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#pop feminism
morlock-holmes · 6 months
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This recent post by @dagny-hasshtaggart brought up some feelings that aren't really related to the original point being made.
One of the reasons "nerds" think through social theory in these systematic ways is because nerds are pretty much by definition people who do not have strong instincts in this area.
If you are good at, say, mathematics, you will have these "eureka!" moments; you'll just suddenly understand how to go about solving what was previously a knotty problem, and, if asked to explain how you got there, may have trouble explaining it other than that "the thought comes when it wills," as Nietzche said.
Some people don't tend to have nearly as many of these "eureka!" moments, and they probably struggle with math. Perhaps they need a lot more instruction to understand math than some other people, and maybe they will never achieve the deep understanding that allowed some few mathematicians to transform society.
Nonetheless they probably can learn some basic, or perhaps even fairly advanced math, if it is laid out systemically?
But people really rebel when I suggest that social behavior might work the same way, that a person without the instinct for it might nevertheless learn to get along well enough through directed practice.
In fact, I feel that right now society believes two things simultaneously:
That the social norms and niceties of traditional society are no longer morally justifiable or even practical on the base level, and society must engage in a radical reinvention of its social norms;
Social behavior exists only as a kind of eruption of pure instinct, and cannot really be taught as a skill; success in the social realm depends entirely on preconscious processes that aren't subject to rational thought or systemization.
And if you think that it would be incredibly disconcerting and difficult to believe both of those things at the same time, then congratulations on getting my point and thank you for coming to my ted talk.
When I talk about mainstream pop feminism, like I did below, I never know whether to include my personal reasoning. On the one hand, personal examples bring things into the concrete world, on the other hand, I feel like the sympathy I get, (Which I appreciate, but I have other issues besides just feminism) sometimes gets in the way of something that I deeply want other people to understand.
Which is that the kind of mainstream feminism espoused by your favorite podcaster and retweeted by your friends and repeated on tv shows is even more schizoid about this stuff then most of the rest of society.
This is a movement that (I have recently been reminded) spread the hashtag #TeachMenNotToRape a few years back and which is also, in my experience, completely and utterly at a loss when confronting a man who says, "I'm scared to express sexual desire because I don't feel like I know enough about consent to be sure that I'm actually getting it."
The reason you want heuristics, or rules, or whatever, is that they let you reason about unfamiliar situations.
Like, say I see an attractive girl at the bar and go over and ask for her number, and she feels creeped out by me. Almost everybody I've talked to says, "Well, you can accept those feelings with grace and respect them, but you can't take responsibility for somebody else feeling creeped out, that doesn't mean every woman you meet in a bar will feel that way."
But on the other hand, say I see an attractive girl in headphones riding the bus with me, should I go up and ask her for her number? Well, most people say, "Well, no, in that case most women would be really irritated and even creeped out, and since you can predict that you have a responsibility not to act that way."
The reason some nerd might want more than that is because, you can't make an exhaustive list of every situation, right? If I'm on a cruise ship or a see a cute cosplayer at a con, is that more like the bar situation or more like the bus situation?
Here's a conclusion I came to about ten years ago,
"Well, allistic people have a magical instinct that lets them know when those kind of expressions of attraction are okay and when they aren't. The reason I don't know which is which is because I'm autistic. And since I really don't know which situation is which, the only respectful thing to do is to never risk being wrong. But that shouldn't matter right? Because Women Like Sex As Much As Men Do(tm) so eventually, since I'm going to parties and hanging out in really progressive spaces, women will ask me out pretty often and then I won't have to take those risks of hurting people."
This is where my allistic, feminist friends just grab the bridge of their nose and have to go, "Well, no, it doesn't work that way, I mean, those are things that I say all the time and you should still believe them, just not in this context, so-"
And that just kicks the can down the road, right? Now my new question is, "How do I tell the feminist advice that every guy should follow apart from the stuff that's meant for like, the alpha male creeps but not for me? And isn't it still really really dangerous for me to mistake one for the other?"
At which point they try to fob me off onto a therapist because I'm obviously a hopeless case.
And I guess I have two points:
The first is, how is a movement where so much of the verbiage is about "teaching" men so entirely unprepared to teach men how to do anything? Doesn't anybody but me find that completely remarkable?
Second, the thing that unites a ton of counter-feminist movements is not "men just want an excuse to be sexist" nor is it that those movements are "more logical" except maybe in the very limited way that they are concerned with collapsing that schizoid mental state where men must, and yet cannot, be taught.
