Emotional Labor

Have you ever been told to smile? Have you ever been told to smile in the workplace? If so, you’ve been asked to perform ‘emotional labour’, and it may have been part of your job. The more low-paid/low status your job, the more likely you are to be required to provide these fake emotional services on top of whatever else you’re doing, be it serving food or scanning grocery items. That’s the shitty thing about it.

Except if you’re a woman, it doesn’t matter how far up the ladder you climb, it’s likely you’ll still be expected to smile.

My first job was teaching in a girls’ high school. The principal was (and still is) a woman, who has been awarded the prime minister’s thing for leadership (by the way). Being a good leader doesn’t necessarily involve much smiling. But one year after prize giving, one of the parents said to this principal, ‘If only you cracked a smile every now and then.’

We were discussing this in the staffroom, and me being a first year teacher, lessons from teachers’ college were fresh in my mind. See, what I’d been taught as a beginning teacher — not much older than the kids I was teaching, and a lot younger than any of the parents — was to keep a neutral face. Here’s the reason: teenagers love to work teachers up. Especially young teachers in cheap polyester suits. If you walk into the classroom all happy happy joy joy, “Great! Fantastic! Awesome!” then some little asshole will try and bring you down.  Pessimistic, perhaps, but true, especially in the tough schools. I’ve accidentally walked into a group of year tens with an abundance of enthusiasm and some little asswipe piped up with, ‘You’re happy today, miss. Did you finally get some nookie last night?’

So something like that happens, and then what happens to your smile? Do you keep it pasted across your face? Nope. Any fool can recognise a fake smile a mile off. Far better to keep your face in neutral to deal with the inevitable range of emotions which will confront you in any given hour teaching in a high school full of emos teenagers.

I ran this past my boss, and she agreed that the neutral face thing was hearty advice. We all wondered if a male principal would’ve been expected to grin all during prize giving like an idiot.

Interestingly, our deputy principal was male, and he was an expert smiler. The students called him ‘Guy Smiley’ behind his back.

DEFINITION OF EMOTIONAL LABOUR

It was Arlie Russel Hochschild, a sociologist from University of California-Berkeley who coined the term “emotional labor” in her book The Managed Heart (1983), to describe a work situation where the requirement of literally and figuratively loving the job “becomes part of the job,” which is what you can imagine from nurses, doctors, waiters, teachers, even bill collectors and call center agents.

- The Manila Times

Why Faking Enthusiasm Is The Latest Job Requirement from Fast Company

Stop Telling Me To Smile Already from The Frisky

Weight Watchers and Emotional Labor is interesting because it outlines a slightly different kind of emotional labor:

Weight Watchers’ strategy of cultivating loyalty among employees and identifying them as “leaders” is far from unique. Many jobs—particularly low-wage service sector jobs, staffed predominantly with women—have similar approaches to labor management. This is an element of what sociologists call “emotional labor“: this sort of labor encompasses not just the work that goes into demonstrating a particular feeling in front of customers, but also the ways in which managers will try to condition a particular emotional state into their employees.

Which job has the highest requirements for emotional labour? If you guessed flight attendant, you guessed right.

Bitchy Resting Face and The Tyranny Of The Smile: Why does everyone expect women to be smiling all the time? from Slate. I definitely have bitchy resting face, or probably more accurately ‘bitching concentrating face’. I appreciate the video and the concept and it needs a name but I haven’t quite put my finger on why I cringe a bit at the word ‘bitchy’.

Should we take heart in the fact that it’s not only members of the female dominated service industries who are subject to being told how to hold their face? Today LeBron James scowls after ‘doing something awesome’ and the media wonders why all the athletes are scowling now.

That Which Was Never Meant To Be Seen

“I perceive, the backs of young ladies’ drawings, like the postscripts of their letters, are the most important and interesting part of the concern.”

- from The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë

The Digital Ghosts Of Google Street View

Especially this very weird half cat which keeps making me laugh, despite me liking cats.

Found Notes, a Tumblr blog

And more disturbingly…

Meet The Men Who Spy On Women Through Their Webcams, or, why you should avoid webcams on your PC, from Ars Technica.

