I think we all can agree that watching Boys Don’t Cry today was a very intense experience. I think this is made even more so when you consider it was based on a true story.

I did some research and read about the real Brandon Teena. I thought you all would  be interested too so here’s a link to learn more:

http://rememberbrandonteena.webs.com/

Something that stuck out for me was this:

“Tisdel sued the producers of the film for unauthorized use of her name and likeness before the film’s release. She claimed the film depicted her as “lazy, white trash, and a skanky snake”. Tisdel also claimed that the film falsely portrayed that she continued the relationship with Teena after she discovered Teena was not anatomically male. She eventually settled her lawsuit against the movie’s distributor for an undisclosed sum.”

We had a large discussion last week concerning Post Feminism and a very important question was raised: Who gets to be a Post Feminist. I have been thinking of this question a lot, especially throughout each of our discussions and I have finally found a personal conclusion.

My opinion is this: Post Feminism is for those who are comfortable or unconcerned with their position in the institutionalized patriarchy. I would first like to state that this belief concerns post feminists who ignore the patriarchy or pretend or even believe it does not exist. I consider these post feminists to be very dangerous to the cause of feminism. This is because I truly believe there is an embedded patriarchal system in our society that results in women being disrespected, underpaid, and objectified. And if a post feminist decides to focus on individual choices and ignores these embedded issues, then she does not help further the cause of disbanding these embedded beliefs. I think it is easy for most post feminists to do so because they are comfortable in their place in the patriarchy. For instance, a rich white woman falls pretty high in the social ranking of the patriarchy, so such a person who does not feel, or does not mind, a lot of the negative effects of a patriarchal society can easily say that she is a post feminist and try to focus on things on an individual level.

Perhaps this will make more sense if I relate it to post-racism. For those who do not have racism affect their every day lives it is very easy to say we live in a post-race world where “we are all human beings” and “the color of our skin does not matter”. For those who are affected daily by prejudices and the institutionalized racism of the society we live in, that concept is a joke. To me this is similar to post feminism. It is very simple for people who do not feel the presence of the patriarchy, or are comfortable of how it affects them to say that our society does not explicitly run on biases of gender and that we should not criticize media and life on the idea of gender. But for those who do not get that pass, it is very difficult.

It’s all about the mother/daughter relationship.

In Freud’s theories of sexuality there is an important phase in young development that occurs in both sexes. This is called the Oedipus Complex. In boys it is very simple: boys first love mom, then begin to see father as a threat and competition, and then begin to hate father.

In girls it is more complicated. In girls they first passionately love their mother, then move away from them and then transfer this love to the father.

Freud’s main point in this paper is analyzing and conjecturing about how/why this split from mother to father happens.

This love for their mothers is very strong and lasts much longer than it would in boys. The mystery is then, why the daughters eventually hate their mothers.

A big part of it comes from the castration complex. When a girl is little there is a point where she realizes that she does not have a penis (or what Freud says “the consequent superiority of the male and her own inferiority”). There are 3 lines of development that can come from this for the girl:

1. The girl turns her back on sexuality altogether
2. The girl becomes focused on the idea of eventually getting a penis. She begins to embrace her masculinity. In extreme cases she can become gay
3. the normal feminine attitude in which she takes her father as the love-object (the Oedipus complex)

There are many reasons why Freud guesses why daughters turn on their mothers:

• jealousy of others (father included) and an unsatisfactory love (from a childish all consuming love) makes the daughter find another love (the father)
• the girl blaming her mother for not being male/having a penis.
• Associating the mother for exciting then stopping her sexuality (when she’s young with her phallic masturbation by accident when cleaning the child)
• The mother didn’t breastfeed long enough

These all lead to the daughter eventually turning away from the mother and going towards the father. This really develops a woman’s sexuality. For instance, although she may choose a husband that reminds a woman  of her father, she eventually may treat her husband with hostility/love of her mother. There are still a lot of things that are unsure (some psychologist think that boys and girls Oedipus complex work the same way), so even Freud who is sure they are different, cannot say for sure what occurs during/after this split.

My Question:

In The Help we see many different types of mother/daughter relationships of many different ages. Do we see evidence of the young mother love and do we see evidence of the hated mother relationship?

Also is this theory complicated when there is more than one mother in the case of the help raising these children?

Something very interesting happened in class today. I have already seen The Help twice, so I thought there would be nothing that would be new or jump out at me. So I watched the film I tried to focus in on the dynamics of each of these women in relation to their children and especially the mothers/daughters. Yet as the movie progressed, it was a different relationship that really stuck out to me: the relationship between the wives and their husbands. What I noticed was that in the relationships where the wives were also mothers, the husbands treated them very indifferently or, in some cases, very rudely. They would be dismissive, abusive or in the very least unaffectionate. The one marriage that is used as a comparison is the marriage of Celia and Johnny. With no children, Celia and Johnny are extremely affectionate with each other and the movie heavily imply the strong sexual relationship between them.

I’m not sure if this was intentional or not, but it seems to be a comment on the lack of sexuality given toward the mothers. As if they could not be the sexual beings like Celia is, and also be portrayed as mothers as well.