The Mad Men Finale, Montage of Heck, and American Endings

I was not a fan of Mad Men, and, although “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became a hit when I was 16, I was not a fan of Nirvana. When it comes to monster pop culture trends, especially those with the greatest appeal to my demographic, I find myself frequently being the person watching everyone else with bewilderment and going, “Sure, it's okay – but that's it.” Or, “Maybe this really is the greatest thing in the world. But doesn't anybody have a different opinion?”

I am not, however, indifferent to The Cultural Conversation; if everybody's talking about it, and I have even the slightest bit of independent curiosity about it, I probably want to think about it, talk about it, and maybe blog about it too. So not only did I watch the finale of Mad Men last Sunday, and then see Montage of Heck in the theatre on Wednesday, but I've also been thinking about them, and about they mythos of America, since then. I was therefore pleased, though not surprised, to learn that the director of Montage of Heck, Brett Morgan, majored in something called American Mythology at Hampshire College before getting his MFA in film.

Don Draper, American Anti-Heroes, and the Soap Opera Heroine

I started thinking about American mythology in relation to the ending of Mad Men. The use of that iconic Coke commercial reminded me of the skin-crawly things about the show that made me stop watching it after a two-season trial binge (which happened, I think, around the time Season 4 was airing): how it takes advantage of the way that something that would have appeared to the world, at the time, as innocuous or even positive, now seems, with ironic, knowing hindsight, at once naive and sinister. In other words, our relationship to the recent cultural past, in Mad Men, is one of condescension, disapproval, and envy, which means that the show is not about the past and what it may have been like to live in it, but about our relationship to cartoon ideas about the past, which relies on, and fosters, cartoon ideas about the present.

I've heard a lot about Jay Gatsby in relation to Don Draper/Dick Whitman, but the series finale of Mad Men actually called to mind the endings of two other classics of American literature, one highbrow and one low: Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (another work that grapples with the present America's guilty nostalgia for its past). In the final sequences of both novels, an important character dies, while the protagonist, after reaching her lowest point, gets an ambiguous ending. Actually, Don Draper's final story arc even more closely recalls that of Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) in what ought to be an American classic, the film Now, Voyager, which takes its title from Whitman. In a moment of crisis, Charlotte, like Don, bolts from the city and seeks help and guidance at a retreat for the rich called Cascade. In Portrait, Isabel Archer, after increasing conflict with her husband, the social-climbing fortune hunter Gilbert Osmond, travels from Rome to England to see her dying cousin, Ralph, at his familial estate, the Edenic Gardencourt; after being confronted there by her obsessed stalker, Caspar Goodwood, who argues that Osmond's cruelty justifies them running off together, she decides, for reasons not revealed to the reader, to return to Rome and her awful marriage instead. And in the movie version of Gone With the Wind, Scarlett, after being left by Rhett, realizes that going home to Tara will give her the strength she needs to go on living and think of a way to win him back.

One of the interesting ways in which Mad Men alters the Victorian ending is by killing off the most hated, rather than the most loved, character. The effect of this was not to punish Betty Draper, but to give her some unexpected dignity and redemption, in a muted, sardonic way that kept true to the character's limitations and, thereby, to human limitations in general. The best way to understand American endings is by looking at how the shared plot elements transform in these different works. Don attempts a kind of homecoming when he goes to see Stephanie, but when he tries to help her, she points out that he's the one who seems to need help, which he gets, in the end, from her spiritual retreat; Charlotte goes to Cascade to get help, but discovers that the best way to help herself is to help a girl who reminds her of a younger and more helpless version of herself. Isabel's one sentimental and ethical tie to Rome is her relationship with a helpless young woman, Osmond's daughter Pansy, whom Osmond has sequestered in a convent for her disobedience, and whom Isabel has promised to help. Don has sentimental ties to all three of the women he calls from California – his daughter, Sally, her mother, his childlike ex-wife, Betty, and his workplace protegee, Peggy – and obligations to the first two. Yet Peggy is the only one who wants him back, suggesting that the workplace is his only real home, just as his professional life is the area where he's been successful.

The American hero or heroine is profoundly alone at the end of his or her story, whether isolated by errors and others' wrongs or by their own bad behaviour. Scarlett O'Hara is still, curiously, the only female American anti-hero of iconic stature. Another way in which the Mad Men finale inverts the Victorian ending is that rather than going to a friend at the time of their death, Don travels away from Betty. The already-famous group therapy session hug combines the emotional breakdown, and breakthrough, that occurs for Isabel at Ralph's bedside with Caspar Goodwood's kiss – non-sexual touching being perhaps as difficult for Don as sexual touching is for Isabel.

Don Draper follows in the footsteps of Isabel and Scarlett by not having his future resolved at the end of his story. In this, he differs from all of the other major characters at the end of Mad Men, who are left in a place of contentment or at least acceptance, and who at least believe that they understand their future: Betty will die, reconciled with her daughter to the best of their ability; Sally will take care of her mother, which is enough to think about for the moment; Roger is newly married; Pete is reunited with his wife; Peggy is in a new relationship and settled in at her new workplace; Joan has started a business. He also differs from iconic American male protagonists, like Gatsby and Charles Foster Kane, who are dead before the narratives that tell their stories begin – or even his anti-hero peer, Walter White.

We don't know why Isabel chooses to go back to Rome and her marriage, but it's hard not to interpret the ending pessimistically: that she may be able to help Pansy somehow, and that the idea of being Caspar Goodwood's mistress doesn't appeal to her, don't seem like enough to constitute a bright future for her. The future looks somewhat brighter for Scarlett, although obviously not as bright as it would have been if Rhett hadn't just left her. At the end of Gone With the Wind, we don't know what's going to happen to Scarlett; at the end of Portrait, we not only don't know what's going to happen to Isabel, we don't know what has happened to Isabel: why she made the choice to return to Rome. And at the end of Mad Men, we have to infer what has narratively happened to Don from the juxtaposition of the image of Don meditating with the Coke commercial, without knowing thematically what it means.

The final image of Don Draper, meditating and wearing an enigmatic smile, has resonances with the famous final images of King Vidor's weepie Stella Dallas, starring Barbara Stanwyck, and Rouben Mamoulian's Queen Christina, starring Greta Garbo. Both women have lost seemingly everything important to them and that defines them (a throne and her lover, in Garbo's case; a marriage and her daughter, in Stanwyck's). (What does it mean that I keep thinking of narratives with female protagonists in relation to Don Draper – supposedly a symbol of turn-of-the-millennium masculinity? Just that the genre of Mad Men, unlike Breaking Bad, is soap opera?) Garbo, her masklike face a careful blank (Mamoulian wanted the audience to read the emotions they wanted to see into it), looks toward the future with stoicism, grimly “going forward” in Don Draper, and corporate capitalist, fashion; Stella Dallas, in contrast, smiles, finding a source of joy unknown to us as she strides alone into a future that we equally don't know. 

From what I've heard and read about the internet reaction to the finale moments of Mad Men, a lot of viewers seem to think that the ending is saying, in a straightforwardly cynical way, that Don's smile seems to signify an epiphany, even enlightenment, but turns out to “really” be an idea for how to commodify his experience of connectedness and wholeness in the form of an ad; using our desperate thirst for higher meaning, “the real thing,” to sell Coke – and America, globalization, and capitalism – to the globe. That's the reductive interpretation, comparable to saying that Isabel goes back to Osmond because there's a conservative part of her that won't allow her to divorce, even if she's revolted by the idea of a sham marriage. There's also the interpretation that no enlightenment, however sincere, is entirely pure, at least none achievable by ordinary people; and at the same time, no really powerful popular image can be entirely cynical, even if its naivety benefits evil.

But isn't that America – or its mythology? I think Henry James would think so. Isabel Archer makes a mistake when she makes the most important choice of her life because, in her naivety, she believes she is free to choose, as the Americans (and aspiring Americans) who chose Coke believed they were free to choose.

The ending of Mad Men also poses the question, without giving us the answer: has Don changed in some way during the course of the show, or, in turning his epiphany, and the entire 60s revolution, into his most powerful image of desire yet, is he the same – only more? Portrait raises this question even more directly by making Isabel make the same disastrous choice again, but here Don really belongs in the company of fellow pop American icon Scarlett O'Hara, who is virtually incapable of change, to the secret pleasure of the reader or viewer, who finds her exciting, and a suitable wish-fulfilment identification figure, because of her flaws. Don is somewhat unique, however, in that he finds some reason to go on that is not external to him (as Charlotte certainly has a reason in Tina, her quasi-adopted daughter, and Isabel perhaps to some extent in Pansy), and that is not simply a reason to survive (like Stella Dallas's, in her loneliness and poverty), but to be great, and maybe joyous. And that's his work, meaning both his creative ability and his professional success. In this he most closely resembles (David O. Selznick's) Scarlett again, because although winning Rhett back may give her a project (like working on Coke), it's Tara that gives her the strength to undertake it, and Tara is nothing more than a symbol of renewal (Mother Earth, continuity): not Coke, but Om.

Montage of a Feminist-Postmodern-Punk Marriage

Kurt Cobain is a very different kind of American icon from Don Draper; and yet, as Montage of Heck also shows, maybe not so different. Feeling abandoned and unloved by his divorced, working-class parents as a teenager, Cobain sought to escape from himself in the very American fashion of reinventing himself as a rock star. Unlike Don, however, Cobain couldn't wholeheartedly embrace the American dream in all of its naive sincerity and absolute inauthenticity. He wanted a happy, united family, and wanted to rebel against it; he wanted to be a world-conquering rock star, and wanted to be a civilization-smashing iconoclast; he loathed conformity and craved acceptance.

At the birth of rock and roll, there was no conflict between being a world-famous billionaire and being a great rock musician. But Cobain belonged to a post-Don Draper generation that had seen everything that looked like the real thing become commodified, including every attempt to rebel against the process. He knew that there was no way to matter on a large scale except by conforming, or at least spawning conformity, and becoming a corporate tool. Cobain stood out not just in being the charismatic zeitgeist vehicle that brought punk into the mainstream, but by being willing to die – not by hedonistic accident, but by shotgun to the head – to establish his authenticity. In that, he was more Isabel Archerish even than Don Draper: in one interpretation that I've always liked, Isabel self-destructively goes back to her husband so that the marriage she was tricked into will be her own choice after all; and Cobain, it seems, killed himself to get back control over a narrative that was being determined by impersonal cultural forces.

