talk about it for months after if the correct themes are there. Teeth is one of those movies, and I’m still under the assumption that many people, myself included for a while, took away from the film something that was irrelevant, we missed the point, we missed the real issues the film was exploring, even if it was done in a very, very bad way.

Dawn, a young virginal, religious girl wishes to stay just that for as long as possible–society rejoices, she is following the rules! She meets a young man at her abstinence group and although he agrees to wait with her, on a romantic date with woodlands and waterfalls he ends up forcing himself on her because she’s still “pure.” Thus begins the sexual assaults literally thrown at the young Dawn. It is during this first forced sexual encounter with a boy she felt safe with that she realizes, to her and his horror, that she has teeth inside her vagina, that literally bite off the boy/rapist’s penis. We get a glimpse of his ripped-off genitals (and it’s not the only time we see gory, bloody castrated penis), so while this movie isn’t directed toward the male gaze in a conventional way (we never see Dawn’s naked body) it might be done in a horrific way.

Something new for the male gaze to enjoy…

Already I’m seeing a lot of messages and themes that are incredibly familiar. To start we have society’s golden girl, the girl that wants to wait, wants to be virtuous and good and clean so that when the right man comes along he won’t feel like he’s gotten soiled goods (I write gritting my own teeth…pun totally intended). Then we have sexual themes thrown at her; she is hit by the very thing that asked her to stay clean, virginal. She is forced to be sexual. She is inundated with sexual activity, as are all women who walk the earth–we are bombarded with images of sexualized women in underwear, in TV and magazine advertisements, in film and music videos, these are telling us that this is what society wants, sexual women. But we know that society also wants us to be virginal women to save ourselves. It’s a conundrum, one that Dawn faces head (or vagina) on. She is forced to confront these opposing views, and her body reacts the only way it knows how, it bites the penis of society, it castrates the men that want to turn her into something she doesn’t want to be: a sexual young woman.

I know, seeing your vagina for the first time can be bizarre, especially if there’s teeth in there, but I promise–you will get over it.

Not only is Dawn violated by a little boy who thought he was man enough to get some from a girl who actively told him she wouldn’t give him anything, she is also abused by her gynecologist, a healthcare professional who is far from professional. During this scene I felt extremely uncomfortable, it was too…familiar. Dawn seeks medical advice about her vaginal teeth, telling the doctor that she thinks ‘there might be something weird going on’ and I’m only going to assume that it was her first visit (she’s a virgin remember) so probably felt a wave of emotions from fear to pure horror at what was going to happen. Many first visits for women are filled with these emotions. But when her doctor takes his gloves off and continues to mess around down there, things really get weird and the wonderful doctor ends up having his fingers bitten off (serves him right too). Now, I’m not going to say this was exactly like my first experience with a gynecologist, far from it, however, it was equally as uncomfortable, and to this day I feel like something was amiss. I was nervous,very very nervous. I was literally a ball of emotions, on my own, and I’m only going to assume the male doctor noticed this because instead of offering a female nurse, or even trying to make me feel less exposed, he called in two female nurses to literally hold my legs open as he examined me, with no blanket, no comfort, just a horrifying shame that has been with me since that day (over a decade ago). So I understand why that scene was so horrific for me and not other people who laughed their way through it, but this only serves to prove that women are capable of understanding the discomfort of the plot, of the numerous sexual assaults Dawn faces, the reaction she has to her own body (hating and simultaneously fearing it) and then her final understanding that she has to own it, be in control of it and her sexuality. She has to have agency in her violent vagina because she knows how powerful it is.

If only we all had her power, and yes it pretty much is a super power!

She arrives, shaken and terrified after her gyno visit at a boys house, she takes a bath and comes out to find that said boy has lit around a hundred candles, stuck on ridiculous music and is waiting expectantly for sex. She is still shaken (who can blame her?) so he offers her a pill and wine to relax, or drug her. She assumes he has her best interest at heart so accepts, I know right? More fool her..but I did say it was a terrible movie. It gets even worse as this encounter unfolds. She falls asleep/unconscious only to wake and find him fondling her breasts, and although he asks her for consent and she tells him not to stop she is still under the influence of drugs and alcohol so cannot legally give consent. They have sex. He ‘conquers’ her, becomes the ‘hero’ (his words!) and gets to keep his penis. The next morning things don’t go so smooth, during consensual sex he answers the phone still inside her (big mistake) and begins to gloat and brag about it. His penis meets the same fate as the previous two men and he ends up being not quite the conquering hero he first thought, he will be stroking this male ego no longer.

