sideblog

You can’t change your sex because sex is an immutable part of your biology that extends down to the cellular level e.g. female is the term for a member of the sex that produces large gametes.

pacify those who might accuse such a storyline of being “feminazi propaganda” (see: reception of the ghost busters remake)

give viewers eye candy (playboy bunny outfit, bikinis, and tight-fitting, low-cut dresses)

etc

lastly, let’s not forget the way she convinced the admissions staff to accept her:

Think about it. The media and culture around us is CONSTANTLY celebrating the performance of femininity— it’s literally everywhere you look. The ads on the bus, the commercials before your YouTube videos, the toys marketed to young girls, the clothes that are available for women’s body types. The movie is just more of the same propaganda for the practice of extreme femininity.

The “villains” in the movie that criticize elle for her femininity are precisely that— characters. Characters made up to prove a point against an issue that doesn’t exist. These fake people are set up in order to construct the staw man argument that performing femininity is an admirable act of rebellion against a world which shuns feminine women. This world does not exist. Case in point, the real people watching the movie, the audience (the general public), universally approves of elle’s femininity. And the story’s narrative only serves to reinforce that position in the viewer.

You’re right though, it’s true that feminine women get underestimated and are thought of as less capable. But so do non-feminine women. Really, all women in general experience this. That’s misogyny for you. In the workplace, if you’re hyper feminine, you’re considered ditzy and will have to prove yourself through even harder work than the men. If you’re unfeminine, you’re an irresponsible slob who has to get her act together before she can be trusted with important things. It’s a double edged sword— there’s no winning as a woman in the workforce.

And in everyday life, femininity is a bargaining piece women have to use in order to receive basic respect. Most of them don’t even realize this, at least not consciously. The world is significantly easier to navigate as a woman who practices femininity— just ask your local butch lesbian or other GNC women. Do you really think they get off easier? Don’t the insults of “dyke”, “slob”, “hairy”, and “unladylike” ring a bell? Don’t you think there’s a reason you only ever see women with full faces of makeup on the morning news while their male counterparts only need powder for the cameras? What about the fully shaven actresses who play in a TV series set in the Middle Ages? Or the female superheroes who fight crime in skintight pants and high heels? Femininity is the expectation for women.

I was discussing this with a friend recently, with regards to Valerie Solanas. She is usually talked about either with derision or extreme contempt, as a complete psycho; the total lack of compassion for her lifetime of suffering is mind-blowing. Men have put her through pretty much every horrifying experience a woman can go through. She was raped by her father age 5/6, then raped by her stepfather as a teen so that she had a first child when she was 14, then a second one the next year, whom she had to give up for adoption. She was homeless for decades and had to prostitute herself to survive, with everything that entails. She also spent years in detention centres and mental hospitals in horrific living conditions (cockroaches in her food and the like), where she was raped again, by prison doctors this time. When she got out she went back to being homeless (and said that was worse than living in lunatic asylums), and since she was now infamous as the Warhol shooter she had people spitting on her in the street and generally lived a life of extreme isolation and poverty. In the last years of her life several people who knew her reported having seen her begging in the streets, covered in sores and wearing nothing but a blanket.