Disney princesses have a BadRep with feminists, and let’s face it, it’s easy to see why. Even the recent ones have waists which are about as thick as their wrists, and the individual life lessons from each could be perceived as so warped as to have become an internet meme.
But is this really a case of “Disney-fication”, with the studio taking fairy tales and imposing ruthless mainstream norms on them? There is a huge body of work which looks at folk stories from a feminist perspective, and I’m not so qualified to talk about that. What I do find interesting is how incredibly polarised much of the source material was in the first place.
Witches: warts, not waifs. (Source: Wikipedia.)
In the European fairy tales which made it big in England and the US (mostly Grimm and some French romances), good people are Beautiful and bad people are Ugly. This is true whether you’re a stepsister, a witch or an ogre; physical ugliness goes along with agressive or dangerous behaviour every time. Good = Beautiful, and this is not negotiable. (Try the reverse: try finding anyone ugly who you’re meant to cheer for. You’ve got maybe a 1% chance. Less if they’re female.)
It gets better though, because that “bad” behaviour is very specific: it is always an act against the interests of the Heroine or Hero. Being a female magic-user doesn’t make you a witch; you could be a fairy godmother. No-one asks the Godmothers what they spend the rest of their time doing, they are entirely defined by whether they bless or curse the Heroine. In some tales, it’s only because one out of thirteen of them is not given an invitation that she decides to curse the child – would the others have acted similarly if it had been one or more of them instead? We don’t know. But once the curse is given, that Godmother is fair game for a horrible death and probably had a secret hooked nose all along. The Disney versions of Fairy Godmothers may be tittering clouds of pink benevolence, but they aren’t often described as “kind” in the tales – they are only judged as “Good” or “Bad” by whether they’re currently on our side or not.
It’s also problematical if we use behaviour to judge who the “good girl” is. The modern versions of Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are all very similar: beautiful, virtuous daughters who get into trouble and need rescuing. It might be a fall into poverty, or danger from an outsider (new stepmother, hot men a wolf) but there’s one critical element to being the Good girl and that is passivity. Red Riding Hood doesn’t kill the wolf. Cinderella runs away and is found (hunted down door-to-door, really) by the Prince, without announcing herself even up to the moment that the shoe goes on. He and her fairy Godmother are the ones taking all the action to save her. Snow White / Sleeping Beauty are unconscious/dead.
We already saw in Markgraf’s movie review of Red Riding Hood that a young woman choosing the wrong man could derail society’s plans (in a time when arranged marriages to a virgin were crucial). All these messages are saying that you need to be compliant, dutiful and passive. If you are a woman who is aggressive, demanding, loud, insists on her own needs or has control over her life, chances are you’re a wicked stepmother and only a few days away from the awesome kind of ending Disney oddly decided to leave out:
“That she should be thrown into a cask stuck around with sharp nails, and that two white horses should be put to it, and should drag it from street to street till she is dead.”
The Goose Girl – Brothers Grimm
The destiny of the Hero is often no less automatic. He is invariably given a beautiful Princess as a prize, to be his wife. Winning her hand is sometimes the only reason he takes on the quest in the first place. The task is often set by her father, who expects the Hero to be killed instead of succeeding, and at no time does the woman have any say in this arrangement.
So given the source material for the stories which Disney decided to take on, if they remained roughly true to the spirit of the tale, is it really fair to bash Disney as much as we do?
Oh hell yes.
First of all, they have a choice on which ones to produce. Chrissy Derbyshire in her essay “Toads and Diamonds” for the anthology “Vs” (which looks at Duality in magic, mythology and religion) points out that there are tales where the magic is entirely neutral, such as a Genie granting wishes. If the person making the wish is bad, sucks to be them. If they are altruistic and peaceful, they’ll probably be okay. There are plenty of tales Disney could have gone with which say “a person’s actions define them”, not “poverty and an evil stepmother can only be solved by marrying the right guy”.
Now okay, not all of the stories which deviate from the “good gets rewarded” trope would make great movies. I think it’s a Brothers Grimm tale which reads roughly (and I am not making this up) “Little Erik was a good boy and never did anything wrong, but one he died anyway because that’s just how it goes sometimes.” I can see how choosing your targets for conversion to animation is a valid excuse.
Even within that though, there’s still the question of the famous Disney poetic licence. They have a history of sanitising and whitewashing these stories for maximum profit, and it’s very rarely to inject any feminist ideas. Sure, in the 90s the women such as Belle in Beauty and the Beast became Independent and Argumentative… but only in strictly approved mainstream ways, to entirely fit the current belief of what would be PC. There are no lesbians in Disney, no women who don’t want a lifelong relationship by the end. It may be that the Victorians had already santised the tales by the time Disney picked them up, but that only works as an excuse for so long.
Okay, Sleeping Beauty physically can’t save herself – there’s no way Disney could have got around that – but even when they try to be PC in recent efforts it is only ever in a way which won’t scandalise the lowest common denominator of American audiences. The source material may praise beauty, passivity and rescuing, but Disney have never hesitated to edit other aspects of the stories to something more palatable. Even in recent times when the female characters actually have, well, character, the one aspect which apparently mustn’t change is the straining of credibility that their tiny bodies wouldn’t collapse under the weight of their own organs. (Check the link in the first paragraph. Look at Jasmine’s waist and wrists. Or Ariel’s. Sleeping Beauty is presumably wearing a corset, but I’m not sure if that’s an improvement when you’re marketing at six year-olds.)
Now, I’m a guy who hasn’t seen many of the Disney Princess movies more than a dimly-remembered once, I haven’t read the reconstructed feminist versions of fairy tales, and my love of Angela Carter aside I’m much less qualified to write about this stuff than… well, most of the rest of Team BadRep.
So we’re going to town on this one. Oh yes.
