Feminist/Gender Theory, Identity, Pop Culture, Society and Politics

I Don’t Ever Want To Get Married – Am I ‘Woman-ing’ Correctly?

Originally published on Fanny Pack, 19th October 2016.

Hello, I’m a woman and I don’t ever want to get married.

It’s not a proclamation likely to make anyone gasp, shudder, faint or feel an uncontrollable urge to form a Frankenstein-esque mob of angry villagers to hunt me down and force a wedding band around my finger, but it is likely to auto-generate one particular question in most people’s heads like a predictive text:

tumblr.

In a world where we – especially women – are still expected to tie the knot at some point in their lives, almost as a default setting, this might seem like a fair response. Except that I don’t think it should be. Not me, Oprah Winfrey, Kourtney Kardashian, Chelsea Handler, Jon Hamm, Charlize Theron, Helena Bonham-Carter and anyone else – famous or not – who choose never to marry their significant other do. But even though marriage is now very much a choice in most places, culturally it still feels like very much the opposite.

I know that it is first-hand – without being Jennifer Aniston – because every time I have to vocalise (when prompted) that I won’t ever be getting married, the reactions I usually get make me feel like I’m either the bearded-woman at the Victorian freak show, or I’m accidentally doing something eyebrow-raisingly rebellious. I’m inadvertently railing against the all-powerful regime of hen parties and white veils and ‘His’ and ‘Hers’ monogrammed everything. It kind of makes me sound like I’m actively fighting against the entire institution, but that’s not true either. Not wanting to get married is exactly the same as being an atheist: just because you don’t have a religion, it doesn’t mean you’re actively trying to stop everyone else from having one. (Richard Dawkins, aside.)

Well, just call me The Walking Dead forever, in that case. Weddingbee.

There’s also this ridiculous wheeze echoed through “think-pieces” and trolling comments in the darker recesses of Reddit and Twitter that feminism has “killed” lovely old-fashioned notions like romance; empowering women to focus too much on silly things like gender equality and their careers rather than keep protecting the sanctity of the nuclear family, as if marriage and motherhood were the last holy bastions holding back the coming apocalypse spilling forth from Hell.

Here are some home truths: not believing in marriage doesn’t mean you’re not a romantic person. I’ve got two very-worn out copies of Love, Actually and When Harry Met Sally that can attest to that fact. I can also tell you categorically that I was a non-believer in marriage long before I called myself a feminist. Feminism didn’t ‘convert’ me into something I’m not – it just helped me give voice and reason to feelings and beliefs I already held to be true.

'By the way, we shouldn't be afraid of the word

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The main root of my feelings was planted when I realised that women are culturally conditioned from young ages to ‘aspire’ to marriage as a crowning achievement rather than the simple lifestyle choice it actually is. This conditioning continues into our adulthood, when we’re then culturally pressured into thinking that spending the amount of money we’d also deem an appropriate price tag for a two-bedroom semi-detached house on what is essentially a piece of paper, two bits of boring jewellery and a giant party made-up of estranged relatives we can’t stand and random acquaintances is somehow the key to life-long happiness.

As a kid, I bought Barbie dolls already decked out in their perfect bridal gowns and consumed hours of Disney princess films that were remiss if their heroine’s journey didn’t culminate in a wedding. I watched women in countless TV shows and rom-coms as a teenager lovingly pour over wedding scrapbooks they’d had since they were children; try on wedding dresses just for the fun of it; browbeat tired and disinterested caricatures of boyfriends into the perfect proposals and then scream and wail when their actual wedding plans started going awry, as if their very existence depended on one day in their whole lives going absolutely perfectly for fear of the rest of it being cursed to fall to shit. And once the rings are on, the curtain falls. Their lives are fulfilled, done and spent.

giphy.

I watched these stereotypes of wedding-crazy women and wondered why I couldn’t relate to them. Was I not ‘woman-ing’ correctly? Then one day it hit me. I’d always played ‘wedding’ with my toys as a child, but I never actually imagined myself to be the bride. To someone who did relate to all those things I mentioned earlier, that might seem like a sad realisation. To me, it was life affirming. I’d seen all the evidence of what marriage could be and what it could mean. My own parents have been very happily married for over twenty years, too. Having weighed all this up, I’d been able to come to the informed opinion that weddings really meant nothing to me, bridal gowns didn’t make me giddy, and being a wife wasn’t a description or title that suited me.