They offer heuristics and ideas that allow men to make systematic sense of the parts of the world that they do not otherwise instinctually grasp. This can be done in a positive way which looks honestly at the world or in a deeply toxic and negative way based on completely untrue premises (e.g. radical inceldom) but I'm not convinced it can be done at all in the context of mainstream feminism.
You can't tell people that they need to go elsewhere for instruction and then be surprised and offended when they do so!
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haggishlyhagging · 6 months
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The aspects of feminism currently given voice in pop culture are the most media-friendly ones, the ones that center on heterosexual relationships and marriage, on economic success that doesn't challenge existing capitalist structures, on the right to be desirable yet have bodily autonomy. Watson's speech to the UN was centered on “inviting” men to get invested in feminism, in order to better legitimize it. Sheryl Sandberg's much-heralded Lean In philosophy is about women conforming to workplaces that increasingly see them not as human beings but as automatons with inconvenient biology. The feminism they espouse is certainly reasonable, but it's not particularly nuanced. It doesn't get to the root of why men might not be invested in feminism or why corporate culture forces untenable choices. It doesn't challenge beliefs or processes or hegemonies so much as it offers nips and tucks.
Despite every signal boost for feminism, every spot-on viral video about beauty standards, every badass, take-charge female film or TV role, and every catchily named nail polish, the beliefs behind the word "feminism" remain among the most contested in political and social life. The question that has always been at its heart—Are women human beings, with the same rights, access, and liberties as men?—is increasingly posed in spheres where it should have been resolved decades ago. This increasingly looks not like a world that has finally emerged into fully realized feminism, but like a world in which we are letting a glossy, feel-good feminism pull focus away from deeply entrenched forms of inequality. It's a feminism that trades on simple themes of sisterhood and support—you-go-girl tweets and Instagram photos, cheery magazine editorials about dressing to please yourself. The fight for gender equality has transmogrifted from a collective goal to a consumer brand.
-Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once
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runthepockets · 3 months
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kazhanko-art · 4 months
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Taylor Swift is not the worst of feminism, because Mary Koss exists, but boy is she a particularly obnoxious example of rich person who milks the feminist label while doing no activism and claiming constant victim status
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vanilla-voyeur · 8 months
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"Men are making so many butthurt articles about a toy! 😂😂😂" says the woman who's been posting daily Barbie memes since before the movie even came out.
People on the internet are giving their opinions on the current topic of the day. It's not that deep.
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hyperlexichypatia · 2 months
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As I keep shouting into the void, pathologizers love shifting discussion about material conditions into discussion about emotional states.
I rant approximately once a week about how the brain maturity myth transmuted “Young adults are too poor to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own” into “Young adults are too emotionally and neurologically immature to move out of their parents’ homes or have children of their own.”
I’ve also talked about the misuse of “enabling” and “trauma” and “dopamine” .
And this is a pattern – people coin terms and concepts to describe material problems, and pathologization culture shifts them to be about problems in the brain or psyche of the person experiencing them. Now we’re talking about neurochemicals, frontal lobes, and self-esteem instead of talking about wages, wealth distribution, and civil rights. Now we can say that poor, oppressed, and exploited people are suffering from a neurological/emotional defect that makes them not know what’s best for themselves, so they don’t need or deserve rights or money.
Here are some terms that have been so horribly misused by mental health culture that we’ve almost entirely forgotten that they were originally materialist critiques.
Codependency What it originally referred to: A non-addicted person being overly “helpful” to an addicted partner or relative, often out of financial desperation. For example: Making sure your alcoholic husband gets to work in the morning (even though he’s an adult who should be responsible for himself) because if he loses his job, you’ll lose your home. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/codependency-addiction-recovery.html What it’s been distorted into: Being “clingy,” being “too emotionally needy,” wanting things like affection and quality time from a partner. A way of pathologizing people, especially young women, for wanting things like love and commitment in a romantic relationship.
Compulsory Heterosexuality What it originally referred to: In the 1980 in essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/493756 Adrienne Rich described compulsory heterosexuality as a set of social conditions that coerce women into heterosexual relationships and prioritize those relationships over relationships between women (both romantic and platonic). She also defines “lesbian” much more broadly than current discourse does, encompassing a wide variety of romantic and platonic relationships between women. While she does suggest that women who identify as heterosexual might be doing so out of unquestioned social norms, this is not the primary point she’s making. What it’s been distorted into: The patronizing, biphobic idea that lesbians somehow falsely believe themselves to be attracted to men. Part of the overall “Women don’t really know what they want or what’s good for them” theme of contemporary discourse.