Creep Shots is presently on Tumblr after being removed from Reddit, and you can help to get rid of them, again, by helping to flood Tumblr’s inbox with complaints. (abuse@tumblr.com)

Creepshot also has a Twitter account (@creepshot). You can first block them, and then report for harassment from your list of blocked accounts.

What is metafiction, anyway?

• Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as “fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.
• “Its relationship to the phenomenal world is highly complex, problematic and regulated by convention.” (I like that phrase ‘phenomenal world’ to what I’ve always problematically referred to ‘the real world’)
• Why do we need words for talking about metafiction? To distinguish between the world within fiction and the world outside it.
• This distinction is more important now that more and more writers are deliberately violating logic and using language for its own sake.
• Although metafictional elements can be found in pretty much any work of fiction, metafiction as a literary device is relatively new in Western literature — perhaps 40 years old. (I adjusted from 20 years in a book which is 20 years old.)
• Examples of metafiction in children’s literature first occurred from the 1980s.
• There are two main types of metafiction.
• The first is to parody a well-known work of literature.
• The second is to consciously discuss the art of writing.
• Metafiction is prevalent in experimental post-modern literature, but shouldn’t be regarded as only an experiment for experiment’s sake.
• The message of a metafictional story is often that the world itself is artificial, constructed, man-made. It asks the question: What is the boundary that delimits fiction and reality?
• In books for young readers, polyphony is one example of a metafictive device. Polyphony is “multi-voicedness”.
• Metafiction isn’t a genre. It’s a trend within a genre.
• Metafiction in children’s books is different from metafiction in books for adults. This is because metafiction always relies on past experience of the reader. Young readers don’t have much experience.
• In children’s literature, metafiction is sometimes obvious to both the child and the adult co-reader, but often it is obvious only to the adult co-reader, resulting in a story which can appeal to all ages.
• Daniel Handler is a good example of a modern metafictive children’s author. His books are written by ‘Lemony Snicket’, and he even continues this gag with him to his stage presentations. Adult readers know that the Series Of Unfortunate Events wasn’t written by one of the characters from inside, that a publishing world exists, with a real-world author behind the name. As for picture books, Mo Willems is a good example.
• A Pack Of Lies by Geraldine McCaughrean, Fade by Robert Cormier and Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers are also metafictive in that their endings make the reader wonder how much of it is really true.
• Directly addressing the reader is a type of metafictive narrative device. Maria Gripe used it in her books about Elvis, and it has been developed by many modern Scandinavian children’s writers in particular.
• A metafictional work has: the writer (e.g. Daniel Handler), the implied writer (e.g. Lemony Snicket), the narrator (the “I” of the novel), the implied reader (“you”) and the real reader. Other (non-metafictional) works might have the writer, the narrator and the reader. Simple.
• “As long as anything can happen in a book it can also happen in real life, since it always happens more in real life.” – Tormod Haugen, “A Novel About Merkel Hanssen, and Donna Winther, and The Big Escape (1986), a metafictional YA Norwegian book

Reference: Maria Nikolajeva’s Children’s Literature Comes Of Age, with a couple of more up-to-date examples of my own.

Intertextuality in Children’s Books vs Books For Adults

In children’s literature, intertexuality is often apparent in the use of

• allusions
• irony
• parody
• literary allusions
• direct quotations
• indirect references
• and the fracturing of well-known patterns.

Intertexuality makes use of the literature which has come before, often building on it, at the least inspired by it. That Bakhtin fellow prefers the term ‘dialogics’. Whatever it is called, the meaning of a text is revealed for the reader/researcher only against the background of previous texts. Whereas ‘comparative literature’ is concerned with how one text has ‘influenced’ the other, an intertextual study considers the two texts as equal.

Intertexuality is one of the most prominent features of postmodern literature for adults, and critics have proclaimed it both welcome and indispensable. In children’s literature most intertextual links are often approached as imitative and secondary.