I honestly don’t know why there’s a crunch, but again, bad movie.

From here Dawn eventually rids herself of her abstinence ring; if society wants a sexual girl they were going to get one, but only on her terms. If men are going to force it, they’re going to lose it, simple as that. The male fear of powerful vaginas really takes on a whole new meaning with this film; it portrays the many anxieties men and the patriarchy have where women are concerned. If women start to realize their inherent power, their violent vagina’s, then some men fear they will be cut down, castrated because of it. The fear lies within the notion that both sexes cannot have equal control. He will take (think virginity), she will give, not the other way around. That’s the dynamic society is used to, so a horror within the film is also connected to the fact that men fear the vagina and its power, they fear what will happen to them and their masculinity if the vagina (women) acknowledges its own power. The film blatantly gives shots of castrated male genitals, bloodied, and disgusting (I’m not a gore fan), and while many men will feel a kind of sympathy pain for the characters (who are rapists by the way), and apologise for showing it in blogs because the writer too felt a pain when posting it, I’m left wondering why women are expected to watch rape in film and TV and not feel the same? Because let’s be honest, it’s not everyday that we see mutilated male genitals, but the violent rape of a women which portrays the same kind of genital pain…yeah that’s pretty common. But for some reason neither of these things represent the same pain.

Dawn indeed does end up using her violent vagina as a tool of revenge and protection for other women. She actively engages with men whose intentions are not good just so she can castrate them in order to protect the future women these men would harm. She totally owns it, she takes on the violent nature of her unique vagina and uses it for good.

Now that’s the face of a woman who is owning her sexuality, even if it is a violent one!

Teeth was categorized as a feminist horror film, and I can see why many people didn’t quite agree with that–Dawn is sexually assaulted a lot, she is not in control of her own sexual behaviour (for most of the movie) and she certainly isn’t a feminist herself; I don’t think the literal biting off of men’s penises constitutes as feminist film. However, her having to come to terms with a part of herself that society both worships and fears is quite the feminist argument. One that rings true to nearly every woman on the planet. On the surface though this film just seems like a crude horror that involves a deadly vagina, a violent, razor sharp vagina. But maybe the horror of this film lies somewhere in the messages it portrays; maybe the real horror is the shit this poor girl, who just wanted to play by the rules, has to put up with on a daily basis, and as such, what women everywhere have little option but to just deal with, from the constant sexualization of women in every aspect of society, the slut shaming, the butt grabs instead of handshakes, the boob stares instead of eye contact, the cat-calling and street harassment, to the flat out sexual assault, the (not at all) blurred lines of consent, the daily beating down of women for having vaginas and showing some skin. Maybe that was the true horror of this movie and not the fact that a girl who endured all of this had the ability to cut some men down with the very thing they thought they had control of and a right to: her violent and powerful vagina.

Don’t they all…

Belle Artiquez graduated from film and literature studies in Dublin and since has continued her analysis and critique of film, TV, and literature (mainly in the area of gender politics and representations) as well as cultural and societal critiques on such blog spots as Hubpages and WordPress.

Polly Gray: The Matriarch of ‘Peaky Blinders’

Though at times problematic, Polly’s story and interactions with other characters is one of a powerful and complex woman who supports and encourages respect for other women.

Written by Jackson Adler | Spoilers ahead.

[Trigger warning: rape and sexual assault; contains harsh language]

Despite (small) recent improvements, there is still a lack of well-written female characters on our screens. Especially anti-heroines. And female characters who are middle-aged. And characters who are working class. And of a religious minority. And are of ethnically marginalized groups. And in positions of power. And whose stories of physical and sexual oppression are more than plot devices to further the motivations of male leads.

Meet Polly Gray from the BBC series Peaky Blinders.

Polly (Helen McCrory) is working class, Romanichal (a British subgroup of Romany) and Irish, devout Catholic, and a middle-aged female in 1919 through 1920s Birmingham, England. She is a loving mother and aunt, as well as the treasurer for and semi-retired leader of the Peaky Blinders, who are “illegal bookmakers, racketeers, and sometimes gangsters,” and who are led by her family, the Shelbys. In order to survive, Polly had to become “hard as nails,” as her actress Helen McCrory describes her. Together with her nephew Thomas Shelby (played by Cillian Murphy), Polly fights to bring safety, respectability, and power to her family through both legal and illegal activity. As anti-heroine and anti-hero, Polly and Thomas head a family of “good people who do bad things for a good reason.”

