Helen Mirren hoiks her spanx

Helen Mirren received the Sherry Lansing Leadership Award on Wednesday at the annual Hollywood Reporter Women in Entertainment breakfast, and used the opportunity to fiddle with her underpants (“hoik my spanx,” to the utter delight of the entire room) and speak the truth about women in film.  “With all respect to you many brilliant and successful women in this room, really not much has changed in the canon of Hollywood filmmaking that continues to worship at the altar of the 18- to 25-year-old male … and his penis,” she explained when talking about the struggles of older women to get parts.  As I noted in an email to my sister earlier today, I really must make a mental note to be more like Helen Mirren.

One cranky final word:  why is it that these events so frequently take place as the “women’s breakfast”?  I’ve attended many “women’s breakfasts” at professional conferences in my academic field and every time I wonder why it’s not a “women’s cocktail party.”  Truly:  there’s nothing particularly glamorous about dragging oneself to a 6:30am bowl of fruit with weak coffee in one of those bleak conference hotel ballrooms.  (Of course, we don’t have Helen Mirren types giving rousing speeches.  Maybe that’s my true complaint.)

“Mad Men”: Year of the Woman

Viewers of “Mad Men” are a tetchy lot, quick to express outrage at the show’s hairpin plot curves or that odd episode that didn’t seem to scale the heights one expects.  Not me.  This show sings to me — and I found this season especially riveting, with its emphasis on an emerging proto-feminist anger — especially by Peggy and Joan in the agency’s offices, and an even more deep-seated anger expressed by little Sally Draper suffering back home with her mother, Betty.  Which leads me to address two (related) kinds of criticism:  those who say the show glamorizes rather than observes the easy sexism of the 60s, and those who say it displays a fetishistic concern with period detail — detail that emphasizes style over cultural criticism.  SPOILER ALERT:  I’ll discuss details from Season 4 — and I’ll warn you again when I get to the season’s final episode.  

The show has only one true protagonist, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the brilliant ad man who exhibits fleeting attractions to smart women but ultimately opts for far less challenging game.  Yet the story of Don helping to elevate Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) from secretary to copywriter is mirrored in the show by the growing emphasis on Peggy’s interior life, such that she’s become the show’s full-fledged Number Two.  This season Peggy has taken on new degrees of responsibility, even oversight of other male copywriters.  Moss shows extraordinary acting gifts in tracing that transformation:  for the first time this season we see her begin to feel comfortable in her own skin (and clothes:  she finally seems to be able to afford outfits she actually likes), and we find her navigating her career with far more physical assertion than in earlier seasons.  Sure, she’s still stuck with inferior men, but no one’s surprised by that scenario.  When she arrives at Don’s office to argue about a pitch, she’ll put her hands on her hips in a way that indicates how much effort it takes to challenge him, and how important it is that she do so.  More than any other woman on the show, Peggy Olson explores what it means to be a woman in a man’s world, and it’s never easy.

It’s not easy because she’s surrounded by utter jackasses on her team of writers, who posture their male fraternity before her with alternate fun and aggression.  (This post is hereby dedicated to Anita Hill, who’s still being harassed 19 years later.)  One of them, Stan, insists that she’s repressed and ashamed of her body, so she strips down to her awful 1960s bra-and-slip set — and then down to nothing — to prove herself and get the upper hand in their work relationship.  But if Stan is an obvious boor, the cutie-pie freelancer Joey is an even more insidious problem.  Joey resents it when the fantastically curvacious executive secretary Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) displays her managerial power over these boys, so he sketches a cartoon of Joan giving a blow job to a male employee — and he posts it on the wall for Joan and Peggy to find.  Joan dresses them down unforgivingly, but Peggy is still incensed.

Despite a chorus of whiney male pleas that “it’s a joke!” Peggy fires Joey, who spits back at her, “Y’see, this is why I don’t like working with women.  You have no sense of humor.”  Nevertheless, firing him feels like justice to her and a triumph for both women, such that at the end of the day when she enters the elevator with Joan, she looks up hopefully and says, “I don’t know if you heard, but I fired Joey.”

Joan, patronizingly:  “I did.  Good for you.”

Peggy, shocked:  “Excuse me?”

Joan:  “Now everybody in the office will know that you solved my problem and that you must be really important, I guess.”

Peggy, shaking her head:  “What’s wrong with you?  I defended you!”

Joan:  “You defended yourself.”

