Liking sexist fiction

My knowledge of popular culture is notoriously bad, but hanging around with fanficcers, as I have been doing recently, does mean that I get to read/hear a lot of discussions about films and TV that I will probably never have the time or inclination to see, such as the new Avengers Assemble movie. It’s also increasingly making me feel that discussing whether or not particular works are sexist (as I have myself been known to do) is surprisingly unhelpful. I was aware in the responses I got to my discussion that I’d made friends of mine feel uncomfortable with their positive response to the film, which I didn’t intend to do.

I think there are two big problems here. One is that it’s surprisingly difficult, beyond the most basic facts (e.g. number of female characters and if a work passes the Bechdel Test) to agree on what exactly constitutes sexism. One reason is that everybody brings their own experiences to a piece of fiction and – particularly for films and TV, where we are rarely privy to the characters’ own thoughts – we tend to project onto and identify with particular characters. A recent review of Avengers Assemble talks about the writer identifying with superheroes, even as she admits their problematic nature. Similarly, I’ve seen complaints about a lack of strong female characters in the Harry Potter books, although I immediately identified with Hermione (as a fellow swot/good girl). JK Rowling clearly also intends Mrs Weasley to be a heroine. One of the highlights of the final battle in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for some readers is Mrs Weasley killing Bellatrix Lestrange; a woman who’s been mocked for her love of family finally conquers. But other readers have seen this as merely the sexist cliché of a woman whose highest role is motherhood defeating a “bad woman” who fails to adhere to properly feminine roles.

As these examples show, it’s very difficult to write any characters – male, female or other – who don’t fall into some stereotypes/tropes, and most of them have been used in sexist ways at some point. So it’s easy to see the same figure as either being part of a long positive tradition of brave mothers or a long negative tradition of “only mothers are good women”. A related and difficult point is that there is no longer any agreement within our own society as to what constitute desirable goals/a happy ending for a woman. Should a woman want to end up married to a man she loves and/or having children? Should she want to end up rich and/or successful, but on her own? To some women among the audience independence from any emotional ties is a victory; to others it’s cutting ourselves off the key things that make us human. (This is one of the reasons why having several prominent female characters in a work is useful: it potentially allows the creator to show a range of options for them. I still remember the ending of Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes in which the heroines variously become a film star, a ballet dancer and an engineer).

People of good will, therefore, can’t necessarily always agree on whether a particular character or situation is sexist or not. But that is compounded by a second major problem. The amount of sexism and the quality of a work are not necessarily inversely correlated. In other words, there are sexist works of fiction that are more enjoyable and/or more inventive in other ways than works that show greater gender equality. For example, the recent ITV detective drama Scott and Bailey was notable for having both the two leads and their immediate boss as female. However, in terms of interesting and plausible characters and memorable writing, it struck me as less successful than a male-dominated show like Sherlock.

Yet sexism often tends to be taken as an absolute marker of value. To say a book or film is sexist is sometimes taken as a claim that one should therefore not enjoy it, and that one is a morally inferior person for doing so. I’ve seen too many discussions between feminists degenerate into defensiveness and rancour because someone likes a piece of work that another person dismisses as sexist, resulting in attempts to “prove” that a work is or is not sexist.

It would surely be far more constructive if it was legitimate to take sexism (or other isms) as one criterion among many for judging the quality of a work, and people were allowed to balance such criteria. We ought to be able to say explicitly “I liked this work for other reasons even though it was sexist” (with the understanding that it’d be a still better work of art if it was less sexist). We also ought to be able to say: “this work pushes a particular button of mine about sexism that means I really, really don’t want to read it/watch it” without it being taken as meaning “you are an insensitive pig if you don’t agree with me and like the work”.

I’m not trying to argue that sexism is purely a subjective matter, but I think we need to acknowledge the subjective side of it, and that our own responses to works of fiction in particular are inevitably personal. In that way, we might make feminist discussions of such works more constructive and less prone to making people feel guilty or irritated.

Beating blog block: What do mutants do all day?

The recent hiatus on this blog is due to having a complete writer’s block re proper blogging of medieval papers/seminars. To try and get round this, the next few posts will be short and unimportant and trying to get me back into the groove of writing this. Don’t feel obliged to read them if you’ve got more useful things to do.

I went to see X-Men First Class on the recommendations of my friends (some more guarded than others, and some probably influenced mainly by it containing Michael Fassbender). There are bits of a decent film in there, but not much of one, and the reactionary treatment of female characters is fairly depressing. (I don’t know how much of this is due to the constraints of the source material and how much was deliberately chosen).

