#because it all comes back to victorian perceptions of female sexuality

[ginnyggginny]

Francoise Gilot painted “Adam Forcing Eve to Eat An Apple” in 1946, the year she moved in with Picasso to become his young muse. In a New York Times article, Alexandra Schwartz quotes Gilot saying that this is no accident. The painting depicts a woman looking at the viewer with an apple forced into her mouth by an angry man with furrowed brows, and the Biblical title implies a sense of lost innocence and hindsight realization of her own unfortunate situation. The description of a “forced” act calls to mind descriptions of sexual assault, a nonconsensual penetration. Gilot is keenly aware of this connection, as she compares Picasso to the monstrous pirate Bluebeard, who 

… didn’t cut the heads [of his wives] completely off… he preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove that there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. (Schwartz)

Gilot clearly delineates the emotionally manipulative tactics that Picasso used, with his desire to keep all his women at arm’s length. Her description of him keeping his muses “hung by a thread” (Schwartz), which he holds in his hand, shows the way Picasso treated her and others as doll-like objects that he could use however and whenever he wanted, and that he had a sense of entitlement towards their bodies, due to a successful career and an inflated career. Even today Picasso is cited as one of the most famous artists in the world, with Guernica and Weeping Woman being some of his most well-known. It is worth noting that Francoise Gilot was a painter in her own right, and she became a muse in an effort to make connections within the art world that would improve her own career by association. She expected that working with Picasso would bring her artistic opportunities, though likely did not expect the mistreatment she received. And yet she is not famous. The tradition of the muse is named after the Greek goddesses who blessed men with inspiration, but it is most famously used referring to the women who posed for portraits, dating back to the Renaissance when classical-style realistic paintings came back into fashion. The essay “Sexual Violence: Baroque to Surrealist” by John Loughery claims that the proliferation of nearly-nude women in Renaissance painting, so ubiquitous in art museums, comes from a more sinister tradition, describing that the paintings “speak volumes about the power factor inherent in the post-Renaissance tradition of the female nude, and, with their riveting straightforward glance, they point ahead to Manet’s Olympia, Zola’s Nana, and an avalanche of prose and imagery that affirms women’s comfort with their own sexuality, or male projections about that level of comfort” (Loughery 299). This essay sees these centuries-old masterpieces not as ethereal works of art that transcend sexuality, but as works of pornography that were designed to titillate the viewer and bypass the highly religious era they came from with their classical setting. Putting aside the oil brushstrokes, Edouard Manet-- and Pablo Picasso-- are simply depicting the nude body of a young woman. While in many cases this situation may have been consensual, Loughery claims that it would be hard to put aside the inherent power dynamic. Like a high-ranking executive of a film company taking advantage of a young woman, a famous and well-connected artist would certainly hold sway over an ambitious young girl. It would be hard to ignore the age difference between the muse and the artist, the often married man and the often-underage ingenue. Also, the idea that “male projections about that level of comfort” discounts the assumption that the women involved would be comfortable with her depiction. Women are often expected to be beautiful and available, Andrea Pino-Silva argues in the essay “I Believe You, Como Eres”, with their “success determined by the boys we charmed at our quinceaneras, of the lengths we took to prepare ourselves to be wives (Pino-Silva)”. There is a clear gender division, visible in every situation from a muse sitting for a portrait to a girl in a ball gown at a quinceanera. The man is expected to have power, he is masculine, the one who asks the girl to dance, the one who moves his model into the position he wants to paint. The woman is just beautiful and must work to keep herself that way. Not only can the artist use his own power and position to take advantage of the muse, he can choose to make her appear however he wants, like a posable doll-- he can make her look like she deserves whatever attention she gets.

Nowadays, the world of artist-and-muse shows itself differently, as the prominent art forms have shifted with time. The familiar story of a man exploiting a woman for creative gain is now most often associated with the film industry, in particular with director Harvey Weinstein and his actress victims. In the case of Weinstein, this is put in a very sinister light with Salma Hayek, who wanted to star in a movie about the artist Frida Kahlo but was forced to include sexual scenes in order to appease Weinstein’s own sexual desires. The muse and the model are very similar, in age and in public perception-- being a beautiful woman paid to look good and inspire works of art. One such model/muse is Kaori, a sitter for the Japanese photographer Araki Hirohiko. During the time of the #MeToo Movement in 2018 and 2019, when millions of women came out with their stories of sexual harassment and assault, Kaori told her story to the New York Times, describing how the photographer emotionally abused her. She describes Araki as treating her “like an object (Kaori)”, when “he asked [her] to do abnormal things, and [she] did them as though they were normal. (Kaori)” Kaori described an incident in which the photographer took nude photos of her, and then published and distributed them without her permission, as described within the New York Times article . It is clear that Araki has taken advantage of his position of power, both as an elderly man in a patriarchal Japanese culture, and in his successful career as an artist allowing him to take liberties with the normal steps of asking for permission and consulting her. This is an extremely similar scenario to Salma Hayek’s experience with Harvey Weinstein, as along with his sexual harassment, Hayek endured extreme emotional abuse. Hayek states in her op-ed for the New York Times that “the range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, ‘I will kill you, don’t think I can’t.’” Like Picasso pushing the apple into Gilot’s mouth, and treating her like a poseable doll rather than a real woman, Kaori and Hayek face emotional abuse from creative men. In fact, the distribution of Kaori’s images could be compared to revenge porn, in which images that have been captured with consent of the body depicted are released without permission, usually for spiteful reasons. Revenge porn is considered a Class A misdemeanor in many states and is considered a form of sexual harassment. The fact that this is such a widespread problem, to the extent where it has been banned by Ireland, shows that the idea of distributing non-consensual nude images has evolved far beyond the Victorian boudoir images of young women resting in nothing but a necklace-- the “male projections about level of comfort” that Loughery mentioned, where male pleasure in viewing a woman’s body is more important than her own comfort and consent.

Women throughout history are often disbelieved, ignored, and left to their own anger and rage. Francoise Gilot channeled her anger into her own Cubist paintings, following a tradition started by Artemisia Gentileschi among other underappreciated female artists who suffered from sexual abuse. Gentileschi is best known for the iconic painting Judith Beheading Holofernes, another example of a Biblical motif being used to convey another meaning. In this image, Judith is bent over the man’s helpless body, her sleeves rolled up over her elbows. muscles outstretched to drag the sword through his neck. Blood spurts out gorily, as Judith is attended by her maidservant. Though the woman in the painting is Judith, it is likely Gentileschi as well-- a woman who was raped by her father’s friend as a teenager, and who was subjected to a humiliating rape trial, according to John Loughery’s essay. The story of Artemisia Gentileschi’s life shows how little her life differs from that of a modern-day rape victim, although Judith was finished in 1621. The painting becomes a revenge fantasy, a way for Gentileschi to release her pent-up rage, visible catharsis as Holofernes becomes her rapist, and her maidservant holding the basket for his severed head becomes a metaphor for the women who unite over a shared enemy. Pablo Picasso and Gentileschi’s rapist were both artists who took advantage of their success and power, in addition to their position as creative men-- as art has been considered a feminine pursuit, creative men may compensate for their choice of career by acting with masculine bravado.  Rebecca Solnit writes about the patriarchy’s discomfort with women, and desire to erase feminine attributes among men. 

