Recently, Zach and I watched the 1993 classic Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray. I'd never seen it before, and Zach had only seen it once ages ago, so we figured it would be a good date night movie.
And I hated it.
Like, viscerally hated it so much that I couldn't sleep that night. I sobbed for a while. I had a bad taste in my mouth the whole following day, too.
(Have I ever mentioned that I'm annoyed at how strongly I react to movies?)
It's objectively a good movie. It's funny, it has lots of sweet moments, and it has a lot of beautiful subtext about searching for meaning in life and learning to become content and help others rather than endlessly chasing pleasure.
But it also featured my least favorite trope in any scenario: a person lying and manipulating to trick another person (bonus points: someone he doesn't care about in the slightest) to get them to have sex (more bonus points: it's presented as a joke).
I spent the rest of the movie wishing the main character would die in a fire.
Sure, there was a redemption arc. Sure, he learns his lesson about how that's not a good way to live life. But at its heart, the trope was used as a throwaway gag, a "LOL, look at what a jerk he is, haha" that propped up his character development for later in the film.
And it really, really bothered me.
At first glance, my reaction felt outsized, even to myself. Why was I so upset over a work of fiction? I've been picking at that thread ever since, trying to follow it to the core of what welled up in me while I sat on the kitchen floor in the dark and cried because I felt so inexplicably furious at the world.
There is no straight line between this trope and my own experience. The scenario has never happened to me personally. Yet, I fear that I'm one of the few women who can say that.
And I think that's the heart of it. It doesn't matter whether I've experienced it— so many other people have. It happens to all genders, but of course it hits especially hard for me to see it acted out in a film on a woman, as a gag. A joke. A "LOL whoops" point on the male hero's character development. Who cares about her, anyway?
It reminds me of the vulnerable place that so many women occupy in the collective imagination of our culture.
It reminds me of the way sex has been used to manipulate and subjugate.
It reminds me of how I grew up being told over and over again that it was a woman's world now and men were the ones who were really oppressed, and how I aggressively saw the world through that filter for decades, not realizing how much I was damaging myself.
It reminds me of all the classic works of literature and film and philosophy and theology that implicitly or explicitly demean and devalue women but we are told to "overlook that" because a bunch of men decided that everyone should like it.
It reminds me of the way I, the chronic storyteller as a kid, almost always played a boy in my make-believe stories because I couldn't even conceptualize women as anything other than a prize, a character-development tool for the male hero, or a punchline.
I don't really have any deep thoughts to come out of this. I am tired and upset, and upset that I'm tired and upset, and writing is a way of processing, and so I write. I write and I let myself feel, and I reach out to find better stories to tuck into my heart, stories of respect and power and agency and love.
Some days, the weariness of existing in the world as a woman is just really hard.
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