We Are Man! *falls over*
First there was You’ve Been Framed. Then there was Jackass. Now we have YouTube. We just can’t get enough of people doing really stupid things and the hilariously violent consequences.
Is it schadenfreude? (or ‘leedvermaak’ in Dutch – there you go, you’ve learnt something new today) Is it innocent slapstick? Who knows. But whatever it is that makes watching people fall over so compelling has been turned into a FORCE FOR GOOD by the End Violence Against Women coalition, with their new We Are Man campaign video:
I think it’s rather splendid, especially the skier who flies into the wall of snow like something out of Looney Tunes. My only niggle is that there wasn’t a more natural way of bringing up the topic of rape in the men’s conversation. I’ve overheard plenty of examples that would do the job. Though perhaps this was actually overheard somewhere, from a particularly gauche misogynist. Or maybe it’s deliberately awkward. Anyway…
There’s no one size fits all way to challenge attitudes to sexual violence, and some people will respond more to one approach than another. I reckon this is an excellent addition to the earnest My Strength is Not For Hurting campaign and the stylish Lambeth Know The Difference posters.
Why not pass it on to some people you know, especially men, and put it to the test? If you could encourage them to get their click on here and join the campaign that would be even better.
PS Interesting comment on twitter from @PabloK about the way that anti violence against women campaigns targeted at men always invoke a model of hegemonic masculinity (e.g. ‘be a man’, ‘be strong, ‘real men do/don’t’ etc) Obviously this is to do with the intended audience, but anyone got any ideas stashed away for campaign creative that offers an alternative?
Blueswoman Etta Baker
There’s a fantastic feminist body of work devoted to recognising and celebrating the achievements (and even the existence of) women in blues music, not least the landmark Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis. Thanks to the toil of Davis and others, the songs and performances of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Victoria Spivey and Ma Rainey are finally taking their place in the notoriously masculine and misogynist blues canon. So I won’t reinvent the wheel – go read about them, learn about them, listen to them. Instead I thought I’d introduce a less well-known blueswoman, Etta Baker.
I say ‘less well-known’, what I mean is less familiar to the general public. Since she was ‘discovered’ in the 1950s (she was included on an album of field recordings of folk music, Instrumental Music from the Southern Appalachians , after a chance meeting with folk singer Paul Clayton) there have been plenty of tributes to her musicianship. Bluesman Taj Mahal said she was the greatest influence on his guitar playing, and Bob Dylan went to visit her in 1962. When you listen to Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right (a rewrite of one of Clayton’s songs) I reckon you can hear Etta Baker’s influence quite clearly.
The album she recorded with her sister Cora Phillips in 2005, Carolina Breakdown, is casually incredible. Her astonishing skill is obvious, even to a cloth-eared listener like me. But it all seems very relaxed. I suppose that kind of confidence is what you get for playing the guitar for 90-odd years (she started learning when she was three…)
Here’s a radio interview with Etta Baker in 2005 and you can listen to some of her songs, see pictures and read more about her life on the Music Maker Relief website. Baker has none of the tragic glamour of Billie Holiday or the stature of Bessie Smith. When you see pictures of her, she’s… well, she’s a little old lady. She’s usually grinning, wearing ill-fitting sweaters, and with the same owl-like glasses that the Queen wears. The admiration she has won is all down to how she played, and not how she looked.
She is not and never was a star. As well as playing the blues, she raised nine children and worked for 26 years in a local factory. Susan Simone of Music Maker Relief puts this in context:
Listening to Baker’s talent, the first question that comes to mind is why didn’t she get onto the stage earlier. To understand this, you need to understand how life was in the Carolinas for people who were living a hardscrabble life of farming and mill work. Opportunities for music were local not national. Skilled musicians played with family, for local dances, at church, or may be in a nearby town…. “My husband could play piano real well,” Baker reflects. “I believe we could have made it, but as he did not want to leave home, there was nothing I could say.”
Performing on stage or to large audiences is of course no measure of talent, or even of influence. And in interviews Baker herself didn’t seem to have any regrets. But when I hear her and her sister play I can’t help but wonder about all the other ordinary extraordinary women we’ll never know about.
Further reading
- Blog series: Feminist discourse in the lives and works of American blueswomen of the 1920s
The moment I find her website, linked by a reader who’s posted some of her illustrations for a feminist textbook on Tumblr, I’m in love with her work. She’s not widely known here in the UK, and works mainly in Finnish (with some translation, mainly into Swedish). Her website bio identifies her as a feminist before everything else. And her illustrations are so arresting, so real, that I have to learn more.
Her name is Tiitu Takalo. You might not know it yet, but she’s your new favourite illustrator. You’re welcome.
