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?

(I loved all these films as a young 'un, and fancied the arse off HF).

I had an early awakening thing for Sean Young, and Bladerunner absolutely messed with my head. The scene where he essentially forces himself on to her is too horrible to watch now for me, which I only realized while trying to share the film with someone who hadn't seen it. It properly sent me down a rabbit hole of realizing how much I had absorbed these ideas about romance and sexual behaviour, and what I had accepted without question.

Pretty Woman!! I loved that film. She was so beautiful and he so handsome and he really wanted her, really cared about her. And prostitution was something that beautiful women would do in 5* hotels and be treated like queens..even though they actually lived in a bad area. And a rich handsome man was going to come and save her, so I would get my knight in corporate shining armour too.

Haven't though that for a fucking long time!! I started watching the film a few years ago with warm memories and couldn't finish it.

One of the things that fascinates me is how many 30s and 40s films, specially the screwball comedies, do stand the test of time. It's almost as if the old fashioned values of respect for women and behaving like a gentleman are more feminist-friendly than what followed.

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.

I'd never thought about this first part, but very true.

And YY to the second part. If I hadn't become a mother, I'd never have understood the systemic oppression and disregard of women and womanhood(s - not meaning male versions) that I do now. And that's because we're so invisible and taken for granted that nobody even sees us to be able to stand in our shoes!

Older disney films. Ariel is just 16 and falls in love with the first man she sees without even ever talking to him. Not quite the brutal ending of the book.

Same with rapunzel.

Getting older and having daughters has definitely solidified my views.

Pretty Woman!! I loved that film. She was so beautiful and he so handsome and he really wanted her, really cared about her

It's a truly awful film. I saw it when it came out and hated. It's utterly immoral.

It's a truly awful film. I saw it when it came out and hated. It's utterly immoral.
I completely agree now! I think I was about 15 when I first saw it though.

On no Rebecca 2 - not Brief Encounter! I mean, I think you're probably right, but still, the romance!
The one that stands out for me is Tootsie - poor little women getting used by men, here let me show you how to manage...
And Wuthering Heights - has to be read before 18 so that you don't notice what selfish, terrible people they all are. Ugh.
Totally agree about Emma B - but LOVE Post Simmond's brilliant take on it Gamma Bovary.
It strikes me often how much more self determining the girls in classic children's books are, compared to more modern ones. Consider Alice, Sara Crewe (a little Princess), Bonnie and Sylvia, or Dido Twite (Joan Aiken's books) All magnificently pass the Bechdel test! Of course, they were written for young girls, and 'teen' novels are a more recent thing - Unfortunately that tends to mean that relationships are more important than adventures. But that's probably a whole other post.

Gemma, not Gamma!

Jane Austen. Though her heroines were awfully materialistic when I was 18. Now I sympathise with their limited options.

Jane Eyre. St John Rivers is a classic portrayal of emotional abuse. Rochester whom the reader is supposed to be sympathetic to is bloody awful.

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

Steinbeck also suffers from whore with a heart of gold syndrome. I suppose it came from wanting to be a nice person, not being judgemental about women involved with prostitution and rooting for the underdog but there's no hint of questioning whether prostitution is wrong or harmful.

It gets laid on thick in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday

Rochester whom the reader is supposed to be sympathetic to is bloody awful.

I'm not sure that the author is that sympathetic to Rochester. Before he is able to marry Jane, she has him lose an appendage (his hand before you ask) and he also loses most of his sight.

I didn't like anyone in Jane Eyre including Jane.

Going back to the original OP I remember those films and as I thought myself a feminist at the time was a bit embarrassed by them but thought it was good to have women "finding themselves" as the theme for a film.

Now I think that these types of films, and magazine articles at the time led to the misrepresentation of feminism as being about women "having it all". ie women more focused on careers but still stuck doing the housework. Women's Liberation failed because women changed but men didn't. :(

And Woody Allen films who a lot of women seemed to like but I always hated them and this was before knowing anything about his personal life.

So not only because of cost I sort of gave up on films and would rely on the occassional recommendation and hire a DVD (remember that!). But compared to the overt sexualised exploitative roles that actesses seem to have to accept now not sure I a missing anything.

I am more concerned about eh songs I used to listen to. Sometimes now when I hear the lyrics (being less caught up in the music) I positively cringe. And I used to sing along.

