On fear

Warning: this post contains violent and sexist language.

A few weeks ago, I was standing on a sidewalk in Stratford, having just come out of a bookstore. A middle-aged man walked up to me, asked if he could have a minute, and when I said "yes," proceeded to scold me for "not looking where [I] was going" and nearly running into him. I have no idea if I did or not; I'd never seen him before in my life. All I knew was that I was on my own and a strange man had started berating me out of nowhere.

About five minutes later, after I got away, my phone chimed and I pulled it out to see what it was. It was an e-mail from someone I'd defriended on Livejournal and ignored his subsequent "but whyyyyyy?" messages. Apparently he hadn't gotten the message, because he was rhapsodizing about how great it would be if we lived near each other and could hang out. I deleted the e-mail.

Would either of these men have hurt me? I don't know. All I knew was that I was getting unwanted- in the first case, hostile- attention from strange men who were ignoring my boundaries. At what point can I assume that I'll be safe? And if I do and I'm wrong, how many people will blame me if I turn out to be wrong?

A few years ago, I came close to dating a man, but called it off when I discovered a series of disturbing internet posts he'd made before arriving at university. I'm not going to link to them because his real name is attached, but suffice to say they described graphic violence against women. After I turned him down he started to Facebook stalk me- whenever I posted something, there'd be a like or a comment from him within the space of five minutes. He was also wont to send me messages out of nowhere, congratulating me on being "cool" when I saw him in public. I unfriended him. Sure enough, within twelve hours, I had a message from him wanting to know why. I blocked him.

Dangerous? Maybe. Disrespectful of my boundaries? Absolutely. The history of violent rhetoric was there. The low-level creeping was there. If I'd let it pass and put up with the annoyance and discomfort, would he have lost interest and gone away? Or would he have escalated?

When I was in high school, a friend invited me over to his house to watch a movie. He had a TV in his bedroom, so we sat on the bed to watch it. Over the course of the next hour and a half, he repeatedly reached over and grabbed my backside, crotch, and breasts. I slapped his hands away. He did it again. I slapped them again. He kept going. His mother was upstairs, and I threatened to scream and bring her running downstairs- that stopped him for a few minutes. I didn't scream, though. I was too embarrassed. What could I say if she came downstairs? "Your son keeps groping me?" I could barely force the word "vagina" out of my mouth.

We were watching "The Fifth Element" that afternoon. To this day, I can't watch that movie without feeling queasy.

I took drama class in high school, and had a classmate who really didn't like me. His name was Jeff. I was assigned to work on a skit with him and one other boy (the one who groped me, but this was before that.) There was a scene in our skit where I was thrown to the ground and kicked. All staged, of course, but then Jeff started kicking me for real. I told him that if he did it during the actual presentation, I'd break character and yell at him to stop. "Do that," he said, "and I'll fucking kill you, bitch." He got more graphic than that: when I suggested wearing a nightgown as part of my costume, he responded "will anyone be able to see your pussy? If I saw your pussy, I'd kill myself." Then there was the time he asked me if I'd ever masturbated and told me I should "stick a carrot in your pussy."

One day, he passed me in the hall and muttered "see you in drama class, Laura" under his breath. I burst into tears and ran to a payphone, begging my mother to take me home. She pulled me out of that class. After I stopped going, we started getting hangup phone calls, from a number that listed on call display as "012345678." I still can't prove that Jeff was the one calling. All I know is that when I mentioned in front of his friend (the groper) that my mother had called the police about the phone calls, they instantly stopped.

That was high school. In middle school- I was eleven- I went to a friend's birthday party. We were walking home from the park, five girls from the age of eleven to thirteen, when a man pulled up on a bike. "oooh," he said, "five pretty ladies!" We all froze.

"Are you scared?" he asked. "Don't be scared of me." In retrospect, that was his mistake. Before, we'd been paralyzed because we knew there was something wrong with the situation, but we couldn't put a voice to it. As soon as he identified his behaviour as scary, it broke the spell. We all started screaming, and ran the rest of the way home. My friend's parents weren't there- just her sixteen-year-old sister, who laughed when she heard the story. "He was hitting on you!" she said. "Get used to it!"

It's been eleven years.

I'm still not used to it.

Get thee behind me, she-devil!

