http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/09/22/emma-watson-recruits-men-to-make-the-world-safer-for-women-with-heforshe-campaign/

Emma Watson recently gave a speech at the UN regarding a new initiative called HeForShe. She brings to attention the many misconceptions behind feminism and how it is all too often associated with  “man-hating.” She speaks to how feminism is by definition “the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes.”

She makes some great points regarding gender equality for both women and men. Theres a 15min video, which I think is definitely worth the time to watch, and the article nicely summarizes her speech.

http://afrolez.tumblr.com/post/7967989547/a-black-woman-speaks-of-white-womanhood-by-beah

As I have been working on the final draft of our assignment, I kept coming back to the idea of femme fatale and how she is the downfall for the male character. What I keep wondering is why can’t the male character just leave her alone to begin with? In The Last Seduction (Dahl, 1994), Bridget turns Mike down several times, but he keeps pursuing her. She eventually goes home with him and then continues to use him throughout the film until she ruins his life at the end. All of this could have been avoided if he would have just respected her initial rejection. She never asked him to pursue her; he could have just left her alone right from the start. Is this a flaw in our society where some guys are taught that they can eventually turn a no into a yes?

I couldn’t figure out what the allure was to these dangerous women that eventually led to male character’s demise. In Women in Film Noir by Janey Place, she said, “Self-interest over devotion to a man is often the original sin of the film noir woman and metaphor for the treat her sexuality represents to him.” (p. 47).   I assume this can be applied to femme fatale woman. Is her overt sexuality what draws him in? Does her self-interest make him continue to pursue her with the hope she might conform to society norms and make her devotion to him?  Why can’t he just let her be?

Rikki Schubart’s “Female Heroes in an Age of Ambivalence” discusses the grey area female action heroes occupy in feminist critiques of film. To Schubart, these action heroes is undeniably the result of feminist critique,  yet they also enforce anti-feminist messages.

The essay makes a distinction between male and female films. Male films are movies that not only designed by men for men, but also portray a role model for masculinity. In male films, such as action or horror movies, the male protagonist is often a lone hero who must work against a evil or corrupt system, usually by using violence.This is in contrast to female films, such as romantic comedies and melodramas, where the female protagonist must learn her place as being fundamentally a part of a society, whether it be as a wife or a mother. These films reinforce gender roles by categorizing men as independent heroes, while women are bond to the men on their lives.

When female heroes were initially introduced to film, they served to highlighting how women are capable of acting beyond prescribed gender roles, and how society punishes women for not conforming to those same roles. They would often take up an action with some degree of success, they would also be brought low for failing to find love or create a family. Today, while these kinds of stories still exist, the female action heroes are now also allowed to gain independence without being punished. While these characters still act as sex symbols, they can now operate, at least somewhat, as individuals.

Critics have had issues with trying to figure out how to interpret female action heroes. This leads to a discussion in the essay about feminists versus postfeminist critiques of films, and I’ll admit that this was the hardest section for me to comprehend. My understanding is this: feminists film critics treat the genders of characters as absolutes. To feminist film critics, a character is representative of either a male or female identity. Postfeminist film critics, on the other hand, treat identity as a more fluid structure. Characters are able to switch between more masculine and feminine ways of being, or to even hold two contradictory gender identities. Thus, when female action heroes first appear, feminist critics rejected them. These critics said that they were either cross-dressers, meaning they essentially male characters in a woman’s body, or masquerades, meaning they were women characters acting like men to be accepted. Postfeminists, on the other hand, accepted these heroes as demonstrating that identity was not set in stone, and that women could have both masculine and feminine aspects to their character. More recently, feminists have become accepting of these characters as trangressive, though though they are wary of the way in which these characters still uphold patriarchal standards of objectification and feminine beauty.

The essay then lists the five most common version of the female hero. These are as follows:

