Arguably, Lucky McKee’s The Woman—heralded in promotional materials as “The Most Controversial Film of 2011”—is merely a close study of justifiable misogyny. Not that low-level, “no girls allowed” stuff we see in locker rooms these days, either. Misogyny as ideology, as spirituality. An abiding rejection of femininity, manifested in a violence so wretched and grotesque it becomes all-consuming, self-explanatory, and deeply righteous. It leaks from onscreen characters and encompasses the theater, the living room—viewers of McKee’s film are placed, for a time, in the uncanny position of acquiescence. It is uncomfortable. For although I live in a world that demands my destruction in a myriad of ways every day and I have thus learned to follow the logic of misogyny, I have no desire to feel it.
McKee’s film lays groundwork carefully. A five-minute opening sequence follows a feral woman through the woods. She is nurturing and careful, but also bloodsucking and unkempt, so definitely wild. A jump cut to Peggy, the teenaged daughter of a happy-enough-seeming family at a backyard barbecue—isolated and inconsolate—establishes this film as one about gender issues. Heavy-handed, but not unclever, McKee then ticks off a list of familial dysfunctions as the rest of the clan parades across the screen. Peggy’s brother, Brian, watches with glazed eyes as his youngest sister, Darlin’, gets roughed up by neighborhood boys. Their mother Belle (played by an unusually unhinged Angela Bettis) acts deflective and abused around her husband, even in public, even at a party. Upon repeated viewings, it’s clear we are witnessing emotionally and sexually abused family members re-enact their domestic roles for neighborhood innocents, but you don’t so much notice this on first viewing.
And that husband, Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers). There is nothing remarkable about him. He is brash and aggravating, and believes his jokes to be very funny. You have met him at family barbecues several times yourself. He is a lawyer, and he likes to hunt. When he goes off into the woods, he finds The Woman there, in the wild, through the site of his rifle. A deep bass line kicks in, the scene goes slo-mo, and we are suddenly in a rock video. She emerges from the water and arches her back, sexually, for him, as she redresses herself. He wants her, and not just to fuck. He wants to own her; a possession, a catch, a prize.
So he takes her. Chains her up in the cellar, and eventually, introduces her to the family. Not as a person, but as his thing, to wash and feed and use at will. Of course for sex—she’s not a person in his mind, but a masturbation aid. She isn’t human, she’s a wild woman, but also just a woman. The metaphors fall away quickly, thin veils that, until this moment, have kept Chris Cleek and by extension every other self-important lawyer/hunter/father you’ve ever met at a backyard family barbecue from going on a rape-and-murder rampage. The veils are labeled: society, respect, family, love, and when the last one falls away, we have only the patriarch, finally unhinged but honest, ranting against womanhood as he pummels every female in spitting distance to the ground.
In the last twenty minutes of the film, there are no more metaphors, only raw and pure misogyny explored to its fullest, without restraint. It is messy and sticky, like an underserved man’s well-earned orgasm. Belle, too late, speaks up. This is not tolerated. A meddling lesbian teacher, interfering, accidently unearths a family secret. She is punished. Peggy balks. She is beaten. Brian, revealed to be the psychopath and rapist he has been trained to be for his entire life, is rewarded. Finally, the men—having imposed total dominion over the women—set to tearing each other apart. And then, the tables are turned, sort of, although maybe put back where they belong?
We’ll return to those, the discomfiting final moments of the film, and pause to answer the question surely forming in your mind: How is this not the most offensive and depraved hate speech ever dressed up as entertainment and put on public display in the history of man? The studio’s marketing team would like you to believe that it is, but it is not. Because this film is not exclusively a performance of misogyny; it posits that misogyny might emanate, also, from women. It therefore imagines an abiding detestastion of femininity as something over which women may have control, even agency. The Woman degenders the misogynist, allowing misogyny a pervasiveness and logic that very closely mirrors reality. Believe it or not, that misogyny might exist in all of us is, actually, quite a hopeful notion.
Let’s consider this about misogyny: if we want to lay all the blame for all the problems of the world at the feet of men—AKA “the patriarchy”—we certainly may. Plenty of people do and they make their arguments quite well, whether they are dusty academics or eleven-year-old girls. There exists plenty of evidence, after all, to back up such claims. The adoration of the masculine as protector must also decry the feminine in all non-submissive forms, and who better to advance such a ridiculous notion than men?