Peggy:  “Fine.  That cartoon was disgusting.”

Joan:  “I’d already handled it.  And if I’d wanted to go further, one dinner with Mr. Kreutzer from Sugarberry Ham and Joey would have been off [the account], and out of my hair.”

Peggy:  “So it’s the same result.”

Joan:  “You want to be a big shot.  Well, no matter how powerful we get around here, they can still just draw a cartoon.  So all you’ve done is prove to them that I’m a meaningless secretary, and you’re a humorless bitch.” 

Moments like that make it all the harder for me to understand the criticism by some that the show glamorizes the sexism of the 60s.  The show doesn’t make sexism sexy (except to some, um, throwbacks); rather, as Stephanie Coontz claimed recently, it looks unflinchingly at the sexism of the era and shows how it affected real-life women without losing its subtlety or getting preachy.  In fact, I don’t see how any working woman today could watch that scene between Peggy and Joan without thinking, “I’ve been there.  Wait:  what year is it?”   Journalists have written about how the sexist world of “Mad Men” is still alive and well in some business worlds, and not just due to the gender pay gap.  It’s also worth noting that the show has a relatively high number of female writers, producers, and directors, especially after Season 1.  This record is not without highly notable glitches, as when creator Matthew Wiener fired the Emmy-Award winning, Peggy Olson-esque writer Kater Gordon a year ago, claiming patronizingly (and obscurely) that she had “reached her full potential.”  Still, the record is impressive:

• Season 1:  5 of its 13 episodes were written or co-written by women; 1 episode was directed by a woman.
• Season 2:  9 of 13 episodes written or co-written by women; 3 episodes directed by women.
• Season 3:  10 of 13 episodes written or co-written by women; 6 episodes directed by women.
• Season 4:  6 of 13 episodes written or co-written by women; 4 episodes directed by women.  

The show isn’t just a workplace drama, of course.  Even though Betty Draper’s role was diminished this season, the show revealed chillingly how angry and dissatisfied she is, and how much she has replaced Don with a paternalistic new husband who chastizes her and demands that she behave.  In fact, when Betty (January Jones) confesses to her friend Francine that they’d had a fight the night before, she says, “I misbehaved.”  Her deep-seated childishness and awful petulance have roused bitter hatred among fans, but I can only express my admiration for Jones’ pitch-perfect, icy performance.  Betty is trapped inside the hell of her own small-minded expectations; to get out of it would mean jettisoning everything she ever learned as a child, everything she witnessed at her mother’s knee, every lesson that taught her that sulking gets you what you want.  Of course she’s not a sympathetic character — in that respect she’s much like Sandi McCree’s perfect performance as De’Londa Brice in “The Wire.”  Things are not going as Betty had been led to expect, so heads must roll — as in this horrific scene only available at AMC.com.  You can just imagine what it’d be like to have such a woman as your mother.  Or, rather, we don’t have to imagine, because 10-year-old Sally Draper emerges as a complicated character in her own right this season via extended conflicts with her mother.  And what an actor Kiernan Shipka proves to be in that role.

These are hardly the only ugly things shown by “Mad Men.”  We see the execrable Pete Campbell rape an au pair in his apartment building, yet he experiences no consequences.  In a parallel moment, Joan’s husband rapes her to remind us that there was no such thing as “marital rape” in the 60s.  [SPOILER ALERT:  I’m coming close to discussing the season finale now!]  Viewers are made irate by these scenes, but they seem to feel that by showing them the series is endorsing such violence.  (Which reminds me of a story I heard recently:  a university professor is getting hate mail from parents because she teaches a class on the history of witchcraft — which, parents believe, amounts to advocating witchcraft.  Remind me never to teach a class on the history of slavery — and just imagine a world in which no one teaches students about the Holocaust for fear of appearing to endorse violent anti-Semitism.)  During the final episode of this season, Don abandons the first worthy girlfriend he’s had since the divorce — the lovely, savvy consultant, Dr. Faye Miller, who had seemed to be a true partner for him — and he gets himself engaged to his secretary instead.  It’s one of the creepiest sequences of scenes they’ve ever shown:  after several episodes of finally coming to grips with his lies and self-deceptions, Don makes one of those 180° turns back toward self-delusion, just like Roger Sterling (John Slattery).  Heartbreakingly, a critic at my beloved Bitch website decries this as an endorsement of Don’s choice.

