Silence Is A Rhythm Too
In 1994 I was 12. I was also spending most of my time in the late 70s. Surely the only punk in my small Cornish town, I’d got a short back and sides, a pair of docs and a blazer prickling with safety pins. I’d got my Pistols, Clash, Ramones, Buzzcocks, Undertones. And I wanted to tear everything to pieces. I was all set.
Then one day while rifling through my parents’ (excellent, though I hated to admit it) record collection I pulled out a sleeve that looked like a B Movie soundtrack. There was an exploding volcano, a pterosaur and three women dressed as bedouin from hell. It was Return of the Giant Slits.
When I put the record on it was like nothing I’d heard before. It was as if The Slits had stolen their beats from the gaps in other peoples’ songs. The rhythms seemed alien but I felt something click into place – next time I had the bus fare to get to Truro I found and bought the magnificent Cut and fell in love. Here was something truly radical, with the chaos and creative destruction that I loved in punk but with irony and humour and WOMEN.
Ari Up onstage at Alexandra Palace in 1981
The Slits were true musical innovators, drawing as much from reggae and dub as from the punk scene. They were funny, aggressive, embarrassing, chaotic, and sexual without trying to be sexy. From the name of the band onwards they played with gender and with ideas of what women were and were meant to be.
The Slits’ lead vocalist Ari Up (aka InnoDBnna Forster) died yesterday aged 48. She was only 14 when she formed The Slits with drummer Palmolive (anyone else feel kinda old? Are you even allowed to form a punk band after you’re 20?) and was still gigging this year. Her music means a lot to me and to many others, and the importance of The Slits for women in punk and, well, most alternative music really is difficult to convey. They cracked the mould.
Rest in peace, Ari.
- Watch The Slits play Typical Girls on the bandstand in what I think is Regent’s Park
- Listen to the whole of their debut album Cut online for free (with ads sadly, but less annoying ones than Spotify)
(Post title is from In The Beginning)
Bechdel Meets The FBI
FRINGE: Olivia and Nina Sharp talk about boys. ...No, wait. ©2008 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Barbara Nitke/FOX
I’ve been thinking about the Bechdel Test recently, and it’s something which has come up frequently in the comments on this site. For those who don’t know, this is a test which rates a movie by whether it has:
- At least two women in it
- Who talk to each other
- About something other than a man
Now let’s face it, this shouldn’t be difficult. It actually doesn’t go very far – it’s entirely possible to write a movie which passes but is in no way “feminist”, or is even actively misogynist. It’s very important not to overestimate Bechdel. It tells you nothing about the tone, content or values of a film.
But it does prove that there are two women, and they talk about something other than men. That has value, in an industry where the pass rate for movies is truly pathetic.
Some of the reasons for this low pass rate are actually more about lazy narrative structure than lazy sexism. Far too often if a conversation between two women happens, it still fails because it is only about the lead character, who is a man. In order to maximise tension and pace, all small talk not relating to explosions or imminent danger is cut from the script. (Sadly it’s more often replaced with “I hope hero-man X can save us!”. Even today, it’s ridiculous how much this happens.)
Network TV suffers from this more than cinema because in most television the lead character MUST, MUST be a white male. Must. No negotiation. Must. If you deviate from this, you are That Brave Show with the Alternative Lead, and some other stuff that no-one pays as much attention to as the fact you have an Alternative Lead. Some movies are pushing the boundaries, but the US networks generally refuse to.
So I’m going to talk briefly about TV shows instead of the usual movies. TV science-fiction is a genre which usually scores pathetically badly in particular, so let’s take a series from there which Does It Right:
Fringe. (Minor spoilers to follow!)
Olivia Dunham, a female FBI agent, investigates paranormal events with the aid of a genius, his insane father, another female FBI agent and occasionally some very recognisable beloved genre actors.
Even here there are problems. The biggest one is that she’s arguably not the main character anymore: the show provided such a rich story for the insane father (and to be fair, an absolutely astonishing actor) that he’s nearer the centre of the show.
But it certainly does pass the Bechdel test. Olivia frequently speaks to her female colleague, her sister and various others on work and personal matters. Although she’s quite unemotional about many things (due to trust issues and a twisted childhood), a lot of the screen time is on her experience as a woman in her role. The character is sympathetic and far from two-dimensional.
Much more impressive (and one point which really raised the series) is the episode where she is kidnapped and the male leads are racing to save her from several armed thugs.
But they don’t need to, because she’s an FBI agent – she promptly frees herself and beats the living crap out of everyone nearby, escapes and phones it in. Because female agents are armed and trained professionals, not princesses in a tower.
True, it’s another case of a woman excelling by acting in ways traditionally associated with male aggression. Proving they can punch people in the face as hard as men can is NOT the same as depicting realistic female lives on TV. Similarly in politics, being more aggressive, intolerant and eager for war than the male Hawks isn’t the way to be an inspiration for women – it just means there’s another right-wing patriarchal asshole in the room, and the world has enough of those. But in this case, Dunham’s principles are so strong and her courage so constant that the show is very clearly about her being a competent agent and a woman in the FBI… without her gender ever marking her out as special. She isn’t cut any slack by her bosses, and isn’t expected to react differently under pressure. Olivia naturally starts as the focus and no-one ever reacts to it as being unusual.
Female leads in action movies are still a hot issue. Elsewhere on the site we’ve had a blogpost on the movie “Salt”, which got made because Angelina Jolie can do anything the hell she wants in Hollywood, and they’re already reassured that she can handle guns and car chases. But the press were astonished at the idea of a woman playing a role which had been written for a male spy.
I would dearly love to see something that has a truly interchangeable lead. A fully-rounded character with opinions and instincts, but one which could be equally played by a man or a woman. What would be really interesting is “Person X has a love interest Y, and doesn’t get on with their ex, Z”. Now roll some dice to decide which gender everyone is.
For me, Bechdel isn’t the point. It proves itself, and is therefore a useful barometer for how female roles are being treated across the industry, but it doesn’t tell you about the movie or show. Fringe goes way beyond it, and the interesting parts about Fringe aren’t described by the pass/fail: the female characters are SO strong that it’s the struggle of wills between Olivia and Nina that is really behind the drive to reveal or cover the truth, not the men.
For example, another TV show which passes the test (but this time just barely) is the unashamedly cowboy-centred modern police story Justified. At one point it has the main character’s current lover and ex-wife talk to each other, but naturally includes him as a subject of the conversation. Given their romantic connection to him and the tension between them right at that moment which comes from it, it’s not an ignorant fail on the part of the writers. It would be bizarre for him not to be a topic of conversation… but this example is typical of the few times that two women talk to each other in a lot of movies and TV.