There are three female mutants, as against nine male ones, and their superpowers are shown as inferior to those of the male mutants. Raven/Mystique can change her appearance (very feminine, somehow) and Angel is basically an angry fairy. The most powerful of the women is, of course, a baddie: Emma Frost, a telepath who can turn her body into diamond. She is conveniently captured in time to be absent from the final great confrontation between good and bad mutants, in which she might otherwise even up the fight a bit.

The section of the film I want to focus on is where the hero, Charles Xavier, who has collected together a gang to fight the baddies, takes them back to his mansion to train them. Most of the training sequence itself is quite enjoyable, but it was only afterwards that I realised that while we see Charles training all the male mutants, we don’t see Raven (the one female left on the goodies’ team) training. Now you can argue there’s a reason for this – she’s been raised with Charles as his sister, so she’s already trained, but she doesn’t get to help doing the training either. What that means, in practice, is that all we see her do during this segment of the film is sitting around being angsty and/or romantic. And this got me thinking about a) the role of depictions of women working in films and b) whether having female characters as part of a ‘gang’ does in itself help produce more interesting female characters.

On the first point, one of the main ways in which women now define themselves is by their work (if you include study and being the primary carer of babies and small children as work, which I would). Any piece of art which doesn’t make work look an important part of a woman’s life now seems odd to me. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it either has to be a good job, or that she has to be good at it: I wouldn’t have minded seeing a sequence in which Raven repeatedly tried and failed to take on a particular appearance. Or films/TV shows where the heroine is stuck in a crappy job and aware of it. But if they’re not shown doing any kind of work, then they’re basically ornamental.

This is particularly the case because, judging by this film at least, good mutants don’t do much all day, anyhow, but sit around, unless there’s a mission on. (Bad mutants, in contrast, are constantly plotting and so much busier). And that’s a more general problem with the ‘gang’ style of TV/film, where the story’s focus is on a gang who have adventures. From the viewer’s viewpoint, the gang’s adventures must be more exciting than anything else they do, or why isn’t that on display instead? So Raven can’t be sneaking off having more exciting adventures, because she needs to be on hand to be part of the gang.

In contrast, we don’t know what Angel or Emma Frost are doing for most of the time, and that I would suggest, makes it easier to imagine that they are doing daring and independent things. I’ve become very interested in the last year in fandom and fanfic and the way that women, in particular, can use it to transform works of art to their own purposes. I’m starting to wonder whether, given the unimaginative way in which supposedly central female characters often get written, whether in many shows it isn’t the more marginal female figures who actually offer the more interesting imaginative potential.

Note: if anyone has read this AND wants to comment, please bear in mind that I’ve spend the last decade mainly not watching either films or TV, so make the pop culture parallels sufficiently plain for an ignoramus.

The body’s grace 1: risky sex and the decline of romance

You can’t study the history of sexual morality without realising that Christian churches are doing a really bad job today at explaining and justifying their stance on sexual behaviour. It’s perfectly possible to argue that sexual activity is best restricted to permanent, public and exclusive relationships (which I would see as the defining characteristics of marriage), but too many Christian moral arguments still end up relying on a view of marriage that is unrealistically procreation-oriented. (Leaving aside issues of birth control, it’s entirely plausible now to have marriages with 20 or even 30 years of post-menopausal sexual activity). And to label all non-marital sex as irremediably wicked also doesn’t accord with people’s own experiences. A Christian morality that isn’t grounded in a realistic account of humanity isn’t going to convince anyone.

So I’m always interested to read Christian discussions of sexual morality that do get beyond simplistic views of ‘married sex good, other sex bad’, and I came across an interesting take recently: Rowan Williams’ The body’s grace which is a speech he gave to the Lesbian and Gay Christian Association in 1989.

Like a lot of Williams’ writing, it’s not always easy to follow, especially, if like me, you don’t know all the literary sources he quotes. But at the centre of the speech is the idea of sexual activity as involving self-giving and mutuality:

my arousal and desire must become the cause of someone else’s desire

in sexual relation I am no longer in charge of what I am. Any genuine experience of desire leaves me in something like this position: I cannot of myself satisfy my wants without distorting or trivialising them. But here we have a particularly intense case of the helplessness of the ego alone. For my body to be the cause of joy, the end of homecoming, for me, it must be there for someone else, be perceived, accepted, nurtured; and that means being given over to the creation of joy in that other, because only as directed to the enjoyment, the happiness, of the other does it become unreservedly lovable.

