By now, you should know about the incendiary and distressing events at Yale and Mizzou. Regarding Yale: understand that this is about more than an email or even offensive Halloween costumes. This is about the daily struggle of minority students and students of color for dignity, a sense of belonging, and a respectful environment free of psychic traumas. Viet N. Trinh, a doctoral student at Yale, answers Erika Christakis’ perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately thoughtless and insensitive letter about racism and “free speech” in a more nuanced way than we, as outsiders to this struggle, perhaps could.
To that point, this New Yorker article by Jelani Cobb is a thoughtful response to the Atlantic’s finger-wagging pieceabout student activist ‘intolerance,’ (as if students with material privilege cannot experience racism), centered on the protests and debates at Yale.
Cosmopolitan, of all places, has a urgent and important take on the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, a former police officer accused of trading on his power as a law enforcement official in order to sexually assault black women. Why isn’t this getting the attention it deserves?
The Nation has an important take on the resignation of Tim Wolfe, and the ways in which exploited student athletes can fight back against administrations. In the article’s words: “The administrators created a world in which universities revolve socially, politically, and economically around the exploited labor of football. Now let them reap what they sow.”
On decolonizing the kind of yoga that exploits the exotic for profit: “As an Indian woman living in the U.S. I’ve often felt uncomfortable in many yoga spaces. At times, such as when I take a $25.00 yoga class by a well-known teacher who wants to “expose us to the culture by chanting Om to start class“ and her studio hangs the Om symbol in the wrong direction, my culture is being stripped of its meaning and sold back to me in forms that feel humiliating at best and dehumanizing at worst.”
And finally, news that’s a little more lighthearted: I love advice columns, and I love Mallory Ortberg. Two great things collide!
This month’s Reel Women is dedicated to a brief blip in the generic morphology of the romcom known as the sex comedy. Between the large-budget movie musicals of the 1950s that replaced sex with song, and the notoriously bleak cinematic landscape of the 70s in which, it seems, only Woody Allen bothered to produce romcoms (a sign that the genre was, indeed, on the rocks), the sex comedy reigned with the sugary self-assurance of a pre-Nixon world. With an aesthetic that I can only describe as what mid-century Hollywood imagined middle America imagined New York to look like, it brought glamour to middle class sex.
Dedicated to the sexual exploits of the newly urban and distressingly unmarried boomer generation, the sex comedy—like all romcoms—attempted to deal with a lot of anxieties about gender, sexuality and class by marrying them off. Despite its name, the sex comedy is exceptionally chaste. Although its characters talk more explicitly and soberly about sex than almost anywhere else in American cinema before them thanks to the Hays Code, they never actually move beyond a theoretical discussion of the mechanics of premarital sex. Two decades earlier, audiences saw more bed-hopping in the screwball comedy than they would find in these movies. Instead, sex in the sex comedy is tasked with both emblematizing a new politics of gender parity while also providing the occasion to force those politics back into the home, ensconced within a loving and now sexually-fulfilling marriage.
This month’s Reel Women is dedicated to a brief blip in the generic morphology of the romcom known as the sex comedy. Between the large-budget movie musicals of the 1950s that replaced sex with song, and the notoriously bleak cinematic landscape of the 70s in which, it seems, only Woody Allen bothered to produce romcoms (a sign that the genre was, indeed, on the rocks), the sex comedy reigned with the sugary self-assurance of a pre-Nixon world. With an aesthetic that I can only describe as what mid-century Hollywood imagined middle America imagined New York to look like, it brought glamour to middle class sex.
Dedicated to the sexual exploits of the newly urban and distressingly unmarried boomer generation, the sex comedy—like all romcoms—attempted to deal with a lot of anxieties about gender, sexuality and class by marrying them off. Despite its name, the sex comedy is exceptionally chaste. Although its characters talk more explicitly and soberly about sex than almost anywhere else in American cinema before them thanks to the Hays Code, they never actually move beyond a theoretical discussion of the mechanics of premarital sex. Two decades earlier, audiences saw more bed-hopping in the screwball comedy than they would find in these movies. Instead, sex in the sex comedy is tasked with both emblematizing a new politics of gender parity while also providing the occasion to force those politics back into the home, ensconced within a loving and now sexually-fulfilling marriage.