In this case the lead is once again a white male, but the show’s entire existence is due to the actor playing a Sheriff in (the excellent) Deadwood, so we can forgive it White Male syndrome a little. (Incidentally, HBO are responsible for Deadwood, The Wire, Rome, True Blood etc, all of which are phenomenally good at passing the Bechdel test.)
It’s the other conversation which is missing. Conversation about… anything except the male lead. Studio execs seem to think this must be women talking about Women’s Things, and that male viewers will vomit themselves into a coma after being exposed to anything more than 5 seconds of it. (This is actually true for Grey’s Anatomy, but then it had that effect on EVERYONE after the first couple of series.) What never seems to get answered on the internet is… what would that conversation be about? Do men get equivalent conversation screentime, or is it that they just don’t talk as much about anything except the task at hand?
So here’s what I’d like to do: as well as suggesting what the Bechdel time should be spent on, I’d like the commenters to answer a modified version of the Bechdel Test for TV, as below.
Does the TV series feature at least two named female characters…
- Who talk to each other
- About something other than 1) a man or 2) the immediate danger they themselves are in
- And does it do this at least once every 5 episodes?
(One occurrence in a 23-ep run or over several series does not deserve to pass the test, frankly.)
Are there any good shows out there? Any absolute stinkers? Is the action / tension so constant and high in modern tv that characters MUST talk about the male lead all the time, because all other spare time involves dodging explosions?
Greek Street, or “SEXY SEXY BODY! TOUCH ME SEXY SEXY!”
Cover of 'Blood for Blood', the first Greek Street Graphic novel, shows a woman in silhouette and Eddie holding a knife.
Yes, the words quoted above are the first words printed in Peter Milligan’s newest comic, Greek Street. As the music plays in a strip club, these words blare from the speakers. One might purport that they sum it up entirely…
[some spoilers in this post]
At first glance, Greek Street seems to be the kind of graphic novel I like to see on the shelves – I’m a huge Vertigo fan, because unlike many mainstream comics imprints Vertigo consistently releases a large range of stories told in a wide choice of settings1 where one does not need a pre-existing knowledge of the characters or a love of the superhero genre to enjoy the title. Despite being myself a fan of the superhero genre, comics can and and regularly do cover so much more than stories about spandex-clad egomaniacs.
The premise of Greek Street is that some stories are too powerful to ever go away entirely. Humankind re-enacts them again and again over the centuries. This involuntary re-enactment is hardly an original idea (see Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad,) and ‘the old stories are real’ is a theme that has been explored rigorously by Vertigo’s Sandman series, their Fables series, The Unwritten, and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls and his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, to name but a few titles. In fact, it’s a pretty tired theme.
In these comics I’ve mentioned, some of the fun of reading them was in spotting the older stories underlying the modern tales – realising who each character represented. Greek Street has none of this subtlety, it wants to hit you over the head with its references, like an over-enthusiastic arts graduate in the pub who just can’t wait to tell you exactly how much they know about the theory of Shakespearean tragedy. Thus its references are clunky and, well, obvious.
The Chorus who narrate the play are all strippers, working in clubs on Greek Street in Soho. The characters – thinly disguised versions of Agamemnon, Daedalus, Medea &c. are men and women involved in the London criminal underworld who pass in and out of these clubs in-
A strip club scene from the comic. There are many of these...
Sorry, yes, you read that right – The Chorus are strippers. That is the level that Peter Milligan is pitching to, here. It’s as if he thought “Hey, Vertigo is an adult imprint, how do I make these Greek myths (with all their, y’know, inherent incest, murder, sex, blood and guts &c.) adult? I know, I’ll add a STRIPPER CHORUS!”
By virtue of their choral role, these women do end up allowing the story to pass the Bechdel Test, but it is a hollow triumph when this role seems merely an excuse to draw naked women over and over again – in the dressing room, on stage, in the bath… Did Milligan think that people would be so bored by women actually talking to each other in comics that he had to give readers some breasts to look at during it?
When one of the strippers is killed (dead sex workers in comics? How original…) and comes back to life, stalking the streets as a revenge-driven zombie, she is also drawn naked. I was slightly amused at the lengths the artist had to go to convey the image of a completely naked zombie women over and over again without ever drawing anything around her groin and therefore upsetting the censors – strategic shadows here, and little strategic scrap of clothing there… quite ingenious work, really, from an artist who can barely distinguish one very similar-looking character from another, and occasionally draws people as though their features are sliding very slowly down their faces…
The strippers aren’t the only women who appear naked (perhaps getting to draw lots of breasts was in the artist’s contract?) and none of them are anything below a D cup, or over a size 12 waistline. Maybe there’s just something in the tap water in Soho? Body diversity is rare in comics, but when an artist is trying to portray the gritty, real world, its lack is always more disappointing.
Eddie – the closest thing we have to a protagonist – begins the story by having sex with and accidentally killing his mother and ends this volume in a sexual relationship with an underage girl (a prophetess called ‘Sandy’ – see what I mean about the obvious references?). He’s a walking catastrophe – getting into all sorts of trouble with criminal gangs, mostly through his own stupidity. It’s hard to sympathise with a character with few morals and no sense of self-preservation.
Wracked with guilt after the encounter with his mother, Eddie attempts to castrate himself – a slightly more extreme version of the self-harm his Ancient Greek counterpart carries out – but useless Eddie cannot even do this properly. Presumably the writer decided that it would get in the way of him having hawt hawt illegal sex with Sandy only a few short days later. This seems a pretty unbelievable leap of logic to ask the reader to make, I mean, surely he’d rip his stitches? (Ouch!) Sandy’s mother also throws herself at Eddie – presumably this is how we know that Eddie is the protagonist, ALL of the women just can’t stop throwing themselves at this scrawny little guy.
Greek Street could have been another great addition to the Vertigo line-up, but it is let down by shallow storytelling and some very poor artwork in places. Milligan needs to shake things up a bit – where something like Fables could get away with using characters from myths and legends, this was because their myths were in the past, over and done with, the Fables characters were facing new problems, not acting out stories we already knew. But this is only the first volume of Greek Street, so perhaps the characters will move on and the plot will improve.
While this book does pass the Bechdel Test and only barely passes the Frank Miller Test, those ‘tests’ are not the be all and end all of writing gender, and unlike Fables, Milligan’s Greek Street treats its female characters as little more than stereotypes and eye candy. And for an imprint such as Vertigo, which is edited by one of the most powerful women in comics and already enjoyed by many female comics fans, that’s just disappointing.