So how can anyone mistake the show’s darkness for glamor, you ask?  I’ve decided after much scholarly consideration (hem hem!) that it’s not the show’s obsession with getting every single detail right, though I know some complain that that obsession is overly distracting.  Rather, it’s the way the show is filmed.  Every shot establishes a scene that seems so stilted, so self-consciously staged, that it attains an air of surreality and demands close attention as if it’s being shot via microscope.  This is as far from neo-realism as you can get:  it’s a kind of theatricality we don’t see elsewhere on TV.  A scene in the back of a cab erases all New York City street noise to focus up-close on the micropolitics of the end of a date; a scene of Don alone drinking in his perfect office evokes the quiet desperation of those men in grey flannel suits.  After four seasons, we’ve grown accustomed to the show’s visual style, but we shouldn’t overlook it:  it’s so important as to nearly constitute a character on the show.  The show’s filming should remind us, constantly, that we are being asked to look on these scenes with a particular set of eyes; it should remind us to see every scene as a subtle, and often horrible, analysis of a world of men and women that lacked the language of feminism.  These scenes emphasize deep divides between people, a profound loneliness, and the way certain kinds of architecture and design might make the world cold rather than warm and homey.  “It’s lonely in the modern world,” the blog Unhappy Hipsters reminds us — “Mad Men” is doing the same in narrative form.

In this positive review don’t accuse me of abandoning my blamer credentials, for I most certainly aspire to the wicked keyboard stylings of Twisty Faster — and it’s not that I don’t have my own criticisms of the show.  But it deserves quick and firm defense against the most facile interpretations.  Even after four seasons, I’ve never seen anything like “Mad Men” for its subtle writing and dead-on historical accuracy.  Now I just need to teach a class on it.

What’s wrong with being sexy? Oh, sexIST.

Ladies:  you must let men do whatever they like to you, otherwise like the entire public will want to hurt you.  Or at least that’s the message from the Inés Sainz case last week.  A 9-year veteran reporter and an on-camera sports reporter with Mexico’s TV Azteca, Sainz appeared on the sidelines of the NY Jets’ football practice with two of her camera crew.  She’s awesome-looking, so those scamps! insisted on throwing passes near Sainz so they could catch it in her vicinity and get a better look at her.  After the game, during the 30-minute period when both male and female reporters are allowed into the locker room, she was subjected to an onslaught of catcalls from the players so loud she had to cover her ears.  Another reporter present filed a grievance with the Association for Women in Sports Media (AWSM) that was addressed immediately by the NFL, which found after an investigation that “she was never bumped, touched, brushed against, or otherwise subjected to any physical contact by any player or coach.”  Because unless one of these guys touches you, you’re not allowed to feel threatened.

Here’s the upshot:  The NFL sent a memo to all 32 teams reminding them to treat women in a professional manner.  What a bitch!  Don’t you totally hate getting memos?

Except that’s not all:  Sainz has been called a bitch and a tease in every possible way.  News stories about the incident invariably feature unrelated photos of Sainz wearing low-cut dresses and bikinis.  Here’s a typical account of the incident:

“Sainz, who has previously appeared in several magazines wearing just a bikini, defended her appearance at the Jets practice session, insisting she dressed modestly, and posting a photo on Twitter to back up her claims.

‘Jeans and a white button-up blouse [are] in no way inappropriate,’ she tweeted.”

Golly, I wonder how most readers will interpret that:  If I can find a photo of her in a sexy bikini, she must be a slut who wants this kind of attention from men.  Actually, I don’t have to wonder how they’ll interpret it, because their interpretations flew fast and furious and invariably made the same point:

“You play with fire, you get burned.”

“Boys will be boys (especially jocks!!) and this chick is only doing this for attention and she is loving it!! Soak it up lady cuz when your looks run out, you will be nothing!!”

What’s a girl to do?  With the public breathing fire, Sainz not only backed off from her initial complaints, but attacked the AWSM for launching a grievance.  Of course she did.  Would she still have a job if she actually stood up for herself?  Hey everybody, Sainz is on board now — let’s go blame the feminists for this incident!  (No kidding: she now says the hasty action by the AWSM set back the women’s rights movement by “at least 50 years.”  Which is actually a pretty confusing claim, but I’m sure it guarantees that Sainz won’t be shunned by athletes.)

