Woman up
Women are, of course, legally emancipated. They have the vote, they are allowed to own property and are allowed the same educational rights as men. That this is right is now, to my generation, so blatantly obvious that it almost comes as a surprise to read articles from the recent past stating that woman still aren’t equal in so many aspects of life.
At first glance, one might argue that legally the status is one of complete equality, and most people accept without thinking that this should be the case. However, being legally equal does not mean complete equality for women. For example, I know several strong willed, intelligent women who like Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight.
On a side note I happen to believe completely in subjectivity. If someone disagrees with me then they have a complete right to do so, in almost all cases. However in this one I am prepared to make an exception. Twilight is one of the worst books I’ve ever read, and yet it is also a genuine phenomenon, and not just among teenagers. Sure, the main market is teenage girls but for something to be as successful as Twilight it has to reach other audiences. These include girls in general, teenage boys, and women of all ages. Obviously I find this bewildering given my viewpoint, and working in a bookshop has given me evidence - horrible, depressing, evidence - that woman are not only subjugated in general, but that society has conditioned them into doing it themselves. This is resting on the assumption that, in mainstream entertainment, people are prepared to overlook moral implications of content if it manages to entertain them. The entertainment part is where subjectivity is definitely a factor, but then morality is also theoretically subjective. This is where things get tricky, but anyway, I digress.
For evidence of the damaging moral content of popular entertainment I would refer to my previous job working at the cinema in St Andrews, where romantic comedies consistently espoused the idea that a woman can only truly be happy when she not only finds “The One” but also marries it too. The overall effect, to my mind, is much like a physically handicapped person stabbing themselves in the leg - they’re basically self-harming but they can’t feel a thing. Again, these films were incredibly popular, with Sex in the City especially bringing large numbers of women, at least a quarter of whom were reduced to hysterics, on the opening night.
Put simply, it makes women look stupid. The key concept in all of these works of fiction is that True Love will prevail, which doesn’t seem like a bad aspiration to propagate. True Love, however, is a tricky one to pin down, and is obviously a subjective thing. For example, in the Uma Thurman starring ‘An Accidental Husband’, the plot is summarised on Wikipedia thusly:
‘New York firefighter Patrick Sullivan (Morgan) had no idea his seemingly idyllic life was about to go up in smoke - especially as the unwitting, second-hand recipient of advice from famed love expert and radio host Dr. Emma Lloyd (Thurman). One day he is a happy-go-lucky guy looking forward to a life with his soon-to-be-bride. Then, his fiancée Sophia (Justina Machado) is seeking couples counseling on the radio from Dr. Lloyd. Lloyd questions Sophia’s concept of romantic love and advises her to break their engagement, which she swiftly does.
Patrick is so upset that when he hears that Emma is about to be married herself, he allows his young neighbour, an Indian computer whiz-kid to hack into public records and create a fake marriage between himself and Emma, because he wants to force a confrontation. Emma is told she cannot marry her perfect-gentleman fiancé, Richard (Firth), because she is already married. She has no choice but to confront Patrick, who after stringing her along with lie upon lie, finds out that he is attracted to her, and makes a play for her romantically. He proceeds to inject himself into her life, causes her to have to lie herself, to her beloved fiancé. Emma is drawn to his immense charisma but tries to ignore it’
Colin Firth’s character realises that his fiancé is in love with a New York Firefighter (and therefore the MOST. NOBLE. MAN. EVER.) and lets her go. Rather than tell the guests that there’s a change of plan, Uma then sets of the sprinkler system so everyone gets drenched and her new One turns up with a fire engine between his legs and marries the shit out of her.
Now, obviously ‘An Accidental Husband’ isn’t exactly a box office trailblazer, but the women who saw it in St Andrews laughed along and enjoyed it, without at any point raising the important question: ‘Why is Uma Thurman, famous for playing a character so tough she punched her way out of a buried coffin, marrying someone who was a complete dick to her when Colin Firth is standing there being almost offensively nice?’
Charisma plays a part here. The fireman is terribly charismatic, even if he’s being a dick by my standards. Colin Firth’s character doesn’t do much wrong in the film, but ends up being jilted. Of course Uma’s character finds true love and this is wonderful, but this works on the assumption that this love makes all the morally dubious actions of the protagonists somehow null and void. It also reflects the general point I am trying to make: if something is appealing and enticing on one level it will make people forget the dubious nature of its contents.