Polly is female character who is complex and multi-faceted in ways that are still extremely rare but much needed in our culture; however, her story is often undermined by those whose responsibility it is to help tell it, especially with regard to her being Romanichal. Roma leading characters are still rare in media, and when they are depicted, they are often heavily stereotyped. Though Peaky Blinders and Hemlock Grove feature Roma families made up of complex and well-developed characters, it must be pointed out that Peaky Blinders is about criminals and Hemlock Grove is about fantasy and mysticism – two of the most prevalent and harmful stereotypes of Roma. It is emphasized in Peaky Blinders, though, that the Shelbys resort to criminality only because they see it as the only way to bring themselves out of poverty and into “respectability,” with their goal to eventually do only legal work. There are also many criminal or villainous characters in the show who are not Roma. However, it is odd and problematic that the two current TV series that feature Roma characters also feature them as stereotypically criminal and mystic, stereotypes which contribute to the “othering,” and therefore oppression, of Roma.

Polly Gray realistically faces extreme discrimination directed at her Romanichal heritage from characters within the show, and yet the creative team behind Peaky Blinders is often also disrespectful of that identity. She and the other Romanichal characters (of which there are many) are whitewashed via the casting of non-Roma and white actors. Helen McCrory is Scottish and Welsh, and Cillian Murphy is Irish. Though there are certainly white-passing Roma, they are a people of color who originated in Northeastern India and Northwestern Pakistan. Not only is this compelling female character of color whitewashed, but Polly and her family are called the ethnic slur “Gypsy” frequently both within the series and without. It is troubling that the cast and creative team, especially creator and writer Steven Knight, would refer to this highly oppressed people (whom they are supposedly working to represent and empower) as an ethnic slur.

This is all the more troubling and downright disturbing as the systematic oppressions that Polly faces, especially with regard to the intersection of her gender and ethnicity, are still wielded today. Polly’s children were kidnapped from her by law enforcement, like many other Roma children were and are from their parents. This contributed to the early death of her daughter, Anna, who is never depicted in the series. Once Polly’s son, Michael (played by Finn Cole), grows up, he leaves the family to whom he was forcibly relocated and finds her. She struggles to reclaim her role as his mother and, as a single mother, to provide the sort of life she wishes to give him. Due to the prosperity of the family business, much of it now legal, Polly and Michael live in a spacious house with a live-in maid and in a “respectable” neighborhood. However, no amount of wealth or respectability politics prevents law enforcement from targeting the Grays and the Shelbys due to their ethnicity. Though there are other contributing factors, it is still a racialized scene when law enforcement arrests Michael on a trumped up charge and takes him from Polly again. Michael, who is only 17, is then tortured by law enforcement until he confesses to the crime he didn’t commit. While Michael was arrested in the early 1920s, there is still a severe over-representation of Roma in UK prisons due to discrimination. One out of every 20 prisoners identify as “Gyspy, Romani or [Irish] Traveler,” and over-representation is even higher in youth prison facilities. This is despite, as of 2013, Roma numbering only about 200,000 in the UK, out of a total population of about 64 million.

A leader of law enforcement, Major (formerly Inspector) Campbell (played by Sam Neill), tells Polly that he won’t allow Michael to be released from jail unless Polly lets Campbell rape her and show that she is “small and weak” compared to him. For the sake of her son, whom she knows is being tortured, Polly stops fighting Campbell and plays along with what he wants. Campbell enforces the system’s and his own biases against the intersectional identities of Polly, as he says to her while raping her “You think you’re so respectable with your son and your house. But I know what you are, you Gypsy Fenion slut.” (Note: “Fenion” is a derogatory word for Catholics, and Irish Catholics in particular, although it has other uses.) Rape is a very real weapon used against women, especially women of color, including women who are Roma.

