I wanna be where the boys are!
I wanna fight how the boys fight!
I wanna love how the boys love!
I wanna be where the boys are!– The Runaways
The Runaways, a low-budget biopic dedicated to the band Joan Jett formed in the mid-Seventies with producer Kim Fowley (and music video director Floria Sigismondi‘s debut feature length) landed in cinemas months ago in the US, but has taken bloody ages to rock across the pond. I know, because I’ve been sitting here in my London bedsit excitedly replaying its trailer ’til it got here. It’s here right now, but blink and you’ll miss it, though if you scour your Odeon Online you might catch it yet. So even if this piece is decidedly late as film reviews go, I’ve waited so long to see the film I can’t help but post it anyway, especially given what we named this site. But most of all, this film beautifully nails the sheer level of confusion that surrounds how female pop musicians should present themselves, especially mired as we are in this business of “sexualisation of young girls”, this debate that continues to grip feminist pundits, the Daily Mail, Mike Stock (yep, him), and everyone else in between, so let me tell you about it, even if it took me a while to see.
For every "I wanna fight how the boys fight", there's an "I am the bitch with the hot guitar". For every Queen of Noise, there's a "Come and get it, boys". But were they really only aiming at the boys? Whatever, they beat Britney for me, hands down.
[AND SO IT WAS THAT THE ROCK ‘N’ ROLL SPOILER WARNING WAS DULY PLACED HERE.]
It’s the summer of 1975, and a seventeen-year-old Joan Jett (a powerfully husky Kristen Stewart shooting down the Twilight-sickened nay-sayers with one shrug of her biker jacket) and fifteen-year-old Cherie Currie (a quietly turbulent Dakota Fanning) are introduced by Fowley after Jett seeks his help in putting together an all-girl rock ‘n’ roll band. It’s the age of glam rock and Bowie, of men in make-up and Suzi Quatro, but the apparent gender-bending freedom of the rock scene is only skin-deep, and the five Runaways have their work cut out. Even getting an electric guitar lesson has been a mission for Jett, who gets a funny look in an alternative rockabilly thrift store during the first ten minutes of the film for avoiding the ladies’ section, pointing at a greased-up biker-boy customer, emptying a mountain of saved-up pocket money onto the counter and asserting, “I want what he’s wearin’.”
Dakota Fanning (left) and Kristen Stewart (right) rock it up as Cherie Currie and Joan Jett. Jett was an executive producer, and the script is based on Currie's memoir, Neon Angel.
Fowley, played with sleazy aplomb by Michael Shannon, is crystal clear in the rehearsal room: this, he trumpets, from underneath a layer of green eyeshadow to rival Elvira’s, “is not about women’s lib! This is about women’s libido!” He is teaching them, he explains, to think with their cocks, going so far as to point at Currie’s crotch (in between constantly calling the whole lot of them “you bitches”), and announce, “This is what the boys want! Filthy pussy.” The girls – and most of them are barely legal, which Fowley quite openly celebrates as a “jail-fuckin’-bait, jack-fuckin’-pot” – grit their teeth and push on through most of this in a dreamy, sunlit, grainy-retro-technicolor montage. Currie is shy at first, but threatened with the sack, plays ball. Jett is determined to rock, and will do anything to get there – or rather, will allow Fowley to make Cherie do anything to get there. And Fowley has his cake and eats it when they get signed, later declaring that actually, it’s always been about “empowerment, man – Aphrodite, Cleopatra, Eurydice! No more second-class status, sitting at concerts with asshole boyfriends!” Eurydice is an interesting choice. If memory serves, she got killed by a snake she didn’t see coming. What happens to our heroines is similarly insidious, as Currie and the girls struggle to meet Fowley’s ever sexier marketing demands whilst also maintaining any kind of musical credibility, or any sense that they own their own sexuality, or the presentation of it.
As the film gathers speed, it focuses not on the fever pitch of rock ‘n’ roll excess – something it’s been called bland for – but on the mounting tension between the girls as they struggle to manage the problem of sexing it up for the lads versus rock credibility rating. Very much a double biopic, its narrow focus on Jett and Currie does exclude the other Runaways-alumni, but it’s a film that’s full of visual dualities that splits the double standards the girls encounter right open in a physical sense – Joan is the “credible one”, perhaps, but she needs Currie on board. They need each other. Currie is pilloried by her bandmates for taking on semi-clothed photoshoots – the same bandmates who urge her to “just sing the line, okay?” in a stressful rehearsal for Cherry Bomb. Stewart’s portrayal of Jett, even as she pours scorn on her friend, doesn’t seem unaware, even quietly, that it is precisely the pervy spotlight on Currie that lets her be the tomboyish backbone of the band, the one who doesn’t have to do it. Quod me nutrit me destruit, indeed.