To sum up – SEXY SEXY BODY! I’ve never been to a strip club, but if that’s what the music’s like, I’m not going.
- Having mentioned that ‘wide choice of settings’, however, I have to ask, did we really need yet another comic set in bloody London? I imagine that comics fans around the world will begin to see Britain as merely a state comprised of one large London-like city and some small parts of Ireland (because they have to make Guinness somewhere, don’t they, Garth Ennis). [↩]
12 Things I Wish I’d Known About Love A Decade Ago: Redux
Ripping the piss out of women’s magazines and their litany of “get thin! buy shoes! value yourself for you!” instruction is a fond feminist past-time. But in the spirit of investigative journalism / having nothing better to do I decided to find out if it was possible to extract any useful advice from them.
It’s buried beneath a ton of heteronormative guff of course, and qualified with asides that stab at your gendersense, but I believe it is possible to extract nuggets of common sense from the pages of glossy fashion shoots and ‘What is your spirit handbag?’ quizzes.
So, here is my attempt to rework “12 Things I Wish I’d Known About Love A Decade Ago”, which featured in a recent issue of a popular women’s mag.
They're hearts.
1) Never underestimate the importance of being ‘interesting’.
You owe it to yourself (and the men you date) to have a life of your own. So find some hobbies. In my mid-twenties, I made a guy my hobby. When he dumped me, partly because he felt smothered, I had to get a life… Now, when I’m on a date and I read the menu in an Italian accent, or I smile when I talk about my ballet class, guys really eat it up.
I say:
Never underestimate the importance of being interesting.
Sigh. Where do I even start with this one? Don’t be interesting for ‘the men you date’, be interesting for the sake of the rest of humanity. It’ll be better for you too, I promise – it irritates me when I think of all the hours I spent a decade ago trying to look beautiful when I could have been doing things I actually enjoyed instead. Being interesting lasts longer than beauty and it will win you friends as well as lovers.
2) There’s a fine line between teasing a man and criticising him.
I used to fall into this bad habit of extreme flirting by teasing. One time, I told an older guy who’d had a skiing accident that he was ‘damaged goods’, and I’d need to trade him in for a ‘younger model’. He looked at me like I’d just kicked his puppy…
I say:
There’s a fine line between teasing someone and criticising them.
I can see the sense of this one, I’ve fallen into a similar habit myself. The right kind of teasing is plenty fun of course, but if you’re in any kind of relationship with someone then the very least you can do is be careful with their feelings.
3) You will probably never fully understand men. So just try to understand yourself.
I say:
You will probably never fully understand people. But try to understand yourself.
If you’re feeling up to it you can try and imagine what someone may be thinking or feeling. And if you’re ready for Advanced Interpersonal Skills you can even ask them.
4) Knowing how to cook: helpful.
I see now that it would have won me points. When I was 21, I said to my flatmate, “I’ve bought a bag of tortellini. How do I boil water?” She told me “Make it bubble.” And, for years, that was all I knew how to do. If I’d had any idea how much men savour a woman who cooks – even if they’re great cooks themselves – I would’ve asked for more tips.
I say:
Knowing how to cook more than the author of this article did at 21: essential.
OK, EVERYONE who is physically and mentally capable of doing so should know how to boil water. Not so men can ‘savour’ it, but so you have some basic life skills. Jeez.
5) Your wants and needs are just as important as his.
And if you don’t express them because you think that doing so will scare him away, then you’re saying you don’t count as much as he does.
I say:
Your wants and needs are just as important as your partner’s (or partners’)
And if you don’t express them because you think that doing so will scare them away, then you’re saying you don’t count as much as they do.
(See what I did there? Fun with pronouns!)
6) We see what we want to see (and ignore the bad signs)
It’s… possible to convince yourself that a guy who is acting distant and cold is doing so because he’s overwhelmed by love. But he isn’t; he’s acting distant and cold because he is distant and cold. Wish I’d known that.
I say:
We see what we want to see (and ignore the bad signs)
True, I think. You can convince yourself of virtually anything if you want it badly enough, or the truth is too painful to admit. In my experience you will go on believing it until something shakes you out of it but that’s not very advice-y. So, um: try and be honest with yourself and get a second opinion from someone you trust. And eat lots of fruit and veg.
7) Things change once you’re naked.
This one truly would have changed my life if I’d known it back when I started having sex: sleeping with him doesn’t give you power. It’s not sleeping with him that does. Power to decide how quickly things happen; power to make him want you desperately; power to keep your clothes on if you so choose.
I say:
Have sex when everyone involved is ready.
… whether that’s after you’ve been married for 20 years or 30 seconds after you lock eyes across a crowded bus stop. And if you don’t feel you have a say in how quickly things happen, or that you can choose to keep your clothes on, then dear god don’t sleep with this person (unless it’s in that ‘ooh I fancy you so much I’ve lost control but actually I haven’t really’ way). Those things are up to you anyway, you don’t need to bargain for them.
8) Being worshipped isn’t all that.
You’ll go nuts if he’s absolutely devoted. So let him have a boys’ night or throw himself into work.
I say:
Being worshipped can get pretty boring. Unless that’s your thing.
Once all your insecurities have been soothed by someone who adores your every atom you’ll probably find it gets dull having someone who will never challenge you. Though of course if you’re looking for a slave then hey, have fun.
9) How much men will talk about marriage.
I’ve heard hypothetical wedding plans from several men I’ve been involved with – sometimes on the first date! Yet I’ve never been married. Why do guys tease so? Simple: even honest men like to tell you what they think you want to hear… So don’t indulge in wedding daydreams; it’s not worth the clouded perspective.
I say:
If you want to get married then wait til you find someone you actually want to marry and ask them. If they say yes they probably want to marry you as well. If you can’t find anyone you want to marry that wants to marry you then I would recommend not getting married.
Got that? Can we stop discussing it now?
10) Don’t be cynical.
These days, I try not to roll my eyes at Public Displays of Affection, or join ‘all men are crap’ conversations. Bitterness is unattractive.
I say:
Be realistic. Don’t be sexist.
Don’t join ‘all men are crap’ conversations. They’re as stupid as ‘all women are crap’ conversations and they won’t fix anything. And I wouldn’t worry about faking mindless cheery optimism all the time lest eligible men think you’re a poisonous old hag – turns out plenty of people don’t mind bitterness and in fact it can become a satisfying shared hobby.
11) Sometimes, guys flirt with you because it makes them feel good about themselves.
(Hey, we do it too.) This is also the ‘aha!’ explanation for the men who asked for your number but didn’t call. Idiots.
