Sexualization – Bitch Flicks

The Evolution of Women in Car Movies

This is a guest post written by Chelsy Ranard.

From Imperator Furiosa to Letty Ortiz, strong and knowledgeable female characters crop up in car movies. The women who used to be relegated to flag girls and objectified as hood ornaments are now being introduced as main characters with their own plot points and story developments. Women have notoriously had a minimal past in the automotive industry (and sadly, women are still underrepresented) and their history in automotive movies is no different. However, much like the evolution of women in film in general, women are evolving from props to leading characters in recent years.

Flag Girls and Hood Ornaments

The stereotypical woman in a car movie has been the woman in tall heels and a short skirt waving the start flag before a race. She’s been the beautiful woman in a bikini lying on top of a hood, washing the car, or standing next to the car in some sort of way.

These women don’t have names, any character development, and tend to be nothing more than gorgeous props, similar to the cars themselves in each scene. Car movies tend to be marketed towards men, so naturally there tend to be beautiful women next to beautiful cars. Even in some movies that portray strong women who know cars and drive them, a few flag girls still remain, but this used to be the only role available for women in car movies — unless you were a love interest; then at least you had a name.

Sexism has been an issue in Hollywood in general, not just movies in the car or action genre. Men are paid more and given more leading roles than women and this continues to be a pervasive issue. Women tend to be props in car movies, but they do in movies in other genres as well. This is an issue evolving and changing, however, and an exceeding amount of actresses speak out against sexism and the gender disparity in Hollywood and are working to change it. Women are still unequal to their male co-stars, especially in male-dominated genres, but the evolution is at an upward slope in car movies and in film and television in general.

Sexualized Characters

The women portrayed in car movies are almost always sexualized; the hyper-sexualized characters are almost always the flag girl type. But even the women taking their roles from props to supporting characters still remain highly sexualized and objectified. Think Megan Fox’s character in Transformers, or Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke in The Dukes of Hazzard movie. These women are car women, not just flag girls or love interests, and are supporting characters. However, Fox’s character still bends over an engine in a crop-top while tightening a cap and Simpson’s character tricks men with her bikini-clad body.

While car movies now mix together more prominent women full of character development and car knowledge, these women are still sexualized. This is definitely not just a woman problem as Hollywood demands that all their stars be beautiful and men are not strangers to shirtless scenes. But men have a wider range of roles portrayed, as well as more lead roles and speaking lines and women are sexualized and objectified, often for the Male Gaze — in film, television and other media — far more than men.

Strong Female Characters

Fortunately, the role of the strong woman in car movies is not a myth and many movies are beginning to add more complex, intelligent, resilient female characters with agency. While some female characters are still sexualized and some aren’t main characters, the more films that feature strong women, the more upward momentum we see on-screen. Characters mentioned before like Letty, played by Michelle Rodriguez in The Fast and the Furious franchise, or Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road, are two examples of amazing female characters in car movies who don’t exist as props, who aren’t overly sexualized, and who possess character and story developments.

Some other strong female characters in car movies include Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) in Thelma & Louise, Stella (Charlize Theron) in The Italian Job, Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) in My Cousin Vinny, and Sway (Angelina Jolie) in Gone in 60 Seconds. Some of these movies walk the line for what is considered a “car movie,” but all of these women drive and represent the strong female characters our car movies need; although we could do with even less sexualization.

Movies That are Breaking Through

The Fast and the Furious franchise is the highest-grossing car movie franchise and has created seven movies so far, all of which feature women in main roles; but all of them also feature flag girls as well. However, the story created for one of the main characters, Letty, in such a big car movie franchise makes it one of the movies causing change as they try to break through the norm. Letty, whose story and character development undergo major plot points throughout the movies, is not sexualized in the way that Fox’s or Simpson’s characters are in their roles. She’s also featured in one of the largest car stunt scenes in film, a feat that not many women in car movies have been able to achieve.

Even in movies like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the main character is a woman and an amazing pilot. Katniss in The Hunger Games trilogy, Hermione in the Harry Potter series, and Tris in the Divergent series are all strong female leads for whom younger generations can identify. They are all leads or co-leads in their movies; brave, intelligent, and strong who show that women are not just love interests in action-filled franchises.

In such a male-dominated genre, the women who appear in car movies stick out like a sore thumb. With each woman we see on-screen in these movies who exists as more than just a flag girl, who has a name, who isn’t just a love interest, and isn’t sexualized — it’s a huge win for women in car films, and women in general. Reaching equality is about making small changes until they build up into big changes, and each win gets women closer to being represented equally among men. In a genre that used to be all Burt Reynolds and Steve McQueen, it’s nice to see women like Michelle Rodriguez and Charlize Theron become common names in the car genre as well.

Chelsy Ranard is a writer from Montana who is now living in Boise, Idaho. She graduated with her journalism degree from the University of Montana in 2012. She is a passionate feminist, loves listening to talk radio, and prefers her coffee cold. Follow her on Twitter at @Chelsy5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No "Gentleman" Is Psy

Written by Rachel Redfern

K-pop is the standard term for the most substantial part of South Korea’s massively prolific popular culture. Within K-pop there are an elite group of top ten bands that release a new single every few months, a song which then proceeds to dominate every single radio station, YouTube advertisement, and TV show for a week. Even elderly Koreans have the songs as their ringtone just as much as any young person does. For years Korea has been trying to bring that K-pop into the west, but its bubble-gum nature and pre-packaged commercialism has not fared well; Psy suddenly, explosively, changed all of that.