The postwar decades saw a perfect storm of cultural and political agitation around sex and the sexual practices of heteronormative Americans. Both Playboy magazine and Alfred Kinsey’s second and most controversial report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, debuted in 1953. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published in 1962, and it became increasingly clear that the happy housewife was a myth and teens and women were having all kinds of sex despite the Leave It To Beaver-ish representations of family life. The Pill was released in 1961, and individual states began rolling back their abortion bans throughout the 60s, eventually culminating in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973. Freud’s theories on sexuality were so permanently in the water that you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a joke—or a straight-faced observation—about Oedipal desire. In other words, despite our vision of the 1950s as a supremely traditional, family-values oriented time—a nostalgic fantasy manufactured by the TV cowboy in the Reagan White House—it was actually as volatile and anxious about the institution of marriage as we are now.
The sex comedy is a pastiche of mid-century gender politics, a precious remnant from the early days of the Second Wave written from the other side. Metabolizing feminist concerns over professional equality, sexual freedom, and unmarried independence, the sex comedy solves these problems through hetero pairing rather than political activity—or rather, the only political activity in these films is marriage itself. In fact, the heroine is both a straw feminist and a romantic lead, seeking equality with her male professional rival while succumbing to the selfsame as a love interest.
This is how the sex comedy goes: an attractive white woman living in the big city with a burgeoning career but a dour love life develops a personal or professional animosity, erotic in intensity, with a faceless man who has made it his purpose to crack her frigid self-possession through tricks, foul or fair. Once the hero accidentally discovers the luscious body belonging to his competition—in this world, the demure, musical comedy stylings of Doris Day are treated as the most sexually inspiring thing in Manhattan—he is forced to mask his identity in order to seduce her. Disguised as a sensitive, gentile, sexually mild drip, he manipulates the heroine into seducing him until his ploy is revealed and she declares that she will never forgive him. But by then, it’s too late. She has succumbed to his charms and is obliged by the power of her own sexual desire to quietly ignore his betrayal and ride off into the sunset with him.
Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor in Down with Love | Image from fanpop.com
If you’ve seen Down With Love, a loving, beat-for-beat send-up of the genre, you know the rhythm.
Like most romcoms, these films don’t pass the Bechdel test. In fact, in this world, there is only room for one respectable middle-class girl in all of Manhattan. Every other female character is either a middle-aged maid who provides our heroines with the only thing that will pass for girl-talk in these movies, or they are showgirls, actresses, and French women whose apparently casual sexual relationships with the male lead disqualify them from true femininity. It’s almost as if our heroine wins by default of being the only virginal choice left.
Virginity itself is a strangely ambivalent category in these films. Although the heroine’s relative chastity is the very thing that makes her the heroine, it is also a source of shame or contempt. One of the first exchanges between Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Pillow Talk ridicules the barren bedscape of the heroine, Jan:
Brad Allen: Look, I don’t know what’s bothering you, but don’t take your bedroom problems out on me.
Jan Morrow: I have no bedroom problems. There’s nothing in my bedroom that bothers me.
Brad Allen: Ohh, that’s too bad.
Even more notably, the heroine of Sex and the Single Girl spends most of the movie attempting to hide her virginity from the hero whose purpose it is to ruin her business as a sex therapist by revealing her as a romantic novice. The heroine’s fastidiousness about sex in these films is meant to betray an unenlightened prissiness that is unacceptable even in marriage and must be hijinks-ed away before her sexuality is safely ensconced in matrimony.