Sure, it walks the line between titillation and criticism. How else do you tell this story, though?
Occasionally the script clunks – the scenes with Currie’s family never feel quite right – but the film is at its most raw and heartfelt when Fanning and Stewart are on screen together. There’s been a lot of squawking about nineteen-year-old Stewart and fifteen-year-old Fanning’s “steamy” scenes in this film, but they don’t feel like they’re intended to be purely titillating. The inner life of the relationship between Currie and Jett in this film exists as a kind of hideaway separate space to the public image of the band, and not in a pruriently-presented, hidden-forbidden secret-sappho way either. Yes, they get it on, no, it’s not explicitly filmed (Fanning is not, after all, of age for that kind of treatment), but most importantly it’s completely uncommented on by the rest of the cast, and neither Jett nor Currie approach proceedings with one jot of identity-angst about it. Jett, particularly, is seen kissing men and women without comment before she even crosses paths with Currie, and the sexual element of her relationship with Currie isn’t tacked on for cheap thrills. In one particularly poignant scene, Currie wakes up in hospital after some archetypal rockstar-bingeing. Jett sharpens gently into focus, sitting stalwartly in a chair by the bed, presumably having sat there all night, and eventually climbs into bed in a foetal position next to her. They barely touch, but the tenderness between them is tangible.
This open, comfortable attitude to sexual experimentation seems to extend to the rest of the band, too. Another rather comical but sweet short scene sees Jett stood outside a shower cubicle, attempting to advise drummer Sandy West (Stella Maeve) on how to masturbate. “It’s not working!” protests West, who has started off with Jett’s initial advice of “Think Leif Garrett, Scott Biao”. Jett’s immediate reply, without even blinking, is “How about Farrah Fawcett? Do you like her?” This appears from the reaction in the shower to be a winner, and Jett punches the air in triumph.
But hold the phone. Isn’t this, nonetheless, still a bit have-your-cake? Here’s a film in which Dakota Fanning cavorts around in her underwear to make a point about the sexualisation of teenage girls. In this regard, not everyone’s felt quite so rapturous about it.
But I think they pull it off (no pun intended), mainly by virtue of the attention paid to the inner life of the girls alongside said cavorting. The distance between this and Fowley’s vision yawns open as Currie finally walks out. As Jett erupts in frustrated rage, our viewpoint pans back, and Fowley is laughing from behind the studio booth window. “Rock ‘n’ roll, baby,” he crows as Jett trashes the place, finally realising the extent to which Currie has been pushed and the fact that without this, her dreams cannot be realised. Even as she protests, Fowley draws a frame around her and finds a way to sell it. The band look like caged animals, yes – but they spit, they rage, and they ultimately find peace, Jett going solo and battling 23 rejections for I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll before scoring a hit.
What happens to the girls once their fantasy sex-kitten image is well and truly up and running? Well, the scene in which a coked-up Currie cops off with one of the roadies (as Jett hammers on the door yelling, “open up, Cherie, I gotta piss!”) is particularly uncomfortable, and is the first sex scene I’ve ever seen in a movie about rock ‘n’ roll that managed to make the rock star feel like the groupie. The roadie almost steers Currie around like a doll as he coaxes a snog, and more, out of her, and it’s creepy as hell – especially framed as it is by the film’s opening scene in which we realise Currie has only just started her periods. Granted, by the time the sex kicks off it’s probably two years later, but it’s harder to persuade yourself that a year or two has passed in a film with such a dreamy management of time – we’re barely aware of it passing, and everything feels fiercely, rawly in the moment. Little bursts of guitar feedback separate scenes, along with blurry shots of winding corridors which recur increasingly as the fever pitch sets in and the band implodes. Perhaps Currie’s infamous white basque in itself is titillating in places, but it’s not a film that takes that aim as a starting point.
The best bit? We can say, as the Evening Standard did, that this film reminds us that the “sexualisation of teenage girls and pop music” debate is older than everybody cares to remember, that right now, quite arguably, nothing’s much better or worse than it was then, that this film is as cautionary as it is inspiring whether it has its cake or not. We can say all of that. Perhaps it’s true.
