Tag: Violence Against Women

Guest Writer Wednesday: A Review in Conversation of Twin Peaks

Welcome to Twin Peaks.



This is a guest post by Cynthia Arrieu-King and Stephanie Cawley.

Cynthia’s take: 
Why do I like Twin Peaks?
I remember dialing through Netflix Streaming back in May of this year as a way of breaking up the cooking of several chopping-intensive dishes. The show was totally unappealing to me when it came out and I was in high school. But this year, for the first three episodes or so, I could take it or leave it: adultery and hysterics and murder with the occasional bright spots of Dale Cooper being absurdly smug about the quality of cherry pie. 
Slowly I paid more attention to the idea of intuition present in Cooper’s scenes. I felt more indifference about its postmodern sorta-for-real, sorta-not simulacra qualities: fifties diners, women who all wear bright lipstick and clingy sweaters, a revolving door of high school types, baddies and inscrutable parents. 
Then, I saw the clip in which Agent Cooper dreams he is old, a little person talks to him backwards in a red room (redrum! redrum!) as does Laura Palmer who then whispers the name of her killer in his ear.
What.
And by the light of the next day, Cooper makes everyone go out in the middle of the woods, whispers the name of each murder suspect to a successive series of rocks in his hand and well, I’m not going to say more, but I was like what kind of bizarre Jungian Joseph Campbell version of the Trickster versus the Intuition is going on here? 
I love these parts but the over-the-top violence constantly involving the women characters wore on me. Because even as satire, Twin Peaks always asks you to recognize that if not at that moment, you once felt real emotion for characters like this, you fell for it, and it is nakedly pushing those emotional sexual violence id buttons to their unbearably absurd extremes, then splashing the cold water of flip logic and optimism in your face.
And over and over until about the beginning of the second season, I felt an edge of incredulity in myself: How could this have been on network television? How in the world did this happen? 
What did you like about it Stephanie? 
Stephanie’s take: 
What do I like about Twin Peaks? The Log Lady, the stoplight, the giant and the room service guy who brings Cooper his milk, every second of Angelo Badalamenti’s walking double bass, when Lucy says, “most of his behavior was asinine,” Ben and Jerry Horn stuffing their faces full of brie sandwiches, Audrey Horn’s saddle shoes, Nadine’s glorious silent drape runners, my unflagging belief in Agent Cooper. So many strange, wonderful things to marvel at in this show! You hit some of my favorite scenes, and the scenes that most stuck out to me on my second time through the show: the donut table at the stone-throwing divination and the first dream in the Black Lodge.
What I love about Twin Peaks, and Lynch in general, is his strange intensity and earnestness. What you called “postmodern sorta-for-real, sorta-not simulacra qualities” I actually see as Lynch making some kind of weirdly authentic invocation of the past or a spiritual core of America through the kitschy trappings of Twin Peaks. I don’t think that Lynch sees cherry pie and creamed corn and prom queens as truly “good” or the “true America,” the way that politicians might conjure apple pie and pick-up trucks to signify some idealized version of America. But I think Lynch uses these images and stock characters as potent cultural symbols that he can shuffle and reconfigure, but that carry strong psychological and cultural associations. As you said, I think that Lynch really is trying to wrestle with good and evil with Twin Peaks, using these cultural signifiers, and this is something I kind of love about it, even if it gets messy and maybe fails at making any kind of coherent statement. 
Though it seems strange to say, another thing that I like about Twin Peaks is that the violence is actually visceral and horrible. Lynch takes these symbols, especially the prom queen girl-next-door All-American sweetheart and perverts them to the extreme. As you say, “it is nakedly pushing those emotional sexual violence id buttons to their unbearably absurd extremes,” though I would also argue that the violence is of a very different quality from so much other violence in contemporary movies or TV shows. 
Violence in Twin Peaks is delivered in a way that is emotional and intense, not so much about cheap bait-and-switch jumpiness or the porno gore splatter, but the horror of the moment of the attack. The horror of violence as an action, as a depraved tunnel that swallows up everything we like about the world. We get so much of humanity being bright and good in Twin Peaks—Cooper, Harry, Andy, Lucy, etc.—but we are also forced to witness and even participate in the spectacle of unspeakable violence. 
(Spoiler alert) The scene when Leland/Bob kills Maddy is one of the most intense sequences I’ve ever seen on little or big screen. The clicking of the record player, Sarah Palmer’s bony hands, the glare of the lights as Maddy and Leland/Bob wrestle, their slow-mo distorted voices. My stomach is clenching just thinking about it. This scene is vivid and visceral, very different from the many horror movies or TV crime shows in which bodies, especially women’s bodies, are violated and disposed of with ease, with almost a wink to the viewer. I think that through scenes like this Lynch forces the viewers to confront violence in a serious way and thus to identify more thoroughly with its victims.
Of course, the victims are mostly women. In fact, violence against women is literally at the core of Twin Peaks. I’m not sure what my question to you is, but this is the thing I am trying to figure out—what to say about all the dead and victimized women?
Cynthia’s take:
What to say. What to say. So much victimization. So many women! I agree that Maddy’s murder is the worst violence I’ve ever seen in television or a movie. And I agree that it’s at the core of the story, and different in its tone than almost any other kind of violence against women in television. There’s no wink, as you say. But I think I read the good and evil in a different way than you do and the more I talk to people about Twin Peaks, the more it feels as if the show’s violence gets taken several ways depending on the viewer. 
I like all the good characters, so to speak, they are bright, but they don’t risk pure earnestness. They all have a crazy quirk to balance out the sincerity. Nadine’s insane eye-patch and youth. Andy’s inappropriate weeping. Cooper’s hanging upside down in his gravity boots while he dictates notes. It could be delight in life, it could be Lynch’s wish to burden us with quippy or awful silences. I can’t help but like this, but at the same time, it’s part of a problematic equation: The killer gets to say, “It was Bob who made me do it,” and can say he’s not responsible for any of this violence. Oops, he didn’t mean it, and in the world of demon possession, well, he’s telling the truth. No one is responsible for the murder of women. We dads just can’t help it and we’re inconsolable too.
I read this scene when the killer is in prison as a way for Lynch to be responsible, to critique this hands-off, “the devil made me do it” stance so prevalent in the way America does, well, everything. In a system of good and evil, it’s powerful that this (spoiler alert) is the close relative of the murder victim. But then my friend Kyle Thompson said, “No, no, no, it’s an apology, it’s not a critique.”
And I would say that he, as a man, may have a way of reading all of these shuffled signs (I love that you said that) in a way we do not and could not. 
Since it is pretty much the worst violence, the most operatic violence towards women I’ve ever seen, in the end I suppose all the dead and victimized women are the thing that kept me from not entirely liking the show up until I realized the show was about intuition, good and evil as you said in a way nothing else was. Twin Peaks flies in the face of our culture in so many ways it’s hard not to want to go apologist for Lynch’s apology. Which isn’t where I want to be. You’re right, it doesn’t have the kind of moral note that stems from sentimentalizing those we oppress – the wink – another-body-in-the-bank-attitude. It’s not network television crime show violence, though I feel it has some hem of magazine shows about murdered women in it, the way it wants to invoke gossip and pity with an old trope, familiar people, manufactured sensationalism. What’s important to me is that Lynch is saying, this is what it looks like close up.
