We Were Feminists Once by Andi Zeisler

Author:Andi Zeisler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610395908
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

The Same Old Normal

CHAPTER 6

Killer Waves

If the backlash against feminism that began in the 1980s had a theme song, it would be the ominous musical score to Fatal Attraction, the 1987 thriller that packed all the fear and loathing of women’s liberation into 119 minutes of running time and became the backlash’s filmic standard-bearer. We probably all know the story by now: Married man meets single woman for a one-night stand. He peaces out, she becomes obsessed. Suicide is attempted, a tranquil suburban home is invaded, a pet bunny is boiled. Order is restored when the wronged wife kills the imposter who has dared to sully her marriage (not to mention her bathtub). The moral of this cautionary tale? Single career ladies are fucking scary, man.

I would submit, though, that 1987’s John Updike adaptation, The Witches of Eastwick, is at least as emblematic of 1980s big-screen backlash as Fatal Attraction. As Updike originally wrote them in his novel of the same name, the witches Alexandra, Jane, and Sukie are formerly partnered but now happily single women who are aware and in control of their supernatural powers, and deploy them occasionally and shrewdly. In the movie, by contrast, the women are widowed, divorced, and deserted ciphers (played respectively by Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer) who only become attuned to their flair for witchery once the rich, mysterious, and bizarre Daryl Van Horn moves to town to seduce them and turn their boring lives upside down with sexual chaos. Jack Nicholson’s Van Horn mesmerizes each women in turn with windy monologues about the nurturing, elemental power of the female sex, as well as denigrations of the average dick-swinging male. “Men are such cocksuckers, aren’t they?” he coos to Sarandon’s Jane, the town’s prim orchestra conductress. “You don’t have to answer that. It’s true. They’re scared. Their dicks get limp when confronted by a woman of obvious power and what do they do about it? Call them witches, burn them, torture them, until every woman is afraid. Afraid of herself… afraid of men… and all for what? Fear of losing their hard-on.”

The film (whose director, George Miller, is the man behind 2015’s most-feminist-movie-of-the-year, Mad Max: Fury Road) revels in superficial ideas of female power and potency, but tempers them at every turn by punishing the characters who dare to believe that their power offers them independence. When small-town gossip about the women threatens to derail their livelihoods and they pull away from Van Horn, he wastes no time punishing them: calling them witches and torturing them until . . . well, he said it himself. Finally, in desperation, the ladies pool their powers to fight back, and Van Horn’s true feelings about women are revealed in the spectacular set piece that results. As he stumbles, vomits, and pratfalls (did I mention this is a comedy?) into the town church under the women’s spell, Van Horn rants about the evil that women inflict on any poor soul willing to love them, and

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