Emotional Labor What it originally referred to: The implicit or explicit requirement that workers (especially women workers, especially workers in female-dominated “pink collar” jobs, especially tipped workers) perform emotional intimacy with customers, coworkers, and bosses above and beyond the actual job being done. Having to smile, be “friendly,” flirt, give the impression of genuine caring, politely accept harassment, etc. https://weld.la.psu.edu/what-is-emotional-labor/ What it’s been distorted into: Everything under the sun. Everything from housework (which we already had a term for), to tolerating the existence of disabled people, to just caring about friends the way friends do. The original intent of the concept was “It’s unreasonable to expect your waitress to care about your problems, because she’s not really your friend,” not “It’s unreasonable to expect your actual friends to care about your problems unless you pay them, because that’s emotional labor,” and certainly not “Disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to be visibly disabled in public, because witnessing a disabled person is emotional labor.” Anything that causes a person emotional distress, even if that emotional distress is rooted in the distress-haver’s bigotry (Many nominally progressive people who would rightfully reject the bigoted logic of “Seeing gay or interracial couples upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public” fully accept the bigoted logic of “Seeing disabled or poor people upsets me, which is emotional labor, so they shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public”).
Battered Wife Syndrome What it originally referred to: The all-encompassing trauma and fear of escalating violence experienced by people suffering ongoing domestic abuse, sometimes resulting in the abuse victim using necessary violence in self-defense. Because domestic abuse often escalates, often to murder, this fear is entirely rational and justified. This is the reasonable, justified belief that someone who beats you, stalks you, and threatens to kill you may actually kill you.
What it’s been distorted into: Like so many of these other items, the idea that women (in this case, women who are victims of domestic violence) don’t know what’s best for themselves. I debated including this one, because “syndrome” was a wrongful framing from the beginning – a justified and rational fear of escalating violence in a situation in which escalating violence is occurring is not a “syndrome.” But the original meaning at least partially acknowledged the material conditions of escalating violence.
I’m not saying the original meanings of these terms are ones I necessarily agree with – as a cognitive liberty absolutist, I’m unsurprisingly not that enamored of either second-wave feminism or 1970s addiction discourse. And as much as I dislike what “emotional labor” has become, I accept that “Women are unfairly expected to care about other people’s feelings more than men are” is a true statement.
What I am saying is that all of these terms originally, at least partly, took material conditions into account in their usage. Subsequent usage has entirely stripped the materialist critique and fully replaced it with emotional pathologization, specifically of women. Acknowledgement that women have their choices constrained by poverty, violence, and oppression has been replaced with the idea that women don’t know what’s best for themselves and need to be coercively “helped” for their own good. Acknowledgement that working-class women experience a gender-and-class-specific form of economic exploitation has been rebranded as yet another variation of “Disabled people are burdensome for wanting to exist.”
Over and over, materialist critiques are reframed as emotional or cognitive defects of marginalized people. The next time you hear a superficially sympathetic (but actually pathologizing) argument for “Marginalized people make bad choices because…” consider stopping and asking: “Wait, who are we to assume that this person’s choices are ‘bad’? And if they are, is there something about their material conditions that constrains their options or makes the ‘bad’ choice the best available option?”
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cardassiangoodreads · 8 months
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Re: Barbie feminism discourse: It's obviously ridiculous to expect that the film was going to give us a Shulamith Firestone treatise or something, but it's also weird to me how many people who do understand that still seem to be underselling what it does do with its feminist themes? I was surprised by the movie because what it had to say really wasn't just "pop feminism." It's critical of the way that companies that are run by men (including Mattel itself) sell female empowerment while still denying women power in concrete ways. It discusses patriarchy as a systemic problem that no one individual woman can solve, but something that can be chipped away at through collective action. Much of Ken's arc is essentially a gender-flipped examination of the way that patriarchy, and particularly the way that it encourages women to compete with each other over men and discourages us from finding a larger purpose outside of who men want us to be, keeps women down and keeps us feeling inadequate -- while also connecting that to concrete examples of that from the real world via America Ferrera's character. Not only is it the most radical movie we could expect from Mattel but it's a strong feminist statement even by the standards of other movies. The reason shitty men are getting as panicked about it as they are is because it did in fact say something that was genuinely threatening to them, and in a film that is going to be watched by a much wider audience of people than usually go to see movies about feminism. Idk, guys, as someone who feels confident saying I've read way more radical feminist theory than most people Discoursing Online: I see literally no reason for feminists to be upset or even "measured" about this one.