So much stuff is available to English-speaking markets that I reckon the vast majority of us here in BadRep Country have a lot of inertia about discovering non-English language media, from the music of Rammstein through to subtitled films, even.1 It’s a shame. We’re missing out. And though I’m not currently able to read Tiitu’s books in the obvious sense, her art is that kickass that I just don’t care. I’m willing to muddle through. Muddling is how a great deal of important learning Gets Done. And if you’re interested in feminist art and media from places outside the UK/US over a language barrier, then comic books are, for obvious reasons, an excellent place to have a go at climbing over said language barrier.
If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that at least three of Team BadRep, me included, are budding illustrators ourselves, so I was fascinated to hear how Tiitu approaches her work.
When did you first realise you were a feminist?
“I think I have always been a feminist. Or all the conflicts with the rest of the world have made me one. It started when I was a child. My mother was a career woman in the metal industry. Most of her co-workers and colleagues were men. She drove the car and also fixed it herself and one of her hobbies was carpentry. And my father did cooking, and he did our carpets by hand – I don’t know the word for it, in Finnish it’s same as knitting, knitting carpets – and he still does that as a hobby. He also did some sewing. And my parents never told us (me and my sister) that we couldn’t do something because we were girls, or that we should behave a certain way based on our gender. I never heard anything like “nice girls do not act like that”. Before I went to school I didn’t know that our family was somehow different. I didn’t know that people think there are some jobs for women and others for men. I didn’t know that men and women are not equal in this world.
“When I was six years old in school I noticed that girls and boys are treated differently. Expectations are different for boys and girls. Even as a child I knew it was not OK. I also noticed that all my friends didn’t share this opinion. They were already brainwashed to think that girls are nice and quiet and tidy, and boys are not, and that this was some kind of natural law.
“I started calling myself a feminist when I met other girls and women who were using that word and were proud to be feminists. Before that, I thought that feminism was a dirty word. (That’s what they want you to think!) And yet, still, I was thinking and acting like a feminist.”
I’m in no doubt that some readers will be asking this, so despite my earlier sentiments on it not being a must-do in any way: are there any plans to translate any of your comics into English? (I really love the look of Kehä (The Ring) as I’m really into boxing, and the blurb reminds me of Girlfight, which is one of my favourite films.)
“Kehä has been published in Sweden, but I don’t have the energy to contact more publishers. There was one small press comic publisher in England which was interested, but nothing happened. I have English translations on a leaflet for Kehä and also for Jää… but it’s sold out in Finnish.”
Who are your heroes and what inspires you?
“I get inspired by other people who do stuff, other zine makers and artists. And it’s inspiring to do things together. Organise a gig, or festivals, or protests, or an art exhibition. I don’t have any heroes or idols. Everyone should try to be one’s own hero.”
What are you working on at the moment?
“I just finished a graphic novel about the history of my hometown, Tampere. It’s a collaboration with a scriptwriter and the Museum of Tampere, so it’s different from what I have done before. Maybe more mainstream. But I like the idea. There are nine stories from different periods. For example the 1850s story is about a 14-year-old girl working in a cotton factory – not the story of the factory owner like it usually is in the history books. The book is also published in English as Foster Sons and Cotton Girls. And now I’m trying to start a new comic project about a community living project I’m involved in.”
We’ve had some artists decide they don’t fancy being interviewed on our site because they didn’t want to be identified with a “feminist” site. Have you ever had difficulty getting work because of your feminist reputation?
“No, I don’t think so. Or I just don’t know if it has been an issue somewhere. In Sweden, where my comics have also been published, it’s actually really cool to be a feminist. They have a really cool feminist comic collective called Dotterbolaget (“daughter company”), and the most popular comic artists in Sweden are women and feminists. I have heard that it’s so fashionable to be a feminist comic artist in Sweden that some male artists who are not feminists are calling themselves feminists in order to be cool or increase the sales of their books.
“We certainly don’t have that problem in Finland. The F-word is still something people don’t want to be associated with. I think it’s important that more people are calling themselves feminists. It is not something to be quiet about. We should be proud and we should be loud! After all, we are making this world a better place for everyone. For women and men and children and sisters and brothers around the globe. Feminism is not just smashing patriarchy: it’s making everyone equal.”
How much do you use digital tools to produce/edit your work (if at all!)? Mine is mainly hand done with barely any digital editing because I like marker pens and am still really getting to grips with digital at all! How is it for you?
“I don’t like computers, and I’d rather spend my time painting with watercolours than staring at a screen. I love to see how the colours blend with water or how ink spreads on the wet paper. It’s like magic! If it’s possible, I don’t do anything with digital tools. I don’t even want to scan my work myself. Someone else can do it better, or even find that interesting. Why should I do it? The answer is, unfortunately, money. When I do my own zines or other publications, I don’t have money to pay anyone to do computer stuff for me.”
You created Hyena Publishing to help get your work out there. Being arty types, we have a fair few friends who are often trying to launch self-published projects, and it’s often a lot of work to stay afloat. What advice would you give to young artists starting out?