All this week we’re having a Feminist Fairytale Fest here at BadRep. We’ll be looking at the incredibly brutal original versions which became censored, at modern reworkings, and at comment from feminists on how to find amazing nuggets of self-agency and adventuring by women in well-known classics!
A Little Less Day-Glo, or Goodbye Poly Styrene
I was just waving goodbye to sixteen when I discovered X-Ray Spex, and I discovered them in the least cool-cred of ways: via a covermount CD I got with Kerrang! magazine, which I bought semi-religiously at the time.
This CD was part of the Kerrang! Hometaping series, in which various leading lights of the hard rock scene, invariably men (do shout me if this has changed, as I have since given up on K!, but my optimism’s economy-size) compiled mixtapes of their favourite tracks past and present. This one, compiled by Casey Chaos of parental-guidance-sticker-collecting Cali-punk-metal outfit Amen, wasn’t a bad mix, looking at it now. For the most part.
But it was the presence of I Am A Cliché on the tracklist that put the CD on regular rotation on my Discman. That track stood out, sparking nicely off The Distillers and The Adverts (the sum total of female input, there) and kicking defiantly against the roll-your-eyes-or-lose-your-lunch misogyny of Let’s Fuck by the Murderdolls (at least the CD had range). And the more I listened to Poly Styrene‘s life-affirming shouts, the more alert I felt to the complete shit that passed (passes!) for acceptable attitudes to gender in some of the rest of the bands on the CD, in the mag, in my music collection, in general. (For that jarringly educational juxtaposition, Casey’s at least to be thanked.)
From there it was a short leap to the rest of Germ Free Adolescents. Nobody forgets the first time they hear the crisp, sing-song pronouncement that opens Oh Bondage, Up Yours! : Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think… (when I set up this blog, I entered it as the mousefloat text description for the Music Box category on the sidebar). Every time I hear it, I feel that emphasis on but I think… reverb through me: powerful, unabashed and instantly compelling. And funny. “Playing with words and ideas, having a laugh about everything, sending it up”, as Poly herself put it to the Independent in 1998 (this approach was arguably worlds away from Amen’s bloodied-up on-stage histrionics, so it’s perhaps faintly ironic she made Casey’s list of hometaped heroes, but anyway).
Poly passed away this morning, having, as her site team have aptly put it, “won her battle to go to higher places”. For me, it’s the loss of a personal hero – she formed the Spex in 1978 by throwing an ad in Melody Maker with a header demanding the attention of YOUNG PUNX WHO WANT TO STICK IT TOGETHER.
She’s on record, in a recent interview with 6Music quoted in her BBC obituary, as saying, “I know I’ll probably be remembered for Oh Bondage Up Yours!… I’d like to be remembered for something a bit more spiritual.”
For me, the impact of X-Ray Spex actually was akin to something spiritual. Poly threw into stark, uncompromising relief the lack of female voices normally in play in mainstream rock, in Kerrang!, and so on. She made me wonder, for the first time, what I thought about that. (Clue: it ends in “up yours”.) So I think in a way, although the Spex’s one album probably will always be her most famous music, that’s okay.
Cheers, Poly. Here’s to you. Rest in peace. (Say hi to Ari Up for us.) The world’s a little bit less day-glo now, and much the worse for it.
- Listen to Germ Free Adolescents on last.fm
- Visit Poly’s official site and find out about her solo projects – her newest album Generation Indigo came out last month
- Poly Styrene Remembered: a photo set on NME.com
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Team BadRep is currently on holiday and will return to the usual posting schedule next week
At the Movies: Red Riding Hood
It is no secret, to this or any section of the internet, that I love werewolves. Like, really love werewolves. I love werewolves with a fiery burning passion that glows with an embarrassing ardour. I’ve been into werewolves since I was old enough to pick up books about them. When I doodle mindlessly, it’s snarling werewolf faces that I draw by default, and when I draw to relax, the things I find easiest and most therapeutic to draw are werewolves. I love the twisted, terrifying combination of human and wolf anatomy. I like to draw thick, maned necks and sharp, curved teeth. I like to draw hand-paws, half human and half wolf, and I like to draw big, burning eyes and long, soft ears.
I hasten to add that I’m not a furry.
Werewolves are the greatest thing ever. They’re great, big, vicious monsters that will pull a person to shreds with their claws, and yet can disguise themselves very effectively as the thing they prey on to hide amongst them. There’s lots of story potential lurking in the legend of the lycanthrope. They’re transformation, liberation, sexuality, secrets, puberty, forbidden passion, rage, hunger and loneliness all at once. The idea of a human that can literally turn into a terrifying predator and go on a rampage has been inherent in legends and folklore since before we could write, probably because of the storytelling and thematic potential in such a creature. What can’t you do with a werewolf? (Still not a furry.)
So I went to see Red Riding Hood because, well, it’s a werewolf film and I have this biological imperative when it comes to werewolf films, and also because I was interested to see what they’d do with them. It’s directed by Catherine Hardwicke, also responsible for the heinous pile of shite that was Twilight, which made me cautious – but I still wanted to see what threads of the werewolf myth would be re-spun for the Twilight generation. I’m all for innovative takes. And, you know, with all that potential behind the werewolf, surely they’d find something fun to run with, right?
Wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, oh god, wrong. I didn’t set my bar particularly high in the first place because, you know, Twilight (do I really need to go into why I don’t like that franchise? Really?) but Red Riding Hood neatly limboed right underneath.
***I suppose there’d better be a spoiler warning here.***
The setting is what you’d expect: pseudo-Medieval village in the middle of an unrealistically spiky forest, with an insulting gender dimorphic, binary society. The characters are nothing more than pages from TV Tropes printed off and pasted onto cardboard cut-outs. The dialogue is emotionless tedious drivel that I’ve seen beaten in artistry by ten-year-olds writing about their lunchboxes and the plot wouldn’t know what “innovation” meant if the OED definition was carved into the side of its face with a screwdriver.