I’ve met so many people who feel this is the best thing they ever saw on television. How accessible do you think the satiric aspect is for yourself or for anyone? Like Mad Men, I wondered if Twin Peaks re-inscribed racist/sexist notions until it started simultaneously to treat violence as serious and mocking us and soap opera for how enthralled we are by story. 
It’s the 20th anniversary of Twin Peaks. Why does it still work?
Stephanie’s take: 
I am really not sure about how accessible the satiric aspect of Twin Peaks is to today’s viewers, myself included, because of the current TV/media climate. So much TV today, especially reality TV, has this bizarre tone that is slightly self-mocking but is simultaneously dead serious about its extravagance. This is actually kind of similar to the tone of Twin Peaks, but I don’t think it’s that intentional or meaningful today. And I don’t even know if the general audience reads this kind of tone as satire, or as a particular form of humor, or if they just read it straight. After all, there are apparently conservatives who seriously believe Stephen Colbert is on their side, and there is a website of screencaps of people posting The Onion articles on Facebook and commenting as if they were serious news. And I sometimes find myself having to explain to my high school-aged students that the word “literally” does not mean “figuratively.” What I’m saying is basically that I don’t really know, but that today’s viewers might either be better or worse equipped to navigate the slippery nature of Twin Peaks, I just don’t know which! 
I think you’re definitely right that Twin Peaks is wide open for many interpretations, and I want to be able to read the killer revelation as a critique, but I just don’t think that it is. I similarly want to be able to read all the gender imbalance in the Twin Peaks landscape as a critique because I really do love so much about it, but I just can’t find enough to back me up on that reading at all. I just don’t think Lynch was thinking about gender that seriously. 
We have both admitted to fondness for the more fringe female characters like the Log Lady, Nadine, and Lucy, but they, and all the other women, really only exist according to their relationships with men. We find out the Log Lady, holder of mystical truths and wearer of incredible flannels, is a kind of Miss Havesham, that she only is the way she is because her husband died on their wedding night. Similarly, Nadine is the way she is—batty and amnesiac and eye-patched—because of husband Ed. And all of Lucy’s energy gets sucked up into a boring pregnancy and paternity subplot, though her pluckiness does seem to exist regardless of her poor taste in men-who-are-not-Andy. 
And the list continues. Audrey’s character arc consists of her moving from virgin with daddy issues to non-virgin with slightly different daddy issues. Donna does some intrepid sleuth-work, but spends most of her time dealing with her sappy relationship with James. Maybe only Katherine can be said to have a personality and take actions that are not based around her relationships with men, but her wiliness really depends on her ability to use sex as a form of manipulation. 
Meanwhile, Agent Cooper and Harry and Ed get to go out and fight for all that is righteous (though they also all have love lives), and Windham Earl and Leo and Ben Horn get to be menacing and threatening and powerful. Even Leland gets to be infected by demons at least! I would like it so much if any of the female characters were at least worthy of demon possession. 
At the risk of sounding like feminist criticism is about score-keeping or, as you said, playing apologist for Lynch, I think I could sort of “forgive” the horrific violence against women if the women characters were actually fully drawn and able to participate in the storylines in an equal way to the men. Since you bring it up, I think this is how Mad Men succeeds (though not with regards to its handling of race, ugh) in depicting a brutally sexist world and some seriously misogynistic characters in a way that is not sexist or misogynistic itself.
That said, I still pretty much love Twin Peaks. My boyfriend and I affectionately dubbed our apartment “The Great Lodge” because it has 70s wood-paneled walls, a fireplace, and is surrounded by pine trees. The Log Lady was my Facebook profile picture for a while. But fangirlishness aside, I’ve watched a lot of TV shows and I’m hard pressed to think of any that are as interesting and strange and ambitious as Twin Peaks.
But I think part of its allure is also in its unfinished-ness. Shows that are canceled unjustly in the eyes of their fans gain a kind of cult following and fervor they might not otherwise have if they were allowed to run their course and possibly collapse or devolve into sloppiness or repetition. Many of these shows, Twin Peaks included, are legitimately brilliant, but still benefit from the extra glory that our culture loves to tack on to things (or people!) that come to an untimely end. So, when we think about Twin Peaks, we necessarily think of the disappointing and horrifying and thrilling lack of closure at its end.
Cynthia’s take:
I can’t believe there’s five years of Mad Men and only two of Twin Peaks. Argh.
I like what you’re saying about the degree of gender critique in Lynch. It’s kind of like when my former classmate Kirk Boyle saw Dead Man by Jim Jarmusch and couldn’t read the cultural critique in it – Is it about Clinton? he asked me once. I was struck by how we can look for these systems of meaning out of habit and it makes me wonder right this second if there’s some blind spot in this. It seemed the movie was about a good death, lawlessness in the American vein, and immortality and that can be undetectable to an eye looking for allegory. Maybe allegory is the case here.
I agree with you about the little power of the women in this show, their silly or violent struggle. But I’m not on the same page with you about Audrey Horne. She does some pretty unbelievably audacious moral acts. She looks for Laura’s killer when in fact she had no deep friendship with Laura. She just knows something’s afoot with her father and the murder so she sleuths her way into being hired at the brothel—looking pretty fierce until the moment her father knocks at her door and she’s in a teddy ready for sex work. And doing better work in some ways than Cooper. She takes over her dad’s business by sheer will, but not after clearing out the entire meeting of Scandinavian investors by moping slyly about her sadness at the violence. She liked undermining her dad so that he would pay attention to her power, and in the end saved his business (and notably, threw off Bobby’s advances so matter-of-factly). To me she represents an m.o. something like, “We’re all playing a role in a power-play; at least I’m choosing my role and making it work for me.”
I guess my final word on the series would be that I like how Lynch holds a serious mirror up to our faces about how much we look for the violence and what it really is like. What’s your final read?
Stephanie’s take:
I still haven’t seen Dead Man and I feel like you’ve mentioned it to me before! In my queue. Anyway. 
I do think I was being a bit reductive in my characterization of Audrey. She is one of my favorite characters and that scene in the brothel is one of the most unsettling scenes of the show (and on a show that is deeply unsettling so often, that is saying something). I guess I’m just a little hung up on what happens with her storyline with the rich guy in the late second season. But I think I’d prefer to pretend that much of what happens in the late second season doesn’t really happen. 
To me, one of the testaments to Twin Peaks‘ greatness is that we’ve had this long exchange about it and could probably still keep going. More than once, I have found myself writing in big, aimless circles when trying to articulate what I think. The show can be read so many different ways, and as you’ve noted, it seems that everyone can bring their own particular interests and concerns to bear upon the show. It fails to resolve neatly, but I think this is what makes it so intriguing, so worth watching and then talking about. For all the interesting, quality TV shows we get to watch today, there is still nothing, to me, that is quite like Twin Peaks. 
My last words on Twin Peaks? Everyone should watch it and then invite me to Twin Peaks-themed murder-mystery dinner parties. I’ll bring the cherry pie. 