Just about the only thing I would do in a wedding dress. Cosmopolitan.

It’s a choice that women in the past fought tooth and nail for me to be empowered to make. But, I think it’s important to remember that my ability to make that choice is a luxury not afforded to everyone. Women and girls are still being forced into marriages they wouldn’t choose for themselves, sometimes to men who are physically and sexually abusive to them. My ability to choose also carries heterosexual privilege too. If I wanted to spend my life with someone of the same sex, I would either not be able to marry them at all if I lived in certain countries, or even in countries that have legalised marriage equality, the choice to not get married would still be less viable as LGBTQ couples face complicated legal baggage around having children. And, as Princess Jasmine’s father learned in one of my favourite Disney princess films, the decision to get married should be based on love, not legalities.

The Sultan allows Princess Jasmine and Aladdin to wed.

“Screw bureaucracy – I’m the damn Sultan!” Fanpop.

At the end of the day, we need to stop treating marriage as an inevitable destination rather than the equal-opportunities choice in our lives we have fought – and still fight – for it to become. If you like it, put a ring on it. Or not. And that should be nobodies’ business but your own.

Feminist/Gender Theory, Pop Culture, Visual Cultural Theory

WICKED WILES: Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937)

This article is part of a series. You can read the introduction to ‘Wicked Wiles’ here or on the Fanny Pack blog where it was originally published here.

Original Film Poster from 1937

Grumpy: ‘She’s a female! And all females is poison! They’re full of wicked wiles!’

Bashful: ‘What are wicked wiles?’

Grumpy: ‘I don’t know, but I’m against ’em.’

Based on a German fairy tale first published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) tells the story of an Evil Queen who becomes envious of the beauty of her stepdaughter – the Princess known as ‘Snow White’. In an attempt to blemish Snow White’s beauty, the Queen demotes her to a servant status, only to have her magic mirror tell her that the Princess is still ‘the fairest of them all’ even with rags and a mop. Furious, the Queen orders a huntsman to murder Snow White in the woods, but luckily for the Princess the huntsman chickens out, and – after fleeing into the woods – she takes refuge in the house of seven dwarves.

The Queen soon discovers that the Princess is still alive and, disguised as an old woman, tricks her into eating a poisoned apple sending her into a deep sleep that can only be broken with ‘true love’s kiss.’

Just two: Snow White and the Evil Queen.

Yes – The Evil Queen. Her motivation is jealousy of Snow White.

The Queen, through fear and magical prowess is by far the most powerful character, yet this power is undermined by her petty fears and ultimately leads to her demise. Snow White seems disinterested in her birthright, therefore the only threat she poses to the Queen is apparently a superficial one. This is also undermines the Queen’s strength as a female character: after all, why would such a formidable Sorceress be so enraged by someone so non-threatening?

Not only this, but unlike future Disney villains, the Evil Queen is not at all unattractive; making her psychosis completely unfounded in reality. It could be that her envy of Snow White’s looks is actually a fear of ageing, and the face she sees in the mirror confirming her fears is that of her inner voice whispering to her that her best days are over – that ‘true’ femininity is for the young. The Queen’s ‘old crone’ disguise adopted to trick Snow White is perhaps reflective of what she really thinks she looks like to others.

Reading the Queen’s ‘evil’ as psychosis certainly makes the Queen more sympathetic, but the film clearly doesn’t want these conceivable sympathies to be obvious to its audience. After all, evil is literally in her name.

The title sequence implies a previous interaction in the form of text from a book. The book tells us that the Queen has demoted Snow White to a scullery maid as punishment for her beauty in the hopes this will detract from her looks.

No further interactions between the film’s only female characters are seen on screen until the Queen transforms into an old woman and tricks Snow White into eating the poison apple. This means that every interaction the pair have – both on and off screen – is profoundly negative. But, as the Queen and Snow White are the heroine and villain, negative interactions are indicative of this dynamic.

