Teenage Girls – Bitch Flicks

“I Want to Slap His Hideous, Beautiful Face”: Sexual Awakenings and First Crushes in ‘Bob’s Burgers’

Honestly, Tina Belcher is the role model young girls have been waiting for, and I’m so glad she’s finally arrived. However, “Boys 4 Now” – the episode that made me really believe ‘Bob’s Burgers’ is *probably* the best show I’ve ever watched – deals with Louise getting her first crush. Rage-filled, insane, absolute genius Louise gets a crush on a boy. Unsurprisingly, she does not take this news well.

This guest post by Becky Kukla appears as part of our theme week on Sex Positivity.

Society, education, media and film all contribute to the shame that young girls feel as they approach their teenage years. The shame of sexuality, the humiliation and disgust that goes hand in hand with newfound desires and feelings – most of which teenage girls are not equipped to handle due to the constant stigmatizing of female desire. Whilst this shaming is apparent within schooling (especially religious influenced education), it is also reinforced in countless forms of media which children are reading, watching, or reacting to on a day to day basis. Young girls are subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, reminded that their sexuality is a sin and should be silenced.

We see this trend in many television shows. My Wife & Kids, Fresh Prince, 8 Simple Rules, and even the “progressive” Modern Family use the tired old protective father trope. The teenage daughter of the family is portrayed as promiscuous and/or less than intelligent, and protecting her virginity becomes another day to day task for her father. Any sign of her sexuality is alarming to her family, especially the male relations. Shows like American Dad and Family Guy go the other way, and depend on routine jokes centered around ridiculing their teenage girls. Meg Griffith, for example, is constantly the butt of every joke in her family and this is only worsened as she gets older and becomes interested in boys. The “Meg Griffin” problem, as we’ve come to know it, is more symptomatic of writers being too lazy or uncomfortable with writing half-decent storylines for teenage girls. Especially as it means they may have to write about sexuality, sexual fantasies or just a silly little crush from the perspective of a fourteen year old girl. Scary stuff, right?

So many television shows, animated or otherwise, like to poke fun or ridicule their young teenage girls, especially when those girls start that painful and mostly awkward transition into “womanhood.” It’s an outdated concept, and one that seems to apply exclusively to women. Teenage girls must not show any sign of outward sexuality, they mustn’t be open about their sexual awakening, and the boy must make the first move. If you break any of these rules, you’re a slut.

This is where Bob’s Burgers comes into its own. I’m sure you are all aware that the character of Tina Belcher was originally intended to be a teenage boy, until the writers realised that it was much more exciting and interesting to have a young girl who is so confident of herself, her sexuality and her fantasies. We rarely see this in films or on television, especially as Tina receives full support from her parents in everything she does; from writing erotic friend fiction to dating two boys at once. Honestly, Tina Belcher is the role model young girls have been waiting for, and I’m so glad she’s finally arrived. However, “Boys 4 Now” – the episode that made me really believe Bob’s Burgers is *probably* the best show I’ve ever watched – deals with Louise getting her first crush. Rage-filled, insane, absolute genius Louise gets a crush on a boy. Unsurprisingly, she does not take this news well.

A brief synopsis of the episode: Linda and Bob have to take Gene to the Table Laying Finals (yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like), so Louise is stuck tagging along to a Boys 4 Now concert with Tina. At first Louise is distinctly disinterested, perplexed and annoyed by all the pubescent girls who are crying and screaming at the boy-band onstage. That is until Louise lays eyes on Boo Boo – the band’s youngest member. She is transfixed–partly consumed by love, partly horrified at herself. She can’t help but look at him, enchanted by his singing and his youthful face. “Who the frick am I!?” she exclaims to herself in the toilets, trying to force the crush out of her system. It’s no good. Louise has been bitten by the love-bug.

Louise, as a character, largely regards Tina with both disinterest and derision. Louise doesn’t understand her sister’s obsession with boys and butts, and often the two of them have very little in common. However, in “Boyz 4 Now,” Louise confronts her crush head on by revealing it to Tina, as she already has an acute awareness that Tina has been through these feelings before. There is no judgement, no mockery – just the simple understanding that this is perfectly normal, and that Louise has got it bad. Louise turning to Tina is a sign of respect, showing that Louise sees Tina’s own crushes as legitimate issues and that Tina is the expert to be consulted. It’s a moment of bonding between the two sisters who, before this moment, never really had anything to connect over.

Frequently, in other television shows, our young female character will change beyond recognition as they start to become sexually aware, or to have sexual desires. Physically, and in their personality, girls are expected to become “a woman” as opposed to “a girl.” There are many phrases associated with this phase–brink of womanhood, blossoming, flowering… I could go on. What they all serve to mean, is that our young girl is now becoming a woman, and will change completely and forever. But in Bob’s Burgers, Louise manages to retain her own personality, despite having gone through an apparently life changing transition. She is still full of rage (“I want to slap his hideous face!”) and she still overreacts to the given situation (“I’m infected, pull it out!”). Louise proves that girls and women simply do not change as a result of becoming sexually aware and actually the experience of your first crush/losing your virginity doesn’t make any difference to who you are as a person. Despite popular culture claiming otherwise. Also, Louise is pretty on the money about how having a crush feels!

The affirmation of “Boyz 4 Now,” however, has got to be at the very end, after the girls have been kicked off the tour bus and Louise has succeeded in slapping Boo Boo in the face. Louise tells Tina that she is a strong woman, and questions how Tina can be alive if her life is just one long string of crushes. As Louise says, “It’s exhausting.” There is a clear moment of understanding between the two of them. Tina is a departure from the stereotypical female daughter on television. She’s a geek who masters her own sexuality and refuses to change for anyone. This context allows us to see how hard it is for Louise to express her own sexual desire, but that this expression is made so much easier by having Tina as an older sister. An unapologetic girl who wants to date the entire softball team and doesn’t see anything wrong with that. Why should she? Louise, when battling her next crush as is inevitable, will be in safe hands.

Whilst most TV shows try and shame young girls for having completely natural and human desires, Bob’s Burgers positively adores them for it. Praises them, relishes them and above all reminds them that it’s normal. The feelings, the sexy feelings, are all normal. And awesome. Tina and Louise’s crushes are never portrayed as gross or indecent. They are never downplayed, and the girls do not end up as the butt of some joke about how stupid teenage girls are or how funny it is that they obsess over a boy-and. It preaches that girls should never be ashamed of their fantasies or of that awkward phase that sits uncomfortably between girl and woman. It’s hard to negotiate, and mainstream TV often makes it even harder. Thankfully Bob’s Burgers is here to put it right.

Becky Kukla is a 20-something living in London, working in the TV industry (mostly making excellent cups of tea). She spends her spare time watching everything Netflix has to offer and then ranting about it on her blog.

Catherine Breillat’s Transfigurative Female Gaze

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

This repost by Leigh Kolb appears as part of our theme week on the Female Gaze.

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

– Catherine Breillat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hate to Love Her: The Lasting Allure of Blair Waldorf

In an interview with the ‘New York Times,’ Gillian Flynn says, “The likability thing, especially in Hollywood, is a constant conversation, and they’re really underrating their audience when they have that conversation. What I read and what I go to the movies for is not to find a best friend, not to find inspirations…It’s to be involved with characters that are maybe incredibly different from me, that may be incredibly bad but that feel authentic.”

This guest post by Vanessa Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Unlikable Women.

Blair Waldorf, the spoiled, plotting socialite of the CW’s Gossip Girl, is not your typical high school student. This Upper East Side Queen Bee is not a relatable character, nor as literary critics would say, a reliable narrator. Competitive by nature, Blair moves through New York City’s elite social world with the shrewd cunning of a cutthroat and cynical business titan. Despite her poised exterior, Blair is initially presented as the eternal underdog to her best frenemy, the free-spirited Serena van der Woodsen.

Yet during its six-season run, fans of the show rooted for Blair as though she were Scarlett O’Hara—a stubborn anti-heroine with grandiose dreams that often clashed with self-destructive desires. In order to catapult Blair from an emotionally flat, cardboard-cutout Mean Girl into a multi-faceted character, she is someone whose deep insecurities and anxieties are nearly equal to her undeniable beauty and privilege. Unlike Serena, who seems to always benefit from some higher source of convenient luck, Blair struggles with her looks, most notably her body image.

Cecily von Ziegesar, author of the series used for the basis of the show, says in a profile with New York Magazine, “I always resented books that tried to teach a lesson, where the characters are too good: They don’t swear, they tell their mothers everything…I mean, of course I want to be the responsible mother who says, ‘Oh, there are terrible repercussions if you have sex, do drugs, and have an eating disorder!’ But the truth is, my friends and I dabbled in all of those things. And we all went to good colleges and grew up fine. And that’s the honest thing to say.” Gossip Girl may exude the flamboyance of a melodramatic soap opera but the character of Blair Waldorf still manages to embody the familiar woes and hangups of a recognizable teenage girl.

