Examined Misogyny and Don Jon

For a film that opens with a barrage of breasts and butts, and makes a hero out of a porn-obsessed male pick-up artist, Don Jon is an encouragingly critical, if shallow, discourse on modern masculinity. This trend of examined misogyny, arguably fostered by the popularity of Mad Men's Don Draper's conflicted womanizing, has grown in recent years with mixed results. Shows like Californication and the new HBO series Hello Ladies often simply make light of casual sexism. And this phenomenon has extended itself outside the realm of film and television into popular music, namely Hip Hop (think Drake's "Marvin's Room" or Kanye West's "Runaway").

Don Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is your typical night club regular. He is always on the prowl; that is until he meets Barbara (Scarlett Johansson). He has to have this "dime" and, of course, she withholds sex from him. What follows is a domestication project. He tries to get in her pants and she tries to make him into her dream guy. Only one of them succeeds. And you can guess who. The film does, however, present an interesting parallel between his idealization of sex in porn and her identification with the heightened love found in romantic films that is reminiscent of our discussions on body genres. It also highlights the emptiness of his promiscuity, though he's never made to seem gross in the way a woman in the same position might be.

Where it falters, though, is the notion that if male chauvinists simply find the right lover, all their bad habits and questionable behavior will disappear. It ignores larger problems within society that create these kind of people. Is it enough for cinema and television to simply present reformed and ambivalent sexism as a model for heterosexual males? One wishes there wasn't such a depiction of monolithic maleness, and that media representations would exist which not only subvert the stereotypes of masculinity but refuse to participate in them.

The Personal Aspect of Feminism

As we have discussed a few times in class, feminism is personal. The word means something different to everyone. In the beginning of the Barbara Hammer reading titled, “Lesbian Film Making: Self Birthing,” this became even more evident. The article begins with the quote, “THE LESBIAN FILM ARTIST BIRTHS HERSELF.” Part of the self-birthing process is innately personal. Hammer then goes on to state, “As there has never been a lesbian filmmaker whose life and work I could study, I study my own life, and by doing so make it work that attempts to partly fill the dearth of lesbian herstory for lesbians of the twenty-first century.” Hammer’s self-birthing and reflections of her films allow the reader to understand her belief of feminism. For Hammer, feminism is rooted in the “lesbian/feminist/women.” She expresses her view of feminism through her filmmaking. Hammer’s films such as Dyketactics and Menses expose the truths of women's sensual and pleasurable experience. Through understanding Hammer's films, it is clear that her expereince of feminism is as a lesbian and as a woman. 

In response to Emily Matters’ "Why We Don’t Need Feminism"

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/why-we-dont-need-feminism/

            I recently came across this article on thoughtcatalog.com and found it to be really relevant to some of the things we have been talking about in class. This article, in my opinion, is filled with irrelevant facts and statistics in an attempt to talk down on the effectiveness of feminism. 

            Matters bolds the first sentence of each first body paragraph. The first sentence of the first body paragraph reads, “We don’t need feminism because it doesn’t quell violence or rape.” She subsequently lists off statistics and facts to back up this statement. Matters writes, “many scholars and advocacy groups believe male on male rape in regular life is radically underrepresented and perhaps even more pervasive than male on female rape,” adding that feminism’s vision is limited, “for misogyny is simply a side effect of man’s biological disposition towards aggression and violence.” This statement may be true in its entirety, but nowhere does Matters mention that women are never raped, and that misogyny does not exist. Matters is simply making excuses for why misogyny exists and claims that while we are spending too much time advocating for females’ rights, men are being raped by other men more than females are being raped by men. Rather than downplaying the percentage of female rape victims, which is what Matters is attempting to do, her statements are shedding light on the issue of rape as a whole for both genders. We should not rid of feminism altogether just because men are being raped, too. This does not make sense.