Courtney Love's relationship to the mainstream and success is every bit as fucked-up as Cobain's, but very different, too. Her desire for success and acceptance has always been absolutely naked, and for that reason, the cool kids of punk (like Kim Gordon), who never questioned their punk ethos, found and find her embarrassing and disturbing; and yet she's more punk rock than they'll ever be, louder, angrier, rawer, more jagged, absolutely incapable of being assimilated into the mainstream. Or so it seems, but she, too, has engaged in an ambivalent dance with success. There was a moment in the late 90s, when, riding the wave of mainstream success that Nirvana had made possible for alternative acts, she released a perfect pop-rock album with Hole in Celebrity Skin; got the plastic surgery just right; successfully launched a Hollywood acting career; and was dating a nice, stable, talented Hollywood actor. Even Camille Paglia approved. As Love has said many times since, she could have fulfilled her dream, then, of being Hollywood Courtney. Did her demons reassert themselves at that point, or the realization that her dream contained a large component of bullshit? Punk Courtney and Hollywood Courtney are each as real as the other – like Professor Kelp and Buddy Love. And that internal tension is what makes Courtney Love (like Jerry Lewis) such a great American star. Whereas Cobain seemed to be unable to live with that tension and conflict, Love made it the subject of her art, and her life into her art.

To see Love and Cobain together in their home videos in Montage of Heck is to see Gen X allegorized in the form of a famous, fucked-up couple who are like inversions of each other. They've got the kind of playful, solipsistic soulmate bond that, in rock stars in their mid-20s, you normally only see between the creative duo in a band: the Lennon and McCartneys, Morrissey and Marrs, Doherty and Barats. Or yes, okay, the Lennon and Onos, which is one of the reasons Ono attracted such hatred: because finding a bond with a fellow artist within a feminist heterosexual marriage precludes the need for the homosocial bond that's the traditional basis of culture. And that fucks up our pop culture. You don't just want the music of The Beatles: you want the Beatles romping together. Morrissey and Marr flirting with each other. Doherty and Barat practically having sex on stage together.

The clips chosen for the documentary give the impression that Love and Cobain, in a way that's very 90s postmodern, were incessantly meta about their relationship and the way it was being mythologized by the public, as interpreted by the media. They were also, in a way that also strikes me as very 90s, very my generation, meta about their gender roles in relation to themselves and to their relationship. This did not produce harmony, however, but rather struggle within oneself and with each other. Cobain despises masculinity as traditionally conceived, but sometimes seems to struggle with conventional attitudes (“Mommy's loud,” he complains to the infant Frances at one point; at another, he pretends to punch Love in the arm and refers to his action as “wife beating,” but he's clearly actually frustrated with her); Love is openly competitive and effortlessly assertive, but has a conflicted attitude toward femininity (she complains about women being mean to her and warns Kurt about the woman who are going to try to get their claws in him on tour). (As I learned from rewatching my wedding video at the time of my divorce, there's nothing like video to capture the small tensions and aggressions that constantly flare up between friends, acquaintances, and members of a couple.)

I found myself recognizing myself in Love, in terms of our relationship to feminism, again and again. Growing up in the 80s and early 90s, one was constantly bombarded by the media (which in those days was TV and magazine articles) with the message that men considered women inferior and didn't like you to be intelligent or angry; that men would ignore women when they spoke, or not take you seriously; and that being female meant to be threatened by objectification, sexual harassment, and rape. As a person with a healthy ego and a pretty elastic relationship to gender (learned from David Bowie – a Cobain favourite), I accordingly cultivated a persona of maximum force and directness. There were limits to this, since by nature I'm a quiet, introspective, meek person who likes to read and write and be left alone. And it was mostly brought to bear in relationships and intellectual engagement with men, and in the university classroom, where I usually dominated discussion; and in the street when having to walk through bad neighborhoods at night. In workplace contexts, on the other hand, it tended to work against me until I figured out what I was doing wrong: the constant expression of frustration just reads as entitlement in situations that call for high levels of patience or cooperation.

Love's context was punk rock, and for her that didn't mean cool, as it did for Kim Gordon, since cool was far beyond her, but the ability to express your aggression. And not only onstage, but to some extent in your personal interactions. There's a scene where she and Cobain are getting ready in the bathroom, their backs to each other, each apparently facing a mirror, where Love, rambling on with her trademark logomania on her usual topic of her perception by others, expresses her concern that she will become the most hated woman in America. Cobain pipes up, muttering, “You're already the most hated woman in America,” to which Love responds instantly by halting in mid-hair-tease and asking, an edge in her voice, “What?”, daring him to repeat himself. I smiled at that point, because I have done that so many times in conversations with men – especially in my 20s, as Love is here. He rephrases himself, placatingly, “You and Roseanne Barr are tied for the most hated woman in America,” and they move on. (Hyper-aware of their mythology, both Cobain and Love like to consider themselves, and each other, in relation to other pop culture figures of the present and the past. Cobain seems especially fixated on Axl Rose as his antithetical doppelganger.)

What's at stake in that exchange? Love is momentarily in denial about how much the public hates her, and doesn't want to hear the truth just then, from him; she's also sensitive to the possibility that by repeating the sentiment, he's supporting it. She has a category of things that men are not allowed to say to her and ways that they are not allowed to speak to her without challenge. In later footage, family and friends sing “Happy Birthday” to Frances on her first birthday, which seems like a joyous occasion until, the moment the song ends, Cobain exits the frame and Love shrieks “KURT DON'T LEAVE!” Was he only able to stick around for the length of the song before he had to get high? In any case, he's shirking his parental duties, and Love won't put up with it, telling him that she won't open Frances's present until he gets back there.

As men and women who'd grown up exposed to second-wave feminism sloughed off their traditional gender roles, it didn't produce equality so much as a new, topsy-turvy imbalance: the spectacle of an openly aggressive woman bossing around a small, quiet man. And yet the power imbalance in the public sphere remained the same, with the man having the more successful career. Which means the dynamic is less something new than the Macbeths archetype. Love is such an important figure not because she had the most respected career of a woman in rock (that would be PJ Harvey, who, unlike Love, has never inspired me to buy one of her albums, because I don't actually care about rock), and not because she and Cobain had a celebrity “power marriage,” which they didn't entirely (if you want celebrity marriages where the members of the couple have equal power, there have always been those, from Liz and Dick to Brad and Angelina), but because, again, she exhibited the ambivalence of ambitious women who were trying to achieve equality with men. Love wasn't content with being separate but equal: unlike Liz Taylor, Yoko Ono, Angelina Jolie, or Beyonce, she evidently considered herself to be in direct competition with her husband for his job of being the greatest rock and roll star in the world. At the same time, because that role wasn't as easily available to her as it was to a man, she was tempted to get power the way women have traditionally had to do it: through association with her husband. That is where feminism was at in the early 90s (see also the Clintons).

A curious way in which we mythologize famous couples, when their personalities or narrative fit the archetype, is by demonizing one of the members. Surprisingly, it's not always the woman who's demonized. When a woman is taken up as a cult figure, often by feminism, like Zelda Fitzgerald, Jane Bowles, or Sylvia Plath, the husband may be demonized, suspected of somehow contributing to his wife's struggles with mental illness. On a larger scale, there's Princess Diana, victimized by her husband and the shadowy machinations of the Royal Family; or the conspiracy theories about Kennedy involvement in the death of Marilyn Monroe. The woman-abuser, wife-murderer, or gaslighter is one gendered Gothic narrative we have at our disposal; its counterpart is the emasculating bitch-wife, so iconic in Anglo-American culture that you can just call her The Yoko, although more recently she's been popping up in cult TV focused on male protagonists through which writers, and apparently viewers as well, work out their relationship to traditional masculinity. That is where feminism, which perhaps should now call “gender relations” (since we're well into getting meta about masculinity in pop culture), is at in the mid-2010s.

The Cobains weren't The Osbournes, in part because Love did pursue her own career rather than being part of her husband's, even as his “boss.” Love and Cobain also come across in the videos as far too intelligent, funny, and self-aware to play the parts of termagant and clueless “schlub” husband. On the other hand, who knows what they would have been like by the early 2000s, if Cobain and their marriage had survived. Is it better to die young, with integrity and dignity, or to get a reality TV show and become an unfathomably rich joke, but evidently enjoy your family life? Love has continued to cling to punk dignity, refusing to take the easy way and become the reality TV star she was obviously meant to be, even though her popularity as a musician didn't survive the 90s. But is it worth it, in a world in which no bit of real reality can survive the touch of commerce or media, and in which “reality” is a TV genre that means “gawking at freaks”?

Game of Thrones and the Obligations of Writers of Fictional Violence

Besides the Mad Man finale, the other thing that happened in TV – which makes up about 85% of The Cultural Conversation in any given week (with 10% devoted to Stuff That Happened on the Internet and 5% to news stories involving celebrities) – was, of course, the latest Game of Thrones rape scene. I don't follow GOT, because I can't imagine anything worse than its combination of static talking heads scenes, grim, grisly, sexualized violence, and tits. However, as with my other two subjects for this week, that won't stop me from weighing in. I've only got three more posts to go after this; I'm giving up this blog to focus on writing a novel after I turn 40 at the end of August. One is going to be on Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, which I've almost finished re-reading; one on my feelings about feminism (not to be confused with my feelings about gender equality); and a final one on the forms my reading has taken in my 39^th year.

This subject makes a good introduction to some of the issues I'll be talking about in the feminism post. Having listened to podcasters on the subject and read several articles on the internet, I want to weigh in from a perspective that I haven't heard represented: a woman who's written in the same genre as Game of Thrones. I'm not talking about sword and sorcery fantasy, although I've seen articles defending the scene based on Martin's deconstruction of the “heroics” of the genre, or whatever. (That shows a bit of a short view of literary history, since the preeminent canonical fantasy epic, The Faerie Queene, is full of the rape and torture of women – for which see Fiedler and Paglia.) No, the genre I'm talking about is pulp, the pop culture continuation of medieval romance (in the sense of “fantasy”). It's the basic underlying genre of pretty much all popular novels, TV drama, superhero comics, daytime soaps, and such movie genres as film noir and horror, and it's characterized by a fascination with sex, violence, and their intermingling, as well as such moods, emotions, or states as “suffering” and “angst.” Thanks to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, we have come to refer to its pessimism (a lowbrow form of the sublime of tragedy) using terms like “comic book darkness,” a mood that strongly informs cult TV.

I myself was writing a fan fiction soap opera parody, but it was in the mode of pulp, which is exactly the same whether it's coming from the imagination of TV, novel, or internet writers. What I found is that following my Muse where it took me while writing a sexually explicit soap opera meant conjuring up a series of increasingly horrible scenarios of intimate abuse, violence, or exploitation. None of which, incidentally, were meant to be titillating, although a lot of other scenes in the story were. Notably, doing really horrible things to the people closest to you is also the basis of Greek tragedy, and in the case of Oedipus Rex, the most iconic of all the Greek tragedies, the crime is sexual; which, as an educated sort of person, I was thinking about in writing my silly, but dark, soap parody.

