Opening that can of worms again...
It's time for another post about everyone's favourite can of worms...Misogyny.
As you all know, I LOVED 7x08. But, there was that one little aspect (of perhaps many) that threw some people off ...mainly, the fact that Sam was "roofied" and tied to a bed. I thought it was a great send up of the film Misery, and since Becky didn't actually do ( Read more... )
As you all know, I LOVED 7x08. But, there was that one little aspect (of perhaps many) that threw some people off ...mainly, the fact that Sam was "roofied" and tied to a bed. I thought it was a great send up of the film Misery, and since Becky didn't actually do ( Read more... )
So the basic theory (as i understand it) goes like this: We've got certain ideas in our heads as to what constitutes masculine and feminine, and part of this is roles: men as the actors, women as the acted on, men as penetrating, women as penetrated, so on and so forth, I know you've already heard this before but I like starting from first principles. Also, I'm tired and if I don't go this step by step, I'll miss something.
The most easily identifiable aspect of it is that there's this idea that men can't be raped, at least not by women. And mostly this is rooted in old fashioned sexism: it runs contrary to a lot of really stupid ideas about what rape is, about gender roles (Women are the raped, duh! Men all want sex all the time from every female body. It's women's jobs to be the sexual gatekeepers!) The old feminist saying is "patriarchy hurts men too." There are as many poisonous ideas about masculinity as femininity in the misogynistic paradigm.
Then you've got the fact that a lot of humor relies on reversals of expectation. And the thing with reversals, whether used for humor or not, is that they're often used as a way of confirming the social order.
So anyway, the long and short of is that we've got this little social bias in our heads that says the right way of the world is men beating women and men raping women. That's not to say we condone it, just that it's kind of in our brains as the way the world works on the same level of dogs chasing cats and the sun rising in the east. Thus its use for humor: at some deep level, it's regarded as absurd...and impossible.
Which also IMO explains its use as a horror trope, too...especially in this show. In straight, non-supernatural horror, the rapist (or threat) will usually be male and the horror will be of an...emasculating kind. It puts a man (strong, active agent, penetrator, aggressor) into the role of a woman (weak, passive, penetrated, victim). When you add a supernatural element into it, you're throwing it into unnatural monster territory, which allows for truer reversals (demon little girls, beautiful women with giant phallic arm-spikes) that don't threaten the order. Humor can use reversals while confirming the status quo because it's highlighting the reversal as absurd, rather than a threat.
In defense of the bechdel test: it's just a tool to point out a trend in media as a whole. It's not a way of saying whether something is good or bad or not. It should be really easy to pass- any two women having a conversation that is not about a man, but it kind of isn't, but we're sort of blind to it. I mean, the reverse of it is nearly impossible to find (i've looked!) Even in the most sappy chick flicks, at some point, there will be two men who discuss something that isn't a woman/women.
It really shouldn't be used to judge movies on an individual basis (though it has to be applied on an individual basis), because some of the movies that pass it are really, horribly misogynistic, and vice versa.
ETA: I'm really sorry if this sounds all very duh. My brain isn't working very well right now and I can't seem to think in more sophisticated ways. But it's something I think about a lot! And now I have a chance to say something. Except I'm sucking at it and probably sounding kind of insulting.
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The funny thing about this "old fashioned sexism" is that it's actually fairly modern. The misogyny isn't, but the the "women as sexual gatekeepers" is. Back in the middle ages, it was the reverse. Women were considered the horndogs that needed to be kept in line by men. It's one aspect of the whole Witch-Trials thing that goes relatively unmentioned in popular histories. It was of course due to the sex-negativity of the church (along with the misogyny). If women are bad, and sex is bad, then women must be the sexual aggressor...or some such faulty logic. Today it's been reversed, yet, still men are considered better than women, go figure.
That all goes to say: I do very much agree that patriarchy also hurts men.
So anyway, the long and short of is that we've got this little social bias in our heads that says the right way of the world is men beating women and men raping women. That's not to say we condone it, just that it's kind of in our brains as the way the world works on the same level of dogs chasing cats and the sun rising in the east. Thus its use for humor: at some deep level, it's regarded as absurd...and impossible.
Very succinctly said, and also, when you lay it out this simply, it seems rather absurd that we (as a society) find it absurd or impossible. As individuals, of course, some of us know better, and wouldn't find it humourous at all.
In defense of the bechdel test: it's just a tool to point out a trend in media as a whole. It's not a way of saying whether something is good or bad or not.
True. I guess I should have been more specific. I hate it they way some people apply it as though it IS the absolute measure of misogyny. It's a fine tool for pointing out the weakness in media as a whole, but it doesn't apply in all scenarios, which I don't think people realize. Because, as you say, some things can pass "the test" and still be horribly misogynistic.