            Matters begins the next paragraph with, “We don’t need feminism because women don’t need to be patronized or coddle about their career choices.” Who ever said women were being coddled? The largest problem regarding gender equality in the workplace is the glass ceiling–– the statistical fact that women earn less than men do for doing the same exact work. Matters claims that the wage gap is “feminist propaganda.” Her reasoning is that women don’t care about money as much as men do and tend to choose lower-paying jobs on their own and not because of societal prejudices. However, women choosing lower-paying jobs has never been an issue for feminists, but rather that when women choose a higher-paying job, they are paid substantially lower than their coworkers.

            The final body paragraph begins with, “We don’t need feminism because we need more, not less, virility.” This statement is a very poor reason for why society “does not need feminism.” If we really don’t need feminism, then it shouldn’t be because we need more testosterone.

            Although it is healthy to have debates about the validity and usefulness of feminism, I believe that feminism is very necessary to achieve gender equality. After all, how many battles have been won in silence?

Erotic or Educational?

I have a problem with the screenings on Monday that is not so much due to the provocativeness of the images but more to do with understanding the creator's goals. The clips clearly revolve around the sexual nature of lesbianism, but I could not place a finger on what story they were trying to tell or what lesson they were trying to teach. While I do not believe that the creators were trying to demonize lesbianism, I cannot comprehend that they were trying to encourage understanding and acceptance, as the way lesbianism was construed in those clips made it seem like a perversion rather than something natural and beautiful. 

   The music was extremely eerie and the fading, overlapping images were reminiscent of a horror film. I felt exactly the same tense and fearful feeling that I get during a horror movie, and it was not due to the sexual nature of the images, but rather the way that they were portrayed. It occurred to me that the creators were most likely using the shock factor of blatant sexual lesbianism in order to show how unashamed they are of their sexuality. However, these clips reduced lesbianism to just raw sex. The nature of the clips was purely carnal - they showed and told stories of women who simply couldn't keep themselves from pleasing one another, rather than pairing that sexual desire with women who feel emotion for each other. This film felt rather indicative of how so many men today view lesbians - as an entirely sexual object. Two women making out has become something that turns men on, rather than a loving or affectionate act between two women. In a sense, I feel that many lesbians today are violated every time they show affection in public, as often a man indirectly feels their pleasure too. Lesbians are extremely sexualized in the public eye and when a clip like this that appears to have more substance at the beginning turns out to be almost purely sexually too, I find myself disappointed. While lesbians and the portrayal of lesbians shouldn't shy away from a sexual nature simply because it pleases men, I feel that clips that tell a story that appears to educate the viewer about lesbianism should have more dimensions. In fact, I feel as though the sinister music and film style in those clips served only to alienate the viewer from the topic.

In a world where homosexuality is such a provocative subject and opinions are so widely divided, I think it is a little careless to make clips like this that do not educate or encourage an understanding. And if they do neither of those things, a clip of that sexual a nature is little more than porn shot in an artistic manner. 

Wicht

"Pleasure from victims" and Consumerism: the case of Korean dramas

This week’s readings are about gender and melodrama, the women’s genre. In Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess while equally examining three “body” genres – pornography, horror and melodrama Williams contributes insightful examination toward the melodrama. In contrast to the feminist empirical assumption that melodrama offers pleasure of viewing for male only, she argues, this women’s genre also offers female viewer the “suspension of pleasure” and “pleasure from victims.” From postmodernist lens, Joy investigates the connection among women, TV melodrama and consumerism.  Like Williams, Joyrich avoiding looking down melodramas, he rather finds its potential in softening viewers’ anxiety when they have to face social and ideological crisis because of the ability offering illusion of the order. Joy argues that because of the cultural place in which women suffer the patriarchy, women do not have the necessary distance toward images presented on the screen. This closeness inspires women’s narcissism. Therefore, they are attracted to images on TV and become subjects of advertising in the depressing search for the real self.