I don’t know about you, but I am hopeless – absolutely hopeless – at being bored. I get violent. It’s a dreadful personality flaw, and really I should be more patient, but if I find myself stuck doing, watching or listening to something that bores me, I get enraged to the point of being pugnacious.
Half an hour in, and I was seriously considering starting a fight in the auditorium.
It’s as simplistic and colourful as a child’s toy. I know it’s aimed at the prepubescent, hormonal tweenagers that take Twilight as seriously as people take their religious texts, but it’s so monodimensional that I found myself Photoshopping in new, imaginary dimensions just to keep myself from falling asleep.
When can we all get as bored as I am of this heterocentric one-girl-two-guys trope? The story, instead of revolving around something interesting and mutable (like, say, werewolves), revolved around the personality vacuum that passed as the lead character (Amanda Seyfried being fought over by HER ONE TRUE LOVE and HER FINANCIALLY VIABLE FIANCÉ (Shiloh Fernadez and Max Irons). Neither of whom was a werewolf. And neither was she. It was like the bloody werewolf was an inconvenient distraction from the real “meat” of the Fisher Price plot.
It did, however, keep me guessing, if just because I couldn’t believe how intellect-insultingly bland it was. “Ooh, the werewolf is going to be her One True Love boy,” I thought, initially. “It’ll be an exploration of forbidden passion and how lust can turn you into a monster.” A well-trodden, predictable and dreadfully slut-shaming path, but at least it was werewolf-centric.
But it wasn’t.
Disappointed, I then thought, “Okay, it’ll be her grandmother, and it’ll be a sisters-doing-it-for-themselves female sexuality tribal-loyalties thing. Look, they’ve even colour-coded her, her mum and her grandma in transcendental Virgin Mary blue!” But no. No, nothing that complex or potentially interesting from a feminist perspective.
It was, in fact, neither of these. The werewolf part of the plot – and I have no idea why I’m being so careful not to spoil it for you – chose the most boring, incidental and lazy option that it could possibly find, and didn’t even bother meshing it into the love-triangle schtick. It was Scotch-taped on like an afterthought, as if just to get a bit of mileage out of the “STAY AWAY FROM ME I AM BAD FOR YOU” unattainable-boy routine that made bloody Twilight so popular.
And after all that, there was only one rampage! It was a good rampage, however, because there was lots of the werewolf smashing stuff, biting people’s arms off and leaping across rooftops – but there was no blood. In fact, this was the most bloodless werewolf film I have ever seen. It was about as horrific and monstrous as a Mr Men book. I felt betrayed. But more than betrayal, I felt pity. Perhaps they didn’t know how to make fake blood? I considered writing to the director and sending her my tried-and-tested recipe for realistic fake blood, but then realised that this might encourage her to make more films and no-one needs that.
Pretty werewolf, though, if a bit plasticine-y. And there was Gary Oldman being a fiendish, villainous priest, and that’s definitely something I can get behind in an extremely visceral sense.
The artist would like to apologise for the lack of illustrations accompanying this review. The reasons for this are twofold: firstly, he is going on holiday tomorrow morning. Secondly, he doesn’t think Miranda would ever forgive him for just filling an entire article with werewolves doing random things, like ironing.
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- It has a nice werewolf in
- Gary Oldman is on Level 5 Ham and god help me but I’d do him lopsided
- The soundtrack is pretty lush
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- You could make a better, more engaging story with a set of MegaBlocks dragons
- Angela Carter already did the Red Riding Hood theme a thousand times better with The Company Of Wolves
- It makes Twilight look like a seminal feminist masterpiece
- Watch Dog Soldiers instead
Right! That’s it for us until after Easter and the bloody Royal Wedding. We’re taking a quick holiday breather, but we’ll be back after the Bank Holidays, following on from this review, with a week of fairytale-themed posts! See you on the other side…
At the Movies: Source Code
This is the greatest thing I have ever drawn.
Source Code, starring my favourite Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, was the total opposite. I saw the trailer and scattered my scornflakes to the four winds. “Pssh and foo,” I said. “Gorgeous, creepy premise and it’s all about SAVE THE LADY, WOOO, TOTALLY UNFEASIBLE ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP IS THE CRUX OF ALL ACTION.” I guffawed and rolled my eyes. “How boring. How stupid. How anachronistically unfeminist, to have the woman as a passive thing that needs rescuing.”
But I went to see it anyway, because my passion for Jake Gyllenhaal’s beautiful face is unrivalled and disturbing. And also because Duncan Jones’s breakout film, Moon, was widely touted as a dreadfully disturbing psychological affair, and I still rue the fact that I missed it at the cinema – so maybe it would have my proverbial cookies after all?
Short answer: yes.
Long answer: yeeeesssss, mmm, yes, mmm, thank you, Duncan, mmmm, Jake Gyllenhaal, hargleblarge he handcuffs a man to a pole, nrrgghhnnffnnff nargb.
Long intelligible answer: It certainly does. It turns out that the film’s content is the complete opposite of what the trailer would have me believe. The trailer bigs up the romantic relationship and downplays the unsettling premise. The film, on the other hand, is all about the premise, which rules the shop from start to finish, throwing up questions of morality and ethics in science, what happens to the universe when we make decisions, and the nature of a good death. The romance is a barely-there breath of something sweet and touching that’s symptomatic of the premise rather than an event all in itself.
I keep talking about this magical wonderpremise like it’s Jesus and I haven’t even explained what it is. How rude of me. Let’s fix that.
The premise, without spoiling anything, is that there is some military science (SCIENCE! more like) that allows a person to take possession of a dead person’s final memories, ten minutes before their death. This involves, of course, a poor bastard (in this case, a harassed-looking, sweaty Jake Gyllenhaal) being held prisoner in a Science Tank and forced back into some dead guy’s brain so that he can solve terrorism forever. In this case, Jake Gyllenhaal scuba dives through time and space into ten minutes prior to a big-ass explosion that detonates an entire train on the way to Chicago.