As you can probably tell from looking at this blog, I put a lot of thought into the media I consume. I'm not saying this to brag about what a smart person I am; I just do it automatically. If you don't think about what you're taking in, how can you enjoy the nuances of the plot and characters? You have to put at least some thing into what you're watching or reading, or you're just staring at a screen/page for hours on end. You don't have to go in-depth with your analysis or anything, but it's pretty basic media consumption to think "X did Y because they were motivated by Z." Again, it's not about whether or not the viewer is smart; it's just how we're wired to interact with media. I think I tend to look a bit closer because I want to create media myself, and so I look at the ways other people have gotten it right or wrong. As a woman, I'm also invested in/tend to notice the way the media I consume treats female characters, because the way we are portrayed in fiction reflects the way we feel about ourselves in real life. If I want to do anything as a writer, it's boost self-confidence rather than deflate it. I want readers to know they're not alone.

So, I've been watching a lot of movies lately! I watch a lot of movies in general, and since I'm taking two film courses this semester, I'm watching more than usual. I've also been looking at horror movies, since Hallowen is approaching. And what I'm finding is . . . disturbing. I'm familiar with the way the media in general views women; you can't be a consumer of fiction and NOT be aware of it. What I wasn't aware of, at least not personally, is the way the horror genre treats women- specifically, how much it loves tearing them to pieces.

Let's look at a proto-example, The Exorcist. You probably know the story: a little girl gets posessed by a demon, and a priest struggling with his faith has to overcome his doubts in order to save her. What are two things you notice about that summary?

One: the person in peril is a little girl, specifically a twelve-year-old. Two: the focal point of the story, the character who has an arc and emotional journey, isn't the little girl at all. She spends most of the movie under control of a (gender-neutral) demonic force. It's the priest. The movie isn't about the person being put through hell and having control of their body taken away; it's the one who Feels Really Bad About It. And the man. The male role here is the important one. It's even the title of the movie: "The Exorcist," not "The Posessed." Regan, in the grand scheme of the film, doesn't matter. Moreover, the way the film uses her to make a point- I would argue- says a lot about what we value as viewers and what frightens us. Remember this scene?

Of course you do; it's one of the movie's big shocking moments, and certainly one of the most controversial. Regan, now fully under the demon's control, "masturbates" (I'd argue it looks more like stabbing, but the intent is there) with a crucifix while her head rotates 180 degrees, and when her mother enters, the demon drags Chris's head down in an attempt to make her fellate her own daughter. Disgusting, right? Of course it is- it's incest. But it's also playing on a lot of our fears about girls, especially preteen ones who are just beginning to be aware of their own sexuality. What's the scariest thing in the world? A young girl masturbating, apparently. And masturbating with a crufix- intentionally profaning one of the holiest symbols in Christianity. So young girls > female masturbation > blasphemy. Starting to see my argument?

You can argue the point; Regan's mother Chris is, after all, a character in her own right who influences the plot. She has feelings towards her daughter, and she isn't removed from control of her body like Regan is. But she still isn't the focal point of the movie itself- Karras is. We may sympathize with Regan and Chris, but Karras is the one we're meant to root for. He is the one who's here to slay the dragon and bring the princess home to her castle. I ask you, then: why isn't her mother given that chance? I know that within the logic of the film, Karras is needed because he's a priest and priests are the ones who perform exorcisms, but what he does in the end is simply invite the demon to enter his body and then kills the demon by killing himself. Did that really need a priest?

Okay, you argue, but The Exorcist is only one movie. There are plenty of horror movies- exorcism movies, even!- that don't involve the demeaning of a girl or woman for the benefit of a male character. Okay, then. Where are they?

How about The Exorcism of Emily Rose? Who's the protagonist of that one?

Oh

Well . . . okay, how about The Last Exorcism? Does that have a female lead?

Not so much, no.

Okaaaaaaaaaay . . . Stigmata! That's the movie I watched that spurred this whole ponderance on my part. That one's got to have a woman who gets to reflect and act on her situation- she's billed on the poster! Surely they won't take yet another story about a woman being tortured and robbed of her bodily autonomy and make it all about a male crisis of fai-

Oh, for the love of God!

I'm not writing an essay (I have to write about five for class anyway); I can't claim to have drawn a definite conclusion from this. All I can say is what I've seen for myself. And what I've seen is . . . an endless parade of women being battered, bruised, and beaten while a man stands nearby weeping quietly over their suffering. But the final shot isn't the women's face. She doesn't get a say in what happens next. Whether she lives or dies (we have a 2/2 ratio on that one, though I'm told that if the director of Stigmata had had his way, it would have been a 3) it's not her story. It's his. This is veering genres wildly, but do you remember the posters for the first season of The Good Wife?

Like I said, completely different genre. But if you take the tagline and flip it, you've got a pretty good description of the horror genre- at least, the subgenre I review in this post. Her suffering. His story.