I say:
Sometimes people flirt because it makes them feel good about themselves.
In other news: sometimes people don’t mean what they say. If they are wearing a Slytherin scarf or an eye-patch you should be particularly careful.
12) Don’t compare yourself to your friends.
Some of them will settle down before you. Mine have been getting married steadily for the past decade. At some point, I started to feel different, and that was a new and uncomfortable feeling for me. Rather than get anxious about it, I’ve tried to remind myself that it’s not a race. Even if you’ve always been first in buying a flat or landing your dream career, you could be the last in marrying.
I say:
Don’t compare yourself to your friends, or to people on TV, in Tesco or in women’s magazines.
Because you’re different people, remember? They have this habit of doing different things, at different times and for different reasons. And more importantly, beware of women’s magazine articles that insinuate that marriage is the goal of everyone’s life, and that if there are no nuptial omens in your tea leaves then you should feel anxious. Bullshit.
An Alphabet of Feminism #3: C is for Crinoline
C
CRINOLINE
In the 1956 version of The King and I, there’s a bit where Anna Leonowens (Deborah Kerr) is surrounded by an army of small children trying to lift her skirt up. Understandably disturbed (her background is, after all, in the mores of Victoriana), she seeks an explanation from the eponymous King’s ‘head wife’, who replies placidly that they think she is dressed like that because she’s “shaped like that”.
“Well, I certainly am NOT,” she replies, lifting up her crinoline to reveal a neat little pair of ankle-length bloomers.
Deborah Kerr: A Crinoline Made of Children
The King and I was one of my mother’s army of VHS tapes recorded off 1990s TV to keep her offspring pacified of a Saturday night, and I always watched Deborah Kerr sailing around the orientalist palace with a confusion similar to that expressed by the child army. Why did these women wear clothes that made them look like a different species from their male counterparts? It’s apparently illogical, one of fashion’s many confusing mistakes, yet the big skirt trend was one that dominated female fashion for at least three centuries, and continued to have iconic moments long after the Victorians. In fact, it’s a true constant, from Madame de Pompadour and Elizabeth the First to Dior’s New Look, Marilyn Monroe’s subway moment, Grease (where Sandy rejecting it in favour of spray-on wet look leggings always feels troubling), and, relatively more recently, the designs of Vivienne Westwood.
There is an obvious explanation for its attractiveness which can be seen simply by looking at the silhouette: in algebraic terms, massive hips = lots of lovely womb space to let. In the case of the twentieth century’s most famous blonde, the explanation reaches new realms of subtlety (big skirt + wind + camera = £££). But this precludes their frequent favour with the women themselves: Madame de Pompadour and Marie Antoinette were, as Westwood is, fashion leaders, not followers, and it cannot be denied that there is a certain something about a skirt with a big twirl factor that feels inoffensively joyful. And looking back to Elizabeth ‘Heart and Stomach of a Man’ The First, it seems unlikely that the Ditchley Portrait is trying to convey nothing more than Hey Boys, Check Out My Womb.
Hair of the Dog
So what is a ‘crinoline’? It’s actually something very specific; in its original sense specific enough to be a brand name, referring to ‘a stiff fabric made of horse-hair and cotton or linen thread’. The brand name in question uses crinoline‘s literal meaning, ‘hair-thread’ to allude to its composition from horse hair, but later on, crinoline comes to refer to other materials, such as ‘whalebone or iron hoops’, which serve to expand petticoats. The dictionary gives as a second definition the crucial word ‘hoop-petticoat’, which it glosses as something ‘worn under the skirt of a woman’s dress in order to support or distend it’.
The much-touted Ditchley Portrait. Check out the womb.
This ‘hoop-petticoat’ was the eighteenth century term for the big skirt, and here it took the form of an architectural arrangement of side-panniers so wide that doorways frequently had to be expanded to accommodate their wearers. But it was not something new: on the contrary, the hoop bore no small resemblance to earlier innovations, most notably the sixteenth-century (Ditchley Portrait) ‘farthingale’, supposedly so named in reference to the wooden structure that gave it its shape – which was, ironically enough, a sort of wooden cage. Conversely, the crinoline, a nineteenth century invention, reached new heights of freedom, since for the first time the skirt could move independently of its owner, a phenomenon that may have led to the Victorian preoccupation with ankles, but which certainly created a new erotic focus for men walking through the park on a windy day. Previous to this, women hankering after widened hips had to wear many layers of heavy under-petticoats in addition to the cage-structure, which not only hindered their movement but also hampered the skirt’s possible circumference, so once the light and airy crinoline-cage appeared, a side-effect was the virtually limitless expansion of the skirt’s width – reaching its nexus in Anna Leonowens’ ridiculous garments, whose recreation in 1956 combined the excesses of the New Look silhouette with the historical extravagance of the Victorian empire.
Indeed, it is perhaps here that the crinoline shows its teeth: the well-known Getting To Know You sequence shows a maternal, wide-hipped Anna Leonowens sitting among her Gentle Savage pupils and breezing about the palace with an ease denied to the stiffly clad king’s wives, making the big skirt somehow emblematic of the West’s superior treatment of women, and the ‘enlightened ideas’ of the British Empire, while its unstoppable expansion may itself have something to do with the ever-increasing size of colonial ambition.
Her crinoline defences
Perhaps, then, with all these sartorial possibilities, it was to be expected that the term should gradually itself expand, to encompass transferred meanings: a piece of diving equipment allowing the diver to ‘breathe more freely’ – of course, everyone knows about whalebone’s famous facilitation of easy breathing – and, for ships, a ‘defence against torpedoes’. I particularly enjoy the use of traditional pronouns in the last citation the dictionary gives, from 1885: ‘Her crinoline defences against torpedoes’, because it returns to one of the petticoat’s primary social significations, mooted in The Spectator way back circa 1711:
‘Our sex has of late years been very saucy, and [so] the Hoop-Petticoat is made use of to keep us at a distance’.
The Spectator, 1711
Another journal commented that the hoop’s ‘compass’ keeps ‘men at a decent distance, and appropriates to every lady a spacious verge sacred to herself’. It is interesting to note the strength words in this context – from the whalebone ‘supporting and distending’ the skirt, steel hoops and all the way to the initial definition of the word as a ‘stiff lining’. The suggestion here could be that the structures underneath a woman’s clothes must either lend strength to something fundamentally flimsy (that old ‘body of a weak and feeble woman’ chesnut), or, conversely, that this is a type of armour, the armour worn by, as Elizabeth I would probably have put it, a ‘king, and a king of England too’. In the queen’s case, I’m sure there’s something going on with metaphorical hip-circumferance fertility: the virgin mother of the nation, but one whose regal power gives her a strength akin to a sacrificed Christ, a mother who will fight tooth and nail to protect her child-country. Less maternal, more martial?