If emotion must be killed, this is work that can make women targets. Less decent men hunt out vulnerability, because if being a man means learning to hate vulnerability, then you hate it in yourself and in the gender that has been carrying it for you. Girl and pussy have long been key insults used against boys and men, along with gay and faggot; a man must not be a woman. (Solnit 30)

[queermediastudies]

Blurring The Lines of Gender In Sally Potter's Orlando

Sally Potter’s 1993 film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s classic novel Orlando follows the narrative of gender ambiguous aristocrat and poet Orlando. Potter efficiently tackles Woolf’s other worldly plotline, in which her hero(ine) lives as both man and woman over the course of 400 hundred years. Potter’s reimagined version of Woolf’s fictitious, gender-bending world, highlights the disparity between men and women, along with the fluidity and performativity of gender itself.

The cast plays a role in both Potter and Wolf’s attempt at highlighting gender performativity. Orlando is played by actress Tilda Swinton who is noted for her androgynous appearance and capacity to play roles of ambiguous gender. In a movie review of the film by the Slant, the author address Swinton’s ability to inhabit these differing roles: “Of course, it’s less than shocking to say that Swinton—by now America’s favorite androgyne—slips effortlessly into the role of the titular male nobleman who awakens halfway through the film to find himself a woman”. Swinton’s character experiences an inexplicable change in gender, as Orlando wakes up in 17th century England in the body of a woman. This scene follows Orlando from her bed (which is often the identifier for a lap in time), to her mirror wherein she turns toward her now female body. With a brief examination of her reflection she says “Same person. No difference at all. Just a different sex.”

This scene is perhaps the most illuminative in terms of Potter’s message of gender performativity. As Butler states in her acclaimed work “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution”: “Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time // an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 520). This film, similarly to Butler’s claims of gender as a notion of socialization and adaptation to fulfil certain modes of behavior and presentation, poses a definitive question regarding the validity of gender constructs. Further Butler speaks to the assumed value and connotative notion toward the body and the way it is presented: “Gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gender” (Butler 520). Orlando’s character is ageless, and thus changes very little throughout the film, aside from the way in which the character performs gender, making this distinction all the more blatant. Costume plays an integral role in how the audience is able to track Orlando’s gender. In the first portion of the film he presents quintessentially masculine for the time he is in, however there is a looming femininity about him.

file:///Users/shaneainsleymoffatt/Desktop/02a7b1bf2cc344670d9926e1aa4d47fc.jpg

After the first laps in time, while Orlando is working in Constantinople, his appearance slowly becomes more feminized although he continues to be identified as male.

Potter perpetuates this questioning of Orlando’s gender via the way he is able to perform it, and the ways in which such performance fluctuates. As a woman, her dress and way of conducting herself is indicative of “womanliness”, and yet she vacillates in her capacity to “do gender.

In a scene amongst famous poets and writers of the time, Orlando struggles with the notion of what constitutes womanly behavior. As the men speak to the predominate assumption of gender roles at the time, Orlando struggles to comprehend why such rigidity would be placed on anyone purely on the basis of sex. The poets iterate conceptions of public verses private spheres of existence, masculine persuits of intellectualism, worldliness and achievement in contrast to the womanly persuits of home, society and virtue.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRFbanBfadU

https://images.app.goo.gl/DU5fcTCxvXcfKWDt6

She again flounders with the perception of proper feminine behavior, when proposed to by Archduke Harry. In his proposition he warns her of the inevitable fall into destitution and ruin if she is to refuse his proposal. Particuarly because knowledge of her being a man and then a woman is commonly acknowledged within English high society. She does however refuse him, preceded by another laps in time to the Victorian era.

As a man Orlando also struggles in his ability to inhabit “manly” ways of being. He is emotional, gentle and does not be inclined to take up heroic aims. There is however, a clear critique on the way in which he is able to move through the world more seamlessly as a man comparative to the characters time spent as a woman. In a brief scene of Orlando walking through a long hallway dressed in Georgian era women’s clothing, this difficulty is covertly expressed. Her large and overwhelming hoop skirt makes the navigation of a simple task like walking through a hallway seem absurdly difficult.”. In Andersson’s work on Queer Media, she discussed both the notion of identity as an ever-evolving “production” contingent upon one’s positioning: “In the same way identity is said to be marked out by difference, that is by what it is not. Instead of thinking of identity as “an already accomplished fact” identity is seen as a “production, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (Andersson 2002). Potter expresses the differentiation in gender presentation and the access (or lack thereof) dependent upon the way one presents; even in the minutiae of activity.

            Potter’s examination of gender performance harkens back to an almost Shakespearean methodology. Aside from the performance of gender the audience can observe in Orlando, characters like the Queen interestingly exhibit a similar queering of gender identity. Orlando has a close working and personal relationship with Queen Elizabeth I played by Quentin Crisp, a queer English actor known for his gender bending performances. The interplay between the two characters denotes the performativity of gender even further. Similar to a Shakespearean comedy, the Queen’s gender has a meta and manifold interpretation; she is a woman performing the acts of a traditionally masculine role, played by a male actor who defies the traditional roles of masculinity.

https://images.app.goo.gl/8QFjjAmshbYgYGP56

The films queering of love can be perceived as either accurate or problematically heteronormative. Orlando’s gender remains perpetually ambiguous, and thus each romantic connection can be applied to a queer reading. However, each romantic affiliation Orlando engages in, does fall within heteronormative expectations. He first falls for Sasha, an unattainable Muscovite princess; with whom he has a contentious and overly idyllic relationship with. Within this context he becomes possessive, petulant and assumes totalizing notions of ownership over her on the basis of affection. As a woman she has a sexual relationship with Shelmerdine, an American revolutionary who is represented of the masculine ideal. By the end of the film she presents more androgynous, is not in a romantic relationship and has become a serious writer. She does however have a child, which appears to fall into the trope of motherhood as some variety of completion for women. There are moments in which the film deviates from hetero notions of romance, as Archduke Harry professes his attraction toward Orlando “whether man or woman”. In spite of this, there still seems to be a gap in representation of queer romantic love within the film.

