A Law of Her Own by Caroline Forell Donna Matthews

Author:Caroline Forell, Donna Matthews [Caroline Forell, Donna Matthews]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Law, Gender & the Law, Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory
ISBN: 9780814726778
Google: Jeg8DAAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2001-05-15T05:23:28+00:00

Fatal Attraction (1987) is Hollywood misogyny, not real life. When men watched the film Fatal Attraction, they found the female stalker’s behavior terrifying—when a female stalker was portrayed acting like a male stalker, men “got it.” They understood that it isn’t really “just annoying” to be stalked in the way men stalk women. The reasonable woman standard would require decision makers to “get it” in real life, which, based on statistics and popular media, they certainly do not.

A recent popular “romantic comedy,” There’s Something about Mary (1998), illustrates the male view of how stalking affects women. Stalker jokes and antics abound. As presented in this movie, stalking is funny, and appropriate stalking leads to romance with the woman stalked—even when she completely outclasses the stalker. Mary is an extremely pretty, single, professional woman living an ordinary life. The comedy revolves around the antics of the four men who are obsessed with her, none of whom she knows as more than an acquaintance. The “hero” is a man who has thought about no one but Mary since they went to the same high school. Thirteen years later, still obsessed, he hires a private investigator to locate Mary. After seeing her, the investigator also becomes besotted and decides to stalk Mary. As the movie develops, we learn about two more men who just can’t stop stalking her. There’s just something about Mary—not something wrong with these guys. They can’t help it; she’s responsible for what happens by just being who she is.

After the hero locates Mary, he travels thousands of miles and arranges to “accidentally” run into her. He picks up a traveling companion—a psychopathic murderer—who, by contrast, makes the hero and the rest of the stalkers look good. The stalkers watch and follow Mary constantly, listening in on her every word. The culminating scene involves three of the stalkers rescuing her from the most disturbed stalker—the one who was so scary and bizarre that Mary got a stalking protective order against him, moved to another state, and changed her last name. Not that any of this did any good—he still stalked her. Next to him, the others look pretty innocuous—they are the funny, harmless stalkers, the “normal” ones. After rescuing her, the three normal stalkers demand that Mary choose among them. Even when they give her the option of choosing the one man in her life who has not stalked her, she still chooses the movie’s hero. At the end, we are left with the impression that Mary realizes that she loves this stalker—whom she knows only because he has been stalking her—instead of her sensitive, handsome, rich, famous, and nonstalking boyfriend, and that she and her stalker will live happily every after.

What makes this movie funny, in contrast to the reverse-gender terror of Fatal Attraction, is its portrayal of stalkers as just regular guys who go a little overboard. They are goofy. This movie tells us that stalking women is, for the most part, harmless—even the scariest stalker was just interested in Mary’s shoes.

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