Which brings me back to my headline, from “This is Spïnal Täp,” in which the band’s manager tries to defend the cover on their new album, “Sniff the Glove,” from an irate woman.  “You put a greased naked woman on all fours with a dog collar around her neck, and a leash, and a man’s arm extended out to her, holding onto the leash, and pushing a black glove in her face to sniff it.  You don’t find that offensive?  You don’t find that sexist?”  He responds:  “This is 1982, Bobbi, c’mon!” while the dim-witted band members express confusion.  “What’s wrong with being sexy?”

This is 1982, man.  You must let men do whatever they like to you, otherwise we will hurt you. 

Sharapova as metaphor: female ambition, bitches, and demons

First let me begin with a scene at the US Open last weekend:  Maria Sharapova is battling Caroline Wozniacki, the top-ranked woman at this year’s tournament, and she should be winning.  Sharapova combines her nearly 6’3″ frame with a lupine fierceness and a seeming pleasure in tasting her opponents’ blood.  She hits her shots with such power that she screeches.  It baffles me that for so long she’s capitalized in advertisements on her blonde pinup girl good looks, as I find her terrifying:  on the court, Sharapova is all mean girl.  Especially when she bows her head and prepares to serve, then looks up from underneath her visor to glare at her opponent with an icy look of death.

So why isn’t she beating Wozniacki?  A major theme used to discuss this year’s wide-open women’s draw is nerves.  With that in mind it seems obvious that Sharapova’s beating herself.  She takes way too long to serve — then hits it wild.  For her second serve she pauses even longer, bouncing the ball endlessly, and then proceeds to whack it into the net (she committed 9 double-faults, the equivalent of more than two full games’ loss).  This prompts the commentators to remind us of her miserable performance at last year’s US Open, when she double-faulted 21 times in a match against Melanie Oudin.  When she gets them in to start a rally, she commits an unacceptable number of errors (36).  Her moments of true brilliance drive Wozniacki between sidelines and far back beyond the baseline; but in the end Sharapova loses 6-3, 6-4.  I am uncharacteristically crushed by the collapse of a player whose talents I’ve only grudgingly admired in the past, and I’m disturbed as I watch her struggle with her demons. 

I don’t know if the commentators are right that a remarkable number of female players suffer from these paralyzing nerves (unsurprisingly, male players’ problems have different gendered connotations:  men lose concentration, or perhaps they tighten up), but I’m interested in how women’s self-doubts, in combination with institutional sexism, can conflict with their ambitions.  In fact, I’m not just interested in these subjects, I’m affected by them.  It was prompted when Hattie responded to a post of mine in which I lamented the lack of recognition for a great film by a female director.  She complimented the post and said something like, “You could use some recognition too.”  How did I respond?  I deflected, as I always do when I receive compliments.  Why can’t I take a fucking compliment?

I see Sharapova as a metaphor for this issue because she’s at once intensely competitive, highly talented, and so burdened by self-doubt as to sabotage her own success.  In the past she’s always been willing to do what it takes to win — even be a bitch on the court to get under her opponents’ skin — but now there’s something else going on.  She can’t “just get over it.”  It’s only made worse by the fact that she knows she could — should — beat Wozniacki.  When she struggles, agonizingly, trying to get a serve in, I see some of my own struggles to write effectively and persuasively as an academic, to thrive in a world that benefits scholars who are both prolific and self-promoting.  Watching Sharapova fight herself makes me remember how I painstakingly eked out the final revisions on my book, and how terrible I am at self-promotion.   

So many women strivers have that extra opponent in the room with them.  Even if they’re perfectly comfortable with being ambitious, it’s the execution that causes such emotional gymnastics.  In my case, getting my book done was excruciating, and there’s still a chapter I can’t look at.  All along the way I worried about a thousand other things — being a good enough teacher so I wouldn’t leave class feeling ashamed; being a good colleague and mentor; getting back to see my parents often enough that I wouldn’t feel like a terrible daughter.  (And then there’s the other crap:  Does this bra make my back fat bulge out?  Why do I insist on wearing shoes of torture even when I have blisters everywhere?  Why can’t my partner ever make dinner without getting food detritus on everything within a 12-foot radius?)  In other words, I spent a lot of time worrying about how not to fail at juggling a number of balls, rather than compartmentalizing and playing like, say, Rafael Nadal, whose mind is only on one thing.  I watch him play and I see so clearly the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose.