One of the arguments that critics of the GOT scene have made is that if you're going to put rape in a story, you should treat it sensitively and responsibly and not just use it exploitatively, for shock value. To which the counter response has been that the show is full of horrible violence perpetrated against multiple characters, male and female – beheading, stabbing, torture, castration. So why should this topic receive special treatment? And if you're going to get upset about this fictional act, why not get upset about all of the others?

Now, I think that a writer is aware of when they are writing something primarily to entertain, whatever the work's actual status as a work of art (as if that's something that's objective and unchanging across all contexts). Writing to entertain doesn't preclude writing to challenge, including writing with the hope that your audience will be shocked, upset, and disturbed. But the sensitive and thoughtful writer who is writing to entertain will pause before using a subject that's a real-life problem, and highly emotional for many people, as fodder for their project of shocking and disturbing in a way that entertains. Such a writer will want to treat those subjects in a way that, without ceasing to be shocking and entertaining, is thoughtful and sensitive, and has consequences for the characters.

So, for example, the penultimate shock-scene in my story was a climactic act of intimate partner violence within a relationship between two men that had been characterized by quasi-consensual rough sex. The result for the characters was that the victim ended the relationship, which was never even temporarily resumed, despite the continued existence of strong feelings. The final shock scene was an act of rape perpetrated on a woman by a man (the worst villain in the story, a sadistic madman), which I used to illustrate that acquaintance rape doesn't have to be violent and can even involve incidental arousal. Subsequent chapters dealt with her emotional healing, confusion, and anger, without making her final story arc entirely about her rape. (A complex and ambiguous character, like every character in the story except, for the most part, the hero and the rapist-villain, she was something of a stalker and sociopath, so her arc had to deal with those things too.)

The question is how I knew to treat intimate partner violence and rape differently from other kinds of violence, in a story that features such acts of violence as: attempted murder of a baby (twice); two murders (one extremely gruesome) and two notable accidental deaths; a good old melodrama shove down a staircase; and arson (twice). And those are just the parts I plotted. (I had two collaborators, and one of them was as “dark” as I was; the other one mainly ran around hooking characters up.) And the answer is that feminism has raised awareness of, and demanded sensitivity toward, those types of violence.

All of which means that I agree with both sides: I do think that writers should treat sensitive subjects with sensitivity; yet I also think that we should use furors like this as an opportunity to ask why only certain representations of violence deserve sensitive treatment, and usually only those in which female characters are the victims; while elsewhere, the sadism of the writer and viewer can run rampant. We should ask ourselves why so much of our entertainment (and, taking the long historical view, our art) is so violent, and whether we should embrace the reign of the unconscious in fiction or choose less violent fictions.

The reaction of self-declared feminist critic Kate Kulzick on The Televerse, one of my favourite podcasts (I listen to it even though I don't watch 95% of the shows they cover and have never watched 80% of them), is instructive of the weird compartmentalization going on with this topic, because after expressing her anger at and disappointment with the GOT scene, she went on to express excitement over David Lynch's return to the Twin Peaks revival. I love David Lynch and the first season of Twin Peaks, but if ever there were a show that used violence against women for no purpose except shock value, that was it. I think particularly of the scene in which the villainous thug Leo advances on his kneeling and cowering wife while swinging a bar of soap in a sock, which was the most shocking thing I'd ever seen on TV as a 15-year-old. (As a superhero comics reader, I'd seen more violent images, including a couple of murders of men that stayed with me for the rest of my life.) Nor was that scene ever meaningfully followed up on. And the horrendously violent scene in which Laura Palmer's murderer is revealed in Season 2 was so gratuitous, disgusting, and silly that I not only never wanted to see Twin Peaks again – I never wanted to see anything by David Lynch again. (He didn't fully regain my trust until Mulholland Dr, a decade later.)

Lynch is a writer-director who knowingly trades in shock imagery, yet one seldom gets the sense that Lynch's intention is to entertain (except in the episodes of surreal humour that drain off some of the constant dread). At its best, such “meta” violence has the result of making the audience pause and question our relationship to violence, imaginative and real, while violence in entertainment has the precise opposite effect; yet it shouldn't be surprising that offence and rage is one possible reaction to such deliberately crafted extreme imagery. Since violence is a staple of entertainment, as it is of life and the imagination, I would in fact, as a viewer/fan, like to see more examples of it being treated as a thing with consequences in fiction, simply because it's an opportunity to deepen the characters and world.

However, violence doesn't show up in writing because writers want to portray “real” issues in sensitive ways, but because the imagination is violent, and a huge amount of what art (not only narrative but also visual) and entertainment does is imagine scenarios of violence and suffering, inspiring pity and fear. (I have now, in case you didn't notice, switched to using “art” in the broader, more inclusive sense of all cultural artifacts with which a significant segment of the public has strong engagement.) We should have strong reactions to these images that permeate our culture, and those reactions are bound to be emotional and confused, because the life/art boundary is confusing, or art couldn't inspire these reactions, or in other words, be art. But I think it's the duty of critics and feminists (and I count myself as both) to not just express emotion and have reactions, but also be critical about our reactions, and get clear about what is confusing and what is going to remain confused.

And let's also keep in mind that internet outrage, a type of mob emotion, is every bit as base a source of pleasure as an exploitative graphic scene. To give a foretaste of the Northrop Frye post (can you wait??), here's one of many great sentences from Anatomy of Criticism: "At play [e.g., in art or sports], mob emotions are boiled in an open pot, so to speak; in the lynching mob they are in a sealed furnace of what Blake would call moral virtue." The internet is somewhere between play and a lynching mob. 

Fifty Shades of Grey, the Movie: Of Tropes, Gender Politics, Sex, and Fantasy

The cultural conversation about Fifty Shades of Grey since the movie came out seems to have two main themes: how badly-written the book is (the movie reviews are showcases for snideness on the topic) and how bad the movie is for women. I've also heard complaints from the BDSM community, or friends thereof, about the book's irresponsible depiction of such relationships – echoes of the reception of Basic Instinct by the LGBT community. The obvious response is that, while anyone is free to worry about misinformation and object to whatever they want to object to, Fifty Shades is a sexual fantasy, not a lifestyle blueprint.

Lionel Trilling famously defended Lolita, a runaway bestseller in America when it was finally published there in 1958, by arguing that Nabokov's novel restored a sense of romance to romance by reintroducing the forbidden. By the late 50s, neither adulterous longing, on which the concept of Western love was founded (see Tristan and Isolde), nor out-of-wedlock lapses carried a sufficient charge of societal disapproval, or created sufficient internal and external obstacles. In the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, it's the love interest's fetish that creates these obstacles. Do they represent what women's magazines would call a “dealbreaker” for Anastasia Steele, weighed against Christian Grey's immense wealth and the frisson that his take-charge attitude evidently gives her?

Fifty Shades of Grey knows exactly what it owes to the Western tradition of romantic love, particularly as it has been depicted and promoted by literature. Anastasia is an English lit major, and on their first date, Christian asks her whether she's an Austen girl or a Hardy girl. She surprises him by choosing Hardy. Diffident, lip-biting Miss Steele (as Christian likes to call her) may seem like one of those garden-variety Austen freaks, but she's going to swerve away from that interminable trend. Deep within her is a repressed, oppressed Victorian maiden, a Tess of the D'Urbervilles, dying to get out.

Intertexual Romance

With its basis in fan fiction, it's hardly surprising that Fifty Shades is self-conscious with its movie references, too: Anastasia dubs the woman who initiated Christian into BDSM practices when he was 16 “Mrs. Robinson.” (I guess recruiting children – Anastasia does later point out that it was child abuse – is an example of a behaviour that the BDSM community would rather not have associated with it.) The Graduate is a movie with a rather different resonance for the female audience for which it was not intended than for its male creators, and is maybe the last time an American movie about sexual desire and mores made such a huge cultural impact.

So Fifty Shades of Grey is a movie about a woman who seems to be the definition of vanilla but might have a secret dark side, and also a movie about a sexual initiation by a person who has a clear upper hand, that ends disastrously. In this case, the difference in power is a matter of money and sexual experience rather than age (I don't know if there's an age difference in the novel, but the two leads look about the same age in the movie although Jamie Dornan is in fact seven years older than Dakota Johnson).

E. L. James may not be a great or even a competent prose writer, but fan fiction requires different talents – such as the media literacy and savviness about media tropes that she does possess. As for psychological complexity, everyone knows that that can be a distraction in pornography. Anastasia and Christian are, first and foremost, types in a sort of role-playing scenario: the powerful businessman with dark appetites and the mousy, unassuming virgin. They are locked in a battle of wills, based in traditional gender roles, that (as Leslie Fiedler argued in Love and Death in the American Novel) is central to the English novel from its first great example, Richardson's Clarissa. Lovelace, as an irresponsible seducer, must get Clarissa to sleep with him before he agrees to marry her; Clarissa, as the most fastidious of virgins, must get Lovelace to marry her before she agrees to sleep with him. The Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies of the late 50s/early 60s are a comedic updating; so, in their way, are the Bugs Bunny-Roadrunner cartoons. We just want to keep telling the same story about appetite, over and over. 

In James's updating, Christian wants to get Anastasia to sign a contract that will make her his “submissive,” while Anastasia wants Christian to act more like a normal boyfriend: go on dates, sleep in the same bed with her at night, let her touch him – stuff like that. Because Christian is obsessed with Anastasia (obviously), he can't help but give in to her a bit while she contemplates the offer: they have some extra-contractual sex, although some of it involves a little light bondage; he agrees to go on a weekly date; she meets his family (who adore her – obviously). All of this giving in, of course, is used as leverage by Christian to make her give in – since, after all, he's made more concessions to her than to any other girl he's ever known.

I didn't find the sex scenes in Fifty Shades especially sexy, although that may be the point, in a way. It often happens in erotic fan fiction that the sex scenes become obligatory and perfunctory because the writer has become engrossed by the characters' relationship. And definitely that has happened here: the characters may not be either believable or especially individualized, but their psychological struggle is what interests James, not the sex. I don't mean to spread the myth that female creators and consumers of erotica are not interested in sex scenes. There's a sub-genre of erotic fan fiction called “PWP,” which stands for “porn without plot,” when you just want a shot of graphically-described, barely-characterized sex. But the truth is that, pretty often, the writer gets more interested in the characters' relationships and the sex scenes become about as much the point as the scene where Buffy fights the monster-of-the-week.