            Another short coming within the film is the highly privileged positioning of Orlando’s character. While Orlando may experience the limitations of existing as a woman within a patriarchal society, she is also in a position of fiscal abundance and operates from a position of socioeconomic privilege. In Doty’s work “Making Things Perfectly Queer”, he address the disparity in intersectional representations of queerness: “Clearly we need more popular and academic mass culture work that carefully considers feminine gay and other gendered queer reception practices, as well as those of even less-analyzed queer readership positions formed around the nexus of race and sexuality, or class and sexuality, or ethnicity and sexuality, or some combination of gender, race, class, ethnicity and sexuality” (Doty 14). The film follows the story of an upper class, high society individual who experiences the socital demands of gender expectations, and moments of queer desire, however Orlando does not encompass an intersectional representation of queer experience. Largley I believe this is due to the fact that it is an adaptation of a Woolf novel, who herself often created her narratives from a position of socioeconomic advantage; however, Potter does deviate in her reimagining of the text, and thus there was potentiality to make this narrative more intersectional and accessible to a modern queer viewer.

            My predominant interest in the film had to do with my affinity for Virginia Woolf, and my previous knowledge of the novel. The novel to me seemed a form of breakout text, as it dealt with notions of gender identity, the position of women within society and was developed out of a queer relationship between Woolf and Vita Saxton West (who she based Orlando off of). While I did feel that the film was able to navigate the complex fictional world Woolf develops, from a mode of cinema, I do feel that there could have been more work put into making this narrative more inclusive and indicative of modern queer lives. I was able to see myself represented in the film on the basis of being a woman and relating to the sexism and limitations the film exposes. I did feel it examined gender roles in a way that was relatable, however there was potential to take the analysis further and admonish some of the elitism which existed within the original text.

 https://images.app.goo.gl/xQf7MQGRAafmqEiQ7 

References:

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Feminist Theory Reader, 2020, pp.

353–361., doi:10.4324/9781003001201-42.

Andersson, Yvonne. “Queer Media? Or; What Has Queer Theory to Do with Media Studies?” July 2002.

Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Canby, Vincent. “Review/Film Festival; Witty, Pretty, Bold, A Real She-Man.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 19 Mar. 1993, www.nytimes.com/1993/03/19/movies/review-film-festival-witty-pretty-bold-a-real-she-man.html?auth=login-google.

[ill-be-istj-if-no-one-else-is]

The (indie) Kids Are(n’t) Alright.

[piece by Nick Southall of Stylus Magazine which has sadly been defunct since 2007; I’m reposting it here because I had to dig through the internet archive to find it]

The following was posted by one of our readers in the comments section of our recent Top 50 Singles of 2005 article. 

Posted 12/09/2005 - 08:07:34 AM by tintin1000: i hate this list. but before i get into a rant, i shall tell you all the "rules" which i relied upon to come to the conclusion that this list is a pile of steaming bullshit. (a) this is a snobby list (b) i understand that this is a list of singles, so it cannot include bands like deerhoof or anything because they don't HAVE singles, but ... (c) this is a lame attempt at justifying why you guys like top 40 chart songs ... a shoddly constructed "logical" justification of listening to top 40 songs, with the "indie mag," stylus, as a sort of buffer ... "oh -- we're really into indie music, so that means we can accept pop music from an "elevated" plane of existence or some bullshit like that. okay -- who the hell thinks that the friggin' backstreet boys write "better" songs than the mountain goats?! than the futureheads!? uh ... and sure -- the concept of r. kelly's trapt in the closet is cool, i think, but how in the hell do you distinguish which gwen stefani single is the "best" on the album? is it the originality of the song? nope? is it in the creativity? nope. is it the craftmanship? nope. is it the songwriting? nope. as far as i can tell, you guys compiled a list that should be dubbed "best singles that will get you crunked in 2005," but since you worded everything so perfectly, it sounds like there is an actual intellectual, logical reason behind the creation of the fucking whisper song. the whisper song is about fucking. since when has fucking merited any artistic credibilty? just plain, raw, primitive sex? if you guys like to dance to this shit, cool ... but don't be dumbasses and pretend that you listen to this shit because you actually think it actually has a true artistic quality to it ... damn. 

I usually try and avoid responding directly to people in the comments boxes, unless they ask a specific question about a piece or raise a factual error, because I think it’s slightly unbecoming for writers to be trawling their own work looking for flame wars, but I couldn’t help but respond to our friend tintin1000, initially with a couple of short notes in the comments box, and now here, in more length and with more thought. 

tintin1000 isn’t alone in his indi(e)gnation (I’m sorry, that’s a terrible forced pun)—you can see dozens, if not hundreds of other people spilling outraged bile into the comments boxes every week in protest at our temerity in choosing to review a country record favourably (and I’m not talking about Lambchop or Uncle Tupelo) or vote Kelly Clarkson as our single of the year ahead of, say, the latest 7” by The Ambivalent Corduroy Medical Students on Squirrel Records which features nine Canadian college graduates banging ukuleles and broken harpsichords and singing about their guinea pig’s gravestone. What’s wrong with us? Why are we pretending to like such manipulative top 40 pop shit? How could we possibly be so short-sighted as to not see the genius inherent in something like Pig On A Stick’s masterful limited edition EP, I’m Ugly, I’m Lonely, All My Friends Are Dead?!Especially when we lavish such shallow, fetishistic praise on hollow, manufactured acts. 

The thing is that Stylus has always loved pop, hip-hop and r’n’b singles, consistently voting them highly in the end-of-year singles lists over the last three years. Just look at the Singles Jukebox articles from the last 9 months—pop music is something we love and something we cover—we’ve never claimed to be an indie website any more than we’ve claimed to be an IDM website (something we used to get accused of every so often when we began). If you’re still not convinced, take a look at the Mission Statement; all we’ve ever been bothered about covering is music, not specific genres. 

So why are indieboys still so vehemently disgusted by our (un)surprising pop-centricity, our schizeclecticism, by the fact that some of us like country records and others like pop records and yet others really do enjoy Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (I’m still not entirely convinced that that particular band isn’t a complex hoax perpetrated by Derek Miller)? I’d wager, for a start, that the majority of our most vocal indieboy naysayers are probably in their late teens rather than their mid-to-late 20s, and that the music they like isn’t just a sonic preference based on what tickles the hairs in their ears in a pleasant way, but that it is a much more deep-seated culture-aesthetic choice. A choice as much about identity as music, perhaps. 

Which is fine, because adolescent cultural choices—hell, adult cultural choices too—are about identity. They’re about peer groups and aspirations and association. The music you like may well help determine the clothes you wear, the friends you keep, how you cut your hair—it’ll certainly determine which clubs or gigs you go to, and who you go with. It’s a chicken / egg conundrum, though, as to which comes first—the music or the identity. Do you like this music because of who you are, or are you making a definite effort to determine who you are and using the music as a tool to do so? Because like it or not, and whether you’re aware of it or not, your cultural choices are a signifier pointing towards who you are. 

Here are a handful of bands and what liking them says about you: 

Interpol - “I am deep, moody, urban and edgy, given to pathos and bad poetry. Please have sex with me, but don’t expect an orgasm.” 