But it’s more than just inner demons, isn’t it?  It’s also the external ones, like the students who pronounce their female professors to be bitches — which, as far as I can tell, means a woman who has power and uses it without apology.  It can affect one’s personal relationships:  one friend had her (male) partner accuse her of being “careerist” as a factor during their breakup.  Then there are the elite white conservative men who oversee promotions and selectively dole out raises.  In my department, the male professors gossip openly about young faculty — which of the younger men are not just brilliant but good guys, which of the younger women are in trouble for tenure because they’re not yet done with their books.  (Kudos to Servetus for terming them her Dementors, à la Harry Potter, sucking out all hope and life from us.)  But you see, not being a bitch almost inevitably eliminates the possibility of their calling you brilliant, because they don’t possess a stereotype that combines “nice” and “brilliant.”  When my book won a major book prize in my field, for example, one could sense the profound cognitive dissonance among a portion of my colleagues.

I’m not saying that all women face such inner and outer demons (we can all think of an exception) but I know far too many ambitious, talented women who do.  And most critics seem to recognize only one part of this phenomenon when they advance their critiques.  Take, for example, Clay Shirky’s “Rant About Women,” in which he tried to understand the broader phenomenon of why women so seldom engaged in professional self-promotion.  Taking a supportive but tough-love position, he declared that “not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks” to put themselves forward to their own advantage.  Not only that, he continued, women will avoid being “self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so.”  Mea culpa.  Shirky is most certainly right when he diagnoses women as generally shying away from such behavior — but what about the fact that many women fear being punished for it, having readily witnessed such punishments of other women?

Then there’s the hullabaloo over Jody Picoult and Jennifer Weiner’s criticism of the Jonathan Franzen love-fest.  When Time magazine put Franzen on its cover with the headline, “GREAT AMERICAN NOVELIST,” and the New York Times Book Review‘s editor-in-chief put his own glowing review of the book on the cover, declaring in the first sentence that the book is “a masterpiece of American fiction,” Picoult and Weiner expressed exasperation.  They’re not complaining that they should have received the same attention; nor are they saying Franzen doesn’t deserve acclaim.  To summarize, in Weiner’s words:

“The only mention my books have ever gotten from the Times have been the occasional single sentence and, if I’m lucky, a dependent clause in a Janet Maslin flyover piece:  ‘Look! Here’s a bunch of books that have nothing in common but spring release dates and lady authors!’  I don’t write literary fiction — I write books that are entertaining, but are also, I hope, well-constructed and thoughtful and funny and have things to say about men and women and families and children and life in America today.  Do I think I should be getting all of the attention that Jonathan ‘Genius’ Franzen gets?  Nope.  Would I like to be taken at least as seriously as a Jonathan Tropper or a Nick Hornby?  Absolutely.

…I think it’s irrefutable that when it comes to picking favorites – those lucky few writers who get the double reviews AND the fawning magazine profile AND the back-page essay space AND the op-ed, or the Q and A edited and condensed by Deborah Solomon — the Times tends to pick white guys. Usually white guys living in Brooklyn or Manhattan, white guys who either have MFAs or teach at MFA programs … white guys who, I suspect, remind the Times’ powers-that-be of themselves, minus twenty years and plus some hair.”

Picoult and Weiner’s complaints are welcome indeed, especially coming from two eminently successful authors who have no complaints when they get their royalty checks.  But this leads me to two institutions that seek to deal with women’s demons as well as their Dementors.  One is the Op-Ed Project, designed to offer advice and assistance for women who want to publish op-ed pieces.  Only about 10% of such pieces are written by women, making these opinion-setting pages of the newspapers shockingly male-dominated.  This institution recognizes that women writers require not just assistance with placement — convincing (unconsciously?) sexist editors to publish something — but with the demons that stop them from sending out the damn piece to begin with.  Likewise, there’s Mslexia magazine for women writers, which contained in its first issue a beautifully astute assessment of the bizarre position of women writers in the marketplace. 

These are some of the reasons why I get so frustrated when Slate wonders if Cathleen Schine’s The Three Weissmanns of Wesport is simply “chick lit,” when films about black women get categorized as some kind of sub-genre of “chick flicks,” why female politicians get criticized for their looks and their clothes (remember when Elena Kagan was criticized for sitting with her legs slightly too far apart?).  All of these things exaggerate the demons women are already wrestling with in their professions.  And then we get told that we’re not succeeding because we don’t want it enough — because of our own “choices.”

