In defense of the evil stepmother…
April 3, 2009
Here’s a ranking where women really stay competitive with men: Entertainment Weekly’s “20 Vilest Villains in Pop Culture.” (Anybody else think that sounds redundant?) Anyway, women have nabbed spots 19, 15, 14, 10, seven and one, but – in the spirit of sex equality – I think we should be awarded half of Norman Bates’ spot at number 12 since Norman is both himself and his mother; and she’s the violent personality. That means we have about a third of the list, including the top spot. (We only have five of 20 on the “Coolest Heroes” list.) Women really know vile villainy!
On second thought, most of these women just seem misunderstood. At spot 19, Alex Forrest of Fatal Attraction did boil a bunny, but she wasn’t the movie’s philandering spouse. Everyone is quick to forget that the Michael Douglas character was the real villain of the story, cheating on the beautiful, warmhearted wife and mother Anne Archer. Shouldn’t he be on this list instead of her? It bothers me that a political pundit (or two) compared Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with Forrest while the former was running for President: a tough, political machine compared with an unstable home-wrecker? (On second thought, Clinton may be the one who is misunderstood. Considering the Monica Lewinsky scandal, isn’t Clinton the opposite of a home-wrecker?) I guess, since Michael Douglas is already on this list (number 18 – Gordon Gekko of Wall Street), the creators felt it was best to spread the wealth, especially since both films were released in 1987.
Ranking number 14, Annie Wilkes from Misery is truly a destructive force, but she’s also a lonely spinster who has become a bit confused about the boundaries between literature and reality. Perhaps, if she spent time with villain number 10, Nurse Ratched of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – who shows no signs of emotion whatsoever, probably as a defense mechanism – the two could form a lonely spinster club. (“Spinster” really connotes something much darker and more pathetic than its male equivalent “bachelor,” don’t you think?) Her first name is Mildred, by the way.
And how about villain number seven: Catherine Tramell of Basic Instinct? Sure, she looks sexy with an ice pick in hand, but does anyone know for sure if she ever actually killed anybody?
The easiest vile villain to defend is number one, though: The Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. This woman gets a terrible rap for no good reason. How would you feel if you were born green and a flying house crushed your sister to death? I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for this “wicked” woman. And according to Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, her name is Elphaba Thropp, by the way.
The only woman on this list who I can’t seem to defend is number 15, Snow White’s evil stepmother, the Queen, in Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She wished her stepdaughter dead – and for her huntsman to cut out Snow White’s heart, that sick bitch! – for the sake of vanity: in pursuit of the title “Fairest One of All.” What kind of an excuse is that?
I have a mental block. I happen to know a certain stepmother…and she’s a doozy! I believe she may in fact be evil. (It’s really quite a shame because her children are lovely in spite of their Cinderella counterparts.)
She’s scoffed at someone’s “silly and irresponsible” career aspirations: writer, filmmaker, English Ph.D. She arranged to marry a father – as in hold a wedding celebration – in the house where two sweet, little boys grew up…with their own mother (now deceased) and that father. She’s taken down all of the pictures of their childhoods and filled the newly empty walls with photographs of her own kids. She insists that the boys’ maternal grandparents adopt her as their own, and insists that they, 83 and 89 year-old grieving parents, allow her to accompany them to doctor’s appointments in lieu of real relatives with whom they are more comfortable. She requires that the boy (now a man), who lives a great distance away, drive three hours with his dogs in tow – whom she hates and shuts in the basement – so that the man can have dinner with her and the father in the house that they’ve redecorated, leaving little testament to the long, lost mother. She sat inside the car while the man gave them their (combined) birthday present ($300 plus in home entertainment equipment) and didn’t acknowledge the gift in person, choosing instead to send an indifferent “thank you” card several days after the fact.
And to top it all off, she’s always at least 20 minutes late for brunch…and she doesn’t apologize for it!
