The Errant Æsthete

Two days ago in the op/ed section of the NY Times (Sept.20), Judith Warner did a piece on the movie, Thelma and Louise (’Thelma and Louise’ in the Rear-View Mirror’) analyzing the theme in terms of the milieu and culture of the times, which not only hit a nerve, but set off something of a cataclysmic reaction on the topic of women in society then (1991) versus now (2007). Is it better? Is it worse? You decide. (Following the article is a sampling of reactions from readers).

I watched “Thelma and Louise” again this week.

Boy, how times have changed.

Remember, in 1991, how topical the movie seemed? How revolutionary, how thrilling, how cathartic?

It didn’t seem any of those things to me the other night, when I attended a screening of the film guest-hosted by Senator Susan Collins and Representative Jane Harman.

It simply seemed depressing, oppressive and hopeless. It seemed like a relic from the past, a buried memory. It was dark. It was disturbing. It was — it dawned on me, driving home and still sniveling over the sight of that blue Thunderbird plummeting into the void — a movie that could not be made today.

Thank goodness.

The “Thelma and Louise” screening was one of a series of events organized by The Week magazine, which periodically invites politicians to choose and introduce their favorite Washington-themed movies. Previous choices, by male lawmakers, have included “The Candidate,” “Dr. Strangelove” and “Dave.” But Collins and Harman, the cheery Maine Republican and tough-as-nails California Democrat, who have worked together on intelligence and homeland security legislation, broke the mold with their choice of the dystopic female buddy movie.

They wanted, they said, to showcase their against-the-odds, across-the-aisle friendship. Yet they weren’t, they warned those in attendance, planning on driving off any cliffs. They made clear that the Susan and Jane show isn’t a continuation of Thelma and Louise’s struggles. Rather, Collins said, it’s the “sequel.”

I found that a nice thought. But after watching the movie I realized that it isn’t really true.

It would be true if “Thelma and Louise” were really, as it has always been considered (except by its makers), a timeless meditation upon sexual politics and women’s general position in American society.

But it isn’t; “Thelma and Louise” is primarily a movie about sexual violence. It’s about all the myriad forms that sexual violence can take – from the psychic violence done to Thelma, who at 18 married her boyfriend of four long years, to the shattering physical violence of Louise’s long-buried rape, to the verbal and gestural violence done to both women by the endless stream of drive-by harassers who pollute their road trip. It’s about the long-term effects of such psychic and physical violence: the childlike Thelma, blindly drawn to men who victimize her again and again, the raging Louise, shut down on the surface but harboring a burning, ultimately self-immolating, rage.

It seems clear to me now that Thelma and Louise’s final act of hara-kiri was not meant to be symbolic of the alleged dead end reached by feminism in the early 1990s. Instead, their act of mutually assured self-destruction was just the end of the line for two abuse victims unwilling to be victimized further by an abusive system.

Yet in 1991 it was altogether understandable that a movie about sexual violence would be turned into a fable about women’s general social and political progress. It made perfect sense then to conflate sexual violence – in all its verbal, psychic, physical and political forms — with sexual politics. That year, the William Kennedy Smith rape case went to trial, belittling and publicly humiliating the victim; Anita Hill confronted Clarence Thomas and emerged besmirched while he reigned victorious; and Roe v. Wade seemed destined for extinction.

All the talk, nationally, was of sexual harassment, date rape and crimes against women generally. Violence against women spiked. “Fear,” wrote Ellen Goodman, had become most women’s “most deeply felt constriction on daily life,” and that fear, in the heart of a generation raised upon hope and a sense of entitlement, brought fury and outraged disbelief. “Now, women who have won equal access to the colleges of their choice are more resentful at the idea that they have to be wary at the fraternity door. Women who live comfortably in coed dorms are more outraged at those men who can’t be trusted. Women who work on the same terms with men are less accepting of inequity on the streets,” she wrote in The Boston Globe in the summer of 1991. “Will this go down in the records as the year that the greenhouse effect of violence is finally recognized?”

The memory of that fear and anger and outrage – the sense of its momentous, transformative power – might have lasted longer had the “Thelma and Louise” moment not been followed, soon after, by a repudiation of “victim feminism” that was widespread and totalizing and highly welcome in the larger culture. It’s easy to forget now how vital and urgent the new focus on date rape and sexual harassment seemed, for a brief moment, back then. And yet it was, truly, transformative; the world of “Thelma and Louise,” I think it’s fair now to say, is not the one that we inhabit psychologically or physically today.

Date rape is no longer a contentious concept; it’s a known reality. Rape victims are no longer so thoughtlessly named and shamed by the media as was William Kennedy Smith’s accuser. Rape itself is down – its incidence having dropped 75 percent since the early 1990s, according to the Department of Justice.

These are profound and meaningful changes, and we should celebrate them — and revel in “Thelma and Louise”’s passage into history.

READERS RESPONSES

Things are far worse for women today than they were in the 1990s.

Recently a judge refused to allow a woman to testify using either the term ‘rape” or “sexual assault” to describe having been raped.

Perhaps if reported rapes are down it is because women know that under the current DOJ they will be treated as though they were the one committing the act instead of the actual rapist.