On the other hand, hands up who’s still inspired, at least by Jett’s eventual triumph? I’m off to pick up my guitar.
Fathers 4 Feminism
This is a bit of wishful thinking really, but I was inspired by a conversation with my own father after I’d told him I was writing for this website.
“Feminism? Does that mean you hate men now?” My father is a master of both dry wit and directness, you can’t foil him with flannel, so what I say next can’t be fluffy or theory-wanking.
“No, it’s more about equality.” At this point I have to pause, because realistically my dad does not need to know the entire history of the feminist movement over tea and scones at the South Bank. He is taking an interest in my interests. Which means I should at least have the grace to be interesting.
“We’ve theoretically got legal equality, but there’s still a lot of inequality in society. A lack of respect for women as people…” He’s still got his eyes open and therefore so far, so good. “Like when men call out to women on the streets if they are wearing dresses. Makes me feel uncomfortable to wear a dress, and that’s not on.”
I can tell that I’ve got him right there. He starts to tell me about a time he was out with my brother and two men were “effing and blinding” (my father rarely swears) at a young woman across the street.
“I might read up on this, on the internet, when I get home to your mum.”
We return to our cups of tea, but internally, ideas are brewing.
Why aren’t more fathers involved in the feminist movement? On the surface, it seems an obvious partnership. Surely no father would want his daughter to grow up in a world where she had less respect, less equality and less room to succeed than her brothers? Yet the link between “feminism” and “making life better for your daughter” seems to be feeble to the point of invisibility. Instead, there is a jump to the fear of the unfamiliar, the media-generated whispers of what evil feminists are like – man-haters to quote my dad, who is neither a sexist nor easily swayed by the opinions of the papers. He was just recounting what he understood the term to mean.
I want to take a little time to unpick the relationship between feminism and fatherhood, with the hope of encouraging more people to think about feminism in a more positive light, to give them the tools to talk to their parents about feminism, and to (finally) get our dads on board.
There is a lot of prejudice surrounding feminism and the family. This can range from the (in)famous Pat Robinson quote that “feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians” to the somewhat outre thinking (not to mention strange definitions) of a divorce campaigner in America. A quick google for references to “feminism and the family” or “fathers and feminism” reveals heartbreaking commonalities mostly centered around the idea that the feminist movement is somehow trying to extract men from the entire family process.
You can see how a wrong-headed reading of women’s rights might have picked up that impression. The longstanding assumption that an increase in freedom for women must naturally lead to a decrease in freedom for men (as if there were only a certain amount of freedom in the world). Changes in legislation over the past eighty years or so, from the vote, through to divorce laws, inheritance, mortgage rights (yesterday I was talking to a lady who told me when she was my age women couldn’t apply for a mortgage by herself) and so on have all enabled women to move from being reliant on men to being more self-reliant. However, this move is all too often read as a move away from men rather than being a move toward engaging with men on equal, independent terms.
The stock figures often quoted as examples of how feminism is destroying the family unit are the rising divorce rate. Personally I take issue with the idea that relationship status is indicative of a strong family unit – I would much rather that parents were happy with each other and unwed than unhappily married. However, that aside it’s important to note that it is almost impossible to gauge what, if any, influence feminism has had on these numbers. Frankly, if feminists could somehow cause such vast social change, then it’s unclear why we still have such crappy rape prevention or why little girls are forever dressed in pink. More is at issue here – starting with the lessening of religious influence in our daily lives (if marriage is not a sacrament, then divorce is no longer a sin), the decline in different social status for married versus unmarried people (there is less incentive to remain within an unhappy marriage) and the lowering stigma of the single parent (although I would argue that single mums are still pilloried by society whilst single dads put on pedestals, but that’s another article). This is social change, perhaps influenced in part by feminism, but just as equally influenced by all the changes that have occured in the last century. The world has changed.
It is easy to sneer at those who think that feminism is damaging to the family.
But before we sneer, we must understand what we are looking at. The truth is that what feminism wants is deeply challenging to a traditionalist and parts of what feminism is hoping to achieve can also be somewhat difficult to swallow by almost anyone raised in the modern UK: it involves a complete step change in our understanding of the family unit which has massive knock-on effects in most areas of society – work, education, retirement, marriage and relationships. If we wanted a truly equal setting for the family, in which neither gender is assumed to have a “natural” role in parenting – and I think we do – then all of these things must change both in theory and practice. And that is mindblowing. Here’s how: try and think about it. Picture, in your mind, if you can (and I find it quite hard), a world in which mums and dads are given exactly the same weight and priority by society. Have exactly the same expectations placed upon them. Are communicated to by the media and advertising in the same fashion.