- Maria Nikolajeva, Children’s Literature Comes Of Age

The Treatment of Time in Books for Boys, Books for Girls

This is a fascinating concept, and something I’d not noticed until it was pointed out, by Maria Nikolajeva in Children’s Literature Comes Of Age. Earlier in the book she defines books for boys (often adventure) and books for girls (horse stories etc, and those starring girls) which these days tend to have pink somewhere on the cover. In an ideal world there’d be no such thing as sex differentiation in books. Because gender is not genre. But I’m quite radical like that.

One Swedish essay on narrative differences in books for boys and books for girls stipulated that male time is linear, while female time is circular…. Time in books for girls and in books for boys is closely connected with place. Not only is male time linear, but male space is open, as books for boys take place outdoors, sometimes far away from home in the wide world. Male narrative time is structured as a series of stations where an adventure is experienced, a task is performed, a trial is passed. Time between these stations practically does not exist. The text can say something like “after many days full of hardships they reached their destination…” The male chronotope is thus corpuscular, discontinuous, a chain of different separate time-spaces (“quants”) which are held together by a final goal. These separate chronotopes may also correspond to chapters in adventure boos: each chapter is self-contained, even if some threads can run from one chapter to another. It is easily observable in classic stories such as Mark Twain’s The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer (1876) or Robert McCloskey’s Homer Price (1943).

…

The chronotope in books for girls is completely different. The space is closed and confined. The action mostly takes place indoors, at home (alternatively at school). Time is cyclically closed and marked by recurrent time indications: (“It was spring again,” “It was Christmas again”). Three classical girls’ books, Little Women (1868), Anne Of Green Gables (1908) and Little House In The Big Woods (1932), are very good illustrations. Any gaps in time can be easily filled by the reader, who knows that it takes time for plants to grow or for snow to thaw, that the school year is full of homework, that housework is the same year in and year out. Female narrative time is often extended to several years with certain recurrent points. The chronotope is continuous both in time and space. Spatial movement in girls’ books means merely a change from one confined space to another likewise confined one — for instance, from the parents’ home to a boarding school, from the heroine’s childhood home to her husband’s home, to “the doll house,” an image often used by contemporary writers trying to break this pattern; one example is Maud Reutersward’s A Way From Home (1979), the Swedish title of which is “The Girl and the Doll House.”

The female narrative chronotope is also based on our conceptions of male and female nature…Female time is circular, follows the cycle of the moon, and consists of recurrent, regular events of death and resurrection, seasonal changes and so on. … Linear male time is a product of enlightenment and is the spirit of action and progress.

…there are many deviations… As in all other areas, in chronotope structures of children’s books of the past ten to twenty years there is also a merging of male and female, a disintegration of the epic chronotope, and some bold innovations.

Nikolajeva’s book was published in 1996, so another 10 or 20 years have passed even since then. I’d be interested to know what has happened since then. Are stories for girls still mostly set inside? Do books for girls run by the moon?

On The Gendered Media Coverage Of Perfectionism

This blog post was going to take a different tack. I’ve been interested in perfectionism for a long time, and  a number of months back I set up a Google alert to catch the most popular articles. Suddenly I’m struck by how ‘perfectionism’ is heavily gendered.

Instead, here’s what I got:

1. Ask Carolyn Hax: New mother struggles with perfectionism
2. This article from the Daily Mail: ‘How learning skills can be child’s play for adults: If only we made the time for learning, we could pick up a new language as easily as kids do‘ points out that perfectionism is a bad thing in language learning and is accompanied by a large picture of a woman with a blonde bob cut with a grim look on her face.
3. And although The Daily Mail is a crock of shit in general, and is ideally best ignored, here’s another article from them about perfectionism, with a very large picture depicting a woman shining a wine glass. Again, it’s a male who is quoted, and he even admits to perfectionism himself, demonstrating clearly that perfectionism affects all genders, despite the female media skew: “Mr Thompson, a math and computer science professor and a self-described ‘recovering perfectionist,’ added that perfectionism is intimately tied to fear.”
4. Pressure To Be Perfect from Essential Kids , likewise, shows the close up face of a worried-looking girl. The picture is of a girl even though the anecdote contained within the article is about a little boy.
5. This one takes the cake: the book about dealing with bitchy women at work. Much has already been said about that book in feminist world, but it’s worth mentioning here that one of the categories of bitches is the perfectionist (The ‘Insecure Bitch’, in case you’re wondering).