Unfortunately, “because men” doesn’t provide a terribly satisfactory answer to the question of how a deep, anti-feminine undercurrent came to run through all of culture and society, providing an ethos for our very socio-economic structure. To hold as true that misogyny is wholly inescapable but emanates exclusively from men, we must also believe one of two things: 1) that women, who truly do exist in every corner of society, even if we cannot see them or do not acknowledge them, in point of fact do have no power, or 2) that women are party to the same flawed thinking as anyone else, as men, as the patriarchy, and therefore tend to use what power they do have toward disastrous ends, at least where gender equality may be concerned. The first construct strips women of agency—itself a misogynist act—while the second degenders misogyny and makes women complicit in it, blaming them, in part, for their own oppression. Yet it also offers a modicum of control over an otherwise external, and often overwhelming, force.
Now these strokes are overly broad and the gender binary easily disprovable, but the question I’m getting at is this: Would we rather our cultural products perform misogyny, or hold folks accountable to it? We could push this question further, for even an abiding belief in the gender binary is an act of violence against those who do not fall neatly into it: Would we rather perform transmisogyny or hold folks accountable to it?1
Most of us familiar with the term, in hoping to ultimately eliminate the need for it, would likely prefer a notion of misogyny that held folks accountable to gender-based violence in all forms. For filmmakers, however, the question is not always so simple. Consider, for example, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. “Accusations of misogyny are routine in discussions of Mr. von Trier’s films,” the New York Times summarized in a 2014 review of Nymphomaniac, following a tally of the harsh brutalities his leads are forced to endure throughout his oeuvre. (Rape by gang of sailors, rape by entire town, genital mutilation, and murder are such standard von Trier fodder that many were disappointed that 2011’s Melancholia merely ended with the world melting.)
The Times, however, decreed von Trier not a misogynist, based on the ample evidence the director himself has supplied, proving he believes women to be capable of performing under the most extreme circumstances in his films, upholding their narratives in the entirety in almost every single case. Indeed, the evidence for von Trier’s non-misogyny grows, for he found his original draft of Antichrist to be not misogynist enough, so he hired “Misogyny Expert” Heidi Laura, a woman, to deepen the abiding woman-hatred in the film.
For the film performers von Trier works with, the answer to the question I pose above is easy: they would rather perform misogyny—that is, perform the experience of it. They do so commendably. It is not in their job description to hold anyone accountable to anything, and performing actual misogyny has got to be a far cry more interesting than mildly reflecting it as the girlfriend or mother of a protagonist, who may not even have a name, much less a battle scar. The hope of such women actors, expressed in countless interviews and public statements, is to perform something well enough that indictment will follow—although by others, and later.
For von Trier, however, the question is more complicated: he wants to perform misogyny, but he wants to do it deliberately. So well, in fact, that he will find the folks who know the most about its effects and pay them to provide pointers on the stuff, even if they are women, because there are many many things that they are better at than men. (Suffering, apparently, is another skill he evidently believes women hold unique talent in.) His is a thoughtful performance of misogyny, and I submit that we are intended to believe that its aim is to hold others accountable for unchecked, undeliberate, unthoughtful misogyny elsewhere.
Yet the women in von Trier’s films all accept devastation, and that’s worth considering too—even Justine, Kirsten Dunst’s lead in Melancholia, submits to the world-ending scenario despite her otherwise fully narcissistic behavior, making no effort to shift the course of nature toward something more befitting her own interests, which otherwise dominate the plotline of the film. Von Trier may be performing misogyny with a considered delivery and purposeful intent, but his leading ladies hardly bother kicking against the pricks, as it were. The world they envision either allows for a great deal of unchecked feminine disapproval, or it will destroy itself and they will submit to it. Von Trier’s misogyny may be intentionally constructed, in other words, but without agency, his female characters are still left to its whims. They are not hopeful films.
Lucky McKee, arguably a lesser artist with a much tinier vision—certainly a genre filmmaker—takes a far more expansive view. His horrific universe is filled with horrible people committing horrible acts, too, although in his films can be detected another possibility: a future in which misogyny may be eradicated. What might it take to build that world? At the end of The Woman, we begin to have a sense.