ETA: I'm really sorry if this sounds all very duh. My brain isn't working very well right now and I can't seem to think in more sophisticated ways. But it's something I think about a lot! And now I have a chance to say something. Except I'm sucking at it and probably sounding kind of insulting.
Don't worry! You're fine! I'm not insulted in the least. Actually, as someone who was raised by mathematicians, anything that begins with first principles is something that I like. ;)
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Well, the role of women in the church is a whole other can of worms, and it's not like the virgin/temptress fallacy was/is exclusive to Christianity. But AFAIK, you're right about the rationale shift being recent--just look at Viennese literature from the 1890s and 1900s, where a lot of authors/poets/playwrights were practically jumping up and down and shouting to draw attention to how messed up misogyny and sexual politics were making everyone, and there were really disturbing pseudo-scientific debates over the personhood of women going on. One of Freud's proteges even wrote a book called Geschlecht und Charakter (Gender and Character) that had the following theses:
1. Women have no souls and are inherently depraved.
2. Jews are just like women.
3. The British are just like Jews (except for Shakespeare, who still wasn't as awesome as Beethoven).
Yeeeeeah. Fun reading assignments for my 19th Century German Lit class. :P Only time I've ever been outraged enough by a short story to attempt a fix-it AU in German--I've forgotten the title of the original story, but it was about a Catholic nobleman who'd sowed his wild oats and was no longer healthy enough to have sex but decided he wanted to marry someone who looked like the Madonna in his favorite Pieta statue. So he married a pretty, innocent girl from a good Protestant family and emotionally abused her until she fit his ideal, but then she got the baby bug and read Song of Solomon and figured out where babies come from. Cue extremely desperate housewife having a one-night stand with hubby's live-in doctor, who genuinely loved her, and then (according to one ending) killing herself out of guilt.
ARGH. Still makes me mad. (In my fix-it, someone helps the girl get an annulment and run away to America with the doctor.)
You know which medieval poet surprised me in a good way, though? Chaucer, especially in Troilus and Criseyde. Most versions of the story paint Criseyde as the villain of the piece, but Chaucer dedicates his version to women who don't have a voice and goes out of his way to highlight just how few rights and how few choices Criseyde actually had as a young widow in Trojan society and as the daughter of a traitor. He can't get around the bad choices she did make, but he never portrays her as a temptress or her change of affections as malicious; his Troilus is an emo git who needs to get over himself, and his Pandarus is CREEPY as well as being a master manipulator. There's a scene early on, for example, where Criseyde, still in mourning, politely declines a letter from Troilus, and Pandarus stuffs it down her dress--and he's supposed to be her guardian. *shudder*
tl;dr: Yes. Good point.
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That's all really interesting stuff. And you are right, of course, I didn't mean to imply that the virgin/temptress thing was exclusively the fault of the Christian church. I was just thinking of the witch trials in Europe, and at the time the catholic church was the predominant social/cultural leader.
I didn't know that about Chaucer, that's pretty damn cool of him.
I was had a misogynistic German lit PROF, haha, I wonder if that's why we never studied misogyny in all that German lit we read... :P
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Fair enough, and it's true that there were all kinds of problems and abuses within the Catholic Church at that time. (For some reason I was thinking of Salem, which... had its own spiritual/social problems.) See also: Joan of Arc.
There's also the fascinating RL case from 1698 that inspired Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book, in which an Italian nobleman murdered his wife for suspected infidelity, got caught, and claimed he had the right to do so because she was his property. The wife (who didn't die right away) explained in her deposition that the husband had been abusive for a long time, that she was faithful but had feared for her life and her unborn child, and that most of the local clerics wouldn't do anything, aside from the one who helped her run away. The case ultimately went to the papal court because the husband was an ex-cleric (second son), and Pope Innocent XII ruled that the husband was in the wrong. Had that crime occurred under the Borgia Popes... well, there's no telling.
Browning sides with the wife, btw, but presents all of the he said/she said/he said/*they* said before giving the pope's verdict.
Re: your prof: that could well be! My profs were all women. :D And I actually got to use my fic for our final project that semester, which was cool.
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Anyway, once again, thanks for the cool info!
I had one female prof (in German lit), and I think we DID study the female literature from the time of salons and such...for the life of me though, I cannot remember anything about that course, besides the day that I fell on a patch of ice when leaving, and the professor had to help me off the ground. Haha, I didn't hit my head, but that'd be a nice excuse for not remembering anything from the course. I must admit, the lit courses were not my strong suit. :P
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I also remember sitting through a talk given by someone studying medieval pastorales who was arguing that some writer was a proto-feminist because he (the writer) argued that women shouldn't be blamed for sin (...because they're unable to control themselves, and it obviously means that their men aren't doing their jobs). And the whole room kind of went, "ummmm....."