This is a feminist blog, so I suppose the best thing for me to do in writing it would be to rise to the challenge of understanding her perspective. Like the witch born green, perhaps this stepmother was (just) born insensitive, narrow-minded, pushy, abrasive and with a complete lack of imagination. In that case, she should be pitied instead of loathed.
A friend of mine explained the stepmother’s mindset to me: “She’s an administrative professional. She probably doesn’t understand artistic careers. That’s just the way people like that think…and she’s a cat person.”
I know several open-minded, creative admins, I’ll have you know! I don’t think your job – which you perform to support your lifestyle – necessarily says anything about your worldview.
Another friend argued in the stepmother’s defense: “Doesn’t she have a right to a home of her own? Doesn’t she have the right to identify with her surroundings, just like the first wife before her?”
I felt myself wanting to find the smallest, darkest corner in my house and crunch my body up into the smallest ball I could so that I could squeak out the words, “I guess so.”
She does have the right to be herself and make the house her own. Yes, she does.
But like any good manager will tell you, a new supervisor can’t come into a workplace and undermine the authority that has previously existed in that environment without offending the troops. The workers will resent their new supervisor before the first work day reaches 5 p.m. The only way an interloper can build alliances within a new group is to respect the dynamic that existed before she arrived. And the same thing goes for a family unit. Change has to happen slowly so that everybody will embrace it.
Of course, that last thought is optimistic. When you’re dealing with senior citizens who are absorbing the loss of their beloved daughter, change may not be possible at all. But like the perspective of the stepmother, their perspective too is valuable.
It can’t be easy being a stepmother, especially under these circumstances. First of all, there’s the dead mother factor. In Bambi, the Great Prince of the Forest is not depicted as remarrying another doe and moving to the suburbs. It’s terrifying enough that Bambi’s mother died; the film does not disparage her by suggesting that Bambi or his father found a replacement.
In the second place, for whatever reason that I’m not privy to, the father and stepmother are refusing to move from the house where the boys grew up. Some things there are different now, not just the pictures. In the living room, they painted one wall red…but they left the blue and mauve curtains hanging in the windows. This means that when the family gathers together, they are forced to consider which things reflect the dead mother and which things do not.
Tacky does not an evil stepmother make. Maybe her title should instead be “Shortsighted and Insensitive Stepmother with Lack of Imagination and Design Sense,” or “SISLIDS” for short. Is that better? More feminist?
The Queen in Snow White, however, is (just) evil…simply put!
What do we really want from our female leaders?
July 3, 2008
I know that the American national political race is a popularity contest to some extent. But just how much of the process is sexual?
Before she conceded the race, I voted for Hillary Clinton in the New Jersey Democratic primary. I have observed and have commented on some of the nasty things people have had to say about Clinton. I get it. She’s just not as likable as Barack Obama and that translates to her lesser popularity.
Now, I’m not saying that Obama hasn’t been poked fun of during the past many months…but the witch iconography that has been applied to Clinton is pervasive in the political pundit arena, as well as in some of the online chat locations where average men and women, such as myself, visit and babble. Consider the following imagery:
This type of “humor” is rooted in the fear and dislike Americans collectively feel for strong and confrontational females. Men, in particular, may find Clinton frightening because she threatens to usurp their authority, rendering them castrated, so to speak. Hence, we have these images:
Whether she’s thought to use her thighs to crack nuts or not, her thighs have become another source for our general dislike of Clinton:
The sign reads: “Hillary Special…Two Fat Thighs with Small Breast and a Left Wing.” So not only has Clinton been compared to a notorious, cackling killer of small animals, she is also compared to a piece of meat; and as such, she doesn’t make the grade. I guess that instead of going to law school, travelling the world, raising a daughter and perfecting her political prowess, she should have been starving herself, getting breast implants and posing for Vogue magazine with Angelina Jolie. That’s really the job of a woman in politics, right? (And while we’re on the subject of Ms. Jolie, do people really believe she’s strong enough to pull off any of the stunts in her new movie Wanted? She looks like vermicelli.)