Perhaps people describing women who complain about having been raped as “victim feminists” are part of the problem.
— Posted by Suzanne Cooke

I never saw Thelma and Louise as a movie showing the death of feminism. It celebrated the friendship of two women. When one saves the other from a rape by shooting the rapist they are suddenly fugitives and they have no trust that the law (or society) will treat them fairly. So ultimately they drive off of the cliff. I never saw that as uplifting, but did see it as reality. There was some power in that F you moment at the end, even it if was to say we aren’t living in this screwed up system any more.

Contrast this to last year’s movie “Sideways” about two guys out for a lark together. One is a scumbag, one a loser. The scumbag is aiming to get laid as much as possible before entering a marriage of convenience (for him, since the wife is from a rich family). The loser hasn’t gotten over a divorce, can’t write anymore, abuses alcohol, steals from his mother and enables the scumbag friend.

How does that movie end? They both get the (beautiful) girl.

I’m not sure so much has changed.
— Posted by karla

Judith Warner’s contention that the world of two working class women in “Thelma and Louise,” is a relic of the past suggests she has little experience with the hard scrabble existence of women who are not financially or academically endowed. I also get the impression she hasn’t been reading recent headlines about women getting murdered after leaving bars or killed in domestic disputes. Sorry , Ms. Warner,but women today are still locked into prescribed roles and for many of them “Thelma and Louise” made a jail break and then committed revolutionary suicide after a experiencing a brief burst of freedom on the road.
— Posted by mary reinholz

Democracy Now and the Washington Post both report increases in sexual assault and harassment in the military. The Democracy Now story made me weep: some of our our female soldiers suffer or even die from dehydration in Iraq because they are afraid that if they drink enough water they will have to go to the latrine after dark and will be assaulted by other soldiers their base. The officers recommend that women use the buddy system to go to the bathroom safely, but soldiers interview expressed reluctance to wake up another sleep-deprived soldier to be a bodyguard. One soldier was the only female in her group — who was going to protect her from her fellow soldiers?

The Washington Post reported “1,700 reports of alleged cases of sexual assault, which includes rape, nonconsensual sodomy, indecent assault as well as attempts to commit those offenses” and predicted that those numbers would rise as reporting became easier. The Democracy Now story also covered the lack of support for women who reported assault.

Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/08/1443232&mode=thread&tid=25

WaPo
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/06/AR2005050601355.html

— Posted by Linda

I was 17 when I first saw Thelma and Louise, half a life-time ago…

Now while I “get” in order to be a victim, you have to accept the role of victim…I do have to stand up and say one thing… We live in a society that fosters the depiction of women as sex objects and arm candy…you don’t have to have a degree in sociology or anthropology to see it plain as day. Just turn on Monday night football and watch the girls on the sidelines. As long as we, as a society, endorse the depiction of women as sexy playthings…we won’t move much further ahead. It’s true that some women like to be sex objects…enough men are easy targets, and a woman can some times go a lot further with her wiles than with her brains. So as long as those women undermine the feminist movement, it would seem reasonable to surmise it will be a looooooooong march to complete equality for the rest of us.
— Posted by Kendra

I am writing from the UK. Statistics on rape in the UK show that, in the last ten years, the number of reported rapes has in fact increased but that the number of convictions is down. Rape crisis centres consistently tell the story of women unwilling to report their rape. Further to this, statistics show that two women are murdered every week by their sexual partners. (Comments based on the British Crime Survey).

Perhaps things are much better in the US, but I have to wonder whether Judith Warner has hit home with her depiction of an increasingly safe world for women in the US. She offers one data point, from the Department of Justice, but it is unexplained and unqualified. What does “rape is down” actually mean? Reported rapes, prosecutions, convictions?

Because of this lack of proper analysis, I can’t help but feel anger at Judith Warner’s seeming complacency that “the world of sexual violence in Thelma and Louise, is not the one that we inhabit psychologically or physically today.” One statistic, confusing in what it actually denotes and thrown in at the end of the article, does not justify such a sweeping opinion piece on an issue so important.

Perhaps the world of Thelma and Louise is not the world that Judith Warner recognises anymore. But it is probably the world that a lot of women (one in five in the UK) would probably recognise all too welll.

I am also bewildered by the line that Judith Warner tries to draw between, on the one hand, sexual violence and, on the other, women’s “general position in American society”. Did I miss a paragraph explaining exactly how sexual violence is not linked to women’s general position in society?
— Posted by Luke

I appreciate Ms. Warner’s essay reflecting back at was in 1991 a landmark movie that empowered two women to use the only means (guns) they had to stop aggressive men from assaulting them. Recently, “The Brave One” a movie starring Jodie Foster (Which I have not seen) has elevated a current victimized woman, whose son was killed in the same attack, to hunt down and use her guns to seek justice.

Outside America the women of the world struggle against repressive religions. I suggest everyone read “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khalid Houssein (who also wrote The Kite Runner) to get a glimpse of the oppression of Afghanistanian women during the period of 1970 - 2000. We have a long way to go for achieving better women’s equality and respect in America, but relative to a lot of the world we have a vastly improved situation.
— Posted by J. Potter

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