Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women

  But instead of revitalizing the word, Summers came close to redlining it. “I think we have to be very careful in the ways we use it,” Summers said in 1988. “Often you can say ‘woman’ and it means the same thing.” But, as subsequent issues of Ms. would make abundantly clear, “woman” and “feminist” are not interchangeable. While the traditionally feminist issues were still being covered, the offending word hardly applied to many of the stories the magazine was now printing. Who needs to talk about feminism in features about “Cookbooks to Dream About” or “Laundry Daze,” an article about “stain-removal rules.”

  Indeed, by the end of the decade, Ms. readers were encountering sentiments in its pages not very different from the moral judgments issued by the backlash press. In an underreported but overheated cover-story assault on the misdeeds of Bess Myerson, the former Miss America and Mayor Koch aide, writer Shana Alexander informed her audience:

  As for the Women’s Movement, I often think we may have opened Pandora’s box. We wanted to be equal. We insisted. We did it . . . We forgot that we are different from men; we are other; we have different sensibilities. Today young women are paying for our error.

  Newsweek couldn’t have said it better.

  Women in the Ms. focus groups complained about another phenomenon: the backlash. “The main thing we learned is that women are having a hard time out there,” Summers says, “and we should be more sympathetic.” One wishes her magazine had been less sympathetic and more analytical. Only after the Supreme Court issued the Webster decision restricting women’s reproductive rights, Ms. did truly rouse itself and declare “IT’S WAR!” on the cover of the August 1989 issue. The abortion cover was seen as too political by some advertisers, who were looking for an excuse in a softening consumer market to bail out anyway. Meanwhile, the magazine’s publishers had been losing many of their biggest advertisers at their other venture, Sassy, which, the year before, had become the target of a fundamentalist letter-writing campaign after printing some frank stories on teenage sexuality. Finally, with Sassy’s advertising exodus threatening to push both magazines into financial collapse, male publisher Dale Lang took control of the female-run magazine in October 1989. Summers remained to fight for her staff and the preservation of the magazine, but was let go as Editor-in-Chief in December by Lang. He then shut it down for eight months, diverted circulation to his other publications, and finally reissued Ms. as a bimonthly journal with no ads, a tiny distribution network—and an impossibly high annual subscription price (a move that cut circulation by half).

  With Ms. no longer a major player in the mainstream circulation, would any of the new magazines launched in the late ’80s dare to challenge the backlash? Not Men or Men’s Life (for the “real man”) or M. Inc. (for the “powerful” man) or any of the other new men’s magazines that hit the newsstands in a sudden burst at the end of the ’80s: they featured stories on why men prefer blondes and what was so repulsive about “the sensitive man.” Not Victoria, Hearst’s new magazine for women: its stories were all about the joys of needlepoint and flower arrangements. Not Elle, the slick new periodical of fashion and beauty trends for young women: it maintained that the new generation of women “no longer needs to examine the whys and hows of sexism,” and, anyway, “all those ideals that were once held as absolute truths—sexual liberation, the women's movement, true equality—have been debunked or debased.” The only new periodical that showed even the vaguest interest in tackling the concerns of real women was Lear’s, a magazine targeted to women over forty, and one of the few run by a female-owned firm. “We want to use characters who are real, with lines on their faces,” publisher Frances Lear announced (though this didn’t stop her from running ads of flawless women half her readers’ age). But by the decade’s end, she, too, was beginning to make backlash noises. At a speech at the 1988 Women in Communications convention, Lear spoke out against the “new pragmatist” who cared only for “all-out materialism,” then declared, “And I blame the women in the movement . . . the feminist preoccupation with filling one’s own needs.” At last, the media’s leaders had found a way to pin crass commercialism that they themselves encouraged on female independence.

  5

  Fatal and Fetal Visions:

  The Backlash in the Movies

  PUNCH THE BITCH’S FACE IN,” a moviegoer shouts into the darkness of the Century 21 Theater, as if the screenbound hero might hear, and heed, his appeal. “Kick her ass,” another male voice pleads from the shadows.

  The theater in suburban San Jose, California, is stuffy and cramped, every seat taken, for this Monday night showing of Fatal Attraction in October 1987. The story of a single career woman who seduces and nearly destroys a happily married man has played to a full house here every night since its arrival six weeks earlier. “Punch the bitch’s lights out! I’m not kidding,” a man up front implores actor Michael Douglas. Emboldened by the chorus, a man in the back row cuts to the point: “Do it, Michael. Kill her already. Kill the bitch.”

  Outside in the theater’s lobby, the teenage ushers sweep up candy wrappers and exchange furtive quizzical glances as their elders’ bellows trickle through the padded doors. “I don’t get it really,” says Sabrina Hughes, a high school student who works the Coke machine and finds the adults’ behavior “very weird,” an anthropological event to be observed from a safe distance. “Sometimes I like to sneak into the theater in the last twenty minutes of the movie. All these men are screaming, ‘Beat that bitch! Kill her off now!’ The women, you never hear them say anything. They are all just sitting there, real quiet.”

