Fight Like A Girl

by Clementine Ford

  Then there’s the recent outing on Netflix of Jessica Jones. Much has been written already about the brilliant construction of patriarchy as the Big Bad in season one, but I’m drawn as well to the central love story. Not the romance between Jessica and fellow superhero Luke, but between Jessica and her adoptive sister Trish. Trish is the only person Jessica truly loves, and certainly the only one she can count on. In fact, the whole first season basically builds up to (spoiler alert) Jessica telling Trish she loves her before breaking the villainous Kilgrave’s neck. Awesome.

  There are so many more examples. I still bawl every time I watch Beaches. The general vibe on that movie is that I’m supposed to be embarrassed about liking it, but fuck that noise. Why does every single man breathing in the world today get to list The Shawshank Redemption as one of his favourite movies and not be shamed for it, but women are supposed to roll their eyes at Beaches? Shawshank is basically a celebration of the same thing (thirty years of platonic friendship and its various trials and tribulations), it just had to be set in a prison so men could give themselves permission to cry over it. Yet we’re supposed to turn our noses up at tearjerkers like Beaches because women and their relationships with each other are pathetic and the theme song was (apparently) annoying. Get over it, haters! Beaches was an epic story of two women who really ended up being the loves of each other’s lives. It covered everything in the handbook of female friendships – adolescence, adventures, petty jealousies, love, loss, what happens when you hate your friend’s kid. It’s really more of a documentary, when you think about it.

  And what about Muriel and Rhonda in Muriel’s Wedding? I think I could watch that movie once a week for the rest of my life and still find new things in it. Muriel has to go on a bit of an emotional journey to figure out what it means to be a good friend and a woman’s woman, but Rhonda is right there from the start. Who doesn’t fist pump during the island scene when Tania ‘You Can’t Talk To Me Like That, I’m Beautiful, I’m A Bride’ Degano and her gang of bitches invites Rhonda to sit with them because ‘it’s not like in high school where you should feel like you’re not good enough to talk to us’? And after a bit of back and forth, Rhonda replies, ‘Shove your drink up your arse, Tania. I would rather swallow razorblades than drink with you. Oh, and by the way, I’m not alone. I’m with Muriel.’

  Right on.

  There are so many more women whose friendships I’ve fallen in love with in books, movies or TV. Benny and Eve in Maeve Binchy’s novel Circle of Friends; the southern belles of Steel Magnolias; Daria and Jane in Daria; the complex women on The 100; Ruth and Idgie in Fried Green Tomatoes (although in Fannie Flagg’s original novel, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café, Ruth and Idgie weren’t ‘just good friends’ but actual lovers, and the movie is irreparably harmed by choosing not to portray that). The list goes on.

  Unfortunately, there’s also a truckload of terrible representations of female interaction on screen. In numerous cases, it either doesn’t exist at all (because too many writers still think it’s okay to only have a woman present if she can double as the prize for the hero at the end) or women’s relationships are defined by bitchiness and competition. This accounts for some of the many complicated feelings I have about the 1980s girl-made-good story Working Girl. As much as I love watching Tess McGill rise like a phoenix into the power zone of shoulder pads and the corner office, I also hate that her major nemesis is her female boss, Katharine. I mean, we’re meant to be on Tess’s side and for the most part that’s easy. But then you remember that Katharine’s boyfriend Jack not only begins an affair with Tess (without disclosing his relationship), but gets to stay with her at the end because we just accept that his moral compass had been devoured somewhere along the way by Katharine’s ambitious, brunette vagina. Tess does have other friendships with women, but they’re minor. Her major interactions throughout are with businessmen (all of whom she’s able to charm with her raspy voice, sexy hair and a business acumen that manages to be both sweetly naive and disarmingly cunning) and Katharine, who ends up trying to steal her ideas and denigrate her ability. I mean, I guess you could take that as a lesson on how not to support your fellow women in the workplace, but it’s a long bow.

  Then there are the examples where multiple women exist but fail to talk to each other about anything other than a man. Cartoonist Alison Bechdel made light of this phenomenon in one of the early strips for her cult series, Dykes to Watch Out For. One of her characters invites another friend to see a movie, but the friend declines, saying she only watches films these days if they meet three specific criteria:

  1. There has to be at least two women in it . . .

  2. . . . who talk to each other . . .

  3. . . . about something other than a man.

  The Bechdel Test, as it’s become known, might be imperfect (namely because there are examples of films that don’t pass but still contain feminist messages, and films that do pass but feel still like they’ve been crapped out of a Men’s Rights Activist’s butthole, and none of its parameters account for the overwhelming lack of racial diversity in cinema) but as a rough guide it’s helpful to see just how often movies fail, particularly when they’re the kinds of blockbusters millions of people end up watching. When you don’t see women talking to each other about anything other than the men who dominate their stories, it reinforces the pernicious view that women exist only to be supporting players in men’s lives. Worse, it further convinces women of what patriarchy has tried to tell us all along: that we are not allies but enemies, and that our only hope of succeeding in life is to win some weird, unspoken competition against every woman we ever meet so that we can win the ultimate prize of men’s admiration and love. Taylor Swift’s early work was basically all about this.