However, the film also offers a conceptual contrast between its protagonist and antagonist, which is revealed in the circumstances of the Queen’s death. The death is signalled long before it actually happens by the appearance of a pair of vultures, which turn up as she arrives at the dwarves’ house. They follow her until she is hit by a bolt of lightening when fleeing from the dwarves on a cliff, and as she falls, slowly descend to claim their meal. This death at the hands of nature – not man – puts the Queen even more at odds with Snow White, who can communicate with animals and spends most of the film living in the woods. The Queen, on the other hand, uses her magic to defy nature, and is punished for it.

Despite being the titular character, it is the Evil Queen, not Snow White, who drives the plot.

The male characters are: The Prince, the Mirror(?), the Huntsman, and the dwarves.

The Prince shows up early in the film and instantly serenades Snow White despite her lowly appearance, implying that her natural beauty shines through the scruffy clothes the Queen has forced her to wear. Even though he is her equal in status and appearance, and the object of her fantasies, the Prince is absent from the film until the very end when he awakens her with ‘love’s true kiss.’

The face in the mirror – a mysterious, disembodied entity – appears with a male face and voice, and actively encourages the Queen’s obsession with beauty. If the mirror is reflective of the Queen’s inner voice, the fact that this voice is male is incredibly telling. Rather than see herself through her own eyes, she perceives and personifies superficial flaws through the eyes she seems to find the most scrutinising – the male gaze, which is driving her to murderous insanity.

The Huntsman is ordered by the Queen to murder Snow White, which he appears to have no qualms about right up until the very moment he holds up his axe, at which point he falters, and through new found sympathy for the Princess, allows her to escape.

The dwarves are introduced to Snow White through their messy home, which she promptly cleans, implying that in the absence of a female presence up until that point, the dwarves were either unable or incapable of doing any domestic work.

Grumpy says when they see Snow White asleep: ‘All female’s are poison with their wicked wiles.’ Considering the only other woman in the story is an evil Queen, this assessment is not altogether unfair, and when Snow White mentions that the Queen wants to kill her, the dwarves react with fear and derision for her.

Grumpy remains vocally resistant throughout most of the film: ‘The wiles are working! Give ‘em an inch and they’ll walk all over yer.’ He also complains that she is feminising them simply by making them clean themselves, implying that she is invading their traditional masculine territory. Unfortunately for him, he is the only dissenter, as the other dwarves are happy to do as they are told in exchange for the benefits of Snow White’s housework and her entrancing looks and singing. In fact, the other dwarves mock him for resisting – forcing him to bathe and covering him in flowers to ‘feminise’ him.

Although their interactions portray men and women to be able to coexist equally and peacefully, it is clear this balance is upheld only by each gender complying with their traditional roles: men going out to work and women staying at home. The Queen – a powerful widowed woman – is non-compliant and filled with madness that will ultimately destroy her.

Other than what will become quintessential Disney Princess qualities such as beauty, kindness, singing, and talking to animals, Snow White has forcible experience as domestic servant, which turns out to be handy in bartering shelter from the dwarves. Despite seeming largely powerless, Snow White’s ability to unknowingly charm every male character around her – even Grumpy – is almost a magical power. ‘The wiles are working!’ Grumpy proclaims, her ‘wiles’ being her ‘fairness.’ Just as the Queen bewitches people with her evil magic, Snow White can bewitch people with her ‘good magic.’ It is her natural qualities, rather than any learned ones, that enable her to survive beyond the castle walls.

Snow White’s sole aspiration is for her ‘prince to come,’ but seeing as her situation is so dire, this dream seems more about being taken away to a better life where she isn’t abused by her stepmother, rather than longing for one specific man, which could be why the Prince – despite a good singing voice – is so in distinctive. He doesn’t even have a proper name. Snow White, knowing she is unequipped to survive alone, dreams of freedom through marriage, which I’m sure rings true with a lot of women in the past whose only option to leave home was by finding a husband.

Although the film’s two female characters are both central to the plot, as Snow White’s power lies solely in her idealised natural beauty and the Queen – despite possessing supreme magical power – is undermined by an unexplained fixation with this beauty, both are weak female role models overall.