And, if I remember right, there was a survey somewhile ago that showed as men got older they became more conservative. Whereas women, who when younger were assumed to be more concerend about security, grew more radical with age on realising they had been misled about what would be good for them!

I do find I have a different view of a lot of films and books. I don't necessarily find them making me mad, I think because I don't tend to see a lot of these depictions, even in comedy, as saying the behaviour is ok or even unimportant.

But I do find a lot of old sitcoms like Friends hard to watch now, and in that case it's because they are all so flipping casual about sexual relationships. I imagine my kids watching and getting their sense of how to lead a romantic life from them, because a lot of those shows seem to be considered ok for that age group and pre-teens sometimes seem to think they depict reality.

I couldn't stand Anna Kerenina, the person rather than the book, even when I read it in university. I think I might be more sympathetic now actually, because I'd see her as younger and fooling. I was a little unforgiving of romantic foolishness at that age even though I managed to entangle myself in several idiotic romantic predicaments that I would avoid now.

I had the experience a couple of years ago of rereading Augustine's Confessions which I hadn't really done since I was a student. One thing I really noticed was that I thought that he was far too hard on his parents, which hadn't occurred to me at all when I was 19. I had always thought he was a dick to his son's mother, but it struck me much more being a mother myself, too.

I think my thoughts about Grease actually went the other way. I wasn't happy with the resolution when I was younger, that she had to change herself. As I've become older, I no longer really think that is what was going on in the story - they remained themselves, the change of clothes (on both their parts really as Danny also intended to do the same thing) was about accepting the social baggage that the other carried. I'm much more pragmatic about that now I think, it's never really just two people all seperate and alone forming a union.

I think Killing In The Name Of..

FUCK YOU YOU I WONT DO WHAT YOU TELL ME

Sums it up rather?

I'm late 50s.

I've never bought into the 'submissive female'/ 'giving it all up for luv' thing.

But bloody hell, I'm way more feminist now than I was at 20!

We watch 'Love Actually' at Xmas , but my two late teen/early 20s boys know they have to sit through my rants as we sit there!😂 Tho I placidly went along with it 15 years ago!

I think maybe, reading all this, that I think of romance films differently all round. I don't see the genre of romance so much as meaning romantic love, though that is usually the subject, so much as it is treated romantically, so like a sort of fairy tale rather than a drama or something realistic.

It never occurred to me until I heard people talking about it that way that people would take the scenario in Pretty Woman as being in any way realistic or saying anything about prostitution, or how real relationships work. As much as it had any serious theme I thought it was about late 80s consumerism or even capitalism (though that's a bit heavy for a light film.)

Yup, we are conditioned from tiny girls to be exactly what men want us to be. Hollywood is mostly sick. Has been probably right from the beginning. Full of pedophiles, rapists, miosgynists, satanists.

I’m in my 60s and always thought I was an independent thinker, grew up in a small town but was always pro choice, anti marriage (ha!), realise your potential.

I’m increasingly incensed by the world I grew up in and the way I was treated. I didn’t accept it at the time but now I am so angry that this is the life I had and I know things could have been different.

Consequently anything that smacks of exploitation or belittlement of anyone really puts my back up.

I remember my mother humphing about 14 year old Vanessa Paradis on TOTP. She turned the TV off because it was sexualised and inappropriate. I thought that she was mad.

Long term, it made me think. It was probably foundational to my realisation that teenage girls are routinely sexualised and that this is wrong. So thanks mum

I am horrified to find the ones I really love are the ones where the male hero is a dickhead 'redeemed' by love

Yeah, we all wanted to be the special girl who was able to tame the bad boy and rid him of his demons purely by the power of our love.

I'm old enough now to know that the 'bad boy' is never cured and likely reverted to an abusive arse who would have made my life a misery.

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

I’m not sure that’s true of women though. Post-menopausal women are, in many ways, outsiders in their own culture - at least in the West.

In societies obsessed with youth and appearance, older women who have passed their “last fuckable day” (), tend to view the world and men, in particular, with a decidedly caustic eye.

Lacking utility in terms of pulchritude, older women, at least in my experience, are deeply radical in their understanding of sexual politics.

I suspect that the radical opinions of older women are not taken into account, because to the rest of the world, older women are in the general category of grannies, and not expected to have opinions about much at all other than scones or knitting.

I’ve had some quite startling conversations with elderly women, in environments where there were no men and they felt safe to express themselves. The older women of today experienced the Second Wave feminism of the 60s and 70s after all.