And finally:  not long after learning I’d won a book prize, I found myself in conversation with a man whose excellent (and prize-winning) book had been one of the contenders.  “You won that prize?!  That was the one I really wanted to win!” he said.  After all this time, I’m still twisted up about that conversation:  still wondering whether he was both complimenting me and expressing confusion about why his book hadn’t topped mine; still convinced that book prizes are just as arbitrary as job offers; still uncertain about how to talk about the prize with people I consider my peers.  (It’s worth noting I had no problem announcing this news to my university’s senior colleagues, Dementors, and administrators, however.)  In short, like Sharapova, I’m still bouncing that ball before a serve, wrestling with these demons, trying too hard not to lose.

“Justified” and enlightened sexism

Bereft for “Slings & Arrows,” I turned to the only thing on TV that looked watchable:  “Justified,” the new Elmore Leonard-based show on FX — it had been getting a lot of good press, and after watching Timothy Olyphant play Seth Bullock in “Deadwood” for three seasons, I was prepared to watch anything in which he dons a cowboy hat again. 

But let’s make no mistake about the gender politics of the show.  Set in eastern Kentucky most of the time, “Justified” takes advantage of what Hollywood sees as a back-assward locale to trot out tried-and-true stereotypes about rural Southern women and the men who protect them.  Olyphant’s character seems mighty courtly, to be sure, but that quality mostly allows him to be an enlightened sexist.  That is, they pay some lip service to the idea that gender roles aren’t locked in prehistoric times, but only long enough to allow the characters to go Neanderthal again.  It’s plain old sexism — dressed up in slightly more knowing clothes, as Susan Douglas shows us.

Olyphant plays Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshal who’s managed to shoot a few too many of the fugitives and renegade prisoners he was hired to oversee, so they transfer him back to Kentucky as punishment.  Although it’s awful close to his hometown, he’s too stoic to talk much about his misgivings about going back home again (instead, we see him suffer silently when he runs across his ex-wife, now happily remarried).  Luckily, Raylan’s views of cowboy justice — and his frequent refrain that his shootings were justified because those other guys drew first — fits right in with Kentucky lawmakers. 

Olyphant gets a lot less actorly exercise here than he did in “Deadwood,” but it’s hard to separate the two characters. Both make great use of the actor’s skill in speaking softly, as if he might be a modern-day Gary Cooper, but his dark, beady eyes show him to be a closet sociopath.  In short, he’s an absolute pleasure to watch.

If only the show had decided to give him any other three-dimensional character to work with.  Instead, he plays with the usual suspects:  comically fat white supremacists (because…being overweight and racist go together?), a sassy black woman co-worker, a bunch of hillbilly drug runners, and — for love interest — a hot, blonde, rifle totin’ missy, Ava, who’s had a crush on Raylan since she was twelve, and who just shot her abusive husband to death. 

In Episode 4, the show indulges in enlightened sexism to try to assuage haters like me — it’s a textbook scene.  Although Raylan was supposed to cede control of a job to Rachel (sassy black woman co-worker, played by Erica Tazel), he’s gone and taken charge.  He brings this up in the car as they leave.

Raylan:  “I’m sorry if I crossed a line with you at the office.  If I shouldered my way to the front of the line it wasn’t intentional.  I can only imagine how hard it’s been for you to get where you are in the marshal service.”

Rachel, smiling wryly:  “Because I’m black, or because I’m a woman?”  …

Raylan:  “Look, I understand I’m the low man on the totem pole—I understand that.  But Rolly and I have a long history and I should be walking point.”

Rachel:  “This isn’t just about this case. You did walk to the front of the line.  And I don’t know if it’s because you know the chief from Glenco but you walked in and you went right to the front.”

Raylan:  “Yeah. You ever consider I happen to be good at the job?”

Rachel:  “And you being a tall good-looking white man with a shitload of swagger?  That has nothing to do with it? You get away with just about anything.”

Raylan:  “What do I get away with?”

Rachel:  “Look in the mirror! How’d you think it’d go over if I came in to work one day wearing a cowboy hat?”  (Raylan smirks.  Rachel persists.)  “You think I’d get away with that?”

Raylan:  “Go on, try it on.”  (Rachel looks at him curiously, as if she might.  End of scene.)