Like many teenage girls who feel that they are never enough as they are, Blair constantly searches for a version of her best self that always eludes her grasp. It’s fitting that Blair’s role models are Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. These iconic actresses, with their regal beauty, trademark style aesthetics, and air of worldly sophistication, reflect Blair’s need to merge her perception of femininity with a quiet yet commanding power. Does she pull this off? Her friendship with Serena, which can easily swing from loving to toxic, exposes her vulnerabilities. Her perfectionism merely functions as a coping mechanism. In season one, episode nine, “Blair Waldorf Must Pie!,” viewers learn that Blair is bulimic. After facing a dysfunctional and stressful Thanksgiving, she resorts to binge-eating and then making herself throw up. She may not be able to control every aspect of her life as though she were a Hollywood director, but she can control her relationship to food. As the seasons progress, Blair’s bulimia is not treated as her defining characteristic or the foundation of her identity.

When discussing the role of the unlikable female protagonist in an essay for Buzzfeed, Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay notes, “These novels [Gone Girl, Dare Me] depict women who are clearly not participating in their narratives to make friends and whose characters are the better for it. Freed from the constraints of likability, they are able to exist on and beyond the page as fully realized, interesting, and realistic characters.”

In the case of Blair Waldorf, her narrative begins with a power struggle between herself and Serena, her childhood partner in crime. When Serena returns home to Manhattan after attending boarding school in Connecticut, Blair’s natural instinct is to panic. Her relationship with Serena is bound by equal parts jealousy and mafia-level loyalty. Serena’s return means that Blair will be stripped of her title as Constance Billard’s Queen Bee. Blair learns that Serena slept with her boyfriend, Nate Archibald, right before Serena shipped out of Grand Central Station. She turns against Serena and commands her newly-appointed court to do the same. Blair is not depicted as the Girl Next Door; in fact, it’s a label that Blair would find a bit insulting due to its implications of commonality. If anything, Serena, with her heart of gold and It Girl charm, is the one who is pushed as likable. Blair is a character that is free from the constraints of likability, but her power-hungry and slightly paranoid motivations, however selfish, do not make her lifeless or cartoonish. Blair’s rocky relationship with Serena prevents her from serving as the resident villain. On the contrary, it emphasizes her weaknesses.

The social pecking order of Gossip Girl revolves around class, rather than outright wealth. Echoing the conflicts of an Edith Wharton novel, the female protagonists exist in a familiar yet distorted version of New York. Blair’s vulnerabilities include her see-sawing feelings toward Serena and her tendency to make decisions shaped by the promise of social-climbing or revenge. Ultimately this pushes her into the arms of Chuck Bass, Nate’s best friend. For some viewers, Chuck and Blair’s courtship of mindgames and manipulation were reason enough to call the pairing and Blair unlikable, to say the least. But unlikable doesn’t have to constitute unwatchable or monstrous.

In an interview with the New York Times, Gillian Flynn says, “The likability thing, especially in Hollywood, is a constant conversation, and they’re really underrating their audience when they have that conversation. What I read and what I go to the movies for is not to find a best friend, not to find inspirations…It’s to be involved with characters that are maybe incredibly different from me, that may be incredibly bad but that feel authentic.”

Despite the extremes of Chuck and Blair’s battle tactics, which include marrying a Prince (Blair) and a deep-seated aversion to commitment (Chuck), their relationship has the same Will they or won’t they? curiosity in the same vein as Heathcliff and Cathy in Wuthering Heights or Carrie and Big in Sex and the City. Blair and Chuck breakup only to reunite, both infused with a sense of fragile pride that is also a vice. Their antics aren’t aspirational. At one point, Chuck “sells” Blair in order to keep his father’s hotel empire. In a conversation with the New Yorker, Margaret Atwood, in response to the question of the likable female character says, “This does still come up. It is indeed a ridiculous question. The qualities we appreciate in a character are not the same as those we would look for in a college roommate.”

None of the characters are exactly the type you’d want for a college roommate. Even Dan Humphrey, the Brooklyn “Outsider,” is not as morally pure as he’d like to believe. He’s just as snobby and self-righteous as Blair, thus making it a surprising yet believable turn of events when they later get together in season four. Regardless, it’s Blair, with her determination, her ability to swiftly flip the switch from charming to threatening, who makes a much more interesting and compelling character than Golden Girl Serena. Edan Lepucki writes for The Millions, “But what if a character isn’t Unlikeable, but unlikeable? What if you just didn’t like him or her? That’s a valid personal response, and certainly a good a reason as any to stop reading. But it’s such a personal response that it’s irrelevant to the critical gaze.” We don’t have to like Blair in order to root for the success of her schemes or even feel sympathy for her self-induced conflicts.

What made Gossip Girl and Blair Waldorf interesting was not the character’s attempts to achieve role model status. The fact that fans of the show that identified with Blair may have even misinterpreted the message or lack thereof. Emily Nussbaum when writing about The Mindy Project observes, “Female viewers, especially, have been trained to expect certain payoffs from romantic comedies, vicarious in nature: the meet-cute, the soul mate, and, in nearly every case, a ‘Me, too!’ identification. Without ‘Me, too!,’ some folks want a refund.” Blair, in all of her messy contradictions and complexities, would lose what makes her fascinating if she were written to be likable.

Vanessa Willoughby is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared on The Toast, The Hairpin, Thought Catalog, and other print and online publications. Find her @book_nerd212.

Life is a Battleground in ‘Drunken Butterflies’

Rockhopper Productions’ first feature film, ‘Drunken Butterflies,’ is a fun-to-watch experiment in filmmaking that’s focused on friendship between working-class Newcastle girls.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Rockhopper Productions’ first feature film, Drunken Butterflies, is a fun-to-watch experiment in filmmaking that’s focused on friendship between working-class Newcastle girls.

“Would you rather have Tracy’s extensions or Tracy’s face?”

So begins a conversation between Tracy’s two best friends in Drunken Butterflies, the debut film from UK director Garry Sykes, now available on VOD.

Billed as a cross between “scripted reality TV” and narrative story-telling, Butterflies is a loosely plotted, largely improvised day-in-the-life movie about six fictional Newcastle teens and the shifting friendships between them. The film relied on its cast of young actors to develop and workshop the characters and story, following a 20-page outline, and portions of the footage were filmed directly by the actors, using phones and hand-held cameras.

In other words, it’s a lot like The Blair Witch Project, if The Blair Witch Project contained an extended dialogue about vajazzling and didn’t make you want to puke.

As the story begins, the film’s main character, Chloe, has just had a falling-out with the hard-as-nails Tracy, causing four of their friends to pick sides to the tune of The Pipettes’ aptly-chosen “Judy.”

The next 90 minutes track the group’s movements through the day, following them through minor acts of betrayal, sporadic outbursts of violence, and moments of genuine caring. Their lives are volatile, confusing, and uncertain, but their makeup looks really amazing.

As an experiment in film-making, Drunken Butterflies could have been more ambitious.

The film adopts a style that’s reminiscent of reality TV and documentaries, and there’s a self-referential scene toward the end, where two of the characters talk about how reality shows are all scripted, but there doesn’t seem to be a concrete message about the line between reality and fiction. Butterflies is more of a pastiche of different modes of representation, acknowledging that, in the age of reality TV and social media, the way that we present ourselves has changed. That those things are an extension of the fronts we already put up for the world.

It would have been nice if the film had done more with that idea, or delved deeper into questions of truth and personal identity – I don’t quite buy the press packet’s claim that “the lines between fiction and reality… crumble to nothing” because of this style – but the movie, I think, still succeeds in capturing something true.

While I didn’t grow up on the “Geordie Shore,” and can’t speak to how real that is, I recognize the girls in this movie as people who could have appeared in my own life – in some cases, as people who could have been me. I remember what it’s like to start a fight with someone just because. To stand there screaming the f-word, self-righteous, because you get off on the drama. To dare someone to hit you in the parking lot.

Ah, youth.

It’s a side of girlhood – and maybe a class-specific side of girlhood – that isn’t represented that often, and often isn’t represented in such a sympathetic way.

This is, first and foremost, a movie about female “toughness” – a quality that’s maybe less required of middle-class women, or is expressed by them in a different way. This is the toughness of physical fights – of being so hard that nothing can hurt you, because there’s a world of hurt waiting outside the front door.

As Butterflies starts to wind down, there are some plot threads that make less sense than they could, and some conflicts that seem to get resolved too easily, but the dominant theme is that life is an ongoing struggle. Each of the characters is fighting a private battle that sometimes puts her at odds with and sometimes makes her best friends with the others.

Life is chaotic and scary, and everyone’s just trying hard to survive.

Butterflies is also the rare film that focuses intently on relationships between girls, treating their interactions with boys as an afterthought. The event that sets everything in motion is the discovery that Chloe cheated on Tracy’s brother, Liam, but this isn’t a movie about whether Chloe and Liam will get back together – it’s about whether Chloe and Tracy will get back together. Liam is – in some cases, literally – pushed to the side while they argue about it.

Although gender isn’t the primary focus of the film, the story takes place in a setting where its heroes are, for the most part, menaced by cat-calls and threats of attack, where they talk to each other in front of a wall of pornography posted by boys. It’s uncomfortable to watch them turn their anger on “soft” targets – like a mild-mannered boy named Chris, whom they corner and bully – but there’s also something about that that rings true, even if the film doesn’t examine it at any great depth.

The decision to mold the characters based on the actors’ personalities means that even those with less experience come across as fairly convincing, and the use of hand-held cameras and cell phone video add a sense of immersion and reality to the experience.