“We belong to the gender of fear, of humiliation,” French theorist and filmmaker Virginie Despentes writes in King Kong Theory. “The other gender. Masculinity, that legendary masculine solidarity is formed in these moments and is built on this exclusion of our bodies. Pact based on our inferiority.”
What Despentes is posing is observation, but also prescription. By acknowledging the precise site of misogyny—as based in women’s own fear, humiliation, and inferiority—she perceives her own complicity in it.
Despentes also offers a corrective. She suggests eliminating that wellspring of gendered fear and humiliation with a display of power. “Going to gigs was the most important thing in my life,” she writes, in a passage describing her own violent rape after hitchhiking to a show. “Worth putting myself in danger for. Nothing could be worse than staying in my room, far from life, when so much was happening.” She will not apologize for her brazenness, or dwell in her naïveté. Despentes has simply weighed the options available to her, as a member of the “gender of fear,” and opts to acknowledge the danger by walking toward it. Experiencing it. During her own rape, she had a knife that she did not use. She writes:
A powerful and ancient political strategy has taught women not to defend themselves. . . . But women still feel the need to say that violence is not the answer. And yet, if men were to fear having their dicks slashed to pieces with a carpet knife should they try to force a woman, they would soon become much better at controlling their “masculine” urges, and understanding that “no” does mean “no.”2
Her knowledge of the political strategy used to keep women acquiescent, even when bodily integrity is at stake, is personal and deep: “I wish I’d been able to escape the values instilled in my gender that night,” she writes, “and slit each of their throats, one by one. Instead of having to live with being someone who didn’t dare defend herself, because she’s a woman and violence is not her domain, and the physical integrity of the male body is more important than that of the female.”
Despentes detects, in other words, her own misogyny. She was complacent to it, and allowed it to take place on her own body, allowed herself to become evidence of it, proof that it lived within her. Not a condition she was all that amenable to, in the end: she writes that she would prefer to carve it from the necks of her attackers—cutting it symbolically out of herself—than live with it inside her.
My own rape was less violent, and not the site of awakening to my own misogyny. That took more time. The realization that, as an editor, I tended to discredit submissions of women writers contributed. My disregard for feminized labor—care work like nursing and early childhood education—started to become clear. Additionally, my sense as a very young person that other young women were “competition” instead of “allies” helped me see that “the patriarchy” wasn’t keeping “women” down—I was. Learning to hate other women had taken time, too: My complacency to misogyny was honed over years of watching good, kind, well-meaning friends comply to the gender-based oppression on display in others, then embodying it themselves. My own rape should probably have been years earlier, in fact, as I was trained by a violent, racist, overbearing, alcoholic father to comply to his every whim from birth. Yet by the time it happened (at a party, there was drinking, everyone was acting crazy, verbal consent impossible in a foreign country where language skills are shaky), it felt so thoroughly natural that it took a decade to notice a violation had occurred. By the time I named it rape, it was already far in the past. By accepting it, unnamed, for so many years, I know that I have the capacity to overlook it if it happens again right in front of me. It is possible that I will let it happen to someone else. Perhaps I already have.
What I know, therefore, is that the shyness, reticence, fear, and humiliation Despentes points to—it needs to be stamped out. In myself and in others. Unlike Despentes, if I went back and slit the throats of everyone complicit in my rape, the bodies left open and bleeding would not only be those of men. That, in fact, is part of why it took so long for me to identify my experience as rape: because I did not understand that women are capable of misogyny. I thought my female friends by definition could not stand by and watch my bodily integrity be violated. Now I remember the time that they did.
If I could borrow Despente’s carpet knife and cut the misogyny from my favorite female friends, I certainly would. The submissive reaction of women to the dominant, violent culture, the way that they—we—have conformed to and upheld a dynamic that stripped women of agency and which they—we—accepted without adjustment—if I could find it in their bodies I would carve it out. If I could locate it in myself I would remove it and watch it die.
Film depictions of rape are diverse and telling. Take the classic rape-revenge fantasy I Spit on Your Grave. Originally released under the superior title Day of The Woman, Meir Zarchi’s 1977 film is brilliant, horror or no, rape-revenge fantasy or no. Although replete with unexamined class problems—spoiler alert: the idle rich win out over the struggling poor, in the end—there are few more accurate depictions of American culture than this little gem.