Williams sees this mutuality is inextricably linked to vulnerability:

for my desire to persist and have some hope of fulfilment, it must be exposed to the risks of being seen by its object.

He contrasts this with what he describes as sexual “perversion”, which he describes as:

sexual activity without risk, without the dangerous acknowledgement that my joy depends on someone else’s as theirs does on mine. Distorted sexuality is the effort to bring my happiness back under my control and to refuse to let my body be recreated by another person’s perception.

I want to write more at some point about what Williams thinks this idea of sex means in practical moral terms. But for now I want to go slightly sideways and connect up with some of my other current interests in story-telling and masculinity. Which is why you’re now going to get one of the first blog posts ever which discusses both Rowan Williams and Hugh Grant.

It doesn’t need much pointing out that most film romantic comedies nowadays are rather feeble affairs, and, in particular, the heroes of them are now so often nerds, or at best Hugh Grant. The physically inadequate and/or socially inadequate hero gets the heroine, who remains conventionally gorgeous. Why this asymmetry? You can’t just put it down to sexism, because if you go back a few generations there were some much more attractive romantic heroes in film (Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, Humphrey Bogart etc). I think it’s because alpha males can no longer have risky sex.

Essentially, a romance is only romantic if there’s a possibility that the hero won’t get the heroine. In previous generations, there were obvious social barriers that could be used to stop even an alpha male having it too easy. He and she come from warring families, or different social classes, or one of them is already married, etc. (It’s noticeable that several of Leonardo diCaprio’s big romantic hits have been in historical parts). In the modern world, it’s hard to find an external reason why the heroine shouldn’t sleep with the hero almost immediately (unless it’s an action film and you can have a lot of explosions intervene).

In addition, an alpha male in a modern film, almost by definition, is also not allowed to be sexually vulnerable. He is supposed to be irresistible to women, he cannot experience the rejection of not being desired by the heroine. And so the romance, the mutuality, is promptly gone, because the risk has gone. The only men who are allowed to be shown as potentially facing romantic rejection, and thus driving an actual plot, are the beta males, the non-perfect. The sexual risk that is at the heart of a romantic/sexual relationship cannot be displayed on screen any more, at least not in the person of the alpha male: there is no more Cary Grant.

History and the History Boys

I have finally now seen Alan Bennett’s ‘The History Boys’, at least the film version of it. It was, as expected, entertaining, touching and thought-provoking, but also, in several ways, more than a little odd. In particular, for a work ostensibly about history, it had a bizarrely non-specific, if not actually nonsensical sense of period. The action, is set, at least according to the film, in 1983, and yet much of the plot makes little sense for that period. Firstly, there were few grammar schools left by that period (and the implication is that this is genuinely a grammar, rather than a fee-paying school still using the ‘grammar school’ label). Secondly, much of the plot is driven by the contrast of Oxbridge and provincial universities and the implication that this matters desperately. Speaking as somebody who got into Oxford in 1983, it didn’t by then. I had contemporaries who didn’t apply to Oxford even though they had the ability, because it didn’t offer the sort of course they wanted. The humiliation of the headmaster in admitting he studied geography at Hull seems archaic. Equally, the actual events of the early 1980s are nowhere to be seen. Despite mass unemployment in cities such as Sheffield, the boys can apparently easily get work ‘on the bins’ or as milkmen, whenever they want. And in the aftermath of the Falklands War, how likely it is that a boy could think that becoming a soldier would never involve fighting? Margaret Thatcher, meanwhile, is a barely mentioned irrelevance, not the central figure to young imaginations that she was.

Most of the plot actually makes far more sense if it is transposed back to about 1963, an era of grammar schools and acute snobbery about Oxbridge versus other universities. Similarly, Hector’s taste for World War One songs fits better for a master born in 1903 and 60 in 1963, than one born in 1923 and 60 in 1983. For a man who normally has such a precise sense of time and place as Bennett, either he has been unusually sloppy or the film was badly adapted in this way.

There are, I suppose, possibilities as to why they story Bennett wants to tell may have been ‘displaced’ by twenty years in this way. One is to get round the problem that all homosexual acts were still illegal in 1967, not just ones with 18 year olds. Another may have been to prevent the piece seeming too archaic, although any piece based around the seventh term Oxbridge entrance exam inevitably seems outdated now. I also wonder whether Irwin is somehow supposed to represent ‘Thatcherite’ tendencies in education. The problem, of course, is that Irwin is no Thatcherite. For all his philistine tendencies, he is also not a charlatan, but a genuine enthusiast about an old-fashioned subject: the later Middle Ages. No thrusting young right-wing historian of the 1980s would really be interested at looking at monastic accounts: Victorian or 20th century history would have been the way to go, probably focusing on economic history or high politics.

