Glasses, Marilyn and Me
‘Men aren’t attentive to girls who wear glasses’ is Marilyn Monroe’s sober pronouncement at the end of 1953’s classic How to Marry a Millionaire. As the myopic Pola, she’s spent the whole of the film whipping off her glasses as soon as she gets a whiff of aftershave.
‘Honestly Pola, why can’t you keep those cheaters on long enough to see who you’re with?’ asks exasperated gal pal Lauren Bacall, to which Pola replies:
‘Oh no, I’m not taking a chance like that! You know what they say about girls who wear glasses.’
Apparently – according to a single and slightly biased internet source – this wasn’t a million miles away from Monroe herself, who was ‘nearsighted and often wore glasses at times when she was out of the limelight’. If we believe this Fun Fact, its absence from the public domain underscores the irony. You know what they say about girls who wear glasses.
Got To Put My Cheaters On!
I’ve got a lot of sympathy for poor Pola-Marilyn. I’ve had moderate to severe myopia since primary school, and spent a large portion of my teenage years bumping into things and hugging strangers out of a misguided desire to be considered attractive by the Average Teenage Boy.
The Glasses Situation, by Hodge.
To be fair, I am unluckily one of those people for whom glasses do not automatically provide a sense of insouciant high-end Tom Ford cool – all the angles of my face are fattened and distorted with a bad pair of frames. And the laws of statistics and dubious teenage taste dictate that most longstanding myopics will choose a bad pair of frames several times over the course of their younger lives before alighting on the style that works for them. (I’ve always considered it very mean that the average glasses model can be selected for her glasses-friendly angles, whereas Real Life distributes myopia and astigmatism with no such aesthetic consideration. But lol fashion industry / real womenz / shocker.)
Marilyn as Pola in How to Marry a Millionaire
To bring the sob story towards a conclusion: I got contact lenses for my sixteenth birthday, wore them every hour of consciousness (to the long-term detriment of my ocular health), got a few erosions, corneal scars and whatnot due to excessive wear, finally accepted I needed a good pair of glasses and recently found the pair of frames I like with the help of a critical and dedicated sales assistant and a significant wad of cash. I objectively like my glasses nowadays. But I still don’t wear them if I can help it.
Yes, I know. What.
Eyes Wide Shut
I have a literary precursor as far back as George Eliot, whose short-sighted Dorothea Brooke misses part of the plot of Middlemarch, by being ‘aware that there was a gentleman standing at a distance, but see[ing] him merely as a coated figure at a wide angle’. For Dorothea, the sights of Rome on her honeymoon are like ‘a disease of the retina’. On faut souffrir pour être belle, non?
Indeed, you certainly don’t see many glasses on women pre-1950 or thereabouts, although they’ve been around for a while. While part of this is undoubtedly an expense issue, pre-Nye Bevan and the NHS ‘John Lennon’ frames, and in the age of the Sherlock Holmesian ‘gold pince-nez‘, I think it was an aesthetic thing too. It’s significant that once bespectacled women start to appear in film and books they are generally working, or practical, women: Midge in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, who is opposed to the mysterious Madeleine Elster, a lady of leisure; the (sexy) secretary / librarian trope; the Plain Jane in need of a makeover and the woman who’s really very intelligent but not very sexy – the one you have to really look at closely to realise – gosh! – she looks like Kate Winslet.
‘Do you know? – without your glasses, you don’t look half bad.’
‘Do you know? – without my glasses, nor do you.’Kate Winslet in Enigma (2001)
These last are very much about glasses as a cover-up for something more exciting (whence, I assume, the provenance of the sexy secretary’s appeal). In another Marilyn Monroe film, The Seven Year Itch, the protagonist imagines his secretary throwing off her (tailored) jacket, throwing out her hair and losing the glasses, to reveal ‘I’m a woman! I’m flesh and blood!’. In much the same way, any unattractive high school social outcast has but to throw off their frames to reveal a Rachel Leigh Cook or an Anne Hathaway. Glasses, a synonym for intelligence and mystery, are the first things to discard when you want to seduce the hottest guy in school, trust.
The 'Glasses Apostle' by Conrad von Soest (1403)
Of course, the popularity of pre-makeover glasses – and their enduring use in teen films – is partly practical. Glasses are the easiest way to disguise a Hollywood beauty, and an instantly recognisable trope for your basic socially inept personality traits: ‘brains’, ‘practicality’ etc. But as a teenager you’re inevitably subjected to a series of little humiliations and embarrassments that go on to dog you, to a greater or lesser extent, for a large part of your adult life. As a girl growing up behind a pair of glasses, and steeped in the standard adolescent amount of ideological nonsense, you cannot but associate all that tedious baggage (‘I’m unattractive! I’m awkward! Nobody fancies me!’) with the teenage glasses, and shedding it with embracing contact lenses.
Indeed, it even seems to be a kind of ironic (and slightly obnoxious) appropriation of these ideas when, conversely, glasses are deemed ‘sexy’ in themselves. One slightly palm-sweating blog in this vein compares them to garters – ‘men want to take them off [the woman wearing them]’, except more fetishy. Personally, I just wear them cos I like …seeing.
Glasses-wearer By Day, Superhero By Night
This is not just one for the girls – before he discovered the famous NHS frames, a very image-aware (but severely myopic) John Lennon refused to wear glasses when playing live, making him a Beatle who didn’t actually see the Cavern Club. But, by and large, men in glasses seem to have had an easier ride: the counterpart to the ‘sexy secretary’ is, rather unfairly, the Clark Kent / Peter Parker paradigm, or rather, ‘glasses-wearer by day, superhero by night’. Compare this to the excellent typist who ditches the glasses only to show her employer that, actually, she does enjoy sex (hmmm… enjoying sex / saving the world…).