The sexual politics of Sex and the Single Girl are even more striking because they are directly tied to the real life cultural landscape. Named after the advice book of the same name by Helen Gurley Brown, who would later go on to found Cosmopolitan magazine, it follows the exploits of a woman named Dr. Helen Gurley Brown (Natalie Wood) who writes an advice book called Sex and the Single Girl. Her book, which advises single women to own their desires and have affairs with married men, is a controversial sensation and attracts the attention of a tawdry magazine journalist (Tony Curtis) who wants to write an exposé proving that Dr. Brown has never taken her own advice. Turning the book into a sex comedy means turning Brown herself, an instrumental figure in the Second Wave, into a naive priss in need of a husband. These movies trope feminism in order to reify tradition, celebrating the new sexual freedoms afforded to white middle-class women at the same time that they seek to put them in their place.
Meanwhile, male sexual dysfunction is a crucial plot device. In their attempts to seduce the heroine, the heroes of these films always adopt an impotent, sexually unassuming persona. Through a series of phone calls in Pillow Talk, Brad convinces Jan that the sensitive cowboy he is pretending to be is gay—“there are some men who…how shall I put this? Well they’re very fond of their mother. They like to share bits of gossip. Collect recipes.” This conversation is made all the more cruel by the fact that Rock Hudson was gay in real life. And Tony Curtis’s Bob shows up to Dr. Brown’s office as an impotent patient in need of therapy in Sex and the Single Girl. It seems that without an impotent straw man, the empowered straw feminist is neither empowered nor, finally, transformed into a wife.
These films seem to want to turn masculine vulnerability into a farce—it becomes simply a role played by a cocky alpha—in order to protect masculinity from true vulnerability. The type of vulnerability, say, made possible by a feminist politics. Although the trajectory of the sex comedy is from career woman to wife through the crucible of normative sexuality, it must get there by queering the masculine. A recurring gag throughout Pillow Talk involves Brad hiding from Jan in the office of an obstetrician where he distractedly attempts to make an appointment and convinces the doctor that he is, miraculously, a pregnant man. The last shot of Pillow Talk is not of the happy couple, but of Brad being dragged into the doctor’s office after cheerfully declaring that he’s “going to have a baby!” He may have gotten the girl and returned to his alpha persona, but, the movie seems to say, he is still a little queer.
Legally Blonde has a lot of feminist bona fides: it passes the Bechdel test with flying colors; the girls in Elle’s sorority, despite confirming to every other sorority-girl stereotype, are not remotely catty and support Elle in all her endeavors; a working-class woman gets a romance plot with a very conventionally-attractive man; when Elle’s male professor turns out to be more of a creep than a role model, a female professor gives Elle the push she needs; and, in my favorite twist on the modern rom-com, the climactic moment normally reserved for the Big Kiss is taken up instead by Elle, high on her court victory, rejecting Warner and walking into the sunshine happy and alone (she does wind up with a man, but it is in the epilogue and not part of the movie itself). But, for me, the most powerful thing about this movie is the way it portrays Elle’s femininity.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t identify as a feminist. I can’t possibly have known the word as a toddler, but I always wanted to prove I could do whatever my older brothers could, because I needed them to know that girls could do anything boys could do. Despite this, it took me until very recently to identify a subtle, insidious form of misogyny I’d internalized and had been holding onto since childhood: the devaluing of the “feminine.”
The opening sequence of Legally Blonde is all pink products and blond hair. We cut between scenes of college and sorority life – a girl being catcalled by frat guys as she bikes past their house, girls in pink workout gear on treadmills, those Tiffany’s heart bracelets everywhere – and Reese Witherspoon’s silky hair and perfectly manicured hands surrounded by beauty-products and markers of traditionally recognizable, material femininity: Herbal Essences “True Color” Blonde hair-dye; nail polishes; dried roses on a stack of Cosmopolitans; a Homecoming Queen banner; a lovingly decorated “President” sorority paddle. Everything that could be pink is pink, from the bedspread, to the glitter pens used to write on a pink card in a pink envelope, to the doggy-sweater for Bruiser, Elle Wood’s chic Chihuahua.