In other words, that parents are treated as parents, rather than isolated and grouped according to gender. And we aren’t surprised by it. Dads change nappies. Mums go out to work. Dads do the dishes. Mums do the school run. Parents Evening is exactly that. There’s no assumption or hierarchy in who might be better at doing what beyond what each individual is able and willing to do. People with ovaries teach children to throw and kick balls in the playground. People with Y chromosomes make chocolate crispy cakes (and mostly mess) in the kitchen. Maternity and paternity leave cease to exist and we have parental leave. No-one bats an eyelid.
It’s a strange place, isn’t it? But wonderful.
And it’s a place I think we can get to, if we try to break down the barriers that exist between perceptions of what feminism could really mean to fatherhood.
In the UK there are a number of dad centered internet institutions (nowhere near as many as for mothers – mumsnet, for example, is a huge and generally positive and useful resource, but despite the claims to be “by parents for parents” is still in name and deed more focused on women than men). These include Fathers 4 Justice and other similarly named organisations that fight for changes in family law, including the website Dads UK which again focuses on access, divorce and children. As far as I’m aware, neither of these organisations have strong links to UK feminists, and in some cases a scan of their pages reveals the same sort of prejudices that are repeated over and over and over again – that the feminist movement took their children away. It’s a little bit like 21st century witchhunting. Scapegoating is easier than finding the real solution – especially when the real solution involves complicated individuals and their lives rather than a nice easy public target.
So how do we change this for the better?
An Alphabet of Femininism #1: A is for Amazon
New week, new poster… and a change of tone. Meet Hodge, folks, and the first letter in her fully illustrated Alphabet series, where we do a bit of dictionary-delving, art history and culture-vulturing from A to Z.
Welcome to Hodge’s ALPHABET OF FEMINISM, inaugural entry, number one: pull up a chair, gather your hot beverages round.
The more specific aims of this series of posts will, it is hoped, become clearer through practice, as it works from A-Z.
But put simply, the idea is to address (with reasonable neutrality), the make-up of the English mother-tongue, to consider how the language has evolved over the centuries, and in the process to prompt some questions about how gender issues are woven into the fabric of the language we use everyday.
Incidentally, when I refer to ‘the dictionary’, I am referring to the Oxford English Dictionary.
A
AMAZON
“This. I Have No Use For This. Remove It.”
The Tea Towel
For those readers who never owned the Greek alphabet on a tea-towel, the ‘maz’ sound mid-Amazon is the same ‘maz’ you find in ‘mastectomy’ and its (mostly medical) cognates. This is because the Amazons in question – a race of female warriors alleged to have lived in ancient Scythia, and the first definition for the first word of the Alphabet of Femininism (hoorah!) – were said to have been rather expert in just this procedure. Or, as the dictionary puts it, rather dryly – and, indeed, euphemistically – ‘they destroyed their right breast to avoid interfering with the use of the bow’.
In so self-mastectomising, this army of women obviously lay themselves open to the extended (and more explicitly gender-specific) meaning that amazon took on around the mid-eighteenth century. Here, an amazon is ‘a very strong, tall, or masculine woman’, unsurprising since they are, etymologically, removers of those most vexed of female glands in favour of ease in brandishing weaponry (more generally considered A Man’s Job).
This all said, the original Amazons do not appear to have been either an (exclusively) lesbian tribe, or even an anti-maternal one: Strabo, the Greek geographer, would have it that they periodically had a baby-breeding field trip to a neighbouring male tribe (the Gargareans). The resultant boy-children were exposed or sent back to their fathers; the girls kept and trained up In The Amazon Way, a rare gender upending for the olden days.
Alas! My Girdle!
But perhaps the most famous of these dedicated Amazons is Hippolyte-slash-Hippolyta, the owner of a magical ‘girdle’, which Hercules stole in one of his less catchy labours (bit pathetic altogether, isn’t it? It’s got a bit of a spotty thirteen year old boy feel to it, in fact. ‘Hey Hercules! See that woman? I dare you to steal her girdle! Yeeah, dude, you rock!’ – That said, I’ve never been completely sure what a ‘girdle’ means in Ancient Scythia: I can’t really imagine an army of one-breasted women in the habit of frequent ‘bow handling’ being particularly concerned about how cinched their waists are. My childhood book of Greek Myths And Legends depicts it as a sort of extra snazzy belt, so that’s what I’m going with).