Cynthia Arrieu-King lives near Atlantic City but her cat Kenny lives in Louisville, Kentucky. She writes poetry and grades a lot of papers. On Sundays at 11AM you can hear her and Stockton students Jenna McCoy and Laura Alexander do a talk show about local and visiting writers,The Last Word, at WLFR FM Lake Fred Radio wlfr.fm.

Stephanie Cawley lives in Philadelphia with her cat, Vincent van Gogh. She writes poetry and reads a lot of comics. 


Why Facebook’s "Occupy a Vagina" Event Is Not Okay

Last week, a Change.org petition urged Facebook to remove pages that promote sexual violence. Some of the offending pages included, “Kicking Sluts in the Vagina,” and “Riding your Girlfriend softly Cause you dont want to wake her up.” The following passage from the petition explains the overall goal:

First, Facebook needs to clarify that pages that encourage or condone rape–like the ones mentioned above–are in violation of their existing standards. Secondly, they need to make a statement that all pages that describe sexual violence in a threatening way will be immediately taken down upon being reported. Finally, Facebook must include specific language in their Terms of Service that make it clear that pages promoting any form of sexual violence will be banned.

Jessica Bennett wrote about the petition and the #notfunnyfacebook Twitter campaign for The Daily Beast in an article called, “Should Facebook Ban Sexist Pages?” She writes:
In some ways, misogyny on Facebook is just a newer version of the same old problem. Indeed, there are enough stories like Sierra’s for Danielle Citron, a cyber law professor at the University of Maryland, to compile a whole book of them—she’s hard at work on a text about online harassment that will be published by Harvard University Press in 2013. She notes more recent cases that have made headlines: the women smeared by AutoAdmit, the law school discussion board; the case of Harvard sex blogger Lena Chen; and the dramatic story of 11-year-old Jessi Slaughter. “I talk to women every day who’ve been silenced, scared, and just want to disappear,” Citron says. “It’s easy to dismiss these things as frat-boy antics, but this isn’t a joke.”