Rather than adopting Williams’ and Joyrich’s arguments to analyze Far From Heaven, I would like to take an alternative road. In the followings, I will clarify the “suspension of pleasure”  (Williams) and the relations of female and consumerism (Joyrich) through examining blossom of Korean dramas in the 1990s in Asia and Vietnam. 

In the late 1990s and early 2000s Korean dramas swept over East Asia, pioneering for the invasion of Korean Wave in many countries in this area. Particularly, in 1997, the show What is Love All About was broadcasted on China Central Television quickly became a phenomenal hit. Since then, a fever of Korean dramas quickly exploded in the neighboring countries such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Vietnam. I still remember clearly how my mom and I excitedly waited every episode of The Autum Heart when I was a high school student. Everybody talked about Korean dramas; they became a hot topic gathering people together. 

Although most of these Korean shows have a noticeably banal formula of triangle love in which one of protagonists dies of cancer, Vietnamese viewers still wholeheartedly embraced because of its sentimental storylines and romance. Night after night my mom and I were crying for the harsh faith of the female character, a poor women in her twenty-something in The Autum Heart. We cried because of our impotence as Joyrich points out in his article. As viewers, we cannot help her out of the severe situation or even tell her lover about her disease as my mom wished. While the passivity made us annoyed, the suspension of the story offered us tremendous pleasure. “What is next?” was the question most discussed in our conversations. We guessed abilities that might happen to her. Then we were looking forward to the next episode to check them out. It should emphasize here that it is not only the suspension of pleasure attracting us to the show but also the pleasure of experiencing the pain of the female protagonist. Despite of being presented as a victim from the patriarchal perspective, the female character possesses the most valuable gift of life: the eternal love. It is this fantasy of being loved forever that maintains the pressure of viewing of female. By this, I would foster Williams’ argument that female viewers also share the pleasure of being object of sadistic male’s gaze rather than merely suffer it. Moreover, for most of Vietnamese female viewers who are unfamiliar with feminist ideas have been got used to the ideas of being passive in the norms of Confucian society, it is unlikely for them – back in the 1990s at least- to expect any subversion in the representations of gender on TV screen. Instead, they enjoy the illusion of being love at the cost of being passive that melodramas generously furnish. Mentioning this, I would emphasize the importance of cultural specificity in the assessment of pleasure.  

From the societal angle, it is the abilities to satisfy the desire of female viewers whose harsh lives sharply contrast with the comfortable lives represented in this genre that has filled up the  “wild fire” of Korean drama phenomenon. The representation of the glamorous city life in the Korean shows quickly attracted the Vietnamese viewers’ attention. It is worth noting that Vietnamese government had just accepted the policy of free market in 1986 and consumerism went along with capitalism to the country since then. Quickly but surely, Korean dramas -within the Korean government’s aim spreading Korean cultures over Asia has established the new conception of fashion standard-  Korean style in Vietnamese society. Everybody wanted to dress and make up just like Korean actors/actress. For over fifteen years, Made-in-Korea cosmetic products and Korean style –oriented fashions have been Vietnamese teens’ and even middle-aged women’s favorite. 

My comment did not intend to this length. What I wrote above is to elaborate on this week readings’ arguments on a fresher land, Korean dramas. I would like to on the one hand make use of the feminist theory; on the other, this take offers me a chance to look at the effects of the cultural specificity on the response toward melodrama genre.  

Far From Heaven: A Plastic Capsule Described as Pastiche

I have to start off by confessing that I am a huge fan of melodramas. Yes, I subscribe to the womanly "weepie" film-- often citing films such as Mildred Pierce or my favorite film of all time, Casablanca, as guilty pleasures. This is one of the reasons I appreciated Williams' article on the gratuitous nature of referring to these pleasure-seeking films as gratuitous. It's a complete baseless critique to call these films overtly emotional because that is where the audience derives pleasure from. (Williams, 728) These films are not viewed for their adherence to reality, but the spectacle of that reality being challenged. Williams cites Moretti: "Pathos is thus a surrender to reality, but it is a surrender that pays homage to the ideal that tried to wage war on it." (739)

In light of this, I was incredibly surprised to find that Far From Heaven (Haynes, 2002) did not yield that usual pleasure-filled-spectacle I am used to with this genre. I completely understand that this film is an homage to a time when these issues were first being addressed (and taking them past the euphemisms Willis describes within Sirk's films), but the post-modernist tendencies within the film almost make light of the issues being discussed.