What distressed American viewing audiences (and why you may never have heard of it) is that the film takes Despentes’ pronouncement—that rape may be controllable if women learn to defend themselves with violence—seriously. And because it does, both the critical reception and the viewership of the film have been curtailed. The lesson on offer is how deeply abiding misogyny is, and how intrinsic to capitalism.
The film follows an urban transplant—a writer named Jennifer Hills—during her summer sojourn in the country by the lake. Her tranquility is broken, repeatedly, by four young men from town, and she grows agitated. Eventually, they nab her, bring her to a remote area of the forest, and rape her brutally and repeatedly. When they finally leave, we witness her struggle to stand and then slowly return home; there they are awaiting her and, again, attack. Three of the young men convince a fourth, who has some form of intellectual impairment, to kill her. He cannot, but claims that he did. Her recovery takes weeks, and when she reemerges, the group of rapists turn on each other in fury that she survived. United they may have been a threat, but once divided, she seduces each handily. Coitus Interruptus: she then kills each attacker in as brutal a manner as she can muster. It is remorseless and ever so slightly thrilling.
Jennifer does this impassively, played by a sensibly stoic Camille Keaton, Buster’s granddaughter. That she was married to Zarchi at the time undercuts the force of the film a bit—onscreen she is a serenely composed, self-aware, independent woman, both before and then a while after the rape. Her stage presence is commanding: it alone is worth audiencefuls of appreciation. Yet can a woman be depicted as remorseless without a supportive, offscreen husband?
Critics didn’t care, and panned it out of hand. (Inspiring a cult following, of course.) Roger Ebert gave it zero stars and called it a “vile bag of garbage . . . sick, reprehensible and contemptible,” getting the thrust of the film dead wrong overall but sprinkling in a muted, off-key cheer for “feminist solidarity.”3 (Barf.) Tasteless, irresponsible, and disturbing are common insults hurled by critics, and certain characters receive unfair portions of blame: namely the “retarded” rapist Ebert points to and the “sick”/“sadistic”/“degraded” female protagonist. Britain used the film to push for tighter control over film standards—censorship. Without the cult following the critical depreciation inspired, the film would have been effectively buried.
Carol J. Clover attempted to set the record straight in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws. Providing an overview of the film’s negative critical reception, she qualifies its inclusion in her tome on gender and horror by restating the purpose of the book: “To offer an account not just of the most but of the least presentable of horror,” nearly apologizing for the nod to the existence of the offensive garbage. She says that she does not “fully share” the negative views of the film—noting one interviewee’s suggestion that it be made compulsory viewing on high school campuses—and correctly identifies the film as not as shocking and less valueless than critics charged. She suggests that I Spit on Your Grave fails because it never adopted a masculist viewpoint, in which gang rape would be let off the hook as acceptable, and makes excellent points about individual culpability for violent actions—each rapist blames the others, at some point, or blames the victim, which begins to raise larger questions about how rape occurs. Yet whatever social value she may find in the film, Clover ultimately condemns it as artless.
It’s not true—long ponderous scenes of tranquility and solitude effectively underscore the plotline of the film, which lend it quite an arty sense indeed—but more interesting is Clover’s point about the gendered POV of the film. If it is true that Zarchi’s film failed to adopt a masculist viewpoint, and that this caused bigger meltdowns in the reviews section and at the box-office, we can surmise quite a bit about how allegiant we expect culture to be to the logic of rape and misogyny.
Strongly allegiant, it may be safe to say. Let’s take the subgenre of horror the film sits in as a first example. From a certain perspective, contextualizing a film as “rape-revenge fantasy” is a problem in itself. We do not have burglary-revenge fantasy films, although plenty of movies begin with a thieved item and continue under a plot dictated by its reacquisition. Movies in which kidnappers or terrorists are hunted down are not characterized as kidnapping- or terrorism-revenge fantasies. Kidnapping and terrorism are too correctly situated already as legitimate crimes to need to justify them as revenge-worthy. Too, films in which rapes occur in the first place are not termed woman-revenge fantasy flicks. In fact, sometimes they are just “fantasy,” if they are distinguished in any way at all. Rape, in fact, is the standard. In horror, in film, and in culture. Only retaliation against it is marked and unusual.