Bright Eyes - “I have read a book about true love and am too scared to treat you badly. Please don’t have sex with me, as I will cry.” 

Embrace - “I really am in it for the music, because the public perception of my favourite band is terrible. Please have sex with me in a slightly dull, monogamous way.” 

Kompakt-style techno - “I transcend the body-mind divide by being intellectually into dancing. Please have sex with me on drugs.” 

Bloc Party - “I am very cool but not as alternative as I’d like to think, and I wish I knew more black people. Please have sex with me, but be careful not to mess-up my hair.” 

Girls Aloud - “I am a shallow pop whore. Let’s fuck! But it will be without true, meaningful emotion.” 

Arcade Fire - “I am into way more cool and obscure stuff than anyone else. Please let me say I had sex with you ages ago, before anyone else.” 

Oasis - “I am a piss-throwing troglodyte misogynist. I am going to date-rape you.”

Each of these assumptions says as much about the inferer as the inferred, if not more so. Each one is a value judgement based on cultural baggage, and everyone’s cultural baggage is different. Most internet-based discussion of music that I’ve come across deals not with what people like, but with what people dislike. What people like is a matter of assumption, some kind of unspoken test to see whether someone is cool enough to be spoken to, to be let into the secret club. You wouldn’t want someone uncool hanging around with the cool kids (on a messageboard, natch) and making them uncool by association because they like, heaven forbid, “The Whisper Song”, would you? 

Ah, “The Whisper Song.” Here’s what tintin1000 said about it: it sounds like there is an actual intellectual, logical reason behind the creation of the fucking whisper song. the whisper song is about fucking. since when has fucking merited any artistic credibilty? just plain, raw, primitive sex? This raises a whole other issue that indieboys can’t stand. Sex. It’s often been stated that indieboys are afraid to dance because they have an intrinsic “fear of the middle of the body,” a post-Victorian-era Catholic / Freudian guilt / paranoia about all things sexual which dates back, perhaps, to Morrissey’s fiercely foppish stance of asexuality and beyond, to Keats or Wordsworth or whoever, and the myth of the sexually-frustrated romantic, the idea that one’s art will be somehow purer if untainted by the dirty touch of lust. But go beyond that, go to Michelangelo sculpting David’s sensuous masculine frame; or all those countless portraits of St. Sebastian, pierced with arrows like an S&M; stunt gone awry, loincloth barely covering his genitals; all those pre-Raphaelite female nudes; every film to ever reveal more flesh than grandmother would like; to Led Zeppelin wailing about plain, raw, primitive sex and John Lennon trying to make the end of “A Day In The Life” sound like a great big musical orgasm. Very few people would question Björk’s artistic credibility, and she’s written countless songs about sex. People are rushing to proclaim Kate Bush’s Aerial a work of genius, and it’s positively dripping with eroticism. Sex is not the be-all-and-end-all of human existence, and to get too caught up in its alluring juices and scents can screw with your head (just ask Michael Douglas or any random Tory politician) but to claim that plain, raw, primitive sex has never inspired any worthwhile art is the folly of the hungry, short-sighted virgin. Pop music in particular (and The Mountain Goats and Deerhoof are as much pop music as Charlotte Church or Sisqo) is about sex. 

And of course sex is key to identity—as if I needed to say that after the assumptions about bands above. Anyone who ever wore skinny jeans or dyed their hair black did so because they wanted some of their idol’s allure by proxy, because they thought that listening to this record and wearing those shoes would get them laid. Everyone. Except me, of course, because I’m above it all. 

The problem with our intrepid hero tintin1000 is that he’s finding his identity, and is thus vulnerable to having the fragile foundations of that identity shaken. And so he sees Mountain Goats, an act he loves for their literate, melodic music made in the cottage-industry style, unadorned by commercial trappings but instead blessed with deep insight into the human condition, at number 50 on our list and is pleased, thinking, hoping and assuming that the rest of the list will continue to reaffirm his identity. Because he trusts Stylus, possibly, as someone he can talk to about these things. And there’s the fucking Ying Yang Twinz, wtf? And Gwen Stefani? And other music that is liked by the people he sees at college or in town and takes an instant dislike to for their shallow natures and unthinking ways, and it jars his assumptions about what it means to like Mountain Goats, about what it says about him when he realises what he thinks liking Kelly Clarkson says about other people. 

The thing is that once you stop worrying about what owning (and more importantly liking) a Girls Aloud record says about you, you can start taking it on its own merits, which are (generally) pretty plentiful. Something like Die Hard is a great film because it knows what it is and what it does and it executes its plan with zero faffing around—there’s no narrative fat in that film (unlike, say, the odious Goodfellas), every single event is a plot device, and there’s joy to be found in such craftsmanship, never mind the actual tangible visceral thrill of the finished article once we get past ontological rumination on the efficiency of the screenplay. Likewise Girls Aloud’s records are faultless exercises in meta-pop constructivism, not so much songs as processions of hooks and choruses with the boring, fatty verses left over for the likes of Okkervil River instead. And, of course, as with Die Hard there is the sheer physical joy of listening to them, of dancing to them, getting caught up in the beats and the insidious melodic hooks, which outweighs even the music-journalistic catnip attraction of playing spot-the-reference. 

And once you’re past the stage of crushing insecurity and aspirational identity positing, the idiocy inherent in statements like how in the hell do you distinguish which gwen stefani single is the "best" on the album? becomes clear. You distinguish your favourite (no such thing as objectivity, kids) Gwen Stefani song on Love Angel Music Baby in exactly the same manner as you would your favourite song on The Sunset Tree—by listening to the record and choosing the song that you like most, for whatever reason(s) it is that you ever like any song. Until your superego stops screaming at you that it’s bad to like Gwen Stefani though, that’s not going to happen. 

It works in stages though, this music / identity nexus. As a child one likes simple things, the multi-coloured hues of pop music perhaps, but once one senses the transition to adulthood one puts away childish things. By writing off whole areas of music for the simple reason that “it’s not the kind of thing someone like me listens to” you are, quite simply, denying yourself a whole lot of pleasures, both frivolous and profound. Malcolm X said in his autobiography that “children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.” It’s not just failing that we shouldn’t be ashamed of. A major finding in neuroscience in recent years is the extent to which our brains display advanced levels of ‘neural plasticity.’ We are not forever ‘hardwired’ for rigid modes of behaviour; we are not static ‘slaves’ to our DNA. There is a remarkable degree to which we can change ingrained patterns of thought, intention and practice. Our identities are not fixed, are not immutable—admitting that you enjoy a Britney record unironically will not destroy your future character. And that goes for an awful lot of things besides music. 

Of course this is all blatant assumption, and doesn’t mean anything at all. Except, perhaps, that you should give in to your ids, indie kids. 

[weather-witch]

Maybe we could find common ground if you knew what we stood for.