Upon my first viewing of the series, I thought that, unlike how rape is often used in TV and film, Polly is not raped to further the leading male character’s (Thomas’) plotline and character development. After a few more viewings, I realized that’s (sadly) not entirely true, even though this rape storyline is still much more focused on the female survivor than those of other shows. Polly comforts herself after the rape by going out for six whiskeys, going home and taking a bath, and most importantly by talking with her niece Ada (played by Sophie Rundle), with whom she has a very close relationship. Ada is also a fellow survivor of sexual assault. Like Polly, her husband has died and she is now a single mother to a young son for whom she wants to provide and to protect. After Michael is released from jail, Polly makes certain that she, not Thomas, is the one to confront Campbell and avenge herself and her son. She then goes home and shares a warm embrace with Ada. Seen this way, the story is focused on women, especially women of color, and how they support each other and their families while asserting their own autonomy against severe oppression.

Polly with Campbell’s blood on her dress, walking away from shooting him.

However, the rape storyline also gives attention to the leading male characters, and the story is made to be largely about Thomas. Campbell raped Polly largely in an attempt to shame and emasculate Thomas. Thomas responds by sleeping with a former love interest of Campbell’s, and succeeds in angering Campbell by doing so. Also, Thomas does confront Campbell, he just isn’t the one to pull the trigger. As problematic as this part of the rape storyline is, however, it is also important to note that Campbell’s and Thomas’ sexism (by treating women as objects and possessions that can be stolen) backfires on both of them. Though Campbell’s main goal in raping Polly was to attack Thomas, it is Polly who is the one to ultimately “finish” him, saying, “This time ‘small and weak’ has a gun” and reminding him, “Don’t fuck with the Peaky Blinders.” Meanwhile, though one of the main reasons Thomas sleeps with the character Grace Burgess (played by Annabelle Wallis) is to use her to anger Campbell, after she and Thomas have sex, Grace reveals that she was, in part, just using Thomas in the hopes of becoming pregnant (as her husband is infertile), and (at least at first) Thomas is offended that she didn’t inform him of this plan. Both Campbell and Thomas are reminded that women are thinking and feeling human beings with their own motivations capable of self-assertion.

This is far from the only time that the male characters in Peaky Blinders are called out on their sexism, and it is usually Polly who does it. Polly not only fights sexism from her enemies, but also from the men she loves and trusts most. In the first episode of the series, when at a family meeting in regard to the business, Thomas condescendingly states that he has nothing more to say about the goings-on of the company that is “any of women’s business.” Polly then reminds him that she ran “the business” while he and two of his brothers were fighting in WWI, meaning that “this whole business was women’s business,” and demands that he inform her of what he is hiding. It should be noted that Polly only gave up direct leadership of the gang because she felt it was the birthright of her nephews. Though Thomas improves in how he sees and treats women, and even claims that he and the family’s “modern enterprise” believe in “equal rights for women,” Polly justifiably calls him out on his hypocrisy, pointing out that he neither “listens to” nor trusts women as much as men.

Of Polly’s adult nephews, Thomas still respects Polly the most and is closest to her despite his sexism. Thomas’ two oldest brothers Arthur (played by Paul Anderson) and John (played by Joe Cole) still respect Polly, but when they are being most respectful to her, they (especially Arthur, the oldest nephew) refer to her as the male-sounding name “Pol” (as in “Paul”) or “Aunt Pol.” This emphasizes that they see power and strength as inherently masculine, despite Polly constantly reminding them that she is a woman and that they should all respect her and other women better. Though John respects Polly more than Arthur does, and is on the whole kinder to women than even Thomas, he does not see women as equal. When Thomas encourages John’s wife Esmé (of the Romanichal Lee family and played by Aimee-Ffion Edwards) to speak at a family meeting, John initially protests, says that as “the head of” his family that he will “speak for” her. Though Thomas makes certain that Esmé speaks, he quickly dismisses what she has to say, for which Polly criticizes him. Polly even experiences sexism from her son, who victim-blames her to her face after Campbell rapes her, despite that he was only freed from being tortured in jail because of it. Thomas became more accepting and respectful toward women because of Polly’s influence, while Michael was kidnapped from his mother’s influence at the age of three. In this way, the systemic oppressions on the Shelby-Gray family not only directly hurt them, but indirectly hurt them by turning them on each other.

Michael walking away from Polly after victim-blaming her.