For a film that was made on a pretty tight budget, Drunken Butterflies looks and sounds great – it’s an extremely watchable film that’s visually interesting as well as interesting to think about. Rather than having the freak show vibe that reality TV can carry, it feels like a sincere attempt to understand a particular intersection of gender and class that’s often ridiculed or stigmatized.

In that sense, I think it does achieve its goal of blending reality and fiction, in order to get at the truth.

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

In Spite of Mean Girls: The Radical Vision of ‘Pretty Little Liars’

In her bestselling collection ‘Bad Feminist,’ Roxane Gay starts the listicle entitled “How to Be Friends with Another Woman” with this as the very first item: “Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses—pretty but designed to SLOW women down.”

This guest post by Jessica Freeman-Slade appears as part of our theme week on Female Friendship.

In her bestselling collection Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay starts the listicle entitled “How to Be Friends with Another Woman” with this as the very first item: “Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses—pretty but designed to SLOW women down.”

Pretty Little Liars, a show on ABC Family that just wrapped its fifth season, looks on the surface to be all about the things that slow female friendships down, especially in high school—the fabulous heels, the purses, the toxicity of secret-keeping and back-stabbing. (For a long time I assumed it was Gossip Girl in suburbia, all about teenagers behaving badly and looking great while doing it.) Yet upon closer inspection, it presents itself as the most radical show about women, and specifically female friendship, on television, a treatise on what might happen when four friends refuse to become mean girls, and choose something to embark on something far more difficult: genuine support of each other. That might explain why the show is the most Tweeted-about series of all time (yes, surpassing Scandal, with 11.7 million Tweets sent during its season 2 finale in 2013), and why it’s proven to be much more than just a pretty teenage drama.

Based upon the YA series by Sara Shepard, PLL takes place in the fictional town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania, where queen bee Alison (Sasha Pieterse) has been missing for almost a year, and her formerly tight clique has broken up as they enter their junior year of high school. Star swimmer Emily (Shay Mitchell), who once nursed a deeply closeted crush on Alison, is just starting to assert her sexuality and independence. Straight-A student Spencer (Troian Bellisario) is tiptoeing around her uber-competitive sister Melissa (Torrey DeVitto). The fashionista Hanna (Ashley Benson) spends most of her time shoplifting and looking the other way while her single mother cleans up her messes. And artistic Aria (Lucy Hale) has just returned from a year abroad with her family, and immediately falls for Ezra (Ian Harding), a cute guy who—tada!—turns out to be her English teacher. These characters seem like archetypes (jock, Type-A, ditz, flower child) with very little beyond typical teenage drama to concern them. But then Alison’s dead body is discovered, and the girls start receiving texts from a mysterious “A” who seems to know all their unflattering secrets, lies, and desires, and worst, the details that could easily nail them for a terrible crime. But rather than turn away from each other, the girls immediately come back together, breaking those archetypes open and forming an alliance to uncover their texting tormentor and bring Alison’s killer to justice. As its millions of rabidly texting fans would attest, Pretty Little Liars has become the rare teen-oriented show that embraces all types of girls, the importance of supporting your friends and how they choose to be happy, and most importantly, how to fight against a bully who keeps you down.

Initially it seems that the villain is the mysterious “A,” whose threats scare the girls into silence or keep them at a distance from what makes them happy. (One of the gentler A threats is in Season 1, when A steals photographs of Emily kissing her new girlfriend and threatens to reveal them to her family.) But the real spectre of terror over the entire series is Alison: the glamorous, manipulative, power-hungry, and freakishly intelligent teenage girl who can bend anybody to her will.

In life, Alison bullied and teased her so-called friends and kept them from showing their own strengths. Hanna in particular withered under her rule, as Alison called her “Hefty Hanna” until she became bulimic. And even after death, the secrets that Alison had kept for the girls serve as A’s material for ripping their lives apart—to reveal Aria’s relationship with Ezra as well as her father’s (Chad Lowe) infidelity, to expose Spencer’s plagiarism of an award-winning essay, and to send Hanna’s mother to jail for stealing money as they’re on the verge of foreclosure. The villainy at the core of PLL is Alison’s undue influence, the one cool girl who rules over other girls and takes away their power.

But instead of becoming more like their tormentor, Pretty Little Liars gives its characters the choice of telling the truth, trusting each other, and taking on the consequences of their mistakes rather than lying their way out of them. Aria confronts her father about the infidelity, and Spencer withdraws her essay from the competition and disappoints her family in the process. Emily comes out of the closet, despite her fears—and her friends are genuinely happy and supportive of her. And to earn back the balance of her mother’s stolen money, on A’s orders Hanna consumes a dozen cupcakes, triggering a flashback to her days of binge eating. Yet when A texts her to do what Alison taught her, to “get rid of it,” Hanna refuses to go down the same old road. Instead of becoming more like Alison, the girls decide to become more like themselves, the selves that they know to be powerful and beautiful, inside and out.

Let’s revisit that #1 rule of female friendship from Roxane Gay—too often we ascribe a kind of inherent toxicity to female friendship, to the way women negotiate power dynamics and competition amongst themselves, as though there was a finite amount of beauty, intelligence, and influence in the room. The perpetuation of “girl-on-girl” crime doesn’t have as much to do with actual criminality or offense (when a cheating boyfriend is caught, why do we blame the other woman?), as it does with the notion that only one girl can win at any given moment. Yet in embracing the differences of the four Liars, the show allows a kind of multiplicity in its portraits of good girls who are not goodie two-shoes, and what winning in a community of women can look like. These girls kick butt together, and they do it with strengths drawn directly from their personalities, without the supernatural powers or exceptionally strong kickboxing or archery skills that we expect from other heroines of pop culture. For Emily, it’s her disarming honesty and candor that allows people to trust and open up to her.

Aria is small but fierce, and her wisdom beyond her years empowers her to make decisions that she can stand by.

Hanna is loyal to the core, and because she herself had been an outsider, she refuses to tolerate deceit from the people around her.

And for Spencer, in a constantly evolving and Emmy-worth performance by Bellisario, it’s her supreme intelligence and drive makes her the perfect troop leader, galvanizing her friends to stop settling for misery and start exposing the threats around them.

To be sure, the show has plenty of faults: the various relationship between teenage girls and some much-older love interests gives me plenty of heebie-jeebies, as do the increasingly improbable plot twists and the immaculate wardrobe, hair, and makeup choices on display at all times. (When, in all that mystery solving and running around in the woods, do they have enough time to pick out such cute outfits?) And, if you agree with A.O. Scott’s recent handwringing over the “death of adulthood” in contemporary media, you might wonder why so much of this positive friendship conversation has to be about teenagers rather than grown women. But these girls are exactly at the age where major decisions about character are made—when you move from childhood into adulthood, you stop absorbing information from your role models and start making your own choices. And the choice—to be a mean girl, and rule over everyone else, or to be a kind girl and to form meaningful relationships—is at the very center of Pretty Little Liars.

Most importantly, the stakes for these friendships are truly, massively high. These girls are literally saving each other FROM DEATH—breaking each other out of cages, chasing down bad guys, and fighting back against people who would like to silence them. While the plotting of the show may be highly tongue-in-cheek in treating death-defying an extracurricular activity, you have to admire how high the stakes have been placed. Without having each other’s backs, without their friendships, these girls would be dead—friendship is not only a positive choice, it is a lifesaving choice. And that is a pretty darn heroic proposition, especially for teenage girls.

Jessica Freeman-Slade is a cookbook editor at Random House, and has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She lives in Morningside Heights, NY.

Girls Just Wanna … Take Control of Their Own Lives

I’m a lot older now and I still squeal with excitement when this film comes on. When it showed up on Netflix my daughter and I watched the movie over a dozen times. We would take “supreme silly” dance breaks whenever the music would play and when the Netflix purge occurred we found a DVD copy (OK we got two in case one got scratched or lost) of our very own on Amazon so that we could continue this tradition at will.

Janey and Lynne bond over Dance TV — Janey and Lynne bond over *Dance TV*

This guest post by Shay Revolver appears as part of our theme week on Movie Soundtracks.

The year was 1985. A very young and impressionable Shay had grown quite fond of the moving picture shows. She watched anything and everything. Some of them only once, others she recorded and watched over and over again. She was particularly fond of movies with a great soundtrack. Her older sister’s old bootleg copy of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School with the defiant, audacious and energetic PJ Soles was at the top of her list.

Then one day she came upon a new girl-powered (and probably more age-appropriate) film to love. This film would seal her belief that music and moving images go together like PB and J. It would imprint on her that the tone of a film could be realized through music and create a process by which the older Shay would write every script and edit every frame to a song. It wasn’t the first film that helped her see this beautiful pattern and it wouldn’t be the last, but it would definitely be the most fun. It would be a movie watched over and over again by a feisty little girl after school almost every day for a month in her Catholic school uniform and triple laced LA Gears. She would down all of the Fun Dip, eat all of the popcorn, and drink all the iced tea in the fridge while hanging out on the couch staring up at the big screen TV watching Girls Just Want to Have Fun.