This is not to say that rape is inevitable, or common, or necessary—only that we do not condemn it thoroughly when it occurs. I didn’t, when it happened to me. Untold numbers of women don’t, either, some under confusion of what does and does not constitute rape. Confusion is more common in some circles than others—as Missouri House Rep. Todd Akin’s more recent claims of the impossibility of pregnancy in the case of “legitimate” rape indicate. Cultural confusion allows for a legal one. As Despentes writes, “With rape, it’s always up to you to prove you didn’t really give your consent.” In I Spit on Your Grave, Jennifer doesn’t bother proving anything to anyone. She simply extracts revenge.
I Spit on Your Grave allows for a cultural imaginary in which the domain of women is violence, both serene and justified, as Despentes suggests it should be. But culture has a way of enforcing adherence to norms, even if tiny pockets of resistance can be found; few know this as well as Despentes, who has also made films that were considered rape-revenge fantasies, and were censored. Her theory therefore holds, that “rape is a well defined political strategy: the bare bones of capitalism.”
In the end, capitalism marked I Spit on Your Grave. The film was problematized by critics like Ebert, who labeled it a deviation from the standard and acceptable depiction of gender politics and culture. Then the film was censored, for those same reasons. The domino effect continued. The film developed a small, cult audience—perhaps the best capitalism can do for women, in the end.
For fans of narrative diversity, as well as those who would prefer the eradication of misogyny, this presents a real problem. A truly great film, the fatal flaw of I Spit on Your Grave is that it fails to privilege a masculist worldview. This has kept it from wider distribution, critical acclaim, and audiences of all but the most dedicated enthusiasts. Could I Spit on Your Grave function as a social imaginary, allowing a possible future in which more men refrain from forced sexual assault out of fear of getting their dicks cut off in bathtubs? We simply don’t know, under capitalism—people would have to see it, first.
So we do not have Day of the Woman to look to, but we do have The Woman. The 2011 film somehow escapes the problematic rape-revenge framing—because Chris Cleek is given top billing?—but otherwise is set against this same sordid media history, and my theory is that what popular success McKee’s film has seen is due to its primary contention that women deserve the oppression they get. Most of the run time of the film, in fact, is obsessively devoted to its masculist viewpoint—the exact one lacking in I Spit on Your Grave.
In McKee’s tale, every female character eventually cannibalizes, consuming herself or others due to starvation, mistreatment, or a fear that is misunderstood to be love. You can read this as a metaphor if you like, but some of these women straight-up eat people. It is a cultural mandate, yes: in this world dominated by a hateful lawyer and his shitty rapist asshole serial killer son, the only means of feminine survival is to sacrifice your body or that of the nearest replacement female. You may starve if you do not consume the flesh of another. Women onscreen hold equal responsibility to men onscreen for the oppression of women, no question. (One of the smart turns of the film is that certain bizarre leaps in plot are blamed on a female character’s unrelated medical condition, Anopthalmia, the absence of one or both eyes: literally, a lack of ability to see. Women in The Woman are horrible because they are incapable of adopting a feminine viewpoint.)
Then McKee’s film takes a sharp turn. Until then a sheerly brilliant metaphor for present-day sexual politics, the narrative falters in its resolution. In the final moments of the film, the feminine returns to nature and nurture, and the masculine is left to rule society and culture: a false dichotomy based on a misguided assertion that gender is biological and cultural politics rooted therein. We will not know what Despentes may have taken from a world in which women make violence their permanent domain within an existing culture; McKee has women stepping back from society entirely, allowing it to remain the dominion of men.
A truly radical narrative might have destroyed this false dichotomy, already breached, or supplanted each with each: What would a society look like if women simply protected themselves in the world into which they are born? Then again a truly radical film would have featured a soundtrack and production by people who are not men, thus creating an economic infrastructure to support non-male cast and crew (as, somewhat awkwardly, von Trier occasionally does). A visionary filmmaker might even have followed through on Despentes’ suggestion that men can learn to refrain from rape and women can learn to embrace the violence of self-protection, and given us a glimpse of what that might look like.
The Woman isn’t, therefore, a radical feminist film. But by siting misogyny in women, it offers a glimpse of a future over which it can be controlled and eradicated.
A portion of this essay was originally published on The Blog is Coming from Inside the House.