The Fem Spot

The crying cat’s out of the bag

Posted in Feminist Theory, Politics, queer theory by femspotter on June 26, 2008

June 26, 2008

Now that Hillary Clinton has “suspended her campaign,” it’s safe for the media to release some of the feminist discourse that may have been held back. It’s safe because Clinton can’t use anybody’s words against them, and even if she tried, nobody would listen because the issue of her candidacy is moot.

I have a big mouth so I’m happy to do the job.

Gloria Steinem contributed an opinion piece to The New York Times: “Women Are Never Front-Runners.” She asks, “Why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?” She answers, “(B)ecause sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was.”

This means that the qualities of gender – masculine and feminine – are identified as the nature of the corresponding sex. Therefore, women are feminine by their very nature and are expected to be sensitive, gentle criers. And because tears are anticipated, a woman becomes a cliché if/when she does cry. (“Is it that time of the month?” men ask.)

Most people would prefer that their leaders don’t cry. This preference has given birth to a “no-tears rule” according to Steinem who commends Clinton’s “courage to break” said rule. Some reacted with sympathy when Clinton choked up in a January question and answer session: the poor woman is overtired and needs to thaw. Others said that she’s a phony.

There’s a biological reason for tears and it has nothing to do with sex and gender. Strong emotion of any kind – from sadness to happiness and back – can cause humans to weep. The protein-based hormones prolactin, adrenocorticotropic hormone, and leucine enkephalin build up causing psychic tears to well, and receptors in our tear glands read intense emotions and force these tears to flow. (How’s that for unisex science?)

The fear that Clinton’s crying when talking to a small group of women indicates that she will cry when talking to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for instance, is irrational, but it exists nonetheless. It’s the giving in to intense emotions that bothers some people; they see it as a sign of weakness.

There is no evidence that can resolutely prove that women cry more than men do. Even people who criticize Clinton and her soppy display probably cry themselves, but they do so behind closed doors.

I like Steinem’s theory because it agrees with mine: we are confused about the difference between sex and gender. Not all females are feminine and not all males are masculine. The problem with the assumptions about sex is that they are often false, and only sometimes true. Clinton cried when a freelance photographer asked her a sympathetic question: “How do you keep upbeat and so wonderful?” But just because she’s a woman who once happened to be somewhat overwhelmed by personal assurance, does not mean that she’ll have the same reaction to Raul Castro in the flesh. (I would cry at the sight of Castro, but I highly doubt that she would.)

People who believe that once a crier always a crier, in the case of women, are probably the same people who suspect and worry that Barack Obama is a Muslim. And if he’s a Muslim, then he must be a terrorist, right?

I’m surprised the press let this next one slip by and can only conclude that they ignored this comment because they have been walking on eggshells around the race topic. Michelle Obama had the following to say in a 60 Minutes interview with regard to her husband’s safety during the campaign: “I don’t lose sleep over it because the realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know. Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know. So, you know, you can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen. We just weren’t raised that way.”

The statement begs the question: who does she think is going to shoot him? And she’d have to answer carefully because each potential answer has a built in crapshoot. If she were to say “a white person,” she’d be guilty of her own form of racism, perpetuating a stereotype that racist whites want to kill blacks. If she were to say “a black person,” that’s almost worse. She’d be perpetuating a stereotype that blacks are out there with guns shooting each other.

Michelle’s statement is problematic for Steinem’s theory because it still ascribes a nature to each race. In order for the two ideas to agree, Michelle’s answer would have to be either “a woman” or “a man will shoot my husband.” But somehow, I doubt that’s what she had in mind.

And she can’t simply respond “some crazy person.” Because that lunatic has a sex and a race, both of which are visible in her mind’s eye.

Finally, I’d like to turn to a June 6 commentary by Rebecca Walker, as posted on CNN.com. “It is time to turn the page on myopic gender-based Feminism and concede that while patriarchy is real, so is female greed, dishonesty and corruptibility,” she wrote. I wonder where she got the idea that humans generally uphold the notion that women are morally superior to men by their nature.

If we can’t say unequivocally that women cry more than men, then we can’t say that they are uniformly more sensitive, caring or generous. And we can’t take that another step and say that they deserved the right to vote in 1920 because they were angels and not citizens, or that Edith Wharton deserved a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 because she was a saint and not a talented writer, or that Hillary Clinton deserved the right to be president because she is a holy vessel and not a qualified leader. I can’t recall any legitimate argument for emancipation that was based on a sex moral foundation. It would lose all of its steam the minute an Erzebet Bathory draws blood or a Martha Stewart obstructs justice, etc.

The argument that Walker is disputing, however, is the same one Steinem has observed: people still think that effeminacy is the nature of all women. Effeminacy is the nature of some women…but there are others with a tougher stance. For us to evolve past the point of marginalizing men and women based on masculine and feminine expectations, we will have to do away with such terminology and the idea of gender entirely.

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My vagina has a movie

Posted in Feminist Theory, Film and Television, Personal Essays by femspotter on June 4, 2008

June 4, 2008

With the hustle and bustle of daily life, I sometimes forget to listen to the little girl inside. She whispers, “I want to be a film director when I grow up.”