Girls Just Want to Have Fun poster — *Girls Just Want to Have Fun* poster

For those of you that haven’t had the awesome pleasure of seeing this film I’m going to break it down for you: Army brat Janey Glenn (played by a very young Sarah Jessica Parker) gets transferred to Chicago with her family. She meets Lynne Stone (Helen Hunt) at her new Catholic all girls school. They become instant friends over their love of Dance TV, a nationwide TV show. When the opportunity presents itself for them to audition to become dancers on the show they couldn’t be happier; that is, until Janey’s super strict military dad puts his foot down and says NO. The story could end there, but Lynne convinces Janey to do it anyway. A majority of the movie is spent with Janey going behind her father’s back to practice with her partner, thwarting (and retaliating against) the evil plots of her rich girl nemesis, Natalie , falling in love with her “wrong side of the tracks” partner Jeff, and finally standing up to her dad, doing things her way and making her dreams come true.

Janey wishing she could be on Dance TV — Janey, wishing she could be on *Dance TV*

The thing about Girls Just Want to Have Fun is that it isn’t just about the girl power, female friendships, choosing your own destiny, standing up for what you believe in story line, it’s also about the music. In fact it’s so much about the music that it’s one of the few feature films whose soundtracks have their very own Wikipedia page. The music in the film isn’t just a soundtrack, it’s the story of their lives. It provides a freedom and excitement that is needed to propel the story (and in some ways the girls’ lives) along.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILXC6S6UZf4&index=3&list=PL8B90EF1762DB0144″]

Each song plays at the perfect time in the story and the music gets more and more intense as Janey breaks out of her shell, pulls away from who her father and society expect her to be and becomes the person she wants to be, or has always been but, not had a chance to discover.

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

The music is Janey in some ways and follows her path throughout the film from the innocent pop music in the beginning as a naive and sheltered Janey begins to explore the world, to the woeful soul music as she faces disappointment, hopelessness, and obstacles on her way to accomplishing her goals, to the “punk” music that plays when she breaks out and begins to express and stand up for herself.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRRKmh6mTpI&list=PL8B90EF1762DB0144&index=8″]

Each note, lyric, and melody seems carefully curated to what’s happening on screen. The soundtrack plays in the background like an extra character in the film. It goes so smoothly with the images on the screen that it seamlessly integrates with the film becoming way more than background audio.

One of the things that makes this film and its soundtrack so memorable is that you feel every note. When the music plays you feel compelled to get up and dance along, which for the record is why it’s good that this film can be viewed in the comfort of your own home. The music even creates a freeing emotional release in the end when Janey’s father shows up to stop her from doing the final dance off to secure her spot on the show against her monied rival Natalie. As the song plays in the background you know before her dad does or even Janey does that despite seeing her dad, she isn’t going to be that good little girl she had always been. She’d grown up a bit and the defiance in the music shows that.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TASGl0_jnjU”]

You could just feel through the music that she was going to acknowledge her father’s presence and do what she felt was right in her heart. She was going to dance, despite the consequences or incurring her father’s disapproval, disappointment, or wrath. When it was all said and done Janey grew up to the music and we all cheered and danced along with her. Even her hard-nosed father came around. He was proud of her and she had gained his respect.

Janey breaks free and literally flies at the finals — Janey breaks free and flies at the finals

As an avid film (and music) lover, this was one of the films that inspired me. It was all about being bold, blazing your own path and figuring out who you are for you. The music didn’t overshadow the film or try to be hip by using the music of the “kids” and coming off as messy or chaotic. It helped tell the story in such a way that it became a part of the story and it taught me that sometimes you’ve just got to dance, a lesson that I gladly share with my little mouseling whether we’re watching this movie or just baking cookies in the kitchen. It also taught a nation of little girls that sometimes it’s OK to be different, to fight the system, to follow your heart, and let it lead you to your dreams. And in a world where girls are still often taught to be seen and not heard, to be obedient without question and to play nice, everything about Girls Just Want to Have Fun was a welcome wake-up call.

Shay Revolver is a vegan, feminist, cinephile, insomniac, recovering NYU student and former roller derby player currently working as a New York-based microcinema filmmaker, web series creator, and writer. She’s obsessed with most books, especially the Pop Culture and Philosophy series and loves movies and TV shows from low brow to high class. As long as the image is moving she’s all in and believes that everything is worth a watch. She still believes that movies make the best bedtime stories because books are a daytime activity to rev up your engine and once you flip that first page, you have to keep going until you finish it and that is beautiful in its own right. She enjoys talking about the feminist perspective in comic book and gaming culture and the lack of gender equality in mainstream cinema and television productions. Twitter: @socialslumber13.

Enjoyment Isn’t an Item on ‘The To Do List’

The sex in ‘The To Do List’—which comes about for Plaza’s character Brandy Klark after she realizes she has no sexual experience going into college—was utterly joyless; it was as if Brandy was going through the motions. This is hardly surprising considering the premise of the film is to check off a smorgasbord of sex acts over summer vacation in order to be appropriately sexually educated as she becomes tertiary educated.

"The To Do List" poster — *The To Do List* poster

This guest post by Scarlett Harris appears as part of our theme week on Representations of Female Sexual Desire.

I was moved to watch The To Do List after seeing Emily Nussbaum tweet about it over the Christmas break. It was a stinking hot Saturday afternoon in my corner of the world, so I thought I’d watch along with her as she tweeted her disillusion with the Aubrey Plaza vehicle.

Nussbaum’s main complaint was that the sex in The To Do List—which comes about for Plaza’s character Brandy Klark after she realizes she has no sexual experience going into college—was utterly joyless; it was as if Brandy was going through the motions.

This is hardly surprising considering the premise of the film is to check off a smorgasbord of sex acts over summer vacation in order to be appropriately sexually educated as she becomes tertiary educated.

"The To Do List" list — *The To Do List*

It’s not a wholly ineffective idea: Brandy understands studying and academic excellence better than she does social mores, so making a project out of a desire to know what to do come college (pardon the pun) prepares her for the next chapters in her life: more academic aptitude and more sex.

Previously on Bitch Flicks, Leigh Kolb wrote in praise of The To Do List, asserting that in the film, “Brandy’s desire is always paramount,” but I don’t think this is the case. While Brady’s parents—well, at least her mum, played to scrunchie-wearing perfection by Connie Britton—and sister, Amber (Rachel Bilson) are portrayed as pretty sexually progressive, their dialogue doesn’t seem to connote “the joy of sex,” so to speak. For example, upon giving Brandy a tube of lube, Mrs. Klark tells her daughter, “As you move forward on your sexual journey, promise me one thing.” “To have fun?” Brandy asks. “No, to use lube,” Mrs. Klark replied. Here, enjoyment seems an afterthought.

A joyless kiss in "The To Do List" — A joyless kiss in *The To Do List*

Brandy’s sexually active sister, Amber, doesn’t seem to enjoy the copious amounts of sex she’s had, either. Though she does tell Brandy to “have fun getting your cherry popped” in the penultimate scene of the movie, it’s said with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

It’s important to note that part of the reason Brandy decides to cultivate a “sex manual,” as the objects of her attractions are wont to call it, is due to peer pressure. She’s called a virgin during her valedictorian speech, and her friends insinuate that Brandy can’t go to college as inexperienced as she is. The tipping point in Brandy’s decision to do her… erm… The To Do List ultimately lies in her lust for shirtless guitar player/lifeguard Rusty (Scott Porter), but even that turns out to be about what other people will think of her landing a college guy. At the end of the movie, she tells Rusty, “Am I going to regret losing my virginity to you? No, you are going to be an awesome story to tell my friends.”

So while The To Do List appears as part of the recent cannon of sex positive “chick flicks,” which includes For a Good Time, Call…, not everything is as it seems. The To Do List is more about peer pressure and the sexual experiences you should be having at that age than it is about actual young female desire.

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

More than Just a Monotone: How Well Do You Remember ‘Daria’?

It’s been more than 12 years since ‘Daria’ ended and it’s still in public consciousness. The beloved MTV series and its heroine frequently end up lists of best TV shows, cult shows, favourite female characters and 90s nostalgia. Music licensing issues that held up home video releases for years, ended in 2010, when a DVD set with the series’ entire run of 65 episodes and two TV movies was released. And last year, College Humor produced a fake trailer for a live-action movie starring Aubrey Plaza. In today’s media landscape, where cancelation no longer means the end of a series, Daria is often one internet commentators beg for more of. And yet, the memory most people seem to have of Daria as a character isn’t quite right.

A memorable shot of an uncaring Daria from the show’s theme song

It’s been more than 12 years since Daria ended and it’s still in public consciousness. The beloved MTV series and its heroine frequently end up on lists of best TV shows , cult shows, favourite female characters and 90s nostalgia.
Music licensing issues that held up home video releases for years ended in 2010, when a DVD set with the series’ entire run of 65 episodes and two TV movies was released. And last year, College Humor produced a fake trailer for a live-action movie starring Aubrey Plaza. In today’s media landscape, where cancellation no longer means the end of a series (as seen in recent resurrections like Arrested Development, 24 and Veronica Mars), internet commentators often beg for more Daria. In the comments section for College Humor’s video, many implored the website to find a way to make the movie for real.

And yet, the memory most people seem to have of Daria as a character isn’t quite right.

On the internet, as in real life, the Daria Morgendorffer people remember is a misanthrope with a monotone voice. An uncaring, almost comatose girl, wandering through the world and hating it indiscriminately.