In 27 Dresses Katherine Heigl starred as a woman who was always the bridesmaid and never the bride. What’s worse, she only had a well paid job that made good use of her intellect, lots friends and large apartment. Tch. Obviously there was a man shaped gap in her life. Silly career women. Odd how there’s never a comedy about someone who married early and had kids and feels empty without her high powered career part of her life, isn’t it? Drama, yes, but never comedy. Sex and the City, 27 Dresses, most romantic comedies of the 21st Century, no-one in them ever has to worry about money.
Possibly this is indicative of society pressurising women into making the choice early on between family life or having a career, or possibly it’s just the fact that ‘She’s a twenty something Data Entry clerk trying to make ends meet and find a man at the weekends’ is not a pitch that will ever make it. Romantic comedies, in short, present a twisted version of the world where women must tick just the one box, irrespective of how much they have achieved in their lives outside of romantic relationships, and until they have their lives are empty and without meaning. It is a rare piece of drama or comedy where a woman ends up happy and contented with her lot, and often in modern day cinema the women involved have a hell of a lot of stuff going on. Their material wealth and possessions are huge. This is not to say that love and companionship aren’t brilliant, but simply to point out that it is perfectly possible to be happy without being married in front of a billion of your peers wearing a designer dress and shoes made of ivory. And once they’re married, that’s it. You’re happy. FOREVER. If this is the type of story women like, my worry is that escapism and will turn into aspiration, and this is what people are shown as a fulfilled modern woman. It bleeds its idealism into reality. Presumably the idea is that, by showing a woman with all the things that society is supposed to set us up to attain, the makers of the film are saying ‘Look everyone! She might earn more in a year than your entire social group put together but she still has the same problems!’
Quite a lot of single ladies would, I feel, happily trade their set of problems for the ones suffered by Katherine Heigl. Interestingly, she described her character in Knocked Up as a shrew, especially compared with the male characters who were out having fun. Whether she has a case is a moot point, especially in light of her choices in playing the lead in 27 Dresses and then The Ugly Truth, a film that was generally panned for its chauvinism, but let us consider the character arc in both films:
Knocked Up: Recently promoted, well liked, talented, intelligent lady gets pregnant to loud, crude stoner with no career prospects. At the end of the film they keep the baby, she continues to progress at work and he has got a flat, a job, and is taking far less weed than he used to because of her.
27 Dresses: Popular, intelligent and sensitive woman has good job and friends, but is in love with her boss. At the end of the film she has found someone else and everyone is happy and she gets married, which is what she really wanted.
Judge for yourselves which one seems more positive.
I feel, simply, that these films are meant to be escapist froth, but despite this they carry an undercurrent of failure. For all their happy endings and glitz they are also highlighting massive differences between those who have and those who have not. If someone aspires to have Carrie Bradshaw’s shoe collection or walk in wardrobe (well, they aren’t going aspire to have her face, body or personality), then maybe the wedding will also be an item on a list to aspire too. With the side effect of a marriage to follow of course. The same is true of other career women of cinema who have financial stability. It’s a short step from aspiring to their clothes to dreaming of their happy ever afters. Perhaps, like cigarettes, romantic comedies should come with a Health Warning such as ‘Caution: Objects on the screen may be more implausible than they actually appear (There’s a recession on you know).’
But RomComs, crucially, are meant to be funny, and sometimes they are. Twilight, on the other hand, is meant to be about True Love and is supposed to be taken seriously.
If you’ve seen the films you initial question might well be ‘How?’ and yet it is the most popular series of books of recent years. It might well be the writing, at least if Meyer’s prose were not horrifically clunky, dull and stale. She fills out pages the way R.L Stine did by describing in excruciating detail the clothing and styles of the characters. Stuff like ‘I decided to wear my slightly stained Adidas pump-sneakers because of the never-ending rain, along with my thick mustard-brown woollen socks and dark ochre jeans with a cord belt tied in a tight knot around my waist. To keep my body dry I wore three layers, a magenta vest-top with wide shoulder straps, a woollen sweater depicting the stoning of St Mischa my gran had knitted me one tolerable Christmas, and a raincoat my Pop had sworn was so watertight because it had been coated with piping hot grape juice. Having highlighted this paragraph and checked the wordcount, the author allowed me to go outside and say boring shit about the trees. The trees…’ and so on. So it’s probably not the prose that is scintillating the reading public, so maybe it’s the characterisation.
