This entry has spoilers for
Downton Abbey Season 3! Frances should not read it!
Long time no see (or, as we say in actual
Chinese, 好久不见),
comrades! Things all got a bit stressful over the last couple of weeks and unfortunately when
you’ve got seventeen presentations and a debate to prepare and hundreds more
characters to learn before your Chinese assessment and true Beijing winter has
descended in all its smoggy, windy, painfully dry* glory, it’s the
2000-words-a-week feminist blog that is the first thing to fall by the
wayside**. Thankfully, the presentations are over now, and whilst it’s still
going to be an uphill struggle to the end of this wintry semester, I should at
least be able to get there with some more feminism to keep me warm and you
entertained every week.
Many
things have happened, or not happened, in the world of feminism whilst I’ve
been labouring away on non-gendered real life things. Both the US and China had
political shake-ups with markedly different results for female representation-
Washington DC is now looking more female than ever, thanks solely to an
increasingly less white-man-dominated Democratic contingent (although
perspective is key), whereas in China a new Standing Committee was appointed whose
biggest cosmetic change is going from 9 middle aged Han Chinese men to 7 middle
aged Han Chinese men, whilst female representation in the Central Committee
decreased from 13/204 to 10/205, despite assertions from important people and
some of my professors that China is totally
interested in getting women into politics Adrienne, stop suggesting that the
lack of women in leadership problems might indicate wider societal
discrimination! So that’s a thing.
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| At least their ties are different colours? Image via Xinhua |
Meanwhile,
in the world of women in British politics- well actually the less said about
Nadine Dorries the better, moving swiftly on. Elsewhere, Ireland’s legal system
just killed a woman thanks to religious “respect” for the sanctity of life,
which is also something I don’t want to talk about until there is some good
news to put on the table. The rest of the world probably kept on turning as
well, with most of its happenings shamefully off my radar as I buried myself in
radicals (the linguistic construct, not the fun kind of people) and 19th
century liberal political thought and the fan-shaped development of Hefei.
When
real life comes knocking hard, there’s only one thing that I, rather counterintuitively,
manage to keep doing, and that’s watching the telly. Not the actual telly in my
room, which is just full of bland uninspiring permutations of CCTV- the CC here
being China Central rather than Closed-Circuit, although the fact that Chinese
state TV shares its name with a form of surveillance is an irony that doesn’t
escape me. Instead I try to keep up with an eclectic mix of British and
American TV shows through means I don’t care to discuss here. Being as I am
incapable of giving my concentration to one activity at once, particularly when
that activity is learning 1,200 Chinese characters, having a constant stream of
relatively unimportant audiovisual information intended to be understood by
people half my IQ works to keep me away from more self-sabotaging methods of
semi-distraction, like hours refreshing Facebook or Tumblr or starting a game
of X-COM: UFO Defence only to discover I’ve sunk 6 hours into trying to capture
a psychic alien without losing half of my fragile pixelated comrades in the
process.
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| Important studies for a student of development. Source |
There’s
two side-effects to this. One is that I’ve become infamous in numerous circles
over the years for an appalling lack of knowledge and experience with the cinematic
canon, and I’m not much better where TV shows are concerned- if you want to
talk about Avatar: the Last Airbender or Doctor Who I’m all over it, and the
same goes for The Room or Studio Ghibili films, but I’ve only ever seen one
James Bond film and got bored after two episodes of the Sopranos. Part of it is
the aforementioned attention span- honestly, movies are just too long for me to
sit and watch unattended unless they’re really
fun, and I couldn’t keep track of all the generic New Jersey accented men in
the Sopranos and write characters at
the same time. I also have a growing scepticism for most media aimed solely at
adults, which is most prevalent in my reading choices*** but definitely also
spills over into my viewing decisions as well. Clever, well-written stories for
children and young adults or “families” manage to skip so much of the “edgy”,
self-conscious blustering of a lot of grown-up stuff gets mired in.
But
a lot of it is also due to a wider malady suffered by many of us feminists, and
illustrated beautifully by the incredible Kara Passey: I’m addicted to feminist
media criticism.
Or,
not quite. As I’ve covered before, feminism isn’t something I turn on and off
when I decide I want to think about vaginas more or annoy people or start
arguments with defensive femi-muggles. So I don’t think that being irritated by
female representation in a lot of what I nevertheless avidly consume is an “addiction”,
as such, because that implies that it’s a shortcoming in me rather than a problem
with mainstream cultural thought. Unfortunately, having my feminist power
switch permanently stuck in the “on” position even when I’m supposed to be enjoying
entertainment leads to a lot of unintended and unhelpful side-effects- mostly
rage, to be honest- when things on the screen don’t fit in with the way I’d
like them to. And as a former English Literature student and one of
comparatively few people in the world who has been able to write “playwright”
on the job section of a US immigration form and get away with it, I’ve
unfortunately got both the academic background and the delusional
self-confidence to pretentiously analyse the shit out of the things I do spot.
Take,
for example, the only decent thing to come out of ITV in the last decade:
Downton Abbey. I love Downton Abbey. I want to get a civil union with Downton
Abbey. Downton Abbey is full of interesting female characters with character flaws,
one of whom is mired in a two season long unfulfilled romance that has been so successful
at skipping my conscious thought processes and wooing my ovaries that I
inexplicably find this man attractive and want to write stories about the two
of them kissing.