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tygerland · 8 months
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Debbie Harry photographed by Trixi Rosen for an article on punk rock attitude, published in After Dark magazine, October 1977.
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lemonhemlock · 11 months
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tried watching the new queen charlotte series but was immediately put off by the ridiculous anti-corset propaganda, so get ready for another rant.
first of all, this is the georgian era so what she's wearing are called /stays/ - corsets are a victorian invention. why do we still not know this in 2023 when period productions have remained consistently popular throughout the years? the concept of tighlacing (the goal being a reduction of the waist) is also victorian and was not the norm at all and v much an extreme practice. this understanding of history is so superficial, it's as if an alien were to open up People magazine and conclude that all human women resort to butt injections and lip fillers to stay with the fashion of the times. also, no, you cannot tighlace in stays to obtain a waist reduction because they are shaped like a funnel (picture 1 = long stays, 2 = short regency stays, 3 = corset)
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charlotte goes on to complain about how dangerous whalebone is and that it might kill her if she makes the wrong move. what the actual fuck? whalebone was actually the very best material to use for this because it was sturdy yet flexible and allowed the /stays/ to completely and comfortably mold around a woman's unique body shape. one of the reasons why today it is v difficult to replicate the same effect in corsetry is because we do not have access to whalebone (killing whales is not cool for obvious reasons) so corset-makers have to resort to other materials like plastic or metal, which CAN break. whereas whalebone doesn't really break as easily. furthermore, stays/corsets were NEVER worn on bare skin, but with a chemise/shift underneath.
why did women in the past resort to this type of undergarment, you ask? well, apart from the fact that women need bust support, the stays also serve the purpose of allowing all the many skirts and petticoats to be placed comfortably onto the waist. you try piling on that much fabric around your bare waist and see how you like it and if you can even carry it all around without it cutting into your stomach.
clothes throughout human history did cater to the popular fashions of the time, yes, but they also reflected the technological limitations and there was thus a practical aspect to it. this is a time before elastic bands, before industrialization and fast fashion, clothes are v difficult to make, everything is done by hand, so a lot of care is put into preserving them, because they are /expensive/ and labour intensive. you don't want your fancy outergarments to get ruined so you wear a lot of undergarments to absorb your bodily fluids since those are easier to make and don't have to look "pretty", can be stained and patchy etc. again, why do you need so many layers in the first place? because this is a time before comfortable heating, with poorly isolated and drafty houses, and it's bloody cold otherwise.
the third reason why that monologue was so dumb is because CHARLOTTE is the reason regency court dress was so preposterous. long story short, in a few decades, the fashionable silhouette changes wildly from the late 1700s to the 1810s.
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the regency waistline was much higher and the gowns were much more flowy and unstructured than the late georgian ones (what's commonly known as the empire waistline). the long stays of the late 1700s were now replaced with short stays that really were similar to modern bras. the scene in the first season of bridgerton where they squeeze penelope's sister into what looks like a pair of long stays (?) is bonkers bc no one would wear a waist-constricting boned undergarment under a regency dress. why would they? the natural waist is not even emphasized in any way. this is just another reason to peddle the women-were-oppressed-by-their-lingerie agenda. so if charlotte really hated long stays that much, regency would really have been her time to shine, right? wrong. the woman loved the fashions of her youth so much she forced everyone who came to court to still comply to them, which is why we get the absolutely atrocious regency court dresses - essentially a combination of the georgian style with side panniers, but with an empire waistline.
