The Year of the Woman? Oy vey.
It's a phrase that's always struck me as ridiculous. It would be one thing to declare it the Year of the Short, Red-headed, Left-Handed Woman, or the Year of the Unmarried, Urban-dwelling Thirty-something Woman, or the Year of the Woman Who Doesn't Want to Have It All, but, I mean, half the people there are women. Saying its our year is so broad as to be totally meaningless -- and more than a tad condescending. (And, as any good writer knows, a mere three examples is all it takes to make a trend. Which is to say, as easy as it would be to round up three examples that prove it is indeed the year of the woman, it'd be equally simplistic to find three examples that demonstrate that, no, in fact, this was not such a good year for women.)
Interestingly, I got to thinking about this idea while reading Sunday's New York Times magazine, which, upon first glance, would seem to be proclaiming 2012 as a the year of the woman. The cover story, "Hollywood Heroines," is accompanied by a beautiful photo spread that spans 21 pages and features the big screen's biggest lady stars of the year. It's exactly the sort of thing you see and expect the accompanying text to be proclaiming the dearth of quality female characters is over, the representation equaled, the hierarchy overturned! (Citing three examples, natch.) Oh, actually, the deck did say that the hierarchy had been overturned. But, turns out, the piece, written by A.O. Scott, was right on the money, and its lessons stretch far beyond the reaches of tinsel town.
Scott cites some good examples of movies from this year that feature strong female characters, and/or pass the Bechdel Test (the shockingly simple, yet equally and perhaps more shockingly impossible-to-pass test comprised of three criterion: 1. the movie must have at least two named women characters; 2. they must talk to each other; 3. about something besides a man).
The heart of Scott's piece, to me, is the following (hyperlinks my own):
The rush to celebrate movies about women has a way of feeling both belated and disproportionate. Pieces of entertainment become public causes and punditical talking points, burdened with absurdly heavy expectations and outsize significance... the things that women do-the people they insist on being remain endlessly controversial. It takes very little for individual tastes and decisions to become urgent matters of public debate. It takes, basically, a magazine cover article. Women are breast-feeding their babies, pushing their children to practice violin, reading '50 Shades of Grey' on the subway, juggling career and child care, marrying late or not at all, falling behind or taking over the world. Stop the presses!
...The behavior of a woman who appears on the public stage can be counted on to provoke a contentious referendum on the state of women in general. Is this good for women? Is she doing it wrong? This happened, in the last 12 months, to Sandra Fluke and Paula Broadwell, to Rihanna and Ann Romney, and, closer to the matter at hand, to Lena Dunham.
...Dunham was mocked for her body, sneered at for her supposed nepotism, scolded for her inadequate commitment to diversity and lectured about the inappropriate things her alter ego, Hannah Horvath, does in bed... Dunham was not quite allowed just to explore her own ideas and experiences. She was expected to get it right, to represent, to set an example and blaze a path.
And while the great majority of us are not Lena Dunham, I'd say that pressure and that judgment -- and, more to the point, that expectation that we're gonna be judged -- is something we all deal with. Because no matter how many movies about women or girl heroes or headlines about secretaries of state or tiger mothers get paraded out on (to borrow Scott's point) magazine covers, the message we take home has far less to do with the specific example itself than it does the analysis. What we absorb is this: Whatever you do, every choice you make, says everything about you, and, by God, you're gonna be judged for it.
When we write about women and choices and the struggles we have determining what to do with our lives, I think we can't overstate the lesson here. In order to make choices that are right for us, individually, we have to recognize how much of our pro and con lists are occupied by these pressures. The pressure to get it right, to represent, to set an example, to blaze a path. It's interesting to wonder, if we could somehow apply a filter that'd shut those considerations down, how much easier our choices would be.