Amazon in trousers, Attic vase, circa 470 BC
Ahem. Post-Hercules, Hippolyta appears in every battered school copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as the future wife of Theseus, who ‘wooed her with his sword’ (oh Theseus, you charmer), and ex-flame of Oberon, King of The Fairies. Shakespeare, whose use of language is so influential that you can expect to bump into him frequently in these dark and twisted lexical corridors, isn’t otherwise a great user of the word amazon, although he does make it into the dictionary’s quotations for the word’s extended, more generic sense, as ‘a female warrior’, which is the first in a pair that ends in the aforementioned ‘very strong, tall, or masculine woman’, unsurprisingly considered ‘forbidding to men’ by the author of Sermons To Young Women in the eighteenth century.
Dot Com
One contemporary application this more general sense has had, curiously enough, is in the modelling world, where the ‘freakish’ aesthetic of catwalk models (and presumably also their exoticism) makes the designation ‘amazon’ / ‘amazonian’ in its sense as a ‘very strong, tall, or masculine woman’ surprisingly true to its lexical origin (annoyingly, if fittingly, for the inaugural post of an alphabet, the prominence of a particular shopping site ‘everything from A-Z’, and the tendencies of said supermodels to write their autobiographies, obscures any such instances of the word on Google, so you’ll have to take my nonspecific memory for it).
Moving on, I particularly like the further sense amazon acquired sometime around the sixteenth or seventeenth century – now, alas, obsolete – as ‘the queen in chess’, who I always thought of as quiet sort of feminist icon, maintaining, as Francis Beale asserts, ‘alwayes…her owne colour’, and zipping around the board with an alacrity denied to her technically more important consort.
To the men an Amazon never fails to be forbidding.
JAMES FORDYCE, Sermons To Young Women (published 1767)
The Queen, or Amazon, is placed in the fourth house from the corner of the field by the side of her King, and alwayes in her owne colour.
FRANCIS BEALE, Biochimo’s Royall Game of Chesse-play (translated 1656)
Yes, But How Many People Does She Shag?
As will become tediously common during these gynocentric word-journeys, it seems virtually impossible to think of a ‘strong, masculine woman’ without at some point branching into her sexuality; thus, the final meaning of amazon (unsurprisingly, the Victorians’ contribution) as in opposition to a ‘vestal’ (another group of women bound together tribal-style, although for an altogether different purpose). As in, ‘Oh man, that girl’s no vestal; she’s an amazon.‘
However, amazon is actually a bit of a relief because its overwhelming lexical impression is one of a guarded kind of respect: Hippolyta would, I think, be satisfied.
NEXT WEEK: B is for Bitch
So, let’s kick off with a film review. We dispatched Markgraf, our resident celluloid-addict, off to the cinema with orders to bring back the lowdown on SALT. [*** SPOILER WARNING goes here!***]
Or an aeroplane made of BICEPS
Once upon a time, some people hatched upon an idea for a film. “Let’s make a film about an undercover agent, who’s so far under cover, NO-ONE knows who he’s working for any more! Not even him!”
“Awesome!” said some other dudes. “And there can be car chases and gun-fights and explosions!”
“…And spiders!” said Brian, from the back.
“And there’ll be a torture scene,” the other dudes continued, “And bombs, and we can blow up a church.” They continued in this vein, getting more and more excited about the idea, until one of them (not Brian, who was playing with an orbweb he’d found) said, “But who are we going to get to play this guy?”
And the conversation went quiet. “Er,” said one of them, “Jason… Statham?”
“Nah, he needs to speak Russian.”
“Russell Crowe?”
“GOD no. And he’s still too busy getting fellated by Ridley Scott.”
The conversation fell silent as they contemplated the options. They needed someone serious, energetic, stealthy, Russian-speaking and with the personal chutzpah to carry such a multifaceted title role.
“Angelina Jolie!” said Brian.
The other guys looked at him. “Brian,” someone said, “I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you, but Angelina Jolie has a vagina.”
Brian blinked a few times. “So?” he said.
Image: Columbia Pictures.