  These messages are filtered to us right from childhood. Think about the role of women in fairy tales and (if you’re an eighties kid like me) how these relationships were depicted in colourful, intoxicating Disney animations. With the exception of the occasional kindly fairy godmother (whose existence I can actually only recall in two stories, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella) women are depicted either as innocent young princess-types or jealous old crones trying to steal their beauty. Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora and Ariel are all victimised by other women, who are in turn all vanquished by story’s end, leaving the heroines to enjoy the great thrill of becoming child brides to handsome older princes. If that weren’t bad enough, these ‘witches’ aren’t even taken out by the heroines. The spells cast on Aurora and Snow White are both broken by men they don’t know but who can conveniently bestow ‘True Love’s Kiss’ on them (while they’re sleeping, because that’s not creepy and gross). Cinderella’s Prince Charming rescues her from a life of indentured servitude because her feet are the only ones in the kingdom tiny enough to fit into the glass slipper, and apparently that provides better proof of her secret identity than looking at her face or, you know, having a conversation. And after spending the majority of the movie being unable even to speak (still not enough of a deficit to stop Prince Eric from falling for her), Ariel isn’t even given the kudos of being able to kill Ursula in the final battle. No, Eric runs a boat through her abdomen.

  And they all lived happily ever after.

  But at least those movies had other women in them. The only other woman of significance in Beauty and the Beast is Mrs Potts, and she’s a fucking kitchen appliance. Let’s not even get into the fact that the story is about a young girl falling in love with the abusive man who imprisons her in his mansion, because we already know that’s fifty shades of fucked up. The less said about Pocahontas the better, aside from the fact it’s a disgustingly racist rewrite of the life of an actual Native American woman who was kidnapped by the British and then later paraded throughout Europe as an example of the ‘civilised savage’. Not exactly a love story. Aladdin and The Lion King may not have evil witches as their antagonists, but they also only have one significant woman character apiece.

&nbs
p; It is changing, and not just with Disney (2013’s Frozen was the kind of capitalist success a company like Disney dreams of, so we can only hope to see more. And Disney Pixar’s Inside Out featured a pretty even split not only between women and men but in the amount of time each group spoke for – in fact, it’s one of the very few films made in which women have slightly more than 50 percent of the lines). ‘Girl power’ is back in vogue, but this isn’t the primary reason we’re seeing better and more prominent relationships between women on screen. It’s because more women are being funded to produce content that portrays what it’s really like to be a woman, not merely what a man thinks it might be like.

  That’s the major difference I see when I think of how women and our relationships with each other are reflected in pop culture. When women have been given creative control, either as writers, producers, directors or performers, I am more likely to see the kinds of rich, positive and complex interactions between women that have been my life experience (well, at least since I wised up and started to work with women rather than against them). That’s why shows like Broad City are so fantastic while being irreverent and silly – because the relationship between Abbi and Ilana, the things they do together and the things they talk about, seems like it’s actually informed by female life as something that exists on its own and not as a depiction of how that life sits in relation to men.

  It is also why every single available copy of the movie Bride Wars needs to be taken to a field, arranged in a gigantic pattern that spells What Were You Thinking, Anne Hathaway?, doused in petrol and set so thoroughly ablaze that the magnitude of that monstrosity can be seen from space.

  Lest we forget.

  In ‘Ready for my close-up’, I talk about the anorexia I developed at thirteen. I went from being round-faced and pudgy to having sharp angles and a sunken chest. This weight loss wasn’t achieved by healthy means, and I can’t say it had too much of a positive effect on my mental state either. Still, there were flashes of satisfaction at being able to wear clothes that had previously been off-limits to me. Our school dress code was more of a suggestive colour scheme than a uniform policy, and one of my proudest achievements as a closet anorexic was the day I found I could fit into the kind of short, tight black skirt worn by the worldlier girls in my year level.

  I wasn’t used to wearing the costume worn by other girls. I’d spent the majority of my life not only chubbier than them but also living in a country where wearing a tiny black skirt would have been considered culturally inappropriate; thus I hadn’t seen much of them until I’d moved to Norfolk. Now that I could finally wear one myself, I felt like I’d ascended into the official state of womanhood – or at the very least, was doing a good job of faking it. My school skirt was more than just an item of clothing. It was a sign that I’d achieved something. (Calcium deficiency? Interrupted menstruation? An obsessive eating disorder? All of the above?) I liked to double roll it at the waistband so that it sat just a couple of inches below my butt, my suddenly lithe legs stretching out beneath it in opaque tights.