Moreover, the weakness myopia is seen to connote in men is generally considered more attractive than the dowdiness it suggests in women – ‘You don’t think they make me look like an old maid?’ worries Marilyn-Pola, through her Dame Ednas, as does Bette Davis pre-makeover in Now, Voyager (1942) – and millionaire-seeking once again in Some Like It Hot, Marilyn hopes ‘her’ man will have glasses. ‘Men who wear glasses are so much more gentle, sweet and helpless’, she says. Indeed, there’s even a sense here that a man with glasses becomes less frightening or powerful, less brashly ‘male’. The only disadvantage for Marilyn is that when she kisses the one she finds, his glasses steam up.
But perhaps she has something when, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she asserts to her (bespectacled) groom’s disapproving father – who sees right through her gold-digging tricks – ‘Don’t you know that a man being rich is like a woman being pretty? You wouldn’t marry a woman just because she’s pretty but, my goodness, doesn’t it help?!’. If a woman’s face is her fortune, best not to cover it with glasses, eh?
But actually, I think the time has come to take that as exactly the nonsense it is. Seeing is sexy. Wear your glasses with pride.
As is my tendency, this is another party I was late to. I only got Arkham Asylum in late October last year as a gift in a Steam sale – it was only a fiver – and I had previously been rather sceptical about it. Nevertheless, I played through it and found it very refreshing as a game – very noir, good combat, puzzles to solve and places to explore – and the storyline was interesting, as was the inclusion of so many Batman baddies. Basically, in short, I loved it.
Mostly.
Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy were the issues. I don’t want to sound like a broken record but boobs on display in a high risk profession such as being a Gotham City criminal is not exactly clever – is it? Harley was very nice to see as a significant part of the story that is out to scupper your plans, but her being called some less-than-charming things by the Joker’s own thugs was tedious to say the least, and when you actually fight Harley herself she is defeated ridiculously easily – in a cutscene no less. Disappointing.
“Please don’t punch me in the chest, Batman. It’d be terribly inconvenient and I might have to reconsider my outfit!”
Ivy, when you first meet her, is lounging about in her cell – apparently the only female inmate – not wearing prison issues but her own clothes displaying her sizeable bust. Later, in her boss fight, for some reason she decides to float about attacking you in what – as our ed described to me in an email – “appears to be a giant laughing vulva-plant which flaps open periodically to reveal she still isn’t wearing a great deal…”. Super.
I’m pretty sure she gets referred to as some less-than-charming things too by henchmen.
Fast forward to Arkham City, which I got in another sale (but it still cost me £20), and now you can play as Catwoman too! However, she appears to have fallen foul of Rule 1 of Sensible Female Armour: her suit is only ever zipped up to just below her breasts, allowing for ample cleavage. When you fight thugs as Catwoman, you get called a ‘bitch’ but for some reason, if you’re Batman, you don’t get called a prick, a wanker, a bastard or even a knobend. Really, people?
The assassins of Rā’s al Ghūl’s order are all for some reason scantily clad sex icons – as is his daughter – and the concept art is mainly essentially the sort of softcore you might find in lads’ mags. In fact the vast majority of the concept art involving any female character is pretty oversexualised and repugnant. We get to meet Ivy again, too, but it seems she still hasn’t bothered to find any clothes since the laughing vulva-plant incident. And Harley is wearing even more revealing kit than last time.
Great graphics, but do we really need to see that much breast?
Now, even if we leave aside all of this sexist nonsense, Arkham City is somewhat disappointing anyway. I finished the storyline in less than a day; the ending snuck up on me and was rubbish. I won’t say what happens, but… just… what?! That’s even before I get to the complaint I have with the huge continuity hole left at the end. I was so disheartened by it that I did a Ragequit of Disappoints and haven’t gone back on it since. Even though I still have lots of side quests and puzzles to solve, I just haven’t found the heart to go back to it.
Arkham Asylum was worth the £5 but City was definitely not worth the £20 – let alone the standard retail price in the range of up to £39.99! The first game offered something new and interesting with a gorgeous noir feel much akin to Nolan’s reimagining of Gotham on film, if not grittier. The second game whizzed past all too quickly, with no real indication that one should slow down, do side quests, do the puzzles and so on, lest you face the atrocious storyline ending.
Benefits of the second game, however, do exist; the world is larger, you get more gadgets and there are no area transitions between outdoor locations. Plus you do get to play as Catwoman, even if she is just eye candy to be abused by burly henchmen. (Are there really no female crims in Gotham?)
Both games do fall down woefully at the Treating Female Characters with Respect hurdle. Would it truly be so hard to think logically about the design of these people? Does Batman walk around without his Kevlar body armour, flexing his pectorals, with a big “SHOOT HERE” target on his chest? No. No, he does not. So why should Catwoman, or Ivy, or Harley? Basic boob-sense would say maybe a comfy sports bra would be better than leather basques and flimsy shirts with only one button done up. At least then the breast tissue wouldn’t detach during all this acrobatic criminality.
Also, Catwoman has anti-gravity boobs.
I write this article with the full caveat that I am a princess-loving, giant-dress-craving reader of copious wedding magazines and probably not what people would instantly think of when they think ‘feminist bride’. Most people would think of someone like the Rock ‘n’ Roll Bride, for example. They wouldn’t think of someone who made a beeline for the veils at her first wedding show and who is collating, not a mood board, but an entire mood album to show suppliers the things I like.