So what is the reason for all these perfectionism articles and advice directed squarely at women, on health and family blogs?

Part of the answer may lie here, in a response to Warren Buffet’s recent words in Fortune Magazine:

Competition may drive capitalist innovation, but Whitney Johnson of Rose Park Advisors asserts women are expected to be “nicer” and “giving,” a behavior not typically rewarded in business practice. Among other traits more likely to be exhibited by women, perfectionism plays a role in different ways for gender. Dr. Jackie Deuling at Roosevelt University of Chicago finds in her research that there are two kinds of perfectionism:  adaptive and maladaptive. Adaptive perfectionism often serves as a motivator, while maladaptive traits create self-doubt and can be demotivating. Dr. Deuling finds women are more likely to display maladaptive perfectionism. This can play a factor in workforce advancement through salary negotiations, asking for time off, and the “over confidence, under confidence” phenomenon. On the opposite side of the spectrum, men may be pressured more to perform and succeed at whatever the cost.

I don’t know. I smell a rat. This all reads to me like psycholgists blaming women’s own shortcomings on failure to achieve workplace parity, instead of an inherently sexist system.

A review of another book on perfection (which I haven’t read) is titled: Hey, high-achieving women! Here’s how perfectionism holds you back, and no, I don’t believe that’s a Jezebel-style ironic title either:

OK, ladies, you know who you are. You take such pride in your work that even mild criticism stings. You want so sincerely for your email messages to have just the right tone that it takes forever to hit send. You keep thinking about completed tasks so much that nothing ever feels finished.

If any of this sounds familiar — and if the words “good enough” make you cringe — you may be suffering from a form of the same modern-day malady that affects most high-achieving women (and plenty of men!) in the year 2013: Perfectionism.

Notice how ‘most high-achieving women’ are suddenly diagnosed with a mental illness, while men get the parenthetical add-on.

Here’s a rare nod to perfectionism in men from a PhD writer, which apparently has a different outworking, and may therefore put down to other things:

“If I don’t do this perfectly it means I’m a failure and I can’t stand failure.” This type of black-and-white thinking can be quite consuming. For example, the public speaker that’s concerned with executing a perfectly flawless presentation will usually be so self-conscious that he’s unable to be as animated and engaging as he could be. Another classic example is in sexual performance. The anxiety that comes from being overly concerned about performing perfectly well is a leading psychological cause of erectile dysfunction.

- Huffington Post

Though I should probably add that erectile dysfunction happens to women too. It just doesn’t tend to be called that.

***

The other thing I’ve noticed about these articles is that women are likewise more likely to be blamed for making you a pain-in-the-neck perfectionist in the first place.

Here’s a classic example from a review of that same book on perfectionism:

Can one negative comment from your boss or mother-in-law throw you into a tailspin?

Note that while bosses can be both male AND female, mothers-in-law can only be female. Were we meant to conjure up images of men when we thought of ‘bosses’, thereby achieving gender-balance in our criticism? Either way, that sort of language stinks.

***

For a more nuanced look into perfectionism, here’s an interesting talk to some graduate students called Taming The Shrews: Perfectionism and Procrastination In Graduate School.

And here’s one of the slides.

While gymnasts, dancers, individuals with disordered eating and professional models are traditionally female pursuits, the categories of professional athletes, graduate students, scholars/scientists and mathematicians are not.

So I’m not yet convinced it’s helpful to think of perfectionism in gendered terms, erectile dysfunction or no erectile dysfunction.

Feminist Film Review: Fantastic Mr Fox

I really love this film: great animation, great artistic style, wonderful soundtrack, quirky humour. This film could be SO DAMN GREAT. So tell me, why the fuckity fuck does Wes Anderson have to go RUIN it by inserting anti-equality bullshit into the storyline, of what is already an outdated but classic story?