• The Dominatrix- The dominatrix is a woman who punishes masochistic men for their pleasure.  Since she is doing this for the men’s sexual pleasure, she is not really considered cruel, nor is the man considered an actual victim of violence. In general this archetype is never a fully embodied because it is too pornographic, but is instead occasionally employed as a masquerade by female characters.
• The Rape-Avenger- The rape-avenger is a woman who punishes and kills the man or men that raped her. The essay notes that this is a kind of a reversal of the rape victim archetype. While the rape victim archetype was used to reinforce women’s place in feminine roles by making her a passive victim that the men must avenge, the rape-avenger has the woman become an active hero because of her rape. The rape-avenger is usually mousy and sexless initially, but after her rape she uses both “feminine” tactics, like the use of cocktail dresses and flirting, and “male” tactics like threats and violence to kill her rapist(s).
• The Mother- The mother tries to juggle her masculine action treat with her more feminine and motherly lifestyle. This character usually has three states; as the good mother, where she is the traditional domestic and caring parent; as the bad mother, where she tries to go beyond her home and into a more masculine sphere, and ends up hurting her family as a result; and as the integrated mother, where she take what she has learned from the masculine sphere and uses it to help with becoming a better mother.
• The Daughter- In order to explain how a woman can exist within a more masculine world, the daughter archetype has the women learn how to manage from their father or from a father figure. For the daughter archetype, the “badass” persona they have a masquerade that is taught to them by their father figure. These characters are essentially feminine, but they can be taught to be more masculine by the men. The archetype is also has shades of prostitution to it, as the woman is usually taught  so that she may go on adventures that will benefit her father figure.
• The Amazon- The amazon is warrior woman who acts independently of men. This archetype takes two forms- “good” and “bad”. “Good” Amazons young, beautiful, and heterosexual, and are usually one lone woman, rather than a society of women. They more or less in favor of the patriarchy, sometimes acting for their own interests, but  also sometimes operating for the good of a system, too. “Bad” Amazons wish to destroy patriarchy and act completely within their own self-interests. “Bad” Amazon are usually a generation older than the other women in the film, and they are often lesbians or bisexuals. Amazons are usually consider androgynous because of how they straddle male and female sex roles, yet there is usually a huge focus on sexualizing the Amazon’s body for the male gaze.

What Schubart emphasizes in this essay is that there is no definite answer to whether these characters are effective feminist role models. While they almost all have some commendable to them, all of these character also play into antifeminist understandings of gender.

Questions:

• How do the characters we’ve seen in our class, such as Bridget from The Last Seduction or even Helen from Blonde Venus, fit into this discussion? What archetypes, if any, do you think they fit, and how do you think they conform to and contradict feminist ideals?
• How do more contemporary female action heroes fit? How in ways to characters like Katnis from The Hunger Games, Black Widow from the Marvel movies, or Maleficent from the movie of the same name show ambivalent attitudes toward feminist ideals?

I wanted to write a little more about the discussion we had in class about the word mother vs. mama or mommy and how that translated in the film, The Help.  I think that the word ‘mother’ is used to represent someone who birth a child, but the words ‘mommy’ or ‘mama’ are words for someone who is actually a parental figure in someones life.

This is applicable to the film between Aibileene and Elizabeth Leefolts daughter.  It is very clear from the beginning of the film, how much of a ‘mom’ Aibeleene is for this girl.  She tucks her into bed and even potty trains her.  In the movie we don’t even see Elizabeth Leefolt holding her daughter in a single scene.  When Aibeleene is holding the little girl in her arms after Elizabeth Leefolt pulls out of the drive way to do who knows what, she says “you’re my real mommy Aibee” which is a line that stood out to me during the whole movie.

The fact that she calls her ‘mommy’ adds to what I mentioned earlier.  Mrs. Leefolt is her biological mother and birthed the little girl, but she is absent in her life pretty much.  The only time she expresses any concern for her daughter is when she might get dirty germs from Aibileen by standing too close to Aibileen’s designated bathroom stall.  Aibileen on the other hand is the little girls “mommy.” She love this girl so much and it is so apparent how much the little girl loves and appreciate her as well.

The scene where Aibileen is asked to leave by Mrs. Leefolt broke my heart and made my teary-eyed.  The little girl says “Don’t go Aibee!” which is another example of how important  Aibileen is to her and how she loves her so much.  When Aibileen walks out of the Leefolt household, the camera shows the little girl banging at the window and calling for Aibileen as she walks away.  That was such a powerful scene, and the fact that Mrs. Leefolt just stands there and doesn’t even comfort her little girl while she is sad goes to show how much of a terrible mother she is.

Connecting back to Kaplan’s article “The Case of The Missing Mother,” I would identify Mrs. Leefolt to be a bad mother/witch because she doesn’t love her children a way a “mom” should.  The fact that she got pregnant with another one towards the end of the film and doesn’t have Aibileen’s help scares me a bit because she doesn’t seem to know a thing about parenting, since she has no experience with it.  I would identify Aibileen as a heroic mother because she leaves her family to work and sacrifices not being with her son to take care of Mrs. Leefolts daughter.  She not only is a nanny to her, but she loves her as if she was her own child which is very clear in the film.

So I’ve shared and discussed the following video in other FAMS classes but in all honesty this is my first WGS class. Therefore I’m curious to hear a more varied reaction.

Video

original article

http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/construction-workers-yell-messages-empowerment-women-snickers-stunt-156541

http://notherapedocumentary.org/another-black-feminist-critique

The clip and other critiques from today is at the end of this article.

