How feminist views change as you get older

[Michelleoftheresistance]

Or films that make you go hmm....

I remember being shown several key women's films while I was doing A levels and at university, in one case studying women writers. Shirley Valentine was one, Educating Rita was another. I got the general key messages at the time: women trying to escape the stereotypes to be more, to be allowed to be themselves, to seek their own fulfilment instead of someone else's, the unfairness of societal roles.

I saw Educating Rita again a few days ago, not having seen it in decades, and it was like watching a completely different film. For a start, when I first saw it as a teenager, I saw Rita as a mature student, an adult much older than me, where I watch it now and think she's early twenties, she's so young and there's vulnerability there I hadn't seen.

But the key message of that film for me watching it now is a triangle of incompetent males who were certain they could be happy if they could force Rita to be who they wanted. Her abusive father, her horrible husband, the creepy professor. All males, incapable of taking responsibility for themselves or their problems, trying to compel a woman to turn herself in to what they needed to fix them, and punishing her when she didn't do it right or it didn't work, or she dared to have boundaries.

Totally different insights. And don't get me started on My Fair Lady....

Has anyone else found their perspectives have shifted radically with different stages in their lives?

Yes I remember watching fiddler on the roof and sympathising with the girls. Now I'm with the parents and I worry about them.

The snog in the Empire Strikes Back - as a teen, the stuff of which my early romantic fantasies were made. As an adult.

Mrs Doubtfire seemed hilarious when I was a teen too, now it just gives me the creeps.

Somehow even as a teen, though, I had the nous to see the ending of Grease as downright creepy - turn yourself into someone you're not to win the love of the bad boy. Erm, no thanks.

On the other hand the one I watch and think "no one would make an all-female ensemble piece like this any more" is Nine to Five.

Good morning Vietnam- when I was younger I didn’t see anything wrong with Robin Williams character following the Vietnamese girl he fancied & bribing his way into the school to teach her. Now I’m urrrghhhhhhhhhhh

Oh yes to all those, especially Madam Doubtfire!

Late 80s/early 90s: Fire in belly, red under the bed in my teens. Politics to PHD level. Loads of feminist reading and analysis. Said it before, and I think of it with all the young women into ‘liberal fem’ sex work is work stuff - I made myself be liberal (more correctly in my case a humanist feminist). I deliberately avoided rad fems like Dworkin, as one example, as I knew I’d have to live in the world with men and I really wanted children. I knew if I read them I’d struggle to accept the structural oppression and how ingrained it was and have those things.

Last 5 years, now with teenage kids of both sexes and some personal stuff, I seem to be plonking myself in with the rad fems who see sex and reproductive capacity as the root of the oppression of women as a sex class (bit of socialist/Marxist in there too).

It’s actually unusual to get more radicalised with age but there we go.

And yes, I look back at much of the cultural canon with a new eye (though I was always instinctively suspicious of things I term ‘boy shit’ but when I was a teenager there was so little to counter it with and what was coming out was often from the margins and fairly obscure). One of the joys has been women owning the cultural means to be heard!

Even watching Friends and Sex in the City is entirely different now.

Phoebe giving away the triplets, Brad Pitt playing an angry incel, Ross pretending to be a girl when he was little.

Carrie being a bit of a numpty in relationships and being quite selfish. Samantha wanting a boob job. Charlotte pushing Harry to propose. I still quite like Miranda.

Becoming a mum changed me and once I found FWR I was fully converted. So glad I found Mumsnet.

I remember being a bit uncomfortable at the scene where the main character films a girl without her knowledge in American Pie when I watched it aged 14, now I look back in horror that it was considered comedy in a mainstream film.

Willy Russell writes pretty good parts for women in his plays, but I wonder if he thought Educating Rita was about the woman - which I don't think it is - or about three incompetent males failing in their lives and trying to use a woman they saw as a kind of prop or mirror?

I seem to have got increasingly less willing to lose myself in the tragedy of the male characters as I think I'm supposed to, and to have much higher expectations mixed with outrage at the inequality of behaviour. Mrs Doubtfire being a very good example.

Mrs Doubtfire is definitely creepy. I also remember siding with him at the start of the film - he was just throwing a fun party! - which I very much do not do now.

All the films - too many to count - in which the man leaves the 'nagging', 'uptight' woman, who normally dares to have a financially successful career, for the carefree, undemanding woman who does something artsy that seems to take none of her time.

Rita was mid or late twenties I think, not early twenties. I don't think the lecturer was creepy either. He fell in love with her and they were both adults. Maybe he did try to use her as a prop, but she outgrew him anyway.