Furthermore, the climactic BDSM scene of Fifty Shades is not meant to be sexy at all. The movie heads toward the signing of the contract as the climax, but instead of that consummation, Anastasia demands that Christian show her the worst he has to offer so that she'll know what she's getting into, and we get a raw emotional scene in which, as she's beaten, we see her take in the realization of the depth of Christian's need to see her broken, vulnerable, and physically and emotionally suffering. This also parallels Clarissa, whose climactic act is the drugging and raping of Clarissa by Lovelace; the mind-bending post-feminist twist of Fifty Shades is that Anastasia is “in control” of the situation because she asks to be physically and emotionally brutalized.

After that, they're reduced to a couple of people at their most emotionally naked and have a kind of primal exchange that made me understand why the director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, has referred to Persona in discussions of the movie. (You read that right, cinephiles: go ahead and have a conniption fit.) Having braved the heart of darkness of her sadist boyfriend, little Anastasia Steele has finally discovered something about boundaries, and her boundaries in particular, and learned how to say “No” in such a way that a man, however powerful, persistent, and persuasive he may be, knows that she means it. Of course she'll be back for more in future installments – though I don't think I'll be.

The Genealogy of Tropes

In From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, possibly the funniest book ever to feature “rape” in the title, feminist film critic Molly Haskell described the favourite women's fiction trope of the Gothic hero: flattering in his controlling behaviour (you definitely know he's into you), exciting in his abusiveness (he's no pansy), and yet with a secret from his past that's left him secretly wounded and vulnerable. He is the perfect hero for the puritan (or just pubescent) heroine, Haskell explains, because despite his impressive displays of “masculine” power, his “feminine” woundedness means that he's unlikely to make real sexual demands on you; instead, he ultimately appeals to one's maternal instinct.

My favourite example of Haskell's is James Mason in the unbelievably silly 1945 British film The Seventh Veil. Mason is a bachelor who becomes the guardian of the heroine when she's a young adolescent. (He seems like an uncle – V. C. Andrews's Dark Angel, from which I'm sure James stole the piano-playing scene in Fifty Shades, is in this same mode – but the movie calls him a second cousin.) He uses a cane – a symbol of his mysterious woundedness and unsubtle indication of the impotence that keeps him sexually non-threatening despite his aggressive temperament. 

Mason doesn't only hate women because he's at a physical disadvantage in the romance market, though, but also because of his relationship with his mother, who hurt him when he was just a helpless little boy. (Aw!) He can only express his attraction to the heroine by being nasty to her, controlling every aspect of her life, and flipping out when she tries to use other men to break free. And yet he has a certain hold over her, not only because she's become obsessed, Stockholm-style, with pleasing him, but because they develop a professional bond as he trains her, Whiplash-style, to become a concert pianist. That can be one of the perks of a relationship with a wounded Gothic hero: sometimes instead of making sexual demands on you, he spurs you to great heights of professional achievement by demanding sublimation. And there's nothing a puritan – which is to say, Anglo-American – woman finds sexier than sublimation.

In that movie's climactic act of displaced consummation, Mason attacks her hands with his cane while she's playing after she informs him that she's going to leave him to get married. But despite having an array of suitors to choose from (a woman's picture trope with a structural similarity to the “whodunnit,” as Haskell points out), the heroine ultimately returns to Mason, whose violent outburst seems to have cleared the air and left him more capable of expressing tender emotions.

Mason gets ready to strike while Mommy looks on

Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer, often held to be the paradigm of feminist TV, features an updating of the Gothic hero in Angel, who pretty starkly represents the gynocentric view of Good (non-sexual) and Bad (sexual) Men. And in case you thought that was an accident, the show reinforces that view when Buffy later develops a sexual relationship with a Bad (sexual) Man, Spike, which she has to break off because the puritan heroine ultimately cannot have a purely sexual relationship (Spike, no matter how much he may reform through his own effort, is still only a body, no soul) without compromising the virtue that's the source of her power.

Virtue, as Nietzsche, I think it was, pointed out, originally meant “strength,” and Buffy is the direct descendent of Spenser's warrior women in The Faerie Queene, Britomart and Belphoebe, who (according to Fiedler, again) turn into Clarissa when the tropes of romance meet the bourgeois realism of the English novel. In other words, the (usually blonde) woman who fights the monsters/rapist is the exact same archetype as the (usually blonde) woman who succumbs to the monster/rapist: Buffy and Laura Palmer are two sides of the same coin. Spenser is illustrating female chastity, or virtue, by embodying it in action heroines; while Richardson's emphasis on pathos rather than action means that he can best represent virtue by showing the fate it meets in a fallen world.

As secular writers from the decades after second-wave feminism, I'm not sure if Joss Whedon or David Lynch are aware that they're representing virtue or chastity; I assume Lynch is thinking in terms of “innocence,” with which his work has a deeply complicated relationship, and Whedon probably in fully secularized, vague terms like “strength of character.” Nevertheless, you can never completely escape the genealogy of tropes, which is why Buffy – strong, liberated, independent modern woman though she may be – can't just sleep with whomever she pleases, whenever she pleases, however she pleases. It's not just that we still have double standards regarding female sexuality; of course we do. But when representing female (or male) sexuality – whether on our screens (including computer screens) or in our fantasies – we also have tropes to contend with, and their embodiment of historical norms that may still hover in our present-day “sexual unconscious.”

A Troubled Relationship to Female Agency

In Fifty Shades of Grey, we may contemplate not only with the genealogy of tropes but also with a literal genealogy that is also a cinematic one: Dakota Johnson's descent from Melanie Griffith, who is in turn the daughter of Tippi Hedren. It is a legacy of portraying iconic characters with a troubled relationship to female agency, and specific moments of Fifty Shades become rich with resonance for that reason, whether it was intentional on the filmmaker's part or not. There's the especially on-the-nose detail of the room that Christian designates for his “submissives” having a caged bird among the wallpaper designs (“Back you go in your gilded cage, Melanie Daniels!”), but there are also echoes of Griffith's humiliating first encounter with Harrison Ford in Working Girl in the scene where Christian comes to the rescue of a blackout drunk Johnson.

Mitch and Melanie have a smug-off

In Working Girl, one of many ambivalent 80s depictions of working women inspired by women's mass entrance into the workforce after second-wave feminism, the creepily baby-voiced Griffith was a throwback to a Marilyn Monroe/Judy Holliday dumb blonde archetype, her full figure and gauzy manner positing an inextricable link between female sexuality and female diffidence even as her character struggled to be taken seriously in the workplace while remaining “feminine.” The movie's linkage between women's professional success, WASP hyper-rationalism and suppression of sensuality, and anorexia through Sigourney Weaver's character and her “bony ass” (as Griffith memorably calls it) is right up Camille Paglia's alley: a traditional woman, and a working-class woman, Griffith has to learn how to “perform” Weaver's WASP style.

There's even biographical resonance in the final beating scene, given what we now know about the circumstances surrounding the filming of Melanie Daniels's traumatic attack by the birds in the attic in the climactic scene of The Birds. (To wit: according to Hedren, and as dramatized in the 2012 TV movie The Girl, Hitchcock became sexually obsessed with her, and in return for rejecting him, he arranged for the scene's filming to be almost as harrowing for Hedren as the attack was for Melanie.) Like the shower scene in Psycho, the attic scene in The Birds was a substitute for rape, but by 1964, American mores had relaxed enough for Hitchcock to finally be able to put a real rape on the screen for the first (but not only) time, in Marnie, also starring Hedren.

Marnie bears a much closer relationship to Fifty Shades of Grey than The Birds. In it, a young Sean Connery plays a wealthy and powerful businessman, Mark Rutland (yep), who becomes obsessed with a compulsive thief who takes jobs as a secretary in order to steal from men like him (except older and less hot). When he catches her, he threatens to turn her over to the police if she doesn't marry him, even after he finds out that she's frigid – unless that's part of the appeal. When patience doesn't make her come around, he rapes her on their honeymoon, and realizes that she was serious when she said no one million times when he has to rescue her from her suicide attempt the following morning. The rest of the plot concerns his attempts to cure her neuroses by playing amateur psychotherapist while keeping his businessmen friends from discovering his new wife's identity and turning her over to the police.

The resemblance between the movies is in the couples' combative relationship and the way they're forced to present a facade of normalcy while hiding problems that no one could understand, but in Fifty Shades it's the man who's suffering from a mysterious childhood trauma that's affected his sex life, and the woman who's forced to play amateur psychotherapist if she has any hope of making this relationship function. And notably, if anyone's a masochist in the Mark-Marnie relationship, it's Mark – who, as Marnie points out, is obsessed with a woman who can't stand for him to touch her.

Hitchcock gives us plenty of scenes from Marnie's point of view, both with and without Mark present, but James and Taylor-Johnson don't bother to allow us inside Christian's head, either because that would make him less enigmatic or because they don't give a crap about him except insofar as he affects Anastasia. This presents Jamie Dornan with a notably tough task, as does what seems to be some pretty striking miscasting. I can see Christian Gray as a Sean Connery type or, if they were going to go with small and effete (however buff), maybe a Dirk Bogarde type. To deliver all of those Smut 101 dirty-talk lines about fucking and wanting to fuck, he's got to have an air of either authority or depravity, while Dornan has less of either than your average boy band member. If they wanted to go boy band, why didn't they get Justin Timberlake? That would have made the movie into some kind of work of genius. 

Meh

Better

Dornan doesn't project an air of much of anything, except discomfort. And it's a shame because in addition to her resonances, Johnson brings everything to the part of Anastasia that it needs, and more (from the perspective of someone who hasn't read the books, anyway): brunette Everywoman prettiness (big nose, wonky teeth, breasts untouched by plastic surgeon, under-eye smudges suggestive of neurosis), charisma, and “go there” guts seldom seen outside of a David Lynch movie.

Source material be damned: there's no reason at all why Fifty Shades of Grey couldn't have been a great movie. The casting is one reason why it's not, but the more important reason is that it doesn't seem to be the director's sexual fantasy. Taylor-Johnson has a feel for the characters' battle of wills and emotional clashes, but unlike a Bunuel, Hitchcock, Polanski, or Lynch, she doesn't have a lascivious eye; one never feels that her own psychosexual fears or desires are on the line. 

Ultimately, the movie's about two things: a woman's attempt to find out the sources of the trauma that keeps her boyfriend from being sexually normal and prevents them from being together; and a man's attempt to stain an innocent woman with his dirty male sexuality. Make no mistake, in this movie's conception of sexuality, men represent sex as its most essential, which, in this movie's conception, means its dirtiest. The heroine's progress from innocence to experience involves finding out what goes on inside the male brain – and bedroom. But that's exactly what makes Anastasia such a courageous heroine, within this movie's terms. She doesn't want to remain naive, and she knows that to get out of that state she has to have such kind of decisive encounter with maleness – with maleness as absolute otherness. In this stark two-hander (as it basically is), the encounter with the man is the encounter with the world.

