by Andi Zeisler
Schumer’s cutting honesty is an exception that she’s able to get away with in part because her medium is comedy—but, more important, because with her own successful movie and Comedy Central show, she has more control over her career than many of her Hollywood peers. Former romantic-comedy mainstay Katherine Heigl is an example of a woman whose honesty about the treatment of female characters hasn’t gone nearly as well: After her breakout role in 2007’s Knocked Up, Heigl made the mistake of telling Vanity Fair that she found the film’s plot “a little sexist” in its portrayal of “the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight” while the men are “lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys.” She was promptly branded “difficult,” with even ostensibly feminist Web sites like Jezebel frowning on her bad form, and her career foundered. Who knows whether Heigl’s relatively tactful criticism would go over better in the brave new slightly-more-woman-friendly film environs of today, but at that time her treatment in the media served as an effective warning to other women to keep a lid on their opinions.
Several years later, the spotlight was on another woman who was deemed insufficiently grateful: though she didn’t call out the film’s content, Precious star Mo’Nique was pilloried for her diffident approach to promoting the film and campaigning for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar that she eventually won. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the actress recalled Precious director Lee Daniels telling her that she’d been “blackballed” in Hollywood because of her unwillingness to “play the game”—you know, the game of cuddling up to an industry that regularly erases or sidelines women of color. 6
Cautionary tales like these might help explain why celebrity feminists (and the media that flocks to them) seem more comfortable with feminism as an identity than with its substance. Then again, there aren’t many media outlets pressing them to talk specifics. “If you’re a celebrity, you’re able to capitalize on the zeitgeisty moment that feminism is having in popular culture,” notes J. Maureen Henderson, a writer and self-described “millennial expert,” when I call to get her take on the new power of the feminist brand among young luminaries. “You can say ‘I’m a feminist’ and we’re not really going to ask you to put your money where your mouth is, to look for that in practice in the roles that you choose or the collaborators that you work with or the songs that you write. It’s enough that you’ve self-identified—that gets the headline, and living the practice is much less interesting to us, it seems.”
Furthermore, there’s no real incentive for celebrities to back up their identities with action. Sure, some corners of the feminist blogosphere might want to hold their feet to the fire, but the feminist blogosphere isn’t paying their bills or casting their next project. Shortly after her HeForShe speech at the U.N., Emma Watson announced that her next film was a live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, the most heartwarming Disney tale ever to be based around Stockholm Syndrome. What a great opportunity for the newly crowned Top Feminist of 2014 to make connections between her global cause and a story about a woman who falls in love with a man who overpowers her and locks her in a castle! Can’t wait to hear what she has to say!
Okay, so Emma Watson’s individual belief in feminism isn’t compromised by taking on the role of a kidnapped princess, just as, say, George Clooney’s activism on behalf of political and journalistic ethics didn’t preclude him from voicing The Fantastic Mr. Fox’s very unethical title animal. With feminism as both a Hollywood buzzword and an identity she’s publicly taken on, it’s not illogical to think Watson would want to speak to how it informs the roles she chooses. But, again, the media outlets that have made her feminism a focal point of coverage aren’t asking. It’s a pretty good illustration of the fact that while most celebrity feminism is no doubt individually well-meaning, it often has no tangible connection to the images and fantasies we pay those celebrities to construct.
In writing about the celebrity-feminist phenomenon for the UK’s Guardian, writer and cultural critic Roxane Gay, who authored 2014’s Bad Feminist, put it plainly: “So long as we continue to stare into the glittery light of the latest celebrity feminist, we avoid looking at the very real inequities that women throughout the world continue to face. We avoid having the difficult conversations about the pay gap and the all-too-often sexist music we listen to and the movies we watch that tell women’s stories horribly (if at all) and the limited reproductive freedom women are allowed to exercise and the pervasive sexual harassment and violence too many women face. We avoid having the conversations about the hard work changing this culture will require.”7 It’s as though feminists are becoming part of a celebrity movement, rather than celebrities joining up with a feminist one.
As with branding, celebrity isn’t about complexity, but about offering up an enticing package that the largest number of people can understand with the smallest amount of effort. Which is why it seems important to approach and query celebrities in a way that corporate media will never do. Instead of asking celebrities how they “define” feminism, we should ask how they enact it in their work and their communities. Rather than focusing on the clothes they wear when agitating for causes, we can find ways to amplify their messages. These are not unreasonable requests, but we’ve been conditioned to think they are via a mediated celebrity culture that can withstand politics only until they begin to reflect poorly on the industry itself. If celebrities truly have a stake in feminism, it can no longer be about who is “bravely” embracing a maligned word. We’ve spent enough time patting actresses and pop stars on the back for “redefining” feminism with their beauty and appeal, or “changing the game” simply by showing up and agreeing that, yes, totally, we should all be equal. Media and pop culture have to help change the narrative whereby simply claiming an identity that’s feminist stands in for actually doing work in the service of equality. It can no longer be about who says they stand for feminism, but about how they stand for it. Like past Hollywood stances on AIDS awareness, environmentalism, antiwar activism, and more, celebrity feminism may well fade out to make way for the next big thing, but while it’s here, we have a small chance to refocus the spotlight.