Clinton’s relationship with her husband is also under intense scrutiny. Take a look at these:
What these prove is that she can’t win either way. If Bill Clinton is seen to have influence over her choices, she ceases to exist entirely. If people perceive that she’s the one in control, she comes off as a dominatrix.
I don’t have these ideas of Clinton and I haven’t considered her likability when choosing her as the next President of the United States. I don’t want to have a beer with the woman, I want her to run a country of potentially 400,000,000 morons who do consider her likability in these terms.
I asked a conservative colleague of mine what he thinks of Clinton. “She’s a liar,” he said. “She tells people what they want to hear. She panders to a specific audience.” These are legitimate complaints. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but he has obviously put some thought into a relevant argument against her electability.
But then he said, “I have absolutely no respect for any woman, including my wife, who catches their partner cheating and stays with them.” Whoa! Hold on! What? He took his argument to the place I am now disputing: a contest of sexual likeability and gender marginilization. If he’s thinking ill of her because she made a decision to forgive, or at least to move on with, a lecherous husband then I cannot support his earlier analysis of her integrity. He’s alligned himself with the Wicked Witch of the West and the Nutcracker theorists and put Hillary in a place of sex and gender based scrutiny. He’s decided to judge her based on her place in a marriage rather than her place in the U.S. Senate.
I probed further. It turns out, this conservative has a longstanding issue with Bill Clinton. “Because of Bill,” he said, “the blow job became very popular with 13-year-old kids. They now think that blow jobs are not sex.”
I want to work with this idea in two ways: 1. Is this really true? and 2. What does this have to do with Hillary?
Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz is a journalist’s investigation of a 1989 rape in Glen Ridge, NJ. Several popular atheletes raped a mentally disabled girl in one of their basements. They used a baseball bat and a broom handle, in addition to their dicks, to penetrate the young woman. As it turned out, many of these atheletes were not used to “face-to-face intercourse.” “Sex was something that was done to them, not something they actively participated in. Hand jobs and blow jobs-jobs that girls performed at their bidding. The guys were the formen supervising their work crew.”
Lefkowitz’s analysis of this trend was that the blow job was not something the boys considered to be “sex.” And it wasn’t an act that put pressure on them to perform well. Sexual intercourse is often judged successful if both participants get off. If the girl didn’t get off, the boy would have been said to have failed. But the blow job was just something for girls to perform successfully.
This all happened in 1989 before the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal of 1997, and many people who read the book could identify similar thinking in high schools across the country. I think that Bill Clinton, therefore, did not invent the blow job as a means to avoid intercourse. He just put that concept on television.
And where is Hillary in all of this? She’s not the one with her dick in somebody’s mouth. She’s not the one on her knees under a desk. And she’s not the one watching this unfold on television like an episode of The Jerry Springer Show.
So how does Monica Lewinsky’s job reflect negatively on Hillary Clinton? We American’s have thrown every standard in the book at Clinton and she’s managed to meet or cleanly dodge most of them. She has a bright smile and healthy skin. She looks slender in her trademark pantsuits. She teared up when she got emotional about her wishes and dreams, and slammed her fists down hard when objecting to Obama’s smear tactics in Ohio.
The problem for Clinton is that every time she has changed to fit our fickle standards, we throw another one in her direction. If we tell her to be tough, she is. Then we tell her she’s a “bitch” or a “witch.” Then we turn around and tell her she’s too soft when she cries or publically forgives a cheating spouse. She can’t win.
And she won’t until we decide what we want. Americans can be really picky, it seems.
We’re picky about our Hillary Clintons and not about cheap, plastic footware. I get blisters just thinking about these:
One of my friends told me he thinks people hate Clinton on a case-specific basis. “It’s not every woman,” he said. “It’s this woman.”
So let’s hope that the next woman to run for President doesn’t come with her own Bill.
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