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yeah, this is how daphne SHOULD have looked like when she was presented at court in front of charlotte. i can understand why the showrunners decided to just leave her in a regency silhouette because this is ugly af. but, anyway, queen charlotte is the last person on earth to be complaining about how uncomfortable stays are.
creative licence aside, the reason this pisses me off is because it is SUCH lazy storytelling. the show wants us to know charlotte is a spunky pseudo-feminist character so the easiest way to do that is to have her complain about the evil 'corset' trying to kill her. it is so profoundly ahistorical and does nothing to contribute to the conversation about women's true problems and true limitations during that time. instead of genuinely exploring social history and women's actual lived experiences, we are STILL, in the year of our lord 2023, diverting the discourse towards fabricated issues that never existed in the first place.
the reasons actresses complain about boned underwear in interviews are manifold. costume designers are very overworked, they have to produce clothes for hundreds of people in a very short time, so they simply do not have the time or resources to construct corsets/stays that fit the actresses like they are supposed to. in the past, these garments were made individually for every person and completely to their own requirements. they also make these actresses wear the boning on BARE skin to look extra sexy to the audience or to emphasize their oppression - that never happened, a shift was always worn underneath (hello dakota fanning scene in the alienist??).
moreover, they lace them up until they constrict their ribcages - these women are already super thin and their bodies cannot support more reduction - instead of relying on the historical practices of padding and illusion. nowadays, body parts are what's fashionable - that's why so many resort to fat transfers or breast implants or starving themselves to achieve a flat stomach. in the past, anyone of any size could have accomplished the fashionable silhouette because they had a wide array of accouterments to plop underneath their garments - panniers, bustles, hoop skirts, padding of any sort. it didn't matter how big your waist was, you just padded other areas until you achieved the desired shape. fat women wore corsets/stays, too. working women, who did a lot of physical labour, did the same. how were they able to perform all of their tasks if they were incapable of moving or breathing? even today, people wear medical corsets all the time.
TLDR the media's obsession with portraying modern women as so liberated because they wear bras instead of "patriarchal" underwear is so tedious.
EDIT: Some very basic chronological tadpoles to make this easier to place within historical context. "Georgian" is used to denote the 18th+ century when Great Britain was ruled by several kings named George, so roughly 1714-1830. Within this interval, we refer to the Regency period as encompassing the regency of Prince George, future King George IV, when his father George III was incapacitated by mental illness. The official political regency took place during 1811-1820, but culturally speaking, this was extended to roughly the end of the 18th century up to maybe 1830 or 1837. This is the time period of Napoleonic wars and Jane Austen novels, so all her heroines should normally wear Regency styles. Think "empire waistline" as in Imperial France and Napoleon. The Victorian era (and its corsets) follows throughout the rest of the 19th century. Queen Charlotte was a contemporary of Marie Antoinette's, so they should be dressed in similar fashions (robe à la française vs robe à la anglais).
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celestial-depths · 2 months
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Poor Things and Born Sexy Yesterday
(spoilers for Poor Things)
I stumbled on a discussion on whether Bella Baxter from the movie Poor Things (2023) is a representation of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope coined by video essayist Pop Culture Detective, who defines it as a mostly fantasy and sci-fi adjacent trope of a regular human man falling in love with a beautiful, otherworldly woman who, through some plot quirk or another, has no knowledge of social norms and no sexual or romantic past. Even though he is brutally average, he is able to win her love simply because he is the first (human) man she connects with and thus everything that's basic about him is impressive to her. Some examples of the trope given by Pop Culture Detective in his video essay are Leeloo from Fifth Element (the physically grown yet mentally child-like alien creature who falls in love with a taxi driver in a wifebeater) and Madison from Splash (a clothes-aversive mermaid who thinks that Tom Hanks is the most enchanting man in the world). I love Pop Culture Detective's work, and the Born Sexy Yesterday video essay was a cultural reset in my personal history. I saw the video when it premiered six years ago, but it has never fully left my mind, so of course I immediately thought of it when I saw Poor Things a couple of weeks ago. The movie certainly touches on the same themes that the Born Sexy Yesterday is made of. However, I think that the movie is an intentional subversion and a satire of the trope rather than a sincere execution of it.
The main character of the movie Bella Baxter starts out as a grotesquely literal version of the trope, as she is literally a newborn in the shape of a conventionally attractive woman who is being actively shielded from the influence of the outside world. She has the brain of a baby salvaged from the fresh corpse of a deceased pregnant woman, planted inside the skull of the reanimated body of the aforementioned woman as an experiment done by the unorthodox doctor Godwin Baxter. He keeps her locked inside his house and controls every aspect of her life, so when he invites the young doctor Max McCandles to join his research, McCandles is served what is essentially the perfect Born Sexy Yesterday experience: an exclusive access to a beautiful and naive young woman who is in a prime position of being groomed into whatever her keepers wish her to become.
Or so they would think.