“Take a small edition of your book or zine. It’s more fun to have sold out than to find 500 copies of unsold books under your bed when you’re cleaning up your place. Try to do something small first. Twenty copies with your home printer or copy machine at your school or workplace.
“Do something together with your friends. It’s more fun and you can split the work and expenses. Do not try to do your best book first. It seems like people have massive ideas for the first book or zine, but they get exhausted by all the work and get nothing done. Don’t think you will get rich by doing zines or even comics. It’s hard work and underpaid.
“Try to contact other self-publishers or small press people. Find out where they are printing and selling and share your knowledge with them too. Go to zine festivals and events. The best thing about being your own publisher is that no one can tell you that your comics aren’t good enough, or that they are too political, feministic, personal or emotional. Do comics you would like to read yourself. Not the comics you think other people want to read!”
Warm thanks to Tiitu for talking to us. Head to tiitutakalo.net and order her books by email – if you ask nicely you might be able to get a translation leaflet…
- I have never understood this one. It’s BEEN translated! What’s with the anglocentric excuse-making complex? It’s just embarrassing. [↩]
SlutWalk: Where Are We?
I went to SlutWalk on Saturday. It was a lovely thing; banners, posters, chanting, brilliant footwear and some truly magnificent outfits all around and about in the inspiring and fun atmosphere. I wore a tank top and spray-on jeans and cooked to death, but the BadRep banner was proudly borne aloft through the heat and the billions of photographs that were taken of it, and I think I did us justice.
Mostly, it was lovely to see so many people rallying to the cause of (primarily, but not exclusively) women being able to wear what they want in public without it being seen as consent to harassment and assault. It’s true. Consent to sexual activity is divorced from anything other than what we say. Nothing else consents for us.
Later, we went clubbing, and on the way home on the tube, some men used me as their paid-for amusement for the evening against my will.
I was wearing this: 
So I stood out, yes. Get in. I looked the fucking business, people. We’d just been to a club whereby anything went as far as costume went, and I’m a guy that will jump at any opportunity to tart up. Thus, tarted up I was.
I was hassled for photographs by some young men who only cursorily asked whether they could get a picture of me before pawing me and grabbing me and threatening me. But that’s fine, if awful – I could deal with that. I’ve dealt with that before. They were young and quite drunk, for what it’s worth, not that it’s an excuse.
I clocked a group of people, some men and some attached women, checking me out and talking amongst themselves further down the carriage. As I watched, one of them – a young man, approximately a few years older than me – stalked down towards me, looking at my body as he went. He looked at my face, my jawline, my throat, my chest, my waist and my hips. He continued past me, and continued his observation of my body from behind. He said nothing, and got out his phone and started fiddling with it.
Intimidated, I moved to put my back to the wall of the carriage, next to the door, and told him that if he wished to take my picture as well, he could ask.
He looked up. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t want to take your picture. It’s just that my mates have a bet on as to whether you’re male or female.”
It couldn’t have hurt me more suddenly or sharply if he’d slapped me. He had been assessing my body to see whether I was of the female-assigned-at-birth or male-assigned-category. I bristled. “Firstly, I’m male,” I hissed, “and secondly, I’m not a fucking zoo exhibit. I am actually quite offended.”
“Hey, calm down,” he started, before my best friend Mim stepped in to ask him, in my defence, what sort of entitled arsehole he thought he was, and what gave him the right to use me as his amusement? Would he put bets on whether someone was gay or straight?
“I just wanted to know what she was dressed as,” he said.
Not only had I been gawped and ogled at like a caged animal, he didn’t even take my own word for my own gender. Apparently, his opinion based on his flawed assessment of my physicality over-rode my own identity. I had my identity casually erased before my eyes. Despite my protestations, I wasn’t human to him. I wasn’t a person. I was a freak, an indeterminate outsider, and therefore he found it acceptable to treat me like subhuman filth.
This may sound minor to some of you. He never touched me, he never hit me, raped me, spat at me, threw a beer can at me – none of the things he could have done. I got off lightly. I’m still intact, aren’t I? No swabs, police reports or bruises.
But he’ll have got home and laughed with his friends about how they hassled this weird girl on the tube who thought she was a man and forget all about it. I won’t. I’m not going to forget. Every time I wonder if there’s a place for me in society, it’ll be his face and words I remember. I’ll remember how he looked at my body – the very thing I fret about every morning to dress carefully around so that people won’t see my tiny waist and curvy bottom and think, “That’s a girl” – and how his cissexist assessment of my shape nullified my identity.
We had a march that very morning about this, didn’t we? Women marching, unified by their contempt for the assumption that they are somehow to blame for their own assault and victimisation. A Facebook event was made, and it ballooned! We had a whole march! And do you remember the John Snow Pub gay kissing incident and all the clictivism that happened for that? Hundreds of people kissed all over the pub in defence of those kicked-out guys.