But What Does It All Mean?

We have lately become entranced with stories about how the genders perceive each other, or how we perceive each other through the lens of gender, and how narratives about gender, sex, and love are entangled with narratives about violence; but Fifty Shades of Grey is actually far less about female masochism than Gone Girl, the second-biggest publishing phenomenon of 2012 (after the Fifty Shades series). The heroine of Gone Girl, Amy Dunne, isn't a sexual masochist, but her roundabout method of getting revenge on men for slights big and small – physically injuring herself to make it look like she has been stabbed, beaten, or raped, and staging her disappearance – suggest internalized misogyny in combination with the cultural training that tells women to take their frustrations out of themselves. This kind of masochism is inseparable from narcissism, since the narcissist is always manipulating her image and altering her body (through exercise or surgery – which of course applies to men too, especially in the media saturated, metrosexual 21^st century) in order to change the way others react to her. In the end, concerned only with how others perceive her, she has no “real,” “inner” self.

Anastasia Steele isn't a masochist at all, which is exactly the problem. The movie isn't about a woman who enjoys being beaten or punished. The relationship is emotionally masochistic insofar as Anastasia can't get what she wants out of it: she's not as concerned about the whips as she is about the fact that Christian can't easily show her affection or accept it from her. He does not, in the parlance of women's magazines, “treat her right.”

In her thinkpiece on the series, Katie Roiphe pissed off feminists, as she does, by suggesting that its popularity is the result of professional women secretly desiring submission in the sexual arena – a thesis stolen from Paglia, who suggested back in the 90s that the burdens of boardroom power might lead to a compensatory desire for someone else to take charge in the bedroom. (Sounds reasonable. I mean, there's that scene in Wolf of Wall Street.) 

Roiphe found lots of other pop culture fodder for her thesis – including Girls, which was then in its first season. It's true that first-season Adam is some kind of Bizarro-universe, internet-porn-era version of the Gothic hero; perpetually shirtless and inarticulate except on the subject of porn-derived role-playing fantasies, Adam is Stanley Kowalski with mild Asperger's. What I see as parallel to Fifty Shades in first-season Adam and Hannah is not Hannah's curiosity about BDSM, but her debate within herself and with her friends over whether it's “okay” for Adam to just use her for sex rather than acting as a full boyfriend – as well as the fact that Adam seems, to her, excitingly, and a little dauntingly, in touch with his sexual desires, whereas she hasn't got a clue about her own. Hannah, however, unlike Anastasia, also doesn't know, initially, whether she wants Adam to be her boyfriend or not. Her concern is, rather, about whether it's degrading, from a feminist perspective, for Adam to use her for sex (is feminism about sexual liberation, or about getting men to treat you right?), and whether, from a feminist perspective, it's okay to be degraded (is feminism about the freedom to have all kinds of experiences, even unpleasant ones... or about not letting men treat you badly?).

Maya Dusenbery's pro-Fifty Shades response to Roiphe's piece on Feministing is way more interesting than Roiphe's pseudo-daring thinkpiece. (That's what you get for using a thesis that was part of a conversation going on in feminism over a decade ago.) Dusenbery suggests that the popularity of the books has to do not with any desire for submission on the part of female readers, since the sub-dom relationship that Christian wants never actually happens. Instead, Dunsenbery emphasizes the “negotiating that happens in their relationship” and the “classic damaged-boy-saved-by-a-good-woman narrative that everyone loves.” In which case the tastes of female readers in romantic fiction haven't changed much since Clarissa – except that Richardson was hellbent on ruining everyone's fun by rejecting any version of the “saved by a good woman” narrative, even though, according to what I've read, his female fans pleaded for him to get Clarissa and Lovelace together even after the rape. I'm sure they took care of that in the privately-circulated, quill-written fanfic, though.

I agree with Dusenbery that whatever the massive popularity of the Fifty Shades series means, it's not, contra Roiphe's insinuations, that “women don't actually want power/equality/liberation.” The fact that women have made an erotica series into an international phenomenon in a world that still does not cater equally to the (heterosexual) female libidinous fantasies, because women still aren't creating 50 per cent of the media we consume, has got to be something for feminism to celebrate. And it didn't happen in a day: it happened because of women on the internet – of all ages, gay and straight – writing erotic fan fiction in a gift economy for over a decade, until a tipping point was reached. 

The fact that the series depicts, in part, female masochism, or at least plays with the idea, makes that feminist triumph imperfect, or at least complicated – bringing an awareness, as it does, that traditional gender roles and our sexual fantasies remain inextricably tangled up. And our reactions to such fantasies are complicated by real events and the narratives about gender, gender roles, and abuse and violence that affect our perception of them and are, in turn, shaped by them: just like the Gone Girl movie, whose release was shadowed by the appearance and discrediting of an account of campus gang rape in the Rolling Stone, the Fifty Shades movie and the criticisms of it coming from the BDSM community, follow on the heels of the fall from grace of popular Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi for having, it seems, practiced BDSM without properly gaining consent in all cases, and for sexually harassing female co-workers.

Eros, Masochism, Genre, and Gender

A “healthy relationship” is the kind of thing most people aspire to have; it is not necessarily the stuff of romantic or erotic fantasies. As I can recall from the soap operas I watched as a child and young teenager, in the late 80s and early 90s, often women's romantic fantasies revolve around a man who is unreliable and in some ways unavailable, so that she has to chase him. (I'm thinking of Jack and Jennifer of Days of Our Lives, the ultimate good girl-redeems-damaged/bad boy story, in which the virginal girl-next-door rehabilitates a rapist.) This may be because it makes him less threatening sexually, but it's also, surely, because, just like men, women are – again, in fantasy – more interested in what they can't get. They may be so interested in it, in fact, that they're willing to withstand a lot of disappointment and heartache in order to keep pursuing it.

There's no real counterpart to this for men, since men do not have romantic fiction explicitly marketed to them. If men are consuming romantic fiction, it's “women's fiction.” In fiction marketed to men, men don't seek romantic love, they seek trophies: in one comedy after another, hot chicks who are way out of the schlubby hero's league but who are so good-natured that he eventually wins them over anyway, and who have no characteristics other than “hot” and “nice.” Dramas marketed to men tend to have women in them as little as possible.

At one time, there was a Hollywood genre that dealt with men's romantic and erotic fears and desires, which was retrospectively termed “film noir,” and if we were viewing it from the perspective of whether or not the fantasies it contains are “good for men,” we'd have to conclude that men are, as a group, perilously masochistic. We do not view narratives from that perspective, however, but – if we're feminists – from one in which if a female character is cruel to a male character, it means the work is misogynous, and if a male character is cruel to a female character, it's because the work is misogynous. This suggests that, for all the valuable insights of feminist analysis of narratives, it has its limitations.

Occasionally in satire, a male gets to totally abase himself before a gorgeous woman in a way that would be unthinkable in a gender-reversed scenario, as in Elaine May's The Heartbreak Kid, or every movie that Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich. It's important to think about how our narratives socialize us, particularly if we are part of a group whose rights are often at risk, and it's understandable that representations of violence toward women by men will have more real-world associations than representations of violence toward men by women to complicate our reactions (although we might want to ask ourselves: why are we not upset by representations of violence toward men by men, which is very much a real-world problem?). But we shouldn't let the narratives that we form out of these facts make us forget that eros makes masochists of us all – at least in our imaginations.

The Gender Parity Gap in Three Areas of the Arts: An Overview

The idea of this post is to see how women are faring in three areas of cultural endeavour: writing, popular music, and TV and film. Much more extensive research would have to be undertaken in each area to get a real picture, but even at a glance it's easy to see that women haven't achieved parity in any of these areas of either sales or prestige.

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, I absorbed the idea that feminism had already happened, in my childhood. Nothing and no one around me suggested that a husband and children were mandatory, or that working wasn't. By the time I was in my mid-teens, in the early 90s, I had become aware that feminism was still around, and inequality was, too, but I assumed that the latter was left over from before I was born and would soon be gone. Certainly, it would be gone well before I reached middle age.

As I discovered, growing up, that I had a fondness and talent for writing, I had no reason to think that it was something men did. Through early adolescence, female writers came my way with a much greater frequency than male writers. My favourite author of what are now called “chapter books” was Lois Lowry; my 5^th grade teacher assigned me a novel by Agatha Christie, whereupon I read almost her complete works; in the 6^th grade, a female friend introduced me to V. C. Andrews; as a young adolescent I adored Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, a postcolonial, feminist, and slash fiction-y retelling of Arthurian legend from the POV of Morgan Le Fay, and the (also slash fiction-y) vampire novels of Anne Rice. 

Even when I was reading novelizations of sci-fi series, even though I'd encountered the notion that "women didn't write sci fi," I couldn't get away from female writers – like Star Trek novels writer Vonda N. McIntyre and 'V' novels writer A. C. Crispin – an “Ann,” I was surprised and pleased to eventually find out. Later I understood that prior to the 20^th century, the female writers who were taken seriously could be enumerated using one hand: Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. As frightening a blow as that was, however, there was no reason at all, glancing at the Fiction section in bookstores or libraries, to think that women weren't as successful as men as writers now.  

Whatever good or bad can be said about it, it's internet feminism that, by calling attention to things like the underrepresentation of female contributors in the elite literary journals and the lack of good roles for women in Hollywood movies, has made me aware, in the past decade, that even if it seems like there are powerful female celebrities everywhere, all may not be equal. And it's the internet that makes basic research into this area unprecedentedly easy, providing us with information on everything from album sales to prize winners to the names of the writers and directors of TV shows, all just a google away.