But feminists come in many shapes and sizes and while the froo-froo shit doesn’t bother me in weddings (although really, someone tell me why you would spend money on wedding favours instead of booze?), there are a couple of traditions that I’m having trouble swallowing. I’m talking about being given away. This is actually really stressful for me, because I’m torn between duty/love and wanting to remain true to myself. It’s tradition that the bride’s father gives her away. Sometimes, if he isn’t available, it’s her brother or uncle, or her mother. In Jewish tradition it is both her parents. And I sodding hate the entire idea.
It’s only in recent years that we primarily started marrying for love. Back in Ye Olden DayesTM, people married for financial security, or because their families had arranged it. Brides came with dowries of land, money, and/or resources and grooms came with significant presents to her family. To show that the head of the family (the dad) was satisfied, the bride would be handed over on her wedding day by her father to show that she was no longer his property and was now the responsibility of the groom’s family.
Ick.
The very thought of this makes my skin crawl. I don’t understand why I can’t walk down the aisle myself, head high as I approach my future husband – my own agency, my own choice, nothing to do with being someone’s chattel. I even like the idea, becoming more common in America, of meeting your betrothed at the entrance of your ceremony venue, having a private moment and then walking in together. You are, after all, entering the married state together, so why not the church or hall?
But. There’s a but. In that I know my dad has always planned on walking me down the aisle. I mean, it’s not like he’s been fantasising about it since I was seven, but it was taken as fact that that’s what I’d have. And while he’s said to me he doesn’t mind what I do at my wedding and that he doesn’t even have to be invited, I can’t quite get to the point of saying ‘No, dad, I don’t want you to walk me down the aisle’. For one thing, he’s my dad and he’s been damn supportive of me, so making him happy with this one thing should be a compromise I’m willing to make. For another, I may need someone to lean on so I don’t wobble with nerves, or panic, or booze (fuck yeah, Dutch courage!). And part of me thinks ‘aww’ when I envision his face as he walks me down the aisle and I face my fiancé. We’re not having a traditional ceremony so there will be no ‘who gives this woman’ because no one does – so surely it won’t matter that much.
So with all these reasons, why does my stomach clench when I think about it? Why do I actively fret over this very simple, 30 second task that is dwarfed by the lifetime vows I’m going to make five minutes afterwards? Do what I want, and I have to deal with a hurt father and guilt – do what will make him happy and I feel like a fake. It’s a conundrum and one I’m not sure I know how to answer. I’m hoping wisdom and clarity will come to me sometime this year.
(Photo: Phil Hawksworth.)
- Lizzie is getting married in 2013 and has already planned roughly 5,748 weddings in her head. You can find more of her musings, wedding-themed reviews and rantings at Wedding Belles UK.
Keep The Gift, Pay What You Owe
Chivalry is dead, I’m told. And now you are all conveniently gathered here in the lobby of this stylish hotel / bar of this cruise ship / dining car of this luxury train I am ready to unmask the culprit. Yes, she’s here in the room with us. *Dramatic pause* Feminism killed chivalry!
Gasp.
But you knew that already. It’s the least mysterious murder mystery ever. Even Hastings could have cracked it (well, maybe). Just google “chivalry is dead!” and you’ll find plenty of witnesses to testify to the fact that it was feminism what done it.
It is also, apparently, a tragic case of mistaken identity as countless Daily Fail and Torygraph writers assert that chivalry wasn’t even sexist. It’s just about being nice to women. Isn’t that what you want, slavering harpy hordes? For us to be nice to you?
Despite being fatally trampled under the feminist jackboot, chivalry is surprisingly pernicious. I spend quite a lot of time arguing about gender on the internet, as you might imagine. And recently the most inflammatory topic seems to be chivalry. Sparked by a call from Graham Linehan on Twitter for chivalry to be resurrected (see here and here) I’ve gotten into a number or heated discussions disputing the value of chivalry today. Sadly, I believe rumours of the death of chivalry to have been greatly exaggerated.
Some people I spoke to claimed that they were defending chivalry as a general approach, towards all genders. But isn’t that just ‘not being an arse’? Why does it need a special name? Especially one with such deeply gendered associations. However pure the intention, bringing chivalry back from the dead serves no one. It’s a problematic idea in any context because it fetishises an imbalance of power. It’s fairness as charity rather than right, in which a privileged group extend a superficial form of power to another group along highly formalised lines.
As it is most commonly understood, as a code of behaviour for men towards women, chivalry is sexist. As Amanda Marcotte says:
Chivalry is a set of behaviors where men feign servitude and humility towards women, but in practice they tend to actually reinforce men’s greater social status.
In my recent conversations I’ve been confirmed in my suspicion that there are a lot of Nice Guys out there who don’t want to hear this. I think the most common objections I’ve encountered go like this:
“But I believe in equality/I’m a feminist, how dare you tell me I’m sexist just for being nice to women? That doesn’t fit with my carefully constructed self-image *cries*”
Following codes of behaviour towards women forged hundreds of years ago isn’t really an act of gender resistance. Sorry. Try turning your deeply-held commitment to equality to use by being considerate and respectful to everybody. If you already are: great! Why not drop the silly name for it?
“But I’m only being nice. Would you rather I punched you in the face rather than opening the door for you?”
Are you nice in this way to everyone? If so, good for you! If not: lots of women find chivalric or ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour patronising or irritating at best, and creepy and coercive at worst. Of course I prefer chivalry to brazen misogyny, but those aren’t the only choices, people. And both enshrine an archaic, damaging attitude toward women and reinforce the idea that women should be treated as women rather than as people.
