You would think that the British Film Institute’s sponsorship of a month-long festival celebrating some of the most memorable female characters in cinema would draw plaudits from feminists. You would be wrong.
Featuring the likes of Nicole Kidman in To Die For, Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her and Bette Davis in The Little Foxes, the BFI’s programme ‘Playing the Bitch’ is meant to explore the female anti-hero. But in a petition originating with academics at King’s College London, 300 signatories have objected that the festival’s theme ‘uncritically parrots rather than questions the misogynist logics that inform so much Hollywood cinema… The women of Bitches do not subvert gender norms, they inhabit stereotypes’.
With my customarily compulsive counter–factualism, I urge you to conjure the BFI’s parallel-universe festival ‘Playing the Goody Two-Shoes’ — designed to celebrate female characters in cinema who are unfailingly kind, selfless, laudable and chaste. (Perhaps we could screen back-to-back Doris Day movies, culminating in a riveting remake of Gone with the Wind, in which Scarlett relinquishes any claim on Ashley because hitting on other women’s beaux is impolite, and devotes herself to the abolition of slavery.) I envision another petition with at least as many signatures: ‘The Goody Two-Shoes festival uncritically parrots the misogynistic stereotype of all women as passive, pliant, subservient, sexually repressed, two-dimensional, and socialised to be “nice”, at the price of being portrayed as fully human, and thus richly, fascinatingly flawed.’ In other words, you can’t win.
For me, the #MeToo mania has fostered a numbing déjà-vu. We went through the whole Betty Friedan brouhaha in the 1960s of my childhood, Gloria Steinem-ed our way through the 1970s (thanks, Gloria; I still use the title Ms), and — though for some reason we seem to have forgotten all about it — endured a frenetic foofaraw over sexual harassment in the 1990s.
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