Tag Archives: women

Women, power and popular culture

iu-1There’s a business school in the US in which female students routinely use the “interrogative lilt” when speaking in class.

This “lilt” turns assertions into questions. The phrase “this strategy looks promising” is made to rise at the end, becoming “this strategy looks promising?” The speaker is now asking for agreement instead of insisting on it.

In a business school!  If women are not learning to be forthright here, something is entirely wrong with the world.  I mean, really.

Popular culture continues to cultivate images that make woman look little, unassuming, unthreatening, unintelligent, and incapable.

Happily, some women are fighting back and using popular culture to redefine themselves. Videos from Ingrid Michaelson (Girls Chase Boys) and Meghan Trainor (All About That Base) give us two great cases in point.  But neither of these go after the “lilting” problem.

I am persuaded that this work will be done by actresses in the world of film and TV. They will portray women wielding power. They will show us how to transcend acts of deference.

The early days were frustrating.  Some actors would overcorrect. They “butch up” their performances but this had the unhappy effect of costing them nuance, as actors and as characters. There was a lot of growling and shouting.  But of course real power usually comes in a more subtle form (and is more effective for its subtlety).

But we are getting signs of a new approach.

In Murder in the First (TNT), Bess Rous as Ivana West and the acting CEO of Applsn confronts her boss.  She is leaving the company and wants to let him know.  He’s a world class bully and tries to intimidate her.  She doesn’t blink.  She doesn’t back down.  In a great performance of self possession,  Rous/West just doesn’t care. She meets his hostility with an attitude that sits somewhere between pity and contempt. No bluff, no rattling of arms. Just an implacable presumption that he doesn’t matter and that she does.  No lilting here. (Please could someone get this scene on YouTube.)

In episode 3 of The Killing (Netflix) we get Joan Allen (pictured) as the head of a military academy. And the pity of this performance is that it is designed to make her look a bit of a monster. But even as Allen satisfies this requirement of the role, she works in little grace notes everywhere. Which is to say this actress can deliver an overbearing authority and not lose control of subtle messages. This aspect of Allen’s art, the ability to assume authority without diminishes it or herself, was also on display in the Bourne Conspiracy.

Tea Leoni as Madam Secretary (in Madam Secretary, CBS) is giving us a variation on the theme. Her approach to power exhibits a light hand. Madam Secretary leaves no doubt that she has power and what she will do with it when dealing with people who disappoint her, but mostly she is alive to the humor and the ironies of the moment.  Call this a sprezzatura performance of power.It’s a welcome addition to our power vocabulary.  (Men have something to learn here.)

Compare this performance to the one being given in Homeland by Clare Danes as Carrie Mattheson.  This is a wonderfully ferocious “let it rip” approach to power. Clare/Carrie goes at it. (She succeeds in making the men around her look like time-serving careerists.)  This is sheer intensity, with no trace of ego or self aggrandizement.  (Men could learn something here too.)

Our culture is under reconstruction.  Gender, especially, is changing. And I think of all the ways the US qualifies as a “city on a hill,” as a prime mover in social progress, it’s surely here on the question of gender that we are most watched and most admired.

Feminism, how far?

LittleSnapperOver the weekend, I gave a talk at the Royal Ontario Museum, my old stomping grounds.

My task: to cover some of the changes that have happened in culture since I left the ROM in the early 80s.

How our culture defines women, that has changed immensely.  But how immensely?  How far have we got.  I presented the following images as a way of suggesting that we have actually stopped defining women as women.

I ended this part of my talk with this slide:

Ember

 

And as I ended with this conclusion, a little voice in my head said “but is this true?”

It sounds plausible.  Even as it is riddled with problems.

Someone is sure to object that gender is defined by nature.  They are obliged to explain how many variations there are on the “women” theme in the world.

“Exactly!” others will say.  “There is no single way of being female, but there are 12 (or 120) variations.  So when you tell me someone is a woman, I can assume that she is defined by one of the 12 (120) variations.  So gender still defines identity.”  This might work.  It might be a better argument.

But I think if we look at the trajectory, it probably fair to say that we are at least moving towards a time when knowing that someone is a woman won’t tell us very much about her.

Here are the slides with which I set up the slide above.

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I started  with Charlie’s Angels.  Remember.  These characters all came with an “identity.”  One was the sexy one.  One was the sporty one.  One was the classy one.  As if a woman had to choose.  (Or viewers were so dim, you didn’t dare confuse them with anything more complicated.)

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The next slide was this one: Sex and the City.  This characters are still defined by a kind of character genre.  (One is the sexy one.  One is the classy one.)  But the characters are more full blooded, more individuated.

Charlie-s-Angels-charlie-27s-angels-217248_1024_768

 

Next up, I used this slide.  When Charlie’s Angels was recast and presented as a movie, we got characters who were less defined by character (and gender) and still more individuated.

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Perfect.  These characters are not standing on ceremony.  They are not constrained by gender expectation.  They are not constrained by much of anything.

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I ended with Girls.  These women are wrestling with gender issues to be sure.  But they are not much constrained by them.  As Mary Waters says of ethnicity in America: it’s a matter of choice, not biology, history or community.  These women have chosen who they are.  And they are largely and increasingly free to choose who they are.

And today we end with a new feature.  A poll to see what you think.  Please vote!

 

 

Contemporary culture: 25 years of change in 15 minutes

In the early 1990s, I founded and ran the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum.

On Saturday, I’m going back to the ROM to reflect on some of the changes that have taken in culture in the last 25 years.

And it’s dizzying to see how much is now changing: the home and the family, the way we think about women, the revolution taking place in TV, the way we are now defining the self and the group.  (I have just 15 minutes to talk, so it’s a short list.)

As you will see, this presentation is  less about technology (the thing with which most people lead nowadays) and concentrates much more on the cultural changes that have taken place.  These are, I would submit, every big as large and astonishing as the tech changes.

You can see the presentation here on YouTube.   Like most everyone, my speaking style has shifted from too many words on the screen to images.  The burden of exposition falling to the speaker (me) when speaking (on Saturday).  Apologies when this makes the deck a little cryptic.  Please do come join us if you are in Toronto this weekend.

Women in combat…at the movies

Every time we renew the debate on women in combat, I think of the soldier in Aliens, rippling with muscles and attitude. 

A fellow soldier asks her,

“Hey, Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?”

She turns and asks him cooly,

“No, have you?”

(See the full scene here.)  

I thought this might stand forever as the best response to a someone who dares challenge a woman’s abilities on the field of battle.

But then I saw the scene in The Dark Knight Rises where someone asks Cat woman,

“Hey, do those shoes make it hard to walk?”

She kicks the offender in the groin and asks,

“I don’t know.  Do they?”