The Misogynistic Backlash Against Women-Strong Films

Dana Schowalter, Shannon Stevens, Daniel L. Horvath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032123103
• eBook ISBN: 9781000469684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is an exploration of the political struggle for visibility engendered by the growing number of women-centered popular films and a critical analysis of the intensifying misogynistic backlash that have accompanied such advances in the depiction of women on screen.

The book draws from a variety of theoretical and methodological tools to provide critical cultural analysis and alternative readings of women-strong films and their important role in society. The authors engage with popular culture and the popular press, media studies, and rhetorical criticism examining new modes of communication while providing historical context to help make sense of these oppositional readings. The book includes case studies on Mad Max: Fury Road, Wonder Woman, Atomic Blonde, Star Wars, and Ghostbusters to analyze critical responses, men's-rights activist boycotting campaigns, online harassment, and the political economy that precede and accompany the creation and presentation of these films.

This is an accessible and timely analysis of the rise of feminist-friendly and women-led films and the inevitable counterculture of misogyny. It is suitable for students and researchers in Media and Communication Studies, Gender and Media, and Cultural Studies.

1 Introduction Women’s cultural production engenders misogyny— A historical overview

DOI: 10.4324/9780429291975-1

On her way to the theater to see Ghostbusters, one of the authors stopped to take a selfie in front of a large cardboard cutout of the film’s star characters. Seeing that image of four women, fully dressed in baggy work suits, as the stars of a film that would paint them as heroes, felt so significant against the backdrop of over three decades of watching films in which women were trivialized and objectified, if they were even included at all. She quickly typed a Facebook post to that effect, but before pressing the publish button, she deleted the post and instead opted to send the photo to her friends, the coauthors of this book. She wanted to be the type of person who decided against posting it because selfies announcing you are watching a movie are uninteresting at best, but the real reason was the dread of the potential backlash leveled against anyone who dared to announce that they saw the film and liked it. In short, she feared what might happen online while she was inside that dark theater watching one of the most profound action sequences she had viewed to date. To this day, she still thinks about that moment when she hit the X, wondering how a person who has studied women in film for many years was so decisively deterred from even so small a statement as posting about their excitement to watch this movie.

As it turns out, she was not alone in feeling that way, and more so, this experience was not limited to Ghostbusters. Each time we presented versions of this work—formally at academic conferences or informally in our everyday conversations—we heard similar stories about people (mostly women) finding an immense cinematic pleasure at seeing representations of strong, dynamic women characters on screen, but hearing over and over in overt and subtle ways that their experiences were invalid or wrong. Those dismissals ranged from the mild (tepid critical reviews) to the outrageous (rape and murder threats leveled at the women starring in these films or at anyone claiming to enjoy them or daring to defend publicly).

Undoubtedly, if you are reading this, you are familiar with many of them: Ghostbusters trolled online relentlessly before it had even been released, including particularly vicious and racist abuse of Leslie Jones; outrage that Mad Max: Fury Road would dare to privilege a woman’s positionality in a fictional post-apocalyptic realm; the “shame on you, you can do so much better” dashing of Melissa McCarthy’s The Boss and Aubrey Plaza/Maggie Carey’s The To-Do List; the fury over casting of a woman as a central character in the new Star Wars films; and so many more. It was, frankly, disconcerting to experience these films in such radically different ways than the mainstream arbiters of taste deemed appropriate. When we watched these films, we laughed, we cheered, we took pleasure in seeing versions of ourselves (and fantasies of ourselves) doing really cool things, and our allies rejoiced with us. It was, ultimately, that disconnect between our lived experience of women-strong films and the widespread maligning of that same work that opened the space for our shared critical analysis of the misogynistic backlash and patriarchal norms that can have devastating effects on women in the creative cultural realm and simultaneously devalue their contributions to such a degree that promotion and distribution of even major studio films is hampered. This feeling of disconnect—and the variations we have experienced, heard of, and read about—has been the driving force behind this book project.