And that’s brilliant. But where are we? Where is the mass anger and outrage for the trans* people? It’s still the Seventies for us in many respects. The internet-based feminist communities are slowly but surely opening their arms to us, but we’re still widely invisible. The beating of a trans woman in Baltimore earlier this year prompted the only bit of mass internet activism concerning a trans* person I have seen in years. We don’t get outraged marches or supportive column-space in newspapers. We’re still the circus freaks of popular culture, the strange deviant unicorns that get exoticised or demonised by turns. Look at the media shitfest over the gender-free baby Storm. Look at how many publications misgender Chaz Bono when they talk about him. Would have that entire carriage of silent passengers stood up in my defence if it was overt racism being displayed instead of transphobia? It’s just not taken as seriously, at all.
I appreciate that there aren’t many of us. If there was a march of trans* people in London tomorrow, there’d be about three people there. 2010’s Brighton TransDOR was woefully under-attended, and the only cisgender people there were friends and family – people who were directly in contact with a trans* person. We’re invisible. But we’re here. And as the social atmosphere changes from hostility to acceptance, more of us will have the courage to live openly and come out.
Bring that on, say I. And that all starts with basic visibility and people giving a shit. So here I am, being as visible as I can be (without blogging continually about living trans* as there’s people that do it better than me!) and I’m asking you to start giving a shit about trans* people right now. Please.
Here are some of my favourite read-think links:
- Transwhat? – an up-and-coming resource for non-trans* friends of trans* people and allies
- Asher Bauer’s “Not Your Mum’s Trans* 101” – a 101 on what it means to be trans* that pulls none of its punches
- Ciscentrism Sucks! on Tumblr – a trans* space that makes good reading if you want to educate yourself on more in-depth trans* discourse
BadRep goes SlutWalking!
Bad Reputation had its second Team Protest Outing on 11th June (the first was March for the Alternative on 26th March, which many of us went to as part of various different groups). This time, for SlutWalk, we were bigger, with almost all of Team BadRep and their friends arriving in various states of dress, undress, latex dress, fancy dress and get-me-into-this-corset-dress. None of us wore high heels, for the record. Unless you count the large stompy New Rocks of our editor Miranda.
We were also better organised, having managed to create a proper banner and it was great running into other feminist and activist groups such as bloggers from The F Word and the Queer Resistance crew.
Look at our banner! It
Most importantly, we were also a little wiser, having learned to pack water, snacks (wholemeal scones with dried fruit have been designated the official protest food) and weather-suitable clothing, which in this case meant sunblock and waterproofs.
We gathered outside the tube station to co-ordinate ourselves and our outfits before filtering over to Hyde Park Corner where the marchers were being gently herded by stewards. It’s estimated that over 5,000 people marched on the day, far more than originally thought. The sun beat down on us as the air filled with a festival air of drumming, and SlutWalk London banners: “No Means No” and “My Dress Is Not A Yes”. Homemade banners told a range of stories, from the extremely personal (“I was wearing jeans and a jumper”) to the slightly Dadaist (a hand-drawn image of a breast crying black tears).
After a little longer in the sun than we might have liked, we eventually set off to a chorus of cheers, chanting “yes means yes and no means no”. The well-dressed folk outside the Ritz, combined with the builders digging up the road, added a slightly surreal quality to the proceedings.
Along the march we were able to look around at our fellow slut-walkers, who all seemed to have arrived from a wide variety of backgrounds, and many of them newly politicised and newly interested in feminist activism. The variety and number of people present was impressive. Men and women, cis and trans* people, old, young, queer and straight. But sadly, that hasn’t been precisely how Slutwalk has been addressed or represented.
The march has been depicted as a “women’s protest“, with most articles leading on the high volume of women and only skirting over the fact that there were plenty of men at the march. This attitude was sadly widespread on the day itself: we were referred to as “ladies” by other marchers despite the fact that we had men in our group.
Here at BadRep Towers, and partly hidden by the veil of the internet, we are often assumed to be a group of women, whereas we are in fact variously women, men and bugger-off with-your-gender-identification. Whilst on the march, we were very visible (especially with our amazing banner!) and yet we still faced the same problem. The men walking with us were either ignored, or even more tellingly, assumed to be women in later writeups altogether. And there was persistent misgendering going on too, even after people were set straight. It’s pretty awkward and upsetting to witness people being excluded on a march because of how they look, when you are marching to remove prejudice over how people look.
The other challenge here is that if SlutWalk is viewed as a man-excluding club then it falls too easily into the trap of accusations of man-hating, rather like common judgements of feminism itself. So, for the record, there were plently of chaps and not just the ones that write for this website. And hurrah for them!
Other media responses included criticisms of the reasoning behind the march itself. The blogosphere exploded into hackneyed analogies along the lines of “people who leave their front doors open should expect to get burgled”, and the media started to generate all sorts of ways to stir up other reasons why SlutWalk is a bad idea.