  • • •

  HOLLYWOOD JOINED the backlash a few years later than the media; movie production has a longer lead time. Consequently, the film industry had a chance to absorb the “trends” the ’80s media flashed at independent women—and reflect them back at American moviegoers at twice their size. “I’m thirty-six years old!” Alex Forrest, the homicidal single career woman of Fatal Attraction, moans. “It may be my last chance to have a child!” As Darlene Chan, a 20th Century Fox vice president, puts it: “Fatal Attraction is the psychotic manifestation of the Newsweek marriage study.”

  The escalating economic stakes in Hollywood in the ’80s would make studio executives even more inclined to tailor their message to fit the trends. Rising financial insecurity, fueled by a string of corporate takeovers and the double threat of the cable-television and home-VCR invasions, fostered Hollywood’s conformism and timidity. Just like the media’s managers, moviemakers were relying more heavily on market research consultants, focus groups, and pop psychologists to determine content, guide production, and dictate the final cut. In such an environment, portrayals of strong or complex women that went against the media-trend grain were few and far between.

  The backlash shaped much of Hollywood’s portrayal of women in the ’80s. In typical themes, women were set against women; women’s anger at their social circumstances was depoliticized and displayed as personal depression instead; and women’s lives were framed as morality tales in which the “good mother” wins and the independent woman gets punished. And Hollywood restated and reinforced the backlash thesis: American women were unhappy because they were too free; their liberation had denied them marriage and motherhood.

  The movie industry was also in a position to drive these lessons home more forcefully than the media. Filmmakers weren’t limited by the requirements of journalism. They could mold their fictional women as they pleased; they could make them obey. While editorial writers could only exhort “shrill” and “strident” independent women to keep quiet, the movie industry could actually muzzle its celluloid bad girls. And it was a public silencing ritual in which the audience might take part; in the anonymity of the dark theater, male moviegoers could slip into a dream state where it was permissible to express deep-seated resentments and fears about women.

  “It’s amazing what an audience-participation film it’s turned out to be,” Fatal Attraction’s directo
r Adrian Lyne would remark that fall, as the film continued to attract record crowds, grossing more than $101 million in four months. “Everybody’s yelling and shouting and really getting into it,” Lyne said. “This is a film everyone can identify with. Everyone knows a girl like Alex.” That women weren’t “participating,” that their voices were eerily absent from the yelling throngs, only underscored Lyne’s film message; the silent and impassive female viewers were serving as exemplary models of the “feminine” women that the director most favored on screen.

  • • •

  EFFORTS TO hush the female voice in American films have been a perennial feature of cinema in backlash periods. The words of one outspoken independent woman, Mae West, provoked the reactionary Production Code of Ethics in 1934. It was her caustic tongue, not her sexual behavior, that triggered these censorship regulations, which banned premarital sex and enforced marriage (but allowed rape scenes) on screen until the late ’50s. West infuriated the guardians of the nation’s morals—publisher William Randolph Hearst called her “a menace to the sacred institution of the American family”—because she talked back to men in her films and, worse yet, in her own words; she wrote her dialogue. “Speak up for yourself, or you’ll end up a rug,” West tells the lion she tames in I’m No Angel, summing up her own philosophy. In the ’30s, she herself would wind up as carpeting, along with the other overly independent female stars of the era: Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and West were all officially declared “box office poison” in a list published by the president of Independent Theater Owners of America. West’s words were deemed so offensive that she was even banned from radio.

  Having stopped the mouth of the forty-year-old West and the other grown-up actresses, the ’30s studios brought in the quiet good girls. The biggest Depression female star, Shirley Temple, was not yet school age—and got the highest ratings from adult men. When she played “Marlene Sweetrick” in War Babies, she was playing a version of the autonomous Dietrich, shrunk now to a compliant tot.

  During World War II, in a brief burst of enthusiasm for strong and working women, a handful of Rosie-the-Riveter characters like Ann Sothern’s aircraft worker in Swing Shift Maisie and Lucille Ball’s Meet the People flexed muscles and talked a blue streak, and many female heroines were now professionals, politicians, even executives. Throughout the ’40s, some assertive women were able to make themselves heard: Katharine Hepburn’s attorney defended women’s rights in the courtroom in Adam’s Rib, and Rosalind Russell’s single reporter in His Girl Friday huskily told a fiancé who wanted her to quit work and move to the country, “You’ve got to take me as I am, instead of trying to change me. I’m not a suburban bridge player; I’m a newspaperman.”

  But even in this decade, the other Hollywood vision of womanhood vied for screentime, and it began to gain ground as the backlash built. Another group of women on screen began to lose their voices and their health. A crop of films soon featured mute and deaf-mute heroines, and the movie women took to their beds, wasting away from brain tumors, spinal paralysis, mental illness, and slow poisons. As film historian Marjorie Rosen observes, “The list of forties female victims reads like a Who’s Who hospital roster.” The single career women on screen, a brittle, dried-up lot, were heading to the doctor’s office, too, for psychiatric treatment. In movies like Dark Mirror, Lady in the Dark, and later The Star, they all received the same medical prescription: quit work and get married.