A sincere Born Sexy Yesterday would be fully fascinated by this power dynamic and probably leave her here to be romanced by McCandles for the rest of the film. The audience would be expected to assume McCandles's perspective and indulge in the fantasy of falling in love with the untainted woman who has neither the life experience nor the critical thinking skills needed to question him.
But, fortunately, the movie doesn't remain here. After the first act, the movie switches its point of view from McCandles to Bella and starts putting her experiences to the forefront. She starts developing interests that absolutely do not align with the wants and needs of the men around her, and she begins to learn things that clash with the essence of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope. Soon, she has grown into a headstrong, independent, sexually experienced, intellectually curious woman who had zero interest in entertaining the whims of men and who intends to live fully for herself and herself alone: an absolute antithesis of the clueless and subservient blank slate the trope would require her to be. My reading of the film is that it's an intentional satire and an autopsy of the BSY trope and the gender politics that gave birth to it. It criticizes the men who entertain fantasies like it by making them look like absolute losers, urging us to ponder on what the hell is wrong with these creeps who see nothing wrong with drooling over a woman who is mentally a toddler instead of their intellectual equal.
The movie also reads as a critique of how women are socialized into a patriarchy. Godwin treats Bella just like a possession of his. Her body and her life are completely under his control from the moment she is "born" (another act in which neither Bella nor the woman she was born from had any say in), which isn't dissimilar to how a lot of fathers view their daughters. He wishes to keep her under constant supervision until the end of her life, until she protests and gets him to change his mind. When he asks McCandles to marry her, the two men treat the proposed marriage as a contract between the two of them rather than as a contract between McCandles and Bella herself. Again, this isn't too different to what marriage between men and women has meant throughout history.
McCandles is romantically interested in Bella even though he is fully aware of the fact that she is mentally a child. He seems to be looking forward to starting a sexual relationship with her after they are wed, as if the seal of marriage would make the intellectual disparity between them any less iffy. This bears resemblance to the way men in the real world prey on young girls with little to no sexual experience and whose brains are not fully developed because they're easier to control than grown women. I don't think that McCandles's hypocrisy is lost on the film. He agrees to marry Bella almost in the same breath as expressing his desire to keep her safe from other men, as if his desire to bed a person who is intellectually at the level of a five-year-old was any better than theirs.
When Bella chooses to leave Godwin's house to explore the world, the two men immediately replace her with a new experiment, showing that they were never truly interested in her as a person. They wanted the eternal baby, the thing that they can cage and control, and not the person who can think and learn and disagree with them. This exemplifies how disposable women are when they no longer serve their limited purpose in a patriarchy, and how replaceable people are when they are primarily viewed as bodies to be used. (Sidenote: I do think that Godwin and McCandles eventually learn to appreciate Bella for the person she is and that they both grow to be better people by the end of the film, but I still attest that these two are total creeps at least by this point of the movie.)
And then there's the supreme loser of the movie: the sleazy lawyer Wedderburn, who slithers into Bella's life and convinces her to run away with him. He is the darkest example of the kind of person who is drawn to inexperienced women like the ones represented in BSY movies - a predator who finds pleasure in the prospect of getting to corrupt and consume an innocent. He intends to take advantage of Bella and abandon her once he's gotten his fill only to find himself choking on his prey, who turns out not to be the malleable, naive creature he thought her to be.
This is the point where I think the movie goes from simply critiquing the BSY trope and everything it represents to successfully subverting it. The characters who embody the BSY trope don't really evolve. The movies they appear in are not really interested in their inner worlds and individual experiences beyond whatever serves the interests of the male protagonists. These characters are projections of male fantasies, so there really isn't a way for them to exist without centering men. This is not the case with Bella, who quickly grows into her own woman who is only tangentially interested in the men around her.
The bright side of Bella's condition is that she isn't just unaware of the ways of the world, but that she's also unaffected by the years of patriarchal conditioning that most normal women are burdened with. She literally has no shame, no internalized misogyny, no history of crushing blows to her sense of self-worth, and no looming knowledge of societal norms society. She has skipped the part in life where she is constantly bombarded with demands to make herself smaller and more palatable, to hate herself, to think of her body and the way it finds pleasure as something disgusting and abnormal, to treat other women as competition, and to think of herself as so much less important than men that she must pursue their validation beyond all else. Because of this blessed defect, she is free in a very rare way.