You may have seen the pithy, ironic poems by suffragist Alice Duer Miller that Lili Loofbourow shared on the Hairpin the other day. Her meditation on chivalry is one of my favourites, and neatly captures the problems with the idea:
It’s treating a woman politely
As long as she isn’t a fright:
It’s guarding the girls who act rightly,
If you can be judge of what’s right;
It’s being—not just, but so pleasant;
It’s tipping while wages are low;
It’s making a beautiful present,
And failing to pay what you owe.
Exactly. Women are owed equality. In the context of hundreds of years of struggle to be taken seriously, for agency, autonomy, self-representation, and social, political and economic power, the feeble gift of a seat or a door held open can feel like a joke. Or even an insult. For me it acts as a reminder of the social expectation – even now – to be ladylike. Grateful, graceful, delicate. Powerless.
Epilogue
Besides, chivalry can quickly become desperately tedious, as Kate Beaton understands:
from http://www.harkavagrant.com - copyright Kate Beaton
Exercising and Exorcising: on Fitness and Fatness
This article began as a reply to the Guardian’s call for responses on body image, but I had more to say than would have fitted into their 200-300 word limit.
For starters: I am overweight and I am not fucked up about it. Here are some of my thoughts on a lifetime of body-based bullshit – a lot of which I only started to realise and address when I joined a gym for the first time this year.
I’m going to focus on the body shape and exercise side of things here because food and loathing is in itself a subject which would take more word count to tackle than our lovely editor has time to read through. Suffice to say that due to being raised right I have always known how to eat healthily, and that ‘diet’ is a four letter word. I’ve sometimes felt a bit left out of the whole dumbass ‘detox fat flush carb starve blah blah fad’ being discussed around the water cooler, but I’m also profoundly grateful that self-hatred regarding food has never been my mother tongue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly confident about my body, but crucially it’s never been the main thing I measure my self-worth by. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am that I dodged that bullet.
I have always been overweight (to varying degrees), but I’ve also always been pretty active (my post-viral fatigue syndrome years notwithstanding). For the last few years I’ve been swimming around a mile a week (sometimes more), I do some yoga, and every couple of years I start working out for a bit. Often people do a double-take when they find out that I swim a lot. ‘But you’re a size 16. Does not compute!’ As Health at Every Size can tell you, fat and fit are not always a dichotomy, but nonetheless the cultural assumption is that a big person must be stationary.
However, since the beginning of November last year, I started exercising a lot (I’m unemployed and needed something to keep me busy) and as I started to ‘tune up’ physically I found myself – despite wanting to move up a gear to the next bit – really dragging my heels about ever moving the exercising out of the privacy of my room. I found myself looking up exercise tutorials on YouTube and then trying to figure out how to supplement the equipment they used with something I had lying around. (Water bottles filled with sand instead of weights because owning weights is for, y’know, them… and I’m not one of them.) However, at a certain point I realised that there weren’t many workarounds left for the machines I was genuinely craving a go on – I needed an actual real-life gym.
Swimming (like I say, my physical activity of choice) does involve wearing a swimsuit, but this is one activity I was raised with, and something about being submerged once you’re in, about not ever getting sweaty, about not having to make eye contact with anyone else, made me think of it as the exception to the ‘exercise is scary’ rule. Gyms remained terrifying to me.
Previously known only as the Valley of Horrors
I’d never been inside a gym before this year, and I was convinced that it would be stuffed with supermodel-beautiful people. I was sure the moment I walked in the music would stop playing and everyone would turn and stare like I’d walked into the wrong saloon in a bad western.
When I finally just bit the bullet and went, I was relieved to find out it was full of a range of shapes, sizes and ages, and I did fine on the machines. The guy who did the induction just talked me through how to use each machine, set a goal and left me to it. No hectoring, shouting, or close-ups on unflattering areas like they do on the TV.
I realised later it wasn’t my own performance I was worried about (I know I’m pretty fit these days – I barely got out of breath), but an internalised shame about being a larger person being seen doing exercise at all. I realised I saw exercise as a ‘thin person’ activity.
I get that if you’re aiming to get fitter, thinner or both, then a gym sure as hell helps, but still I was reluctant. It didn’t seem to make any sense – but then I realised: all the shame and embarrassment I was feeling wasn’t about me, it was a response to a lifetime of others’ assumptions. Experiences like being laughed at if I got pink-faced after running somewhere, or always being picked last for the teams in PE (despite being pretty good at football back then – fuck you, my Year 5 class), or a school bully cackling loudly when she overheard me say to a friend “yeah, sure, I’ll meet you after dance club”. My own abilities didn’t put me off exercise – other people’s (conscious and unconscious) group shaming did.
In fact, avoidance of embarrassment has been seen to be one of the largest factors inhibiting girls in the UK from doing PE. The WHO’s own study has noted that:
It is important to recognise the significance of girls’ early experiences of physical activity and it is often within the context of physical education lessons where understanding of individual sporting identity is developed … what were initially regarded as lesser concerns for school governing bodies, such as specific uniforms for physical education lessons and the standards of showering facilities were shown to be significant aspects in girls’ actual enjoyment of school sports.
[…] in sports there are many occasions where the body is literally displayed and this has the potential for the individual to be exposed to negative emotional experiences of shame and embarrassment.
Can I get an amen, sister? I’m writing this a few weeks away from my 26th birthday, but I only very recently realised that I am still haunted by the memories of the Nelson Muntzs of my school years pointing, laughing or making bitchy comments.
Anyone who does any sports or goes to the gym will tell you: you will get sweaty – that’s how it works – but in my teens (and even before) how well you did at PE wasn’t half as important as avoiding the indignity of getting sweaty, red-faced or out of breath. As a chubbier kid, I was an even easier target for the standard crap.