In the process of this, Jake Gyllenhaal observes the bloody, violent reality of the terrorist attack, and experiences first-hand the nature of the death the train passengers had foisted upon them out of the blue. This raises two issues: firstly, the morality of the military experiment that forces a man to repeatedly experience death from which he cannot escape. Secondly, we realise, along with Jake’s captive captain, that death without closure is worse than death itself.
So the reason, then, that there’s this romantic subplot anything, is less about OH ROMANCE, SAVE THE LADY, THE MERE PRESENCE OF A WOMANLASS MAKES MAN LOSE ALL SEMBLENCE OF RATIONALITY AND FLING ASIDE ALL PLANS AND SCHEMES FOR HER, FOR SHE IS RUBBISH GIRL! WHO CANNOT SAVE HERSELF! AND HE IS ERECTILE-TISSUE-BRAIN MAN! WHO THINKS OF NOTHING BUT WHETHER OR NOT HE CAN BESHAGGERATE A THING! and more about giving this woman – and her fellow passengers – a chance to have a good death.
Wow, that was one hell of a paragraph. What I’m saying is that Source Code doesn’t buy into the “Fuck everything, save the chick!” spiel wholesale. It touches upon it, but it’s made emphatically clear through events in the film that it’s not really about that at all. And good job too, because we all know that that kind of carrying-on is insulting to everyone involved.
Another thing: although this film deals heavily with military science – a combination of fields that stereotypically leaves women out wholesale – one of the lynchpin characters is a woman, and she’s not only steely and full of agency and poise, but she carries a bucketload of morality and cunning, too. I loved her. I was very glad she was in it to balance out the do-stuff-and-explode machismo of Jake Gyllenhaal Fighting Science.
That said, he fights science very well, and when we’re dumped right into the thick of it along with Mr Gyllenhaal’s beleaguered captain with as much explanation as he gets (that is to say, none whatsoever) the tension is wound so tight that it’s painful. It’s frightening and paranoia-inducing, and flavoured with a little pinch of Groundhog Day.
Overall, yeah! Source Code is surprising: it’s a fun and entertaining ride without being brainless. Also, I did mention the thing with Jake Gyllenhaal and he’s in a suit and he’s doing things and oh god help I’m on fire.
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- It’s not revolve-around-romance stupid as the trailer makes it out to be
- It does fun and interesting – if not necessarily innovative – things with choice-making and time
- Morals and ethics and science, oh my
- Jake Gyllenhaal, suit, things, oh god his gorgeous face etc.
- Some bits are, if you think about them, really fucking creepy
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- Well, the science is fucking hilarious. Wait, that’s a reason to see it.
A Lower Low
Please welcome the glorious Hannah Eiseman-Renyard to the guestpost soapbox…
Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: THAT’S NOT FUNNY!
I love live comedy, honest I do. I spent two weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year and I’ll be there for the full three weeks this year. Some of my best friends are (very good) comedians. However, as a scene: live comedy has a problem. I haven’t been an aficionado for many years, so maybe it was always there – but if recent articles are anything to go by; it seems to be growing. Increasingly, the search for ‘edgy’ material is translating into a scene where the recoil laugh – the I-can’t-believe-you-just-said-that laugh – is the only one aimed for. The targets are ‘soft’ – minorities and marginalized groups – and the jokes prod at the same old prejudices. The numbers of times I come home from a comedy gig wanting to dry-clean my brain is rising.
My hackles were finally raised enough to write this article after an especially bad gig I went to recently. A sketch group of white, able-bodied young men performed a series of female grotesques which were so consistently unpleasant that – though cheerily presented – the unmistakable undercurrent to the evening was ‘we really don’t like women much.’ Most sketches involved a member of the group donning a plastic wig to ‘be a girl’ – and every female character was a Lolita, a whore, a woman giving birth or a mother who hated her children. The punchlines ranged from coat hanger abortions to incest to rape to paedophilia. At my table, from about halfway through, we didn’t laugh so much as look to each other for reaction shots and a reality check. This troupe’s final skit was a song and dance number, the ‘Cell Block Tango’ from Chicago, with the words changed to ‘she had it coming’. Had there not been other people on the bill who I really wanted to see, I would have walked out then and there.
The problem is more widespread than just one shit comedy troupe . People more eloquent than myself have pointed out this return to the bad old days. It seems like the decades of hard-earned progress, a basic standard of ‘don’t be a shit to the marginalised’, is being discarded because now it’s apparently ironic. Sexism is increasingly tolerated (after all, everything’s sorted and equal now, so just lighten up, bitch) and other kinds of prejudice are also creeping back, too. ‘It’s not racist, it’s just un-PC, and no one likes political correctness. So, while we’re at it, what about those immigrants, homos, and the disabled, aye?’
Increasingly comedians who get pulled up for saying genuinely unpleasant things (I’m looking at you, Frankie Boyle) have taken this to be their selling point and then upped the ante in general douchery. While Jordan, the gossip-magazines’ favourite glamour model, might seem a fair target, when exactly did her disabled son become fair game, too? Let alone in a joke about incest and rape. I’ll repeat that: an incest-rape joke about a disabled eight-year-old child.
While I’m sure there has always been some truly unpleasant comedy around, its apparent mainstream acceptance is a new trend. The Frankie Boyle joke aired on Channel 4. This worries me because our words do carry a power – they reflect how we see the world, but they also set our standards for what is normal, acceptable, okay. The trickle-down effect has real-world consequences. The rise of the rape joke can be a horrific trigger for those who have experienced it. In increments, these themes – packaged as entertainment – normalise these horrors and dismiss their seriousness.
