Tag Archives: femininity

Femininity, Masculinity, and the Strong Female Lead

Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, holding a stakeDebbie says:

Brit Marling’s opinion piece in the New York Times, “I Don’t Want to Be the Strong Female Lead,” relies on gender essentialism:

It would be hard to deny that there is nutrition to be drawn from any narrative that gives women agency and voice in a world where they are most often without both. But the more I acted the Strong Female Lead, the more I became aware of the narrow specificity of the characters’ strengths — physical prowess, linear ambition, focused rationality. Masculine modalities of power. …

It’s difficult for us to imagine femininity itself — empathy, vulnerability, listening — as strong. When I look at the world our stories have helped us envision and then erect, these are the very qualities that have been vanquished in favor of an overwrought masculinity.

Simply by coding physical prowess and focused rationality as masculine and empathy and vulnerability as feminine, Marling is replicating the exact binary simplification she wants to move past.  So she’s eliding trans and nonbinary people, as well as human (and character) complexity even in a simple, unreal bigendered world. She comes by that simplification honestly: the polarized division so often controls how we think about men and women (from Mars/from Venus) and certainly determines what we see in movies, television, and other pop culture images.

I emerged from [a success with her microbudget films at] the Sundance Film Festival with offers to act in projects I would never have been allowed to read for a week prior. Most of those roles were still girlfriend, mistress, mother. But there was a new character on offer to me as well, one that survived the story.

Enter, stage right: the Strong Female Lead.

She’s an assassin, a spy, a soldier, a superhero, a C.E.O. She can make a wound compress out of a maxi pad while on the lam. She’s got MacGyver’s resourcefulness but looks better in a tank top.

Here’s the real insight: the Strong Female Lead is a new way to kill women in stories. The old way isn’t used up–the “woman in the refrigerator” trope is hardly dead. But I hadn’t thought about the ways in which stories about kick-ass women can function to make female-identified qualities disappear:

I began to see something deeper and more insidious behind all those images of dead and dying women.

When we kill women in our stories, we aren’t just annihilating female gendered bodies. We are annihilating the feminine as a force wherever it resides — in women, in men, of the natural world. Because what we really mean when we say we want strong female leads is: “Give me a man but in the body of a woman I still want to see naked.”

Here’s a telling story from Marling’s time in an investment bank:

The lone female V.P. on my floor and my mentor at the time gave me the following advice when she left to partner at a hedge fund: Once a week, open the door to your office when they finally give you one, and place a phone call where you shout a string of expletives in a threatening voice.

She added that there doesn’t actually need to be someone on the other end of the line.

My first reaction to Marling’s story was to think of foul-mouthed Chrisjen Avasarala (played on TV by Shohreh Aghdashloo), UN Secretary General  in The Expanse, a terrific example of a woman outside of the stereotypes Marling describes. It’s easy to imagine her getting that advice from a mentor when she was young.  Marling — both on screen and off — is being coerced into performing stereotypical masculinity so she can inhabit a space where she is — sort of — female, but coded male enough to keep men confident that they know how to deal with her, and that it’s fine to imagine her naked.

Marling then goes close to my heart and my history, evoking Octavia E. Butler and her heroine Lauren Olamina, as well as mentioning the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood. Lauren Olamina, protagonist of Butler’s Parable of the Sower, is a much more complex character than Marling gives her credit for. Yes, Lauren

has “hyperempathy” — she feels, quite literally, other people’s pain. This feminine gift and curse uniquely prepares her to survive the violent attack on her community in Los Angeles and successfully encourage a small tribe north to begin again from seeds she has saved from her family’s garden.

This is where essentialism falls down. To keep her thesis, Marling can’t say that Lauren is also tough-minded, ready to fight, willing to draw a gun on an enemy, and could easily be filmed as a Strong Female Lead (whom male viewers would love to see naked) while keeping the hyperempathic aspect of her character. Buffy Summers (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) was one of the early super-popular Strong Female Leads, and she also has schoolgirl crushes, makes stupid decisions to keep men happy, gets entrapped in high-school rivalries … and dies not once but twice in the course of the series.

