Tag: misogyny

MeToo#

I watched ‘The Irrational Man’ on Netflix last night, for something to do and not knowing anything about the film, but as the credits rolled I saw that Woody Allen wrote and directed it.

I had the impulse then not to watch but made myself do so with particular attention to the script. It intrigued me.

A typical plot: an older eccentric and seemingly troubled professor of philosophy draws in the attraction and desire of a young bright student who in time breaks up with her loving boyfriend over her beloved professor.

The professor resists his student’s overtures at first, while simultaneously conducting an affair with an older married colleague who is also completely smitten with the professor and would run away with him in a heart beat.

This man is so much the object of desire, despite his appalling behaviour. He drinks whiskey from a hip flask regularly and is rude and abrupt with people.

He has a rugged look and what appears to be a scar on his lip – congenital perhaps – and a small pot belly – as if he’s given up caring about his appearance, while the women are both so perfect in their bodies and beauty, both the older women and the younger one.

Eventually the professor succumbs to his desire for his young student, succumbs and in the process decides to murder a judge whom he and his student believe is corrupt after they overhear a woman and friends in conversation about him.

It seems this judge is matey with the woman’s ex and is making it impossible for her to keep her children.

The professor is fired up by this story of unfairness and finds himself alive again, energised, no longer in the grip of the ennui that had engulfed him earlier, given his plot to kill the judge, unbeknown to any one, including the student.

The symbolism is obvious, as if the professor loses his capacity to ‘judge’ in face of his desire to right what he considers a wrong, notwithstanding his own wrongdoing.

I won’t go into how it all unfolds. To me the plot is somewhat implausible and high drama but I listened for the usual lines. One short sentence in particular jumps out when the professor takes the young student out for dinner and she says to: “I love how you order for me”.

I wanted to puke.

It’s all part of the seduction I suppose, part of the drama but thinking more about these things and I feel like Carly Findlay, who among other things writes about how disabled people are misrepresented in film.

I’m struck yet again by the way women are represented in films and the artist, in this case the genius professor, is seen as a flawed hero who begs for our understanding.

I wonder whether some of Woody Allen’s work is his attempt to make sense of his own troubled self.

Nothing wrong with that I suppose – I do the same in my writing, but there’s something about how the women fare in all of this that bothers me.

I resent women simply being portrayed as the adoring, somewhat innocent and more often than not extremely beautiful underdog to the tortured and flawed genius hero/man, who is looking for salvation – or a mother, with whom he can have a sexual union that reassures him he’s not getting too old and past it.

Enough of this rant, which seems to me to be connected to the MeToo# campaign, if only at a tangent.

Long may it live.

Sex and death

There’s a story doing the rounds in cyberspace about a
father who wants to teach his adolescent daughter a lesson. In the family’s blog he is dressed
in very short shorts and stands provocatively at a bar for the benefit of what
I imagine to be someone’s iphone camera. 
Apparently, both
the father and his wife do not enjoy the spectacle of their daughter dressed in her short shorts.  They consider it unseemly, obscene,
inappropriate, disturbing, provocative – you name it.
 
Despite their protests, the daughter had insisted on
wearing her short shorts to a family dinner and so her father took a pair of his shorts from his room, cut off a few inches from the legs, and wore them out to dinner, too.
 
Did the daughter learn her lesson?  I’m not sure. I’ve been trying to
figure out what the lesson is.
Had the girl’s mother cut her own shorts down to size, the
comparison might have been more telling.  
I ask myself why these things matter?  Why do we care so much about young women wearing their short
shorts?  
 
Then there’s the Robin Thicke clip that’s also doing the rounds to the song Blurred Lines.  The lyrics are provocative, implying there are blurred lines to sexual consent. The men are in suits, the women naked.
 To counter this a group of Auckland University students created a spoof where the men, dressed only in white underpants, dance to the whims of the women who are fully clothed.  The lyrics are different, too.  An attack on misogyny.  
Not long after mini skirts came into vogue, women started
to burn their bras in protests against patriarchal constraints.  At the same time not wearing a bra
could be sexually provocative.
 
I cannot be sure what led me not to wear a bra on my
wedding day.  Was it simply because my wedding dress could not sit well with the imprint of
a bra beneath.  
My wedding dress was of a fabric that I believed could conceal the
fact that I did not wear a bra. At least in my mind it was sufficiently modest, though I later heard rumours that people like my mother were horrified.  
I have the horrors myself when I look back on another
time, a New Years Eve in the 1970s when I decided to go bra-less to a party at a friend’s
house in Ivanhoe.  
I had bought
myself a blouse, a long floppy sleeved and cropped blouse, the type you see
on a flamenco dancer.  It came
together tied in a knot across my midriff.  The white cotton was as thin as a summer nightie, and almost as transparent. 
I wore it with pride.  But now I find myself cringing at my exhibitionism if indeed
that is what it was.
 
That night people got drunk.  Someone pushed someone else into a swimming pool.  Fellows slipped off their clothes.  The
men, I might add, not the women.  
The women wore bathing suits, but several of our young male companions took
to skinny dipping. 
It was a night of arousal though nothing untoward happened
as far as I can remember, though to look on it from the outside it might have looked like an orgy.
I wonder then about what is or is not appropriate in this
life?  What determines our
behaviour?  What do we decide is
obscene and what not? 
Yesterday as family members stood around the grave side of an elderly aunt about to be
buried I checked out the depth of the hole.   
‘It’s
so deep,’ I said.
‘But look at that clay,’ one brother said.  ‘Oh to get my hands init.  To sculpt from it.’
‘It needs to be deep,’ someone else said, ‘so they can
fit another body on top.’
 
I looked into the hole in the ground and wondered what it must be like for my uncle to see his eventual resting place.   
My husband and I have yet to choose a burial plot.  I think about it.  Preparations for death.     
My sister has made a family pall of white silk, embroidered in gold thread.  It has sections to represent all the
members of our immediate family and in each section my sister has included both
zirconium crystals to represent the boys in each family on the extended line
and tiny pearl button to represent the girls.  
The pall symbolises the lives of our parents and their nine children, twenty three grandchildren and
twelve great grandchildren with another two on the way.  My sister hopes that every member of
our family will use this pall for their own funerals.  
I shrink a little inside whenever I see the pall.  It seems to me it will soak up so much
grief and I cannot help but think of the pall draped over my own coffin when I
die, or when my husband dies, my siblings, my mother and in time my children and then their
children.   
There’s something ominous about a pall, so unlike a
christening gown, which signals new life.  
‘When you’re dead you’re dead,’ my brother said.  ‘You won’t know.’  
‘But there’s the build up to death.’  One my cousins nodded her head in recognition of my qualms
but another sister insisted she does not think of these things. 
We chattered on about death until my oldest brother leaned
over, ‘I’m not sure now is the time to be analyzing such matters.’
People stood at the side of the grave and waited for the
funeral organisers to do their thing.  We fell silent, though a few chatterers further up the hill continued to talk.
 
When human silence prevailed I heard the birds twitter in the trees
above and fell back to thinking not so much of my aunt whose body was about to
be lowered into the ground but of the rest of us still alive who are left
trying to make sense of how we might go on living in a world filled with rules
and regulations about how we should behave.  
I still cringe at
the sight of me in my see through blouse.  
My older self wonders how could she
do it?  
My younger self says, who cares?  
The celebrant read out a poem.  Her words stay with me.  ‘Your bones are made of stars/ your blood is filled with oceans.’  
There’s more to us all than our appearance or desires.