I’m about to argue that this is not really a film for kids, which is strange and counter-intuitive, since the book upon which it is based is undoubtedly a book for emergent readers. This is a film for adults who loved Roald Dahl as kids.

As is often the case with films, the screenplay is freely available online.

MOVIE POSTERS

Movie posters are important because they form a media in their own right. In the first one below we have The Smurfette Principle at work with ten male characters to one female (Mrs Fox). I can’t even say that Mrs Fox is a ‘female feisty’. She’s being led by her husband, leaning back in classical dance style, safely in the arms of her husband. While a sophisticated audience will know after watching the film that this is an ironic take, since Mrs Fox is more sensible and moderate than her hair-brained husband, this is not apparent from the poster alone. Is ironic sexism suddenly not sexist? I always argue no.

So is the one below any better? With Mrs Fox almost hidden by her husband? Maybe, since the gender imbalance is at least halved: the ratio is now four to one.

The French decided not to bother with Mrs Fox at all. This is perhaps more honest, since Mrs Fox exists only as a minor character, with speaking roles to match.

Here’s a snapshot of all the posters from a series, in which girl viewers are reminded that girls can be anything, especially if their brains are hidden behind those of a man.

It’s easy to miss how few female characters exist in stories ‘peopled’ with animals. As Janet McCabe wrote after a large scale count of gender representation in children’s literature:

“The persistent pattern of disparity among animal characters may reveal a subtle kind of symbolic annihilation of women disguised through animal imagery.”

CHARACTERISATION IN FANTASTIC MR FOX, THE MOVIE

The first page of a screenplay is especially telling because these blueprints offer a thumbnail character sketch, and offer up what the filmmakers feel  are THE most important points about the characters:

Reading the script, I notice something I didn’t when watching the film (which I’ve seen a handful of times now): That Mrs Fox wears men’s trousers. Why is that? Why is it important?  Someone at the Overthinking It blog makes a very good case for Fantastic Mr Fox being all about penises. Strange as this sounds at first, BY DICK, THEY ARE RIGHT! It’s important that Mrs Fox wears The Pants because Fantastic Mr Fox is feeling emasculated.  But here’s the thing: I’m not sure WHY Mrs Fox has to be wearing the man pants. I’m not sure why at all, because as you can see from the get-go, Mrs Fox shrugs and agrees to do as her husband tells her. This relationship continues most the way through the story, until the fairly mild berating scene after Mr Fox actually endangers the lives of the whole community by being a stupid dickhead. Mrs Fox makes Mr Fox feel important. That’s her role in the relationship. On the very next page Mrs Fox asks Mr Fox, ‘What is a squab?’ Mr Fox replies ‘You know what a squab is. It’s like a pigeon, I suppose. Anyway, it’s a type of bird we can eat.’ Mrs Fox asks the questions. Mr Fox does the explaining. Throughout the script, Mrs Fox is ordered to do a lot of shrugging whenever her husband suggests something dangerous or unlikely.

The sophisticated viewer understands that this is a good example of what pop-culture has come to describe as ‘mansplaining’. It’s a poke of fun at Mr Fox, who doesn’t even know what a squab is himself, despite his insistence on explaining it to his wife. But what of younger viewers? What would they make of Mrs Fox’s constant submission to her husband?

So if Mr Fox is feeling emasculated, his very own submissive wife has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Why the ‘men’s trousers’? Might it be because wives are blamed for men’s feeling powerless… whatever they do? Just by their very existence? To a sophisticated audience, this husband/wife relationship is exaggerated and silly; of course we understand that Mrs Fox is the one who really wears the pants. This is why we saw her wearing the pants in the opening shot, naturally. But a younger audience? No, all they will see is a power imbalance. As highlighted by the script Mrs Fox’s man-pants are indeed very important to the story, but the audience would have to be familiar with the phrase ‘wearing The Pants’ to understand the symbolism.

anachronistically OLD-FASHIONED GENDER ROLES

Part of me is willing to let this slide. Roald Dahl had this book published in 1970. But a sign on a windmill reads ‘Bean Inc (since 1976)’ and makes me wonder when this film is set exactly. Gender roles were already shaking up even in 1976, so creating a 1950s world genderwise is an unnecessary anachronism. This world is a divided one, in which men do almost all of the talking, making all of the decisions. When women appear at all, it’s only because a gender segregated milieu dictates their existence.