(I was going to take screenshots to go with this but instead I'm just going to shamelessly thieve the hard work of one of my absolute favourite Tumblrs in the world, Telegrams from Downton. Seriously if you haven't seen it or its parent, Texts from Last Night, leave here now and read them in full. They're not desperately empowering but they are desperately amazing.)
Unfortunately,
Downton Abbey also has the plotline of Sybil Crawley. The youngest, radicalest
sister who joins the suffrage movement and wears trousers! She is also
completely not class-conscious, despite being the daughter of an Earl, and
helps the ginger maid from season one to get a sweet typist’s job and thus
Social Mobility. How amazing for feminists have a character to relate to, in a
time period where a significant number of people today seem to think we belong.
Said character has a really fascinating relationship with a moderately
attractive radical Irish chauffeur, and that’s where the feminist in me- the
feminist that is me- starts to get a
bit annoyed.
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| Exactly how it goes down in the real thing. |
Radical
Irish chauffeur is an interesting character, and the way he gets to demonstrate
being an interesting character is by taking over the storyline of youngest
radicalest sister. This starts in the first season- when, for example, she goes
to a political rally despite being a weak upper-class woman, she of course gets
injured and goes unconscious and he has to meaningfully carry her away- and is
sort of an undercurrent in the second, although it’s subordinate to the several
years of Sybil going to Branson’s garage and going “I can’t marry you yet I’m a
posh nurse”. But by the third, Sybil turns into literally nothing but the
pregnant wife of her more narratively prominent husband. Watch Tom be
hilariously out of sync with upper class dress codes, and his wife be quietly
conflicted! Watch him escape the country for being involved in separatist
escapades, and then her follow him without having done anything interesting of
her own (except be pregnant!). Then, for the grand finale, watch the previously
really important feminist suffragette character die in childbirth because of the incompetence of a well-to-do male
doctor and the snobbiness of her dad, and then watch the rest of the storyline
be entirely about the Irish radical
and his scandalous Catholicism (and also he watched whilst they burned down
somebody’s house one time and he doesn’t know how to play cricket, what’s with
that.)
Curse
you, Julian Fellowes, for not only killing off everybody’s favourite character
but also for doing it in a way that sends my feminism into paroxysms of endless
amateur analysis. I was just trying to watch people with awesome hairdos make
googly eyes at each other, why do you have to go and ruin it? Especially when
other parts of the show and its creators impress me- Edith’s development has
been a highlight for me, allowing to her find a place for herself in an
in-character way that isn’t just about “OMG HUSBANDS”- and although it’s
something that they should have fixed already, the fact that Fellowes’ response
to being called out on a lack of racial diversity was “you’re right, we should
include X and Y historically accurate but diversifying categories of people”- better
than some “feminists”, isn’t that right LenaDurham. Perhaps my terrible lack of cinematic experience means that I just
haven’t found the right thing to compare this to, but I can’t think of a gender
reversed corollary where a pivotal male character gets shoved to the sidelines
in favour of the woman who was originally a prop for his development.
Of
course, the problem with getting mired in media criticism is that you can’t
actually make a factual case for any of this. The actual circumstances that led
to Downton Abbey sidelining and then killing off Jessica Findlay Brown’s
character are probably super complicated and spread across both the real and
fictional world, and much the same as my particular feminist reading leads to a
strong dislike of the storyline, I’m sure there are probably decent
interpretation, both feminist and patriarchal, which see the situation very
differently. With this in mind, perhaps it is
my fault that I can’t just sit down and weep over Lady Sybil like a good media
consumer without breaking down the universal implications for female
empowerment?
I’ve
got other problems too. I can’t decide whether Chasing Amy (which I watched for
the first time two weeks ago, I told you I was behind the times) is a fantastic
subversion of lots of tired societal tropes about women and lesbians or whether
that one scene in which Alicia’s lesbian friends universally deride her because
Man Hating instead of being able to enjoy her self-professed happiness negates
all the positive aspects. Merlin’s female representation has always been poor
but since the knights became the prominent secondary cast I feel like it’s got
even worse, and the loss of Morgause and the fact that none of the few female
characters are allowed to exist without displaying gravity defying cleavage at
all times really bothers me, especially as this slide is going on whilst the
show as a whole is getting better. I enjoy How I Met Your Mother but I have no idea why- similarly, watching Spy on
Sky 1 almost solely because of the beautiful majesty of Mat Baynton doesn’t
really negate the fact that it’s two notable adult women are depressingly
stereotypical (in fact, it makes it worse. I’m literally just watching it
because it contains the fittest man ever to grace a children’s historical
sketch comedy show. Also it is quite funny, in a patriarchal sort of way). And the less said about Doctor Who and
Amy Pond, the better. I am very apprehensive about soufflé girl. You have no
idea.
On
that note, I hereby declare that this blog is ending on a cliffhanger- as
befits my first entry about things I watch on telly. I’ve got more to say on
representation, depth and also about something that’s it’s not possible for me to complain about (I know, right!), but even I
can’t go on much longer in a single entry. Tune in next week!
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| Sentiments are not those of the author! |
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*except
during the freezing rain
**The
second is my participation in National Novel Writing Month, which is definitely
also a sore spot. Although there’s still time! I theoretically can write 3,333
words a day. It’s just unlikely.
***
Related: I’m almost to the end of the latest not-just-Percy Jackson book and oh my goodness I’m so worried how are they
going to escape the nymphs aaah! Just had to get that off my chest.
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