Woman on the Edge of a Drag

I had a flashback to a scene in Marge Piercy's seminal book Woman on the Edge of Time the other day while watching the trailer for Burlesque.

If you haven't read Piercy's book, it concerns the life and times (I use the term advisedly) of a 37-year-old woman named Consuelo (Connie), who receives a series of visitations from a resident of the future named Luciente. In the world that Luciente occupies, most social ills have been relegated to the ancient past. Sexism, environmental degradation, homophobia, and bad credit have all been banished from the peaceable kingdom of Mattapoisett. Although people there haven't been entirely freed from all assholery, they are still humans after all, possessed of the mad monkey minds that drive us relentlessly forward, grasping, greedy megalomaniacs that we largely are. But, for the most part, the people of Mattapoisett have learned to live with each other and with the planet in relative comfort and equality. If you haven't read Piercy's book, and anyone who ever took women's studies undoubtedly has, go and find a copy, even for sentimental purposes.

But the scene in question, the Cher-induced moment, if you will, concerns the book's other future scenario. Connie, in her time travels, also visits another possible future. It is a mirror-cracked twin of the humble village life of Mattapoisett. In this other vision/version, the planet has been rendered largely uninhabitable by industrialization and pollution. The great unwashed abide in chemically induced fantasy, while a thin sliver of extremely wealthy individuals live in enormous towers, separate and distinct and completely in control. In this reality, the function of women has been reduced to that of sex robots, surgically enhanced to grotesque proportions, valued purely for their physical appearance. Sound familiar? Looking at Cher's ageless robot face, I thought,"The future is now."

But it's the bad future, the one that Ms. Piercy warned us about. So, how exactly did this come to be?

Dancing for The Man

Don't expect any easy one-word answers -- I'm still trying to figure out what people see in Christina Aguilera. But the question has nagged me for a while, popping up in different places in books, magazine articles, documentaries and simple old every day existence.

If you don't want to work for The Man or the "The Cher" (they are oddly interchangeable in Burlesque), your choices are thin on the ground; you can opt out entirely, but somehow that seems like running away. So, consider this an un-review, an anti-review of Burlesque. Since the purpose of criticism has largely been reduced to a further extension of marketing, even mentioning a film can be construed as publicity. To be clear, Burlesque itself isn't worth writing about: the plot is shopworn, the acting oddly awkward and stilted. it lacks even the maniacal sex honking of Elizabeth Berkley in Showgirls. The whole exercise feels almost tepid, in fact. Most music videos contain more plastic raunch inside of three minutes than does this entire film. But it is indicative of the larger cultural fabric, a point in time in which the sheer deluge of sex sexy sex sex is so unrelenting in pop culture world, it sometimes feels like there is nothing else. No one is allowed to get old, to get saggy and unsexy, to simply want to read books and be left alone.

You don't need to go see Burlesque. I would prefer that you don't, actually. There are far better things you could do: take a walk in the midst of a soggy Vancouver winter, talk to your crazy kid(s), bitch on the phone to your cranky sister, better yet, go see a film about a woman who is intelligent, talented, beautiful, complex, and utterly human. No plastic surgery sex robots allowed. Vancity is showing The Woman with the 5 Elephants this weekend, a film that will reaffirm your faith in the idea that women are more than the sum of their various bits and pieces.

Or, if you want to embrace your anger, then perhaps go see Burlesque, and then get your hands on every piece of Robin Morgan's writing, beginning with Goodbye to All That....

See how you feel afterwards. I felt pissed off and deeply sad all at the same time. The feeling has been stealing up over me for quite some time, but Burlesque sealed the deal. Perhaps it started while watching a documentary about systematic erasure of the last 50 years of feminist art practice. In one interview, a woman artist of a certain age bemoans the fact that so many of her young students ape the worst of the 1950s behaviour. I would add that it is the 1950s again, but with a thick layer of porn on top.

The second wave crashing down

The future turns back upon itself, but mind you, not without a lot of help. This is where culture comes to bear, in movies, television shows, and on the radio, with one too many Rihanna songs. Have you noticed that there is not a single political song on the airwaves lately, or even one that is anything less than full-on erotic come-hither invitation. Rihanna in her latest pop tune croons to her male friend about entering any door the lady has. It doesn't take much imagination to come to a conclusion about which entrance is on offer. Anal sex may be many things, but empowering is not the first thing that leaps to mind.

It's like there never was a second wave, that women never fought and died for the right to be respected as fully human and deserving of common civility. Even as the city of Edmonton launches a campaign about sexual assault that seems more about titillation than education, young women are encouraged to believe that sex is power. But all the sex positive blah blah about being empowered reminds me a little too much of what Ms. Morgan is talking about in Goodbye to All That, where women were booed and hissed by their brothers in the revolution if they didn't hang an open-to-all-comers sign on the zipper of their bellbottoms.

While certain proponents of the burlesque form maintain that it can be considered almost a form of female drag, and in the case of Cher, this certainly feels correct -- the woman became a gay male icon for a reason -- the film often feels more like gay-male fantasy than anything else, right down to the Pussycat Dolls dance routines. The film's writer and director Steve Antin's sister is Robin Antin (who founded the Pussycat Dolls, naturally enough).

My own sister has a theory that coming down off of 30 years of estrogen is a little like coming off serious drugs. Even if it is chemically created in your own little brain, the effect is the same as any other type of drug, a sense of altered reality. And like any trip, coming down isn't all that fun. Adult life, comprised mostly of work and the occasional small pleasure isn't bad, it just lacks the big ups and downs of hormone induced hysteria.

I don't know if there is any point in drawing a conclusion about the nature of female existence based on a bad film starring Cher and chicken-legged Christina. But what if you thought that this was all there was, no other way of being in the world? What if you never woke up, never grew up, but stayed stuck in drug-induced infantilism and fantasy, like the majority of the people who populate Marge Piercy's dystopian vision of the future?

Maybe it is just the prevalence of stupidity, crassness and porn-laced everything that depresses me, from the Bratz hooker dolls for little girls to older women being encouraged to sex up and dumb down. Dumb not only in the stupid sense, but also meaning silent, mouths shut, legs open. Meanwhile, large sections of history are busily being erased even before you know it existed. A film such as Burlesque is the epitome of that narcissistic solipsistic thinking, where the world begins and ends on the dot of your pretty little nose.

In Woman on the Edge of Time, Connie must make a decision between her own potential happiness and the two possible futures that hang in the balance -- the dystopian robot world, or the egalitarian society of Mattipoisett. In the end, it come down to that, there is no opting out, you pick your battles and, win or lose, fight the good fight. Connie sacrifices her own happiness for the fragile hope of a better future. The book ends with her stating, "I did fight them."