From the script:

‘Fox and Mrs Fox dart through a hole under a painted fence; race along a thin trail next to the garage; crawl beneath a window where a blonde woman serves an early dinner, dealing hamburgers like playing cards to three little, blond children…’ [because women serve dinner] Twelve fox years later, ‘Mrs Fox stands at the counter-top stirring something in a bowl with a whisk. She is dressed in a paint-splattered, cream-colored, Victorian-style dress’.

Badger, Beaver, and Stoat L.L.P are a law firm of three men.  The secretary is an uneasy female otter who peers in at the men’s conversation from the outer office. I find this symbolic.

My question is this: When film makers have the leeway to create AN ENTIRELY FICTIONAL WORLD, why do girls so often get the short-shrift? In an ENTIRELY FICTIONAL WORLD, POPULATED WITH TALKING ANIMALS, why can’t girl viewers see woman-animals as lawyers? Why do lawyers’ female secretaries still have to peer in at the action from the other side of the door?

perpetuation of rape culture

Are you for reeeeaaallll???? Yes, I know. Stay with me. Or maybe I can let the script speak for itself:

That, folks, is what you call ‘slut-shaming’: basing a gag on the idea that it is insulting to a man to insinuate that his wife had sex with lots of partners (‘the town tart’) before marrying (like a good girl should). ‘Let’s not use a double-standard’, Fox reminds the sleazy rat, in a self-conscious, ironic nod towards the fact that this is a sexist insult. He doesn’t get to finish his sentence however, as he tries to explain that his wife ‘marched against the’ (unspecified feminist issue, we’re to guess). As I will keep saying, every time I watch a film that is ostensibly for kids or young adults, ironic sexism is STILL SEXISM.

So how is slut-shaming part of rape culture? I’ll leave that to Jessica Valenti of the Nation to explain:

‘What kind of world do we live in when young men are so proud of violating unconscious girls that they pass proof around to their friends? It’s the same kind of world in which being labeled a slut comes with such torturous social repercussions that suicide is preferable to enduring them. As a woman named Sara Erdmann so aptly tweeted to me, “I will never understand why it is more shameful to be raped than to be a rapist.”’

Sex and shame is the reason why revenge porn sites exist.

Having a high partner count is an asset for a man. Whether most women will admit this or not, a guy’s perceived sexual experience is attractive to them. While many a woman might act shocked at a man’s admitted number of lovers, secretly she’s pleased. His “vast” sexual history tells her that he has been heavily pursued by other females. Intra-gender competition kicks in. If she can tame him, she has defeated all the women who have come before her.

- Role Reboot, The Difference Between Bad Girls and Bad Boys

See also: One woman’s Crusade Against Revenge Porn in lieu of actually visiting a revenge porn site. Note that there is a proliferation of revenge porn sites showing pictures of naked women, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a revenge porn site showing pictures of naked men. Because for men, having sex is not shameful. It’s manly. Ergo: no revenge.

Back to the film in question, although increasingly unnecessary and anachronistic, it IS okay for big-budget stories about men, featuring powerful men in traditional manly roles to exist in this modern world. BUT NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF WOMEN. And certainly not in films based on children’s books, in which it’s easy to assume THAT THIS FILM IS FOR CHILDREN. Which it is, of course. It’s a family film. Real cuss words are replaced with ‘cuss’. There’s no sex. There’s comic violence.

women are decorative, AND INTERESTED IN THE SUPERFICIAL

We have only Mrs Fox to run with, because there are no other female characters in Fantastic Mr Fox who say more than a few lines. So all of the messages about women must come from her.