See?  It’s really Rachel’s fault that she’s not more assertive.  Not only did she fail to take control in her own case, but in this very conversation she permits the subject of the white man’s aggression to drop.  After this scene, the episode spends zero more time fretting about the fact that Raylan has completely taken control.  He continues to use the same tall, good-looking white man with a shitload of swagger persona, and he wins.  Now that we’ve had a moment to take feminism into account, we can go back to appreciating a 1950s version of gender/race relations, where the white guy is always in charge.

And what happens at the end of the episode?  Rachel does try on the cowboy hat.  But it doesn’t fit.

The Double X Shuffle

If only it were an April Fool’s joke.  A week after Slate’s XX Factor featured the pro-Goldman Sachs article by KJ Dell’Antonia telling working mothers to give up on a humane work schedule, now it’s got Angie Kim blaming feminists for demise of the mommy track. (In the meantime, their editor Hanna Rosin asked first and foremost on their Double X Gabfest whether The Three Weissmanns of Westport, the new book by the eminently smart and literary author Cathleen Schine, is “chick lit.”)

Of course the real question is why I keep picking this scab — why can’t I leave Double X alone, if all I get is a schizophrenic antifeminism under the guise of “what women really think”?  

When it launched on May 12, 2009, Double X posted such self-consciously provocative stories as “Why I Am Bored With Feminism” by Terry Castle (Terry, why?) and “Yes, Virginia, Feminism is Really Dead” by Susanna Breslin. Subsequent stories would state that feminists don’t understand Muslim women, while Christina Hoff Summers claims that men are now the “second sex”—propounding the newly popular line that there is a new “gender gap” for boys. As Breslin chirps about feminism, “I mean, didn’t we kill it already?” 

I think the reason I can’t leave it alone is because the Double X writers’ antifeminism indicates a particular generational malaise about the subject.  A site created by smart, educated, cosmopolitan women, many of whom are in their late 20s or 30s, seems to feel that in order to appeal to female readers, it needs a straw feminist to bash around—schizophrenically claiming that feminists are malicious, irrelevant, boring, or dead.  Apparently, the readership they anticipate looks exactly like them — coastal, highly educated, highly privileged, mostly white women who’ve already established themselves professionally and benefited as much as possible from the feminist legacy.  Now if only they could recognize that feminism might hold strong relevance to someone besides them.

There are a lot of reasons to feel exasperated by such a perspective (not least for its logical inconsistency).  I think my frustration with this perspective comes from living and teaching in Texas, a place that Molly Ivins (of course) described best. In Texas, she wrote, “the cultures are black, Chicano, Southern, freak, suburban and shitkicker. (Shitkicker is dominant.) They are all rotten for women.”

Maybe because of the rampant machismo here, Texas has long featured strong, outspoken women leaders from Ivins to Barbara Jordan to Ann Richards — and I’ve begun to see a new resurgence of feminism by young Texas women and men, as witnessed by the upcoming Feminist Action Project, among other efforts.  If Double X wants to succeed, its editors should recognize not only that feminism is relevant outside their small hothouse, but that many young people today who may not call themselves “feminists” nevertheless share frustration at the easy sexism and cheap homophobia appearing with such regularity and with so little check from media, politics, workplaces, and families.    

Take back the F word not merely from the Texas bubbas who still like the term “feminazi,” but from the women at Double X who moved up the ladder only to kick it out from the younger generation trying to move up.

More on “The Runaways”

“The Runaways” leaves no cliché untouched. It’s as if the writers went to TVtropes.org and selected the biggest chestnuts.

• girls with daddy issues
• girls turn to music because they don’t fit in
• success quickly leads to substance abuse problems
• dreamy drug-fueled sequence in soft light with lesbian sex
• conflict within the band over big ego of lead singer

Right up to the end:  the band’s big blowout fight takes place — in the recording studio.  The one thing I can say is that at least the film moves as efficiently as possible from one trope to the next, and manages that efficiency by focusing solely on Jett and Currie at the expense of all other band members.  It’s such a disappointment.  So Floria Sigismondi, the film’s director, isn’t going to be the next female winner of a Best Director Oscar; and I’m starting to think that Kristen Stewart has only one trick in her acting bag (avoids eye contact, hunches shoulders, mumbles).

And it’s too bad, because the film could have answered a lot of questions about women in rock.  The film has a lot of obligatory scenes of screaming male and (especially) female fans — but what are they screaming for? 