It has been a while since I was sufficiently frustrated to sit down and write a bit by bit response to a piece of writing, but here I am baffled at how utterly misunderstood our position as gender critical feminists is. However, it is not my frustration nor my bewilderment that has me writing this tonight after sitting in Auckland traffic for over an hour. Nope. It is a pathetic skerrick of hope I have that if people who have expressed so much hate for us can be so fundamentally wrong about what we stand for then perhaps if they learnt the truth we could find just a little bit of middle ground.

Gotta love a trier, right?

The piece is What is ‘Gender Critical’ anyway? On essentialism and transphobia by Danielle Moreau — hopefully I can help her find out.

Transphobes are having a moment in Aotearoa. Attempts to pass a bill allowing transgender people to change the sex on their birth certificates without having to go through the courts have been met by vigorous opposition from a small but well-organised group of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) or — as they would rather be called — ‘gender critical feminists’. These activists, who probably number in the dozens rather than thousands, have been joined on social media and petition websites by a large contingent of overseas allies, most notably from the UK. In the process, we have learned of the existence in that country of a trans-exclusionary subculture that has been radicalised by, of all places, the parenting forum Mumsnet.

First of all, thank you. Our campaign to halt the BDMRR Bill and sex self-identification was hard work and I appreciate that you could see how well organised it was. However, the persistent myth that we are two ‘TERFs’ in a trenchcoat is as ever totally inaccurate. Likewise, the conspiracy theory of an army of Mumsnet poms wielding cups of tea and scary opinions is laughable. We are in contact with gender critical feminists in the UK though…and Canada…the United States, Australia, France, South Korea, Portugal, Argentina, Nigeria, and more. There is an international community of gender critical feminists because we are all fighting a lot of the same battles. We support each other; commiserate, celebrate, and share resources. We are just like any other community.

It may be a good time, then, to examine what being ‘gender critical’ actually means.

At first blush, the phrase ‘gender critical feminist’ is essentially meaningless: all feminism is ‘gender critical’ by definition. The TERF label is at least partially descriptive, since exponents of this ideology are certainly trans-exclusionary, but it may be too generous to suggest that they are either radical or feminists. Feminism is a big tent, but it is hard to welcome into it a group so dedicated to returning us to the values of the Victorians.

Feminism is at its roots (that’s where the name Radical Feminism comes from by the way) gender critical. Past iterations of feminism were entirely gender critical, but there is little that can be said to be gender critical about third wave feminism. This is why gender critical feminists reject it. We prefer the radical analysis of our foremothers. Radical does not mean wild or extreme it simply refers to “relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something”. It is about stripping everything back and analysing the nature of female oppression. For gender critical or radical feminists our “central tenet is that women as a biological class are globally oppressed by men as a biological class.”

What makes TERF ideology reactionary rather than radical is its dedication to binary gender essentialism. The concept of gender essentialism is practically timeless, and reaction to it is key to understanding why feminist theory exists in the first place. Gender essentialism is the idea that there is an innate, immutable ‘womanness’ or ‘manness’ which expresses itself in what we consider ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’. It posits, for example, that women as a group are naturally more caring and empathetic and men as a group are more aggressive and clever, and — crucially — that these gendered qualities exist inherently, without societal influence. Another key aspect of essentialism is that it is often, but not always, tied to bodies and ‘biology’. So, because a lot of women give birth, gender essentialism associates childcare with women because they are biologically ‘destined’ for it.

I’ll ignore the incorrect use of the word radical for the rest of this piece and move on to the extraordinary claim that we are dedicated to “gender essentialism.” Not only are gender critical feminists not gender essentialists, we are actually the complete opposite. In our CRITIQUE of gender we are more accurately described as gender ABOLITIONISTS. There is nothing immutable about gender. It is not innate. Rather, based on thousands of years of socialisation, survival, hierarchy, and oppression, gender is the set of stereotypes and roles that we as societies have imposed on the sexes. A more accurate moniker for gender critical feminists would be “sex essentialist”. That is because we believe that it is our biological sex and our biological sex alone that makes us women. It is not the gender stereotypes that we are socialised to associate with womanhood. It is not the “empathy” or outward expressions of femininity like how we dress or style our hair. Our POTENTIAL to become pregnant is a core part of our femaleness and it is central to a lot of the experiences women have in common. I say ‘potential’ because not all women want to or are able to get pregnant. However, it is society’s perception of us as potential ‘breeders’ that brings with it some of our most acute oppressions around bodily autonomy and biological functions.

I am going to take my refutation of the assertion that gender critical feminists are “gender essentialists” a step further. I contend that it is in fact proponents of gender identity ideology who are gender essentialist. After all, it is they who think gender is so innate that someone can be born in the wrong body. They conceptualise gender as a kind of soul that exists as separate from the biology of the person. Is it not terribly gender essentialist to suggest that a man who feels an innate sense of ‘womanness’ because he is (perhaps) empathetic, nurturing, gentle, sensitive, and presents femininely, must actually be a woman? Because no man could possibly possess those characteristics and present in that way? Rather than embrace the feminine man or the masculine women, gender identity ideology would have them switch place to ‘match’ their gender identity to the ‘appropriate’ sex.

Destined for it?

Feminism’s first wave, popularly associated with the suffragists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bought into gender essentialism in a big way. This wasn’t entirely their fault, for several reasons. They were heavily influenced by the dichotomous Victorian concept of ‘separate spheres’ for men and women — men in the world, women in the home — even if they tried to reject it in some limited ways. ‘HOUSEKEEPERS need the ballot to regulate the sanitary conditions under which they and their families must live… MOTHERS need the ballot to regulate the moral conditions under which their children must be brought up’, said the New York Woman Suffrage Association in 1915. The suffrage movement was more broadly linked to things like the temperance movement, and the temperance movement used essentialist ideas about women and their caring, empathetic natures in order to influence politics and get alcohol banned. (Alcohol was a huge issue for women mainly because they had so few other legal rights, and so drunk husbands could beat and rape them with no real recourse. We know now, unfortunately, that alcohol is not the thing doing the raping and beating.)

I have nothing to dispute here, but I will just point out that the history of the construction of public toilet facilities specifically for women is a fascinating part of the opening up of the public sphere to the female sex class.

Another reason for the first wave’s reliance on essentialism is that reliable contraception had yet to be invented. If you are not familiar with feminist theory, the cause and effect may seem quite tenuous here, but it is difficult for anyone to conceive of non-gendered, unfettered humanity if you are forced into a brood mare situation from young adulthood. As a result of these factors, among others, the first wave had painted itself into a theoretical corner with its essentialism. Buying into dichotomist ideas about gender used by patriarchy since time immemorial meant accepting hard limits. It meant accepting inferiority and never being able to achieve true equity.

I don’t agree that first wave feminists “relied” on gender essentialism. The realities of their sex (as you point out with reference to the lack of contraception) and the gender roles they enacted were simply all they knew. They weren’t using gender essentialism. It was the framework in which they existed and in fighting for a place in political life they were only beginning to peel the layers off their oppression.