NEXT WEEK: D is for Doll
Manolo Inferno
We should have burned high heels instead of bras. I’m not sure why the bra was taken as a symbol of female repression: at least it serves a practical purpose. Bras allow us greater physical comfort and security – especially if you have larger breasts – protecting delicate nipples and posture, reducing the strain on the back and giving the freedom to do exercise without the fear of black eyes.
Ditching bras led to the hippy generation exposing their newly “liberated” breasts, much to the excitement of the male populous, but though the swinging sisters’ knockers were emancipated, their feet remained in chains. Brave souls fought the revolution from the floor up, rejecting those spiky torture devices in favour of Birkenstocks and Doc Martens. Rather than becoming a symbol of a new femininity, they were (and still are) decried as unfeminine, butch, ugly and a little bit silly. Aside from a core group of defiant activists, most women clung on to their high heels and attempted to teeter-totter their way to equality.
As anyone who has ever walked in high heels knows, it’s difficult, it hurts and you make slow progress in exchange for a bit of perceived power and some flattering glances. Which is a pretty good analogy for how women are hampered in general life, so why should we persist in adding to these problems by going along with something that limits us?
It’s important to admit that I own several pairs of high heels, and have even worn them on a number of occasions. There is not a single instance of doing so where, at some point, I haven’t wished I’d worn flats instead. I am pretty certain that the only reason I ever wear them is because I think they make me look “sexy”. Yet, I know that I don’t always feel sexy in them. For the first few minutes, yes. Then I often feel footsore, annoyed, uncomfortable and insecure. Which is hardly sexy as I understand it.
Understand this instead – high heels make me feel sexy because I have been socially conditioned to believe that they do. There’s a lot of wibble that is spouted over how high heels emphasise the curve of the calf, or mimic the way the foot appears in orgasm (I actually know very few people who look at their partners’ feet during climax). These are all smokescreen attempts to try and make the high heels = sexy equation make sense. In reality, we (men and women) think that they are sexy because society tells us that they are sexy. Because of the hundreds of thousands of images and descriptions of sex and sexual arousal that involve high heels. In the same way that black lace, Haagen Dasz, the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny, red silk and feather boas are put in the big box of “sexiness” these are things that we have repeatedly conflated over and over and over again with sex until they are themselves signifiers of sexiness.
And who doesn’t want to be sexy? The problem is that high heels have become entwined with an idealised feminine sexuality that actually has very little to do with real women having real sex.
In order to be considered either feminine or sexy, we have to adopt these symbolically and socially appropriate signals to show off how attractive and womanly we really are.
High heels are a fetishised (often literally) and almost untouchably sacred shibboleth of accessing femininity: a litmus test for being a “real woman”. In fact, that act of wearing high heels for the first time, perhaps from our mother’s wardrobe, is almost a rite of passage. I never did this because my mother, also a tall woman, didn’t own any, which may go some way to explaining my perspective on heels. Being able to walk in high heels is a desirable skill, which women should learn in order to be “properly” sexy. Although it is also possible that if you feel you have to wear them in order to feel feminine then learning how to walk in them is a necessary survival mechanism to avoid falling over all the time.
The high heel, and walking on it, is part of the mask of constructed femininity, ways in which we contort our bodies into more socially-accepted shapes. Alongside corsets, padded bras, make-up and so on, the high heel is a tool in the Frankenstein workshop in which we create these fake shapes, themselves a distortion and extension of our own shapes to the point where our “natural” bodies look like failures, consistently being too big here or too small there.
We are addicted to high heels, and like many addictions, they are not good for us.
I have friends who adore high heels, including a friend who has several pairs she has never worn and dedicates a portion of her life to the process of breaking in new ones. The stock responses when I criticise high heels is that they make you taller, especially when compared with men, they make your legs look better and that they are pretty. I understand all of these points. I also understand that there’s a need to dig deeper into those reasons and appreciate that they centre more around feelings about power and self-worth than bits of leather and plastic on your feet.
Height is associated with power. We perceive “taller” as being better and physically attractive. It’s no wonder then that women, when they want to look powerful and sexy, try and be taller. Men too, but they have a genetic advantage, certainly over women, in that area, and a social constraint against trying too hard and fussing over their appearance.
The female dolls can't stand up without their high heels...
For women, no such luck – in fact, not trying enough and not “dressing up” properly for social occasions can sometimes cause offence, even amongst other women. In fact, I would go as far as to say especially from other women. Our heel addiction is something we push on other each other, like crazy drugged-up people giggling whilst encouraging our sober friends to try just one little inch. Then another, then another. There’s a tendency to blame mysterious (male) fashion gurus for difficult or challenging clothing that doesn’t suit or fit or just plain makes us feel silly. But the vast majority of the social force behind wearing heels comes from other women.
Which is actually a good thing. Because it means that we can stop it. We know that sexiness is something that is socially defined – certainly over time and across different cultures what it is to be sexy has looked totally different. And so too, what has been considered feminine. We can control it, by choosing to accept or reject these ideas. High heels have no more and no less control over about our femininity, our power or our sexiness than we, collectively, let them. In and of themselves, shoes are just bloody shoes. I realise that in saying this I am committing deep heresy and may as well hand in my women’s club membership card and will have any number of women ready to beat me to death with their precious designer spikes. This of course, only really goes to emphasise my point.
We need a heel amnesty. All of us, as one, should take them off and put on those beloved trainers that we only wear on a “scruffy” day, those boots that make us feel like we could kick the arse of the world, those flip flops that remind us of wandering along the beach, free for a day. If we all gave them up, we could all stop trying to compete in the height stakes and learn to accept ourselves – even just a tiny bit – for being the shape we are. Which is a natural, normal, comfortable and above all, powerful shape. Your shape: the one that you own and navigate the world in and which lets you run, jump and move like a human being rather than with the stiff gait of socially-conditioned sexiness.
Women of the world – buy comfy shoes! You have nothing to lose but a few inches!
And remember, it’s not height that it’s important. It’s stature.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Rewrite
Ramona busts out of her chains to kick some ass.
So when nearly half of the BadRep team took a trip to Tottenham Court Road to see Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, I agreed to write about it. Markgraf wrote a review earlier, but here’s a look at both the movie and the comics.
Yeah. Reviewing a film where a man duels a woman’s exes so that he can date her… for a feminist website? I must be mad.