Then, on November 5th, ZDNet published an article called, “Facebook Finally Removes Pro-Rape Pages,” and the writer goes into detail about Facebook’s “massive problem with sex”:
With zero tolerance for porn and a refusal to define it, Facebook has deleted breast cancer survivor communities (labeling one breast cancer survivor page as “pornography”), retail business pages, individual profiles of human sexuality teachers, pages for authors and actors, photos of LGBT couples kissing (for which Facebook just apologized), and even the occasional hapless user’s profile who has the misfortune of having someone else post porn on their Wall.

With no comprehensible or clear methodology around sexual speech, we see pages deleted that discuss female sexuality, while pages that joke about and encourage raping women and girls rack up the likes.

So, yes, Facebook complied (finally) and removed some of its pro-rape pages, but as Shelby Knox noted on Twitter, “… #notfunnyfacebook isn’t a victory until they clarify the pages violate their terms of service.” We’re still waiting, Facebook …
In the meantime, I’d like to talk about the Occupy a Vagina Facebook event. When it first appeared a little over a week ago, the page was bombarded with offensive and violent rhetoric targeted at women (all in the name of “comedy” and “fun” of course), but when many women and men got angry about the event–and pushed back by leaving comments on the event wall asking the creator to remove the page (because it promoted rape and violence against women)–the creator deleted the comments. Now, the Occupy a Vagina event page says this:

(Edit for all the trolls)

*************

To all of you people who want to assume this event has anything to do with rape, you are completely wrong… This event was created by a WOMAN as a JOKE!!! If you don’t think it is funny, then click not attending and move on… I will be deleted any trolling ass messages about “promoting anything” other than comedy so don’t waste your time……

I mean, where in the fuck do I even begin? (Seriously, I keep starting and re-starting paragraphs because I don’t know where the fuck to begin.) With outrage? Okay, look: I don’t give a shit if a woman created the event, or if a man created it, or if I created it when I was passed out drunk in my bathtub–if it promotes rape, then it promotes rape. The author basically makes the ridiculous assertion that women can’t possibly participate in the perpetuation of rape culture (e.g. “this event can’t even contribute to rape culture because a woman created it to be funny.“) No. See, the thing is–and people still can’t seem to successfully grasp this in Sexual Harassment 101–intent is irrelevant. Do I believe the creator intended to invite a bunch of people to an Occupy event sponsored by rape culture? Or that the “attendees” honestly believe they’re engaging in anything that might directly or indirectly cause women harm? Not really. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the event is out there, and it’s seriously problematic, and it isn’t just “harmless fun”; it’s another permanent fixture in (omg, is she gonna say it again?!) rape culture. Here’s a primer:
According to the rape culture theory, acts of sexism are commonly employed to validate and rationalize normative misogynistic practices. For instance, sexist jokes may be told to foster disrespect for women and an accompanying disregard for their well-being. An example would be a female rape victim being blamed for her being raped because of how she dressed or acted. In rape culture, sexualized violence towards women is regarded as a continuum in a society that regards women’s bodies as sexually available by default.

It’s important to note that even the language–occupy a vagina–divorces women from their own bodies. It’s a form of dismemberment, and I’ll say it again: we live in a rape culture, a culture that reduces women to body parts, whether it’s to sell a product, to promote a film, or for nothing more than reinforcing (and getting off on) patriarchal power. When we use language that prevents us from seeing a person as a whole human being, language that encourages us to view women in particular as a collection of body parts designed for male pleasure (e.g. occupy a vagina), then she exists as nothing more than an object, a fuck-toy, sexually available by default. It might not have been the intent of the event creator to participate in women’s subjugation, but it’s certainly the fucking reality.

It’s also important to talk about the Occupy a Vagina event within the context of the recently reported rapes and sexual assaults at several Occupy camps. The founders of the valuable Web site Occupy Patriarchy wrote a piece that highlights many of the incidents. In response to the assaults, several women’s groups have moved forward in creating safe spaces (like women-only tents) so that women can fully participate in the Occupy movement without fear, although safer sleeping areas don’t necessarily mean women will experience less groping and invasion of personal space in general. Obviously, we need to address the underlying (and pervasive) privilege in the movement that allows violence against women to occur in the first place, but these are all positive first steps to ensuring women can, you know, Occupy.

Now, let’s talk about what it means, in the context of the movement, to “occupy.” The original organizers of Occupy Wall Street proposed the following: We show up at Wall Street on September 17th, with tents, and we fucking move in. Why? Because it’s ours. You can hear it in the chants and slogans at every rally: “Whose Street? Our Street!” Even the Occupy Times Square protest was often described as, “taking the square.” This, my friends, is a campaign that involves moving into public spaces; it involves taking back, or reclaiming, our cities and reminding the very small yet powerful group in charge that it’s really the people who own this shit. And, perhaps most importantly, it involves resisting when we’re told to leave. [Note: the problematic “occupy” language, as it pertains to Native territory, has been written about far more elegantly and intelligently than I can do here, so please read those pieces as well.]

If we read the Occupy a Vagina event in the context of the other Occupy events (and why wouldn’t we), it’s easy to immediately see the problems: vaginas are not public spaces; they don’t belong to a collective group; they can’t be owned or reclaimed; and resisting when a woman tells you to get the fuck off her vagina–well, that’s rape. It isn’t funny. It isn’t harmless. This isn’t a cute little “event” that’s upsetting a small minority of angry feminazis who can’t take a joke. It contributes to rape. To narcissistically quote myself from a previous piece about rape culture: 
…This constant, unchecked barrage of endless and obvious woman-hating undoubtedly contributes to the rape of women and girls.