With few exceptions, the second wave of feminist theory questioned and rejected gender essentialism. One of the important aspects of why the second wave was different from the first wave of feminist theory is that by this stage reliable contraception had being invented, accepted, and come into wide use. People were, for the first time, able to divorce their existence from sexual reproduction. Linda Cisler, in 1969: ‘different reproductive roles are the basic dichotomy in humankind, and have been used to rationalize all the other, ascribed differences between men and women and to justify all the oppression women have suffered.’ Feminists argued that social influence was the primary reason we assumed women were such-a-way and men were such-a-way; that men had written nearly all the history and psychology to that date; that patriarchy created hegemonic propaganda based on binary essentialist ideas. Second-wave writers were exhilarated by the newfound theoretical power to refute their inferiority, and you can feel it emanating from their engaged, emphatic, often uproarious writings.

In this paragraph, you see the beginnings of the gender critical movement. We as a movement identify far more with second wave feminism than with the convoluted nonsense that has followed. Cisler’s quote neatly encapsulates our true position on sex and gender. This is gender critical theory.

The second wave did, of course, get many things wrong. It tried to use its new powers of analysis to make ‘womanness’ many different things, theorising that women were a ‘class’, or ignoring voices that dealt with racism. Many of its ideas weren’t nuanced. Being associated with their bodies for their whole lives, and exploited within those bodies, gave some feminists from this era problematic ideas about sex and sexuality. There was also a subculture of hippy mysticism that associated the female reproductive organs with purity or power.

It is bizarre and, I cynically think, intentional that this idea of gender critical feminists as only white keeps getting rolled out. Believe it or not, when founder of race critical theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw, coined the term ‘intersectionality’, she used it to analyse the intersections of sex, race, and class, and this analysis is a core part of gender critical theory. This piece by Dr Holly Lawford-Smith explains really well what intersectionality really is and what it isn’t. We understand the ways race and class make us different while analysing how as a female class our lived experiences are unique from our male counterparts.

Call me a hippy, but I love celebrating the wonder of the female body. The world we live in is a jumble of phallic one-up-manship. The male is everywhere; our architecture, art, cultures, everything! Phalluses everywhere! I love that second wave feminists decided to do a bit of collective self love. As females we are pitted against our own body from day dot and I fail to see what is wrong with celebrating its power. To be honest, it is a bit of fun too. Having shared iconography that represents shared realities is a wonderful part of bonding as a community of any kind.

However, although feminists with uteruses or vaginas wanted to know more about them — because that knowledge had been systematically hidden or controlled by ‘men of science’ — they rejected being defined by their bodies. Binary gender essentialism was, in sum, not the primary theoretical view of second-wave feminists. In fact, second-wave theory laid much of the groundwork for our current, welcome conception of a society-wide removal of a restrictive gender binary. Karen Sacks wrote in 1970: ‘For women to merely fight men would be to miss the point. The point is to change the social order …. Perhaps for the first time in human history we are faced with the possibility of a pan-human, non-exploitative society.’ By 1986 Judith Butler had taken the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to their logical conclusion: ‘it is no longer possible to attribute the values or social functions of women to biological necessity … it becomes unclear whether being a given sex has any necessary consequence for becoming a given gender.’

Women still don’t know enough about our bodies. Research and funding for male bodies and medicine far outstrips that for females. Simply compare the money and care that has gone into developing erectile dysfunction medication to the relative void of information on the debilitating condition endometriosis which affects approximately 10% of women. The true form of the clitoris and all its glory were not known until shamefully recently either. We have every right to be obsessed with learning about our bodies; there is so much yet to learn.

Judith Butler has a lot to answer for. Her post-modern, deconstructive anarchism is at the heart of the worst parts of gender identity ideology. Please tell me you aren’t going to quote Foucault. However, that particular quote is one of her more benign. She is right that as women we should not be valued primarily on our biological ability to bear life. Our lives need not be dictated by breeding, however, that does not erase our bodies. It does not erase the fact that society still treats us in certain ways because of their perception of our ability to become pregnant. We are still oppressed in many ways because we belong to the sex class of female.

TERFs ultimately tie rights to body parts. Their approach seems to be that, because women were originally oppressed to some extent because of their bodies, their rights should be forever tied to qualities within those bodies, when in fact the precise opposite is true. Their reactionary ideology, with its obsession with binary gender essentialism, is actively harmful to all genders. TERFs aren’t even calling back to the second wave — they’re calling back to the first wave. Their ideas are over one hundred years old, and they aren’t good ones.

This is a bizarre conclusion to draw. But I’m glad I got to the end without having to read a Michel Foucault quote so, thank you. I have a question for you, Danielle. A genuine one.

If not because of our bodies, our sex, why were and are women oppressed?

It is our bodies which have always differentiated us from men. It is the fact, as you say, that before contraception we spent our lives pregnant and in the home. It is our bodies and our potential to become mothers that sees us valued less in the workforce (as well as gendered sex stereotypes). It is because we are female that we are overwhelmingly the victims of sexual violence, but rarely the perpetrators. It is because we are female that in some parts of the world little girls have their genitals mutilated, are married off to men, and deprived of education. I am terribly and genuinely confused as to what you think sexism, female oppression, and male violence are, if not based around our respective realities as members of our sex classes. What is feminism for if not to liberate the female sex class?

This does not mean that any of this oppression is our destiny. However, we simply must know what we are fighting for and against if we are to effect change. Sex is WHY we are oppressed. Gender is HOW we are oppressed.

I really hope you read some of this at least. I’m not telling you how to think, I’m telling you how we think. You have seriously misunderstood our position on things that seem to form the basis for why you hate us. It is your choice if you wish to still paint a picture of us as the antithesis of decency, but I wanted to make sure you’re at least hating us for positions we actually hold.

My Twitter DMs are always open for respectful, confidential conversation. I welcome questions and hope that maybe some of you who are afraid to be seen engaging in taboo subjects with blacklisted people will feel comfortable to reach out privately.

We need to talk to avoid further misunderstandings.

[clairebeauchampfan]

Meeeow! Why are we obsessed with cats?

Claws out! Why pop culture clings to the crazy cat lady

Lucy Jones, The Guardian newspaper

Mon 16 Apr 2018 16.48 BST

For years, women with cats have been portrayed as lonely, sexless and eccentric – but why does this stereotype endure? And can millennial ailurophiles reclaim the purr-jorative?

Did you hear the story about the old woman from Ohio who was arrested for training her 65 cats to steal her neighbour’s stuff? The Columbus police department found thousands of dollars’ worth of jewellery in the 83-year-old lady’s house and discovered she taught the cats to bring back “anything that shined”.

The news story went viral at the end of last year. How do you picture her? Unkempt hair, dressing gown and slippers, living alone, rarely leaving the house? The “crazy cat lady”, in other words. In fact, the story was fiction on a satirical website, but people bought it and shared the story thinking it was real.