Writing

Part 1: Awards

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (formerly The Novel), 1917-2014:

1920s: 5/9 (women/total)

1930s: 6/10

1940s: 1/8

1950s: 0/8

1960s: 3/9

1970s: 2/7

1980s: 4/10

1990s: 3/10

2000s: 3/10

2010s: 2/4

31/87=35.6%

1980s-present: 12/34=35.2%

First female PP winner for the Novel, Edith Wharton

Most recent female Pulitzer winner for Fiction, Donna Tartt

Man Booker Prize, 1969-2014:

1970s: 5/11

1980s: 3/10

1990s: 2/11

2000s: 4/10

2010-2014: 2/5

Total: 17/48=35.4%

1980s-present: 11/36=30.5%

Governor General's Award for English-Language Fiction, 1936-2014:

1940s: 2/10

1950s: 3/10

1960s: 2/8

1970s: 3/10

1980s: 3/10

1990s: 3/10

2000s: 3/10

2010-2014: 3/5

Total: 24/75=32%

1980s-present: 12/35=34.2%

GG Award for English-Language Drama, 1981-2014:

Total: 12/34=35.2%

GG Award for E-L Poetry, 1981-2014:

Total: 16/34=47%

Part 2: Sales

Publishers' Weekly, Novels (US):

(No. of female authors out of total no. of authors per decade)

1895: all men

1896: 2/10

1897: 1/10

1898: 2/12

1899: all men

Total: 5/42=11.9%

1900: 2/10

1901: 2/10

1902: 2/10

1903: 3/10

1904: 5/10

1905: 7/11

1906: 4/10

1907: 4/10

1908: 2/10

1909: 2/10

Total: 33/101=32.6%

1910: 7/11

1911: 4/10

1912: 3/10

1913: 3/10

1914: 3/10

1915: 2/10

1916: 5/10

1917: 3/10

1918: 4/10

1919: 4/10

Total: 37/100=37%

1920: 3/10

1921: 5/10

1922: 3/10

1923: 4/10

1924: 3/10

1925: 3/10

1926: 4/10

1927: 4/10

1928: 3/10

1929: 3/10

Total: 35/100=35%

1930: 3/10

1931: 7/10

1932: 3/10

1933: 2/10

1934: 5/10

1935: 3/10

1936: 3/11

1937: 2/10

1938: 4/10

1939: 5/10

Total: 37/101=36.6%

1940: 2/10

1941: 4/10

1942: 5/10

1943: 3/10

1944: 4/10

1945: 3/10

1946: 4/10

1947: 2/10

1948: 4/10

1949: 1/10

Total: 32/100=32%

1950: 4/10

1951: 0/10

1952: 4/10

1953: 1/10

1954: 3/10

1955: 1/10

1956: 4/10

1957: 5/10

1958: 4/10

1959: 1/10

Total: 27/100=27%

1960: 3/10

1961: 0/10

1962: 2/11

1963: 4/10

1964: 1/12

1965: 0/10

1966: 3/10

1967: 2/10

1968: 3/10

1969: 4/10

Total: 21.5/102=22%

1970: 3/10

1971: 1/10

1972: 2/10

1973: 2/10

1974: 1/10

1975: 2/10

1976: 3/10

1977: 3/11

1978: 2/10

1979: 1/10

Total: 20/101=19.8%

1980: 2/12

1981: 2/10

1982: 2/10

1983: 2/10

1984: 3/11

1985: 4/10

1986: 3/11

1987: 2/10

1988: 3/10

1989: 3/10

Total: 26/104=25%

1990: 5/10

1991: 5/10

1992: 5/10

1993: 3/10

1994: 4/10

1995: 3/10

1996: 3/10

1997: 6/10

1998: 6/10

1999: 2/12

Total: 42/102=41%

[Note: 2000 and 2005 Harry Potter novel excluded from this decade; Twilight books excluded: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008]

2000: 3/12

2001: 1/12

2002: 4/12

2003: 3/11

2004: 1/12

2005: 5/10

2006: 2/12

2007: 5/12

2008: 4/10

2009: 4/10

Total: 32/10=32%

[Note: Adult Fiction and Children's Fiction tallied separately as of 2012; but women also dominated AF with 8/10]

2010: 3/10

2011: 3/11

2012: 8/10

Total: 14/31=45%

The Publishers' Weekly lists are a bit weird. Seemingly they concentrated on adult fiction up until the YA boom of the 1990s, with some exceptions for anomalous runaway bestsellers – like the Eloise children's books in the 1950s. The Harry Potter books were excluded from the lists during the 90s; a couple get into the Wikipedia lists in the 2000s, but the Twilight books are excluded (but Meyer's adult fiction novel is included). The 2012 list above, however, is drawn (as the Wikipedia reference link reveals) from both the adult fiction and children's fiction lists, which I guess is how it's going to be for as long as YA and children's fiction are selling like crazy (or – which may be more accurate – are the categories that still sell print copies).

Nevertheless, the rough picture that emerges is this: Jonathan Franzen was talking complete crap when he complained that in America, reading is considered an activity for women, and therefore books “for men” (and, presumably, by men) don't sell. With a sudden jump in numbers at the turn of the 20^th century, female novelists hold steady at 30-40% until a bad dip in the 1950s, from which they do not recover until the 1990s. God knows why, but suddenly in the 1990s female authors are at near-parity even without taking J. K. Rowling into account. With Rowling, they are probably at parity. And Rowling changed everything, paving the way for the Twilight series (which paved the way for the 50 Shades of Grey series) and the Hunger Games series. In the 2000s numbers dip down again, but would probably be higher than pre-1950s numbers if all of Rowling's Harry Potter novels plus the Twilight series were included. And in the 2010s, so far women are at near-parity.

But Franzen's vision of women's petticoats sweeping away serious men's fiction was clearly always a fantasy. Decade by decade, there have never been as many novels by female authors among the Top 10 bestsellers as there have been books by men, and I assume that the Top 10 is roughly representative of what's going on below. It hasn't been 50/50 – and, just sticking to the 20^th century, often it wasn't even close. And sure as hell female novelists weren't crowding male novelists – whether serious or frivolous – out of the market.  

Part 3: Literary Journals

The London Review of Books and New York Review of Books have already been called to task by feminists in recent years (as in, 2013) for their extremely low numbers of female contributors. Did anything change in 2014?

Well, if the numbers from last year are an improvement, they're still a joke. The number of female contributors per issue in the NYRB didn't once reach as high as one third, and only three times (out of 18!) reached as high as a quarter. That would be pretty good, if this were the 18^th century. LRB did mildly better: out of the 24 issues in 2014, the number of female contributors got as high as a third twice and as high as a quarter six times.  

But these offenders pale in comparison to The Paris Review. Check out the dismal gender numbers for their author interviews:

1950s: 3/25=12%

1960s: 5/37=13.5%

1970s: 8/39=20.5%

1980s: 15/75=20%

1990s: 18/88=20.4%

2000s: 26/66=39%

2010s: 10/43=23%

Holding steady at 20% since the decade of second-wave feminism, TPR only got into the game, in the previous decade. So far in this decade, however, they've fallen back into old habits. And yet somehow we find ourselves talking about a past Dark Age for female writers. Fucking pathetic.  

It's one thing when dinosaurs like the LRB, NWRB, or Paris Review offend. What's really irksome is when sexist attitudes are carried over into a new medium, and perpetuated by young people. This is the case with Scott Esposito's The Quarterly Conversation, an online journal devoted to international modernist literature in translation that I'd like to love, if only it weren't for the distinct odour of machismo presiding over the proceedings. As proof, here are the stats from the past 10 issues, nos. 29 (Fall 2012) to 38 (Winter 2014). These are the number of articles about women out of total articles about a woman or a man (usually an author, but sometimes a filmmaker); so themed articles are excluded. (I also excluded translators as contributors, which is ironic given the nature of the publication, but less confusing.)

Issue 29, articles about women: 5/20

Issue 29, female contributors: 4/21

Issue 30, articles about women: 3/25

Issue 30, female contributors: 11/27

Issue 31, articles about women: 11/31

Issue 31, female contributors: 12/31

Issue 32, articles about women: 2/18

Issue 32, female contributors: 9/21

Issue 33, articles about women: 3/19

Issue 33, female contributors: 4/19

Issue 34, articles about women: 4/21

Issue 34, female contributors: 6/25

Issue 35, articles about women: 11/22

Issue 35, female contributors: 7/23

Issue 36, articles about women: 1/10

Issue 36, female contributors: 4/10

Issue 37, articles about women: 3/16

Issue 37, female contributors: 5/16

Issue 38, articles about women: 3/12

Issue 38, female contributors: 7/14

Total articles about women: 46/194=23.7%

Total female contributors: 69/207=33.3%

So, about a quarter of the articles over the last 10 issues are about women, and a third of the contributors are female. What are we to make of this? Are women, internationally, not writing experimental fiction and poetry? Are they not being published? Are they writing and being published but not being taken seriously enough to be translated? Are they writing and being published and translated but not being taken seriously by TQC?

The links along the right side of the QC website, to articles on the site's contemporary heroes (two of them dead at a young age), McCarthy, DFW, Murakami, and Bolano, so no women, were what made me first start pondering the place of women in serious contemporary fiction. I knew that the traditional heroes of modernism and postmodernism were men: all of the High Modernists except for Woolf, and especially Joyce and Kafka; Faulkner, Beckett, Pynchon. But that was in the past. Surely no one would perpetuate such preposterous hero-worship now that so many more women were writing, and we were all alert to, and on the same page (SO TO SPEAK) about, the injustice of gender bias.

Or then again....

There are of course other, more female-friendly places one can go on the internet to read about serious new writing, such as Jessa Crispin's Bookslut. My quarrel with TQC is not that there are no alternatives to its modernist machismo, but that that machismo is unnecessary and antiquated, and especially disappointing in an online-only publication, which should break with the biases of the past.

Popular Music

Part 1: Village Voice Pazz & Jop Reader's Poll

For me, the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Reader's Poll is the only bright spot out of all of this research, revealing as it does how the number of women in rock has risen, and the profile of women in rock with it, while the profile of women in pop has also risen, and with it, the prestige of pop. Still, as we get to the most recent poll, only 34% of the top 100 albums have female artists attached to them – and I counted cases where there was even one woman, not necessarily the singer, in the band.

1970s: The website only lists 10 albums up until 2008. In the inaugural year, albums by female artists creep into the 9^th and 10^th spots: Joni Mitchell's Blue and Carole King's Tapestry. In 1975, Mitchell's Court and Spark tops the list, but there are no other albums by female artists on it, or any women in the bands on the list. In 1974, Patti Smith is the only female artist to get on the list, with Horses, in the second spot. There is obviously already goodwill toward women who are serious songwriters – but not many around. In 1976, Kate & Anne McGarrigle take the 5^th spot, with Joni two spots behind. In 1977, only Fleetwood Mac, in the 4^th spot with Rumours, features women. In 1978 there are finally none at all, and in 1979 we're back to the initial situation, with Donna Summer's Bad Girls sneaking into the 10^th spot, and the B-52s at no. 7.

1980s: Things remain pretty much the same in the 80s. There are no women to be found on the list in 1980, but in 1981, X (whom I confess I've never heard of before) is in the 2^nd spot, Rickie Lee Jones in the 5^th spot, and The Go-Gos in the 10^th spot. In 1982, Richard & Linda Thompson are in the 2^nd  spot; X sneaks into the 10^th. In 1983 – X again, this time in the 4^th spot... and that's it. In 1984, Tina Turner is in the 5^th spot; in 1985, Aretha Franklin's at no. 9; in 1986... nothing. In 1987: nothing. In 1988, we're in business again: Sonic Youth at no. 2, Tracy Chapman at no. 3, Michelle Shocked at no. 5. In 1989, Neneh Cherry is at no. 5, and The Mekons and Soul II Soul have women in them, as do The Pixies, at no. 10.

