Wednesday, June 1, 2005 |
12:04 - Powerpuff Progress
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You know, some days it seems to me that feminism and the push for gender equality have been brilliantly successful, even too successful—and then some days it seems like it never made an impression on anyone at all.
I think this is because society has taken all the wrong lessons to heart—like the Japanese post-Perry producing pornography with pointless little letter-of-the-law black bars covering almost nothing in lick-off-able soy ink, we've decided to adopt some aspects of gender equality to the point where the effects saturate us, and at the same time we've chosen to ignore some other intractable aspects of traditional gender roles that survive to this day.
The whole precept of feminism was to establish that women can aspire to more in life than being seen as creatures to woo and marry and raise a family with so they can keep the house clean while you (men) work, right?
So, then: why is it that when a movie like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants appears in TV trailers, critical reviews say things like "You'll fall in love with the girls of the Sisterhood"? As though the default reaction to seeing girls in any context is to "fall in love" with them. Reverse the situation, in the usual tired old mental exercise. Never mind how absurd a movie trailer would sound with a female announcer reading off the blurbs—who would advertise a movie like Lords of Dogtown by saying "You'll fall in love with the Boy Kings"?
At a concert by a US Marine Corps band at my high school years ago, a female Marine vocalist was introduced by the emcee as "The Lovely" so-and-so. As though beauty is the only characteristic by which to describe a singer before you hear her voice, or as though you'd introduce a male vocalist in anything like the same way. And many years before, when my brother and I were kids, I remember how we used to go through decks of cards giving nicknames to the face cards: the Queen of Hearts we named the "Marrier", because, see, she's female, and her icon is a heart—obviously all she wants to do is marry people. Hearts and love and kissing are still the icons of the feminine, even in trendy grrl-power vehicles like The Powerpuff Girls.
These staples of our discourse endure. And yet during the same commercial break as that Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants trailer, there was an ad for the new Honeymooners movie with Cedric the Entertainer. Yep, it has the "To the moon, Alice!" line in it—but of course now it's supposed to be a romantic line, and it gets thrown back at the buffoonish husband by a hip, urbane, sarcastic wife making that "schoolmarm" finger gesture—and the rest of the movie is full of the women's exasperated eye-rolling at the husbands' stumbling boobery.
And throughout the rest of the evening's commercial breaks, just you try to find an ad featuring both a man and a woman that has them in any other tableau than "Bumbling, obnoxious, thoughtless, juvenile man who gets shown up by the smart, patient, omniscient, long-suffering, yet stunningly attractive woman". Dumb husbands who upstage their wives talking about digital cable get bowls of popcorn dumped on them by the wives. Husbands too stupid to be able to help their kids with their homework are banned from using the Internet by their wives. Husbands who want to take time out for a game or two of golf during the vacation they're planning are discovered and cowed into submission by righteous wives demanding uninterrupted relationship time. Stick them into the middle of an Everybody Loves Raymond episode and you've got a perfect little capsule of Americana that's going to look as freakishly unbalanced fifty years from now as the original Honeymooners does to us today.
And to really creep yourself out, try reversing the man's and woman's roles in any such ad. Just see if you can even picture it being filmed today.
What are we left with in the post-PC, post-feminist world? A pop culture in which we've swapped the male and the female in the "competent" and "incompetent" roles they've occupied for so long, ensuring that anyone who portrays a man as being more intelligent or more correct in an argument than a woman in any TV ad or movie will be hounded from the public light—and yet, at the same time, in which it's still okay to prefix women's names with "The Lovely" and where the immediate reaction you're supposed to have to a female on any public stage is to fall in love with her. Portrayals of women have been purged and transformed beyond recognition, whereas expectations of women have essentially remained static.
Seems to me that society has missed the point of feminism—if indeed it were ever articulated properly in the first place. Unless the goal all along was so that women could take on the mantle of "Better than men at everything, and prettier, too"... which I suppose isn't too much of a stretch in the minds of some engines of the movement.
Then again, maybe if the reverse were true—if androgyny were the norm in how actors and actresses were presented to pop culture consumers, and if men had retained their pre-Homer-Simpson general competency in matters of life and household, perhaps our world would be as gray and Soviet as any dystopia we could have imagined.
So, hey, maybe things are just fine this way. It could be a lot worse, I guess.
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