There’s a great moment in Todd Haynes’ “Velvet Goldmine” in which Christian Bale, as the maybe-gay teenager fan of a David Bowie-type gender-bending rock star, takes his newly-bought record into his bedroom in the crap suburban house where he lives with his family. He gently takes the sleeve out of the cover, letting us see the beautifully erotic nature of fandom. It’s a great moment — evoking the possibility he might experience by listening to it, not just for its music but for the personal liberation and transformation it promises.  “The Runaways” tells us that Bowie was also a huge influence on Cherie Currie (which is so interesting on its own).

The same possibilities were there for “The Runaways” other than to plow through all our received wisdom about how rock bands get together and break up.  The band’s officious manager, who teaches them how to growl and purr for their audiences, sees their appeal solely in sexual terms.  Rock is a man’s world, he insists; they’ve got to meet it on those terms.  “This isn’t about women’s lib, this is about women’s libido,” he says.  But during concert scenes, you start to feel intuitively there’s more to it, before you’re yanked away to another cliché (Cherie is worried about her sick dad!).

Another wasted opportunity to think about women onscreen.  But let’s also pause to remember that Joan Jett, now 51, is still rocking, promoting new talent, and looking hot and mean.

Love song to the makeover movie

“I Know Where I’m Going” — I’ve seen it probably five times now and can attest that it’s a really good film that gets better on multiple viewings. It could be seen as the film that inspired “Local Hero” with its elegiac images of the Scottish coast, except here the redemption comes in the form of love with the right man. If you’ve never seen it, prepare yourself for a quiet movie with the slightly improbable matchup of the brittle Wendy Hiller and the goofy-looking Roger Livesey (who, at 40-ish, simply could not pass for the early 30s he’s supposed to be). But their acting is perfect: Livesey is a good man; Hiller is redeemed. 

Oh, the makeover narrative — a stock aspect of the “woman’s” film. Most fully realized in Pride and Prejudice (in which both Elizabeth and Darcy must change) and satisfyingly re-created in the BBC version of “North and South” (curiously, not in the Gaskell novel, however), this storyline appeals again and again.  It’s worth noting that love isn’t always the main plot device; highly satisfying makeover narratives appear in films such as Judy Davis in “My Brilliant Career” all the way through the winsome Carey Mulligan in “An Education.” Clearly, the transformation doesn’t need a wedding altar scene at the end.

We can argue about the implications of narratives that transform the heroine through love, but let’s quickly point out the differences between female and male makeovers. First, I believe that female makeover tales most often require interesting male counterparts, three-dimensional creatures interesting on their own — whereas male makeover films seem to invariably feature what Nathan Rabin of The Onion calls the “manic pixie dream girl archetype.” Whether it’s Jennifer Aniston in “Along Came Polly,” Natalie Portman in “Garden State,” or Sandra Bullock in “Forces of Nature,” these women’s unpredictability and full embrace of life allows them to “teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” She is pure plot device, not a character worthy of an inner life or transformation. (Sidebar: Holly Welker has a piece this month that ties this archetype to Helen Andelin’s 1963 classic, Fascinating Womanhood, a book that might be termed the anti-Feminine Mystique [also published 1963].) The manic pixie dream girl merely permits the elaboration of self by the man.

It’s not that Roger Livesey is a terrifically complex figure in “I Know Where I’m Going,” but he’s the embodiment of the magic of Scotland’s Western Isles — poor but noble (like his namesake, the Colonel’s golden eagle), modest and well-mannered, familiar with everyone on the island, and a fine contrast to the rich industrialist Hiller intends to marry. Livesey grows on her, and on us; his aging, goofy looks become handsome as his admirable qualities become more pronounced. We imagine their marriage as a happy partnership of equals. Likewise, Peter Sarsgaard might have stolen “An Education” had it not been for the perfect performance by Mulligan — he subtly transforms from dashing to oh-so-slightly fleshy and deluded during the course of the film. His initial glamour is slowly exposed as a lack of depth as it becomes clear that the con man is conning himself, while Mulligan gains complexity by learning the hard way.

Okay, maybe it’s not a fair comparison. Drew Barrymore’s male counterparts in her string of makeover movies (“Home Fries,” “Never Been Kissed”) weren’t three-dimensional, either. But take a look at how hard Livesey works in this scene to mitigate the snarky comments by the locals about Hiller’s fiancé. He’s a good man. Makeover movie: I sing to your female protagonists and worthy male counterparts.