This leads me to my second problem with the story: is Bennett really trying to suggest that Hector is a better teacher than Irwin? If so, he is unconvincing, though I wonder if he deliberately hasn’t balanced the arguments rather better than that. The best pedagogy in the whole work, I would argue, is the debate about the Holocaust, and it’s really Irwin who drives that forward. Hector does set up the French brothel scenario, which is impressive, but otherwise, it’s only in his discussion of Thomas Hardy’s poem, that you really get a sense of him as a potentially inspirational teacher, someone who can convey something of the meaning of the great works he loves. Irwin, in contrast, with his demand for bold ideas, may be rather too glib, but he does at least get his students thinking. Ignoring entirely the issue of groping, I’d find Irwin more intellectually stimulating as a teacher than Hector, and probably more inspiring. But again, Hector v Irwin seems a curiously old-fashioned kind of contrast, a world away from a school history syllabus with nothing much beyond Hitler and Stalin and an emphasis on transferable skills. If Bennett does a period piece, that’s in itself fine, and can even be revealing: I just wish he’d been a bit more realistic about which period.

Acting transsexuals

The film ‘Transamerica’ comes out shortly in the UK and the publicity has just started, focusing on Felicity Huffman being Oscar-nominated for her role as a male-to-female transsexual. In the one newspaper feature I’ve seen so far, it says:

Initially Huffman felt the fact she was a woman robbed Transamerica of its inherent drama, but she was persuaded otherwise by Duncan Tucker [the director and writer], who “wanted to honour where transsexual women were going, not where they’d been.”

I think Huffman’s first instincts were right – it seems to me this is a fairly crass bit of casting and unenlightened gender politics. At one level, we’re back to the old problem of whether it’s appropriate for an actor to play someone with a radically different bodily appearance: a white actor playing black, a physically able actor playing someone who’s disabled, a thin actor in a fat suit. (This isn’t about whether you can act something you’ve never experienced, e.g. a straight actor playing gay, an actor pretending to be a Nazi. It’s the specifically physical aspect here). Roughly, on these matters, the trend seems to be that it’s felt that it’s acceptable only in two cases. One is if there are very few actors who are physically near the required type (there aren’t many actors in wheelchairs, very fat and ugly actresses etc), though this is always debated. Secondly, where the whole piece is non-naturalistic, e.g. integrated casting in a Shakespearean play, where the audience is having to imagine already the stage is a Bohemian kingdom, so imaging that a black man is king there is not much of a further stretch. (Or indeed, pantomime, which has its own traditions and conventions).

Here, neither reason seems to hold valid: there are good male actors who could play a transsexual and (I presume) a naturalistic effect is being striven for. So why have a woman in the part? In fact, the casting seems to me to go one bit further in its denial of gender than if it was simply having a white person play someone black. Part of the difficulty of being a transsexual is precisely that your physical body does not match your belief of who you are, in a fundamental way. In order to live as one of the sex you feel you really are, you have to manipulate your body to resemble something it’s not. And such ‘passing’ is very difficult, and often unsuccessful. (See http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,1733547,00.html for Norah Vincent’s discussion on how hard it is for a female to be taken as male, arguably the easier way round). I’ve just seen an episode of ‘New Tricks’ (a humorous British cop show) that had a plot about a male to female transsexual. The character was made quite sympathetic, with reactions to her that included recognising the fundamental similarity of her to some of the ‘straight’ characters. Physically, she wasn’t caricatured and yet when you saw her (played by a man) you would be unlikely to think that she was biologically a woman. Similarly, the one transsexual I knew slightly was immediately recognisable as such. The realities of size, bodily contours, voice are hard to change or disguise. A woman playing such a role hides the difficulties of this and thus distorts an audience’s reactions both to the character and to the character’s relationships with others in the film. It reminds me, of the stupid decision they made in the remake of the film ‘Showboat’. One of the key characters is Julie, a mixed-race woman ‘passing’ as white, who is exposed and due to racist laws is forced to separate from her white lover. In the second film version, Julie was played by Ava Gardner! A white actor playing someone ‘passing’ as white seems about at the same level to me as a woman playing someone ‘passing’ as a woman.