Aubrey Plaza plays Daria in College Humor’s fake trailer

Plaza plays her this way, never excited, never caring, never attached to anyone or insecure. Several articles about the College Humor video even praised her performance as a perfect Daria impression. But Daria, though often monotone, was much more than that. While she did wander around uncaring through the theme song, in the series proper, she was always running into walls- the people and institutions around her, her world’s expectation of what she should be, and most crucially, her view of herself.

More than anything, Daria wanted to be the girl we remember as unfazed by anything, but instead, kept disappointing herself with her insecurities and the inadvertent connections to people she formed. She was like so many of us as teenagers, deciding what kind of person we were supposed to be while killing ourselves to fit the mold.

But did she cared. Perhaps she cared about things more than anyone else around her. Through five seasons, she fought against fake sincerity, commercialization, and the power and respect given to those with status, money and good looks. She refused to lie about herself for a college scholarship, fake enthusiasm for a part-time job and challenged authorities who threatened the quality of her education, her integrity and her artistic expression. While she scoffed at false values like school spirit, popularity and edginess (a word adults use to sell things to teenagers), she hated them for robbing her generation of meaning and for talking down to youth.

There was a sour taste in her mouth when consuming media directed at youth but written by adults attempting to remain cool. She rejected media directed at teen girls in favor of Conrad, Camus and many political, philosophical and feminist texts, giving 90s teens perhaps their first exposure to classic writers and important ideas. That Daria read these kind of things on her own without a teacher assigning them shows how much she valued learning and encouraged many viewers, myself included, to revisit things we’d been assigned in school and written off as boring.

In her spare time, Daria wrote short stories, acted out No Exit with dolls, made anatomical models, learned about art history from her artist best friend, Jane, and music history from her crush, Trent, and enjoyed watching trash TV–all ways of developing an intelligent mind and broadening her conception of the world outside Lawndale High: her personal idea of hell.

Daria feels contempt for her peers, dismissing them as idiots

I think you can best understand Daria as a character by seeing her as the type of girl who suffers through high school, assuring herself that in college everyone will magically understand her and speak to her on her level. Sadly, when she visits a local college, she realizes that the people there are the same ones she knew in high school; they’re just older.

Like many of us, Daria looks down on her peers, believing she is more intelligent, sophisticated and mature than them. Though in many cases she’s right, as her classmates, particularly the jocks and cheerleaders are often cartoonishly stupid (even for a cartoon). The popular crowd can’t even spell their own names, and they view being a “brain” like Daria as a fate worse than death. She’s different from her peers, and that difference stands out, as in one episode, she and Jane are the target of a witch hunt.

But Daria is often shown that her assumptions of people’s character and her contempt for them are unwarranted. Her vain sister Quinn is capable of writing a vaguely intelligent poem, ditzy cheerleader Britney has moments of insight and a brilliant tactical mind, and infrequently Daria meets intelligent boys who understand her and her weird sarcastic humor. It’s even painted as a character flaw that Daria clings to first impressions and judges everyone around her. She’s never surprised when someone disappoints her, displaying their true self as self-centered, calculating or dense; she’s only surprised when they go along with her joke or give her an intelligent argument. For example, when she finds out Andrea, a would-be friend from summer camp, idolized her, she can only respect Andrea when she stands up to her.

Daria has a crush on Trent, her best friends older brother — Daria has a crush on Trent, her best friend’s older brother

Even Daria herself doesn’t always measure up to her ideals. Though she is a a teenage girl, Daria wants to be so much more than that. Along with her dismissal of her peers and of the media they enjoy, she views being a teenage girl as a weakness and refuses to allow herself to be human. She has a hopeless crush on an older “bad boy” who rarely notices her, even though she’s smart enough to know he’s irresponsible and totally wrong for her. If she’s being logical, she knows he’s not an option for her and the type of life she wants to live, but still she finds him irresistible and even gets a navel piercing to please him; something she would never do otherwise.

She feels ashamed when she realizes she really wants a romantic celebration for her anniversary (like 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon and her wedding), as she views sentimentality as pathetic. In several episodes, she struggles with her own sense of vanity, attempting to hide a rash across her face and attempting to wear contacts even though they hurt her eyes because she likes how she looks with them. She disappoints herself with her desire for contacts as she feels there is no reason to want them besides vanity.

Within her school, Daria is known as “the brain” and “the misery chick,” identities she never chose for herself, doesn’t completely like but feels entirely lost without. Within her family she’s the smart one, and Quinn is the pretty one. When that balance is disturbed and Quinn is praised for her intelligence, Daria feels threatened. If she isn’t a brain and smarter than everyone else, she doesn’t know who she is. In another episode, she struggles with her peers’ view of her as someone who is always miserable and thinking about death.

Daria briefly gives herself a makeover to look like her sister, Quinn

Though when people meet Daria, they frequently gasp (to an exaggerated degree) in disgust at her appearance, it is frequently suggested that she could easily fit in and be popular if she wanted to. Modeling scouts at the school first zero in on Daria over supposedly more attractive classmates, and in one episode, she dresses like Quinn and her appearance threatens her sister. Through she sees herself as far above her peers, she clearly understands them and knows how to appeal to them, once inciting a riot by manipulating them with a short story.

Daria’s friendship with Jane Lane is one of the greatest things about the show as it portrays them as two people with similar interests and a shared sense of humor, while managing to make them distinctive people with different reactions to the same events. Their relationship also humanizes Daria, as Jane challenges her and forces her to confront her flaws and figure out why she feels certain ways. Without Jane, Daria could easily be that silent girl, observing and judging a world she is unattached to, but Jane gives her reasons to care. Jane also worries less about fitting into a certain image; instead she wants to experience every opportunity she can, believing it will make her a better artist and drags Daria along to house parties, school dances and other parts of teen life she would otherwise ignore. Moreover, Jane doesn’t see being intelligent and sarcastic and joining the track team, getting a boyfriend or auditioning for the cheerleading squad as mutually exclusive. Her attempts to get involved force Daria to attempt to reconcile her contempt for their peers as a group with the existence of Jane, one of her peers who she really likes and respects. It is perhaps Jane’s humanizing influence that make Daria feel guilty about making a video that paints Quinn in the worst possible light and so edits it to be more flattering.

Daria’s best friend Jane is a humanizing influence

Certainly Daria is someone that needs humanizing. In one episode, she confesses to Jane that she often feels superior to other people, sometimes thinking to herself, “You can see things that other people can’t. You can see better than other people.” This reminded me of the first episode of Girls, where Hannah Horvath memorably told her parents she thinks of herself as the voice of her generation. It was an audacious statement, that led many to hate the character, but it was also really unique for a young woman to express grandiose thoughts, to think of herself as great and significant, rather than suppress herself with (often false) modesty as many of us have been taught to. Jane is a great friend for Daria because she takes her confession seriously, values Daria’s opinions, and disarms her, joking (though with a kernel of truth). That this is why she’s proud to be Daria’s friend. It’s great to see characters who are allowed to be audacious.

As she grows up, Daria is able to recognize how difficult she was as a child and how much her parents struggled to raise her. She learns that when she was in elementary school her parents’ marriage was strained as they were frequently called in by the principal to talk about her lack of friends, her refusal to participate and her depressive nature. Toward the end of the series, when she volunteers at a summer camp, she meets a young boy who reminds her of her younger self and is able to see some of her character flaws for herself. She quickly becomes invested in his growth, realizing that she really cares whether she gets through to him. She helps him avoid some of her mistakes, particularly missing out on life by pretending to be uninterested. It’s plain that Daria as she was when the show began would never have been able to see herself so clearly and to connect on this level.

Using a short story Daria imagines the future for her family

We see a glimpse of the future Daria expects (and most will most likely get) when she writes a short story imagining herself and Quinn as adults visiting their parents. Both are happy and have learned to get along and step out of their comfort zones. The story makes Daria’s mother cry and reveals she is more sentimental than even she realizes.

If you’ve never seen Daria, or you haven’t seen it in years, it’s worth a watch to see one of the most memorable and realistic teenage girls I’ve ever seen on TV.

________________________________________________________________________

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

When Girlhood Fantasy Turns Murderous: ‘Perfect Sisters’

It’s no easy feat to make a true crime film that rises above Lifetime schlock. It takes things like dark humor, broader social context, impressive cinematography and storytelling risks to breathe life into a stale murder plot. With that goal, ‘Perfect Sisters’ isn’t exactly a blazing success, often falling into the trap of domestic melodrama, but I think it’s still worth a watch.
Based on a notorious Canadian case where teenage sisters drowned their mother in a bathtub, it’s the story of Sandra (Abigail Breslin) and Beth (Georgie Henley), sisters whose whole world is each other.

Sandra and Beth rely on each other for comfort and reassurance

Based on a notorious Canadian case , where teenage sisters drowned their mother in a bathtub, it’s the story of Sandra (Abigail Breslin) and Beth (Georgie Henley), sisters whose whole world is each other. These girls have faced a difficult childhood, forced to take care of their younger brother and Linda (Mira Sorvino), their depressed alcoholic mother; they see each other as their one constant. As Sandra says, “It was always me and my sister against the big bad world.”