But it is not that Scott believes girlfriends can be won by duelling other guys. He’s not complicit in any medieval romance-style scenario. He and Ramona are already dating. It is more that these exes, this oddly-dressed group who DO subscribe to the idea that people can be won or lost romantically through fighting battles, must be dealt with before Scott and Ramona can get on with their lives, free of these people who keep on crashing through the ceiling and punching Scott in the face. Because that kind of thing can really ruin your first date.
Now there were many good things about the movie, from Ramona’s ever-changing brightly-coloured hair (call me a fangirl, but I can see how Scott fell in love with her at first sight – I did!) to Edgar Wright’s special effects, which were gorgeous. The fight scenes were well done, just as overblown and tongue-in-cheek as they ought to have been, without looking cheap. I also loved the little touches, such as the cute “RIIIIINNG!” bubbletext that emerged occasionally from the phone in Scott’s flat, reminding us of the film’s comic book roots. The cast was well-chosen – Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s sardonic Ramona masters the spirit of the character spot on, especially when straight-faced and dealing with the fantastic, (boys shooting lasers out of their eyes, etc) whereas Kieran Culkin steals every scene he’s in as Wallace Wells. Can we have a Wallace Wells movie, please? I know Markgraf agrees…
However, the movie suffers in two ways in comparison to the books: 1) Some things just don’t translate as well in a movie, and 2) the movie was written before Bryan Lee O’Malley finished the final books, and therefore there are some aspects of the plot which just don’t add up.
The franchise has been criticised for being shallow, and it kind of is. It is a ‘scene’ franchise. It presents a world where getting your band noticed or getting that girl to notice you is the biggest of your first-world problems, a world almost entirely made up of attractive, mostly white, thin teens and twenty-somethings. Was there anyone outside of this age range who appeared in the movie?
But the franchise has good reason to seem this shallow. Bryan Lee O’Malley, the author of the series, told the actors certain things about their characters that would help them act their parts. The most revealing of these is the one Michael Cera chooses to quote in an interview:
Scott IS this shallow, this is his world as Scott Pilgrim sees it. The movie and comics are not flinching in their portrayal of Scott as… well… a bit of a dick, really. Where the movie is insubstantial in its scope and concerns, it is because Scott Pilgrim himself is a shallow kinda guy.
So I’m not going to criticise the franchise for its essential lack of depth. What I will say is that this shallowness seems more pronounced in the movie than in the comics, and I believe this is a flaw in the medium, not in the message.
It is much more painful to watch a real-live actor say clueless lines such as “Like, Chinese food?”, dismiss lesbianism, constantly mention Knives’ race, or watch an Indian bad guy perform an exaggerated Bollywood dance, on screen in a room full of movie goers, than it is to read the same thing in a comic, coming from tiny, black and white cartoon people on the page. The comic, because it is unrealistic, reminds us that this is Scott’s ‘weird perception’ of the world, whereas the film, while there are unrealistic special effects, is not quite as good at this.
Crucially, the movie also makes cuts which interfere with the story. A comic book in which there was room for the four non-white characters to be developed gives way to a movie where the Japanese Katayanagi twins are the only two of Ramona’s exes who do not speak a single line. Knives’ development from an obsessed high-schooler to a kickass kid who’s moved on feels much too rushed onscreen, if she’s moved on at all.
When the movie was originally written, it was given a ‘Team Knives’ ending – she was the one who ended up taking Scott home. The actresses were playing all their scenes in the knoweldge that Knives would win Scott in the end. Then when the sixth and final comic book came out with a ‘Team Ramona’ ending, just before the release of the movie, the very last scene was very quickly re-filmed to make sure that Scott ended up with Ramona.
This hurts both Knives’ and Ramona’s portrayal in the movie. Movie Knives does not move on, seemingly in love with Scott even as she tells him to chase Ramona in the final scene. She supports Scott during the final battle, making some really heroic action heroine moves, and generally seems a much better choice than the flighty Movie Ramona who only stands by to watch Scott get mercilessly pummeled by Gideon. Knives never reaches the place she does in the books, where she has realised that a) Scott is a dick who cheated on her and b) while she forgives him, she’s got too much self-respect to ever go out with him again.
Ramona and Scott deliver the final blow to Gideon.
Ramona is also massively short-changed by the rewrite. Comics Ramona’s very large part in the final battle is entirely glossed over, so that she is a passive observer for most of the final scenes in the movie. In the comics, she AND Scott defeat Gideon, together. She throws off Gideon’s mind-control by her own ingenuity, and she and Scott deliver the final blow to Gideon together, with one, simultaneous sword-strike. That final blow symbolises the new equality in the relationship, the new power balance. It’s pretty essential to Ramona’s character, and it wasn’t in the movie.
Movie Ramona is a poor mind-controlled girl who gets rescued by Scott. Comics Ramona rescues herself. I’ll always love the comics more, if only for that.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World was a very enjoyable movie, and the premise is hardly as crappy in its gender politics as many BadReppers thought it might be, but it is sad that so much of the material from the comics was lost. It also suffers from a clumsily rewritten ending which punished some brilliant secondary characters and could probably have been avoided with better communication between Bryan Lee O’Malley and his scriptwriters. All in all, it’s an exciting, colourful movie which brought a great line of comics to life for many viewers, but the final half will leave some comics fans with a slight aftertaste of missed opportunity.
At The Movies: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
[***SPOILER WARNING GOES HERE!***]
I went into this film grumbling slightly and kicking my heels. “Man fights exes in order to win girl, oh fucking great,” I said. The trailer hadn’t done anything to dissuade my grumblitude, and I’d spent the past few days staring angrily at Le Roman De La Rose and going, “HAVE OUR IDEAS OF HOW MEN AND WOMEN INTERACT IN THE FIELD OF RELATIONSHIPS REALLY NOT IMPROVED AT ALL SINCE 13TH CENTURY FRANCE” ad nauseum to all those around me.
"If I say yes, will you sign for your damn package?"
So in I went, determinedly wiping my mind clean and free of any prejudice, and settled my fine arse down in one of the seats and glared at the cinema screen, daring it to prove me wrong.
It literally did, as well.
I was comprehensively proved wrong about Scott Pilgrim by Scott Pilgrim, and I’m actually really glad of it, because I had a great time. Allow me to inform your mind-hole about how I was proved wrong and where.
Well, firstly, there’s the whole evil-ex-fighting thing. “GRUMBLE,” said I. “FIGHTING FOR A WOMAN,” said I. It is, in fact, none of these things. I felt a bit stupid. Perhaps I should have read the graphic novels first? But then, I’m a firm believer in the idea of things being able to stand alone as works of art despite being based on a previous work, and I think this film does. So I sat there, stewing in my own uneducatedness, occasionally hissing “Hah! Reading the source material is FOR THE WEAK!” and actually loving it.