Mrs Fox is there to give the okay to the floral curtains that Mr Fox holds up for her approval, after buying a new house without her. She’s interested in keeping things clean. We see her vacuuming in the background of the action. ‘Oh no, Foxy. It’s filthy,’ she says much later, of a metal ladder.

When Mrs Fox is not cooking, clearing the table or hoovering the floors, she paints landscapes. Because women are arty. ‘Fox looks at Mrs Fox’s canvas. It is a picture of the pond and landscape ahead, but in severe weather with black clouds and lightning bolts. It is signed Felicity Fox. Fox raises an eyebrow. Fox: ‘Still painting thunderstorms, I see.’ A sophisticated audience will understand that Mrs Fox’s depiction of a thunderous landscape, over and over again, is a metaphor for her warnings which continue to go unheeded by her reckless husband. She paints because she has no voice. A younger audience might see only that painting is for girls. Or worse: that girls are only good for painting.

Mrs Fox has ‘beautiful’ fur. She glows when she is pregnant (a gag because it is literal).

Except every now and then Mrs Fox gets another role. She gets to be ‘the voice of reason’. Decorative female in movies often get to be the voice of reason, but don’t let that fool you into assuming she gets heard. Because she doesn’t. Instead, she gets to say [coldly]: Lower your voice, Ash, while her husband gets the funny, ironic, satirical lines. Straight woman, funny man. A familiar trope. (Mrs Fox is looking ‘coldly’ more than once. While Mr Fox is ‘pained’ and ‘surprised’ and otherwise animated, the script dictates that Mrs Fox says things ‘coldly’ and ‘quietly’.)

Throughout the story, Mr Fox lies to his wife about his chicken-stealing adventures.

MRS FOX: Where’d you get this chicken?

FOX: (shrugs) I picked it up at the Five-and-Dime last night on my way back from–

MRS FOX: It’s got a Boggis Farms tag around its ankle.

FOX: (hesitates) Huh. Must’ve escaped from there before I bought it.

It’s clear that Mrs Fox knows what’s going on. But is there a bust up, eventually? A confrontation between lying-husband and ever-patient wife? Yes, thank goodness. What does she do, though? She scratches him in the face. This should be somewhat cathartic:

MRS FOX: Twelve fox-years ago, you made a promise to me while we were caged inside that fox-trap that, if we survived, you would never steal another chicken, goose, turkey, duck, or squab, whatever they are. I believed you. Why did you lie to me?

FOX: (simply) because I’m a wild animal

MRS FOX: You’re also a husband and a father.

Except I’m reminded that in real life it’s still women who are so often blamed for/expected to ‘tame’ their ‘wild’ men by expecting them to live up to their roles as reluctantly responsible husbands and fathers. I’m not sure why this scene irritates me, but I think it’s because this false gender dichotomy so often forms the basis of nagging-wife gags.

And it might be funny, if all were right with the real world. Felicity Fox’s calm throughout the confrontation is a typical demonstration of her stoicism. But aren’t interactions like that a little too close to home, in a world where women are still so poorly represented at decision-making levels? After all, Mr Fox goes on his merry way, continuing to cause mishap after mishap, running the show even after it has been demonstrated that the sensible, calm and collected wife should be allowed to take the lead. A sophisticated audience understands the parody. Meanwhile, I wonder what messages a young, female viewer might walk away with.

Later, in dire straights, Mr Fox addresses a mixed crowd:

FOX: Gentlemen, this time we must dig in a very special direction.

… Everyone starts digging, slowly but intently.

Did you notice how EVERYONE starts digging, but Mr Fox addressed the group as ‘gentlemen’? Would the opposite happen, anywhere? In which a mixed group of characters is addressed as ‘ladies’? Not to mention that men are for doing the useful, heavy work.

A sophisticated audience knows that Mr Fox is old-fashioned and benevolently sexist, not to mention completely self-absorbed. (‘I’ve done it! he shouts when everyone helps to dig them to the surface.) The unsophisticated audience understands (unconsciously, no doubt) that men are the stars of the show. Women may help, but only in the background. “Who knows short-hand?” Fox asks, after his amazing idea. Linda does, his otter secretary. Linda says two words, over and over again. ‘Got it’.

