"You Still Can't Sit With Us" (Mean Girls Extended Edition)

So I figured I might as well pop back around and do the second half of the post I started like a million years ago about Mean Girls, now that several weeks have passed, and nobody is Googling it anymore. I have a person problem with not wanting to write about things that are topically relevant, so this should be way more comfortable for me now, I'm guessing.

So toward the end of Mean Girls, there's a scene where Tina Fey stands at the front of a gym full of female students, Betty Buckley style, and delivers a series of regurgitated culture-of-female-aggression critiques about how adolescent women are backstabbing, two-faced, and manipulative, and the solutions to their (our) problems is to start banding together and supporting each other more instead of being so flaky. Lots of these points are probably salient, but the way they're presented within the larger context of the narrative made me really think about the way female gender identity specifically is often presented in media like this.

As in the real world, male gender identity in Mean Girls pretty much doesn't exist. Though the egotism and stupidity of male characters is occasionally lampooned, the actively predatory characters are all women. The movie is concerned only with the action of being female. The female characters are actively female; the male characters are neutral. In fact, one of the things I didn't like about Mean Girls, from a purely formal perspective, was how dramatically unsatisfying the neutrality of the male characters was. Aaron, for example -- the movie's dumb jock love interest, who constantly waffles back and forth between Cady and her Satanic arch nemesis Regina -- was a really, really boring character. This wasn't just unsatisfying -- it became, at a certain point, problematic. I kept waiting for the movie to take Aaron to task for shifting his alliances so casually, but he just stayed bland and innocuous throughout the whole movie, despite how inherently provocative his character arc was.

Mean Girls acts like it's interested in destroying the concept of constructed, "false" gender. It sees young women's performance of femininity as a shallow way of volleying for social power and distinction, not as a "real" expression of anything. Through its condemnatory dissection of female culture, Mean Girls seemed to be suggesting that traditional gender expression is a dangerous and ugly thing, and that the way women act, think, and see the world as a result of being socialized as women, is the best example of how horrible traditional gender identification can be. This is something that a lot of movies, books, and TV shows are guilty of, even (and sometimes especially) when they are made for a female audience. The concept of "female culture" is almost exclusively negative, something to be feared and avoided, or at least approached with caution (or occasionally, in more affectionate treatments, to be laughed at). When it's not horrible or farcical, it's usually because the "culture" the film or TV show describes is highly non-traditional, or is the result of some sort of self-conscious reclamation.

I'm not suggesting the passive aggressive posturing that Mean Girls depicts isn't real, or that it shouldn't be examined or critiqued. What I am suggesting, though, is that explorations of these problems are almost never as multi-faceted as they deserve to be. Because they're not more comprehensive, more studied, or more sincere, they almost always reveal things they didn't mean to reveal, and unintentionally obscure other facets of their subject matter that could have easily been treated with more resonance and insight.

Corporate Sleaze

So I woke up this morning to discover this article on my Google + feed regarding recent events concerning Hobby Lobby that you may have vaguely heard about, just as I had sort of vaguely heard about them prior to this morning.

Basically what’s happening is that Hobby Lobby is getting ready to waste people’s tax money on a Supreme Court case intended to determine whether or not their company should be allowed to decline coverage for birth control to its employees on “sincere moral grounds” or some bullshit, I’m too cranky right now to go back and reference the actual language.

I won’t dwell overly-long on this because the problems with this court case even happening seem obvious to me, but it does tie in with what I’ve been trying to talk about generally in the last few posts I’ve done, and I’m going to try to explain why it is that current events such as this are relevant to things like my post about J.D. Salinger from a few weeks ago, or the way a person like Woody Allen, and other people who like and support him, have been allowed to speak and behave in public regarding the very serious criminal sexual allegations made against him.

On a larger-than-just-individual scale, the Hobby Lobby court case is about deciding who controls cultural narrative. Narrative is something we think of as being important only in a fictional environment, and that narratives created in the real world are something that only affect individuals, or relationships between individuals. But narrative affects everything, and its ramifications in real life are as immediate and significant as in fiction.

The Vice article talks a lot in the second half about corporate personhood, a ludicrous legal concept which has already been thoroughly lampooned by many people cleverer than myself (the documentary The Corporation is one example). The idea of the narrative that’s being created here is that it makes sense for “a person,” i.e. the ostensibly personlike entity that is Hobby Lobby, to be able to express its opinion about birth control because as a “person,” it should have “freedom of expression.”

A lot of misogynistic violence occurs because of bad narratives. The bad narrative that the Supreme Court is considering about Hobby Lobby is racist and culturally bigoted beyond mere misogyny, but what ties it together most importantly with the individual human examples above is that it’s being discussed in terms of “personal expression” and “perspective,” as if these things are always equal. What’s really happening is that Hobby Lobby is expressing the desire to cause measurable harm to people, in the form of a brutal invasion into their private lives, and its opponents are expressing the desire not to be invaded and brutalized in this way. By entertaining the arguments of the corporation, the Supreme Court is treating these two expressions of “individual perspective” as if they are wholly equivalent and worthy of equal consideration.

If you talk about people having “different perspectives” or emphasize interpretive ambiguities, you are siding with the person or entity with the greatest ability to brutalize or oppress the other. You’re pretending that developing a narrative always starts from square one, when in reality, it’s a complex that is built slowly over time, like a military unit.

Manifesto

So after reviewing my post about Salinger from a few weeks ago, I've been trying to think about what specific ideas are really motivating me to do a blog like this in the first place. The central, binding theology is still vague to me and I don't know if I could really articulate exactly what the common threads are that seem to be pulling together into something I want to pursue.

I don't want to do a Feminist blog in the regular sense because I don't honestly feel like my views are driven only by Feminist theory. For many years I was not a Feminist at all, and although I identify as one now, my real reason for wanting to hone my skills as a writer, and a human being, in this particular way is that I have such a personal lack of resolution about the subject.

I am a cisgendered female raised mainly by cisgendered females, and for a long time, due partly to my rocky relationships with the other women in my life, I felt really enraged and alienated by the entire concept of femininity. The idea now of trying to explore and absorb Feminist theory is just beginning to make some sense, and it's been a tumultuous shift. Rather than apologizing for my perspective, what I want to do is use this blog to explore the ideas I'm encountering as they're happening to me in real time. My posts will conflict a lot and will be extremely vulnerable to criticism, which is the only reason why I think the project is really worth doing in the first place.

The issue at the heart of the Salinger post is the issue of narrative. Whatever literature may exist about "narrative" in relationships between human beings, or in gender relationships specifically, I'm not familiar with. But what was meaningful to me about Salinger was that a lot of people apologize for him, and that the reason for those apologies appears to be reverence for Salinger's ability to create narrative. To his defenders, Salinger wasn't sexually exploitative, or even careless -- he was "obsessed with purity" or "haunted by the specter of lost innocence," and his projection of those values onto the women he interacted with means more than whatever actually happened between them as people.

This is also true of Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, et al. These men represent something conceptually important to people because they have the ability to create narratives, and the narratives transcend collaborative reality.

Narrative can be an extremely powerful weapon, and although it's important in all histories of oppression, I think it has particular importance with relation to gender discrimination, because instead of one giant historical narrative, there are a million small narratives happening every day which support the larger narrative of gendered inferiority. The narrative of gender is hypertextual, mysterious. Sometimes it is very alluring.