1990s: This is where things change. All of a sudden, a lot of women are being taken seriously across the board, in rock, in punk, in electronica, in country, and in hip-hop, and there are a lot more all-female or female-led bands around. Sinead O'Connor takes the second spot in 1990; Sonic Youth is at no. 4; and Roseanne Cash is at no. 8. In 1991 (the year of Nevermind), there's only The Mekons, squeezing into the last spot. The following year, P. J. Harvey appears for the first time; the next year Liz Phair takes the no. 1 spot (beating out In Utero), Harvey is in the 3^rd spot, and The Breeders are in the fourth. Hole take the no. 1 spot in 1994, with Liz Phair in the 6^th spot. In 1995, top spot to P. J. Harvey (third year in the row for a woman or female-led band), Elastica is at no. 4, and Bjork at no. 7. In 1996, the Fugees are at no. 2, Sleater-Kinney at no. 3, and Amy Rigby at no. 8. The following year it's Sleater-Kinney at no. 4, Missy Elliott at no. 6, Erykah Badu at no. 7, and Bjork at no. 9. In 1998, it's Lucinda Williams at no. 1, Lauryn Hill in the second spot, and P. J. Harvey at no. 7. The decade closes on a slow year for women, with only Fiona Apple, at no. 7, and Beth Orton, at no. 9; and there's a woman in The Magnetic Fields.

2000s: The 2000s start strong. Year 1: P. J. Harvey (2), Shelby Lynne (4), Jill Scott (9), and Sleater-Kinney (10). 2001: Bjork (3) and Lucinda Williams (9). 2002: Sleater-Kinney (5) and Missy Elliott (10) – but where are the new artists? There are some in 2003: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs (5), led by Karen O; and The New Pornographers (7), featuring Neko Case. But in 2004, there's only Loretta Lynn, at no. 3. 2005 is a good year, with a new artist, M.I.A. bursting onto the scene at no. 2, Sleater-Kinney and Fiona Apple at 4 and 5, and The New Pornographers at 9. In 2006, a Neko Case solo album gets into the 8^th spot, with Joanna Newsom right behind it. M.I.A. takes third position the following year, with Amy Winehouse's Back to Black right behind her. 2008: Portishead in the 3^rd spot, Erykah Badu in the 5^th spot, and Santogold at no. 7. 2009: Neko Case at no. 3, Yeah Yeah Yeahs at no. 4, Dirty Projectors at no. 5., and The xx at no. 7.

Only including bands with significant female content, then, the 2000s hold strong, with female artists making up about 25% of the Top 10s in both the 1990s and the 2000s. That's compared to about 15% in the 80s and around 10% in the 70s. The importance of the 1990s to women in popular music can't be underestimated. But what about the current decade – and the Top 100 albums?

The wondrous Janelle Monae emerges in 2010, taking the 4^th spot. There are women in Arcade Fire, and Beach House and Sleigh Bells are male-female duos. Merrill Garbus's tUnE-yArDs take the no. 1 spot in 2011, with P. J. Harvey back in the second spot, Wild Flag in the 4th spot, and Adele in the 6th spot. In 2012 there's Fiona Apple at no. 3, Grimes at no. 9, and Beach House at 10; in 2013, Beyonce's at no. 4, My Bloody Valentine at 6, Haim at 7, Janelle Monae at 8, and Kacey Musgraves at 10. Finally, in 2014, St. Vincent took the no.4 spot, with FKA Twigs (a producer!) at 5, Taylor Swift at 7, and Angel Olsen at 8. For the decade so far, content by (cis) women is at 35.6%; in the Top 10, 40%, a big leap again from the 2000s. 

2008: 3/10; 25/100

2009: 4/10; 42/100

2010: 4/10; 32/100

2011: 4/10; 39/100

2012: 3/10; 39/100

2013: 5/10; 34/100

2014: 4/10; 34/100

Verdict: The 90s were the breakthrough decade for serious female artists in popular music, following in the wake of pioneers like Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith. But although there were suddenly a few dozen female artists and bands of major reputation, the mass of buzzy bands and rappers out there, most of whom will only appear on these lists once, are still overwhelmingly male. Women hover at 35-40% of the total content, but only if you include a lot of bands with only one female members, who is not the lead singer or main songwriter; or a couple of female members, if it's a large collective. If you stick to girl bands, female-led bands, male-female duos, and female solo artists, it would probably be more like 30-35%.   

Part 2: Best-Sellers

In commercial popular music, women have also gained successes in recent years without attaining full parity – as sellers; who knows how well they're paid. If the music industry is anything like the movie industry, which it probably is, there's probably even less parity there, but probably also some gains in recent decades.

I didn't bother to look at prizes for the music section because my time is limited and I'm way more interested in which albums Village Voice readers like than in which albums win Grammys. Whereas although I don't give any more credence to the Pulitzer Prize than to the Grammys, I was more interested in finding out how women had fared with the former than in tracking down decades of year-end best-books lists. So basically, the research I did for this post reflects partly what I happened to want to know about a particular topic and partly what information was (readily) available on that topic.

To get a rough idea of how women in popular music sell, I looked at this Tsort site, which has compiled chart info from worldwide sources.

Out of the 50 biggest chart acts, worldwide, by decade:

1960s: Barbra Streisand (22); The Supremes (23); Aretha Franklin (29); Peter, Paul, and Mary (33); Petula Clark (35); Joan Baez (42)

1970s: ABBA (4); Donna Summer (23); Fleetwood Mac (27); The Carpenters (28); Carole King (42)

1980s: Madonna (2); The Eurythmics (12); Whitney Houston (15); Tina Turner (31); Diana Ross (35); Pat Benatar (42); ABBA (46)

1990s: Mariah Carey (1); Madonna (2); Celine Dion (3); Whitney Houston (7); Janet Jackson (17); Alanis Morisette (20); Spice Girls (21); Roxette (24); Ace of Base (34); TLC (36); The Cranberries (37); Cher (47); Sheryl Crow (48); Shania Twain (49)

2000s: Madonna (2); Britney Spears (3); Beyonce (7); The Black Eyed Peas (8); Pink (10); Avril Lavigne (11); Alicia Keyes (14); Norah Jones (15); Jennifer Lopez (20); Rihanna (21); Mariah Carey (25); Shakira (28); Celine Dion (30); Christina Aguilera (31); Destiny's Child (35); Kelley Clarkson (36); Kylie Minogue (38); Nelly Furtado (39); The White Stripes (40); Evanescence (43); Taylor Swift (46)

In the 1960s, the women who chart highest, making up only 12% of the Top 50, have nothing to do with rock. In fact there are no women in rock, at all, at this point, and the only women on the list that have anything to do with modern pop are The Supremes. In the 1970s, the supreme decade of the rock group, it's worse. ABBA, the epitome of modern pop, get into the Top 10 with two women, and Donna Summer, the queen of disco, is the first female solo artist on the list. There's also Fleetwood Mac, another 70s supergroup of married couples, and, of course, The Carpenters.

Madonna leads the way to the light in the 1980s, showing what a female pop superstar really looks like. Annie Lennox and Whitney Houston are other pioneers, and Streisand comes back strong, but other than Madonna in the no. 2 spot, women haven't made that much advancement.

But wait! We were just warming up. In the 1990s, female solo artists occupy the first three spots, and female acts or acts featuring women make up 28% of the Top 50. It seems as though the 1990s are a breakthrough for women in music commercially, as it was for women in music being taken seriously. Second-wave feminism may have failed to produced any theorists that I wanted to read, but I can't argue with its effects on music. The seeds were sown, however, in the era of first-wave feminism. Patti Smith showed us what a female rock star looked like, and even if The Runaways were manufactured and exploitative, afterwards it was possible to envision a female rock band. By the 1990s there are a lot more women in bands, even if they're usually in bands as vocalists, and Madonna has provided the model of a female pop star who's obviously and unapologetically in control of her image and career. But few post-Madonna female pop stars will give us the impression of control over their careers and personas from beginning to end, and few – certainly none of the white ones – will be allowed to not be girls-next-door, however crossed-with-porn-star their image may be.

And the improvement holds during the following decade, with female acts/female-featuring acts getting up to 42%. This has little to do with women in bands and a lot to do with remaking pop, after the example of Madonna and the decline of Michael Jackson, as exclusively female. No need to fight the perception that the role played by women in popular music is as vocalists and, with few exceptions, eye candy. The exceptions are the true legends, but the standards of appearance for people in the public eye seem to get higher all the time, especially for women, that it's hard to think of Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand becoming superstars now – and it was implausible enough at the time. Reality TV let an ordinary young woman, Kelly Clarkson, become a star, and the internet allowed Adele, a plus-size woman, to become a megastar, and those seem to be the only means. A different, “edgier” style of attractiveness is favoured in the indie rock world, and being too conventionally attractive, like Lana Del Rey, can get you kicked out of the cool kids' club, but the ornamental function of the frontwoman still has few and usually partial exceptions – which is why someone like Merrill Garbus is such a delightful surprise.

Merrill Garbus

Now women seem to be stuck – and men too. Once it was considered acceptable for men to be crooners – neither songwriters nor musicians. Elvis wielded a guitar but didn't write his songs, and was primarily known as a voice, face, and set of hips. A decade on, it had become necessary to be “authentic” and write your own material. But women had a harder time making the shift, and have continued to have a hard time going behind the scenes in other ways – notoriously, as producers and engineers. For one thing, women were going into popular music as vocalists rather than forming bands, so writing their own songs wasn't a natural step. For another, there was no shame for women in being ornamental – at least not yet. Ultimately, this situation – where “authentic” rock or indie musicians wrote their own material but “manufactured” pop singers had their songs written for them – led to an unfair devaluation of the role of vocalist. But perhaps this was also partly because it was so easy to sell a pretty white girl with a pleasant voice.

Despite the huge success of Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill (1995), somehow the notion of marketing female rock singer-songwriters didn't take off, whereas the solo female pop star after the Madonna model became a juggernaut. But then if you look at the albums that are selling in the US in this decade, there are no performers that one would call “rock,” either male or female, while “rap” is only one category among many (and there are even some top-selling female rappers). The favoured categories are male solo performers, female solo performers, and bands, in about equal numbers, and rock and roll might never have happened (whereas the favouring of country acts is an American eccentricity). The female percentage suffers because the all-male band continues to be the norm while the all-female band continues to be an eccentricity.

The idea that there should be more women in rock or rap has nothing to do with women's success in popular music – at least not at this stage. Women are doing great as solo vocalists, probably much better than they did in the pre-rock era, although they'd do better still if there were more women in bands, which appear to be the only legacy from the rock era in the charts. Only hipsters (such as the Village Voice readers) keep rock alive, and increasingly rap as well, it seems. 