Oh, but I probably should mention that Badger’s wife get to be a pediatrician.

THE FEMALE CHARACTERS EXIST TO PROVIDE AN OTHER: MEN ARE MEN BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT GIRLS.

BEAVER’S SON (to Ash): We don’t like you, and we hate your dad. You’re too snazzy. You dress like a girl. You’re creative. Now grab some of that mud, chew it in your mouth, and swallow it.

A sophisticated audience subsequently sees Krisofferson, the super-talented cousin stand up in the face of bullying. The sophisticated audience recognises bullying, for starters. The unsophisticated audience may get this, may not, but definitely understands that being called a girl is an insult and NOT A GOOD THING. Of course, this unsophisticated reading is reinforced by every single bit of imagery, and by the fact that girls don’t actually get to do anything throughout… except pine over boys.

Female characters are referred to in relation to their husbands. Mr Fox is referred to as ‘Fox’ throughout the script; Felicity is ‘Mrs Fox’. That’s nothing special. That’s how society works. But what about:

FOX: Go to the flint-mine. Tell Mrs Badger, Rabbit’s ex-girlfriend, et al. that help is on the way.

As you can see from the dialogue, Rabbit’s ex-girlfriend doesn’t even get her own name.

As an aside, I’m wondering why the character Kylie is named ‘Kylie’. IMDb reveals that the rather hapless creature who becomes Mr Fox’s ‘secretary and personal assistant’ is named after a real person in Wes Anderson’s life — a man called Kylie — and I don’t know if it’s just because I live in Australia, but Kylie is a distinctly feminine name to me. Is this why they chose it? Is an opposum with vacant eyes who is scared of thunder funny also because he has a feminine sounding name?

Kylie tries to bite the chicken on the neck. The chicken is unharmed. Kylie shrugs. Fox kills the chicken with one quick flick of the jaws. Kylie looks horrified.

I’d be interested to hear from people living in America, even though opossums are associated with Australia, and possibly therefore with Kylie Minogue. Maybe in other countries Kylie is a unisex name. But BabyNamePedia tells me that ‘Kylie has in the past century been predominantly given to girls.’ And we all know that when male characters are compared to weak, ineffectual girls, that’s funny, right? And so easy! Ba ba boom! Instant funny.

UNQUESTIONABLY A MOVIE FOR SOPHISTICATED VIEWERS

Common Sense Media offers insightful commentary on age-appropriateness.

Parents need to know that director Wes Anderson’s dry, offbeat adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s story Fantastic Mr. Fox is fine for most grade-schoolers but also has some themes and humor that will go over kids’ head.

But I’m at odds with this. Fast-paced dialogue may well go over kids’ heads, granted. And the slut-shamey gag is certainly fast-paced. At the same time, aren’t we constantly being told how impressionable kids are, that their minds are like sponges? I’m constantly reminded by my own kid that they absorb way more than we think they’re absorbing.

We’re at a strange point in history re family films. The best ones appeal to both kids and adults. Dual audience is often achieved through multi-level humour, and this humour so often relies on ironic whatever, in this case ironic sexism. The very problem with ironic sexism is that, to the younger viewer, it’s not ironic at all. I believe hipster sexism is happening with such reliability in family films because there’s the idea that women are equal now, that all the gender thingos have been fixed, so now we can poke fun at the past, in all its sexist ridiculousness. In truth, the world is nowhere near equal. Not in any way, shape or form.

This family film is basically good. But truly great filmmakers know how to crack a sophisticated joke which does not exclude half of its audience. A great filmmaker refuses to keep alive unhelpful stereotypes, perpetuating them for its young, knowing what to omit and what to keep in the adaptation of a classic.

***

In case anyone’s still interested in Wes Anderson: Illustrated Floor Plans of Wes Anderson Films. (The fourth one is for Fantastic Mr Fox.)

And you know how people keep saying that watching too much TV will turn your kid into a jerk? Well, I don’t think that’s the appliance’s fault.