PART TWO
The Same Old Normal
CHAPTER 6
Killer Waves
If the backlash against feminism that began in the 1980s had a theme song, it would be the ominous musical score to Fatal Attraction, the 1987 thriller that packed all the fear and loathing of women’s liberation into 119 minutes of running time and became the backlash’s filmic standard-bearer. We probably all know the story by now: Married man meets single woman for a one-night stand. He peaces out, she becomes obsessed. Suicide is attempted, a tranquil suburban home is invaded, a pet bunny is boiled. Order is restored when the wronged wife kills the imposter who has dared to sully her marriage (not to mention her bathtub). The moral of this cautionary tale? Single career ladies are fucking scary, man.
I would submit, though, that 1987’s John Updike adaptation, The Witches of Eastwick, is at least as emblematic of 1980s big-screen backlash as Fatal Attraction. As Updike originally wrote them in his novel of the same name, the witches Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie are formerly partnered but now happily single women who are aware and in control of their supernatural powers, and deploy them occasionally and shrewdly. In the movie, by contrast, the women are widowed, divorced, and deserted ciphers (played respectively by Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer) who only become attuned to their flair for witchery once the rich, mysterious, and bizarre Daryl Van Horn moves to town to seduce them and turn their boring lives upside down with sexual chaos. Jack Nicholson’s Van Horn mesmerizes each women in turn with windy monologues about the nurturing, elemental power of the female sex, as well as denigrations of the average dick-swinging male. “Men are such cocksuckers, aren’t they?” he coos to Sarandon’s Jane, the town’s prim orchestra conductress. “You don’t have to answer that. It’s true. They’re scared. Their dicks get limp when confronted by a woman of o
bvious power and what do they do about it? Call them witches, burn them, torture them, until every woman is afraid. Afraid of herself… afraid of men… and all for what? Fear of losing their hard-on.”
The film (whose director, George Miller, is the man behind 2015’s most-feminist-movie-of-the-year, Mad Max: Fury Road) revels in superficial ideas of female power and potency, but tempers them at every turn by punishing the characters who dare to believe that their power offers them independence. When small-town gossip about the women threatens to derail their livelihoods and they pull away from Van Horn, he wastes no time punishing them: calling them witches and torturing them until . . . well, he said it himself. Finally, in desperation, the ladies pool their powers to fight back, and Van Horn’s true feelings about women are revealed in the spectacular set piece that results. As he stumbles, vomits, and pratfalls (did I mention this is a comedy?) into the town church under the women’s spell, Van Horn rants about the evil that women inflict on any poor soul willing to love them, and appeals to God to explain these infernal creatures: “Women: A mistake, or did he do it to us on purpose?”
In Updike’s novel, as Margaret Atwood pointed out in her 1984 New York Times review of it, the source of the witches’ power was simple: “They became husbandless . . . embodiments of what American small-town society tends to think about divorcees.” At novel’s end, all three are remarried. And in the film, Van Horn gets the last laugh the old-fashioned way, foreclosing on the women’s independence from him by knocking each of them up. The film’s final scene shows that while the women managed to vanquish Van Horn’s physical form, they’re saddled with three literal spawns of Satan, all boys, who are summoned by the disembodied devil through a giant bank of television sets. It’s a final warning to not just the witches, but to any women uppity enough to think that they can dare to be autonomous from or change the essential man: Don’t get too comfortable, ladies.
As a confluence of movements that, taken together, posed a burgeoning threat to the status quo, the women’s liberation efforts of the 1960s and ’70s were promptly and ungenerously mediated. The activists who demonstrated and marched in the streets were deemed “a small band of braless bubbleheads”; reporter Marilyn Goldstein of Newsday was instructed by her editor to “Get out there and find an authority who’ll say this is all a crock of shit.” Some of the earliest examples of what Jennifer L. Pozner has dubbed False Feminist Death Syndrome (a “pernicious, media-borne virus” that “contaminat[es] our collective understanding of the history, ideology, and goals of the women’s movement,”1) were presented in the “No Comment” section of a 1982 issue of Ms. The page, known mostly for collecting egregiously sexist and racist ads, this time comprised newspaper and magazine headlines that crowed over the apparent downfall and obsolescence of the fight for gender equality. “Requiem For the Women’s Movement: Empty Voices in Crowded Rooms” (Harper’s, 1976), “Women’s Lib is Dead” (Educational Digest, 1973), and “Is Feminism Finished? (Mademoiselle, 1981) were among the declarations and bad-faith queries that were symptoms of the media’s chronic condition.
The backlash that Susan Faludi described, in her 1990 book of the same name, as a “relentless whittling-down process . . . that has served to stir women’s private anxieties and break their political wills” was effective because it had an ace disguise: postfeminism. Though the term’s origin is sometimes contested, before 1980 it was found chiefly in academic writing alongside a host of other “post”-prefixed theories (postmodernism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism); the “post” postulated what came next to build on the foundation of feminist theory. But as the term seeped out of the academy into a new, conservative era, mainstream media seemed unnervingly pleased to embrace the “post” in postfeminism to mean “against.” As in, pack it up, go away, you’re done. The books had been written, the marchers had marched, nothing more to see here.
