Through male eyes
This this this. It’s not just the Harvey Weinsteins, it’s not just the actual men and their actual groping and raping. It’s also the sea they swim in: it’s the content. Kate Hardie knows.
The focus is quite rightly on the horrendous sexual abuse that Weinstein is alleged to have committed. But to focus on that alone is to miss the point that the portrayal of women – of their lives, their feelings, their sexuality and their bodies – is nearly always decided upon and filtered through male eyes. Nearly every actress will tell you about scripts that included scenes of female nudity that seem to have no apparent reason for being there and that are often degrading.
And quite a few women in the audience for such scripts will tell you the same thing.
You only have to turn on most police dramas to find the obligatory image of a battered, naked – but beautiful – young female corpse. (Apart from the ones written by Sally Wainwright: will someone please put Sally Wainwright in charge of everything for a while?) You don’t have to be talking about consent and abuse to be mortified by many female roles.
Second that. I love Sally Wainwright. In case you’re thinking “who?” – Scott and Bailey. Women have all the big parts, and they’re real women.
I am 49, so I do not get asked to be naked any more. (That is another thing the male-dominated industry is not keen on – women over 40 having any kind of satisfactory sex life or, indeed, bodies.) But when I was 17, I had become so used to being required to appear naked that I asked for a no-nudity clause to be written into a contract. I was fired by the male director because, despite there being no nudity in his script, he felt the clause curbed his creativity should he, on a whim, decide he needed me to remove my clothes. (This director, fittingly was given his break by Weinstein.)
Besides which, why is a woman even in the movie if she doesn’t take her clothes off? It’s not as if women ever do anything.
We proceeded to read the scripts; the room was full of women – a casting director and assistant director included. A male producer was reading out the stage directions, his voice hardly faltering in tone as he read out: “He rips open her shirt and we see her tits.”
When we finished, it was announced that anyone who wasn’t an executive producer, producer, writer, director or the director of photography had to leave so that those left behind could make important decisions. I watched as the room emptied of women.
While the men stayed in the room to decide when the women had to take their clothes off for the camera.
That’s another thing with Revenge of the Nerds – the women are all standing around the sorority house naked, walking around with no clothes on, as if the only time women wear clothes is when they leave the house. I thought that was stupid then, and I think it’s stupid now.
And so we can choose to set off down one of the courses before us: the Pilgrim’s Path to Puritanism.
The (celibate) religious orders of Catholicism have long since found the answer to this: the female ones require not just celibacy, but for the women to dress in garments designed specifically to avoid suggestion of female body shape that might trigger arousal of male passion. Islam on the other hand requires women to cover themselves completely, so that none but their husband has any idea of what could be coming their way when at last they reach the confines of home.
Classic psychological studies have shown that of the four basic physiological ‘drives’: thirst, hunger, sex and homeostasis (physical comfort), sex is actually the least powerful, but comes to the fore when the subject is sexually deprived but sated in respect to the other three.
Going by his photos in the press, I would say that Weinstein has looked after himself thoroughly with respect to his food, drink and bodily comfort. But (as I am sure any zookeeper or veterinarian will confirm) confined avian and mammalian males relieve the monotony by loading up big time in the sexual dimension: which in the right circumstances can lead to the sort of trouble that sees them physically confined for long periods and given a most uninteresting diet day after day. In other words, a self-stabilising and auto-correcting situation.
Omar, while there is probably something to your analysis, I think the answer lies somewhere else. It isn’t the craving for sex – as a wealthy powerful producer, he could no doubt have had all the sex he wanted with consenting females. This is more of a lust for power, the desire to bend someone else to his will, to force them to participate in an act in which they were not willing. That is sheer power, not lust. It is about proving your strength by overpowering someone who is weaker (in this case, not just physically but financially and in terms of authority).
iknklast::
Or as noted by that eminent philosopher, Henry A. Kissinger, power is the great aphrodisiac. But it is not like mathematics or physics. Once is not enough. The proposition has to be continually verified, and verified again. And again, and again, and again…
I could go on.
The problem I think isn’t a craving for sex. Nor is it necessarily misogyny, or at least not exactly what we think of as misogyny.
A lot of it is more about what we think about being male, than what we think about the role of women. We think of being male as being the fighter, being forceful, being willing to take charge.
So with the Catholics, they can try and eliminate any hint of sexual characteristics from women, and they end up… with a massive child rape scandal that spans the entire globe. Islam tries to do the same thing, as I’m sure you’re well aware, and the net result is… more of the same stuff.
The problem isn’t the sexual desire, it isn’t about women’s bodies, it is about what we as men have going on in our heads. It is that stuff we consider being a “real man”.
Sometimes you need those traits of being a fighter, being forceful, being willing to take charge, they aren’t inherently bad things, except what we’re taught to think of as winning is somebody else losing, and that means those traits are prized in a way where consent is not only devalued, it is seen as a negative.
If everyone wins, is it victory or is it a participation award?
President Jacob Zuma, a while back, argued in Parliament that because the ANC won the most votes, the ANC has more rights than everyone else. His view of democracy was as a means of winning those rights.
Is it any surprise that Jacob Zuma, the ANC and the country as a whole, have less than great histories regarding respecting consent? When your concept of political victory is you have more rights than everyone else, that, not anything really to do with women per se, is a problem.
What is our language around sex? Conquest. Conquest is a form of taking power that is not achieved through mutual consent. Leadership becomes dominance, and dominance is desirable because you don’t have to think about what other people want. “When you’re a star, they let you get away with it.”
When you’re a successful movie producer, when you’re a TV icon, when you’re a president, when you’re in charge and you’re a winner, you get more rights. It isn’t simply about how men view women, it is what happens when the way we’re taught to see everything gets applied to women.
But of course all of this is IMO, and maybe I’m crazy. I hope so, because actually solving the problem I’ve set forward is much harder than identifying it.
On the topic of power: Orwell points out in 1984 that you can only be certain that you’re exerting power when you are making somebody suffer, making somebody do what they don’t want to do. If the driver of behaviour for the Weinsteins of the world is the exertion of power, then, they do not WANT consenting or willing partners; the infliction of their intentions on the unwilling is itself the source of their gratification.
I hate sex and nudity scenes. Never seen a single such scene that was necessary to the plot or made the movie better in any way. The only thing they ever accomplish is to make the movie worse.
[…] a comment by Bruce Gorton on Through male […]
Bruce @#5:
Biology is to blame. Biology is what has set us up. There is a joke about that, concerning what the left testicle said to the right testicle. Details on request.
;-)