"And that clarity helps us remember that all of us, female and male, have been socialized from birth on to accept sexist thought and action" (viii)...
as I was reading bell hooks' Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, a movie came on t.v. - one I had seen so many times before, at first I didn't even recognize the connection.
Baby Boom starring Diane Keaton came out in 1987. In the opening sequence, a narrative voice over (Candice Bergen, I think) a standard Bill Conti 80's score and a background scene emphasizing busy New York streets filled with women wearing skirt-suits and tennis shoes (no one could walk that fast in heels) assures us that "33% of the American workforce is female. Three generations of women," we are told, "have turned a thousand years of tradition on its ear."
Eventually, we are introduced to J.C. (a suitably androgynous name), known in the business world as "the Tiger Lady...first in her class at Yale with an MBA from Harvard." J.C. is a marketing executive who is soon offered a partnership - with reservations, of course, because she may change her mind at any moment and walk away from her hard-earned, six million dollar a year salary to start creating babies instead of ad campaigns.
"You know that normally I don't think of you as a woman," her boss tells her, "but in this case I do have to look at you as a woman-slash-partner...I'm lucky," he says, "[as a man] I can have it all." To nail the partnership, she tells him what he wants to hear:
"I don't want it all. I don't."
Before 29 more movie-minutes have run, however, J.C. is nearly ready to walk away from it all after "inheriting" a baby from deceased relatives, a baby she has no idea what to do with until, miraculously, while taking the child's temperature (rectally) she finds her inner-Mother and falls in love. Before the movie closes, she will lose her job, move to the country (after purchasing a 60+ acre farm with a working apple orchard), develop and market her very own gourmet baby food, and shove her new-found success in her former company's collective face.
On the surfact it's just a sweet movie with an obvious feminist bias - all based on what Barry calls "essentialism:"the "view that there is some natural given essence of the feminine, that's universal and unchangeable" (128), but by squinting your eyes ever so slightly, this innocent movie becomes a grand cog in bell hooks' "systemic institutionalized sexism" (1) machine.
Not only did the script not consider the possibility that a woman's heart would not automatically be changed by the mere presence of a baby but the fact that J.C. uses a stream of working-class women (secretaries, nannies and later employees) who are barely given any voice and are often portrayed as bumpkins or damaged in some way (and absolutely no women of color) is never even mentioned.
"By failing to create a mass-based educational movement to teach everyone about feminism we allow mainstream patriarchal mass media to remain the primary place where folks learn about feminism, and most of what they learn is negative" (23).
The character of J.C. was what hooks calls a "reformist feminist" who was able to "break free of male domination in the workforce and be more self-determining in [her] lifestyle" (5) without a second thought to her less fortunate "sisters" in the struggle. Movies like this, produced in the "patriarchal mass media" allowed everyone to pretend the feminist battle was not only over and done - but won. Years after this movie was released (and since played and re-played on weekend television), I sat in a Women's Studies class, full of young female students who all "assume[d] that sexism [was]no longer [a] problem" (17).
But women still make significantly less than men in the workplace, most single-parent homes are still headed by women, and they still live, for the most part, below the poverty line. Birth control is not covered under most insurance policies, but Viagra is. None of the young women in that classroom even considered voting for Hilary Clinton - but they still believed they could do and be anything that men could.
If they can't see a problem, they will never look for a solution.
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I'll probably continue to love that movie, and Diane Keaton, but you're right. It doesn't do enough, but I don't think that the movie in itself is especially damaging, it's the fact that a monster feminist like Keaton thought that this script was probably the best 1987 had to give her. I'm also fairly certain that if the script had been more politicized it would have been chucked.
ReplyDeleteWhat we need is more women writing scripts for women, and even moreso for strong female leads for women of color (I'm still bitter that Haley Barry was the first black woman to win an Oscar for best actress). I'll harken to Michaela's post, if a Taiwanese male director can win all kinds of awards for a movie about four women driven to poverty because of their gender, then what can't the rest of us do?
"They" always becomes "we" if we see but do nothing.
I'm going to have to disagree that this movie (and all of its clones) weren't damaging in that they exactly inform your last statement. Like the frog, "we" might jump out of a pot of furiously boiling water (i.e. in-your-face "feminist" movies) - but we are likely to smugly stew in our own juices watching movies like Baby Boom - we see nothing, so we do nothing.
ReplyDeleteI think it's exactly this kind of movie (and ideology) that now allows so many to argue the feminist movement is no longer necessary and thereby remove it from the political arena - which, in turn, is why in 2009 we are still having to call for "more women writing scripts for women."