This is not an argument for censorship – I had fervent arguments a few years ago with Daily Fail-reading colleagues about whether Jerry Springer: The Opera should be shown on TV (yes, yes, a thousand times yes!) – but there is a huge middle ground between Mary Whitehouse prudery and comedy which is getting pretty close to hatespeech. Please, guys: self-regulate a little by engaging the brain.
Some would argue that if I don’t like this brand of comedy, I just shouldn’t watch it. To some extent they’re right, and I do try. When I saw a poster in Edinburgh for a standup show called ‘The Lying Bitch and the Wardrobe’ (I see what you did there) I had a pretty strong inkling that this wouldn’t be my kind of thing and I didn’t go. But on a mixed bill (as almost all small live comedy gigs are) there’s rarely any warning what each person will do – so while you might have gone along because you recognise one name that you like, there is no disclosure until you’re hearing it that the third act, Joe Bloggs, will be your prejudiced asshat for the evening, berating you all with a microphone for at least ten minutes.
Oh, and you paid to see this.
I don’t think anything should be off-limits – but some topics are so unpleasant (not to mention increasingly over-mined) that if a comedian wants to tackle them they will need to be so damn funny, so ingenious, original, tactful – that 80% of comedians just shouldn’t bother. Needless to say, the 80% that aren’t up to speed don’t get this, and the 20% that can do it well often have better things to do than prod triggertastic subjects and tired old clichés with a great big stick. They’re off crafting material that makes you belly-laugh (and think) rather than just titter nervously in disbelief.
As my friend James Ross, who runs the consistently wonderful Fat Kitten Improv group and the Better Living Through Comedy night put it: “From a purely technical standpoint, shock humour suffers acutely from a law of diminishing returns: the audience build up a resistance to it, and that alone would be good reason to limit its use.”
I think the thing which is missing (besides originality) is a measure of basic empathy. In the increasingly desperate search for ‘dark’ and ‘cutting edge’ material, comedians forget that a lot of their lazily-picked targets are people. Real people. People with feelings and also (self-interest alert, guys:) people who go to comedy gigs.
The rising amount of ‘ironic’ misogyny is not creating a particularly friendly environment for a certain 50% of punters. Last year I went to the Comedy Store to see twelve different comedians being filmed for The World Stands Up. I wasn’t entirely sure if the person who’d invited me along had intended the evening as a date or not, so it was potentially awkward already. Then, as the evening unfolded, four out of twelve comedians used ‘bad fellatio’ as the bedrock of their sets. One standup spent his whole set mocking his wife for not pleasuring him correctly. In the narratives that we heard that night, women’s main role was as dispensers of sexual favours – and we couldn’t even do that right. Thanks, guys. I haven’t been back to the Comedy Store since.
For another example, I was once out with a group for a friend’s birthday when a standup did a set about making a mess in the disabled toilet and blaming it on a disabled person. While he wasn’t to know that birthday girl, sat in the front row, had cerebral palsy, why did he think this would be a good topic in the first place? How many times has he encouraged the able-bodied to laugh at this disadvantaged minority’s expense?
Example of good standup! Catherine Semark performing at Edinburgh Fringe. Photo by me.
This isn’t an argument for ‘nice’ comedy. Some of my favourite comedians are pretty darn dark and twisted – Bill Hicks, Dylan Moran, and I heartily recommend London sketch group The Beta Males – but the ‘type’ of twisted is crucial. Jokes are about status – people use them every day to agree boundaries of what’s acceptable, and with that comes a certain amount of responsibility. When activist comedians such as Mark Thomas or Kate Smurthwaite use humour to mock people in power for making bad decisions, that’s something very different to a middle class standup laying into ‘chavs’ for ‘talking funny and drinking cheap booze’.
Anger and humour are very often interlinked, but where you aim that anger makes all the difference. Aim it ‘up’ at deserving, more powerful targets and it’s subversive, it can hold people to account – satire has a long and proud tradition. Aim that anger ‘down’ at the underdog and it’s tired, old and – frankly – it’s bullying.
- Hannah Eiseman-Renyard is a short, fat, ginger four-eyes who nonetheless loves live comedy. She works as an editor by day, a writer/performance poet by night, and on the weekends she fights crime. She’ll sleep when she’s dead. Hannah runs the Whippersnapper Press, a web-publishing site for short, innovative and funny creative writing. She is twenty-five and lives in North London with her three grandchildren and thirty cats. Her turn-ons include moss, handicrafts and Bohemian clichés.
A Game of Thrones and Sex and Violence
So, the first episode of HBO’s Game of Thrones, adapted from the popular George R R Martin books (a series of gritty low-fantasy books about the battle for control of a kingdom and the threat of wintery Others from the North), has now aired. How is it? We’ll get to that in a moment.
What’s been almost more interesting than the content of the show itself has been the response from critics. Ginia Bellafante kicked things off in the New York Times, labelling the show as “boy-fiction”, and suggesting that the standard HBO sex has been thrown in to appeal to otherwise disinterested female viewers. Because obviously boys like swords and fighting and girls like sex and drama. That’s how gender works, right? Wait, no.
Annalee Newitz at io9 argues back, but instead of dismissing the whole notion of gender essentialism and stories that are “for” one gender or another Newitz takes it the other way, arguing that this is clearly a tale for women. Oh, wait, perhaps it’s a satirical exaggeration of the idea, to highlight the ridiculousness of Bellafante’s review. Well, hopefully it is. It still doesn’t get around the issue of thinking people of any particular gender are wired to want certain things from their fiction, though.
Ilana Teitalbaum weighs in with a more straightforward critique of the ways in which Bellafante’s review is terribly misguided over at the Huffington Post, and probably provides the most sensible view on the discussion. I’m going to quote her here, because what she says is worth repeating for anyone too lazy to click through the links.