In a world dominated by the RED CIRCLES OF SHAME from Heat magazine and the like – drawing attention to any perceived imperfections, sweat stains, funny creases and so on in even the most highly-regarded beautiful people – is it any wonder that the perceived embarrassment of getting hot, sweaty or out of breath is prohibitive to many people? The Surgeon General in the ‘States has drawn flak for suggesting that the extra haircare required might be a small contributing factor in putting many women off exercise, and in a world where a bad hair day for some celebrities can make it to the press, is it any wonder that the trickle-down effect has been to make ordinary women self-conscious about these things too?
Fat-shaming is not just a shitty way to treat people (duh) – it’s also utterly counter-productive. To be honest I only ever felt moderate embarrassment about my figure, but I felt acutely ashamed of my body in relation to exercise. I felt that because of my body shape, certain doors were closed to me. Ironically, most of those doors were ones that led to better fitness and possibly even changing my shape.
In an inverse-snobbery retaliation I’d decided that explicit, gym-type exercise was for horrible/vain/stupid people. When I started exercising, I started working through all the years of rubbish I’d accumulated in relation to physical activity – and my self-image has done far more of a reshape than my body has over the past three months (though the body’s coming along nicely, thanks for asking). While I’ve been really enjoying exercising under my own steam, I’ve also been exorcising the ghosts of schoolyards past.
Some of the things that kicked me into upping my exercise ante were finding friends of mine were into certain sports and realising that exercising was actually a pretty normal thing that pretty normal people do. Not everyone who goes to the gym is either a supermodel or a wanker. And some exercise can be pretty badass (I’m still looking for boxing lessons locally – I really want to hit things).
So, uh, morals. Well, the moral of the story is don’t be scared of new stuff, and if you are trying to get healthier then for God’s sake don’t worry about other people. You’re not at school anymore and no one gives a crap. That haw-haw Nelson Muntz kid from the playground isn’t here. They’re grown up, somewhere else, and would probably be embarrassed to remember they were that mean. That toned person sweating on the exercise bike next to you? They’re much more worried about their own abs than yours, and are probably mentally compiling shopping lists as they go. No one cares, and no one should be judging you anymore. This is about you and your body. You’re the one that gets to live in it.
It’s a guest post! Please welcome Becky Shepherd to the soapbox. (And if you’ve got a guest post, send a short pitch to [email protected]).
The subjection to online abuse of female writer sorts is something that has, of late, been widely discussed. The press appear to perceive it as a non-issue, even though there resides a catalogue of women who’ve experienced this kind of backlash, ranging from the latently patronising to intimidating and violent threats. But a new twist came when Nick Cohen wrote an article defending writers Laurie Penny, Polly Toynbee and Melanie Phillips – and condemning the vitriol that they in particular experience when passing comment in the mainstream press. His bone of contention is not that any of these women face criticism; that’s a given if you make known your judgement on highly emotive issues. What he does have a problem with, however, is that these journalists encounter very personal, sexually abrasive and downright scary comments because they are women, and that these comments specifically target their womanhood. He even goes as far as to blame the “complicity of newspaper managers” whom he believes do very little to deter this type of victimisation and actively “demean” their female staff.
Seems a commendable sentiment, does it not?
The problem then became that he was zealously praised for bringing these virtual misogynistic tirades to light, despite the fact that female bloggers have been persistently trying to get their mistreatment taken seriously. Feminists are angry that Cohen rode in on his horse, waving his gallant testimony, rescuing the damsels and making this concern valid, like it wasn’t already. Nicky Woolf, another New Statesman voice, wrote a counter piece claiming that “male supporters of women’s rights risk looking like ‘white knights’” and subsequently raised the question: can a man ever really call himself a feminist? There followed a lot of dictionary definitions of feminism and references to the multifarious tapestry that is social theory.
Photo: Rachel Strohm (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rachelstrohm/)
There are those who believe men cannot identify themselves as feminists. End of. The argument being that unless you relentlessly suffer under patriarchy, you can’t comprehend the impact it has on your very existence. I do appreciate this school of thought, and it’s used for many other social prejudices, including racism. The reason I don’t agree with it though, is twofold; firstly I think genuine empathy is just as valuable as shared experience, because it demonstrates a wider acceptance of the goals you’re trying to achieve. If you only encourage your philosophy within the tight constraints of those whom it will inherently appeal to, you’re not going to change anything. It’s like running an ideological bakery; trying to sell cakes to a cake lover is easy, trying to sell cakes to a diabetic is… well, it’s dangerous, but you catch my drift.
My other reasoning is that, as my crudest understanding of feminism is the pursuit of equal rights, refusing to call men feminists on the basis of their gender is hypocritical, and the very antithesis of equality. Throwing inter-defined phrases like ‘pro-feminist’ or ‘feminist sympathiser’ around creates a ‘them’ and ‘us’ mindset. By resorting to the dissection of semantics, you risk alienating someone who wanted to identify with you – and you, with a desire for black and white delineation, then reject them. Men already suffer prejudice if they express any distaste for hegemonic masculinity; it’s difficult to publically denounce sexism without being seen as ‘girly’ somehow. I think it’s widely believed that until traditional ideas about masculinity are rewritten so that’s it ‘normal’ to feel sensitivity to violence and rape, feminism will fail to accrue male mass appeal. I’m sure that lots of men don’t give a flying fudge what their peers call them, but ignorance to the implications of old fashioned gender roles for men is unforgivable. Separate sphere-ism is something that still plagues society, for all genders.