Psy’s surprising viral rise to the top of every musical chart in the world marks a huge moment for Korean culture; in a country often overshadowed by the magnitude of China and the familiarity of Japan (and even its crazy northern neighbor, North Korea), Psy has become the first truly international Korean symbol, an ironic fact considering that his music is not a standard representation of K-pop (click here and here if you would like to see what K-pop normally looks like).

Still from Psy’s latest music video, “Gentleman”

As an American expat currently living in South Korea I see Psy every day. He’s on the side of buses, and buildings, he dances across commercials, and is on every talk show. The next person (either in South Korea or anywhere else in the world) to ask me if I know who Psy is might just lose a limb. For a while he was hailed as a clever entertainer and songwriter, one who’s last song, “Gangnam Style,” satirizes the materialistic culture of one of Seoul’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

However, perhaps Psy’s overwhelming success might need to be tempered a bit, especially in our enthusiasm for his newest video, “Gentleman.”

Korea is, for the most part, a very conservative culture, one where, despite some very short shorts, most female pop stars remain much more covered in comparison with their American contemporaries. Therefore, I was a bit shocked when halfway through the video, K-pop star and lead female in the video, Ga In from “Brown-Eyed Girls,” sucks on a hot dog with cream bubbling out over the edges in one of the most blatant visual representations of oral sex I’ve seen in a while. Oddly enough, KBS, the national broadcasting network in Korea, even banned the video, though not for this scene; rather, the video was banned because he destroys public property.

Psy’s music video “Gentleman” and K-pop star, Ga In

There has been some controversy about how the video treats women, some calling it simple “irony,” others saying, “irony gone too far.” Perhaps the first situation is the case; perhaps it’s only meant to be a funny, silly video about how people treat each other. On the most basic level the video seems problematic and sets a bad example; Psy acts like a jerk and intentionally treats women badly. Of course, the lead female thinks it’s funny and returns the favor, and the two end up together, finally having found their soulmate. Going one layer of analysis under this surface level suggests that he is actually mocking that behavior; perhaps the video was meant as a satire for the way “gentlemen” still treat women? Or perhaps he was trying to comment on the problematic nature of gender politics in the modern world?

And then I read an English translation of the lyrics: Nope, he’s not making that commentary.

I don’t know if you know why it needs to be hot
I don’t know if you know why it needs to be clean
I don’t know if you know, it’ll be a problem if you’re confused
I don’t know if you know but we like, we we we like to party

Hey there
If I’m going to introduce myself
I’m a cool guy with courage, spirit and craziness
What you wanna hear, what you wanna do is me
Damn! Girl! You so freakin sexy!

[lengthy chorus where the following line repeats]

I’m a, ah I’m a
I’m a mother father gentleman

I don’t know if you know why it needs to be smooth
I don’t know if you know why it needs to be sexy
I don’t know if you know darling, hurry and come be crazy
I don’t know if you know, it’s crazy, crazy, hurry up

Hey there
Your head, waist, legs, calves
Good! Feeling feeling? Good! It’s soft
I’ll make you gasp and I’ll make you scream
Damn! Girl! I’m a party mafia!

[Chorus again]

Gonna make you sweat.
Gonna make you wet
You know who I am Wet PSY
Gonna make you sweat.

Gonna make you wet.
You know who I am
Wet PSY! Wet PSY! Wet PSY! Wet PSY! PSY! PSY! PSY!
Ah I’m a mother father gentleman

I’m a, ah I’m a
I’m a mother father gentleman
I’m a, ah I’m a, I’m a mother father gentleman
Mother father gentleman
Mother father gentleman

*translation from Huffington Post

Consider one of the main lines, “It’ll be a problem if you’re confused,” followed by, “What you wanna do is me” and “I’m going to make you sweat/I’m going to make you wet.”

These lyrics and the rampant arrogance that comes with the video does present a problem for me. While the actions of pulling out a chair and just being an asshole to women are annoying, to me they are less problematic than the hyper-sexualization and the obvious objectification shown to all the women in the video, most notably in the close-up on Ga In and the hot dog.

Still from Psy’s latest video, “Gentleman”

This scene and the lyrics put Psy in place as the sexual instigator and idolizes his own arrogance and behavior; according to the lyrics, he’s a dirty asshole who will “make you wet,” with the women only being playthings–sex objects and static recipients of his desires. For me, the mocking and disrespect compounds until “women as funny toys” just gets tied into “women as funny sex toys.”

There are problematic performers and songs running around on the Internet every single day, and I usually try not to support those entertainers. After this video, I don’t think I want to support Psy anymore either, cause Psy, you’re just not all that.

What do you think? Is “Gentleman” funny and forward-thinking satire? Or irony taken too far?

Also, I’m not linking to the music video in this article because I just can’t stand to hear the song one more time.

———-

Rachel Redfern has an MA in English literature, where she conducted research on modern American literature and film and its intersection, however she spends most of her time watching HBO shows, traveling, and blogging and reading about feminism.