It's been a dismal summer for women in film. The movies designed to attract women viewers portrayed us less than flatteringly. Ostensibly femme-friendly, both romantic comedy Knocked Up and period biopic Becoming Jane featured one-dimensional female protagonists who, despite intelligence and independence, inexplicably fall for cads. Needless to say, both films were directed by men, and both reflect a paternalistic attitude towards women that persists in our culture.
Knocked Up, supposedly a refreshing look at pregnancy, actually took a conservative stance, obscured by genitalia and bong jokes. This film kept us chuckling all the way to its core message: a woman, no matter how successful her life and career, shouldn't raise a child alone. She needs a man.
Furthermore, the film glosses over heroine Alison's decision to keep her pregnancy after she sleeps with Ben, a slacker who ditched his condom. Her choice is summarized by minor characters serving as angels of conscience -- the good angel, Ben's dad, lovingly encourages his nebbishy son to have a child. The bad angel, Alison's mom, shrilly demands that her daughter "take care of it" and wait to have a "real baby." With these caricatures substituting for her internal life, Alison's agency is nonexistent. She and her pregnant belly are reduced to being the catalyst for Ben's emotional growth.
Set 200 years earlier, Becoming Jane puts its heroine in a similar spot between a rock and a soft place. Jane Austen's mother is a shrew who wants her child to get married -- and fast -- to ease financial strain. Her sweet dad just hopes his daughter ends up happy.
Hathaway's historically inaccurate Jane lacks worldly wisdom. But then she meets whoring, carousing Irishman Tom LeFroy. Tom introduces Jane to the bawdy classic Tom Jones (which the actual Jane most likely have read already) the art of making out, and eventually, heartbreak -- and he feeds her some tasty lines of prose. Tom, the film posits, is the great man behind the great woman; he is her mentor and muse.
Like Knocked Up's Alison, Jane is a self-sufficient woman with supposed talent; like Ben, Tom is a boorish, weak-spirited charlatan. But in each movie, the guy gets the plurality of the screenplay's witty lines, and the woman is relegated to being his faithful audience, a breathing testament to his charm. As Time's Richard Corliss says, "Today, smart or sassy talk is something only the guys get to do."
And then there's that kindly father figure. He is the ethical center of both Knocked Up and Becoming Jane, despite being a small character in each. His voice can be read as a stand-in for a male director who claims to really understand his female audience, even while devaluing his female characters.
Alas, that father-knows-best voice is a familiar one for American women, having been used to threaten our reproductive and workplace rights for years.
It showed up in Justice Anthony Kennedy's April SCOTUS decision banning partial birth abortion. While restricting women's corporal freedom, the Justice waxed sentimental about the "bond" between mother and child, and bemoaned the flightiness of females: "some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained." Kennedy treated women as easily manipulated naïfs. Thanks to him, paternalistic misogyny got codified into law.
And at a May debate, Sam Brownback said that he'd force a women to carry her rapist's baby to term because to him, the fetus is the child of a "loving God." "I think we can explain it [to women]," he said. In other words, if those clueless rape victims really understood things, then they would feel differently.
This reinvigorated paternalism is everywhere, from abstinence pledge rings that dads give their daughters, to judgmental pharmacists who refuse to dispense the pill to women, to discrimination against female professors who are presumed to be on the mommy track. Christopher Hitchens even penned a condescending piece about how women aren't funny -- and it actually got published.
It's ridiculous that women film characters (and film audiences) are disrespected by male directors, but it's genuinely disheartening that the same is true for real women. Much of our society continues to view gender with the same thoughtful subtlety that Knocked Up's Ben shows when he says of his newborn, "It's a girl. Buy some pink shit!"