Just four minutes into the movie, a salesgirl sizes Elle up the way many viewers – my thirteen year-old self included – would: “a dumb blonde with daddy’s plastic.” The salesgirl tries to sell Elle a last-season dress as a new piece, and sweetly and swiftly, Elle shows through her extensive knowledge of fabrics and fashion that she’s no easy mark. Immediately, we see that Elle is deeply seeped in all that is considered feminine, but that however frivolous this knowledge is judged to be, Elle’s sharp, legalistic mind uses her extensive knowledge to her advantage in a wide range of contexts. It is not only that her Barbie-esque exterior leads people to misjudge her intelligence; it is part of her intelligence.
Legally Blonde has a lot of feminist bona fides: it passes the Bechdel test with flying colors; the girls in Elle’s sorority, despite confirming to every other sorority-girl stereotype, are not remotely catty and support Elle in all her endeavors; a working-class woman gets a romance plot with a very conventionally-attractive man; when Elle’s male professor turns out to be more of a creep than a role model, a female professor gives Elle the push she needs; and, in my favorite twist on the modern rom-com, the climactic moment normally reserved for the Big Kiss is taken up instead by Elle, high on her court victory, rejecting Warner and walking into the sunshine happy and alone (she does wind up with a man, but it is in the epilogue and not part of the movie itself). But, for me, the most powerful thing about this movie is the way it portrays Elle’s femininity.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t identify as a feminist. I can’t possibly have known the word as a toddler, but I always wanted to prove I could do whatever my older brothers could, because I needed them to know that girls could do anything boys could do. Despite this, it took me until very recently to identify a subtle, insidious form of misogyny I’d internalized and had been holding onto since childhood: the devaluing of the “feminine.” Since girls could do anything boys could do, why wouldn’t they? Why would I play with dolls when I could collect baseball cards? Why would anyone want to be a stay-at-home mom when they could work? I was so terrified of being associated with femininity – despite being a fairly shy, soft-spoken kid – that when I was twelve and a friend of mine painted my nails for the first time, I wrote in my diary “I have to go to this New Year’s party with mom and dad. My nails are still painted…I hope everyone doesn’t think I’m a girl or something.” I dressed as male characters for several Halloweens, and when we did our “traveling biography” projects in fourth grade, I dressed as Milton Hershey and learned how to tie my own tie.
In Female Masculinity, queer theorist Jack/Judith Halberstam observes:
[T]omboyism is quite common for girls…[and] we tend to believe that female gender deviance is much more tolerated than male gender deviance…Tomboyism tends to be associated with a ‘natural’ desire for the greater freedoms and mobilities enjoyed by boys. Very often it is read as sign of independence and self-motivation, and tomboyism may even be encouraged to the extent that it remains comfortably linked to a stable sense of girl identity (5-6).
Halberstam argues that this acceptance of female masculinity, of tomboyism, ends at puberty. And, for the most-part, she’s right; once we become teenagers, girls are certainly expected to look feminine. And mainstream culture still expects them to act feminine. But a sizable chunk of counter-culture wants the “best of both worlds.” It wants, in other words, the “Cool Girl” – a trope made famous by Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, but one that certainly existed prior to her novel.
Photo @GoneGirlMovie/Twitter
Gillian Flynn describes the Cool Girl as
[A] hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want.
This girl, Flynn argues, is a fiction, because, in her words, “no one loves chili dogs that much!” Flynn sees a sad core beneath this persona – “the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.”
Tracy Moore at Jezebel has a more sympathetic take on the “Cool Girl,” arguing that she is “not a fiction, but a phase.”
Liking beers, hot dogs, sports, partying, and having a general allergy to feelings or Anything Too Serious is not the province of straight men in reality…but generally speaking, it is the cultural province and conditioning of straight men. These are the criteria for general dudeness, and by acknowledging this we must also acknowledge the criteria for general ladyness, which is typically thought of as a softer, gentler, more feelings-driven creature…
So when a woman for whatever reason embraces traditionally straight male interests while retaining aspects of straight female interests, and is hot (she always must be hot)—when she manages, for all intents and purposes, to somehow combine the best of both genders into one bangin’ superpackage of awesomeness—you have what is called a Cool Girl.