Disparaging women’s voices

The backlash against women-strong films and the relentless public devaluation of art that centers women’s perspectives has a far longer history than the few movie titles of the ‘10–’20 decade invoked here would suggest. In fact, the devaluation begins when women simply try to speak up in public. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell¹ discusses this systematic disaffirmation of women’s voices at length in her Man Cannot Speak for Her volumes, highlighting how early feminist rhetors, speaking on important issues—such as the links between excessive alcohol consumption and gendered violence, voting rights for women, and the abolition of slavery—were and continue to be disparaged and discredited. Not only were many of these women met with verbal abuse and physical violence (including state-sanctioned violence and policies of brutality women faced while incarcerated for the crime of speaking up), but they also faced systematic silencing that included a conscious refusal to enter their testimony into the congressional record, newspapers’ decisions to not include their speeches and events in their coverage, and over a century of rhetorical scholars refusing to see their speeches as public address worthy of critical interrogation.

Campbell argues that it is precisely their role as women, and not any other stylistic rhetorical choices they make, that aids in this systematic dismissal.² She writes, “The potential to engage another is the aesthetic or symbolic power of a piece of persuasive discourse…However, many rhetorical works fail to achieve their ends for reasons that have little to do with their style or content.”³ The very fact that women were entering the public sphere and speaking about experiences that were felt most deeply in the private sphere created a barrier to understanding the depth and breadth of their words. In essence, for early women activists, their ability to influence others was hampered by a cultural understanding of traditional womanhood that made it difficult for listeners to recognize the quality of the speakers’ arguments and presentation. Further, even the best constructed argument, when advocated by a woman, was unlikely to be persuasive as it encountered audiences steeped in a deeply held sexist ideologies, the very rigid mores early feminists were rallying against.

This inability to appreciate women’s discourse is not limited to overt activist speakers. The inability of reviewers and audiences to connect with women as entertainers has a long, storied history as well. Perhaps, the most infamous example is that of The Cherry Sisters, who were at one time among the highest paid groups on the vaudeville circuit⁴ and a favorite target of theater critics in the late 19th century. Their act and critical reception combine to provide an early glimpse of what is now a centuries-old sport—male critics maligning women in the entertainment industry for a multitude of “reasons,” from their unpleasant voices to their inappropriate choices of content.

One such review merits further discussion for the legal and critical precedent it set in how reviewers can discuss the work of all performers, and in this case, the work of women whose act was popular enough to merit an appearance on Broadway.⁵ The Des Moines Leader published a review describing the Cherry Sisters as “three creatures surpassing the witches in Macbeth in general hideousness,” and goes on to critique each of their physical appearances thusly:

Effie is an old jade of 50 summers, Jessie a frisky filly of 40, and Addie, the flower of the family, a capering monstrosity of 35. Their long, skinny arms, equipped with talons at the extremities, swung mechanically, and soon were waved frantically at the suffering spectators. The mouths of their rancid features opened like caverns and sounds like the wailings of damned souls issued therefrom…. Effie is spavined, Addie is knock-kneed and stringhalt, and Jessie, the only one who showed her stockings, has legs without calves, as classic in their outlines as the curves of a broom handle. The misguided fellows who came to see a leg show got their money’s worth, for they never saw such limbs before and never will again--outside of a boneyard…. Not even in the woods around Sac City, nor in the wilds of Monona county, could three such raw and rank specimens of womanhood be found. … Their personal characters are above reproach; they are virtuous both from necessity and choice, as any one will conclude at sight of them.⁶

The Cherry Sisters filed a lawsuit against the paper, claiming the inaccurate description of their bodies as malicious and libelous. In reaching its verdict in favor of the reviewer, the judge referenced two primary points of law: truth and malice.⁷ First, the judge ruled that the essence of what the critic wrote was truthful (the judge himself insulted the performance during the legal proceedings); and second, the judge said that the critic was without malicious intent when doing his job of reviewing the performance, which he must be able to do without restraint. The case is widely cited among the most important free speech protections for journalists, cementing their right to engage in critical analysis.

