Brave and the third wave
I meant to link at some point to Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic piece on why women still can't have it all, but I think I forgot. At the time it would have been a bare link, without any discussion. Now in the context of this Pixar movie - which is, at its heart, about women, power, relationships, and balance - I have a lot more thoughts. Most of which revolve around this movie with its bouncy-haired protagonist and her sedately-haired mother.
At this point, you've all read the article, right? I don't think it should be news to anyone. Anyway, I thought it was a good piece - I've heard critiques that it's classist, since not every girl-child in our parents' generation grew up hearing those messages about how they were expected to smash through the glass ceiling while juggling a family and a career, and that's highly correlated with a certain kind of privilege - but I grew up surrounded by enough of a smart-woman-in-science chosen-one mentality that it sure sounds familiar to me. Conflicting expectations that can only be resolved by doing it all. And since this is the kind of privilege we want to extend to more people, not the kind of privilege we'd rather no one had, the dialogue should only become more relevant over time.
I had two main lines of thought about Brave, which seems extremely well-timed in a number of ways, not just because it really was about time that Pixar came out with a movie that had a female star. All of it sort of connected to my thoughts about third-wave feminism, and how women in the movie are portrayed. I'm going to try to steer my discussion free of specific plot spoilers and keep it fairly abstract; if you are paranoid about spoilers, you may want to avoid it anyway, and it will probably make more sense if you've actually seen the movie. My thoughts center around the fact that it's a movie about a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother has specific, gendered but also class-specified expectations for her daughter, the mother herself is a strong female role model who gives the daughter a lot to live up to, and the daughter seeks a way to work with and around those expectations that does not involve running away from home, cutting off all ties from her family, and leading her own life with chosen family. That story gets told a lot more, especially to kids; this one seems to get told less often.
(Mostly male) commenters on some review sites complained about small anachronisms breaking their suspension of disbelief and ruining the movie for them. They missed the fact that the entire movie is an anachronism, or more kindly, an allegory. It's about the problems people face now, not the problems people actually faced in the 10th century, and I think that's a strength, but it's also a bit troubling because, hey, those problems are actually relevant and troubling. (Mostly male) reviewers have a lot of other random complaints about the movie, and I'm tempted to go through and debunk every one, because I think the movie is awesome, but I'll try to stick to my main point. The movie was very character-driven. I like character-driven.
It becomes clear, in the society of the movie, that men and women have different roles and different kinds of power. The men go off and have exploits, hack at things, wage war, kill things, lose limbs, rally troops on the battlefield. They come home and tell stories about the events they've lived through, exciting rollicking tales. The women stay at home and keep the world going. They weave tapestries and send correspondence, and they pass on history to their children. The women do a lot of the sense-making, turning the adventure yarns of lived experience into legends that fit into a larger arc, that help people find meaning for their lives and their actions, helping instill values and direction.
issendai makes a really good point in their review of the movie, pointing out the difference between the queen's power and the king's power. The king's power comes from bellowing, physical strength, and male camaraderie. He's a good tactical leader in the heat of the moment, but the first weapons that come to hand for him are actual weapons. He can try to shut a crowd up by yelling at them or threatening them. He encourages his daughter to explore the physical pursuits she's interested in, while her mother frowns on them. Her mother spends years teaching her daughter to act like a princess, to know political geography and diplomacy and deportment, more subtle but no less potent weapons for a ruler. Merida scoffs at it, but when it comes down to it, it's her mother's deportment and eloquence that can actually sway a crowd, not her father's volume and bluster. The two of them work together, but the queen wields much of the real power. She wants her daughter to be a perfect princess so that her daughter will be able to use the same weapons with the same strength.
Merida eventually learns the value of the stuff her mom was trying to teach her; her mother eventually learns the value of the physical skills Merida picked up from her dad. The compromise that is eventually reached respects the value of both skillsets. Contrary to what it says in some of the obnoxious reviews, Merida does not give up her femaleness to become "a kind of honorary boy" in order to have the freedom she wants. She is not implied to be a lesbian, and it's strongly implied that she does get married eventually and live out her proper gender role in society. She is not rebelling against being a woman, just some specific, stifling expectations. Although, it's true, treating a tomboy as an honorary boy seems like a much more expected way for a kids' movie to handle this, because men can really suck at writing female characters. But she's not. She cares about relationships and expectations; she's not the kind of tomboy who goes and plays with the boys and ignores the girls. (Not that there are actually any other children from her kingdom in the movie.) She doesn't give up being a girl - what kind of reconciliation and compromise would it be if she ditched everything her mom had taught her?