  I always believed this kind of physical ideal was what girls were meant to aspire to – and that once we arrived, the cruel taunts of being ‘tubby’ or ‘gross’ would stop and we could enjoy the satisfying privilege that involves being both respected and left alone. But having never spent any time on this side of the girl fence, I didn’t realise that there’s never a moment in which any of us are considered to have ‘earned’ the right to have scrutiny withheld. I didn’t expect to suddenly find myself dealing with sly whispers and giggles.

  She thinks she’s so good.

  She just wants boys to like her.

  Look at that skirt.

  Slut.

  The funny thing is that I had said these things about other girls myself, racked as I was with envy over the privileges I thought their beauty gave them. I had projected my own insecurities on them by calling them names, calling their moral worth into question and bitching about them with other girls. It gave me little stabs of pleasure to denigrate them, to punish them for their good fortune. I told myself this was fair and justified, because why should being beautiful mean they were automatically loved by everyone?

  Perhaps the thing that really allowed me to forgive my behaviour, though, was my belief that they wouldn’t care. Why would they? I didn’t know that beautiful, popular girls were just as likely to be hurt by other women calling them sluts and bitches as the plain wallflowers. That they would find the experience just as confusing and isolating, and it would make them feel just as likely as anyone else to turn away from the possibilities that friendship with other women offers.

  Women are supposed to be beautiful, accessible and gaze-worthy, and we know this on a very deep level. But we’re also keenly aware of how unfair this measure of value is, and how arbitrary the judgment that ascribes it to us. Unfortunately, instead of tearing the whole facade down and taking control of the rules ourselves, we turn to the patterns of behaviour that teach us to work against other women instead of with them. Rather than banding together to reject the system entirely, the ones who feel let down by it make it the fault of the women it supposedly rewards. We tell ourselves that they might be pretty, but they’re empty-headed. They might be sexy, but they’re a slut. They might be desirable, but they can’t offer anything more than physical pleasure. We are so used to feeling the gaze on ourselves that we learn to look at each other with men’s eyes.

  How powerful would it be if we used our own eyes instead? If we could look at other women and say, ‘She’s beautiful and she makes me laugh.’ Or, ‘She’s really intelligent and I can tell why so many people enjoy her company.’ Or even, ‘She has sex on her own terms and I really admire her confidence.’

  We don’t have to like every woman we meet. That would be impossible. But we have to stop disliking them because we’re afraid they might be a rival for the male attention we’ve been taught to want or because we think that destroying them for being too slutty/too pretty/too arrogant/too bitchy/too unpredictable will earn us patriarchy points.

  When I was sixteen, someone wrote the words Clementine is a slut! on the fence of my family’s home. My uncle found it early one morning and fetched my father to help him scrub it off. I didn’t find out about any of this when it happened, because neither of them wanted to bring it up. When my father finally told me years later, I treated the news with a curiosity that can only be made easier by the passage of time. I knew that it wouldn’t have been any of the boys I went to school with, because they were far more likely to call me fat or ugly. I have a fairly good idea that it might have been the girls who once invited me to spend the evening with them at the town’s annual show, and then spent the whole night pointedly ignoring me and acting as if I was a bad smell that had latched on to them and which they couldn’t shake. They reminded me of a group of girls I’d been friends with briefly in England; the ones who’d invited me to meet them in a meadow one afternoon and then never shown up. I waited for half an hour before deciding I’d got the message wrong and leaving. I found out later they’d been hiding on a ridge the whole time, watching me and laughing.

  Does the fact that a bunch of girls were bitches to me in high school mean that no girls are to be trusted? Of course not. I don’t buy into the bullshit argument that tells us women are each other’s worst enemies. The idea that women’s greatest oppression comes from the lateral violence inflicted by other women is simply another tool developed by thousands of years of patriarchy to deflect our attention away from trying to destroy it. If women can be convinced to mistrust one another instead of working together, patriarchal order is secured for another day.

  Men are often oblivious to the fact these power dynamics exist, which is why it can be so frustrating to try to explain it. How do you tell someone what air looks like? Just because you aren’t aware of something doesn’t mean you don’t benefit from it. If women and teen girls are taught to vie for the attention of men, those men have to do very little
to feel themselves admired. And so it becomes unconsciously assumed that women will embody the practice of flattering men, be that through their conversations with them, their attempts to aesthetically please them or their willingness to tear down the other women who present as rivals for the crumbs thrown out as reward.

  Lateral violence isn’t a by-product of women’s nature but is designed to protect the stability of a structure that relies on women’s subordination. Patriarchy acts to alienate women from one another and teach them instead to seek value and approval in the good opinion of men. It encourages us to work at being the Official Woman, the only one in the clubhouse, the woman above all other women, the woman good enough to hang with the boys – in short, the woman who excels so much at proving her allegiance to men above women that she earns the right to eat their leftovers.