The characterization of fantasy as “boy fiction” is offensive to the genre and offensive to women. That we for the most part will only read what Oprah has picked, and especially if a woman wrote it, is a stereotype that is not only demeaning to women — it is also untrue…
…When we categorize books as “boy fiction” and “girl fiction” it’s just another way to promote gender stereotyping. It is predicated on the assumption that people will only read books that reflect their personal experiences, so therefore women will only deign to read about dating, shopping, and kitchen intrigues.
Okay, with that said, on to the show itself. Trying to avoid spoilers here, but apologies if any slip through. As an adaptation, it’s generally pretty damn solid. There are the inevitable minor changes that come with translating a work to screen, but there are none of the glaring alterations that make you stand up and go “They did what? But that’s totally out of character! Did they even read the books?” The casting is good (Harry Lloyd as Viserys Targaryen is palpably creepy and unpleasant), the costumes are well done, and Arya Stark and Tyrion Lannister already shine as the best characters. Arya Stark gets painfully little screen time though, which leads to the first issue with the show.
Danaerys Targaryen being blonder than thou.
The female characters, as of the first episode, do not get much representation. Hopefully this is a temporary thing and, like the books, we’ll get to see Arya, Danaerys, Catelyn etc grow into being hugely important badasses that sit firmly at the centre of key plot points. But right now they’re just not there. They get scarcely any screen time, and when they are shown they’re mostly cast in passive, receptive roles. Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) sleeps with a prostitute (because it’s not a HBO show without frequent sex and nudity) who gets more lines than Cersei Lannister and Arya Stark put together.
And Danaerys… Okay, this falls on the book as much as the adaptation, and it’s hard to see a way they could have worked around it, but her initial role as a tool for her brother’s plans, without any say in her own life, feels very awkward. Two scenes in particular are awkward enough to be uncomfortable to watch. First there’s the close up of a nude Danaerys (Emilia Clarke) being examined by her brother (and bear in mind this is a character written as being just thirteen in the book, though thankfully HBO seem to have aged her up a bit), to make sure she’s up to scratch for bartering away in exchange for an army, with oddly lingering shots of nipples and buttocks. This scene, which really should convey “look how bloody nasty and unpleasant Viserys is,” instead comes off more as “and here are some breasts, do you like them?”
And then we have the consummation of the marriage to the head of said army, Khal Drogo of the Dothraki, a scene that is shown to be even more upsetting and non-consensual than it was originally written. And it was pretty damn bad to start with. The scene is at least short, and cuts away before anything graphic, but it does raise the question of why someone at HBO thought “Hmm, what this scene needs is to be made a bit more rapey.” Seriously, there is pretty much never a time when this is a good thing for a piece of fiction. Ever.
Still, as said, there is hope that the characters will develop along the same lines they did in the book, so this issue might be a passing one. The second problem, though, is less likely to improve with future episodes.
Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), doing his best Douchey Prince Charming act.
The second issue, you see, is the unfortunate race failure. You could argue that it’s just being faithful to the books, but honestly that’s not much of an excuse. Everyone is oh so very white, and everyone we’re told is attractive (Cersei, Jaime, Danaerys) is oh so very blonde to boot. The closest we get to non-white characters are the slightly-tanned Dothraki horsemen with whom Viserys is trying to forge an alliance. And, of course, they’re depicted as crude savages. And I don’t mean “they’re a bit misunderstood” – we’re talking full on “these people are barbaric, they are not like us.” We see two men fighting over a woman, one literally pushing the other away mid-thrust and hopping on himself (which is a whole other pile of issues), before blades are drawn and someone gets disembowelled. True to the books it may be, but there’s a definite problem with a world where everyone is divided into groups of “white people” and “savages”.
Issues aside, it’s worth sticking with. If nothing else it’ll be interesting to see how they handle the events that happen to Eddard Stark, what with Sean Bean being their big name cast member.
Found Feminism: “SlutWalk” Street Protests in Toronto
An FF from our Canadian cousins across the pond. Now, for reasons that escape me, I’ve long considered Canada to be a bastion of forward thinking and at the forefront of feminist thinking.
So it saddened me a little to find out that victim blaming is as rife on that side of the Atlantic as over here. Fortunately, there’s also a healthy culture of individuality and protest. Thus arose today’s Found Feminism: Toronto’s SlutWalk.
Have a look at the clip below which explains everything (well, not everything everything; the creation of the universe or where the other sock went is not covered):
I love inversions and subversions alike, which is why this linguistic reclamation project is placing “slut” alongside the word “queer” in my heart. Our very own wordsmith Hodge is probably better placed to go into the history of the word, although my wiki-fu tells me that Chaucer used it to apply to lazy men before it became an insult for sexually promiscuous women.
Now whilst I am the first person to get all mumsy and worry over scantily clad people gadding about, I will fight to defend their right to do so without being blamed if they are harrassed or assaulted. Because that is absurd and I’m not going to go into it here – let’s focus on the positive.
And the positive action.
There’s a UK-based sister group planning a SlutWalk in Birmingham (Facebook page is here) so sign up, click “like” or even get your boob tube out and go for a walk in Brum. I may well see you there!
- 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]!
An Alphabet of Feminism #26: Z is for Zone
Z
ZONE
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glittering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.John Donne, Elegy 20: To His Mistress Going To Bed (c.1654)
Starry Starry Night
All together now: THE LAST ALPHABET POST EVER. And it’s a word with one of the longest definitions I’ve yet come across: zone, first cited in 1500, from the Latin zona and the Greek zone, which originally means ‘girdle’.