American Pie was very cringy to watch with its peephole style of rudeness, all for the male gaze.

I loved the sketches with Paul Finch and Stifflers mum as a welcome change. Unfortunately it seems that's where the term MILF originated from. Sigh

Agree about Grease. Saw it when it first came out and enjoyed it, so went happily along to a charity sing-along event and ended up feeling very uncomfortable as everyone just went along with it.

Brief Encounter which I still love for the music. I sympathised with the woman having the affair with the dashing doctor but now see him as a predator who nearly killed her

Now I do exactly the same when my dds watch MTV with really talented young artists twerking and touching themselves. I just think of all the male executives creaming off (literally) the money from that and how not much has changed - men can be old, ugly, covered up. But women have to be very young, pretty and half naked

I think the problem here is these young women are not talented artists. There are plenty of talented women in the music industry who don't have to cover up their absence of talent by taking their clothes off and you do a huge disservice to those women.

I was 19 when I saw Grease when it came out. It was bloody awful. So many things wrong with it.

It’s actually unusual to get more radicalised with age but there we go.

One of my friends has a great phrase: radicalised by motherhood. (Weirdly my mainstream political views probably have done the classic centre left to centre right shift with age, but my feminism's definitely become more radical at the same time.)

Literature too - I recently started to re-read War and Peace (amazing what lockdown's driving people to). As a young woman, I found Prince Andre so romantic - now I can't get past what a total and utter shit he is to his first wife in the first few chapters. (Probably doesn't help that in the intervening years I've tried to read Dworkin's Intercourse, which means reading W&P is also coloured by knowing his attitudes - I've never managed to finish Intercourse because I just find it so upsetting. My mum actually read all of Tolstoy's correspondence and diaries, together with several biographies - she was fascinated by 19th and early 20th C literary figures and their milieus, so I know that Dworkin wasn't selectively quoting - it's a pretty accurate portrayal of just how monstrous he was towards women.)

Re-reading , aged 30 plus, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina and concluding they weren't admirable romantic heroines but selfish pains in the arse who ruined other people's lives.

So many films of my youth that I fear to revisit. Many I felt uncomfortable with, but tolerated because the rest was good, or because I could not put my finger on what bothered me, or because others pooh-pooed my discomfort our opinions. What more will I realise now?

The Breakfast Club - I literally wore out two video tapes watching and rewatching it.

Put Anna Karenina and Bridget Jones in the same box where they can whine pathetically at each other, lock it and throw the key away! I never understood how either of them could be considered romantic heroines.

Re Anna K and Emma B , I think it depends when you read them. If late teens, just about to leave home and go into the big world they seem wild, dangerous, exciting, railing against convention. Reading them as a grown-up they are silly and spoilt and destroyed other people's lives.

Bridget J is just a bit silly.

Never did get on with Anna Karenina - always found her self indulgent. (And also, I wonder if a bit of me instinctively twigged that this was a man's view of what a woman throwing away her life for love should look like - that the penny dropped with Anna Karenina in a way it didn't with W&P because I was just that bit older when I read it).

I loved Mme Bovary as a novel because I found the writing fascinating. I must try re-reading it and see what I make of it.

Steinbeck East of Eden is another one which is very male-gaze, "evil woman horribly betrays our hero."

Oh, and back to films. Priscilla Queen of the Desert which I thought was wonderful - I think the scene with the poor "Asian wife" (aka mail order trafficked woman) firing ping-pong balls from her foof would move me to absolute fury these days. To my shame, I just didn't put it into a wider context of exploitation when I first watched it as a silly little painfully liberal minded student.

I have terrible weakness for romantic comedies of the very formulaic variety. I used to indulge this with nary a twinge, but since understanding feminist ideas, I am horrified to find the ones I really love are the ones where the male hero is a dickhead 'redeemed' by love.

I saw a great youtube video about Harrison Ford's characters that crystallized a lot of what made me uncomfortable about it all. When I was growing up, attracted to other females, my perceptions were completely screwed up by all that movie and tv romance schtick. I didn't want to swagger over and dominate an initially unwilling but truly submissive romantic partner, but everything was telling me that's what 'normal' women aspired to.

It's taken decades to unpick all that.

Oh god, yes, Harrison Ford's filmography!

Working Girl - now I'm team established professional woman - she gets totally screwed over as a character by the plot.

And Presumed Innocent - married man screws around, but then by a really contrived plot twist it turns out it was his crazed wronged wife what done it.

And the scene where he uses the whip to pull the cardboard cutout love interest into his arms at the end of (the deeply racist) Temple of Doom - cringe.