The Mail (of all places) criticised Slutwalk for being too middle class in its focus. We (much like the Mail) did not conduct an in-depth survey of the class background of all 5,000 protesters, so I’m going to let the image of women holding a Socialist Worker sign used in that very article attest to the class conscious values of those present. Irony points, indeed.
And, as was sadly bound to happen, some members of the press completely missed the point or just concentrated on the titilation aspect.
Media response aside, the general mood on the day was very positive and there are plenty of articles out there that are just as upbeat, just as expressive of the wide range of people who support Slutwalk: lesbilicious offers an eyewitness account, or if you don’t feel like doing any more reading, there’s a huge collection of photos that show the range of people at the Slutwalk over at Urban75.
We met a lot of cool people and heard a range of inspiring, heartfelt and amazing stories from speakers when we landed in a jam-packed Trafalgar Square. In the bustle, it was hard to see the speakers, so we let a wave of different voices wash over us. We listened to plummy, stately tones deride the idea that only working class women get raped, then the quiet voice of “Just Jo” deliver her life story about the experiences of being a trans woman subject to verbal and physical abuse. We heard the shocking facts about abysmal treatment of sex workers in instances of rape, delivered by Sheila Farmer of the English Collective of Prostitutes and activist Sanum Ghafoor angrily berated the catch-22 situation of living in a society that criticises women and dubs them “terrorists” in the street when they don the hijab and “wear too much”, yet casts them as “slags” when they wear too little. She was ably supported in this by the presence of Counterfire’s Hijabs, Hoodies and Hotpants block.
Personal stories told by all kinds of people, but all pointing to the same conclusion. Rape happens to people regardless of what they are wearing. Rapists, not those who are raped, and certainly not the clothes of those who are raped, are to blame.
SlutWalk London still need some extra cash – organising protests costs a lot of money. You can help them by donating here.
Unsung Heroes: Annie Jump Cannon
How many stars are there in the sky? If you’re the fantastically named Annie Jump Cannon the answer is “at least 230,000”. Working at Harvard Observatory around the end of the 19th century, Cannon is credited with pioneering the first organised system of classifying stellar objects, the Harvard Classification System. Nicknamed “The Census Taker of the Sky”, she classified almost a quarter of a million stars, more than anyone else has ever done – including 300 she personally discovered.
Possessing a sharp mind, and with the good fortune of coming from a family that could afford quality education, Cannon had attended Wellesley College and graduated with a degree in physics in 1884. Finding the limited career options of home life boring, and having little in common with her peers, being (paraphrasing from her autobiographical writings) older and better educated, Cannon returned to Wellesley in 1894. Guided by her former instructor, the formidably minded professor Sarah Frances Whiting, Cannon took graduate courses in astronomy and spectroscopy (a relatively new development in imaging at the time), and discovered her true calling.
After two years of graduate study, and looking to get access to Harvard’s superior telescope facilities, Cannon was hired at the Harvard Observatory as part of the group that would become known as “Pickering’s women”. The Harvard Computers, to use the group’s actual name, were a small group of women hired by Edward Pickering to work through the raw data being gathered by the observatory (this of course being a time when a computer was still generally a person who calculated things, not a machine). Pickering had hired Cannon and her fellow computers largely because women were cheaper to employ than men, allowing him to hire more of them; a neccessity given that the rate at which data was being gathered was outstripping the rate at which it could be processed.
So, what was Cannon earning, given her degree and graduate work at one of America’s most prestigious private colleges, and the fund set up by the wealthy physician Anna Draper to support the observatory’s work? Somewhere in the region of $0.25 to $0.50 an hour. This put her slightly above an unskilled factory worker, and somewhat below a clerical or secretarial worker. What would a lot of us do in the face of woefully poor pay despite excellent qualifications and a natural talent? Probably look for new work, or failing that become disillusioned and start putting in less effort than perhaps we should.
Fortunately for modern astronomers, Annie Jump Cannon had a passion for her field, a drive for progress, and a rather brilliant mind for organising and classifying abstract data. Rather than throw up her arms in frustration at the poor pay and oten tedious work of examining stellar images she set herself to the task of examining the bright stars of the Southern hemisphere.
Now for some vaguely sciencey details: at the time, there was a disagreement between two others working at the observatory, Antonia Maury and Williamina Fleming, as to how stars should be classified. Cannon pioneered a third system, classifying stars based on the strength of their Balmer absorption lines (one of a set of series that describe the spectral line emissions of hydrogen atoms, the strength of a star’s Balmer absorption lines provide a reliable indicator of the stars temperature). This provided a thorough and yet elegant means of classifying stellar objects, dividing them into letter categories based on temperature. When astronomers refer to our sun as a G-type star, that’s Cannon’s classification system in action.1
Following her groundbreaking work on stellar classifications, Cannon remained dedicated to the field of astronomy, eventually receiving a regular appointment at Harvard as the William C Bond Astronomer, in addition to receiving an honorary doctorate from Oxford (the first one given out to a female academic). Her legacy lives on for astronomers, both in the ongoing use of her work and in the Annie Jump Cannon Award, given out by the American Astronomical Society to pioneering female researchers in the field. Even off the planet, Cannon’s memory lives on, one of the Moon’s craters being named in her honour.