It seems to me that the compromise the movie reaches is essentially the compromise the third-wave feminists are complaining about. Merida masters the physical, masculine skills her dad teaches her, and learns that in order to be the leader she wants to be, she can't neglect the intellectual, feminine skills her mom has taught her, too. She could possibly be a good female leader without the male set, but the female set is absolutely essential. To be the person she wants to be, she has to be a superwoman, excelling on both sides. You can picture her ten years down the road, going out to fight a war, coming home, cooking dinner, and teaching the children to read before bed, then getting up early to do it all again the next day. Or maybe not. But Merida's compromise is the one that says women are needed to keep the world running, and there's no reason to limit them to sedentary household work, but they can't give up their crucial obligations as women either. Or the world will stop working. (The cartoonishly useless portrayal of the men in the movie reinforces this, but I think there's an actual point here.)
When this first struck me, it seemed extremely dated. Disney finally catches up with The Feminine Mystique? People have been advocating for the "you can have it all as long as you do all the things" model of female success for the past fifty years - how did Disney miss this? But honestly, I think this is actually progress - for all their attempts to show strong female characters, Disney hasn't actually articulated this compromise before. Sense-making is a slow process. Events turn into history. History turns into legend. (And you weave the legend into a tapestry and tell your children so they can develop values.) What are Disney movies but the myths and legends we feed our children? Fifty years after it started appearing in the random, chaotic lives of actual people, this model of feminine success is actually fighting its way into the Disney canon. By now we have the perspective to see why it's problematic, but it's still stronger than what came before.
The other thing that makes the movie seem particularly relevant right now is the character of the mother. I know that, by Disney standards, she is doing pretty well just to be alive at the start of the movie - Disney likes absent mothers. But she's actually a tremendously strong woman who wields a lot of power in the day-to-day running of the kingdom. Her daughter has a huge amount to live up to. And while she would not label herself a feminist, and she's living a life strictly within the gender role assigned to her, she's pushing the role as far as she can to make everything run as smoothly as possible. She's a successful woman of the previous generation, and she's figured out the rules needed to succeed in a man's world and wield power. It is very important to her to pass on these rules so that her daughter, with all the advantages she never had, can exceed her own abilities and do the things she never could. She has done her best to give her daughter the tools to do all the things that matter.
And we come back to third-wave feminism. Merida is the daughter of a strong female character, struggling to live up to her mother's (and her father's) example. How often does that even come up in stories? I can think of a hundred examples in real life and only a couple of examples in media. (Maybe the sequels to the Kushiel books? Except Imriel's a boy, so we don't get to see Phèdre duking it out with her teenage daughter. Sadly.) But that's where we are now - we are the daughters of the feminist generation, the ones growing up knowing that we are supposed to wield power on our own behalf, in order to be successful. And our struggle is finding out how to do that while being true to ourselves. We are the daughters of strong female characters, struggling to be our own strong female characters. A lot is expected of us, and our mothers' carefully gendered advice and preparation is hardly enough for us to keep up with expectations. They've shown us that we have power, but now we want to forge our own way. And if we use the freedom we've been given to exceed our mothers (as they said they wanted), our progress may not even be measurable by the metrics of the previous generation.
Looking at it that way, maybe it's not so outdated after all. To succeed in our parents' generation, you had to work a lot harder to conform to gender norms than you do to succeed in ours. Trying to get them to recognize the freedom we have, the risks we can take, the new societies and worlds we want to build - despite love, despite communication, it's always a struggle. My mom wanted me to follow my heart; she encouraged my sisters to pursue writing and music and education, but she was absolutely appalled when I didn't want to shave my legs. When you've had to satisfy strict expectations your whole life, it's terrifying to see your children violate them. What will people think?
I want to sneak forward in time and watch the Pixar movies that my children will show their children. I want to see the truths we're struggling to negotiate make their way into three-dimensional computer-animated legend. Movies where passing the Bechdel test is a given. I can't even imagine what the stories would look like - could you tell a believable narrative that took "you can have it all" as a given, and worked out a different compromise as an ending? Where would that even end? The next generation will take our progress for granted, and I am dying to see what new truths they work out.