AND THUS, I assume, SALT WAS BORN. True story – it was written with a bloke in mind for the title role, but the part ended up in Angelina Jolie’s bony little hands. And she does well! She does really well. I say this quite apart from my love of good old Ange’s acting – she’s severe, stalwart and precise, which is exactly what the role needs.
But you can see the seams where they’ve added things in or changed things so that the role is “more suitable for a woman”. There aren’t many things. Hell, she casts aside her heels in favour of being barefoot in order to escape the CIA and make a rocket launcher out of a table leg and a fire extinguisher.
But there are things. It’s a shame. Like, at the beginning when, as I said, she makes a rocket launcher out of cleaning products, spit and hope – she’s been using the fire extinguisher to blind the CCTV cameras as she goes, and when she starts to need that for her improvised explosive device, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING comes to her brilliant mind, apparently, to cover the camera in the room OTHER THAN HER PANTS.
You heard me. Evelyn Salt, the master of improvised brilliance and clawing her way out of a corner, is stumped by the plethora of chemicals at her disposal and chooses to blind a camera with her (small, black, lacy) panties.
Thanks, film-makers! Because that’s what women would do, isn’t it. Let us consider, for a moment, other (male) action heroes who have used their underwear to stealth past unwanted observers. Do you remember that bit in Assassin’s Creed where Altaiir uses his pants to blindfold a guard so that he can stab up Robert de Sable? Of course you don’t! Because he didn’t. (Presumably because he was a 12th century Assassin and I’m not sure if they even had pants).
If only the Womanification of Salt’s role had stayed at the occasional panty shot and her perplexingly ever-perfect hair.
Whenever she inflicts bloody violence, the cinematographic eye watching her is shaky and squeamish. There’s a bit, for instance, where she smashes a bottle and glasses a man to death with it. All you see of this action is her reaction, on her face. And some squishy noises. Let us compare the bit in Casino Royale where Bond smashes a man into a sink until he dies. It’s gritty, hard, and completely unflinchingly filmed. The focus is on Bond’s actions, rather than his reaction. In Salt, the focus is most definitely on her own reactions to her violence rather than on the violence itself.
Her motivation stinks of “Oh those crazy, emotional women and their dependence on men!” I wish it didn’t. I really do wish I didn’t have to tell you what I do now. I mean, avoiding detailed spoilers and all, but Salt’s entire motivation to ruin the rules that held her previously was sparked by her marriage (she married for love, don’t you know!). It’s very ham-fistedly plonked in, too. It doesn’t fit with anything else we’re told about Salt. It’s like we’re suddenly expected to believe that this hardened motherfucker who’s been through psychological programming, torture and worse is going to go all wounded vixen over a man. Seriously?
That said, Salt’s husband (played by the eye-meltingly gorgeous August Diehl, previously familiar to me as the creepy uniformed Gestapo officer in Tarantino’s brilliant Inglourious Basterds last year) fills the role usually played by women in this sort of film perfectly. He’s seen a few times, doing his thing (spiders, as it happens: thanks, Brian!) and glimpsed in emotional flashbacks and then ultimately used as a tool against Salt.
But does she really need this, and just this, to serve as the sole motivation for her actions?
Would a man?
I’m not sure. I’m still mulling this one over. From the way the events pan out, it looks like she’s been planning her defection from much earlier – but why? There’s no satisfactory explanation given. And it’s a big defection – not just something you could do on a whim.
All that said, it is a super film, and there’s a good chunk of gender-bending in it, too. I do love my gender bending. Angelina looks proper smashing as a bloke. A bloke in uniform, no less. Lovely. You listening, Hollywood? More like that, please! Cross-dressing that isn’t put there for a cheap laugh! Is it a first? Possibly not, but it certainly made me happy. Also, the fact that she ends up with short hair means that I wasn’t distracted and put off by the Swinging Curtain Of Unrealistic Feminine Follicular Perfection.
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- It’s fun
- Angelina Jolie is convincing and heroic
- She carries her own as practically the only woman in this male-dominated film with gravitas
- There’s SPIDERS
- There will be lots in it for you if you have a boner for violence
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- Bond never twanged his pants at Scaramanga
- Oh god I have just had the best idea for Bond fanfiction ever
EDIT
The author would like to make it clear that neither he – nor his boyfriend – hold a negative view of homosexuality. Apologies to readers who felt this piece was written in a way which was open to that interpretation.
This site is a learning experience for all of us, and we hope you’ll keep reading.
BadRep Begins
There has never been a better, more exciting time to be a feminist.