Though at times problematic, Polly’s story and interactions with other characters is one of a powerful and complex woman who supports and encourages respect for other women. While she herself is imperfect and not free from bias, and participates in the slutshaming of sex worker-turned-secretary Lizzie Stark (played by Natasha O’Keeffe), she overall supports women (especially fellow Romanichal women such as Esmé and Ada) in both the workplace, such as by demanding they have a say in how the business is run, and the home, such as by helping Ada with her new baby. The story does not mock her for her assertiveness and for her support of women’s equality, even though male characters often do. Though Polly is whitewashed, and is not the leading character (rarely being featured in the series’ posters and publicity photos, and is referred to often by an ethnic slur, Polly’s role in Peaky Blinders is still refreshing when compared to how other TV series depict women and their storylines. Hopefully in the coming third season of the show, Steven Knight will continue to and even improve in how he writes Polly and how she contributes to the overall narrative of the story. One can also only hope that Peaky Blinders will inspire other series to write multi-faceted women and Roma.

The Complex Masculinity of ‘Outlander’s Jamie Fraser

This guest post by Carly Lane appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.

Jamie Fraser, of the Outlander series (and subsequent television adaptation), is the quintessential romance hero. Mention his name to any fan of Diana Gabaldon’s works and you will likely hear a swoon in reply. When it comes to romantic traits, Jamie’s got them in spades. He’s a Highland warrior, a well-educated man, and he’s good with horses – not to mention easy on the eyes.

His role in the series, however – first as Claire Randall’s love interest, then as her hastily wedded husband – is anything but predictable, and it’s in looking at his story in the first book (and first season, respectively) that we realize just how multifaceted this masculine hero truly is.

When we’re first introduced to Jamie in the year 1743, he’s actually something of a damsel-in-distress; due to a dislocated shoulder suffered in the heat of battle, he cannot ride a horse without intense pain. Although Claire has been recently rattled by her time travel through the stones from the 1940s, her medical training won’t allow her to sit by and watch while his fellow Highlanders attempt to set his arm incorrectly. She takes it upon herself to put his shoulder back in place – and then to tend to him later through various gunshot and stab wounds. It’s interesting to watch the dynamic between the two characters in their first interactions together. Claire is familiar with taking charge in a situation after serving as a nurse in the Second World War, but Jamie doesn’t allow his masculine pride to get in the way of letting her help him. (Then again, given Claire’s headstrong nature, he likely doesn’t have much of a choice either way.)

And he can wear the heck out of a kilt, ya ken?

The more we learn about Jamie, the more we come to see him as the epitome of a manly man. He volunteers to take a public beating instead of a lashing for a girl accused of loose behavior, and we see him smiling even after getting punched in the face. We’re witness to his participation in a very violent game of shinty against fellow clansmen, tackling other players into the mud. He’s survived through two severe whippings at the hands of Black Jack Randall, a captain of the British army, which left him with serious scars on his back. And when he relays his past as a fugitive to Claire in private conversation, we find out that he’s had to do some pretty hairy things in order to stay alive – like eat grass, for example.

But what’s most surprising about Jamie is that he encapsulates both the (fairly) innocent virgin and the male warrior in tandem, something that has almost been unheard of in fiction. After he and Claire learn that they will need to get married in order to ensure Claire’s protection from Black Jack, she confesses that she’s not exactly a virgin due to her first marriage. “Does that bother you?” she asks. “No,” he answers, “so long as it doesna bother you that I am.”

It’s a surprising twist on the trope. Jamie is undoubtedly a force of man to be reckoned with, though the fact that he is a virgin and thus relatively inexperienced in terms of sex when he encounters Claire – the older, more experienced woman – attributes some unexpected “feminine” qualities to his character. In the wedding episode, there are several scenes dedicated to his sexual education. His comprehension of the act in itself is completely transformed – he admits to Claire that, up until that night, he had believed it was something done with the man behind the woman, “like horses.” He does make a point of reminding Claire after a particularly heated first kiss, however, that while he may be a virgin it doesn’t mean he’s been a monk.

But he is a fast learner and a conscientious partner – he listens to Claire when she tells him he’s crushing her with his weight, and he’s careful to ensure he hasn’t hurt her when she experiences an orgasm the second time they have sex, inquiring if it happens every time for a woman. That thoughtfulness and willingness to reshape his worldview is not something that often goes hand-in-hand with an uber-manly man.

He does define the meaning of "heart-eyes" from time to time. — He does define the meaning of “heart-eyes” from time to time.

That worldview is also challenged again when Claire runs away, endangering the clan in the process, and Jamie is expected to beat her as a disciplinary act according to tradition. In the beginning, he can’t grasp why Claire is angry with him for doing so – but later agrees that adhering to a custom is not always the best course of action. After a particularly intense interlude on the bedroom floor (during which Claire holds Jamie’s dirk to his throat in the throes of passion and makes him swear he won’t beat her again), Jamie understands that what may be the conventional response to something in the 18th century isn’t necessarily the right thing to do.

