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Animal Crossing Wild World - 8am
Hey there! This page is some writing I've done to collect my thoughts and share them with friends. I hope it makes you think thoughts.
The traps of womanhood and what it means to use one’s sexuality as a means to empowerment.
Spoilers ahead.
Sexuality is the only tool Anora’s Annie has ever had. She doesn’t have access to money, status or education, so as a sex worker, her life opportunities and access to social mobility rely entirely on her sexuality. When Vanya meets her, it’s through her work, and when his family rejects her, it’s for her work. Her sexuality is her only tool, and yet, it is the thing that traps her in her socioeconomic position. Her sexuality gave her a taste of freedom, but it prevents her from truly being free. Anora is, in part, a story about what it is to be a woman.
I am a middle-class, educated woman who lives in an entirely different social and economic environment to Annie. Yet her story, one of violence and pain in relation to her gender, deeply resonated with me. As women, we cannot have a relationship with our sexuality that is separate from the violence and subjugation that we have (and continue to) experience/d. These four stories are all stories about what it is to be woman. They’re also all stories about violence, power and isolation. To me, they illuminate the pokey corners of what empowerment means for women living in a society built around patriarchy.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred has been reduced entirely to an object of procreation; she is her reproductive system. She is entirely powerless,so she seeks what empowerment she can get by using the tools she has available. She is acutely aware of her sexuality. She can feel men’s eyes on her body even through layers of fabric. She knows that their desire for her gives her power over them. She has forbidden fruit. She smuggles butter to use as moisturiser, to protect her beauty. The world has told her she’s an object, but she clings onto her womanhood as a reminder otherwise. Yet, her womanhood is the thing that renders her an object. In her world, women are inherently lesser, and their potential sexuality is justification for this constructed truth. She clings to her beauty to keep her power, but it is a patriarchal world that defines what beauty is. She uses her sexuality and femininity as a tool, but it is also a tool society uses to subjugate her.
Butter’s Manako Kajii was excluded as a child because she got her period and a body seen as more ‘feminine’ younger than most. She was perceived to be a woman before she was one, so like Annie, she was forced to use it as a tool. As an adult, she keeps several non-committed relationships at a time which she claim fulfil her sexual and emotional needs. However, we see that she is really a lonely and troubled person. Her internalised misogyny results in violent outbreaks that push her further from female friends and towards rich men who only value her for her willingness to serve them. Kajii believes her sexual freedom is demonstrative of her overall freedom, but because she relies on her sexuality as the means to empowerment, patriarchy and internalised misogyny have locked her into a life lacking connection with others. She has spent her life in servitude to men who neither respect her nor fulfil her needs.
Offred, Annie and Kajii are all placed in positions where their sexuality is their only means to find empowerment and freedom. However, their sexuality is also the thing that renders them powerless in patriarchal societies. Offred lives in Attwood’s speculative fictional future America where women are all reduced to objects for men’s use. However, Attwood says her work is speculative fiction rather than science fiction because “all of these things are real.” Annie and Kajii live in modern day New York and Tokyo respectively. The patriarchal structures they live under are not fictional. While women in my corner of the world now experience freedoms we never have before, patriarchal structures are still present in how we experience and express gender. Women are therefore still beholden to these structures in the ways we experience and express sexuality. At the same time, patriarchal structures also reduce women to their sexuality. Whether or not a woman seeks to express her sexuality, she will be seen as a sexual object. Female sexuality has been painted as an ‘asset’ granting women power over men. This is a temporary fallacy, created by patriarchal structures built around male power over women. We see it is a fallacy when women face the consequences.
Kajii has been convicted of murdering three of her partners and sentenced to life in prison. This (alleged) violence is the outcome of a life of isolation and servitude. She faces two narratives pushed by the media that seem to hold equal moral weight: she is a murderer, but she is also an overweight, lazy woman who somehow seduced innocent men into sponsoring her extravagant lifestyle. Butter explores the pressures that push on Japanese women from all sides: be thin, be beautiful, don’t be a slut, be hard-working, be a homemaker, prioritise caring for your husband. Kajii fails to meet many of these standards and as a result she is painted as a siren luring men to crueldeaths. She is even accused of leading other women astray. There are no limits to her depravity, and backlash seems focused on her many failures as a woman, rather than the actual act of.
Offred is alone in her world. What limited connection she builds with other handmaids is perverted by the conditions of the world: their intelligence seems to turn to petty gossip, their rebellion turns to meaningless in-fighting. The handmaids are eventually driven to mindless violence as a sort of repressed animalistic revolt.
While Annie does experience physical violence because of her links toVanya, the violence of isolation and powerlessness cuts deeper. In the final scene of the movie, we see how trapped she is in her sexuality and how deeply lonely she is. I use the word violence because it is easy to see her as a victim of her situation, but I want to draw attention to the role that patriarchy plays in inflicting violence. This isn’t a rule of the universe, this is a constructed system of oppression enforced and reinforced by humans.
Stag Dance adds a new dimension to this story. Babe is a hulking lumberjack, known for his immense size, strength and ugliness. When he and his crew are given the option to attend their camp dance as a woman, Babe volunteers. We see his strong desire to experience womanhood and be courted by the other men. His glimpses of womanhood as the other jacks recognise his femininity, although brief, are a source of inner fulfilment and outer freedom from the physical body.
However, choosing womanhood makes Babe a vulnerable target to new violence. Folk tales filled with drowning maidens and adulterous wives set a harsh backdrop. He had previously sat comfortably in the ranks of the jacks, but now he is excluded and laughed at. The name Babe, a folkloric reference won by his strength, becomes a demeaning jab. And yet, he wants womanhood. To prove his femininity he chooses to perform weakness, which in turn, makes him truly weaker. In the ultimate punishment for his choice to become a woman, Babe is turned into a ghoul of folklore, a perverse personification of male violence called forth by his feminine sin.
Stag Dance explores elements of what it is to be trans, but it illuminates something about what it is to be any woman, trans or not. Like Annie, Offred and Kajii, Babe is caught in a violent trap. When he chooses woman, his agency is removed and he is forced to use the tools of femininity he has (petroleum jelly lip balm, performing delicateness) to win his safety from men who hold power over him. The choice to be woman and express his inner feelings of femininity (an empowered choice) is the things that makes him powerless. The influence of trans women’s experiences on Stag Dance brings violence to the forefront and shows the extent that gender expression justifies harm and exclusion. It also reveals that these violent power structures are constructed.
Babe’s transition to woman is almost entirely social rather than physical, let alone biological. Yet, the biological differences between women and men is present in the power dynamics between Babe and the other jacks. He is made to feel smaller and weaker, and he is placed in a position of subservience under the camp leader. He eventually becomes a scapegoat for the camp’s misfortune and the target of an angry mob acting like witch hunters. But he still looks like a hulking lumberjack. The camp hates him because of his performed femininity, not some biological truth about women.
...
If I was more radical, my call to action would be for us women to build new communities and ways to thinking to move beyond our current systems of gender. But I’m not very radical. I could have written this from a hopeful perspective: These women are trapped by invented gender power structures, yet they still find empowerment by reclaiming this tool of subjugation. But I didn’t. I don’t feel hopeful about this, and I am more emotionally connected to the pain these women face than the brief moments of connection and fulfilment they find.
Maybe my titbit of hope is that we, as participants in these structures, can be better informed and better equipped. Is there a point in being equipped for an impossible trap?