It probably
doesn’t come as a surprise to most feminists that mainstream Hollywood movies promote a fair amount of sexism, misogyny, and nasty stereotypes of both women and men, just as I’m sure it
doesn’t come as a surprise to most people of color that the same pop-culture vehicle promotes racism and vicious racial stereotypes. The 2008 movie Taken, with Liam
Neeson and Maggie Grace, is no exception; it’s both sexist and racist. But the specific misogyny in this movie has led me to a surprising epiphany as to how I, and perhaps other women, have allowed sexist dogma to take control of my body.
As the camera slowly pans out from
Neeson holding his daughter, Grace, in her white negligee, the golden sheeted round bed, the dead non-specific-rich-Middle-Eastern-man on the floor, I was already contemplating a post-movie cigarette and the rare, “well that was a waste of time” conversation with my husband. But the credits failed to roll. The next scene shows Grace bumbling like a deer on new legs to her mother with the same smile plastered on her face as when she boarded the plane to France one hour and thirty minutes earlier--before she was sold to the sex-slave trade and nearly raped by said non-specific-rich-Middle-Eastern-man. But again, the credits failed to roll. In the final scene,
Neeson gives
a surprise to Grace: a music lesson with her favorite pop singer. Smiles a la
carte. Problems solved. Credits roll.
My feminist verbosity was muted. Hollywood had truly outdone itself. Where was the trauma? Where was the scarring? Then, three post-movie smokes later, it hit me: there was no trauma for Grace to contend with because she had not been raped. Her body, though stolen and sold, had never been physically penetrated so, of course, she was fine.
Never before had I seen such a dramatic portrayal of the stereotype—of one of the foundations of misogyny—that the female body is a holy sacred vessel. From this ideal comes the conundrum that women still face today. We are either whores or virgins. There is no in between. In
Christian mythology, Mary, Mother of God, must maintain her virginity in order to remain holy because the female body once entered physically becomes unclean, unholy. This ideal
continues to affect women worldwide, from the legally mandated physical covering of the body by some Islamic groups in the Middle East, to female genital mutilation in Africa, to good old fashioned sexual abuse, rape, and domestic violence epidemics here in the States. I wonder if the myth of the female body and the catch 22 it creates is the reason that Hollywood, and we as consumers of Hollywood, are so fascinated with stories of female rape and abduction? Is our collective unconscious still attempting to understand and solve the whore/ virgin conundrum? Perhaps.
And, perhaps, there is nothing revolutionary about my discovery, but it led me to a more tangible and, hopefully, more useful question: are we, as women, unconsciously allowing ourselves to be more traumatized by sexual abuse and violence than necessary because we have bought into this idea that our bodies are sacred vessels? Do we believe ourselves to be either whores or virgins?
I do not speak accusingly; I speak from experience. I am a member of the not-so-elite statistic: “1 in 6 women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime.”
[i] I know that rape, and all forms of sexual abuse, are extremely traumatic. I am not suggesting that rape is “no big deal,” and that we should all just “get over it.” On the contrary, I wonder if women could recover from the trauma of rape more quickly and, at the sake of sounding detached, more efficiently, if we realized that this misogynistic, illogical, and unreasonable stereotype/archetype is ingrained in our subconscious.
Taken made it clear to me that I have been hanging on to something intangible for too long. I have been clinging to the idea that something has been taken from me that I can never get back. But that is the virgin/ whore ideal speaking. I was a virgin. Then I became a whore, and my life was over. I have been living as if my body constitutes my entire identity, while simultaneously fighting this perception as a feminist. I have been viewing my experiences as if my body had not been violated, had I been Grace, I would not have any trauma to deal with.
The reality of what happened to me, and to many other women, is not sexual or even physical. What happened to me was about power. Rape is an abuse of power; it is the physical representation of the male power that exists in our society. That is what has lingered. That is what hurts. My body is just my body, and it has healed. What I am left to deal with is my position as a woman in a society where men have power over me. The root of this problem lies in unequal power dynamics, not sexuality. That is why Taken is so shockingly unrealistic. Everything is taken from Grace, except her virginity. Had it not been for her father’s divine intervention, she might have lost it all…but thanks to Grace, and the movie Taken, I have come to realize that I haven’t lost anything, except, perhaps, time.
[i] http://www.rainn.org/statistics
