Welcome to Issue 12 of Obsessions, one lesbianâs obsession with the body and culture. In this post, I will be writing about the movie Promising Young Woman as a way to open the door to cis womenâs experiences with sexual assault and misconduct in 2021. This piece will not cover sexual assault as it affects non-binary and trans-identified people. Nor will this cover cis menâs experiences as survivors. When names are used, they have been altered and identifying details have been changed. In terms of supporting this work, please forward my work to your friends.
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In 1990, Karen Finley performed âWe Keep Our Victimsâ Readyâ in New York City. That same year, John Frohnmayer at the NEA vetoed her grant for her performance art. This was art about #MeToo before #MeToo. Art about womenâs bodies. Iâm not going to say it was art about non-binary bodies or trans bodies because I think thatâs assigning meaning to her art that didnât exist at the time. Her performance art piece was based on a 1987 case where a woman was found barley conscious in a trash bag. At this time, Karen Finley was a serious art fixture who was living hand to mouth according to her memoir. Â When the NEA threatened to pull her grant, she gave a protest speech in DC and a man in the audience threw a glass of urine at her.
You can watch clips from âWe Keep Our Victims Ready,â but there is some danger in taking these clips out of context. Itâs not easy to summarize. Although please, if youâve got the creative muscle to summarize, please do the dirty work for me in the comments.
The film Promising Young Woman opened for online viewing to mainstream audiences this month in January 2021. We meet the character Cassie at a bar frequented by lawyers and business men. Her body is slumped on a burgundy leather couch that frames her slight figure dressed in a white button down and tight black skirt. The instrumental horror music frames an entitled conversation that three men are having about the women they work with. The men want to know why canât we have work events at strip clubs anymore? Why do women in the department complain about the wage gap when they could just âwork harder?â We are supposed to already believe that these men are dumb, dumb douche bags. And we watch Casssie drop her head and open her legs as the music gets louder. One of the guys offers to help her out by getting her a ride share and then insists she come upstairs while they are in the ride share.
My hands and lips get tight watching as this man from the bar tries to make out with her non-responsive face. Cassie is not moving her tongue or arching her back or looking at him. She is like a flopping, distressed tulip. He starts kissing her while her hands fall flat by her sides and her mouth is shut closed like someone who is asleep.
âI need to lie down,â she says.
And so the man takes Cassie to his bed and she lies down, and he takes her panties off without her consent and Cassieâs voice changes to a clear, deep confident, âWhat are you doing?â
Again, âHey, I said. What. Are. You. Doing?â
Iâm not relaxed. Iâm nervous about this slight woman alone in this manâs apartment. But I take some comfort in the depth of her tone. Sheâs confident even though sheâs still at risk.
âEvery week I go to a club. I act like Iâm too drunk to stand. And every week a nice guy comes over to see if Iâm okay, â Cassie explains to the audience.
We find out that Cassie regularly goes to bars to see what so called nice guys may do with a woman who appears to be very, very drunk. She is looking for proof that her reality is real. That those who survive rape are left with damages and those who rape often move on like they just ran over a very dead squirrelâs body.
The movie does creatively and artistically what the political reporting by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey does factually for #MeToo. Complicit patriarchal ecosystems have become emotional places that characters can inhabit because the mainstream can finally imagine a patriarchal ecosystem. This is new.
Cassie only cries once on screen.
She spits in a guyâs coffee.
She tells her Mom she has no friends.
She kicks a trash can.
And she plots revenge.
Complicit patriarchal ecosystems ravage womenâs bodies. Sorry, Iâm so sorry, sorry. Sorry I forgot to open the door for you. Sorry I forgot to smile at you. Sorry I forgot that you were going to knock into me. Sorry that you might hurt me or kill me or blame me. Sorry Iâm so pretty. Sorry Iâm so ugly. Sorry Iâm wearing a mask and standing in line and you are cutting in front of me. Sorry you raped me, but it took me five years to tell the police and âI led you onâ to think youâd go scot free. So, so sorry. Oh, and itâs often selfish women who keep us in line. Sorry Weinstein raped you but like Iâm up for an Oscar and even though my pockets are already lined with cash, I will chose my Hollywood ordained ascendance over protecting other women.
Women choosing their careers over other women is baked into capitalism.
This whole, I-actually-care-enough-about-other-women-to-take-risks-thing is actually relatively new and pretty wobbly at best. I mean at least with folxs whose ascent is based on proximity to powerful, wealthy cis men.
The anti-hero Cassie seeks accountability. And no other person in the film will provide it. The dean at the school where Cassie dropped out chooses the reputations of the young men over the accounts of young survivors even with video evidence. The man she is dating turns out to be guilty by association. Even after the victimâs implied suicide, women slut shame the victim.
