Embedded in the routines and language of everyday life
Deborah Cameron suggests a category of “banal sexism” for the background noise of stale jokes and insults about women that most people don’t even notice.
Sexism also has ‘hot’ forms, and those are the ones mainstream discourse finds it easiest to recognise and condemn. The western media have no difficulty in recognising the sexism of the Taliban and Boko Haram; the more liberal parts of the western media have no difficulty in recognising the sexism of Gamergaters and Donald Trump. But what you might call ‘banal sexism’—ordinary, unremarkable, embedded in the routines and the language of everyday life—is a different story. It does often go unnoticed, and when feminists draw attention to it they’re accused of taking offence where none was intended or embracing ‘victim culture’. These knee-jerk defences are often delivered with an air of surprise—as if the people responsible hadn’t realised until that moment that anyone could possibly dissent.
Dear Muslima innit – except it’s not irritable celebrity science dude on Twitter but nearly everybody all the time.
Banal sexism doesn’t provoke outrage. It occupies the part of the spectrum that runs from ‘seen but unnoticed’ (like the ‘default male’ convention which I discussed in an earlier post) through to ‘annoying but not worth getting all fired up about’. You might shake your head, roll your eyes, post a photo with a scathing comment on Facebook, but most people wouldn’t bother to make a formal complaint.
But we can also collect the photos with scathing comments on Facebook – and on blogs – and that’s a little more effective than just shouting at the tv. On the other hand there are also anti-feminists collecting their photos with scathing comments on Facebook and blogs, and at the moment they seem to be winning.
I think I’m dealing with a situation of “banal sexism”. In the play I wrote that is being produced, there is a strong, independent woman in a position of power. There is no sexuality written into the play, implicit or explicit. The director has the female character swooning in sexual interest over the disinterested, rather rude and boorish male character. Like somehow he can’t figure out how to build a friendly relationship between these two characters without that? Or maybe he’s just trying to reassure the male audience members that women will swoon even if they are smart and strong? Unfortunately, standard in the industry gives us rights only so far after we agree to let a theatre produce our work. I can prevent them from changing my words, but “interpretation” is up to the director
Oh, gawd, that’s so annoying.
It’s like what the (male) director did to Big Little Lies – he added a whole bunch of sexual activity, most of it violent or semi-violent, that’s not there in the novel. It’s as if he thought a story of some women dealing with violence would be too boring without plenty of soft porn thrown in.
Yes, and to make my situation even worse, the characters aren’t even the same species! One character is a honeybee (worker bee = asexual). The other character, the male, is a cockroach.
He’s playing it for laughs, because he thinks my fable is a farce, apparently. But it isn’t funny, at least not to me.
iknklast, as far as I know (which is not far) you can have “moral rights” written into the contract. Then you can stop directors from messing with the meaning, not just the words. Might be worth asking a lawyer before your next play is produced (Congrats! by the way). Your current situation would make me go postal.
Quixote – I haven’t heard of anyone getting that sort of a deal unless they are a David Mamet or an Edward Albee. The cult of the director is very strong, and the idea in theatre (since sometime in the 20th century; prior to that, directors were often one of the actors or the playwright) is that interpretation is totally the province of the director. They cross out stage directions and ignore stage directions, and consider any instruction from the playwright to be a violation of their autonomy. Because otherwise, they can’t claim to be the single most important artistic influence on the final production (which many directors state right out – writers can’t write, actors can’t act, so we have to have directors to make sure the play comes together in spite of all the incompetents (s)he is saddled with).
I do intend to register a complaint at the post-mortem, however. This theatre purports to be woman friendly, but this is not the first instance where it has demonstrated otherwise.