The sudden idealization of Charlie Sheen as some bad boy to be envied, even though he has a violent history of beating up women, contributes to the rape of women and girls. Bills like H. R. 3 that seek to redefine rape and further the attack on women’s reproductive rights contributes to the rape of women and girls. Supposed liberal media personalities like Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann showing their support for Julian Assange by denigrating Assange’s alleged rape victims contributes to the rape of women and girls. The sexist commercials that advertisers pay millions of dollars to air on Super Bowl Sunday contribute to the rape of women and girls. And blaming Lara Logan for her gang rape by suggesting her attractiveness caused it, or the job was too dangerous for her, or she shouldn’t have been there in the first place, contributes to the rape of women and girls.

It contributes to rape because it normalizes violence against women. Men rape to control, to overpower, to humiliate, to reinforce the patriarchal structure. And the media, which is vastly controlled by men, participates in reproducing already existing prejudices and inequalities, rather than seeking to transform them.

It’s unfortunate that I need to add to this:

Facebook’s refusal to ban all pages that condone sexual assault and violence against women, and their refusal to acknowledge that these pages violate their already existing standards, contributes to the rape of women and girls.

See, at Bitch Flicks, we believe more than anything that the blind and uncritical consumption of media portrayals of women contributes to furthering women’s inequality in all areas of life. And as we all learned from The Social Network, one of the most misogynistic fucking movies I’ve ever seen, Facebook is a form of media that’s defining a generation. (Thanks so much for your contribution, Fuckers.)

YouTube Break: Jean Kilbourne’s "Killing Us Softly" Lecture

From her website:

Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on the image of women in advertising and her critical studies of alcohol and tobacco advertising. Her films, lectures, and television appearances have been seen by millions of people throughout the world. She was named by The New York Times Magazine as one of the three most popular speakers on college campuses. She is the author of the award-winning book Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel and co-author of So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids. The prize-winning films based on her lectures include Killing Us Softly, Spin the Bottle, and Slim Hopes.

Guest Writer Wednesday: Sucker Punch

Sucker punched by “Sucker Punch”– Girls and guns don’t equal female empowerment

This is a cross-post from What Tami Said.

This really is the best movie ever cuz its like hollywood finally said to me Fuk yeah you my man are all we care about heres some awesome shit for you to get off on and everyone else can just go fuk themselves and you get to watch. Read more…

I just “liked” Flick Filosopher Maryann Johanson on Facebook solely on the basis of her Sucker Punch review, written in what oddly sounds like the voice of the guy who sat behind me yesterday afternoon when I went to see the movie. Based on the predominately male and middle-aged audience in the theater, I am likely the only woman who fell for the previews and thought Sucker Punch might be some video game or graphic novel-based film about ass-kicking chicks who slay dragons and other cool shit. Well, actually, that stuff does happen, but it’s surrounded by too many other porny, fetishy, gender- and race-biased tropes to be any sort of empowerment tale. The characters were too cartoonish to be relatable. And the fight scenes and CGI weren’t exciting enough to allow me to forget the analysis and enjoy the fun. Sucker Punch comes off like a slightly twisted adolescent’s wet dream–if said wet dream had the benefit of a cool score and awesome computer-generated graphics.
Set some time in the late 50s/early 60s, Sucker Punch tells the story of 20-year-old Baby Doll (Emily Browning), who accidentally kills her little sister, while attempting to save the girl from being sexually assaulted by their stepfather. The act earns Baby Doll, whose mother dies in the film’s first frames, commitment to a Goreyesque Vermont mental facility, and, after her stepfather pays off a weasly orderly, a date with a lobotomist (Jon Hamm, who seriously must be saying “yes” to every acting job now), due at the hospital in five days. As Dr. Don Draper stands poised above a bound Baby Doll, wielding the long, sharp orbitoclast he will pound into her frontal lobe, Baby Doll (and the audience) escapes into the fantasy that is the rest of the movie, including a second world, where Baby Doll and her fellow inmates are enslaved at a “dance club,” where they are forced to offer sexual favors to keep the moneyed, male clients happy.
Let me concede that the dirty, gothic look of Sucker Punch was arresting. The soundtrack, with an ominous cover of the Eurythimics’ “Sweet Dreams,” was fantastic. I’ve already downloaded it. It’ll be great accompaniment when I haul my butt off the couch and start my spring running regimen. Also, I’m gonna need to explore more of actor Oscar Isaac’s oeuvre. The fight sequences in Sucker Punch were pleasingly flashy and loud with lots of leaping and flashing steel and steampunkery, but ultimately they were made hollow by repetition and uninspired choreography. We’re more than a decade on since The Matrix debuted. You gotta give me more than slow motion shots of a character leaping past bullets and dragon fire.
Since Sucker Punch couldn’t entertain me with its sound and fury, I couldn’t help but notice the larger problem in the movie: A disturbing and regressive treatment of women masquerading as “girl power.”
**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**Spoilers Ahead**
We can start with the infantilization of the lead character, Baby Doll, a 20-year-old rendered as woman child–tiny but big-headed, with large eyes and white blonde, pig-tailed hair, perpetually dressed in schoolgirl drag. She is mute and trembling through much of the first half of the film. The result is that Sucker Punch plays on “jail bait” fantasies using the cover that its heroine is truly an adult woman.
So too does the film leverage implied threats to women to titillate–particularly sexual threat. From the earliest scenes, when Baby Doll’s hulking stepfather eyes her lasciviously and tries to push his way into her bedroom, Sucker Punch highlights the protagonist’s sexual vulnerability–not to make a point about violence toward women, but to render her more fragile and endangered, and by extension, to underscore her femininity and desirability.
And it must be said here that the key to Baby Doll’s persona and her place in the film is her whiteness. Sucker Punch genuflects to the traditional views of womanhood that have historically been assigned exclusively to white women (to the detriment of ALL women). It is not a mistake that, of the gang of female characters, Baby Doll is the blondest and most alabaster of skin. She is the most innocent. It is she that is reserved for the most special of the fantasy club’s clients, the High Roller. It is her dancing that is so arousing that it hypnotizes the men who witness it. It is Baby Doll that the swarthy pimp/orderly (depending on the fantasy world) must have and who he intends to take by force. (A nasty nod to the white women in danger of rampaging dark men stereotype.) Conversely, it is the women of color in the film–Amber (Jamie Chung) and Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens)–who are drawn as the flattest of the flat characters, with no back stories or desires, but to serve Baby Doll. And it is those women whose lives are unwillingly sacrificed (literally) so that one pretty, blonde, white woman can live the life she deserves.
The most obvious sign that Sucker Punch is no female empowerment film–not even a Kill Bill (which I really liked and to which Sucker Punch plays homage)–is the plot itself. The idea that a young woman, who has recently lost her mother and sister; who is imprisoned for fighting against domestic violence; who may have endured rape at the hands of her stepfather or just narrowly escaped it; who is about to endure a forced medical procedure would, for relief from her trauma, retreat into a fantasy world where she is a sexual slave who must dance provocatively for strange men…absurd.