From my own experience, inhabiting the role of the Cool Girl is especially appealing to girls who never quite “got” traditional femininity – those of us who, in middle and early high-school, felt out of place, off-kilter, girls whose senses of humor, whose tastes in clothes and movies, whose priorities and hair and just about everything were somehow wrong. Then suddenly, in college, all the things that made me feel like an awkward loser made me feel magical. Girls who “weren’t like other girls” weren’t losers. We were cool. We were desirable. We were special. As Moore writes:
Sometimes it feels good to reject cultural notions of femininity and take up residence on a strange earth and live among the Others—to be told that for a while, you were that sort of girl, the one all the men wanted, admired, and desired, and could never quite grab hold of.
Both Flynn and Moore address the problem of the Cool Girl never getting angry (or never showing it), allowing men to treat her poorly out of a paralyzing fear of seeming clingy or needy. But what is more sinister is that Cool Girl often comes paired with not simply a distaste, but a disdain for all things feminine. For girls who wear makeup all the time (because somehow, the Cool Girl looks hot without trying, or showing that she tries), for girls who want boyfriends, or want their boyfriends to spend time with them, for girls who diet, for girls who drink cosmos or light beer instead of whiskey neat and IPAs, for bubblegum pop, for collections of high heels.
The tendency to think of “masculine” things — emotional remove, spicy foods and hard liquor, movies with car chases — as better, as more legitimate, cooler, than “feminine” things certainly exists outside of the sphere of the “Cool Girl.” Whether we expect women to adhere rigidly to femininity, or to juggle the aspects of the “masculine” and “feminine” that comprise the “Cool Girl,” or do whatever the hell they want, it is rare that femininity itself as portrayed as strength; at best, a very feminine-seeming character surprises us with her martial arts skill or impeccable aim, a sort of Cool Girl cum Femme Fatale, whose femininity masks her inner strength.
Elle is, again, the apotheosis of all things feminine. She wears pink, subscribes to Cosmopolitan, wants to get married – with a big rock on her finger to boot — wears her heart on her sleeve, and spritzes her resumes – typed on pink paper — with perfume. She is unapologetically feminine, and this does not change throughout her story. Nor is it entirely fair to say she “finds her strength” over the course of the film; she certainly learns a lot about herself, discovering that she’ll make a pretty great lawyer and that she doesn’t need a man.
But that strength was always there. In her unique (for lack of a better word) application video to Harvard Law School, she showcases her comfort with “legal terms in every day situations” by responding to a cat-caller with a swift “I object!” Once she sets her sights on Harvard – for admittedly less-than-ideal reasons – she has complete confidence in her ability to get in, and she rocks the LSAT. Over and over, we see people judge her: the salesgirl at the beginning of the movie; Warren, when he dumps her because she’s not “serious” enough for a future senator’s wife; her guidance counselor who doubts her ability to get into Harvard; her classmates and professors when she pulls a pink, heart-shaped notepad out on her first day of class; the judge when she questions [daughter] about her hair-care routine on the witness stand. And over and over, Elle proves them wrong.
On the first day of class, one of Elle’s professors quotes Aristotle in saying “Law is reason free from passion.” Three years later, as she speaks at her class graduation, Elle says
No offense to Aristotle, but in my three years at Harvard I have come to find that passion is a key ingredient to the study and practice of law — and of life. It is with passion, courage of conviction, and strong sense of self that we take our next steps into the world, remembering that first impressions are not always correct. You must always have faith in people. And most importantly, you must always have faith in yourself.
Elle brings unbridled passion to everything she does. She will never be “cool,” because in addition to her fabulous pink wardrobe, she will always care, and always show it. While Legally Blonde certainly makes an argument for passion – and against cynicism – it doesn’t enforce Elle’s femininity (it is, however, very hetero-normative and very white). But it does celebrate it. It is a girly movie about girly things, where “girly things” is broadened to simultaneously mean manicures and Prada shoes, and serious smarts, talent, and ambition. Legally Blonde elevates “frivolous” femininity to the level of serious, old boys’ club masculinity – for which there is hardly a better symbol than Harvard Law School.
acromag.wordpress.com 