So, next time you’re looking up at the sky, keep in mind Annie Jump Cannon, who more than likely labelled most of the stars you can see.
(As a final note, Cannon was not the only woman working in the Harvard Observatory at the time to do amazing things. Henrietta Swan Leavitt‘s work on Cepheid stars arguably provided the vital theoretical underpinnings on which much of Edwin Hubble’s work was based. She received almost no recognition for her discoveries during her own lifetime.)
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
- For the curious, the stars are classified from hottest to coldest as O, B, A, F, G, K and M. The hotter stars tend to be more massive and less common than their colder cousins. The classes are further sub-divided into 0-9, 0 being the hottest in a class and 9 the coldest. Our own sun is a G2 star. [↩]
Team BadRep were sent a writing prompt this month: What is your favourite film or TV series, and why? If it’s what you’d call ‘feminist-friendly’, what about it appealed? If it isn’t, how does that work for you, and are there nonetheless scenes, characters and so on that have stayed with you and continue to occupy a soft spot for you as a feminist pop culture adventurer?
Unlike the previous film I chose to write about , this one is definitely in my Top Three of all time.
Source: Wikipedia.
I love all the Sergio Leone Westerns. I love the stand-offs, the saloons, the mad Mexican trumpeting – in fact, any music at all by Ennio Morricone.
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) is different. It is a death-knell for the cowboy movie. The entire 2-3 hours is about how the world has moved on, and to me that makes it a specifically feminist piece no matter how much it laments that the change is happening.
First of all, take a look at that poster. Of those four faces, who looks like they’re the most important? Whose name is first after the director? Claudia Cardinale. This is a cowboy movie which is largely about a woman who isn’t a gunfighter.
A difference between this and the Dollars westerns that you immediately notice is the pacing. For the first ten minutes, absolutely nothing happens. Three men wait for a train. One catches a fly under the barrel of his gun… then lets it go again. They wait some more. This is a slower, more contemplative movie, and not remotely about how many bandits Clint Eastwood can kill in 90 minutes.
Henry Fonda (famous for playing the good-guy, brilliantly cast here as a ruthless killer of women and children) is hired to shoot Cardinale’s family because they own a piece of land which will be valuable when the railroad comes through. He kills the men and boys, but she hasn’t arrived in town yet. When she discovers she’s now the sole owner of the land, she decides to fight to keep it.
There’s also Charles Bronson at his squinty best as “Harmonica”, a silent man with a debt to settle, and Jason Robards as a bandit whom Fonda tries to frame for the murders. Aaaand… that’s about it.
There are several points at which Cardinale’s character Jill is exploited or attacked, but she refuses to give up. It is a struggle of power, and while the attacks and prejudices suggest that women are still as sidelined as they were in the Middle Ages in my previous post, the owner of the railroad doesn’t even see her as a woman: just a small person who can be bought or murdered to get them out of the way like everyone else. It’s about money, and large companies vs the individual, not women or lone gunmen. It’s barely a cowboy film at all.
And it is very much about money, because that’s the final message. As the good gunmen leave Jill to run the town herself, you don’t know where they or the other loners will go now. The time of individuals carving out the frontier is over. Civilisation has caught up, and their world has been replaced by Banks and Corporations; these men are relics and they know it – powerless, irrelevant, unwanted. The new money allows anyone, of any gender, with no gun skills or army, to live securely and with power over themselves. Jill as a merchant not only represents the death of the Old West, but is the one person who thrives and succeeds in the entire movie. As the romantic vision of the lone gunman rides off into obsolesence, we miss it a little but are reminded that the heroine of the piece would never have had a chance to live in safety under the old ways.
It doesn’t have the quick gratification of the Dollars trilogy, but just a few seconds of the trailer is enough to put a smile on my face. (Interestingly, the trailer depicts nearly every time that Jill is attacked or oppressed, when her character and role is the opposite for most of the actual film. I’m just grateful they managed to put her on the poster without making her boobs or legs the focus.)
None of this is why I love it, of course. It’s the music, the crazy camera shots, the 10-minute scenes, the almost infinite time Leone can spend looking at every crag on someone’s unmoving face while gunfight melodies swell in the background, and the stunning performances from everybody involved. Fonda’s incredibly hard icy eyes. Bronson’s unflinching return gaze. (Top comment on the YouTube link to the trailer is Chuck Norris took one look at Charles Bronson’s eyes and wet himself.) It’s an epic, entertaining masterpiece. It IS cinema. Several scenes were timed to fit with the soundtrack for maximum effect, and the end result is remarkable.