The first mainstream use of the term was in a 1981 New York Times piece titled “Voices From the Post-Feminist Generation,” in which writer Susan Bolotin found that young, middle-class women were actively retreating from the concept of feminism. Bolotin’s subjects spoke of feminism and the women’s movement with barely disguised pity. “It’s all right to be independent and strong, but a lot of those women are alone,” said one. Another offered, “Sure, there’s discrimination out there, but you just can’t sit there feeling sorry for yourself. It’s the individual woman’s responsibility to prove her worth. Then she can demand equal pay.” It was a striking bit of cognitive dissonance, and even the author didn’t bother to draw connections between second-wave feminists’ work on behalf of equality and her interviewees’ freedom to disparage it.
The rejection identified by the Times article centered on a very specific demographic—mostly college-educated, career-minded young white women whose thoughts and experiences would become invaluable to media coverage of “the death of feminism.” In fact, feminism flowered in the 1980s; it just happened to be in places that mainstream media wasn’t inclined to look. Black and Latina women, in particular, whose involvement in second-wave activism was mostly eclipsed by the movement’s focus on the concerns of white and middle-class ones, spent the decade shaping a feminism that better acknowledged how race and class identities intersect with gender to inform and impact women’s lives. The groundbreaking texts of womanism and intersectional feminism published during the 1980s—Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class; Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back; Gloria Hill, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us are Brave; Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter; Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider; and bell hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center—simply didn’t fit the mainstream media’s narrative of feminism as a finite movement whose time had come and gone. As a media story, women of color broadening the scope of feminist theory in the academy and beyond wasn’t nearly sexy enough for column inches. White women cruelly brushing off the efforts of their predecessors while greedily enjoying the fruits of their labors? That could sell.
Media postfeminism didn’t happen in a vacuum, but in an enormously changed national climate. President Ronald Reagan swept into office in 1980 on a wave of increasing conservatism and neoliberalism, and his platform—anti-abortion, anti-civil rights, anti-social services, anti-affirmative action—was, among other things, the start of decades of policy that pointedly targeted women’s autonomy. Reagan struck the Equal Rights Amendment from the Republican platform, backed the anti-abortion Human Life Amendment, buddied up to the Religious Right, and set the tone for rising enmity toward families in poverty with his florid image of the government-draining “welfare queen.” The GOP veered rightward with shocking speed, becoming a bizarro mix of cowboy fantasy and cartoon villainy in its attitudes toward women, ethnic minorities, immigrants, the mentally ill, and more. (“We have tried for two years to meet with him, but he will not see women’s groups,” noted the leader of the National Women’s Political Caucus, herself a Republican, in 1983. “I don’t think there is any woman within shouting distance of the President.”2)
Against this backdrop, the concrete successes of second-wave feminism—including no-fault divorce, criminalizing of domestic violence, hiring equality, equal access to education, and more—were recast as failures by much of the mainstream media. Such freedom, their stories and op-eds charged, had created monsters in the form of ultra-independent women who realized too late that they were childless, lonely, and starved for love. Newspapers and magazines were only too happy to cherry-pick statistics and warp study findings into fainting-couch stories about equality run rampant. As Faludi pointed out, the media’s adoption of postfeminism wasn’t an accident, but a crusade built on faulty logic, lack of nuance, and a fundamental discomfort with actual feminist gains. “The press,” she wrote, “was the first to set forth and solve for a mainstream audience the paradox in women’s lives . . . women have achieved so much yet feel so dissatisf
ied; it must be feminism’s achievements, not society’s response to those partial achievements, that is causing women all this pain.”3
The news story that most famously anchored the backlash was Newsweek’s 1986 report on “The Marriage Crunch.” On the magazine’s cover was a graph that looked like the world’s worst single-drop roller coaster, and next to it, the headline “If You’re a Single Woman, Here Are Your Chances of Getting Married.” Inside was the now-notorious assertion that heterosexual, college-educated women who had not married by age forty had a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of nabbing a husband: that asserstion alone launched a thousand trend stories, dating services, man-catching seminars, and advice columns. But as Faludi noted, the story extrapolated from a study, “Marriage Patterns in the United States,” whose actual findings, when broken down, were not nearly as dire as Newsweek’s interpretation (and said nothing about terrorism). But in an increasingly conservative time, as “family values” became coded language for hetero, male-breadwinner/female-homemaker marriage, the mainstream media was hungry for any news that might help to discredit or undermine feminism, and Newsweek’s bombshell accomplished both. Not only did it point the finger at feminism for making women delay marriage at their peril, the panic it sowed intimated that, for all this talk about liberation and independence, what women really wanted was a traditional, normative love story. This narrative not only had legs, it had control-top hose and running shoes. Fifty-three feature articles bemoaning the lonely state of career woman (and feminism’s role in their unhappiness) ran between 1983 and 1986, as compared with five during the previous three years.