Maybe someday male critics will even learn to pay attention to movies about women and notice what's actually going on.
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At this point, you've all read the article, right? I don't think it should be news to anyone. Anyway, I thought it was a good piece - I've heard critiques that it's classist, since not every girl-child in our parents' generation grew up hearing those messages about how they were expected to smash through the glass ceiling while juggling a family and a career, and that's highly correlated with a certain kind of privilege - but I grew up surrounded by enough of a smart-woman-in-science chosen-one mentality that it sure sounds familiar to me. Conflicting expectations that can only be resolved by doing it all. And since this is the kind of privilege we want to extend to more people, not the kind of privilege we'd rather no one had, the dialogue should only become more relevant over time.
I had two main lines of thought about Brave, which seems extremely well-timed in a number of ways, not just because it really was about time that Pixar came out with a movie that had a female star. All of it sort of connected to my thoughts about third-wave feminism, and how women in the movie are portrayed. I'm going to try to steer my discussion free of specific plot spoilers and keep it fairly abstract; if you are paranoid about spoilers, you may want to avoid it anyway, and it will probably make more sense if you've actually seen the movie. My thoughts center around the fact that it's a movie about a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother has specific, gendered but also class-specified expectations for her daughter, the mother herself is a strong female role model who gives the daughter a lot to live up to, and the daughter seeks a way to work with and around those expectations that does not involve running away from home, cutting off all ties from her family, and leading her own life with chosen family. That story gets told a lot more, especially to kids; this one seems to get told less often.
(Mostly male) commenters on some review sites complained about small anachronisms breaking their suspension of disbelief and ruining the movie for them. They missed the fact that the entire movie is an anachronism, or more kindly, an allegory. It's about the problems people face now, not the problems people actually faced in the 10th century, and I think that's a strength, but it's also a bit troubling because, hey, those problems are actually relevant and troubling. (Mostly male) reviewers have a lot of other random complaints about the movie, and I'm tempted to go through and debunk every one, because I think the movie is awesome, but I'll try to stick to my main point. The movie was very character-driven. I like character-driven.
It becomes clear, in the society of the movie, that men and women have different roles and different kinds of power. The men go off and have exploits, hack at things, wage war, kill things, lose limbs, rally troops on the battlefield. They come home and tell stories about the events they've lived through, exciting rollicking tales. The women stay at home and keep the world going. They weave tapestries and send correspondence, and they pass on history to their children. The women do a lot of the sense-making, turning the adventure yarns of lived experience into legends that fit into a larger arc, that help people find meaning for their lives and their actions, helping instill values and direction.
issendai makes a really good point in their review of the movie, pointing out the difference between the queen's power and the king's power. The king's power comes from bellowing, physical strength, and male camaraderie. He's a good tactical leader in the heat of the moment, but the first weapons that come to hand for him are actual weapons. He can try to shut a crowd up by yelling at them or threatening them. He encourages his daughter to explore the physical pursuits she's interested in, while her mother frowns on them. Her mother spends years teaching her daughter to act like a princess, to know political geography and diplomacy and deportment, more subtle but no less potent weapons for a ruler. Merida scoffs at it, but when it comes down to it, it's her mother's deportment and eloquence that can actually sway a crowd, not her father's volume and bluster. The two of them work together, but the queen wields much of the real power. She wants her daughter to be a perfect princess so that her daughter will be able to use the same weapons with the same strength.
Merida eventually learns the value of the stuff her mom was trying to teach her; her mother eventually learns the value of the physical skills Merida picked up from her dad. The compromise that is eventually reached respects the value of both skillsets. Contrary to what it says in some of the obnoxious reviews, Merida does not give up her femaleness to become "a kind of honorary boy" in order to have the freedom she wants. She is not implied to be a lesbian, and it's strongly implied that she does get married eventually and live out her proper gender role in society. She is not rebelling against being a woman, just some specific, stifling expectations. Although, it's true, treating a tomboy as an honorary boy seems like a much more expected way for a kids' movie to handle this, because men can really suck at writing female characters. But she's not. She cares about relationships and expectations; she's not the kind of tomboy who goes and plays with the boys and ignores the girls. (Not that there are actually any other children from her kingdom in the movie.) She doesn't give up being a girl - what kind of reconciliation and compromise would it be if she ditched everything her mom had taught her?