Until the murder begins to unravel them, the sisters have an appealing symbiosis. They share a made-up language, shared fantasies and Beth knows to corroborate Sandra’s lies unprompted. For their shared point of view on the events, the girls make one singular person, constantly clinging to each other. Sandra also acts as Beth’s mother, holding her when she’s scared at night and fighting off Linda’s boyfriend Bowman (James Russo) when he attempts to attack her. Though they both have love interests, their primary bond is with each other.

Used to moving around when Linda loses jobs and to cramped apartments with roaches, they’ve learned to make the best of it with their rituals of setting up their shared bedroom. They’re quite skilled at interior design, arranging their possessions to mimic faded wealth and glamor, the private castle of two princesses trapped by their mother’s demons.

The girls make the best of their situation by decorating their room, making it into a refuge

The film is reminiscent of Heavenly Creatures–two girls who share a secret world that no one else can understand. As in that movie, also the true story of a murder committed by teenage girls, their fantasies bleed into reality as their lives grow bleaker, becoming more colorful and increasingly violent.

Perfect Sisters has been criticized by people familiar with the case, such as Bob Mitchell, the reporter who wrote The Class Project , the true crime book it’s based on, for playing down greed as a motive, instead suggesting the girls are driven to murder by their difficult circumstances.

Director Stanley M. Brooks has said his aim in the film was to show the sisters as sympathetic characters, not evil or sociopathic, but immature young women who make made bad decisions. He attempted to be accurate to the real events and says he fictionalized almost nothing about the case. Whatever the truth is, this approach is more cinematic, giving viewers likable (to a point) characters and room for discussion over their level of awareness of their actions and the nature of evil.

As in most true crime movies, viewers know going in both that the girls’ mother will be murdered and that they are guilty. The murder is not a shocking climax that has viewers on the edge of their seats and there is no real mystery or suspense, as the these’s never any doubt of the perpetrator. Brooks’ decision to challenge the audience to sympathize with girls we know will become killers is one that adds an intriguing element to the film, each bit of the girls’ inner lives, the minutia of teenage girlhood and idle lunchroom gossip is weighed against the knowledge of viciousness they are capable of.

Before school starts, the sisters give themselves makeovers, each attempting to be someone new and more desirable this year

It’s startling to watch the squeaky clean child stars of Little Miss Sunshine (Breslin) and The Chronicles of Narnia (Henley) move in darker, adult fare, playing the matricidal “bath-tub girls.” Automatically, the audience’s sympathies are aligned with these familiar faces we’re used to seeing as adorable children who believe in magic and fairness.

Here, they’re morbid (in one scene, Sandra is distracted from a kiss by the sight of a dead bird) and jaded. Still, they’re good girls with perfect disciplinary records and honor roll grades. Over the summer, they’ve each reinvented themselves. Beth dyes her hair matte black and wears heavy eye make-up to attract the gothic romance of her dreams, while Sandra yearns to be popular and lose her goody-goody rep. She makes up rumors about herself to get attention, strangely they are the type of things most girls would try to cover up. Sandra wants to be a bad girls, desirable and dangerous, so she tells everyone she’s pregnant by her therapist.

They’re used to their mother’s addiction and they’ve been dealing with it for a long time, propping her up, shuttling her through their routines and taking on her responsibilities. There are several hints that the girls and their brother have experienced earlier traumas because of their mother and her string of abusive boyfriends.

When Linda begins dating Bowman, a wealthy man who can support them, she puts up with beatings and cruelty, as well as his enabling of her addiction into a worse state than the girls can remember it ever being. They reach their breaking point when she does nothing to help them when Bowman hits their brother and begins to make sexual advances towards Beth.

It’s suggested that her alcoholism and refusal to leave her abusive boyfriend, even when he turns on her children, stems from low self worth. She doesn’t feel her life matters, so she allows Bowman to beat her. The girls have dealt with this situation so many times before that they are disturbingly able to write off their mother’s life. To their minds, she’s given it up already. They’d be fine to leave her to destroy herself, but as minors who depend on her, if she goes down, she takes them with her.

Together, the sisters imagine a perfect mother who will do anything to protect them

To cope, Sandra and Beth imagine their perfect mother, a vision they both interact with. Their perfect mother is impeccable groomed and shines with a halo of light and offers to make cookies and brush their hair. In their fantasies, she’s always there with to take care of them and provide comfort, something they have to find in each other instead. In reality, Linda is embarrassing. She tries to be her daughters’ friend and jokes around with their friends. At a party in their apartment, she gets drunk and babbles sexual things while their guests laugh at her.

When Sandra is called upon to be the adult of the family and attend her brother’s parent-teacher conference, she wears the same outfit as their perfect mother wears in their fantasies. Dressed in these clothes, Sandra clearly resembles Linda. She takes on her maternal responsibilities, using this perfect image of Linda as a role model and fixation on remaining in control to create as much distance as she can between her and her mother’s embarrassing weakness. Long after Beth has given up on her, Sandra continues to make excuses for Linda and try to understand her. In the wake of the murder, her prized control dissolves and Sandra repeats her mother’s self destructive mistakes, drinking and flirting and sharing her story with anyone who’ll listen. Beth becomes ashamed of her, in one scene saying, “You remind me of Mom.”

Before deciding to kill her, they attempt to find other ways to save themselves. They appeal to both their father and their wealthy aunt, asking to live with them but are denied. The girls quickly lose their faith in social services as they’re told no one can help them until there has been serious abuse. Beth speaks the truth about the cycle of trauma, “By the time they do anything, I’ll be the alcoholic neglecting my kids.” Through this frenzied attempts, Bowman’s threat of rape is treated as an inevitability. It’s a truly terrifying situation, sooner or later, they suppose, Beth will be vulnerable and alone. They have to do something before that happens.

Linda leans on her daughters, forcing them to take care of her even when they need her to take care of them

Though we see them trying to get out of their situation by finding a new place to live, the judge at their sentencing later in the film, rightly points out that there are teenagers who have been in much worse situations and not murdered anyone. After all, Sandra is a senior, soon she’d be an adult capable of living alone. This suggests that they are unwilling to do something hard, like work multiple jobs and live on minimum wage to support themselves. Their ideal situations are either to live on their own with an insurance payout or be taken in by their wealthy aunt.

Perfect Sisters is not afraid to show the cruelty of these girls. They are able to causally plot their mother’s murder, laughing about it with their friends, enthusiastically speculating about the freedom that will be available to them, chatting online and researching the pros and cons of different methods. Planning the murder takes on no more weight than speculating who’s dating who or what’ll be on the next math test. In one scene, the girls form an official “murder club” and gather in a school classroom writing ideas on the board. In another, the group gathers at the sisters’ home and practice attacking each other. It’s never entirely clear if their friends realize plotting the murder is more than just a game for the sisters.

In a darkly comic montage, the sisters crowd around a computer with their friends and watch their mother die over and over again in different scenarios. Part reality TV viewers, part judges scoring a performance, they watch and laugh as their mother is strangled and suffocated, pushed down the stairs and set on fire. In the end, they decide drowning will be quick, easy to make look like an accident, and it’d get the biggest insurance payout.

The murder itself creates a rift between them, when Beth leaves the bathroom while Sandra holds their mother’s head underwater. It also begins to reveal, for the first time, the fundamental difference between the girls, as shown by how they cope. While Sandra immediately panics and appears to regret what she’s done, Beth cries on cue as she calls 911, a smile on her face.

Sandra is crippled by her guilt, haunted by the memory of her mother face under the water

The knowledge of what they did hovers as an open secret through their high school and they reach a higher social status. Some classmates act like they are celebrities, having them pose for pictures, as the stroll down the hallway, while other gawk and retreat, afraid. The murder was so well planned that it seems like they would have gotten away with it if they weren’t gossipy, boy crazy and immature- basically if they weren’t teenage girls.

The last act of Perfect Sisters forms an intriguing portrait of how differently two people react to one event. Beth grows cold and introverted, while Sandra externalizes her guilt, partying and basking in her celebrity. She becomes the sloppy mess everyone secretly laughs at at parties, confessing the murder to anyone who’ll listen. The boy next door type who has loved her for years, biding his time, finally gives up on her and disgusted by what he sees as her lack of remorse, wears a wire to secure her confession.

Of course, they’re convicted and sentenced to jail time, but that’s not the real tragedy in the sisters’ eyes. In the end, they’re literally ripped apart, kicking and screaming by security officers and forbidden from communicating with each other for the duration of their sentences. In trying to save themselves, they each lost the one person who made them feel whole. Both girls are now released and attending college, and due to Canadian law regarding young offenders, their identities are protected (their names were changed for the film).

The girls only realize the gravity of their actions when they are found guilty and forbidden to see each other

In the last sequence, we are shown the girls as children changing in their teenage selves, as onscreen text explains their fates. This suggests the tragedy of their transformation from innocent children into convicted killers.

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Elizabeth Kiy is a Canadian writer and freelance journalist living in Toronto, Ontario. She recently graduated from Carleton University where she majored in journalism and minored in film.