Sucker Punch is no female fantasy. Sucker Punch isn’t about women at all, despite the female leads. Josh Larsen of Larsen on Film describes exactly what Sucker Punch is:

…it’s the fantasy of a 14-year-old boy steeped in kung fu, “Call of Duty” and online porn. Read more…

And this is why I should start reading film reviews before I see films not after.
Tami Winfrey Harris writes about race, feminism, politics and pop culture at the blog What Tami Said. Her work has also appeared online at The Guardian’s Comment is Free, Ms. Magazine blog, Newsweek, Change.org, Huffington Post and Racialicious. She is a graduate of the Iowa State University Greenlee School of Journalism. She spends her spare time researching her family history and cultivating a righteous ‘fro.

On Rape, the Media, and the ‘New York Times’ Clusterfuck

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On Tuesday, March 8, The New York Times published an article by James C. McKinley Jr. titled, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town.” Eighteen men held down an 11-year-old girl and repeatedly raped her in an abandoned trailer while recording the rape with cell phones. Much has been written about McKinley’s—and the New York Times’—irresponsible, victim-blaming, rape culture-enforcing report of the rape.  Or should I say lack of report of the rape. While the entire article is a catastrophic joke, this paragraph warrants specific mention:
Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands—known as the Quarters—said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.
Shakesville breaks down the story, and it’s a must-read piece. The writer points out, “Nowhere in this story is the following made clear: … that our compassion and care should be directed first and foremost toward the victim rather than the boys, the school, the community, or anyone else.”  The NYT piece is such an obvious case of victim-blaming, and terrifyingly unapologetic, that it wasn’t surprising to see an immediate petition go up at change.org, “Tell the New York Times to Apologize for Blaming a Child for Her Gang Rape.” The creator of the petition, Shelby Knox, writes, “1 in 4 American women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. A culture that blames victims for being raped—for what they were wearing, where they were, and who they were with—rather than blaming the rapist, is a culture that tacitly condones rape.” As of now 43,820 people have signed the petition, and Arthur S. Brisbane of the New York Times has issued an apology—not without its flaws—regarding the lack of balance in the piece.
*****
That apology should’ve felt good to read. But about an hour before it was issued, I’d posted the petition on my Facebook wall, urging friends to sign it. And this was one of the first responses:

Actually…no. I just read the “offending” comments of Mr. McKinley. The complaint is that he “gave ink” to the opinions of some idiots from Texas? He’s a reporter for Christ’s sake. He’s SUPPOSED to present all angles of the story. Looks like responsible journalism to me. Attack the idiots in Texas for this. Attack the wretched perpetrators. Why in the world is anyone mad at The New York Times for telling the whole story? If anything its GOOD that they reported on those folks as well. Its important for people to know that there are idiots like that everywhere. This is wildly misplaced rage here. Wasting time on things like this is why no real problems ever get solved in this damn country. Let the public burning commence. I’ll be tied to the stake willingly. =)

Another person immediately agreed.  Thankfully, others jumped in to defend the petition, but I didn’t walk away from the thread feeling good about it. I felt defeated. Exhausted. Like I might burst into tears. So when the NYT finally got around to “apologizing” for publishing an article that never should’ve seen the light of day to begin with, I wanted to revel in the success of a group of people coming together to affect change. I couldn’t, though. And I started to think about why I couldn’t.
*****
The same day the New York Times published its story, the newspaper in my hometown published a report of another young girl’s rape, “Man accused of raping 12-year-old girl.” I read the opening paragraph: “A Middletown man has been charged with rape and intimidation of a witness after allegedly conducting a sexual relationship with a 12-year-old girl.” I read it again … “a sexual relationship” … “with a 12-year-old girl.”  I kept reading … “accused of having sex with a child younger than the age of 12” … “alleged abuse of the female juvenile.”What the hell? A child cannot consent to sex. Ever. Under any circumstance. So how does a man conduct a sexual relationship with her? How does a man have sex with her? And why does “the girl” suddenly become “the female juvenile”?  If I’d ever gone a moment without thinking about Rape Culture (and it’s hard to do), two newspaper articles published back to back—discussing the rapes of two girls as if one girl could consent to having sex with a man, while another could facilitate her own fucking gang rape—would make sure I spent a good few days and nights obsessing about the most recent media onslaught of violence against women.
*****
Three years ago, on March 28, 2008, Amber and I started Bitch Flicks. We respected blogs like Women and Hollywood that focus on women in film and explore how difficult it is for women to navigate the sexist terrain of Hollywood. And we wanted to be a part of that conversation, by looking closely at how popular films, television, music videos, movie posters, and other forms of media contribute to misogyny, violence against women, and unattainable beauty ideals. Because more than anything, we believe the blind and uncritical consumption of media portrayals of women contributes to furthering women’s inequality in all areas of life.