Avasarala directs the U.N. with an iron hand, never misses a chance to say “fuck,” and is putty in the hands of her extremely sweet husband, the male mirror to her masculine toughness.

Conversely, Luke Cage, the invulnerable African-American Marvel comics hero played on TV by Mike Colter, wants nothing more than to go unnoticed and unchallenged through ordinary days in Harlem. SImply delighting in his invulnerability would make him boring.

So it’s far more complicated, even on the screen, than Marling acknowledges. And yet, she couldn’t be more right about how the stereotypes work, all too often:

Sometimes I get a feeling of what [my nascent woman character] could be like. A truly free woman. But when I try to fit her into the hero’s journey she recedes from the picture like a mirage. She says to me: Brit, the hero’s journey is centuries of narrative precedent written by men to mythologize men. Its pattern is inciting incident, rising tension, explosive climax and denouement. What does that remind you of?

And I say, a male orgasm.

Thanks to Guy W. Thomas for the pointer to the article. Follow me on Twitter.

Links for a New Year

Debbie says:

I spent the last two weeks of the old year, and the first week of this one, harvesting so many links I can’t blog them all. Here’s a selection of especially interesting ones.

jaden and three female models, all in skirts, with handbags

Gender fluidity crossed a major barrier very recently. Jaden Smith will be modeling traditionally female clothes for Louis Vuitton. John Boone at ET says,

Jaden dons a skirt and fringed top in the fashion line’s Spring 2016 campaign and poses alongside models Sarah Brannon, Rianne Van Rompaey, and Jean Campbell. Nicolas Ghesquière, creative director of Louis Vuitton, was first to share the photos, writing, “Happy to introduce Jaden Smith.”

Women have been wearing various kinds of traditionally male clothing, from slacks to tuxedos, both inside and outside the fashion industry for decades. But a male-bodied person in a skirt is still a surprise in most contexts (though on a cold-for-California day in December I saw a tall, thin, bearded guy in a gauzy just-below-the-knee skirt, bare legs and sandals, holding a toddler’s hand; made me happy all day).

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The fashion industry’s choices aren’t going to solve the problems of trans teens. Claudia McNeilly writes at Broadly about young trans people and eating disorders, something I certainly knew nothing about:

A study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health earlier this year found that transgender youth were four times more likely to report an eating disorder diagnosis than their cisgender heterosexual female peers—the next leading eating disorder group. …

The researchers compared various gender identity and sexual orientation groups with cisgender heterosexual women, who are usually the focus of eating disorder literature. Not only were transgender students four times more likely to report an eating disorder diagnosis than their cisgender heterosexual female peers, they were also twice as likely to report using diet pills and more than twice as likely to report vomiting or laxative use during the previous month.

McNeilly looks at stresses on transgender teens from a few perspectives, with a great conclusion:

In order to seriously address the issue of eating disorders among trans youth, it seems, the simplest way is to shift our understanding of what eating disorders look like and whom they affect. Dr. Alexis Duncan, senior author of the study [said]: “People tend to think about eating disorders as being people with anorexia, but most people with eating disorders are not too thin, so they by definition do not have anorexia. It’s much more likely that someone will have binge eating disorder or bulimia, and be of normal weight or even overweight. So the question is: how do we bust the myth?”

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It’s not eating disorders, but you might call it overly ordered eating. Kate Handley, writing at Sociological Images, has studied how our companions affect how we eat:

For my senior thesis, I explored whether women change the way they eat  alongside what they eat when dining with a male vs. female companion. The study is small, and intentionally limited to Euro-American women. I found it interesting and completely unsurprising.