‘It Felt Like Love’ (or Something): One High School Girl’s Sexual Exploration

Some of these scenes we watch like they are part of a horror movie, wanting to say to Lila, “What are you thinking?” Lila, with all her lies (to her father, to Chiara, to her neighbor and to Sammy) never takes the audience (or anyone else) completely into her confidence, so we don’t know what she might do next–and dread seeing her do it. Besides Chiara (who does offer some limited advice and support) Lila has no female figure in her life who can help her navigate the complicated sexual landscape in which boys treat her as if she’s not there. While she listens and watches they talk shit about other girls (and even about her), look at porn and listen to hip-hop in which a man brags that “she fuck me…until she bleed cum.” Lila’s mother is dead and her father hardly seems like someone she can talk to. We can see she wants someone to care about her comings and goings as much as she wants sex: when she texts Sammy or calls him and gets his voice mail the family dog is often her only company.

Films that focus on a 14- or 15-year-old seeking out sexual experience are not unusual, but ones that do so from a female perspective are. The Norwegian movie Turn Me On, Dammit!, written and directed by a woman, Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, featured a teenage protagonist who wanted sex, but the actress who played her was a young adult, not a kid, so laughing at her scenes of lust gone awry was easy. For a film as powerful and unsettling as writer-director Eliza Hittman’s first feature, It Felt Like Love, which will soon have a theatrical run after playing at the Sundance NEXT section in 2013, we have to go back more than 25 years to David Leland’s Wish You Were Here with the magnificent Emily Lloyd in the lead as a girl who both longs for and is eventually undone by sex.

Hittman’s film focuses on one girl growing up in an unhip section of Brooklyn (though as in Girls, it’s the alternative universe version of Brooklyn where hardly any people of color reside). Lila (hauntingly embodied by Gina Piersanti, just 14 at the time the film was shot) spends the summer hanging out with her friend Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni) and the latest in Chiara’s succession of boyfriends, Patrick (Jesse Cordasco). Lila’s pale, open face, often shot in close-up, with her bud-like mouth and dark eyes, thickly lined in black is reminiscent of the 60s supermodel Penelope Tree with dense bangs that cover her forehead along with long, luxuriant hair that brings to mind the other “dolly bird” actresses and models of that era. But for the same random reasons (which never last beyond graduation) many of us remember from our own high school years, well-tanned Chiara with her bikini and short shorts and skirts is the one who receives all the attention from boys, while Lila sits on the beach, in a one-piece bathing suit that’s a little too big for her, her face covered in zinc oxide.

In one early scene Chiara’s boyfriend Patrick breaks into an empty house that he invites the girls into and pilfers a cheap-looking “promise” ring from a music box as Lila watches. He puts his finger to his lips, the same gesture he makes when Chiara shows the ring Patrick “got” for her to Lila. And as close as Lila is to Chiara (she dyes her hair an identical color to her friend’s and in one scene Chiara asks Lila to look under her skirt to check and see if “there’s anything there” on her itchy vulva) Lila never tells Chiara Patrick’s secret.

Patrick’s presumptuousness–and Lila’s response to it–is a precursor for the relationships (if one can call them that) which Lila develops with the boys she meets at the beach and parties, who all resemble Patrick, with their slim, hairless but muscular bare torsos (often the subject of close-ups, in Sean Porter’s striking and expert cinematography) they are all about the same height and have similar, unflattering, short haircuts. They reminded me of the one boy the girls who appointed themselves the leaders in such matters determined was the “cute guy” in my seventh-grade gym class. He was inarticulate, not smart and not even good-looking by most measures, but seemed the kind of boy girls were supposed to like, as opposed to the scrawnier (or tubbier), soft-faced ones we girls could actually talk to. Lila readily buys into the peer-determined standard of attractiveness: the middle-school neighbor boy she hangs out with and “confides” mostly lies to is just a friend. The barely verbal, college boy with the tattoo winding around his shoulder whom she sees at the beach (and of whom Chiara says, “He’d fuck anything”) Sammy (Ronen Rubinstein) is the boy she pursues.

The problem is: she hasn’t even been introduced to or talked to him. And because Lila is at the very beginning of forming her own identity, and Sammy barely acknowledges her–as either a pretty girl or just a person–neither of them have anything to say to one another. Even when she visits his workplace he continues to merely tolerate her company as her machinations to spend time with him (and to try to make him want to spend time with her) become progressively more desperate.

Although another world of cultural and social opportunities would be just a subway ride away for Lila, she, for the moment, is stuck in a very limited high school social sphere those of us who grew up in the suburbs will recognize. Because Lila is so young she doesn’t realize she can escape and doesn’t find out, until too late, what the audience knows from the start, that no matter what she does to or for Sammy (or pretends to), he still won’t give a shit about her. In the same way she doesn’t know (but her father does) that Chiara’s romance with Patrick won’t last, no matter how “in love” they say they are. In the end Lila is too young to know that Sammy, if he did reciprocate her interest would have to be something of a loser himself, because she’s just a kid, yet to be formed.

THE WRITER-DIRECTOR TALKS ABOUT THE FILM

I was able to speak by phone to Eliza Hittman (whose remarks here are edited for clarity and concision). Hittman says this film was influenced by French writer-director Catherine Breillat (Romance, Fat Girl): “There’s so much that’s provocative in her work. It explores power dynamics between women and also these views of romantic love and different types of sexual experiences that you don’t necessarily encounter in a film about young women growing up.

“Catherine Breillat is part of a movement that explores sex as hard. I think a lot of times you watch films about girls who are pursuing men and the main character is super-sexualized. What’s different about this film is, the intention of the character is the same, but in this film you don’t want to see her have the experience. She’s not ready and it’s not reciprocated. That’s uncomfortable to watch but I feel like it’s true, at least of my experience growing up.

“(Lila’s age) is when all of the pressure starts. (You are) looking for models, so you build your identity. That’s why the character dyes her hair like her friend.”

Hittman says, “The title (of the film) for me is about wanting to have a certain type of intimacy without quite knowing what it is. When you’re that age you’re always (wondering) what love is. I was listening to that song, “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” from the 60s. This character is pursuing something and not really knowing the difference between positive and negative experience.”

Although the film will have theatrical releases in New York (this Friday, March 21) and Los Angeles (on March 28) and has received good reviews, like Concussion, another well-reviewed film about a woman from a woman writer-director that was part of Sundance in 2013, it won’t play theaters in my very art-house-friendly city, but will be available on VOD. I can’t shake the feeling if the film were directed by a man, and told from the viewpoint of Sammy, it would be in more theaters. I asked Hittman to comment on distribution of women-directed, women-centered films, “I will say that it does feel like there are limited options for women telling stories about women.You get to Sundance and you have, or I had, this realization that everybody buying and selling movies is male. I think that affects the market in some way.”

You can help change this status quo by making plans to see Hittman’s disturbing, distinctive film however you can. More info, including on future screenings of the film, can be found at http://itfeltlikelove.com

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrqcUMN4s8E “]

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

Fandom, Feminism, and One Direction

One Direction is, first and foremost, a product. And yet I think the consumption of 1D by fans demonstrates that young women are not completely manipulable by corporatocracy, but rather comprise a powerful grassroots movement capable of taking what they are fed and reappropriating it on their own terms, often in ways that defy the design of the corporate media producers.

As feminist critics, we get very frustrated by the constant cultural devaluing of media aimed primarily at girls. It goes farther than just a lot of people saying, “Twilight sucks,” because Twilight does suck, but it’s not always clear if people are making a legitimate critique. Are they saying, “Twilight is poorly written and full of problematic assumptions and messages,” or are they saying, “Ew, it has a female creator, a female protagonist, and a predominantly female fanbase”?

Even the former can contribute to the cultural devaluing of girl stuff. I’ve read literally dozens of feminist critiques of Twilight, some of them very detailed and very thoughtful; but I just don’t see an equivalent barrage of critique leveled at, say, Transformers (which could be considered the masculine-coded equivalent of Twilight). Of course the reason for this is that Twilight, being “for girls,” is more interesting from a feminist standpoint than Transformers and offers a richer vein of potential for feminist analysis; but the upshot is a net contribution to the vastly greater cultural scrutiny of products for girls than of products for boys.

One solution is to quit scrutinizing stuff for girls so closely, but if we do that we lose valuable feminist analysis. Another is to start scrutinizing stuff for boys with the same critical eye, but Jesus Christ, have you seen a Michael Bay Transformers movie? Nobody should be subjected to that. Perhaps the correct counterbalance to feminist critique of bad stuff for girls is the feminist championing of good stuff for girls.

Caveat: when I say “for girls” or “for boys,” I am not being prescriptive. I’m a 24-year-old man writing publicly about my love of One Direction. I do not believe that any book, movie, music, TV show, article of clothing, color, website, philosophy, job, hobby, interest, or anything else is inherently “for girls” or “for boys.” I use the terms advisedly, to refer to the demographic towards which a product is primarily marketed and the demographic that comprises the majority of its consumers (which are not always the same demographic).

Let’s get the unavoidable critiques out the way first. One Direction is the product of a cynical capitalist empire and when you buy your 1D concert tickets (assuming you can – they’re way outside the grad student price range) you are lining the pockets of Simon Cowell and perpetuating the manufacturing of lowest-common-denominator entertainment where artistic merit is firmly subjugated to the concern of profit margins. The band is designed as a hegemonic artifact servicing the production of heteropatriarchal capitalist values: five cute but non-threatening boys for barely-adolescent girls to swoon over and spend their (parents’) money on.