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I think you are misremembering - though, I'm sure it was possible for men to also be tried as witches, the way it was taught to me, or at least, the description given for witches, was very much focused on women.
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This is how I remember the conversation: I was on a great ranty diatribe about Minoan Crete, which has long been imagined as a matriarchal paradise without really any evidence (of anything regarding social structures, matriarchal or otherwise), and that the public perceptions and fantasies had (again, without much evidence) become so firmly entrenched that even the scholarship had become recursive (a bit like that recent xkcd strip), and that this was making it very hard to do my research on the interpretation of Minoan art.... which then lead to a discussion by someone else about the perceptions of vikings having horned helmets, which somehow got me back on the subject of how the Minoan Matriarchy was an idea latched onto by Victorian evolutionists and then handed down to second wave essentialist feminists, who ran with the idea big time.
And then the medieval person chipped in that their biggest pet peeve was the witch trials, and the way the narrative has been shaped by early feminists and neopagan interpretations.
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That's interesting about Minoan society. I didn't know that. I LOVED that xkcd strip, because it was so true...and something I'm sure I've fallen victim to myself.
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This is non-obvious. The figures are all so stylized that they all have broad chests and wasp waists. There are some figures that are more obviously women or men, but there are plenty of times when the figures are identical. So I started digging. I wanted to know why that assumption had been made. But in the end, the citations all were fairly recursive...except for the ones that went back to Arthur Evans. I actually dug up Arthur Evan's work on the subject, and the first time he mentions it, he just states that obviously, the white figures are female and the red male. Period. A little more digging- into his personal journals- revealed that his assistant, who was the one with the real archaeological cred, was the one who suggested it. The explanation was no more than, "That's how the Egyptians did it."
At which point I went ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!. 100 years of scholarship on minoan society, all pretty much based on the fact that one early archaeologist assumed that the Minoans would have used the same aesthetics of sexual differentiation as the ancient egyptians.
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I feel like there should be an expose on this in a major publication - that's insane.
Mind you, things like that happen in history ALL THE TIME. There's a particular German historian who wrote a book that everyone refers back to - because it's bold, and controversial, I guess...but, if you actually read it, it's NOT good history. He doesn't back up any of his "facts" with evidence. It's basically an opinion piece, but people refer to it as though he actually did the appropriate research. It's ridiculous.
I wonder if that early archaeological assistant realized that their assumption is the bases of 100 years of scholarship :P Man... I don't know the years on the Minoans vs. the Egyptians...but, I mean, is there any evidence they were influenced by them whatsoever? That just seems...I mean, even if they WERE influenced, they might have gotten it the wrong way round and made the women red. Stuff like that happens all the time!
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I don't really think any of this would be so much of a shocking revelation...and if I ever got my PhD, I would probably try to get something published along those lines (with a lot more research, obviously- I was somewhat hobbled by the fact that most of my research had to be done in the 6 weeks I was home and able to get access to the UC Berkeley library), if only to see someone argue the other side.
The problem is that there really isn't anything to go on. We can't read linear A, but even if we could, it's probably not anything more than storage inventories. Knossos is problematic because of the reconstruction. There's very little we can know, as is evidenced by everything we have of Knossos that's not related to the frescoes. ("Well, this room was possibly a kitchen. Or a bedroom. Or a place ritual sacrifices were. This room is a cellar with three pillers with markings. It was probably religious. God knows why. Here is a mysterious thingy, we call them kernoi. We don't actually know if they're all the same object or not, they're just things that are generally roundish with a circle in the middle." )
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And good point about the Mycenean/Minoan split. I remember that from a high school project I did on the Myceneans. Man, I'm going WAY back. There was a time when I thought I'd go into ancient history, but then I got sucked into modern Germany :P
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To be fair, though, I didn't get that sense from Chaucer. The only reason Criseyde even gives Troilus the time of day is that her position--no property rights, no family--forces her to rely on Pandarus' protection, and Pandarus is all but physically pushing her into Troilus' bed because Troilus is a twit who's used to having women fall at his feet and doesn't know how to react when Criseyde doesn't. It's dub-con at best.
I never really studied the European witchcraft trials, either, but the stories/legends of *false* accusations that I know are all about women being accused by men who wanted something from them. One of the ghosts at Glamis, for example, is supposed to be a virtuous widow who refused the advances of James V; he framed her for witchcraft and confiscated the castle when she was dead.
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