I found that women did change the way they ate depending on the gender of their dining companion. Overall, when dining with a male companion, women typically constructed their bites carefully, took small bites, ate slowly, used their napkins precisely and frequently, and maintained good posture and limited body movement throughout their meals. In contrast, women dining with a female companion generally constructed their bites more haphazardly, took larger bites, used their napkins more loosely and sparingly, and moved their bodies more throughout their meals.

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Men may or may not be judging how the women with them eat; Handley didn’t examine that. But we learned that at the highest levels of government and politics, men are judging how and where and when and for how long women pee. After Hillary Clinton was frequently and publicly criticized for missing a few minutes of debate because of a long bathroom line, Soraya Chemaly wrote this for the Huffington Post:

I write and talk about controversial subjects all the time – violence, rape, race – but I have never received as vitriolic a response as last summer, when I wrote about the disparity in public facilities for men and women, The Everyday Sexism of Women Waiting in Bathroom Lines; it was a piece about norms and knowledge.  Angry people mostly men, by the hundreds, wrote to tell me I was vulgar, stupid, ignorant and should learn to stand in order to pee, because it’s superior. It continued for weeks, until I wrote a follow-up piece on the ten most sexist responses.

… Can you imagine the backlash and media frenzy if Clinton had actually, in some detail, pointed out that the women’s room was farther away or that there is often, especially at large public events like this debate, a line that women patiently wait in while men flit in and out and makes jokes about women’s vanity? That the microaggressive hostility evident, structurally, in so many of our legacy public spaces is relevant to women every day. “Bathroom codes enforce archaic and institutionalized gender norms,” wrote Princeton students Monica Shi & Amanda Shi about their school’s systemic sexism this year.

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If you’re curious about Addyi (the “female Viagra”), you’ll appreciate Amy Gamerman’s long, detailed article for Vogue on her experiences with it, plus some scientific background and information about what else is coming down the pike for pharmacology and women’s desire. Gamerman’s piece is hard to excerpt, but here’s a bit that caught my eye:

My desire is improving, as is the quality of the sex. I’m more enthusiastic, less distracted. The color commentary that usually runs through my mind during the act—This is nice, but am I enjoying it enough? Is that a paint chip on the ceiling?—has fallen silent. The sharp edges of daily life melt, just a bit.

Has the Addyi flipped a switch in my entorhinal cortex? More likely, the drug is helping to create “a good neurochemical environment” for desire, according to Jim Pfaus, Ph.D., a scientist in the pharmacology of sex, based at Montreal’s Concordia University. Mindfulness training, sensate exercises, and talk therapy could probably achieve the same result, given enough time and energy. But as Pfaus points out, “You can’t take a trip to Cozumel every weekend.”

Gamerman decided to renew her prescription. I wonder what else the Addyi is doing, and whether she’s missing other benefits to that theoretical trip to Cozumel. At the same time, she provides an interesting counterpoint to this link I posted last year.

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Finally, Margaret Corvid, writing for The Establishment, tells us what sex work has taught her about self-employment. Here’s one example.

Your time and emotional labor are worth money.

The work you’re paid to do is rarely all the work you do to keep your job. If you’re paid to code as part of a team, you’re probably not paid to make yourself presentable and business appropriate, deal with catcalling and packed subway cars on the way to work, and silently bear the racist rants of your office’s resident Trump fan.

The same holds true if you run your own business, but with the advantage that you can, like a magician, convert bullshit into money. If a client wants to book me in the kink studio three hours away across a rat’s nest of traffic-snarled roads, he’s going to be paying a premium for my mileage, time, pain, and suffering—and he’ll get a better service from me when I feel adequately compensated, rather than resentful. If a client wants to talk about the dirty details with me over the phone while jerking off, he’s either going to pay me or I’ll hang up and append “wanker” to his name in my phone.

It’s rare and refreshing to see sex work analyzed as work rather than as sex.

All links from my regular reading, which includes Feministe, Feministing, Shakesville, Sociological Images, and io9, among other sites.