It seems to me that the compromise the movie reaches is essentially the compromise the third-wave feminists are complaining about. Merida masters the physical, masculine skills her dad teaches her, and learns that in order to be the leader she wants to be, she can't neglect the intellectual, feminine skills her mom has taught her, too. She could possibly be a good female leader without the male set, but the female set is absolutely essential. To be the person she wants to be, she has to be a superwoman, excelling on both sides. You can picture her ten years down the road, going out to fight a war, coming home, cooking dinner, and teaching the children to read before bed, then getting up early to do it all again the next day. Or maybe not. But Merida's compromise is the one that says women are needed to keep the world running, and there's no reason to limit them to sedentary household work, but they can't give up their crucial obligations as women either. Or the world will stop working. (The cartoonishly useless portrayal of the men in the movie reinforces this, but I think there's an actual point here.)
When this first struck me, it seemed extremely dated. Disney finally catches up with The Feminine Mystique? People have been advocating for the "you can have it all as long as you do all the things" model of female success for the past fifty years - how did Disney miss this? But honestly, I think this is actually progress - for all their attempts to show strong female characters, Disney hasn't actually articulated this compromise before. Sense-making is a slow process. Events turn into history. History turns into legend. (And you weave the legend into a tapestry and tell your children so they can develop values.) What are Disney movies but the myths and legends we feed our children? Fifty years after it started appearing in the random, chaotic lives of actual people, this model of feminine success is actually fighting its way into the Disney canon. By now we have the perspective to see why it's problematic, but it's still stronger than what came before.
The other thing that makes the movie seem particularly relevant right now is the character of the mother. I know that, by Disney standards, she is doing pretty well just to be alive at the start of the movie - Disney likes absent mothers. But she's actually a tremendously strong woman who wields a lot of power in the day-to-day running of the kingdom. Her daughter has a huge amount to live up to. And while she would not label herself a feminist, and she's living a life strictly within the gender role assigned to her, she's pushing the role as far as she can to make everything run as smoothly as possible. She's a successful woman of the previous generation, and she's figured out the rules needed to succeed in a man's world and wield power. It is very important to her to pass on these rules so that her daughter, with all the advantages she never had, can exceed her own abilities and do the things she never could. She has done her best to give her daughter the tools to do all the things that matter.
And we come back to third-wave feminism. Merida is the daughter of a strong female character, struggling to live up to her mother's (and her father's) example. How often does that even come up in stories? I can think of a hundred examples in real life and only a couple of examples in media. (Maybe the sequels to the Kushiel books? Except Imriel's a boy, so we don't get to see Phèdre duking it out with her teenage daughter. Sadly.) But that's where we are now - we are the daughters of the feminist generation, the ones growing up knowing that we are supposed to wield power on our own behalf, in order to be successful. And our struggle is finding out how to do that while being true to ourselves. We are the daughters of strong female characters, struggling to be our own strong female characters. A lot is expected of us, and our mothers' carefully gendered advice and preparation is hardly enough for us to keep up with expectations. They've shown us that we have power, but now we want to forge our own way. And if we use the freedom we've been given to exceed our mothers (as they said they wanted), our progress may not even be measurable by the metrics of the previous generation.
Looking at it that way, maybe it's not so outdated after all. To succeed in our parents' generation, you had to work a lot harder to conform to gender norms than you do to succeed in ours. Trying to get them to recognize the freedom we have, the risks we can take, the new societies and worlds we want to build - despite love, despite communication, it's always a struggle. My mom wanted me to follow my heart; she encouraged my sisters to pursue writing and music and education, but she was absolutely appalled when I didn't want to shave my legs. When you've had to satisfy strict expectations your whole life, it's terrifying to see your children violate them. What will people think?
I want to sneak forward in time and watch the Pixar movies that my children will show their children. I want to see the truths we're struggling to negotiate make their way into three-dimensional computer-animated legend. Movies where passing the Bechdel test is a given. I can't even imagine what the stories would look like - could you tell a believable narrative that took "you can have it all" as a given, and worked out a different compromise as an ending? Where would that even end? The next generation will take our progress for granted, and I am dying to see what new truths they work out.
Maybe someday male critics will even learn to pay attention to movies about women and notice what's actually going on.
This entry has
comments. Leave a comment? (Click "Log in with OpenID?", top right corner.)