Several days ago, I saw a curious red balloon dancing in the rain. It gently rose and fell with the wind. I immediately ran outside to take a picture. Why? What is inspiring about a lonely red balloon?Castrate this!

When I took a moment to listen to my little girl inside me, she reminded me of the little French movie from 1956: Le Ballon Rouge by Albert Lamorisse. It’s about a little boy who befriends a red balloon and travels with it all about Paris for a day. And in the end, he flies away from a group of bullies who’ve popped his friend the balloon, clutching the balloon’s balloon friends who’ve flown over to play.

That’s a simple premise for a very lovely movie about friendship and imagination. When I was young, and even today, it spoke to me about the power of will and make believe. And where there’s a will, there’s a movie. I wanted to tell the stories created in my mind with much the same simplicity. I became a filmmaker and made two short films with very little dialogue and lots of fanciful imagery.

As I grew older, I realized that so few films spoke to me in the same way as Le Ballon Rouge had. There are many reasons for this: dialogue is often obvious and overstated, tropes exhaustively explored in films marketed at me and other twenty-something women are superficial, etc. Increasingly over the years, I have felt excluded from mainstream cinema because I have felt that so much of what happens on the inside of a character is exploited on screen. Additionally, the roles of women in these movies are marginalized: female characters are either sexy or matronly, but are rarely neither or both.

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly.” Laura Mulvey points out in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” that fictional cinema has a long-standing tradition of falling in line with the male phallocentric gaze: filmmakers have reflected male dominion, which has been at large in the world, in their movies.

“The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies.” To me this means that men want women to be powerless, but it is female submission to this desire that makes that power all the more relevant. If we women said “No!” and “Fuck you!” more often, we’d minimize this phallocentricism…in theory.

We are obsessed with the phallus in human society, today and historically. Swords, guns, buildings and rocket ships all make use of this physical presence, one that is outward and potent. The vagina on the other hand is inward and secretive. How could imagery in motion pictures possibly reflect this? In truth, there are few that do.

There Will Be Blood, the 2007 Oscar-nominated loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, works on this level of contempt for the female and castration of her power. Filled with flat, dry landscapes, one cannot miss the enormous erections of phallic oil towers and the seminal gushes that emerge there from. And yet Sinclair was sympathetic to the plight of the common female prostitute, as much as he was the working man. Gone is his socialist message. In the only scene in the movie that does depict a prostitute, she is heard but not seen. And there is no supporting imagery in the film that makes a case for her struggle. She and her vagina are sidelined.

How can I love the movies when they so blatantly offend me by castrating the presence of women?

I love the movies because every so often there is a little gem that comes along and speaks to me. The red balloon represents for me my vagina on screen, you see. It gets blown about and still follows the one sensitive person to whom it is instinctively drawn. “Look at me,” it says. “Love me.” Meanwhile, a gang of bullies thrusts after it and tries to pop it by throwing stones.

In 1993, Jane Campion made The Piano wherein she ties a female character’s identity to an instrument. I particularly like the scene in which Harvey Keitel, lusting after Holly Hunter, finds a hole in her stockings as she plays her piano. He pokes the hole with a stubby finger. Later on, Hunter’s own finger is cut off in an horrific instance of spousal reprimand. If the finger is meant to be a phallic image in the visual language of the film, then Hunter has been castrated. There’s also an unusual shot of the back of Hunter’s head wherein the camera tracks into her neatly-wound bun. This is the filmmaker asking the viewer to ask, “What’s this character thinking?” I think this entire movie is Campion’s way of exacerbating the tendency of cinema to take away all the power from women, including their right to keep secrets.

And last year in 2007, Adrienne Shelly’s film Waitress was released posthumously. The film’s female lead bakes pies and the pies stand for her secret emotions: she doesn’t want to be pregnant so she makes “Bad Baby Quiche.” At one point, she considers making a pie with a banana in the center. Wait! “Hold the banana,” she says and takes it out of the vaginal center of the pie. (I love this movie!)

Words cannot express my relief at witnessing a film about a woman who rejects the imposed obligation of motherhood and who embraces her own sexuality in the process. And yet she says to her lover, “I don’t want you to save me.” (I love this movie!)

Last week the movie Sex and the City was released and did big box office numbers; in fact, it had the largest opening weekend for a movie targeted at women, who statistically don’t rush out to the theatres on opening weekends. I liked this movie. But unfortunately, the female characters still reflect the male gaze that has created them. Carrie Bradshaw may have a new big closet, but it is a gift from a wealthy, powerful man. In an episode of the television series, Bradshaw likened this man to the Chrysler Building. She enables him to be so by assuming the passive role in their relationship. He is the skyscraper to her walk-in closet. (This only works for me because it seems to work for both of them.)

The little girl in me wanted to grow up to be the first woman ever to win an Academy Award for Best Director – maybe she still will. But I’ll have to do it on my terms with my women characters and my red balloon clutched in my small, chubby hand.

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