Wedderburn absolutely cannot handle that. When Bella first gets to know him, he paints a flattering picture of himself as a proud social deviant who gleefully eschews the rules of polite society. However, when faced with the actually deviant Bella, who flatly refuses to obey and center him, Wedderburn is revealed to be a phony. He is not a genuine libertine. He does not want to live in a truly free world with a free spirit like Bella, because he is a pathetic, insecure little man who only likes women in scenarios where the power balance is stacked against them. In my opinion, this is a direct shot fired at the BSY trope and its average enjoyers: if your ideal woman is someone who is many steps behind you in terms of mental capacity and experience, you are quite pitiful and would not stand a chance in an equal playing field.
It's hilarious how Wedderburn loses his mind when Bella starts exhibiting the kind of behavior he himself has proudly displayed earlier in the film: having multiple sexual partners, keeping sex and feelings separate, not falling in love with him or treating him like he's special, dropping him once she's had enough of him, and generally living life in an unconventional way. Again, the movie is pointing out the hypocrisy in men who fetishize inexperienced women while bragging about their own sexual conquests.
The part in the movie where Bella becomes a sex worker delivers the final blow to whatever is left of the BSY trope in her story, because the trope relies on sexual exclusivity and the fetishization of virginity. By having many partners and gaining lots of sexual experience out of her own free will, Bella stops fitting the ideal of the untouched woman who can be deflowered and exclusively possessed by the male protagonist. Also, through the conversations between Bella and the other sex workers, the movie finds another way to address the politics behind certain men's sexual fantasies of women - such as pointing out that some men enjoy sex with women more the less the women themselves enjoy it. It's a stray observation that the movie doesn't get deep into, but it has its place in the tapestry of the general theme of what desire reveals about people.
Finally, there's Alfie, who gives Bella (and us) an idea of the kind of life Bella's "mother" lived - as well as the kind of life Bella herself might be living had she grown up the normal way. It seems hellish. She'd be living under the tyranny of her awful husband, under a constant threat of violence, under absolute bodily control. Alfie wants to impregnate her against her will and to mutilate her genitals to deprive her of pleasure, and there's nothing that she could do about it because he is her husband and thus legally allowed to lord over her. She sees a terrifying glimpse of the role even privileged women like her have in this world: objects who exist solely for the pleasure of the men who own them. I would venture to say that the same description lies in the underbelly of the BSY trope.
I am happy that the movie doesn't take its sweet time to revel in the horror of this part of the story like so many other movies that address the oppression of women do. Instead, Bella stays with Alfie just enough time to say a hard and a well-informed no to his bullshit before getting on her merry way.
I think Poor Things is such a great example of taking a trope and exploring its implications in a way that goes beyond just pointing it out or parodying it by simply repeating it.
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women will Aggressively Support female pop stars but ignore female rockers, punks, metalheads etc
is this about supporting woman musicians or sticking it to the Dad Rock fandom regardless of if the music is actually good or not
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junkdrawertales · 7 days
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oh no, Dylan Mulvaney wrote a shitty pop song about shopping waaaah! yeah so what. Ariana Grande also wrote terrible pop songs about romanticized capitalist womanhood. where was all this outrage against oversimplification of the female experience when 7 Rings came out? Personally I think the words “breakfast at Tiffany’s and bottles of bubbles/girls with tattoos who like getting in trouble” are an overdone commercialization of women. what about when she wrote a song about ruining other people’s relationships on purpose because she’s better than other women? Do you remember “break up with ur girlfriend, im bored”? A bad mainstream pop song about a trans influencer’s video blog is not destroying womanhood but your shitty attitude sure is
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You can see everything clicking here
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thespringsoldier · 10 months
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A lot of you think that being pro sex worker and being pro sex work are the same thing and boy let me tell you that is not how that works
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joy-haver · 1 year
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vanilla-voyeur · 8 months
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Pop feminist blogs are always making posts like "Study shows MEN think this horrible thing about WOMEN". And then you look at the study and the methodology was just to take like 100 guys from the professor's psych class (mostly white, Christian, and middle class) and ask them things about women. The journal's impact factor is 1.5.
For a study to reveal the secret misogynistic things all men are thinking, it needs to at bare minimum ask men about BOTH men and women and also ask women about both men and women. (Bonus points if you remember nonbinary people exist.) If you don't do that then you can't really distinguish between whether it's because men are misogynists or everyone is misogynistic or women and men think differently about a thing or women and men don't understand the opposite gender or everyone is a misanthrope or option I didn't anticipate but neither did you.
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