“The New Yorker: Against Nature – Elisabeth Badinter’s Contrarian Feminism” by Jane Kramer

• Elisabeth Badinter polled France’s “most influential intellectual” in 2011

o   Believes that young women are “falling victim to sociobiological fictions that reduce them to the status of female mammals, programmed to the ‘higher claims’ of womb and breast.”

o   Wrote 5 bestsellers on feminism

o   1^st: “Lamour en Plus” : a history of the changing notions of mother love

o   Dismisses the myth of maternal instinct as a somewhat “cultural construct”

o   Latest book: “Le Conflit: La Femme et la Mère”

• Analysis of what she sees as a “spreading cult of ‘motherhood fundamentalism’ in the West
• Denounces the model of motherhood : “that primitive idea that nature is God” – “I have a horror of that naturalistic ideology”
• Questions just what we mean when we say “maternal instincts”
• Feminist guide to her readers
  • Sees a conspiracy against women’s freedom, fuelled by economically uncertain times and religion
  • Calls it “an identity crisis perhaps unprecedented in human history”
• Badinter rarely mentions her mother, who worked for “Elle” magazine – says the relationship between mothers and daughters is “complicated”

o   Had a very special/profound relationship with her father

o   Suspects that most strong women have fathers like hers

o   Married a man 14 years older, had 3 children in 3 ½ years because “he was older and he wanted it”

• Always had an au pair for her children—couldn’t have completed her exams without one

• Criticism of today’s mothers:

o   Rejects the notion that a child needs “only” its mother

o   Women are falling victim of a movement that is a modern, moral worship of all things natural

• Ex: Won’t use epidurals because they want to “feel” what it is to be a woman
• Idea that if you’re not suffering, you have failed the experience of maternity

• Badinter: You should decide for yourself what’s “right” as a mother
• Kramer asks her: How can equality happen if we will make no exceptions for inequality?

o   Badinter answers: “There are no exact solutions. Women still bear the burdens of private life—home, children, family, and also of work, of public life—and without the equality of private life we will never have the same liberty as men.”

• Questions:

o   The male characters in “The Help” had particularly minor roles, with the exception of Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain)’s husband, Johnny – do you think this was necessary in order to focus on the relationships between the women and establish a sense of female dominance, or could the same effect have been achieved had there been more of a male presence? (Did the female-female dynamic accomplish something that a male-female dynamic couldn’t have?)

o   Badinter rejects the notion that children “only” need their mothers; even though many characters in the film had strained mother-daughter relationships, they still emphasized the role of the maid in raising the children (and still maintained the mother-like figure). So, by her standards, is “The Help” Badinter-approved? Does it display that children don’t really depend on their mothers, or does it show that they need some sort of motherly figure to raise them, even if it is not their biological mother?

After taking a course in psychology, and now reading this article, it is true that Freud is as weird as ever. I am still trying to understand the notion that from birth a child’s first love and fixation is on their mother. I am also curious to talk about the idea of competition between children and their parent of the opposite sex. In relating this back to The Help. I am wondering how this compares to competition with the maids and mothers. If the maid is the one who is tending to the child more than the biological mother, does this mean that the maid becomes the object of love for the child?

The term Mother has always has a dual meaning (for me at least). I offer that the word Mother is usually assigned to the biological carrier of an individual and after that it [mother] takes variations depending on the relationship between child and “mother”. So everyone has a mother [biologically], some have a “mom”, sometimes the mother and mom are one person and some have no mom at all. To link to the article by Kaplan the “mom” takes the role of who the child aspires to be/who they trust and learn from. A mom can come from anywhere there is no need for a biological connection (although in most cases I’d hope that would illicit a stronger connection). I know my definition can get muddled with the different images of mothers that Kaplan discusses or with the idea of image through mother and daughter discussed by Williams but, I believe there is still validity.

To look at the scene in King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937), when Stella is watching her daughter Laurel through the window as she is about to be wed. I think we see a shallow representation of the split between mother and mom. Laurel’s mother is outside looking in because she gave up her daughter for her child’s benefit (heroic mother) but Laurel still looks for her mother. Not completely alone, Laurel has a step mother whom she begins to mimic. This is discussed in the Williams article I believe. When she talks about the relationship between mother and daughter and the dynamic of it. (the mother and daughter bond over their lack of penis, the mother passes the image of herself onto her daughter etc)

So to look at Tate Taylor’s The Help (2011) the relationship between Elizabeth Leefolt’s daughter and Aibileen Clark is extremely complex. For the split now has added a dimension to image. Aibileen loves the little girl as if her own and the little girl reciprocates this love stating, “you’re my real mommy Aibi”. That line, to me, was one of the most important lines of the film. For how do we dissect the word Mother/mom/mommy. IS a mother the term for the nurturing, caring, and forgiving parent or is it the biological term for the sex that carries the offspring? Even further into the film Aibileen begins to tell stories about the children she has raised, exclaiming that she had told one little boy that she drank to much coffee to explain her skin color. I know that this dynamic is intriguing to me but I don’t quite know how to tie it in to the readings directly. So how does the idea of race and even biological ties play into what the word “mother” is?