While the judge was embracing journalistic freedom and making an important move to limit efforts at silencing the press under the guise of libel claims, the way he gets there is troubling. The idea that there can be an objective truth about the quality of a comedic art form is flawed logic as is the judge’s failure to see as malicious a review that includes a description of the performers using adjectives normally applied to aging and decrepit horses (spavined, stringhalt) as well as language intended to invoke the sexist accusations of witches, even going so far as to say that the root of the sisters’ messages of chastity and morality came of necessity (as in they are too ugly to get laid).⁸ This insult is, of course, a permanent fixture of the discourse of violent misogyny as evidenced most prominently by former president Donald Trump’s frequent use of the trope—“She’s not my type” or “Believe me, she would not be my first choice”— when responding to accusations of rape.⁹ For the Iowa judge deciding this case in 1901, though, the malicious nature of the misogynistic review was almost certainly a cultural blind spot. It is not uncommon for judges in free speech rulings to make clear that they do not like the speech they are reading, but that the speaker nonetheless has the right to say it—that did not happen here. Instead, he penned:

the editor of a newspaper has the right, if not the duty, of publishing, for the information of the public, fair and reasonable comments, however severe in terms, upon anything which is made by its owner a subject of public exhibition, as upon any other matter of public interest.

To say that the performers opened themselves to such criticism (they had it coming!) and that it is the critic’s duty to report it as he sees fit shows an acceptance of this hateful, gendered rhetoric.

Of course, we cannot go back in time to watch the Cherry Sisters perform one of their variety shows to make arguments about quality or style. But here’s the thing—we don’t have to do that as ultimately the “truth” about their appearance and skill is neither relevant nor objective. What matters is that their disparagement became the critical norm, so much so that more than a century later, the critical commentary on the poor quality of their work lives on in free speech textbooks and essays as an important shift in thinking about what constitutes libel.¹⁰ Additionally, the case opens up space for discussions about how quality assessments shape and are shaped by cultural norms, including the norm of gender inequality, as we move into our media analysis framed in terms of production, promotion, and perception.

Scholar Mark Jancovich ties the influence of these cultural norms to the ideas of taste, writing, “reviews are products of specific taste formations, and also function specifically as gate-keepers or guardians of specific taste formations, mediating between texts and audiences and specifying particular ways of appropriating and consuming texts.”¹¹ In short, assessments of film mediate between having good taste or bad taste in film, helping to create boundaries around these two concepts that define which films are worthy of our attention and which films are not: thumbs up or thumbs down. It is this definitional power that makes reviews consequential as they are wrapped up in larger debates about representation and power while simultaneously serving as a prescription about which films are good for us and which are not. Or, as film scholar Lisa Bode writes, assessments about which films are good also reveal “the dynamics of power in classification of films and their audiences, and the ways in which such things as gender, age and class are linked in this process of classification.”¹² Within that classification system, the white man in his prime always wins.

Bode goes on to highlight the ways that gender serves as a useful category of analysis for how categorizing film audiences also shapes perceptions about film quality.¹³ Here, she draws on the work of Andrea Huyssen¹⁴ and Barbara Klinger¹⁵, who show that defining the audience of genres such as soap operas and melodramas as “for women” aided reviewers in pain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: women’s cultural production engenders misogyny— A historical overview
• 2 Misogyny and the missive of mediocrity: disparaging women-strong films in movie reviews
• 3 The economics of misogyny and the “surprising” success of woman-strong films
• 4 “None of us asked for this”: Ghostbusters, online harassment, and mechanized misogyny
• 5 “Why You Should Not Go See ‘Mad Max: Feminist Road’”: parasitic film criticism and (post) apocalyptic fears of feminist propaganda
• 6 Star Wars (toxic) nostalgia and the looming end of man
• 7 Atomic Blonde and her critics: disciplining of a pre-patriarchal feminine archetype
• 8 Conclusion: counter-publics, patriarchal (reel)realism, and a call to action
• Index