Jamie is not the first character to experience sexual assault in Outlander, but he is the first male character. When he is captured by British soldiers, his masculinity and how he views himself as a man are completely fractured after his traumatic assault at the hands of Black Jack Randall in Wentworth Prison. His entire sense of identity is shattered in those harrowing hours where he faces abuse after abuse, and through his recounting of the events to Claire the audience is privy to every agonizing moment. Not only is he subjected to physical violence that permanently impacts the full use of his hand, he is emotionally manipulated by Black Jack into forced climax, his body unable to stop what his mind is straining to resist.

It’s no wonder Jamie feels less than a man when he is finally rescued from Wentworth. The damage that has been done to not only body but mind causes him to pull away from Claire and any sense of shared intimacy between them. He admits that he can’t even think of returning to his wife’s bed when any attempt at sex would make him feel sick to his stomach.

Through Claire’s love, support and assertion of his masculinity, as well as his willingness to share about his experience, Jamie is finally able to begin to reclaim his sense of self – and the first season ends on a note of hope, as the two sail away from Scotland together. It is rare that a series portrays a leading male protagonist – especially the undisputed romantic hero of the story – as a survivor of rape and sexual trauma, and how he will be healing from that harrowing experience as time goes on.

At first glance, Jamie Fraser might seem like just your average hero – but he’s a fascinating, layered character who doesn’t simply fall prey to the typical traits of masculinity. In true Highlander fashion, he defies them.

Carly Lane is a writer based in New York City who specializes in obscure pop culture references and miscellaneous geekery. Her work has been featured on HelloGiggles, The Mary Sue, Femsplain and more. You can find her on Twitter at @equivocarly.

I’m Sick to Death of Talking About Rape Tropes in Fiction

Aside from being lazy, careless depictions like this are dangerous. They desensitize people to an issue that is still very pressing. It’s not that rape shouldn’t exist in fiction, but they must be framed responsibly. Fictional female characters are forever being raped as retribution against the ills of the men they’re connected to, or as punishment for not being submissive to the men around them. And this happens time and time again across genres and media. So while the denotative reading of these acts might be that “evil men rape” the connotative interpretation over time becomes “rape is a valid punishment for women.”

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

I’m sick of talking about rape.

Forcible rape, date rape, grey rape, acquaintance rape, spousal rape, statutory rape and now fictional rape. I’m sick to death of explaining why the callous rape of women and girls in media is a very bad thing for our culture and why we should cut it out. *wags finger*

This Game of Thrones storyline is just the latest in a long line of excuses and equivocations for why the depiction of brutal and gendered violence against women is a storytelling necessity. People are sticking their heels in on both sides but to me the moral position is clear: there is nothing to be gained from lazy representations of rape in a media landscape that already devalues women and reduces them to objects and property.

Now I’ve read the arguments in favour of the narrative value of Sansa’s rape. That it showed that Ramsay was a sadist. That it would help Theon come back to himself and help Sansa escape. That it would motivate Sansa to seek vengeance. But it’s all bullshit.

What did that scene add that we didn’t already know? Did the writers think that cutting Theon’s penis off was too subtle to indicate Ramsay’s sadism? Did they think the brutal murder of her mother and brother were not strong enough motivators for Sansa to want revenge against the Boltons? Could they not conceive of a single other way in which Theon might be able to mentally recenter himself? What about this particular rape scene added such probative narrative value that it had to be transposed from one character to another even as the original victim is excised from the story? All it was is more rape on a show already replete with rape, for the sake of having rape. None of this is new information.

And it’s not that rape should never be represented in fiction. Rape is everywhere. It’s unfortunately an all too real danger of the world we live in. But it’s not as though there is some dearth of rape representation in media. Using rape as a narrative tool is lazy, and especially so when it’s invoked this many times in the same show. We are now at three female characters (all of whom are considered major point of view characters in the novels) who have been raped in the series, two of whom weren’t raped in the source material. It’s just rapes on rapes on rapes up in this bitch…

And then to add insult to injury, the framing of the scene takes the emphasis off of Sansa and her trauma and places it firmly on Theon and his anguish and having the witness the act. That slow close up to Theon’s face as we hear Sansa scream and cry in the background places him and his emotions squarely at the centre of the scene. We see not, Sansa’s emotional turmoil at being humiliated and degraded by her new husband, but Theon’s tortured face as his guilt consumes him. So on top of Sansa being raped in the first place, that violation is used not to make us feel sympathy for her, but for a man who betrayed her and her family. She doesn’t even get to be the subject of the violence that is happening to her. Her pain instead gets used as a device to advance a man’s character arc instead of her own (the perils of which I talked about back in December in this essay about the rape plot in the CW show Reign).