But see, he’s not fighting for Ramona (The Girl, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead) at all – he’s fighting for himself. Each ex is more daunting and jealousy-triggering than the next, and he’s fighting what we all fight when we get together with someone new – the Ghost Of Partners Past. Not the literal partners, but our ideas of them, and how much better they are than us.
…I know it can’t just be me, okay, I just saw a film that said it wasn’t just me. Shut up.
Secondly, I was all, “Ugh, this is going to be heteronormativity central”. It wasn’t. There wasn’t just gay visibility (with Kieran Culkin as Scott’s MIND-MELTINGLY ATTRACTIVE housemate Wallace OH GOD) but also a bit of bi visibility, with Ramona’s exes being adamantly exes and not ex-boyfriends. I mean, it’s spoiled a bit when Ramona confronts Roxy (Mae Whitman) with “It was just a phase, I was a little bi-curious” rather than it just being accepted unapologetically as, “Yep, I’m bisexual,” but in an age where bisexuality is still thought not to exist (!!) it’s something. Excuse me for triumphantly dancing around the only scrap of water in this desert.
Roxy Richter (Mae Whitman): more than a little bi-furious
Thirdly, th-the female characters don’t suck! I thought they were going to be crap, and they weren’t. Knives (Ellen Wong) was fantastic. Ramona was stalwart and human. The stand-out moment for me, however, was when Scott (Michael Cera) and Ramona are in bed, and she says, “I’ve changed my mind; I don’t want to have sex with you, and I reserve the right to change my mind again about that later” and that’s that. It passes with no awkwardness, no negative comment and no pressure whatsoever. It’s brilliant. Can we please have more positive portrayal of women choosing not to shag guys in films, please? That’d be great. Because too often, she’d be demonised for that – words such as “fickle” and “cock-tease” would be flung about like undesired cornflakes placed before a two-year-old – but she’s not, here. Hooray!
Similarly, there’s no gay panic. You know gay panic? Yeah, that. Well, it doesn’t exist in le Universe d’Scott Pilgrim. Scott shares a bed with his gay housemate (and his housemate’s increasing library of lovers) with no comment or problem. It’s an idealised world where the oft-played-on awkwardness of “straight masculinity vs. gay masculinity” simply doesn’t exist, and it’s really refreshing.
Also, I was totally won over by the soundtrack and visuals. Then again, I am a simple creature. Glitter and 16-bit everywhere! It’s like an illegal rave in Marioland. I’m almost disappointed that I loved it. I wanted a really good trumpeting rant, and I’ve been denied that. Damn you, Scott Pilgrim! Damn you for being surprising and good.
"... and also, I totally play the lute."
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- It does many things right, including people, consent and sexuality
- It’s a winsome and appealing portrait of how much people suck at interacting romantically
- It’s really very gorgeous
- …And so are the people in it
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- It’s very geared at a specific audience (late teens/early twenties, geeky, internet-fuelled) and therefore might not be accessible for everyone
Movie stills: Universal/Everett/Rex Features
The Bottom Rung of the Ladder
We not only have to survive, we have to deserve to survive.
– Joss Whedon
Whedon was talking about how characters make hard decisions in Battlestar Galactica, but the same sentiment is reflected in lines from his “Equality Now” speech:
Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity, we need it to stand on this earth as men and women – and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who’s confronted with it.
These two quotes sum up why I’m a feminist. Equality is not optional. I’m intelligent enough, and live in a society educated enough, that there is no excuse for me not to aim for it. Without equality, we fail as human beings.
From Planet of the Apes, 1968. (Stop complaining about spoilers, you've had 40 years.)
This type of “equality” is not some iron-clad regulation of behaviour, but an equal chance to live as you choose to: not to be disadvantaged because assumptions are made about one of two categories (which don’t match the multiple physical or mental possibilities anyway). Not pressured to act a certain way, or locked out from having power over your life. And it’s not some unimportant dream of abstract perfection but the most fundamental part of the lives of millions.
Reaching this fabled Equality won’t solve many problems. Those people lucky enough to escape poverty will still need to work every day, death is still inevitable, resources are still finite. If we had a much-reduced need for feminism, we’d only be starting on the struggle for a better society – but we wouldn’t be dooming over half our population to lesser chances and consideration because they don’t have man-parts.
Of course, aiming for true equality and overcoming the prejudices which are deeply ingrained in our (somewhat twisted) upbringings is difficult even for feminists. I wonder whether giving up my seat on the train for a woman is deeply offensive and sexist, because it’s based on the idea that women are weak creatures to be treasured and looked after by big strong men. I start to examine every single decision I make that is based on the line “because she’s a woman”. In a society where equality was real, that reason would virtually never apply.
For most roles, if gender is the only difference between two people then they should be interchangeable. A decision should immediately be about the positives and negatives of the individual instead. By having true equality, you would be free to see the person for who they are – at the very least, THEY would be free to choose who they are without having it dictated because of what society thinks “women” are/deserve this year.
But instead girls still get pink dolls and boys get blue trucks.
It’s not unrealistic to have true equality as the eventual aim. In fact, it makes identifying the current inequality all the easier: endless shelves of women’s magazines full of airbrushed anorexics, and also full shelves of men’s mags featuring topless women all with identical body shapes… if we were surrounded by constant images of perfectly-toned half naked men with impossible airbrushed bodies on every second billboard and magazine cover instead, you have to wonder how long this shit would last.
Mark Thomas (the political comedian) released a “People’s Manifesto” earlier this year. It was made by his audiences volunteering their ideas for new British laws. My favourite reads:“Models to be selected at random from the electoral register”.
Male, female, young, old. Large, small. All races, all shoes sizes, glasses-wearing NORMAL PEOPLE modelling clothes for normal people.
Of course, his show is supposed to be a comedy.
Going this far into the idea of a culture where we truly don’t dictate gender roles is not Joss Whedon’s point at all, and not really my main one either. We’re not there. We’re not even 10% of the way there. We’re in a world where we still have to campaign to stop female genital mutilation in England. Where large parts of the planet treat over 50% of human beings as property, or as unclean, dangerous sexual objects.
A feminist, yesterday. (Photo of Bill Bailey from http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk)
The term ‘Feminism’ has a bad rep with a lot of men. When I linked to this site from my blog, one of the commenters said they found the idea of male feminists “somewhat absurd”. That’s light compared to the reception they receive in some places online.