I remember reading a piece by Cath Elliot a couple of years back which looked at this debate. Her most valuable observation is about fragmentation; she speaks of the need to ideologically confine ourselves to very specific labels which can ultimately lead to the splintering of women’s’ groups. She says that the conflict as to what extent men can be included in feminist activism is just another manifestation of that; another thing that can’t be agreed upon and risks hindering progress. I’m not sure how far I agree with this, but it does raise an interesting point about how feminism treats its supporters. It sometimes looks like the remnants of a Pankhurst vs Fawcett debacle, which neglects to realise that ultimately, we all want the same thing. But I think this is probably the case for lots of groups seeking social reform. The political is personal, and personal politics aren’t easy to share.
It translates into pop culture too. A current example of the divide is exhibited in criticisms of Stieg Larsson. The Hollywood revision of The Girl With The Dragoon Tattoo has, yet again, stirred up misgivings about Larsson’s depictions of misogyny in the Millennium Series. I too, feel uncomfortable with the sexed-up sexual violence displayed onscreen, but is it really fair to question the author’s motives? It’s common knowledge that the books were inspired by a childhood trauma, when Larsson witnessed the gang rape of a local girl. And all the evidence suggests that as a consequence, he genuinely abhorred violence against women. He was a socialist activist, founding the Swedish Expo Foundation which sought to expose and end extreme right and white supremacist activity. He was very vocal about his feelings on inequality. So why does it appear so difficult for us to read the message with the spirit in which it was intended? Would we feel the same discomfort towards the franchise if the creator was a woman? If the writing had been female, maybe it would have been viewed as harrowing instead of graphic. But whatever your thoughts on the series, you have to pay credit where credit’s due. Larsson has helped bring misogyny to the forefront of public debate, the volumes have sold 65 million copies worldwide, and the films are huge too. Regardless if it appeals to one’s personal taste, surely the feminist community should embrace the chance to discuss misogyny within a contemporary and popular context?
I suppose for me, my perception of men and feminism is built around my own heroes. My Dad, for one, always instilled a sense of ‘you are not a girl, you’re a person’ in both me and my sister, and that was vital to my understanding of sexism, misogyny and the injustices I felt later on. It’s not because he identifies himself as a feminist, mind – he has no socio-political interest whatsoever. It was simply that, as his children, he wanted to pass on his interests to us, and the fact that we were girls and some of his pastimes were less than feminine was irrelevant. His biggest passions were music and film, and I owe my love of both to him. I was listening to Dire Straits when most girls my age had little in the way of audio knowledge other than the theme tune to Rosie and Jim. He made us have a crack at everything; fishing, sailing, karate. We were taught to use tools. Although I’d like to think my thoughts on egalitarianism are a little more sophisticated than they were as a kid, I do owe my unwavering faith in fundamental parity to the men in my life, as well as the women. So I feel a personal obligation to ensure that men and women are credited and treated fairly.
I do get it. We don’t want to rely on men to make feminism credible – I suppose the fear is that many thoughtful discussions aren’t ‘validated’ until they’re echoed in a male voice, meaning that the content of the message is only getting through via a diluted medium. But to split hairs over whether or not a man calls himself a feminist is flouting the nature of what we’re all about. After all, what’s in a name?
- Becky Shepherd meanders around Essex looking for shellacs, toot or beer. She’s an aspiring novelist, but until someone’s mad enough to publish her efforts, you can ‘ave a butchers at her blog, All Quiet On The Wench Front, where she’s busy putting the world to rights one parody at a time. She also scribbles for The Indie Pedant and on Twitter: @Becky_Shep.
Time To Take Another Walk Down Gin Lane
I was reading Lancashire Life whilst back home at my parents’ (stop judging me, it’s the rural North and the Internet doesn’t work properly) when I came across an article about Joanne Moore. Not the glamour girl of the silver screen otherwise known as Dorothy Cook (no relation). This Joanne Moore works for G&J Greenalls, and she’s the world’s only master gin distiller.
It’s an interesting article, and well worth a read, but there’s more to this than wheeling out the tired old saw of “Wow! A woman doing a man’s job!”. However, I do want to offer some heartfelt congratulations to Joanne especially for her signature product Bloom, which is made with notes of chamomile, pomelo and honeysuckle. Chin chin, darling.
Gin for Victory!
For the UK gin is a rather relevant beverage, with its history steeped in that of the Empire (not unlike tea).
Hogarth's famous print "Gin Lane" hardly strikes a classy note
Gin arrived on our shores in around 1690. By the eighteenth century it had become very popular, culminating in The Gin Craze. Put simply, gin was cheap, strong and easily available, particularly for the urban poor. A lot of gin was drunk, and a lot of poor people got drunk. As is often the case when poor people take drugs, gin was linked to crime, and in the case of poor women, it was linked to promiscuous behaviour and infertility, earning the sobriquet Mother’s Ruin.
Reformers of the time, including William Hogarth, focussed on how gin consumption might be affecting women. This sort of thing is still the case today – with excitable press articles over binge-drinking “ladettes“, the idea of a drunken woman is treated very differently from that of a drunken man. Given that women were supposedly exemplars of correct social behaviour, their bad gin drinking behaviour was treated with something akin to political hysteria, and we all know about the history of that word. In fact, gin’s image was such that the 1751 act of parliament introducing taxation on alcohol was known as the Gin Act and for a while, at least, gin did not touch the lips of any woman who wanted herself to be thought well of.
The Martini Comeback
Why don’t you slip out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini?