And we’ve noticed a few things here and there: rape being played for laughs in Observe and Report; the sexual trafficking of women used as a plot device in Taken; the constant dismemberment of women in movie posters; the damaging caricatures of women as sex objects in Black Snake Moan and The Social Network; and we’ve often pointed to discussions of sexism and misogyny around the net, like the sexual violence in Antichrist and, most recently, the sexualized corpses of women in Kanye West’s Monster video. It barely grazes the surface. I mean, it barely grazes the fucking surface of what a viewer sees during the commercial breaks of a 30-minute sitcom.

Yet, this constant, unchecked barrage of endless and obvious woman-hating undoubtedly contributes to the rape of women and girls.

The sudden idealization of Charlie Sheen as some bad boy to be envied, even though he has a violent history of beating up women, contributes to the rape of women and girls. Bills like H. R. 3 that seek to redefine rape and further the attack on women’s reproductive rights contributes to the rape of women and girls. Supposed liberal media personalities like Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann showing their support for Julian Assange by denigrating Assange’s alleged rape victims contributes to the rape of women and girls. The sexist commercials that advertisers pay millions of dollars to air on Super Bowl Sunday contribute to the rape of women and girls. And blaming Lara Logan for her gang rape by suggesting her attractiveness caused it, or the job was too dangerous for her, or she shouldn’t have been there in the first place, contributes to the rape of women and girls.

It contributes to rape because it normalizes violence against women. Men rape to control, to overpower, to humiliate, to reinforce the patriarchal structure. And the media, which is vastly controlled by men, participates in reproducing already existing prejudices and inequalities, rather than seeking to transform them.
And it pisses me off.
*****
“This is wildly misplaced rage here. Wasting time on things like this is why no real problems ever get solved in this damn country.” I decided to respond to that portion of my friend’s Facebook comment by quoting a passage from a piece on Shakesville called, “Feminism 101: ‘Feminists Look for Stuff to Get Mad About,'” in which Melissa McEwan makes the following argument:
 … in a very real way, ignoring “the little things” in favor of “the big stuff” makes the big stuff that much harder to eradicate, because it is the pervasive, ubiquitous, inescapable little things that create the foundation of a sexist culture on which the big stuff is dependent for its survival. It’s the little things, the constant drumbeat of inequality and objectification, that inure us to increasingly horrible acts and attitudes toward women.
People can argue that “the little things” are less important to point out than “the big things” all they want to. They can accuse feminists of misplaced anger, irrationality, man-hating, overreaction.  But the reality is that violence against women has become so commonplace in film and television, in advertising, in stand-up fucking “comedy,” in video games, that it’s the absolute default treatment of women in media, and we can’t pretend that doesn’t extend to how women are treated in the rest of society. It contributes to rape.  And it certainly contributes to a “liberal” newspaper’s inability to effectively report an 11-year-old girl’s gang rape without victim-blaming and slut-shaming, which, incidentally, also contributes to rape.
So. I gave myself a break. I let myself feel shitty and helpless for a minute. I’m over it now and ready to fight back. Stay tuned for our regularly scheduled programming …

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

The general media obsession with Mirren’s sex life has been replaced these days by a kind of awe, no less misogynistic, that a woman in her 60s can look attractive and happy. At 65, Mirren is adored and venerated; if it’s true that, after being made a Dame in 2003 and winning an Oscar in 2007 for playing the title role in The Queen, she has become that dreaded property, a national treasure, then at least she is one with plenty of sharp edges capable of giving you a painful nick if you’re not careful.

Feminism has gotten somewhat of a bad rap lately. Many people feel that it’s outlived its goals. Don’t women have equal rights now? What is there to complain about? The answer to this is that just giving people the legal possibility to do something doesn’t mean you are genuinely opening opportunities for them. Saying that giving people equal rights leads to them instantly being regarded as equals is like saying that giving African-Americans the right to vote ended racism in America. But what has all this to do with movies? Well, feminism isn’t just a political movement, but also an academic one. And yes, there is something like feminist film theory.

Feminism Friday: Any Woman Worth Her Salt from Blazing Modesty Changes the World
Not so for the moment a little earlier when, after spraying CCTV cameras with a fire extinguisher to cover the lens, she inexplicably, with the fire extinguisher still to hand, whips off her knickers to block the final camera.  This she can do easily and a million times more gracefully than any knicker removal I’ve seen or executed in real life, thanks to the massive slit in the tight skirt she wears to her office job in the CIA.  I can’t believe Jolie even did it, really.  I’d have been tempted to punch the director in the face.  There’s also a questionable moment at the beginning of the film when she’s learning to fold napkins for her anniversary dinner with her husband.  I find it very hard to believe this was part of the original script, and while the function of the episode is clearly to establish the husband and the occasion, this would never have been written for the character as Cruise would have played it.