–Zoe Margolis, reviewing Cath Redfern’s Reclaiming the F Word
Hi there, internet! This is a feminist blog-
Quit gurning at the back already. EYES FRONT, PEOPLE. Just for a moment.
This is a feminist blog.
Feminism has a bad old rep at the moment. My search results for the word, as I write this, are a predictable molotov of very established feminist sites and an obligatory dollop of “this stuff destroys homes”-type bile. So far, so expected.
But increasingly, there’s a lot of mainstream cringing about the f-word going on, with words like “irrelevant”, “exclusive” and “outdated” on constant rotation. Call yourself a feminist in conversation, and you will very likely be handed the Invisible Awkward Balloon.
You know what I’m talking about. Suddenly everyone’s looking at you funny. They’ve decided you’re “a bit quirky”. You have to hold the Awkward Balloon for the rest of the conversation. No matter what you do, it will not just float away. You think, “Ack. I am so not mentioning this aspect of my socio-political views out loud ever again”. Sad times, people.
That Whole Knotty ‘What Is Feminism Anyway’ Business
For us, putting it simply, feminism is the recognition that in many areas both close to home and internationally, women and men do not receive equal rights and privileges. It goes further than that, too – it’s the stance of owning the opinion that this should change for the better, and not in a way in which one gender supercedes another, whatever the “fem” bit at the beginning might imply. A great deal of progress has been made with this in many countries, but the fact remains that attitudes change slowly, even after legislation has been passed.
The Dreaded F-Word, You Say?
There are a lot of people out there who would support the above stance. But they’re wary of using the dreaded f-word, or of connecting with people who use it. Some of them, however it happened – and we’re not bothered about blaming anybody – seem to have ended up feeling that their activism might not be welcome if they did either of these things. We think this is a shame.
Ladies And Gentlemen And Everybody Else
The six individuals who make up this blog at the time of writing – and we are a mixed-gender group – are friends. We didn’t meet through feminism, though we have it in common as a label we agree works well. This blog is our shared platform – and we don’t always agree with each other, either. Sometimes we’re angry, but we also have a sense of humour. We’re all featured briefly on our About page, but we hope that we’ll emerge, over time, as distinct voices.
Our strapline is a feminist pop culture adventure. We’re named after a Joan Jett song for a reason – we want to be a good first route in for people just starting to become interested in feminist and gender-related issues, and we also want to reclaim some of the inspiring, rock ‘n’ roll energy that characterised the feminist movement in previous generations. (Also, c’mon. Joan Jett is freaking badass.)
Jett leaps into action. Kinda like we want to. We named our site after Bad Reputation for a reason...
Angry All The Time?
This site is about looking for positives as much as shouting out a problem – if we don’t like something, we’ll try and point at something else we think does get it right, or something that you, at grassroots level, can do about it. We’re about simple, practical activism.
So it’s not all anger and humourless ranting, though anger rightly has its place as long as there’s still a gender gap.
But it is about moving, about thinking about what’s going on around you, every day, and pushing – even in small ways – for change.
And it’s about enjoying how far we have come, acknowledging the good stuff, and connecting with people who feel the same.
Let’s Go!
A movement is defined by who’s on board. It is what you make it. We like this bandwagon fine. It may have a Bad Rep, but we’re okay with that. It’s our bandwagon, too. It’s achieved good things, and we believe it isn’t done yet.
Welcome aboard.
BadRep Reference Post: The Frank Miller Test
This is a backdated post for our writers to refer to.
Created in the same spirit as the Bechdel Test, the somewhat tongue-in-cheek Frank Miller Test goes to show how much some writers (coughFrankMillercough) are obsessed with writing about sex workers. Like the Bechdel Test, this is not the final word on whether or not a work is feminist, it is merely useful shorthand for a very common trope.
If the proportion of female sex workers to neutrally presented women is above 1:1, the author fails the test.
While sex workers have stories that we want to hear about, it is all too common for writers to create works where the only roles for women are in the sex industry – where the sex industry is the only place that women can be successful. While this could be interpreted as political comment, it all too often seems merely an excuse, especially in visual mediums such as films and comics, to portray lots of scantily-clad young women and pander to the male gaze.
Genres such as historical fiction, noir, crime and detective stories are where this trope is most often found.
The Shortpacked webcomic’s take on Frank Miller. Miller is the creator of Sin City.
The test was first proposed by ‘thene’, blogger at Aaru Tuesday here.