I’ll leave the last line to Wikipedia:
In 2009, it was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant and will be preserved for all time.
Revisiting Our Favourite Movies: Excalibur
Team BadRep were sent a writing prompt this month: What is your favourite film or TV series, and why? If it’s what you’d call ‘feminist-friendly’, what about it appealed? If it isn’t, how does that work for you, and are there nonetheless scenes, characters and so on that have stayed with you and continue to occupy a soft spot for you as a feminist pop culture adventurer?
I’m a movie geek who (along with several of Team BadRep) can’t possibly choose only one favourite film. It’d take me a month just to narrow it down to a top 20. In the end I wrote about two films – this first one precisely because it’s pretty indefensible from a feminist point of view, and the second – which I’ll get to in tomorrow’s post – because I think it is very feminist in a genre where you don’t expect it.
But I also think this choice, my first, has some hidden feminist aspects:
Movie poster for the 1981 film "Excalibur". (Copyright Warner Bros.)
John Boorman’s Excalibur. We’re firmly into ‘Knights In Armour’ territory here, which means the usual relegation of women to being prizes to be fought over, silent Queens, or love interests whose own opinions aren’t asked for, and absolutely nothing else. There’s a debate about whether showing this dynamic is itself feminist if you use it to highlight how unequal and appalling the situation was for women historically (HBO’s recent series Game of Thrones is reigniting this argument, although the source material books for that one are clearer: they start from a position of female oppression and have several characters rebel against it precisely because of the extreme power difference, and makes the readers acknowledge and dislike the inequality).
At first glance though, Excalibur isn’t even trying for feminism points. Its famous heroes are a male King and a male Wizard, some men who all get to be equal to other men around a table, and a man who starts a war over someone else’s wife. And everything goes to hell when one of the few named women sleeps with the man she actually loves.
Looking at the main female characters in detail, we have Igraine who is a pouting, mostly naked object of lust, and played by (somewhat creepily) director John Boorman’s daughter Katrine. She is famously – and this causes wincing every time – naked while being given loving attentions by a man in full plate-mail (surely that would chafe?!).
We also have Guinevere, played excellently by Cherie Lunghi as someone spirited, but increasingly trapped and fragile. I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to reveal that Guinevere falls in love with Lancelot. The fact that she chooses to act on it in defiance of the strict rules around sexual conduct could be seen as empowering (even if it does result in her being sentenced to death, from which she has to be rescued by him).
And we have… Morgana. Played by Helen Goddamn Mirren.
Which is the point at which the film redeems itself a hell of a lot. It’s not just the power of the performances (several of which are brilliant despite the very-1980 effects and pomp) it’s that as well as being the best cinematic retelling of popular Arthurian Legend even today, the movie is filled with iconic archetypes, and they stand out way beyond the plot.
We’re reaching a bit to find any feminism in the movie up to this point, I agree. The source material was put together (in the best-known version) just around the time women were reduced to princesses in towers in storytelling, so maybe it’s not surprising that they’re mostly given similar treatment here. But there is one ray of hope.
Whether this movie counts as having a strong positive female lead eventually depends entirely on whether you think the archetype of The Witch is a positive one.
Morgana is absolutely the classic dangerous magical female. She’s immensely threatening: ambitious, capable, cunning, sexual, malevolent, but also completely outside the rules. She uses seduction as a weapon, and is utterly transgressive – her hate drives her to sleep with Arthur (her half-brother) and have a child (Mordred). This in turn breaks the whole of nature, and specifically the King’s link with the Land.
The only other magic-user (Merlin) is also chaotic and mysterious, but very careful to stay within the boundaries. Morgana is not. She is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, stronger than the King, and stronger than Merlin (and she proves it in both cases). She sees clearly, which (due to the aforementioned sex-in-armour incident) is what sets her on a path of vengeance in the first place. She is owned by no man, with her own desires and plans for her family to gain power. And she succeeds at a great deal of it.
Now okay, it’s not going to raise the banner of feminism very high when this character is unequivocally the Baddie – meant to be feared and mistrusted from the outset. Witches are outcasts, however independent or fearsome that lets them appear. The men Morgana opposes have made her their enemy by being flawed with greed and lust, by abusing her family and fighting endless wars, but we’re not meant to be sympathetic to her. She’s far too lethal and hungry.
As well as the performances, this movie is one of my favourites because of the amazing visuals, the number of people who turn up in early roles (Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, Ciarán Hinds, Patrick Stewart), the fact it has loads of mud and blood in it (unlike many sanitised retellings) and for the sheer bonkers joy of filming a load of knights in armour charging around to the sound of Wagner.
But Helen Mirren and Nicol Williamson (Merlin) really do stand out. What could have been an epic about how ‘men defeat other men to decide which man gets to be top man while a man does some magic’ is instead largely taken over by the brilliant interplay between Merlin and Morgana – the electric, snake-hissing, mountain-deep emnity, the sense of power and caution whenever they invoke their power. They’re much more exciting than Arthur or Guinevere.