Snow White does learn and possess skills beyond her Princess role, but does not develop as a character. Meanwhile the Queen only falls further and further into a maddening pressure to stay young and beautiful, and is ultimately punished for her insecurities.

The male characters are compassionate and – particularly the dwarves – comedic, but their main purpose is to provide a masculine edge to emphasise Snow White’s softer femininity – to conform to a narrow and traditional male/female dynamic for which the Queen is demonised for flouting. This positivity towards conformism is twinned by the subtextual Nature vs. Artificiality duel personified by Snow White and the Queen.

In summary, although Snow White is a story about escapism and fantasy; equally there is a fundamental message left for young girls and it seems a problematic one. Natural beauty is to be aspired to if you’re lucky enough to possess it but if you don’t have it, and try to pursue it, your vanity could lead to jealousy, jealousy to obsession, and finally dangerous madness.

Coming up next in the ‘Wicked Wiles’ series: Cinderella (1950)

Follow this blog and Fanny Pack for updates every month.

Feminist/Gender Theory, Pop Culture, Society and Politics

A Response to ‘Women Against Feminism.’

Imagine this:

The year is 2014. You are a white Western woman. You wake up in the morning in a comfortably sized house or flat. You have a full or part-time job that enables you to pay your rent or mortgage. You have been to school and maybe even college or university as well. You can read and write and count. You own a car or have a driver’s licence. You have enough money in your own bank account to feed and clothe yourself. You have access to the Internet. You can vote. You have a boyfriend or girlfriend of your choosing, who you can also marry if you want to, and raise a family with. You walk down the street wearing whatever you feel like wearing. You can go to bars and clubs and sleep with whomever you want.

Your world is full of freedom and possibility.

Then you pick up a newspaper or go online. You read about angry women ranting about sexism and inequality. You see phrases like ‘rape-culture’ and ‘slut-shaming.’ You furrow your brow and think to yourself: ‘What are they so angry about? There is no such thing as sexism anymore.’

Now imagine this:

The year is 2013. You are a 25 year-old Pakistani woman. A few months ago, you married the man you love. A man you choose for yourself. You are also pregnant with his child. You see your life stretching out before you, filled with hope and happiness. Suddenly, you and your husband are dragged away from each other. You are both beaten with bricks and batons. You can’t fight back. You can’t escape. No one comes to help you. Through your fading vision, you look up, and look into the eyes of one of your assailants: into the eyes of your father.

The year is 2013. You are a 23 year-old Indian woman. You are a physiotherapy student with a promising career ahead of you. You are sitting on a private bus travelling home alone on a warm December evening. You gaze out of the window as the buildings of New Dheli rush past you and feel content. Suddenly, a blunt force hits the back of your head and you fall to the floor of the bus. A group of strange men are standing over you. They bring the metal bar down on you again and again and again until all you can taste is the blood filling up your mouth. You pray that you will die soon. And you do, but not then. You are raped, beaten, and tortured over and over again. Death is slow and agonising.

The year is 2014. You are a 13 year-old girl from Niger. You no longer live there though. You are now living in the neighbouring country Nigeria, sitting alone in small room on a small bed in a small apartment high above the city of Kano. You are not allowed to leave. Your stomach is swollen from the unwanted life growing inside of it. You had no choice. The father is a man in his 40s. He is a businessman. He has bought you as his wife. You were a penniless, uneducated girl when he came for you. You don’t know of any life you could have had. Neither did your family: just one less mouth for them to feed. You still have the body of a child, and it’s straining under the pressure from the one inside of you. You feel like you’re about to be split in two. You don’t wonder if you will survive the birth. A part of you doesn’t want to.

These are fictionalised accounts of real events that have happened to real women living in our world today. They follow the past 250 years of women and men campaigning for women to be given equal rights to men to prevent these kinds of injustices and abuses on the grounds of gender taking place. Over the course of this time, campaigners – Feminists, both female and male – have been locked up, beaten, tortured, and even killed, in the pursuit of equality. They did this with pen and ink and print; they did this with their voices; they did this with their bodies; they did this with art and music; they did in courts of law and halls and houses of government that they fought be to allowed into.