The crazy cat lady is a common, recognisable trope in contemporary culture: think of Eleanor Abernathy in The Simpsons. After a promising career in medicine and law, she experiences burnout, starts drinking and gets a cat. Next minute, she’s talking gibberish, looking dishevelled and throwing her army of felines around. Then there’s Robert De Niro’s predictably bonkers elderly Christmas cat lady in a 2004 Saturday Night Live skit: she “had dreams and then she was kicked by a horse and now she has cats. The end!”

The younger version of the stereotype is usually associated with being single, kooky and weird; after her relationship with Carol Burnett comes to a head, 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon acquires a cat. “I can fit Emily Dickinson’s whole head in my mouth,” she tells a concerned Jack Donaghy. You can even buy a Crazy Cat Lady action figure online, complete with deranged, staring eyes.

To understand why this trope exists – and why it may be on its last legs – let’s scoot back to the middle ages and the earliest perceptions of women and their cats. Even before witch-hunts, cats had a bad rep in the western world – with associations with heretical sects and the devil. Medieval types conflated feline sex lives with lustful, sinful, female sexuality: cats were seen as “lecherous animals that actively wheedled the males on to sexual congress”, according to the historian James Serpell. Although, in recent pop culture, cat lady has evolved into shorthand for a lonely, sad, sexless woman. Too sexy, not sexy enough: can’t please ’em.

The earliest cat ladies in the west were, of course, witches. In Malleus Maleficarum, the landmark medieval treatise on witchcraft, a 13th-century folk story is recounted, whereby three witches turned themselves into cats, attacked a man on the street and accused him of assault in court, showing the marks on their bodies. From then on, witches were believed to have cats as familiars, or to change into felines at night.

Why would cats get such a satanic rep? We can only guess. Cats are mysterious. They come and go. Unlike dogs, they refuse to obey and be domesticated. They’re nocturnal. The Ancient Egyptians worshipped Bastet, a woman with a head of a cat. Although the Bible does not specifically mention cats, early Christian pilgrims were highly suspicious of other religions, and they deemed the black cat to be so demonic that being seen with one could be punishable by death.

Although the 18th century saw people beginning to question superstitions – such as the belief that a woman’s wart was a teat suckled by Satan – negative connotations of the relationship between cats and women remained. The Victorians switched witches for old-maid stereotypes – for single women without children: “Old maids and cats have long been proverbially associated together, and, rightly or wrongly, these creatures have been looked upon with a certain degree of suspicion and aversion by a large proportion of the human race,” wrote a journalist in the Dundee Courier in 1880. The Old Maid card game was often illustrated with a dour woman and her cat, the “friend of the friendless”, as it was described at the time. In the 1900s, anti-suffragette propaganda used images of cats to portray women as silly, useless, catty and ridiculous in their attempt to enter political life.

The inception of the “crazy” moniker is harder to pin down, but its connotations of hysteria are an old gender stereotype. Added to this, the extreme end of the modern “crazy cat lady” stereotype has more than a few cats, which is unusual. Eleanor Abernathy, for example, has cats dripping off her: she is, essentially, portrayed as a mentally ill, alcoholic, compulsive hoarder.

There may be some truth in the idea that animal hoarding is more common in women. A study in Brazil found that, while generalised hoarding disorder affects men and women equally, nearly three-quarters of animal hoarders were women. Since 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies compulsive hoarding as a psychiatric disorder, with animal hoarding as a subtype.

Another recent theory is to do with a parasite called toxoplasma gondii. This tiny critter infects rats and mice and changes their behaviour by, scientists believe, creating an attraction to cat urine, so it can wind up in the stomach of a cat, where it reproduces. It also infects between 30% and 60% cent of people. Scientists are exploring evidence that toxoplasmosis could create behavioural changes in people, leading to lots of excited articles wondering if the parasite is a clue to explaining the phenomenon of “crazy cat lady”. The parasite contains an enzyme that creates dopamine, which is associated with risky and impulsive behaviour, among other things, but so far the data is inconclusive.

But, really, the concept of the crazy cat lady tells us more about societal perceptions of women than anything else. It has long been a pejorative term and a device for transferring shame and judgment on women who challenged traditional roles, or were hard to domesticate and keep in line. Here is the co-creator of Batman, Bob Kane, explaining his creation of Cat Woman: “I felt that women were feline creatures and men were more like dogs. While dogs are faithful and friendly, cats are cool, detached and unreliable … cats are as hard to understand as women are,” he said. “You always need to keep women at arm’s length. We don’t want anyone taking over our souls, and women have a habit of doing that.”

But millennial ailurophiles have had enough. Over the last few years, there have been multivalent efforts to debunk the crazy cat lady stereotype and project a positive view of women and their cats. Pussy is striking back.

From glossy fashion magazines celebrating the feline-human relationship – Cat People, Puss Puss – to Taylor Swift and Katy Perry’s unashamed adoration of their feline pets, the stereotype is being recalibrated. CatCon Worldwide, a new conference celebrating cat culture, has, as its core value, the desire to “change the negative perception of the crazy cat lady and prove that it is possible to be hip, stylish, and have a cat”.

The book Cat Lady Chic (2012) offered elegant images of cat-owners Audrey Hepburn, Georgia O’Keeffe, Diana Ross and Zelda Fitzgerald as an antidote to the Eleanor Abernathy archetype. And Girls & Their Cats, a sophisticated series of photographs of women and their feline companions, was created by Brooklyn-based fashion photographer BriAnne Wills to help dismantle the stereotype.“It just wasn’t representative of any of the cat ladies I personally knew, who are all independent, cool, career-driven women who really love their cats,” she said. “Also, there are more than a million cats euthanised each year so if women (and men) are afraid to adopt because of negative stereotypes it definitely hurts cats in the long run.”

In the memorable short story Cat Person (2017), Kristen Roupenian inverts the cat lady trope by giving her male protagonist, Robert, a couple of pet cats. She employs the presence of Robert’s felines as a symbol that Margot uses to construct her image of him. “We decide that it means something that a person likes cats instead of dogs,” said Roupenian in an interview. But there is something sinister going on. Margot never sees the cats, and wonders if Robert has lied about them. So what is it about pretending to have cats that might endear Margot to him in a sexual setting? Is he using his cats to lure her in?

But perhaps the moment the crazy cat lady motif truly jumped the shark was with the song Buttload of Cats on an episode of the television series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend earlier this year. Rebecca Bunch walks herself down to the Lonely Lady Cat Store. “The smell is overwhelming inside / This is the future smell of my house / It’s the smell of my dreams that have died,” she sings. “When you’re a permanent bachelorette / It’s mandatory that you go out and get / A buttload of cats / Oh, yeah!”