Of course, there is a story behind that.
As the director says in his autobiography ‘Adventures of a Suburban Boy‘, Williamson knew Mirren from some years before, when they had a huge falling-out during a production of Macbeth. Boorman told the would-be Merlin that Mirren was likely to be playing Morgana, and the actor immediately changed his reply. (I can’t remember the exact words from his book, but the general idea was as follows):
“Oh, then I couldn’t possibly do it.” “Why not?” “Well, if you must know, she wanted to sleep with me and I turned her down.”
This confused John Boorman. Neither of the pair were known for being shy in that regard. (Helen Mirren ended up dating Liam Neeson during filming…)
Boorman asked Mirren if she wanted to play Morgana, and she was very excited. Then he said Nicol would be Merlin.
“Oh, then no way.” “Why not?” “It’s been awkward ever since he wanted to sleep with me and I said no.”
Not knowing if either of them was telling the truth, Boorman decided to cast them anyway, figuring the tension would be good for the chemistry onscreen. And he was right.
I love the overblown fanfare of this movie (and not just in the soundtrack). It has the best ever “hand holding a sword out of a lake” scene, epic battles, amazing Irish locations, and moments where everything is just focused on Merlin or Morgana saying a few words which change the world. Also, Helen Goddamn Mirren being awesome.
The really bad news is… they’re remaking it. In the last two years both Bryan Singer and Guy Ritchie (!) have been linked to King Arthur movies with the words “remake of Excalibur” from Warner Brothers specifically mentioned. Don’t do it, WB! This version may be knee-deep in Eighties Cheese but it will never be beaten, certainly not by today’s Hollywood. Huge amounts of Eighties Cheese never stopped Robin of Sherwood from being amazing (and in fact still the best version of Robin Hood, despite constant remake attempts) and the two have much in common.
Overall, Excalibur is a bit of a guilty viewing pleasure in feminist terms, but that’s not the case at all with my next pick. That one stands up as a triumph of film-making AND feminism…
It’s been a mixed bag for representations of women in the world of computer games releases. In the woot! corner, we have the much-anticipated arrival of Portal 2. The original Portal garnered a lot of press, not only because it was a lot of fun to play, but because it challenged a lot of notions about the FPS (first person shooter) genre. There’s a nice, if rather Freudian analysis of the first game here.
Chell, the character you play in Portal 2
Whether or not you agree in full with that critique, Portal is different, even down to the attitudes its game designers have towards designing the female avatar.
We can certainly look at this new arrival as a continuation of gaming house Valve Corporation‘s pleasing two feminist fingers up to traditional notions of male-centric gaming.
Speaking of traditional notions, in the Epic Fail corner we have Brink, which was also hailed as being a revolutionary, life-will-never-be-the-same-again game. Which it might well be, on some fronts, and as far as I can tell, it is a pretty cool shooty-killy game. But then, I like guns and explosions. However, woe unto those who cry “awesome”, because one of the main selling points of Brink is that the dollmaker (the widget that lets you select how your character looks) has literally millions of variants, so many that the internet has spawned tons of webpages and YouTube vids helping you through this process. And yet, none of these options are female. Cue a variety of opinions on the Internet as to whether this is actually important.
Naturally, I think it is, and if we want to chuck hard facts into the argument, let’s remember that under-representation of women is rife in almost all walks of life and serves as a discouragement to other women from participating, thus continuing the gendered ghetto. The gaming world is an interesting one because whilst men do outnumber women in terms of time spent playing computer games, around a third of game players are female. Which is quite a lot, really. I often wonder how many more women would enjoy them if there were more games that had a more inclusive idea of gender. And, as if in answer to my musings, along comes a good example from 2006 sent in by our own Rob, Saints Row 2.
Now, a game franchise based on gangster culture is not the most likely source of this Found Feminism, and the website does not scream “we’ve totally got our gender issues sorted!” at me, but hold onto your controllers kids, because Rob has pinged me over some screen grabs from the dollmaker which make for interesting viewing.
The sliders shown to the left of the character (the second image enlarges if you click) allow you to toggle a number of variables, including muscle, fat, age and skin tone, which effectively lets you make characters who look far from the basic stereotype hypermasculine and hyperfeminine models so common in games. Of course, you can still be Mr Abs and Ms Double G should you so wish, but the important thing is that the option to NOT do this is there.
And that’s rather the point of this Found Feminism, and one of the reasons I am a feminist. I am not up in arms because the representations of women in computer games are of beautiful sexy assassins, it’s because there is so rarely an option to be anything else. Which means that when a few games come along that push against those barriers, we should applaud the makers and encourage them to do more. And perhaps one day the promised cake of gaming gender equality will no longer be a lie.
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!