Blame him. He stole my clothes. Venus and her cestus, Lucas Cranach the Younger (1540s)
Its complexity is mainly owing to the range of disciplines that have claimed it for their own; these include astrology, astronomy, physical geography, mathematics, poetry, and crystallography. Its immediate practical meaning is geographical: ‘Each of the five ‘belts’ or encircling regions, differing in climate, into which the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and the Arctic and Antarctic circles divide the surface of the earth’ – that is, ‘the torrid (burning) zone between the tropics, the (north and south) temperate zones extending from the tropics to the polar circles, and the frigid (frozen) zones (arctic and antarctic) within the polar circles’.
A zone, then, is a ‘belt’ that marks out space, enclosing and dividing at once, as reflected in its vaguer sense from 1559 as ‘any region extending round the earth and comprised between definite limits’, where it is also applied to ‘a similar region in the heavens or on the surface of a planet’.
Of course, the Ancient Egyptians gave the practical sky-based role of zoning to a woman – Nut, the goddess of the sky, married to the earth god Geb (an unusual gendering). Nut is depicted throughout Egyptian art as a naked woman arched over the earth, balancing on her fingertips and tiptoes, and often covered in stars, from which position she protects the sun god Ra, and the earth below – a zone in its fourth sense (from 1591), as ‘a circumscribing or enclosing ring, band, or line’. Whence it is but a short step to 1608’s contribution to the party, zone as ‘a girdle or belt, as part of a dress’ (chiefly ‘poetical’), which is really the only literal use for the word: before the word’s adoption into English, Ancient Greek women wore a ‘zona‘ under their clothes to accentuate the figure.
Alas! My Girdle!
So we end where we began: with an extra-snazzy belt. Women’s girdles have a long and varied history going back to the cestus or ‘Belt of Venus’, an ill-judged wedding present to the Goddess of Love from her husband Hephaestus which rendered her irresistible to men (and, appropriately, endures on as an astronomy term). Martial refers to the cestus in his Epigrams as ‘a cincture that kindled love in Jupiter’ (planetary theme ftw), and clearly considered it quite hot stuff himself, since it was ‘…still warm from Venus’ fire’.
The Medieval West was not to be left behind in all this sexy-talk: no right-thinking female of the thirteen-hundreds considered herself fully sexed-up without a gipon, a type of corset designed to flatten the breasts and emphasise the stomach. And in case this proved insufficient, she might also pad her belly out for extra effect – well-rounded bellies appear again and again in contemporary art – and, as with the Cranach Venus (above), a decorative zone was the perfect way to emphasise its shape, making this a garment no less sexually charged in the 1340s than the 1940s (when, of course, its job was to hold the belly in). Like a garter, then, a girdle could serve as a fetishistic focal point for erotic (and indeed erogenous) zones, marking them out and keeping them restrained at the same time.
A sixteenth-century German satirical woodcut: the rich old man's wife takes his money but her young lover brings her the key.
The Dictionary seems to have picked up something of this atmospheric heat itself, and brings us all back to earth by citing for this sense of the word Francis Quarles’ Emblem VIII (‘Shall these coarse hands untie / The sacred zone of thy virginity?’ (1635)). Neatly, this citation highlights the flip-side of zone‘s erotic focus – the Roman marriage ceremony famously culminated in the groom untying his wife’s girdle (enduring into the thigh-rubbing Latin slang phrase ‘zonam solvere‘ – ‘to untie the girdle’).
Meanwhile, the chastity belt (which also encompasses the ‘torrid zone between the tropics’, if you want to be vulgar about it) supposedly made its debut in Western society during the Crusades, lest the mice should play while the cats were off murdering Muslims. They may have been a niche market then, but – under the waggish and consistent alias ‘Venus’ belt’ – they were certainly widespread enough by the sixteenth century to become a target for satire. It was not until 1718 that English got the separate word zoned, but its meaning – ‘wearing a zone or girdle, hence, chaste’ – was clearly familiar to Francis Quarles, although he’s not talking about a literal woman, but about the relationship between body and soul.
John Donne plays with this conceit in his Elegy: To His Mistress Going To Bed, which famously describes the ‘mistress’ in question as ‘my America’. Her ‘girdle’ glitters like ‘heaven’s zone‘ (viz.: the celestial sphere), but the woman’s body is itself a ‘world’, a ‘new-found land’, and the speaker’s ‘roving hands’ explorers in a ‘kingdom’ – just as in The Sun Rising, ‘she’s all states, and all princes I’. It’s not just Donne (Thomas Carew did it too): think how many landmarks are claimed for sleeping giantesses, using the female body to map out geographical zones, just as geographical zones can be used to map out a woman (what else is the mons veneris?), and think back to Sir Francis Dashwood, landscaping pudendas in his garden.
Much like the zone itself, this Alphabet has tried to encompass various notions of womanhood. Come back soon and maybe there’ll be a final post mortem-style analysis…
It’s funny because someone asked me about why I dressed the girls like that, and I said, ‘Do you not get the metaphor there?’
… You can say what you want about the movie, but I did not shoot the girls in an exploitative way. […] As long as you’re self-aware about it, then that’s okay.
In this article, I discuss the abuse portrayed in Sucker Punch. I don’t discuss it in detail, but what I do discuss could be triggering for some.
Gather ’round, internet. Sit about me in a circle while I tell you a tale. Open your belief-flaps.
You know that the gorgeously wonderful Sarah C has already reviewed Sucker Punch. I know that, too. We both know that together. But what I also know is that I went to see it, too, and my face exploded with woe. Intergalactic space woe from the woe tubes. You know the stuff.
Like Sarah, I felt I was the target audience. I’m a pubescent boy who likes ladies, dragons, guns and stuff going on fire. There was no ingredient that went into this that, in theory, I wouldn’t like. But I hated it. I was blisteringly disappointed. Let me assail your faces with why.
I am not the person this film was made for. Neither was Sarah. The person this film was made for is a person that fetishises abuse, and likes their women best when they’re woefully underclothed and sobbing in fright.
This is not Sparta.