They did this so that women would no longer been seen as property, livestock, breeding machines, sex objects, punching bags, or infantile morons. They did this not just for themselves, but also for their daughters, and their daughters, and their daughters for generations to come. They did this for women they would never meet – women who lived across countries, across vast oceans, across the entire globe, and even across time.

They did this so that women like me – a white Western woman – could attend school and university; to learn to read, write, and think critically; to gain a degree; to get a job and be paid an equal salary to a man in the same position; and to sit here with my own computer and type all of this.

Feminism is a movement for freedom, equality, choice, love, compassion, respect, solidarity, and education. We may argue, we may disagree, we may struggle to understand the choices and perspectives of others sometimes, but these core beliefs of the movement have never changed, and they never will.

That is why I am a Feminist.

If you feel that you have so far lived your life unaffected by even the mildest form of sexism – anything from feeling uncomfortable when a man catcalls you in the street, to feeling scared walking home alone at night in a secluded area – and are treated with love and respect by every man in your life, then to you I say: I’m glad for you. If you don’t think you need feminism, then that is a victory for the movement. You have fulfilled all those dreams that every suffragette being force-fed in prison and every ‘witch’ burnt at the stake dreamed you would one day.

But perhaps take a second to consider the life of the Pakistani woman who was beaten to death by her own family for marrying a man of her choosing. Or the life of the Indian woman who was raped, beaten, and murdered on a bus by a gang of men. Or the life of the little girl in Niger who was sold to a man more than twice her own age and forced to carry a baby that may kill her to deliver. Do they still need feminism?

And perhaps take a second to consider this too: Even in our liberal, Western world, why do women still only fill 24% of senior management jobs? Why are more women than men domestically abused or even killed every week at the hands of their male partner or ex-partner? Why is there still a pay gap (in the UK specifically) of 15% for women doing the same jobs and working the same hours as men?

And what about on a cultural level? Have you ever noticed how comedy panel shows usually only have one female panellist compared to 4-5 male ones? That almost every dieting product on the market is solely aimed at women? How a lot of newspapers and advertising campaigns will use a sexualised or pornographic image of a woman to sell news or products that have nothing to do with sex?

Or perhaps on a personal level: Do you choose to wear certain clothes because you want to or because you feel ‘unfeminine’ if you don’t? Do you choose to cover yourself up because you want to or because you feel ashamed or intimidated by a man looking at your body? Do you shave your legs and underarm hair because you want to or because you will look ‘ugly’ if you don’t? Did you parents dress you in pink as a baby because they liked the colour or because you were born a girl? Do you want to have children because you want to or because you are a woman?

When you look at yourself in the mirror in the morning, do you see yourself through your own eyes, or through the eyes of the men that will look at you when you walk out the door?

The fact is, like it or not, you still live a world where gender matters. Where gender controls not just the entire course of your life – but the lives of women all over the world. Every second, a child will be born female in a country where she will persecuted for this random biological occurrence for the rest of her life. So before you hold up your anti-Feminist placard proudly and smile at your own sense of empowerment, think not what Feminism can do for you, but what it can do for that one girl. She needs someone to stand up for her. That someone could be you.

UPDATE: Click here to read my follow up to this article: ‘Equalism: The Feminist Alternative?’

This is a response to ‘Women Against Feminism’ groups on Tumblr and Facebook.

The stories of the women mentioned in this post were sourced from these sites:

http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2014/05/29/pakistani-woman-stoned-to-death-for-marrying-a-man-of-her-own-choosing/

http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2013/01/02/indias-tipping-point-death-of-rape-victim-sparks-global-outrage/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-27619295

Other facts and statistics were sourced from here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/international-womens-day-2014-the-shocking-statistics-that-show-why-it-is-still-so-important-9177211.html

iwantedwings

A Geeky Feminist's Musings On Pop Culture

Tag Archives: Politics

I Don’t Ever Want To Get Married – Am I ‘Woman-ing’ Correctly?

Originally published on Fanny Pack, 19th October 2016.

WICKED WILES: Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937)

A Response to ‘Women Against Feminism.’

Originally published on Fanny Pack, 19th October 2016.

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