Bella, the main character, moans a lot. In the first book she complains about the speed of her internet connection, the age of her car, the weather being bad, the fact that she’s really popular at school, how people like her and ask her out and seem to want to get to know her and be really welcoming and nice. But y’know, she’s an angsty teenager and no-one really gets her. This is presumably because people assume she’s nice but dull, rather than apparently full of contempt for everyone who does good things for her. At no point does Bella ever express much talent for anything, or particularly interesting opinions, or say what she wants to do with her life and what she wants to be when she grows up. All her internal monologue consists of is complaint after complaint after complaint.
So maybe the story is popular because people think ‘Wow! She has literally no personality or ambitions in life! If she can go out with a mysterious and handsome stranger then surely true love must beckon for me also!’
Bella is in love with a vampire, y’see. She wants to become a vampire too so he doesn’t have to worry about killing her when they get jiggy. Typical woman, always thinking with her woo-woo. Anyhow, Edward eventually says that he will make her a vampire if she marries him, at which point she backs off slightly because this is a big commitment. As opposed to becoming a vampire, which isn’t that big a deal really. Bella loves Edward because he is mysterious and dashing, and speaks like a cross between a retarded P.G Wodehouse character and Vincent Price. Edward loves Bella because he finds her fascinating. That this is popular is more troubling, because the entire story revolves around a young woman defining herself entirely around her love for a violent and troubled man. Films, in comparison, at least have women who are reasonably confident in other fields of life (usually their career, so if they’re unrealistic and fail to address massive questions about women’s choices in society they do at least give their characters some positive attributes while doing so), whereas Twilight presents a heroine with nothing interesting about her whatsoever. The ‘Oh my god, this is so unfair’ aspect is obviously going to appear to teenagers but grown women read this crap too. The obvious question is: ‘What the hell is wrong with them?’
On a slippery slope, the popularity of Twilight says some very troubling things about the state of women’s emancipation. I work in a bookshop, and made an ironic comment to someone that they could buy their second copy of New Moon because the new one is slightly bigger and has a free poster in which Ro-Patz is staring slightly creepily at you in the form of ethereal mist.
You know what? She bought it. It was £9.99 for a book she already had. Clearly some of the effect is simply that of an attractive man being in the film, but that doesn’t account for the size of the readership before the films went into production. In Twilight the sheer dizziness of the love between the two characters sucks people in. They have to overcome so many obstacles just to be together, and make no bones about it, that sounds pretty damn romantic. Except, when you think about it, they have so many obstacles to overcome because she’s managing to be stubborn and pliant at the same bloody time and he’s so besotted by her he will do things to her that he knows will cause her harm, because she wants him to. The commonly voiced problem with the series is that Bella is simply a terrible role model. She doesn’t want a job, she doesn’t have any plans for the future other than being with Edward. She isn’t a fully realised human, frankly, as she defines herself entirely by her choice of partner. The opposing choice of interpretation is that there is so much love involved that all other things become unimportant in comparison. Perhaps this represents the other main choice women have, as opposed to RomComs: get married and have a baby in your early twenties, don’t think about a career or higher education until the children are grown up.
There’s a lot of stuff to gloss over in Twilight, which is presumably why all the vampires bloody twinkle everywhere they go.
So where does that put women in 2010? The escapism the majority choose involves a love so pure and wonderful that is obscures all else. Let’s play amateur psychologist for a second: is it possible that women were always disposed towards forming such a close and monogamous bond or is this something that centuries of expectation and conditioning has caused? Has the latter resulted in a mindset so firmly installed that the accepted wisdom of times gone by is simply unshakeably present in modern women? That they should be interested in dresses and pretty clothes and, in the case of Bella, being so fertile that the sperm of a one hundred year old undead teenager gets you pregnant? Because contemporary modern culture exacerbates these ideas that people scoff at as being outdated.
My flatmate pointed out that powerful women (in the business world, or ‘The World’ as it is also known) are regarded as almost asexual, but I think that perhaps they are regarded as honorary men. Michelle Mone was once described using the phrase ‘She’s got balls.’
We’ve got a lot of unconditioning to do.