  By the ’50s, the image of womanhood surrendered had won out, its emblem the knock-kneed and whispery-voiced Marilyn Monroe—a sort of post-lobotomized “Lady in the Dark,” no longer fighting doctor’s orders. Strong women were displaced by good girls like Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee. Women were finally silenced in ’50s cinema by their absence from most of the era’s biggest movies, from High Noon to Shane to The Killing to Twelve Angry Men. In the ’50s, as film critic Molly Haskell wrote, “There were not only fewer films about emancipated women than in the thirties or forties, but there were fewer films about women.” While women were relegated to mindless how-to-catch-a-husband movies, men escaped to womanless landscapes. Against the backdrop of war trenches and the American West, they triumphed at last—if not over their wives then at least over Indians and Nazis.

  • • •

  IN LATE-’8OS Hollywood, this pattern would repeat, as filmmakers once again became preoccupied with toning down independent women and drowning out their voices—sometimes quite literally. In Overboard, an unexceptional product of the period, Goldie Hawn’s character, a rich city loudmouth (like Fatal Attraction’s antiheroine, Alex), plunges off a yacht and suffers a spell of amnesia. A rural carpenter she once tongue-lashed rescues her—and reduces her to his squeaky-voiced hausfrau: “Keep your mouth closed,” orders the carpenter (played, curiously, by Hawn’s real-life partner Kurt Russell), and she learns to like it. In The Good Mother, the wisecracking Babe, who resists marriage and bears an illegitimate child, winds up drowning in a lake. Her punishment parallels that of the film’s heroine, Anna, a repressed single mother who dares to explore her sexuality—and, as a result, must sacrifice her six-year-old daughter. Fittingly, this was the decade in which Henry James’s The Bostonians was brought to the screen; Basil Ransom’s vow to “strike dumb” the young women’s rights orator had renewed market appeal.

  Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction was not the only independent working woman whose mouth gets clamped shut in a Lyne production. In 9½ Weeks, released a year before Fatal Attraction, a single career woman plays love slave to a stockbroker, who issues her this command: “Don’t talk.” And soon after Fatal Attraction’s triumph at the box office, Lyne announced plans for another film—about a literally mute black prostitute who falls for a white doctor. The working title, he said, was Silence.

  The plots of some of these films achieve this reverse metamorphosis, from self-willed adult woman to silent (or dead) girl, through coercion, others through the female character’s own “choice.” In any case, only for domestic reasons—for the sake of family and motherhood—can a woman shout and still come out a heroine in the late-’80s cinema. The few strong-minded, admirable women are rural farm mothers defending their broods from natural adversity (Places in the Heart, The River, and Country) and housewives guarding their families from predatory single women (Tender Mercies, Moonstruck, Someone to Watch Over Me, and Terms of Endearment). The tough-talking space engineer who saves an orphan child in Aliens is sympathetically portrayed, but her willfulness, too, is maternal; she is protecting the child—who calls her “Mommy”—from female monsters.

  In Hollywood, 1987 was a scarlet-letter year for the backlash against women’s independence. In all four of the top-grossing films released that year, women are divided into two groups—for reward or punishment. The good women are all subservient and bland housewives (Fatal Attraction and The Untouchables), babies or voiceless babes (Three Men and a Baby and Beverly Hills Cop II). The female villains are all women who fail to give up their independence, like the mannish and child-hating shrew in Three Men and a Baby, the hip-booted gun-woman in Beverly Hills Cop II, and the homicidal career woman in Fatal Attraction. All of these films were also produced by Paramount—ironically, the studio that had been saved from bankruptcy a half century earlier by Mae West.

  Of all Paramount’s offerings that year, Fatal Attraction was the one that most mesmerized the national media. Completing the feedback loop, the press even declared the movie’s theme a trend and scrambled to find real live women to illustrate it. Story after story appeared on the “Fatal Attraction phenomenon,” including seven-page cover stories in both Time and People. A headline in one supermarket tabloid even dubbed the film’s single-woman character the MOST HATED WOMAN IN AMERICA. Magazine articles applauded the movie for starting a monogamy trend; the film was supposedly reinvigorating marriages, slowing the adultery rate, and encouraging more “responsible” behavior from singles. People promoted this trend with
cautionary case studies of “Real Life Fatal Attractions” and warned, “It’s not just a movie: All too often, ‘casual’ affairs end in rage, revenge, and shattered lives.” Though in real life such assailants are overwhelmingly male—a fact surely available to the six reporters assigned this apparently important story—all but one of the five aggressors People chose as examples were women.

  FATAL ATTRACTION, BEFORE AND AFTER

  British director and screenwriter James Dearden first dreamed up the story that became Fatal Attraction one solitary weekend in London in the late ’70s. He was battling writer’s block; his wife was out of town—and he wondered to himself, “What if I picked up that little black address book and rang that girl who gave me her number at a party six months ago?” The original plot was simple. Dearden recalls it this way: