Category: not angry just disappointed

New French president Francois Hollande has been making quite a splash and in his first few days in office hasn’t yet revealed himself to be a crushing disappointment. He has taken steps towards gender equality by making sure that half of his cabinet are women: something which should not be a surprise, given that half the population are women, yet under patriarchy this is not the norm. I’ll give props to Hollande for this: he’s meeting transitional demands admirably. Next up, abolishing hierarchical power structures, I hope.

Meanwhile in the UK, right wing bog roll The Daily Mail has reported on this story rather poorly. I will not link to the article, but here’s a taster from the beginning of an article entitled “HOLLANDE’S HONEYS: NEW FRENCH PRESIDENT UNVEILS HIS CABINET OF BEAUTIES”:

Carla Bruni has only been out of the Elysee presidential Palace for a matter of days.

But already a new line-up of glamorous political beauties is threatening to make the French former first lady a distant memory.

Newly sworn in French President, Francois Hollande, last night unveiled his cabinet, led by a bevy of young, stylish Mademoiselles.

Unsurprisingly, the rest of the article is largely photographs of women’s legs with commentary on how their looks. I would really, really recommend not reading it, as this summary I have given is completely accurate and every time you look at the Mail a baby penguin dies.

The title “Hollande’s Honeys” echoes the “Blair Babes” of the nineties, which makes it ghastly enough in and of itself. It also fails at alliteration: are we meant to voice the silent “h” in “Hollande”, or are we meant to drop the “h” from “honeys”? Most importantly, though, it is sexist as hell.

Words like “babe” and “honey” manage to simultaneously sexualise and infantilise the target. They attribute characteristics of saccharine femininity, yet are also almost always used to cast the target as a sex object. While regional variations of the words apply, the intention behind the the Mail’s label is clear: look at these sexy little things doing politics! Isn’t that cute? Let’s all have a furtive wank over what they’re doing.

The fact of the matter is that Hollande’s “honeys” are highly unlikely to have been appointed as a bit of popsy, and are actually capable grown women who have successfully managed to smash through the glass ceiling and into positions of political power. Rags like the Mail, dedicated to preserving patriarchy at all costs simply cannot handle this and feel obliged to throw these women back into their place. It reminds us that women can’t be successful: we are sweet little things who walk the tightrope between whore and Madonna, teetering in our heels as we wait to be told how pretty we are.

The appointment of a cabinet which is somewhat representative of the population (at least, in terms of gender; race, disability, etc seem to be as neglected as usual) is big news: a wedge has been driven into a crack and it might just be possible to wriggle it open and smash down the wall of patriarchy. The Mail can’t let this happen, so it pretends to celebrate the success of these women by turning them back into the delicacies that they believe them to be.

Trigger warning: this post discusses domestic violence/abuse

Interactive billboards seem to be the New Favourite Thing of advertisers. Hot on the heels of the billboard that judges your gender (badly) and the billboard that shows you boobs if you hold your phone up to it, National Centre for Domestic Violence has decided to take a slice of the pie.

The ad takes place on billboards at Euston Station. On one billboard, there is a moving image of a man shouting aggressively at a woman. Next to them is a caption, reading “USE YOUR PHONE TO DRAG HIM AWAY” and a URL. If you enter the URL into your smartphone, you are faced with a little yellow arrow next to the man, and using your finger you can drag him away, and he’ll still be bellowing, helplessly dragged across the rest of Euston’s billboards followed by some text about injunctions. You can see a video here.

Now, I can see the good intentions to this campaign. Really, I can. But unfortunately, this campaign is problematic as fuck. The biggest problem with it is the same problem inherent in all of these “shock” campaigns: triggers. The experience depicted in this billboard is one which is frighteningly common, and at a busy train station, it is likely that at least some women will have experienced this. While some might feel empowered by the interactive nature of the billboard and drag the fucker off, it is likely that many will respond negatively. Ad campaigns of this nature are flat-out irresponsible for this reason alone.

On top of this, there’s a whole heap of other problematic content. Firstly, the campaign portrays a very “typical” example of violence with a male aggressor, shouting overtly and aggressively. Sadly, abuse often doesn’t look like this. The perpetrator can be of any gender, as can the survivor, and, most crucially, it often doesn’t involve overt shouting. There is a host of tactics used by abusers, and many of them are stealthy and subtle, causing the survivor to doubt hirself. A lack of acknowledgement that this happens maintains the culture of silence, keeping survivors in that perpetual state of doubt. This campaign could work just as well with images from the film Gaslight, and would then branch out beyond the “traditional” view of abuse.

It is notable in this campaign that while the aggressor is animated in his aggression, the woman remains still, only blinking slightly to demonstrate that she isn’t just a photograph. This continues throughout the display. She does not move when a passerby interacts with the billboard, she doesn’t react as the aggressor is conveyor-belted away. She’s just there. To me, this seems like a distasteful lack of agency bestowed upon the survivor: things just happen to her. While abuse often takes away a sense of agency, I would have expected some notion of activity to be demonstrated in the “response”. It would have been gratifying to see, at the very least, her posture shift from “frightened” to “strong”.

This ties in, though, with the solutions NCDV are providing in their campaign: recommending securing an injunction. Now, this can be very important in abuse cases, as it is legally-enforced space between survivor and aggressor, but it is hardly a panacea. An injunction can be broken: it is not a magical forcefield, and a determined aggressor will not be deterred. Given that even in this ad campaign the aggressor is still shouting as he is “dragged away”, this suggests that the injunction is not the route to a happy ending. Furthermore, given the conservative nature of the legal system, injunctions may not be passed, particularly for less “recognisable” forms of abuse. Finally, if only dragging an aggressor away were so simple!

Ultimately, NCDV tried, and they tried hard, but trying isn’t enough. Campaigns of this nature need to be better. Being eye-catching alone is nowhere near enough.

Another day, another oppressive ad campaign. This time, soap-merchants Lush decided to “raise awareness” about animal testing by putting on an “art performance” wherein a woman was tortured by a man. Graphically. In a shop window.

Now, this isn’t the first time women have been instrumentalised and objectified in an ad campaign, and certainly won’t be the last. What is interesting about this particular stunt, though, is that Lush clearly put some thought into it (unlike PETA, who tend towards the “let’s stick in a naked lady, and we’ll get more attention”). Unfortunately, their thought process was this:

It was a performance of violence (not violence against women) where – unsurprisingly – the oppressor was male and the abused was vulnerable and scared. We felt it was important, strong, well and thoroughly considered that the test subject was a woman.

This line of argument is summarised quite nicely by @NadiaKamil: “it wasn’t misogynist but -unsurprisingly- we had to use misogyny”. Both sentences appear to be diametrically opposed to one another, to boot. The first seemingly argues that the “performance” definitely was not gendered, which some defenders of the campaign have also been using. The second states that it definitely was.

And it was gendered; it doesn’t matter if the performer was playing the role of an animal. Violence against women is something that happens, and happens a lot. Each day, women are injured, raped and murdered. I don’t believe this is in any way the same as animal testing, but even if one does, this is not how one would raise awareness.

It is somewhat comparable to the awful adverts targeted at “raising awareness” of rape, which feature graphic depictions of violence which will somehow magically end rape. Such campaigns are triggering for the sadly vast number of people who have had similar experiences. The same goes for a performance involving the torture of a woman by a man in a shop window.

Lush’s stated aim of this action is to raise awareness of animal testing, because they’re very against that. Defenders of Lush have argued they do very good work to make sure that no animals were harmed in the making of their products. By raising awareness, then, Lush are implicitly inviting consumers to purchase more of their own products.

In other words, Lush are instrumentalising violence against women to generate profit for themselves. This may be entirely well-intentioned, but it probably isn’t, as Lush are a commercial company whose ultimate motivation is to turn a profit. They are capitalising on depicting a violent, every day occurrence.

There is also an issue of class here. Lush is a fairly expensive shop, charging ludicrous sums for a small phial of bubble bath. Maybe they are more ethical than other cosmetics companies, but few people can afford to purchase their products. The effect here may therefore be that many people, upon feeling shocked and triggered by the instrumentalisation of violence of women, feel a sense of guilt that they cannot reconcile as they cannot fork out a small fortune for something which is sold as more ethical.

Whatever the intentions here, there are some unpleasant effects from the campaign that must be examined and cannot be excused. Lush have used violence against women to promote their own products. This is never acceptable and ultimately serves to perpetuate the context in which this occurs.

In our semi-regular feature, let’s have a look at what happened next with some of the dickheads with whom regular readers of this blog are familiar.

Unilad: Their site is relaunched, and content is going up. No rape jokes as yet, but some instances of what is approximately the most horribly bad writing imaginable are coming out. Check this out from an “anonymous” contributor (whose username happens to be Lorna. Very anonymous). Is it earnest? Is it satirical? We will never know due to the clusterfuck of sentence structuring.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn: The legal case surrounding his alleged involvement in a prostitution ring continues. Strauss-Kahn’s odious lawyers reckon “He’s being reproached for a kind of crime of lust.” Right. There’s rape culture right there in a nutshell. Crimes of lust. Of course, Strauss-Kahn being so powerful, he’ll likely get off anyway.

Tom Martin: A while back, I blogged about a bloke trying to sue LSE for discrimination and how that was completely silly and he probably lacked the academic smarts to complete his Gender Studies course. He later showed up in the comments, being silly and lacking academic smarts. Martin’s case has now been thrown out of court, with him citing as examples of discrimination the fact that the chairs were a bit hard. He also reckons all women, especially feminists, are whores. This happened last week, and I am still laughing about it.

Religious womb-obsessed fucknuggets: 40 Days For Life, famous for harassing women outside abortion providers, are still there. They are inviting an anti-choice bishop to pray with them this Friday. As the clinic is closed, activists will be holding a counter-demonstration. It’s this Friday in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury at 7pm. If you like uterine privacy, come along.

Manic pixie dream girls. You can’t go to the cinema or switch on to the telly without encountering a perfect little bundle of saccharine cutesiness in a floral frock, trotting out radio-friendly indie hits on a ukulele these days. From classic films like Bringing Up Baby, to recent indie hits like Garden State to our televisions in New Girl, the manic pixie dream girl is everywhere.   Hollywood papers over the shallow vapour of its female leads with contrived quirkiness and we get to pretend that there’s no sexism because the character makes an impact on the plot and characters.

Of course, this isn’t right. The manic pixie dream girl (MPDG) trope is sexist as hell. The creeping, insipid nature of the sexism inherent in this character archetype is harder to put one’s finger on; the veneer makes it difficult to tease out exactly what is wrong.

It is best to start with the original definition of the MPDG from film reviewer Nathan Rabin:

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.

Here, it becomes abundantly clear that the MPDG must exist only in relation to the male main character. The entire point of her presence is to bring a little bit of chirpy sunshine to the life of someone else. Without a man to mend, the MPDG simply cannot be: she will instead fall into other character archetypes. The MPDG is not a character with agency: she is a perky, pretty little plot device-cum-love interest. She serves the same function as the Magical Negro, with added sex.

The lack of agency of the MPDG is the most egregious problem with this character archetype, but it is far from the only issue. In its comprehensive collection of pop culture reference points, TV Tropes demonstrates two other characteristics common to the MPDG.

Firstly, the MPDG exhibits quirkiness in a very childlike manner. She is likely to be playful and carefree, climbing trees and bursting into inappropriate song. There is an innocence about the MPDG which enchants the male lead (and, presumably, is supposed to endear the audience to her, too). This childishness is infantilising, a fetishisation of youth. It turns an adult woman into a little girl, and it is intensely, tooth-grindingly patronising. While there is a wide spectrum of behaviour, and no woman should be expected to act in a certain way, it is telling that the media machine loves nothing more than to suggest to we women that we should never grow up.

Secondly, the MPDG is almost always meets the hegemonic Western “beauty standards”. We do not get to see a wide spread of ways in which a woman can be beautiful with a MPDG present. Can you think of a MPDG that is not Hollywood thin? A MPDG who is not white? A MPDG who is butch? My own mind is drawing a blank here. What we get is the standard leading lady that is perpetually shoved down our throats, but perhaps she will have blue hair to make this less immediately noticeable.

These two attributes are not unproblematic on their own, but taken with the existence only in relation to a man, the MPDG becomes a very unpleasant portrayal of women. The MPDG is the avatar of benevolent sexism: a portrayal of fragile femininity from which good stems. The MPDG completes her man, she is pure, she is a thing to be worshipped and is better than the man. Almost every item on the measure for benevolent sexism applies to the MPDG very strongly. This is why it is so much harder to decry the MPDG as sexist: many are not yet ready to admit the existence of benevolent sexism.

Even when subverted, the problems of the MPDG apply. There are instances, such as in 500 Days of Summer or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where the MPDG exists as salvation only in the mind of the male main character. Here, she still completely lacks independence: if anything, it becomes more of another tedious story about men than the trope played straight. In other instances, the MPDG will turn out to be some shade of crazy: perhaps she’s a psycho bunny boiler, or pretending to be sweet so she can get something from the male main character. In these cases, the trope slips from benevolent sexism towards its more recognisable, hostile cousin.

There is nothing that can be done to save the manic pixie dream girl archetype. It is sexist from top to bottom. The monotonous drone of narrative sterotypes reflects and magnifies attitudes towards–and resultant treatment of–women. The MPDG does not exist in a vacuum, but, rather in a world where benevolent sexism is still seen to be all right, giving men false hope that a tiny tornado of quirkiness will fix their lives, while suggesting to women that perhaps if they were prettier and completely subsumed themselves to the will of a man, they might get laid more. The MPDG is a fantasy, and not a very nice one for anyone involved.

This is not to say it is impossible to make a good film involving a MPDG. Many cinematic works considered brilliant contain Magical Negroes: consider much of Morgan Freeman’s body of work. Likewise, MPDGs can be done well: arguably, Marilyn Monroe’s character in Some Like it Hot is a MPDG. This does not mean we cannot critique these tropes: indeed we must, so that eventually, the fantasy of the manic pixie dream girl will die.

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In this post, I might have criticised a TV show or a film that you like. Before you leave a comment telling me I’m wrong on the internet, please read this and this so you don’t look like a proper tit in the comments.