That’s a harsh paragraph. I realise that. But it really is the only way I can describe this film. It’s chock-full of abuse (implied rape and explicit beating) and the way it’s handled is emphatically not empowering in any way. The film is ostensibly about women battling their inner demons (quite literally, in this case – I see what you did there, Mr Snyder) and surviving, but it fails at every possible hurdle. The only way the characters can be powerful and dangerous is if they’re laminated in glitter, leather and fishnet. And the only way they can survive their abuse is if they cry and scream on screen and track mascara down their faces. Fear is sexy, you see.
I can’t put it better than if I just quote what one of the characters says (not verbatim, but it ran along these lines): “They act it all out up there [on a stage]. It’s quite a show, you know, when they’re acting out who touched them or hurt them or whatever.”
It is quite a show, yes. It smacks of Snyder trying to make the film self-aware and clever – he does it quite a lot, like the bit where we traipse right into Baby Doll’s inner world and there’s this line (again, paraphrasing, but Zack himself paraphrases similarly in the interview linked at the start of this post):
Wait, wait, wait, back up. This is meant to be sexy? Sexy school girl, I get. Frightened mental patient, yeah, okay, it’s a bit weird, but I kinda get that, too. But lobotomised vegetable?!
Hi, Zack, I see what you did there, too. You’re trying to make us think that this over-sexualised portrayal of abuse survivors is ironic. You’re trying to tell us that all this dribbly mascara and all these panty shots are ironic. That this wall-to-wall objectification and infantilisation (hell, the lead character’s name is Baby Doll and she constantly dresses like she’s 13) is all in the name of ironic, clever, snappy feminism. It’s a lancing, sassy criticism of objectification, you say.
Well, let me tell you something, Zack. There is nothing sexy, sassy or ironic about rape. There is nothing clever, witty, edgy or cool about showing us terrified, crying girls dressed like they’re 13 years old, getting abused in a way that is clearly meant to be titillating. It was about half-way in, and there was another scene of a weeping, shaking girl being hit in the face by a man who – it was strongly implied – at least attempted to rape her, when I realised that I just didn’t care what clever, witty, ironic message Zack Snyder was trying to send. The fact of the matter was that I was being fed images that anyone with even a hint of abuse in their past would find nauseatingly upsetting to watch and I was meant to be sitting there, revelling in how darkly sexy it all was, and going, “Hmm, yes, well done Mr Snyder, this is certainly a very clever comment on the sexualisation of women!”
Fuck that. I’m furious.
I could now continue to comment further on the film and how the characters were distinguishable only by outfit and hair, and how stating facts about characters doesn’t make us care for them automatically. I could say that the only bits that I loved in the film were the bits with the airships and the dragons. I could say that the only character that I empathised with was the Mother Dragon. But Sarah’s covered that and I agree with her, so what I’m going to say instead is this:
This, on the other hand, is Sparta. Look at the lack of sexual harassment amongst the chaps.
Zack Snyder was the man that brought us 300 – a smorgasbord of semi-naked, oiled, unrealistically ripped manflesh and violence – and I loved that film. I ain’t gonna lie: I’m predominantly androphilic, and that film catered to my tastes. I love 300 very much, and not because it’s a man-thigh sandwich. I love it because the characters in it work as a tightly-wound, perfect humanoid machine. Also because asksdjfh the Persian army are amazing.
But it wasn’t based on something that Snyder originally wrote. And, most crucially importantly, the objectified, sexualised Spartan warriors and their acres of bronzed musculature are not abused. They struggle, fight, love and die for each other in a war, but they’re not smacked in the face and threatened with rape every fifteen minutes. When they fight as an army, the camera caresses their strength, their competence and their teamwork alongside their biceps. The muscle is part of their mechanised, physical unity and strength.
In Sucker Punch, on the other hand, when Baby Doll slices up giant samurai robots, we’re treated to her pants every four seconds, her thighs every minute and her unchanging expression of “Oh no! A penis!” pretty much constantly. It’s exasperating. It’s writhe-in-the-seat horrible. It’s as if the panty shots are put there purely to lubricate the idea that she might be physically powerful, too. In fact, one of the major themes in the film is that the only power these women have is their sexual desirability. I’m insulted on behalf of everyone I know.
And this is from someone that really enjoys thighs.
I am disappointed and sad about it. Also angry and frustrated that this film, which is a landmark work in terms of how many women it had centre-stage, had so much potential to do good, but fucked it all up by trying to play “WOOO IRONICALLY SEXY” with something as serious and horrible and real as abuse. I actually want to bill Zack Snyder for my ticket price.
But I really loved the bit where the zeppelin exploded. At least there’s that.
Here are my pros and cons to go alongside Sarah’s.
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- A zeppelin explodes! :D
- DRAGONS! :D
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- No power in creation can justify this level of sexualisation in the handling of abuse.
Easy Like Sunday Morning
What are you lot doing this weekend?
If you’re in East London on Sunday, you should totally swing by the Zine Symposium. For Hodge will be in attendance armed with a selection of Alphabet goodies, including a very few ALPHABET POSTERS.
If you missed the first run (which you probably did, as there were only ten and only one actually went on public sale) these are currently rarer than tyrannosaurus eggs, and there’s no guarantee there will be another run in the near future. For the Hodge thy Hodge is a jealous Hodge, and can’t be dashing to the print shop every five minutes.
There will also be a selection of HAND COLOURED prints (coloured by Hodge’s silken hand), a few mounted images (like the stuff in the shop, only SANS p&p), and whatever else enters Hodge’s hyperactive mind between now and Sunday, including (probably) a selection of stuff not yet seen on the internet.
Affordable, fun and an opportunity to expose Hodge’s true identity. Plus loads of cool zines and fun people. What’s not to like?
Check her out at the bereavement tape table.
…totally just realised this says ‘by hodge’ at the top. i don’t talk about myself in the third person on a regular basis.