Willis describes Haynes' homage to Sirk as "retrospectatorship" in terms of his adhering to the style of the great melodramatist through pastiche (literally frame-for-frame copying his opening scene), yet going even further by providing "false notes" that upset the popular image of the 50's familial unit (Frank embarrassing Cathy at the party, the complete disregard of the children). While I can appreciate the attention to detail and the extra steps Haynes takes to try and address these cultural issues that are still temporally relevant, the artificial container it comes within is a distraction from the real issue at hand.

Perhaps this seems contradictory to my praise of Williams earlier, but the "montage of memory" that creates a completely artificial world, as though we were in a dream-like trance, did not sit well. The canted angles to show the "off-ness" of the situation. The dissolves and fade-outs a recall of Classical Hollywood. It was almost plastic and thus allowed no actual emotional connection. Even Bernstein's soundtrack (the only saving grace with its simplicity) could not save the formalistic qualities of the film.

Another reason I couldn't connect with the film was because I was in no way connected with the protagonist, Cathy. It's as though we're supposed to assume as an audience that Cathy won't be progressive because she is a home caretaker in the 50's and are instantly supposed to change our minds when we see her support the NAACP and the friendship she develops with her African American gardener. Is she automatically progressive because of this? Not racist = good person / ahead of her time? Her life literally falls apart because her patriarchal world goes to pieces, but she can find a way to build herself up again because of her "progressiveness" in terms of race? The film is even self-reflexive about borrowing from a film that is self-reflexive in terms of utilizing race as a dramatic quality.

I think that though many of the issues addressed in Far From Heaven are still in existence today, the way in which they are presented -- using pastiche as a capsule -- simplify the issues. Yes, Haynes takes the extra step further than Sirk ever did, but it still falls flat in representation.

The Regressive Nature of Cathy in Far From Heaven

I agree with Kali’s post that the character of Cathy in Far From Heaven is quite regressive. The film addresses an array of sexual, cultural and racial differences. Frank, Cathy’s husband, is a closeted homosexual, and Raymond, Cathy’s gardener, deals with a plethora of racial issues including his daughter getting stoned by a group of white boys. However, in the end, life goes on for everyone except for Cathy, proving that the deepest cutting issue in the end lies in ones gender.

In the 1950’s, homosexuality and race were major issues that were looked down upon by many. However, by the end of the film, Frank is assumed to lead a happy life with his male lover, never questioned or caught by the ostracizing eyes of society. Raymond, too, is accepted by the black community, and when they turn against him after learning about his relationship with Cathy, he has the opportunity to leave and start a new life for himself and his daughter. Cathy, on the other hand, is not granted this opportunity. She cannot start a new life for herself because, while she is a very defiant woman, she is still a woman who must assume the role of a typical 50’s mother and housewife. No matter how much she has defied society by engaging in a relationship with Raymond, she cannot just abandon her children or her womanly duties. Additionally, she was never given the choice to stay with Frank. He was the one who declared that the marriage was over and wanted a divorce, despite Cathy’s pleas to try to make the marriage work.

While I do not think that Cathy is a progressive female character, I do think that this film is undoubtedly feminist. The portrayal of Cathy as a typical 50’s housewife and the conclusion that no matter how defiant she is of her gender role she is always stuck in it, gives the message that gender inequality is always among us, no matter how hard we try to defy it. Overall, the examples listed above prove that while there are many deep cutting issues that society faces, a woman’s role in society (something that is not looked as strongly upon today as issues of race and sexuality) is a deep cutting issue that must be carefully analyzed and reformed.