No, the main reason to care about women getting into rock or rap has to do with the prestige accorded these genres as originally male genres. Of course women have great reasons to rebel and be angry, and no doubt it's helpful to the cause of feminism for women to show that they can project aggression, intimidation, and power, so it's easy to see why the idea of women in these genres appeals – to women, and to fans of the genres – and why the idea of these genres appeals to women. Still, encouraging women who want to try non-traditional (i.e., “masculine”) things easily turns into denigrating “feminine” things, since our culture is already eager to encourage the latter. And we should be wary of this as feminists, even as we're aware that asserting the awesomeness of Disney princesses is not a sufficient kind of feminism.

(As one example: you still hear well-meaning people bemoan the fact that there has never been a queen of late-night TV. But why is this such a terrible thing when women clean up as day-time hosts? Ellen DeGeneres already out-earns David Letterman. Just because an area is female-dominated doesn't always make it pink-collar. Of course the domination of the daytime talk show by female hosts depends on a lot of women being at home with the kids, at least temporarily. But that's another story.)

Film and TV

Hollywood's problems with women seem to get endless attention without anything ever changing. And I'm just talking about its problems developing movies with female leads or even non-perfunctory supporting female characters, and, when it happens, paying the actresses as much as the actors. Let alone with getting women into a directing role.

I'm sure that many more women are directing now than in my early 20s, when I took it for granted that film directing just wasn't something that women did. (Since I like movies a lot and admire many directors, that thought did bug me a little, but not that much, since I had no interest in directing movies myself.) Even now, though, there's usually only one fashionable female director at a time, and without the help of the internet, I know the names of less than half a dozen that are currently working.

The gender parity gap in the US entertainment industry has been well-covered, so I'm not going to add new information here. I'll just restate some of the points and discoveries that have been made:

• Jennifer Lawrence was the top-grossing actor in Hollywood in 2014, yet she was paid less than her male co-stars on American Hustle. 
• In 2014, the combined spoils of the top 10 highest-earning Hollywood actresses was a little over half that of the top 10 actors
• In 2013, according to a study by San Diego State's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women represented 15 percent of protagonists in the 100 top-grossing films, 29 percent of major characters, and 30 percent of speaking characters  

Now that TV series creators are starting to emerge as auteurs, it also bugs me that the problem from film seems to belong to the entertainment industry in general. And it's not just the entertainment industry. The problem is also a culture of fandom, criticism, and its overlap – as with cinephiles and auteurists in film criticism/fandom and modernist machismo in literary culture – that perpetuates the idea of the hero-worship of men by men (and sometimes by women) as culture. Hence the hilariously solemn celebration of Matthew Weiner and Vince Gilligan, or, in geekier corners, the giddier fandom directed toward Dan Harmon (and Joss Whedon and Gene Roddenberry before him). (In fact I'm pretty sure that TV auteurism emerged in sci-fi corners first – didn't it? Not counting British comedian comedy.)

The only high-profile female tele-teurs to date have been Lena Dunham, who also gets a spectacular amount of hate, and Jenji Kohan, who is generally considered to be extremely uneven as a showrunner based on her first series, Weeds. (Which really does suck after the second season.) Among the series creators that one hears less about because they make popular television, the phenomenal Shonda Rhimes had two TV shows among the Top 50 broadcast TV shows of 2013/2014, both near the top; 2 Broke Girls was co-created by Whitney Cummings; Maurissa Tancharoen co-created Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with the Whedon brothers; Gemma Baker co-created Mom with Chuck Lorre and Eddie Gorodetsky; Elizabeth Meriwether created New Girl; Elise Doganieri co-created The Amazing Race; The Middle was, amazingly, co-created by two women, DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler; the now-cancelled (after one season) Super Fun Night was created by star Rebel Wilson; and that, of the 53 non-football shows on the list, sometimes with up to four male co-creators, is it.  

Shonda Rhimes

The one area where we can trace improvement for women, both commercially and in terms of prestige, is popular music. In the mainstream, there hasn't been much challenging of gender norms by women, but in the 80s, the solo pop star regained the ground lost to bands, and female pop stars became a charts fixture, ever-increasing in numbers and stature. Nor should it be forgotten that Madonna's projection of both financial and sexual power as a global superstar was its own kind of challenge of gender roles, and allowed women in pop to have more assertive personas – although that, of course, has now become simply a box to tick (not unlike male rock “attitude”). Among music lovers, the prestige of female artists has steadily grown, and although the 90s burst of all-female rock bands didn't keep up, it's now more common in indie to see female-led bands (but not that common).

Film is still going through a Dark Ages as far as gender parity goes, and TV isn't much better. Presumably women have had trouble breaking into film directing for the same reasons they've had trouble breaking into music production: because it requires combating stereotypes about women and leadership and women and technology. But we notice this more in the area of film, because the director is the auteur, whereas in music, the artist is usually assumed to the be the auteur. Music journalists and critics pay some attention to producers, but overwhelmingly their attention, and the attention of the public, is directed toward the artist. In mainstream music, often producers have more creative control than the artists, but that is precisely the area that receives less attention from music journalists and critics. Only in the area of club music are producers considered auteurs by aficionados.

In literature and fiction, the position of women as either prize winners or sellers hasn't substantially improved since the beginning of the 20^th century, and it is notably vulnerable and subject to setbacks. For the past couple of decades women's writing has had a commercial boom, I think largely due to the phenomenon of female fandom, which saw adult women reading YA genre lit and teenage girls reading online erotica, as well as vice versa, and the YA lit becoming online erotica and then becoming a best-selling print erotica series. This boom relies on marketing literature by women to women, but then so did the successful marketing of commercial fiction by men to men for so many decades. In this moribund time for books, publishers have found a way to tap into a thriving market of female readers.

In the area of literary prizes, there's no clear rhyme or reason at all to the fate of women. In recent decades women have won the Pulitzer for Fiction more often than in the 40s and 50s, but less often than in the 20s and 30s. Overall, female writers have won the Pulitzer 35% of the time, which is the same percentage as female winners of the Man Booker Prize – but since the 1980s, which is to say, in the era of modern feminism, women have won the Man Booker only 30% of the time.

Meanwhile, in the Canadian poetry scene, women would appear to be at parity. Now how did they manage that? Was there such an abundance of female poets, or such a dearth of male ones, that women got in control of the prize-giving? And if parity can be achieved in this area, why not in all of them? While it's easy to see how having children could interfere with the career of a TV writer or a Hollywood director, it's less easy to see how it could interfere with the career of the majority of novelists, poets, playwrights, musicians, or indie directors, who make very little money and, accordingly, have low stakes attached to starting late or taking long breaks. I could see the low income of being part of the arts community making a woman put off having children more easily than I can see the choice to have children being a blow to her career. Is institutional sexism the biggest obstacle to women's advancement in the arts, or do most women, whatever else they want to do with their lives, simply prefer to put motherhood first? I don't know, but I don't think we can deny that the combination of the two, and the way they reinforce each other, is the reason that parity seems to be so difficult.

In cinema, not only are things slow to improve behind the camera; in front of it, things may have actually gotten worse. Conventional wisdom attributes this to a combination of late capitalism and competition from TV, which made the marketers panic and decide that they should only make movies for teenage boys. Lo and behold, those teenage boys grew up and became middle-aged men, and still wanted to see the same kind of movies: even better for Hollywood, but worse for women who like movies, and worst of all for actresses. And since corporate filmmaking has no investment in diversity, only in making money, no one wants to make the effort of making action blockbusters with female protagonists, even though at least once a decade someone comes along and proves that they can make money.

I think some blame also has to go to the auteurs and auteurists, though. American independent filmmaking has always been a macho enterprise, led by the Kubricks, Scorseses, Coppolas, and Altmans, and their fanboys. Whatever the virtues of these filmmakers, it is rare for American auteurs to be interested in telling stories about women (the alternative tradition is represented by De Palma, Cassavetes, and Lynch); whereas in Europe, as Molly Haskell has pointed out (with a lot more savageness than I would use, especially with regard to the heroines of Dreyer – and yet I take her point), directors kept using women, but as symbols more than as characters. In any case, in recent years it's hard to find a female protagonist whether you're in the mood for a blockbuster or for arthouse fare.

But what do the execs of publishing houses, movies studios, and TV networks think that women are doing? They don't think we're going to movies; they've only recently found out that we read; and they can't think we're watching TV, since few shows with female main characters can be found there. Of course there are exceptions on network TV: Grey's Anatomy is a soapy monster; Modern Family features upper-middle-class men and women who are in completely traditional gender roles, for which the “clueless,” yet understandably smug, men are endlessly beaten down by the “assertive,” yet economically dependent, women; the female characters on The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother are almost as important as the male characters; there are lots of genre shows with female sidekicks, like Elementary, Bones, and now Sleepy Hollow. It does look like things are a little better for women in front of the camera in TV than in movies, though not great.

Modern Family, a convincing argument for the extreme horror of traditional gender roles (the gay couple included), where no one wins

I'd like to know, however, if female stars ever had the box-office draw that male stars did, and if “woman's pictures” were ever made in greater numbers than they are now. That genre is remembered primarily because the memory the great female stars of Hollywood was kept alive by gay men (definitely not by auteurists), which allowed young women of later generations a point of entry into film history. So as much as I admire Stephanie Zacharek's Kael-influenced critical voice, I can't share her bewilderment and seeming distaste (in an interview on the podcast The Cinephiliacs) at the fact that well-known female film bloggers like Kim Morgan and Farran Smith Nehme have come to share the gay male admiration of these actresses. Men worship men all the time, and women worship men, too, because there aren't enough celebrated women to worship – so we can always do with finding more. 

Presumably the parity gap that remains in these and other areas is the result of a combination of unconscious sexism on the part of men; women being less interested in these areas than men; and the difficulty of combining motherhood and career. Although the basis of one kind of classic feminism is to argue that women would be exactly like men if the obstacles to it were removed, it is also possible to argue that biology predisposes men and women differently and that they should not be forced to be the same or exact parity expected in everything. The evidence, however, is that the number of women in areas once thought reserved for men climb as attitudes toward what women can do change over generations.  

How do attitudes change? Through the actions of pioneering women (and the men who welcome them and even champion them) and through men and women calling attention to sexism. The best way to prevent calling attention to sexism from descending into petty bullying and harassment of men is, I think, to have a movement that's centered on women's achievement: on what women can do, not what is done to them. But that's for a future post. Others think we have to take action, such as by creating special classes or camps for girls to combat the societal message that there are certain things they can't do. Should change happen organically, over time, or should it be pushed along by directing girls into male-dominated areas? I don't have the answers, but I think we should all keep asking questions.