feminism Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The other day, a blog entry from the cinetrix about "The Rule" evoked a flood of memories from my love-movies-hate-the-patriarchy college days. In 1989, my then-roommate's then-girlfriend showed me a comic strip from the series Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel. The strip was called "The Rule" and it was about a character who explained that she only went to movies that met three criteria:

1. Two of the characters had to be women --
2. Who talked with each other --
3. About something other than a man.

Read the original strip for yourself. At the time, "The Rule" had a big impact on my life -- it explained a lot about what I found lacking in movies. I wanted to watch strong action heroines, but I also wanted to see movies with women who talked about ordinary stuff that didn't involve boyfriends or husbands.

"Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels."

In graduate school, I had a roommate get all over my case for videotaping a Pedro Almodovar movie I'd seen the year before and wanted to watch again, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (pictured above). She asked me to please not watch it when she was in the apartment. "I don't see how you can possibly want to watch something that is so degrading to women," she told me. She was also disgusted that I liked Midnight, the 1939 movie in which a female character says she doesn't disapprove of a man beating his wife.

A few years later, I was having lunch with a female coworker and told her the story about how I loved A Clockwork Orange so much the first time I saw it, that I went back to the theater the next night to watch it again. And once I went to the Paramount to see it when I had a fever of 102. She looked at me like I was insane. "I didn't know I had a fever at the time," I explained. "It's not that," she said. "But you liked A Clockwork Orange? I wouldn't see it myself, I heard it's terribly misogynistic." "Well, yes ... but it's very good," I replied. And this week, acquaintances have been giving me the hairy eyeball because I admitted to liking a movie advertised with a poster featuring a woman in chains: Black Snake Moan.