That is a dangerous idea to be spreading.

As author Robert Jackson Bennett puts it in his brilliant short essay on the subject:

“Now instead of raping a buxom, weeping young woman, your Extremely Bad Dude is now raping a terrified six year old boy. Does it still feel like it deserves to be there? To use the usual fictional rape apologist arguments, there’s no reason this scene shouldn’t exist. Child rape exists, and no doubt happens in times of war. It probably happens even more in third world countries that are at war. Historically speaking, I’m sure there have been thousands of child rapes since the dawn of humanity. Maybe millions. Practically speaking, it would be remiss not to include a child rape scene or two, right? It happens. We must be truthful to reality. It’s our duty. Or, wait – is it possible you’re using this horrific, degrading, monstrous act as window dressing?”

Why is it that sexual violence against women is the only kind of violence seen as such an inevitability that not including it raises suspicions?

And for all the people who keep harping on about how much worse Jeyne Poole’s fate was in the novels, you’re missing the point. We’re at the juncture now where the series will likely deviate wildly from what George R. R. Martin wrote in the novels and from what he intends to write in the future. This gives the show’s writers enormous latitude to readjust the moral compasses of these characters. Evil men will stay evil, and good men will stay good. But how evil and good they may be is up to them. I find it very upsetting and frankly offensive that in all the retooling that was done to this storyline, the rape scene was the one thing that just had to stay. We’re literally talking about an entirely different character with a different history and experiences, but she just had to get raped because…. “realism?” It’s amazing to me that we can accept a fictional world where dragons are real and men kill their brothers by shadow proxy, but a world without rape (or even just a little less rape!) is unfathomable to some people’s imaginations.

But when it comes down to it, I’m sick of talking about rape because it’s exhausting. I don’t think the men who are disingenuously barging into these conversations understand how truly exhausting this new cultural trend can be for female viewers. And often they bring up the many, many murders on Game of Thrones as a counterpoint, but that isn’t a 1:1 comparison. For one thing, nothing is preventing men from “making a stink” about the excessive violence of these shows. We as women aren’t required to not care about something that affects us because men don’t care about something that affects them. But I digress…

In our daily lives, murder is not something that most people are actively protecting themselves against. For most men, unless they’re in the people-killing business, getting murdered is not exactly a daily, top of mind concern. But for women? Getting raped is a daily concern. Women have whole routines built around not making ourselves vulnerable to rapists and sexual predators even for a second. Every day we have to think about getting raped. We self-police what we wear, where we go, when we go, how we go, with whom we go, all in an effort to make sure that we’re taking every possible precaution against being raped. And then we’re raped anyway and society tells us it’s our own fault for not having a more effective rape routine.

So for women to then come home, (hopefully having managed to not get raped) and have to watch ALL THE TV SHOWS be about women getting raped? It’s too much. The men defending Sansa’s rape don’t get that this depiction is yet another reminder that rape is everywhere, there’s no escape and that we could be next.

If you really to make a leap, we can see this uptick is the engagement of rape tropes as an element of social control. Because it isn’t just Game of Thrones that’s doing this. From House of Cards to Scandal to Reign, lots of shows are adding rape “for flavour” and it serves as a constant reminder of danger. When we look at it like that, is it really too much to ask that creators are at least responsible with their use of rape in fiction? When you’ve created a scenario where an entire segment of your audience is actively debating whether or not Sansa was even raped because “she chose to play the Game of Thrones” you’re being irresponsible with your craft. These discussions are not fun rhetorical games. They have an active effect on our lives as women. It’s disheartening as a feminist lover of television to find that this is the new status quo. Rape your women, king your men. And watch TV behind your fingers.

I gotta say, I don’t know how many more television shows I can watch while quietly mumbling “please don’t rape her please don’t rape her” under my breath.

Can we please stop raping our fictional women?

I’m all raped out.

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