When I was 23, my friend Taryn told me a highly traumatic story that involved an acquaintance Iâll call Lauren who apparently had had sex with multiple men at a college house party. Yes, she had been drinking. Yes, she was sexually less experienced. My friend at the time thought Lauren was a slut. I remember saying something along the lines of Why would she, when was probably a virgin, choose to have sex with multiple men at a big party? The idea that that could have been consensual smelled like bullshit. I knew Lauren was Christian, and I was familiar with the slice of Christians that viewed women as floating tulip baby machines that love to make cupcakes and must be protected by good men. I was also aware that must like religious fundamentalist patriarchs everywhere women were viewed as damaged when men were the damaged ones.
Nothing magical happened with Taryn that night. Because I didnât really know Lauren, I was able to have a pretty calm conversation with Taryn. Iâm sure my brow was furrowed, but I didnât have to endure having a friend call me a slut when I survived a horrific sexual assault. But the thing is Taryn honestly was no different than the characters that stand by the rapist in Promising Young Woman or the hordes of people that stood quiet around Harvey Weinstein.
That was around 2005. Internalized misogyny was all the rage.
2005 was the year Courtney Love warned women about Harvey Weinstein and was publicly ignored.
In 2005, a famous actress somewhere must have known Courtney Love was telling the truth and that person did nothing, or that person told a reporter who did nothing, or that reporter told their boss who did nothing. Folxs told Rose McGowan that no one would believe her because she did a sex scene once. And guess what, so many other women who were not living paycheck to paycheck stayed quiet.
Dear Courtney Love and Rose McGowan, I love you, and America is a puritanical shit show. But as Shilpa Ray likes to sing, âAmericaâs got the talent to seduce you to reduce yourself. Americaâs got the talent to seduce you to reduce everybody else.â
Cassie is seeking revenge because her friend, the victim of a videotaped rape, is dead. She distrusts the man she is dating who turns out to be implicated in her friendâs rape. She distrusts the dean where she dropped out because the dean takes the manâs side even though there is evidence on video.
Karen Finleyâs character in âWe Keep Our Victims Readyâ is a woman society doesnât want to understand because understanding her would mean looking at ways we enable harm. She is more problematic than Cassie because we canât totally place her. Is she the victim or is she the assailant? Â
The character demands that we visit dark closets. She shapeshifts from one unlikeable woman to another. And we donât know her history. We just feel the shape of her voice. And because the actor is loud and naked, she is censored by the NEA. Even though art may be the one place where a woman could embody trauma so that the audience can be invited to know a thing, the NEA still wants to censor Ms. Finley because naked storytelling women are far scarier than men who sexually assault women over decad
Karen Finleyâs work is made to make the viewer sit with their own discomfort. I donât know that we had the language in the 1990s to say discomfort around consent specifically, but I do think we had the language to look at discomfort around women.
The discomfort and the dissonance is in the color palette. Cotton candy pastels draw us into Cassieâs hyper feminine look. Her nails are softly rounded rainbow pastels. She is often wearing a rose-gold lipstick that screams Goldie Hawn. Her sweaters are soft and pink covered in roses or daisies. She looks like a rainbow Cinnabon swallowed by flowers. When she goes out at night, her neck is wrapped with a choker and her clothes are tighter and golder. She looks like a pharmaceutical saleswoman with a drinking problem. Â
If Lux Lisbon from the movie Virgin Suicides were to grow up and move back with her parents, she very well might be Cassie. Beautiful, very blonde, sugary looking, and depressed.
Promising Young Woman can feel rather clunky with the way the characters conform to the plotline rather than the plotline conforming to who the characters are. But part of the reason the movie feels clunky is because the director Emerald Fennell is doing something that is new in film. She is addressing #MeToo by expanding on the moods and emotions and pains of the women affected while flattening the men. And if someone wants to complain that the men are two dimensional, maybe ask first why we have 22 seasons of mainly dead women on Law & Order SVU.
I think back to Karen Finleyâs âWe Keep Our Victims Ready.â And I think quite a bit about awkward conversations Iâve had with other women defending men where my gut said he did something very, very wrong. What does it mean to be responsible to our own communities? And also when are cis men going to start showing up and actually doing their part? And what does it mean to refuse to simplify that which is complicated in a patriarchy?
For me, the movie was hard to watch because there is a helplessness that emerges for the character that resembles a helplessness I feel looking at my own healing. How are survivors of sexual assault supposed to heal when we feel the stories of E. Jean Carroll and the attacks on Rose McGowan in our own bodies? How are we supposed to believe compassionate justice is possible when Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court? The story of E. Jean Carroll is particularly disturbing because itâs a reminder that I believe women know in their bones; a man can assault you and it can be particularly entitled and obvious and he can still be President of the United States. Women choose problematic men over and over because nestling under patriarchy still means more opportunities under capitalism.
Thanks for reading. Please share your thoughts on Promising Young Woman and #MeToo in the comments. And please like the piece if you feel called.
Thank you dear Obsessors,
Renee
Media that influenced this piece:
Promising Young Woman. 2020.
A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley. 2000.
She Said. Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey. 2019.
The Catch and Kill Podcast with Ronan Farrow. Pineapple Street Studios. 2019-2020
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Renee, you never cease to amaze me with your pieces. This is so thought provoking. Thank you for bringing this out in the light.
Ah thank you! Have you seen the movie?