The song made a mockery of the hysteria projected on women who own cats. So is the notion of the crazy cat lady over? Wills believes there is still work to be done to change perceptions, but she hopes that her photography project will help. “It is 2018,” she says, “and women are tired of defending themselves.” And their love for their cats.

AND I LOVE CATS TOO. ESPECIALLY SIAMESE (but my dog hates them) 

[sincerelybluevase]

What I dislike about romance in YA fiction

Last month, I made a post about some of my favourite and most hated literary things related to romance. It was supposed to be a quick, tag-like post, but whilst writing it I realised that I actually had a lot to say about several aspects of romance. Tags are not the appropriate place to do so, so I figured I might as well make it into a post of its own and give it some well-deserved space. I decided to write about the way romance is portrayed in YA fiction, because a) I read quite a lot of YA, b) some of the things that irk me are very noticeable in YA. Please note that it is more than possible to write entire books about this topic, meaning that what I’ll write down here is going to be pretty succinct and not always as nuanced as I might want it to be. Note that I am not blaming people or judging people if they read some of the books I’m going to talk about and point out as having problematic aspects and find them highly enjoyable. I must also point out that I am aware that probably all of these problems are not limited to YA. In fact, you can find plenty of them in adult fiction, too. However, I have found that YA books tend to have tropes that are extremely prevalent, so much, in fact, that they can almost be seen as characteristics of YA. Some of those relate to romance, which means that it is appropriate for me to talk about them here. Now, with those safety warnings out of the way, let’s start.

 It happens quite a lot that relationships in YA are not based on mutual equality. In fact, some of them can be downright abusive (but more about that later).

Relationships can be unequal in multiple ways. One of them is based on not seeing women as equals. Now, putting women on a pedestal or looking down on them as sluts, both putting them on another level than yourself, is a trend that goes back centuries. Just looking at the tradition of the Petrarchan sonnet shows us this (and highlights another problematic aspect of the way we perceive women, namely that they are somehow responsible and to blame if a man can’t get them). Freud coined a term for it, calling it the Madonna-whore complex. Though most of what Freud wrote is no longer used today, the Madonna-whore complex remains relevant and, sadly, highly prevalent. It actually encompasses a huge amount of tropes and can be used to explain why Edward is obsessed with Bella remaining a virgin in the Twilight-saga, why Marcie in the Hush Hush series is continuously ridiculed because of her sexuality, why it is continuously stressed how fragile and pure Juliette is in Shatter me, why Mal doesn’t want Alina to kill people, etc. This type of thinking is incredibly dangerous, because it doesn’t leave any room for seeing women as people. The Madonna-whore complex states that a woman is either good or bad, a virgin or a slut, someone to wed or to bed. A girl has to behave almost prudishly (without being a real prude, because that would be plain boring) to deserve the guy at the end of the story, but the guy rarely has to live up to similar expectations to deserve the girl. It infantilises women by completely ignoring that real women cannot be put into one of these categories, that they actually incorporate a space that falls somewhere in between. Again, infantilising women is a trend that spans decades (one only has to read a basic Victorian novels in which it is stressed how small and girlish and innocent the ‘good’ female characters are).  

The next aspect that I want to discuss ties in with the entire concept of unequal relationships and shows a lack of respect, too: abusive behaviour. Not only are women often infantilized, they also have to put up with appalling behaviour that is often not described as such and, at times, even romanticized. Characters are touched or kissed or fondled without giving consent, often at inappropriate times, such as during a fight. It gets even worse when they are told that, deep down, they actually want this (The Twilight-saga is probably the most infamous example of this in YA. Actually, I think that everything problematic that I’ve discussed here+ some bonus content can be found in those books). This type of appalling behaviour does not end with touching; often, there is a psychological aspect to it, too. I think this is most often seen in love triangles, in which two male characters both manipulate their female object of desire by either telling her half-truths, lies, or withholding vital information, or treating her like she is too stupid to understand certain problems. The worst thing is that they often claim to give the girl time to make up her mind about who she wants to be with, though their actions state quite the opposite. The Masque of the Red Death duology provides a clear example of how these types of abusive behaviour can come together: Araby, the main character, struggles with her detachment from reality and her drug addiction. One of the two boys interested in her injects her with drugs against her explicit wish because he just knows so much better than she does that it will help her. Also, he withholds important intelligence, then blames his competitor when things go wrong. UGH.

 Of course, not all romance in YA is this problematic. I would argue, though, that romance in YA can be rather unrealistic at times in several ways.

Firstly, a lot of books pretend that the relationship between the two main characters is based on destiny, the highest type of love there is, or plain old True LoveTM (Twilight, Fallen). Within the frame of the story, this may work. However, I find it problematic, because the main characters of YA tend to be around 16 years old and most relationships we have at that age tend not to survive into adulthood. That is OK; most of those relationships are a kind of trial, a test in which we learn to define what we want and don’t want in a relationship, what is acceptable and what is not, how much you have to take and how much you have to give. This is not to say that they are somehow less than relationships people have in later life (in fact, most people will remember their first relationship very vividly, as well as the strong emotions that went along with it). Of course, there are always people who end up staying with their childhood sweet-heart for the rest of their life. It must be noted, though, that this is rare. Portraying the relationships teenagers have as the highest kind of love there is 1)insulting to other kinds of love that are equally valid, 2)plain wrong, since many people will have more than one serious relationship in their lives, 3) as well as dangerous, because it implies that, as soon as your teenage relationship ends, your life’s purpose (or at least one of them) has somehow come to an end. This sounds highly dramatic, but I would like to point out that this is exactly how some books portray a break-up (New Moon is practically infamous because of it, but other books, such as the Trylle-trilogy, do it as well). It also implies that there is something wrong with you if you haven’t had a relationship before your teenage years end, even though there are plenty of people who haven’t really dated as teenagers, which is completely normal.

Secondly, there is the entire love-triangle aspect. It is dumb because it portrays women as objects to be bartered for, as well as highly unrealistic. Most people are happy when they find one guy or girl that is happy to have them. To have more than one fighting for your attention is almost the opposite of a problem (or would be, if it wasn’t so incredibly abusive).

 So, why do we even have to care about all of this? Naturally, there is a point to my ranting, or I would not have written so much. Though YA is read by people from all types of age categories, it is a fact that a large part of the readership consists of young teenagers. Though I feel that a lot of teenagers are a lot more intelligent and perceptive than we as a society give them credit for, the fact remains that they are pretty impressionable. They are in a phase of their lives during which they become more and more self-aware as well as aware of the world around them, its conventions and norms and paradoxes. When abusive, unrealistic behaviour is presented as normal or even romanticized, they will not or only partly realize that this is not the way they themselves should behave. It becomes internalized, and once it becomes part of the way you think, it is very hard to get it out of your system.

 Again, this is not a post to slander YA. There are books out there that subvert these tropes and do manage to paint a fairly positive picture of teenage romance. I just wish that there would be more.