– Robert Benchley
The rise of gin can probably be attributed to the gin martini. Not the vodka heresy as drunk shaken-not-stirred by 007 (who eschewed the womanly gin connection), but the real deal, made with gin, vermouth and either an olive or a twist of lemon (I recently found out that those slivers of peel are pleasingly known as “dead goldfish” in the bar trade).
With the invention of the cocktail - and the cocktail dress - gin became a premium product for women
Gin martinis were invented at some point in the mid-19th century, and they oozed class and sex appeal. Gone was the downtrodden image of gin, and here to stay was the limey note (although the martini is an american invention, gin remains very, very British) of superiority in cocktail form. My favourite anecdote is over Noel Coward‘s recipe for the martini: “filling a glass with gin then waving it in the general direction of Italy”.
With sexy gin came sexy ladies, of course. In popular culture, the gin-drinking lady had shaken off her working class shackles and exchanged them for high heels and a form-fitting cocktail dress. Yet the phantom of criminality still lingered, especially in the States, where during Prohibition cheap, illegal gin was widely available due to the relative ease of making the spirit, giving rise to bathtub gin, so called because you could make it in your bathtub.
And as we know from Hogarth, criminality + gin + women = political difficulties over female sexuality. This time, there are tales to be told with women on both sides of the bar.
The case for Prohibition was being made by the Christian campaigning group known as the Women’s Temperance Movement. On the other side of the fence, we have gin-drinking flappers adorning the aisles in Speakeasies. These women were both working towards different kinds of freedoms, which perhaps have reached their pinnacle in the sex-positive and anti-porn camps of today’s feminist movement.
The anti-gin temperance faction were looking for a way of getting their household money out of the hands of the barkeepers and into their cupboards to feed their children (this from a time when men were the primary breadwinners and their wives were given an allocation of salary to spend on the home and family). The glittery girls in their cocktail dresses were living a lifestyle outside of traditional notions of “home and hearth”.
Gin and I
Now, I’m partial to a gin and tonic, having been brought up to think of it as a “grown up” drink, unlike the fizzy gunk in a bottle presented to us as teenagers in the form of alcopops. Being able to sit down and enjoy – not just drink, but actually enjoy – a well-made gin and tonic was one of the ways in which I knew my tastes had changed from those of a sweet-craving teen into something more adult. I’m now a bit of a gin aficionado, and gin, in return, is cool.
There’s lots of different sorts of brands, with their own mix of botanicals. There are gin clubs, and many of the beautiful London pubs are reclaiming their heritage as gin palaces. These buildings, with their wood panel divisions and separate entrance ways, marked a time when it was unseemly for a lady to be in a public house, and the ability to drink with discretion, and away from the riff-raff, was valued.
Yet there is still the spectre of Gin Lane hanging over womankind:
The most dangerous drink is gin. You have to be really, really careful with that. And you also have to be 45, female and sitting on the stairs. Because gin isn’t really a drink, it’s more a mascara thinner.
“Nobody likes my shoes!”
“I made… I made fifty… fucking vol-au-vents, and not one of you… not one of you… said ‘Thank you.'”
And my favourite: “Everybody, shut up. Shut up! This song is all about me.”
– Dylan Moran
Gin remains a tricky drink, known for its tendencies to make one tearful, and crying is still sadly a girlish subject, although there are ongoing attempts to make the drink more manly, as seen in the macho advertising for Gordon’s Gin featuring sweary chef Gordon Ramsay.
Now, whilst seeing Captain Shouty pelted with ice and limes is quite entertaining, the obvious message is “gin is a MANLY DRINK for MANLY MEN” with a side note of “take it seriously, this is a foodie subject” to reinforce the quality of the product. Gordon was recently dropped from the campaign, following a decline in sales, which may or may not indicate that, for the time being at least, gin still remains a ‘female’ tipple.
At The Movies: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Oh God I Am So Sorry I Watched The Remake First
Oh, by the way? There’s spoilers in this, too, if, like me, you were/are a complete Millenium Trilogy virgin.
I’ve turned over different ways to start this review in my head, and really the best way I can think of is with an apology. I’m sorry. I did a bad thing. I watched the American remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo before I saw the original Swedish. I haven’t even read the books, either. When my own revolution comes, I’ll be first against the wall. And then my revolution will end.
I am often ferociously anti-Americanised-remakes, as the remake trend can assume, on the part of their Western, English-speaking audience, a certain level of can’t-be-bothered-with-anything-not-in-their-own-language.1 It also assumes that anything not English-language isn’t really worth seeing, and this is fully gross. That said, I avoided Stieg Larsson’s critically-acclaimed Millenium Trilogy until the remake came out, and let me tell you why. It’s quite simple, really.
Rape scenes. That’s why. There’s some notoriously graphic sexual assault in these films. So I avoided them. I avoided them very well until I heard Trent Reznor2 was doing the soundtrack for the remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and then, three days ago, I found myself with a spare few hours and a fiver in my pocket, and went, “Hey, I’ll go and see a film that I know will trigger the fuck out of me on my own! What could go wrong with that?”
Nothing went wrong at all. I mean, yes, both rape scenes are absolutely atrocious and I actually felt sick and cried, and if you’re at all disturbed by the portrayal of sexual assault, stay the fuck clear of this film, BUT I saw it again the next day and bought all three of the original Swedish films (well, the extended versions that were two-parters for televised release), and watched the original TGWTDT that very evening. I was going to, in fact, write a comparison piece on the films and talk about how the remake does things differently in terms of the plot and all that, but something magic happened when I went to see the film the first time around and I found myself incapable of doing so.