A Question of Habit from Whalen Films
In the February 23, 2008 episode of Saturday Night Live, Tina Fey made a seemingly serious case for Hillary Clinton as president, arguing that we shouldn’t mind if she’s a bitch because “bitches get stuff done.” Fey went on to bolster her argument with the following observation: “That’s why Catholic schools use nuns as teachers and not priests. Those nuns are mean old clams, and they sleep on cots and are allowed to hit you. And at the end of the school year, you hated those bitches, but you knew the capital of Vermont.” How did nuns become part of this discussion? And how did they get reduced from the historical reality of their significant contributions to such a narrow and nasty caricature?

Shortly after the Oscars ended Sunday, Samuel L. Jackson sent an e-mail to a Times reporter wondering why no black men had been chosen to present awards on the film world’s biggest stage.

“It’s obvious there’s not ONE Black male actor in Hollywood that’s able to read a teleprompter, or that’s ‘hip enuf,’ for the new academy demographic!” Jackson wrote. “In the Hollywood I saw tonite, I don’t exist nor does Denzel, Eddie, Will, Jamie, or even a young comer like Anthony Mackie!”

Jackson may be on to something, at least when it comes to the young comers.

For me, this frustration is usually borne of being othered and disrespected, when I simply aimed to be entertained by a trashy novel or TV show. I dipped into Charlaine Harris’ Aurora Teagarden series, hoping to enjoy the books as I enjoy the TV series based on Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse series. Instead, I got a bunch of thinly-written, triggering stories where all women (but the protagonist) are routinely judged harshly and women like me (black women) are alternately sassy or angry or dead or running from the law, and blackness or Jewishness or gayness or any other “ness” that is not small-town and conservative and Southern and Anglo and Christian is to be frowned at or remarked upon or, best, hidden. And so, instead of enjoying a cozy mystery in my downtime, I wound up feeling uncomfortable and marginalized.

I dislike SATC for the way it forced its central characters into stereotypes. To service those stereotypes for the sake of a storyline. Chris Noth was the tall-dark-and-handsome wealthy man. Kim Cattrall the over-sexed hyper-assertive female who had to stumble over failed romances or personal trauma (breast cancer) to show her sensitivity. Cynthia Nixon is the cynical New York career-woman. Kristen Davis the doe-eyed, Rules playing, sweater-set wearing woman on a mission for the nuclear family and nothing else. Sarah Jessica Parker is the child who plays dress-up, even in her marriage, trying on costumes in the hopes that they’ll make her lifestyle complete. These roles needed to be boldly and sharply drawn in oder to parody or even slay some of the stereotypes of women.

At a do last year to crown Lennox Barclays Woman of the Year, barely half the roomful of 450 of Britain’s brightest women admitted to being a feminist. Lennox was disgusted. “They were afraid,” she says. In a sort of stream of consciousness ramble, she adds: “The word feminism needs to be taken back. It needs to be reclaimed in a way that is inclusive of men. Men need to understand, and women too, what feminism is really about. And it is not the parody that it has been diminished and turned into, and it is not this parody about whether you burn your bra or shave your armpits or whatever. That’s just nonsense. Actually it’s a red herring. It’s really disgraceful that it has become the kind of dumbing down of something that has to do with human rights, social and political values – and where we’re going as a world that is dominated by war and strife. And young women being born still have no rights over what is done to their bodies.”

Thelma and Louise came out in May of 1991 and change was in the air.  The film touched a raw nerve in women that had been lying dormant during the Reagan backlash years.  It became a cultural touchstone, was on covers of magazines, and got both Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon Academy Award nominations.  Geena Davis tells stories of women seeing her on the road and honking at her and thanking her for the film.  But here we are 20 years later and it feels like that film was never made.

Today, it’s time to look back at ten women who’ve made cinematic history. I won’t claim that this ten constitutes the “best,” because to do so would immediately detract from the hundreds and thousands of women developing cinema worldwide. These are, quite simply, ten women you should be familiar with. Some have the honor of “first,” while others have left an indelible impact on the industry.

Consider this your springboard to a rich history of female talent.

On the silver screen women are usually seen as a helpless mother, submissive wife, devoted girlfriend, overcaring sister, daughter or a vamp, but directors like Vishal Bharadwaj and Alankrita Shrivastava are trying to break the mould and present women in a more realistic, vibrant and unconventional way.

One-film-old Rajkumar Gupta’s “No One Killed Jessica” was an attempt to bring alive the struggle of Sabrina Lall’s fight with the Indian judiciary for years to get justice for her murdered sister.

Kathryn Bigelow may have been the first female filmmaker to win a Best Director Oscar for 2009′s The Hurt Locker. But did you happen to notice that for the most recent Academy Awards, the nominees in the same category were all men — in a year when two movies directed by women, Winter’s Bone and The Kids Are All Right, were up for Best Picture?

Gender inequalities exist throughout the arts, but they’re especially pronounced in the rarefied world of film directing. We all know a few big-name women filmmakers: Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Susan Seidelman, Catherine Hardwicke, Nora Ephron, Julie Taymor. In honor of International Women’s Day, we present ten great, contemporary female directors who you may not know but should definitely check out.

The key to the influence of film is HOW film is used to represent violence against women to the masses. The key is to see film as a tool:

Done well, a powerful documentary, movie, public service announcement, music video or television episode can give might momentum to helping activists and nonprofits working to end violence against women motivate grassroots support for the cause.

Done right, the film-maker will be able to walk the balancing act of accurately depict the horrors of violence against women while inspiring the viewer to join the movement to end violence against women.

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