Bad Rep believes that we’re not going to make much change by refusing to engage with 49% of the population on principle, so this last bit is aimed at male readers:
Men! Do not be afraid! Not only are you welcome here, but you probably already agree with everything feminism stands for:
A feminist is a person who answers “yes” to the question, “Are women human?” Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. … It’s about women having intrinsic value as persons rather than contingent value as a means to an end for others: fetuses, children, the “family,” men.
– Katha Pollitt
Or more succinctly:
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
– Cheris Kramarae, Paula A. Treichler, Ann Russo: A Feminist Dictionary.
Equality is not optional. It is the only way we can get to the very first step of the ladder that creates a society to be proud of, and leave a record of the human race which doesn’t mark us as worse than the apes we came from. It’s not ‘absurd’ to have everyone involved – men need female equality to be in place before we can truthfully call ourselves men.
An Alphabet of Feminism #2: B is for Bitch
B
BITCH
(n. and v. )
Four Legs Good
The four-letter word that isn’t a four letter word, at least properly a bitch has four legs. As anyone who’s ever tittered at Cruft’s will be only too aware, the glory of bitch is that, like gay, it has a meaning unrelated to human sexuality in many circles. Hence its first meaning, ‘the female of the dog’, originating in Middle English and Old Norse. The dictionary extends its potential out a bit: you can, it insists, have other types of bitch creature (e.g., ‘bitch fox’) as long as you specify. Bitch aardvark; bitch turtle (I hope).
You say 'bitch' like it's a bad thing.
But, with typical ingratitude to Man’s Best Friend, the human race quickly (well, by the fourteenth century) started using dog to mean all the juicy olde worlde insults – ‘worthless fellow’, ‘traitor’, ‘low cur’, ‘coward’, etc. – with the implication being that a four-legged dog only thinks of its survival and has no interest in Elevated Human Ideals like honour, dignity, nobility, etc. Bitch is the female of the species in every sense, so, while dog is connected with male inadequacy and primitivism, bitch attacks women on that most unoriginal of plains, sexuality.
Enter the second, and probably most commonly understood use of the term: its opprobrious application to women. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED to you and me) initially sticks to the rather conservative definition ‘a lewd or sensual woman’, adding sternly ‘Not now in decent use’, although it then extends the term to mean ‘a malicious or treacherous woman’ or, more generally, an ‘outstandingly difficult or unpleasant’ thing, this last surely an allusion to the proverbial aggression of mothering animals. But why do these sexual meanings keep cropping up? The answer lies in the Dim And Distant Past.
A Diversion Back In Time
When these terms begin to be bandied about in the 1300s, the crucial point is that that much-touted Man On The Street would probably have said that men were spiritual, closer-to-God beings, while their wives were, well, Closer To God in the Trent Reznorian sense. There was a very simple reason for this: physically speaking, women can, er, last longer than men. ‘What is this?’ their husbands cry, ‘I’ve had enough – That’s all anyone should need! Womankind is dangerously lecherous!’ Moreover, since Man had been created first (and in God’s image) he was some way towards divinity already, but the daughters of Eve were far from such exalted regions. They were really just a higher kind of animal: Adam had, after all, been given dominion over his wife along with the birds and beasts.
So female lechery could quickly become perceived as a primitive, animalistic trait that the forces of humanity – and the superior self-restraint of men – were always trying to overcome. And bitch emerges as evidence of such a view, since just as dog suggests that primitive man is, in essence, cowardly, bitch implies that all women (as the female of the species) are basically dogs in heat, driven by their genitals, and consequently liable to stray towards adultery and sexual deception just as, today, men supposedly ‘think with their pricks’ (more on how this shift occurred to come!).
BITCH. A she dog, or doggess; the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of ‘whore’.
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1811
Wait, What About Me?
The sub-definition of bitch‘s opprobrious sense relates to its application to a man. Here, the dictionary argues, it ‘has the modern sense of “dog”‘, although its use is, bizarrely, ‘less opprobrious, and somewhat whimsical’. So a male bitch is essentially a dog, a coward, a whiner, a weakling: all terms which, handily, reflect back on the gender the man in question is borrowing. But, you know, whimsically.
The plot thickens! If, linguistically, (lewd) women are essentially the same as dogs in heat, the verbal senses of bitch (I bitch, you bitch, she/he/it bitches) take on a whole new inevitability. Denigrating people behind their backs becomes behaviour to be expected from any female animal, and, consequently, natural and normal. Moreover, it becomes an explicitly feminine activity: men do not ‘bitch’ about each other, or rather, if they do, they are upsetting a perceived gender role in the process. Son of a Bitch (supposedly Old Norse in origin) is a useful comparison here: men who are treacherous, it implies, are their mothers’ sons.
Bitcho Ergo Sum, or whatever.
So then, interactivity time: is there an equivalent word for men, that, if appropriated by women, has a censorious reflection on ‘natural’ male behaviour? The only ones I can think of generally reflect badly on the woman, and have little impact on the man – ‘sharking’, ‘pimping’ – or hardly change at all, as with the pleasingly unisex ‘fucking’.
‘You Say “Bitch” Like It’s A Bad Thing!’
Finally, a word on bitch in the twenty-first century. Since the purpose of this Alphabet is to work through linguistic history via the Oxford English Dictionary (which is in so many ways the pater familias of conventional English), I find myself ill-equipped to discuss the many nuances the word has acquired in modern day slang (‘a crocodile will stone cold eat a bitch’, etc.), which, however, is an area I hope readers will be able to bring something to themselves in the comments.
However, what is really confusing me is the question what to make of the increasing tendency nowadays for certain women (or, at least, greetings card companies aimed at women) to reclaim bitch as a Fun Ironic Term: hence all those novelty cards about how one would be ill-advised to disturb ‘the bitch’ when she’s sleeping / shopping / eating chocolate / gossiping / menstruating, for LO, SHE IS A BITCH. This seems to translate as something along the lines of ‘Hey, I’m the female of the species! I have, like, moodswings and stuff! I’m deeply unreasonable!’ These women do not, however, seem to be particularly concerned with sexual activity, which, the dictionary insists, is bitch‘s primary definition in its application to women. Ironically, they are in fact using the term in something much closer to its secondary meaning, ‘an outstandingly difficult or unpleasant thing‘.
Further reading
- Francis Grose’s 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (ho ho)
- http://bitchmagazine.org/ – Something I’ve not really gone into detail about, but this is a good example of reclaiming the word from a more acceptable point of view than GIVE THE BITCH HER CHOCOLATE.
NEXT WEEK: C is for … Crinoline. No, really, it’s an awesome word! And we thought we’d dodge the obvious.