Have you ever fallen in love with a fictional character? Everyone says it’s impossible to fall in love at first sight, and while that may be true of people you meet in the street, it’s totally possible to fall in love with a character the moment they appear in the story.
I have fallen in love with Lisbeth Salander. So, this review is going to compare the original Lisbeth (played by the divine Noomi Rapace) and the remake Lisbeth (an unrecognisable Rooney Mara), and how her character varies across the films, in part because of some very small design decisions. It’s also a good excuse for me to do some proper fanart of her. I fully accept that my opinion of Lisbeth was shaped by the version of her I saw first.
In Niels Arden Oplev’s original films, Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth is withdrawn and quite brusque, but perceptive and vengeful. She makes eye contact with people, she touches them, asks questions – she’s pretty easy to relate to, and in the however-many hours of sprawling investigative plot you get, she undergoes a lot of development, morphing beautifully from a quietly damaged, pained creature to this fully-fledged angel of justice. In the final scenes, where she hunts down killer Martin Vanger on her motorbike, she doesn’t ask for permission to do so; she just watches him burn to death, deaf to his pleas for mercy. It’s a beautiful scene. There’s steel in her eyes and mouth. It explicitly echoes her own setting alight of her father – a parallel only hinted at in the remake – and her associate Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) is amazed and disgusted with her when he learns of her actions, which allows Lisbeth to give her gorgeous “Don’t make him into a victim” speech.
Original Lisbeth is a human. Plenty of design decisions have lead to this: she has eyebrows, for a start, which do a lot to shape her face and give her expression. She has make-up that looks like a professional taught her how. She wears colours other than black. Her skin is unblemished, and her nails are short and neat. She carries herself with quiet pride, and her eyes are alive with Noomi Rapace’s trademark razor-sharp observational glare. Her hair lies flat a lot of the time.
She’s as brusque and vicious as you’d expect, but she shakes people’s hands. She makes eye contact and says things. And all this fleshes her out as a character in more explicit ways that a viewer can relate to – it’s easier to form an empathic bond with a character who has dialogue, obviously – but she’s a lot more human. And yes, I do actually count that as a bad thing.
Remake Lisbeth, in David Fincher’s film (co-starring Daniel Craig) is a tiny, vicious monster. She is easily the greatest thing about the film, with Rooney Mara effortlessly stealing every scene she so much as breathes on, but unlike Original Lisbeth, she starts out as being so viscerally damaged, so visibly broken and so fucking furious with the world around her, that it feels as though she remains quiet just to barely contain the thrashing, clawing monster that she constantly keeps under skin. Where Original Lisbeth becomes more overtly monstrous, the character development with Remake Lisbeth is that she becomes more human, almost – she seeks out Mikael because she has, as she says in a one-sided conversation with her former guardian, “made a friend”.
Everything Remake Lisbeth does and says is carefully tailored to make her as cold as possible – fitting perfectly into what is visually an ice fucking cold film, all in blue, black and white. “I have a high metabolism, I can’t put on weight,” she deadpans, as though she’s said it a thousand times before, when she’s asked when she last ate, even though that wasn’t the intention of the question. Her make-up is sloppily crayoned-on as if she simply couldn’t care less. She doesn’t care. She prowls through the film as though everyone she meets couldn’t affect her life if their own lives depended on it, and if they tried, she’d literally bite them to death. Her eyes are wild, fiery and bestial. In the last shot of her face, when she watches Mikael walk off with his lover, Erika (the painfully hot Robin Wright), she honestly looks like a wolf. Her eyes are almost red. It really does feel as though in everything she does – including sex – Lisbeth performs only the very basics of what she needs to be received at all in society, because that’s in her best interests. Everything else can burn.
And that, my friends, is why I liked the remake better than the original: because Lisbeth is a werewolf. Also because she gets better consensual sex scenes and her revenge upon her rapist isn’t filmed to be a precise echo of her own rape. Perhaps I’ll write a second Lisbeth Salander Please Can I Be Your Friend Why Are You Biting Please Stop Biting Me essay comparing all the sex she has.
But for now, here’s a potted summary of why you need to see the remake, honest.
YOU SHOULD SEE THE REMAKE BECAUSE:
- It’s bleak, disgusting, savage and beautiful all at once
- It’s very nicely paced
- The acting is superb, and it contains predominantly European/Swedish actors!
- It doesn’t feel very Americanised, product placement aside (why do I suddenly want an Epsom printer?)
- LISBETH LISBETH SHE’S AMAZING LISBETH I LOVE YOU LISBETH
- I literally do not have the words for how perfect Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s ethereal, terrifying soundtrack is
YOU SHOULD SEE THE ORIGINAL BECAUSE:
- It plumbs into the mechanics of the story with more depth
- Lisbeth has more dialogue, particularly showing her social politics
- The sex scenes (as opposed to the sexual assault scenes), particularly between Erika and Mikael, are more loving and personable
- You get more backstory to the characters in general
- It’s a lot less bleak and disgusting-feeling than the remake (although the endless shots of dead women’s faces at the end is horrendous)
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THESE FILMS BECAUSE:
- I am not joking when I say that, between them, both films contain two of the most personally painful rape scenes I have ever seen (Rape 1 is worse in the original, Rape 2 is worse in the remake, but that’s obviously completely subjective!)
- A cat is mangled in the remake (but not the original)
- Seriously, it’s actually quite horrible in its violence, both portrayed and alluded to, so steer clear if that ain’t your bag
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- Did you know they’re making a Hollywood remake of Troll Hunter? I know, I know, I set everyone around me on fire, too. It’s okay. It’s a natural reaction. [↩]
- I would crawl through fire to get to this man’s trousers. [↩]