Fan participation is key to how 1D is consumed by its fans. Fanfiction platforms are abuzz with works about 1D, some of it even officially endorsed, and there’s even an iPhone app specifically for 1D fanfiction. Even the lead animator for Archer has gotten in on the action. Of course, it would be remiss of me to talk about 1D fandom without mentioning the Larry shippers – the people who want Louis and Harry to be in a relationship. Obsessive shipping of real people is damn creepy, and when the shippers try to bend reality to their will it gets a little horrifying. But I think for the most part, barring the tinhat fringe, it’s not the “real people” that many shippers are interested in. It’s “Harry” and “Louis,” the public personae, who are by design not real people. The artifice is part of the point. The fantasy of fan participation is the way in which fans, mostly young women, can reclaim agency by writing themselves and their desire into the corporate product they are fed.

The movie One Direction: This Is Us is just one part of the 1D package. It’s a bit of fluff comprising ninety minutes of concert footage and squeaky-clean depictions of the 1D lads being Nice Boys. As an official production, it naturally doesn’t address fan reappropriations, but there’s the kernel of something interesting there. The boys repeatedly thank their fans, claim to have the best fans in the world, say they would be nowhere without the fans. On the one hand this is kind of true, but on the other hand they are a manufactured group who started on a reality TV show and are in the pocket of the most powerful mogul in pop music. The fans may have made the band, but the media empire made the fans.

This is why I think it’s so important to see the fans reacting in ways the media empire couldn’t predict or endorse. These fans are an extremely powerful force, sometimes for ill, sometimes for good, and that cannot be ignored.

Of course, all the focus on the behavior of the fandom can obscure the basic fact that 1D are feelgood and fluffy. Even taking them at face value, they don’t on the whole have a bad message. In a pop milieu that elevates Robin Thicke, 1D are noticeable for their deference to female agency. Every song on their first album, and most of the songs on the subsequent two, are addressed to a non-specific (but usually female) “you.” They are all expressions of blisteringly sincere emotion within the completely artificial framework of the manufactured boy band talking to the generic listener, but the emotions are always gentle. There are the Sad Songs, where the singer (who is, it must be noted, never singular: the five lads divide up lines in all the songs) laments his deep, sincere, unrequited feelings for You; and there are the Happy Songs, where he/they rejoices in deep, sincere, requited love. The subtext of many of these Happy Songs is pretty explicitly sexual, but it’s always entirely reliant on Your – the implied young female listener’s – consent. Take one of my favorites, “Kiss You”:

[youtube_sc url=”http://youtu.be/T4cdfRohhcg” title=”One%20Direction,%20%22Kiss%20You%22″]

Tell me girl if every time we touch
You get this kind of rush
Baby say yeah, yeah, yeah

If you don’t wanna take it slow
And you just wanna take me home
Baby say yeah, yeah, yeah

And let me kiss you

You’ll never convince me that this song is actually about kissing. Not only do the opening lines talk about “turn[ing] your love on,” that stuff about not taking it slow and taking the singer(s) home is language more usually associated with sex. Even if you accept the naivety of “kiss” at face value, though, rather than reading it as coy metonymy for sex, the song is explicitly about consent and communication. From the opening verse’s “Tell me how to turn your love on” to the chorus’ exhortation to “say yeah, yeah, yeah,” this whole song is about talking about what you want and making sure your partner is enthusiastically consenting before anything happens. Almost all of the songs, Happy or Sad, grant the (female) listener agency. The narrator lays his feelings bare, and You can prolong or end his misery or joy by reciprocating or not; but the decision is always Yours, and You are never coerced or ill-treated. “Blurred Lines” this is absolutely not.

Let’s get back to the gay shipping though. This Is Us doesn’t address it directly, but it takes care to show the lads’ uniquely close relationship with one another, in a way that’s surely grist to the shippers’ mill. There’s a certain queerness inherent to the homosocial structure of the boy band, noticeably in the collectivity: 1D don’t harmonize all the time, nor do they take turns on songs, but they share lines within the songs. Their songs seem to have a clear, singular narrator, but the five boys take turns being that narrator. The 1D collective addresses the (collectively-singular) listener. In some ways you’re being invited into a relationship with all five of these fellas, even though it is the done thing to have a favorite.

I’m not saying that One Direction is a feminist triumph. It’s still a manufactured boy band, and as such it’s not reinventing the wheel, and the fandom can be absolutely vicious. But I think it’s about time we started giving young girls a little more credit for the way they consume the things they like.

Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. He’s not afraid of all the attention, he’s not afraid of running wild.

‘Bob’s Burgers’: The Uniquely Lovable Tina Belcher

Delightful Tina. Shy, painfully weird, butt-obsessed, quietly dorky, intensely daydreamy Tina. Tina is a little bit like all of us (and–cough–a lot like some of us) at that most graceless, transitional, intrinsically unhappy stage of life that is early adolescence. She is also a wonderfully rich and well-developed character, both in her interactions with her family and in her own right, and she’s arguably the emotional core of the whole show.

Written by Max Thornton as part of our theme week on Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists.

It might seem odd to be writing about Bob’s Burgers for Bitch Flicks‘ Child and Teenage Girl Protagonists week, but I can justify it. For the uninitiated, Bob’s Burgers is an animated comedy centered on the Belcher family,who run the titular restaurant: long-suffering paterfamilias Bob (Archer/Coach McGuirk!), his irrepressibly cheery wife Linda, and their three children–awkward 13-year-old Tina, genial 11-year-old Gene, and borderline-sociopathic 9-year-old Louise. The show is charming, warm, and very funny, and it’s no great leap to declare it the spiritual and comedic successor to The Simpsons. It’s also eminently possible, as A.V. Club’s Sonia Saraiya explains in a recent article, to read Tina as the show’s protagonist.

Delightful Tina. Shy, painfully weird, butt-obsessed, quietly dorky, intensely daydreamy Tina. Tina is a little bit like all of us (and–cough–a lot like some of us) at that most graceless, transitional, intrinsically unhappy stage of life that is early adolescence. She is also a wonderfully rich and well-developed character, both in her interactions with her family and in her own right, and she’s arguably the emotional core of the whole show.

The typical oldest child on TV doesn’t look like Tina. Oldest children are smart and accomplished or bratty and rebellious, but always outspoken and confident: Becky from Roseanne, Sondra from The Cosby Show, Bart from The Simpsons, Haley from Modern Family… The oldest child is almost never the clear point of identification for the TV viewer, but Tina’s gentleness makes her the most relatable and in some ways the realest Belcher.In Saraiya’s words, “She’s sensitive and working-class and even possibly neuroatypical.” This might not seem like a recipe for a popular television character, but it gives Tina a depth, nuance, and a potential for growth in comparison to which her family seems a little, well, cartoonish.

Wait... you mean to say... they ARE cartoons?? — Wait… you mean to say… they ARE cartoons??

Tina’s very existence is arguably an explicitly feminist triumph. To quote Saraiya once more:

In the original pilot for Bob’s Burgers, [Tina] was a teenage boy. That fundamental difference aside, Daniel Belcher and Tina Belcher are the same character—but looking back, that choice had enormous implications for the show, because a TV audience has never seen a girl growing up like this. She’s nothing like an archetypal teen, but she’s also unmistakably one. She daydreams about kissing her crushes—and also about touching the butts of all the cute boys in her class. She fantasizes about being a prettier, bolder version of herself, who talks politics with adults and is an object of affection among the guys at Wagstaff School. … Puberty and dating have a typical arc on shows about teenage girls, but Tina’s arc on Bob’s Burgers is something else entirely. It’s gross. It’s messy. It occasionally encourages threesomes. And it’s hilarious, but the show is careful to never make Tina the butt of any jokes. (Tina touching butts, however, is okay.) If the viewer is laughing, it’s most likely with Tina—or at the very least, with the people who love her.

Amen to that.

An oddity of Bob’s Burgers is the fact that Kristen Schaal, the voice of the wonderfully evil Louise, is the only woman among the cast for the Belcher family. John Roberts voices Linda, and Dan Mintz voices Tina. Metatextually, I’m troubled by yet another instance of women not getting work in the vastly male-dominated industry of film and TV; but within the world of the show, it’s simply one instance among many of gender norms being subverted, tossed aside, or merely ignored by the marvelous Belchers. Whether it’s Tina regretting waxing her legs because she mowed down her “furry little friends,” Bob delighting in the fact that he also waxed his, Linda and Louise bailing on a creepily womb-centric mother-daughter seminar to bond over laser tag, or Gene casually declaring which outfits in a fashion catalog would suit him–all examples from a single superb season 3 episode, “Mother Daughter Laser Razor”–the Belchers are not bound by the anxieties of conforming to strict gender roles, and it’s glorious to behold.

The whole Belcher family dynamic is the real reason to watch this show. As Saraiya notes (and I swear this is the last time I will quote her), “everybody watches out for Tina, because Tina couldn’t hurt a fly.” As someone whose siblings are my best friends, I love the Belcher kids more than any other set of TV siblings. They pester and needle and tease other, as siblings do, but they also scheme together, protect each other’s greatest vulnerabilities, and have huge amounts of fun together. Tina isn’t bossy or a bully, like so many TV oldest kids. She’s weird, she’s wonderful, she’s a 13-year-old girl voiced by a 32-year-old man, and she’s one of the best young female characters on TV.

Also, she's basically Tumblr in human form. — Also, she’s basically Tumblr in human form.

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