Why is or would be a crazy cat lady (CCL hereinafter) considered dangerous? Let us examine the highlighted words more thoroughly: “elderly”, “widow”, “alone”, “dozens or more cats”, “small house”, “woman”, “middle-aged or older”, “no husband”, “empty lonely void”, “stinky homes”, “white trash”, “loves her cats more than people” and “old lady”.  These words create a person of a certain gender, marital status, age, economic income, mental health and philosophical ethics. By these descriptors, CCL is always (1) a woman, (2) single/unmarried, (3) middle-aged or older, (4) economically disadvantaged, (5) with mental disabilities (e.g. hoarding, social anxiety), (6) lacking in personal hygiene, and (7) bonding with other species (cats) than only humans.

CCL is a slur, a negative and hostile label, directed at women who do not conform (willingly or not) to the dominant societal ways of living which still consist of obligatory coupling with another adult person – most likely of the opposite gender – resulting in formation of a marriage and creation of the nuclear family where animals (i.e. cats) do not occupy a central role in the household. Any deviation from these lifestyle guidelines creates a threat or disturbance to the existing patristic social order where anything or anyone dangerous is sometimes handled as the Other. When Otherness is manifested as a cultural misstep from the expected role – as is the case with CCL – it can be ridiculed and used as a warning to stay within (societal) lines.

The CCL label carries a subtle set of discrimination and stigma, directed at non-conforming women: sexism (only women), heteronormativity (unmarried and childfree), ableism or sanism (“crazy”, hoarder, asocial), ageism (middle-aged or older), classism (poor and dirty) and speciesism (love for cats).

The dimension of sexism in the CCL label is evident in the imposed gendered belief that any cat loving person must be a woman. And while there are no labels describing a cat person who happens to be male as a “crazy cat man” or – when different species are involved as pets – a “crazy dog woman” or a “crazy parrot man”, the relationship between a cat and a woman stays largely devalued.  If a dog is man’s best friend, then a cat can never be appreciated as woman’s significant companion. There are many cultural sources that associate women with cats; for example, “catfight” is pejoratively used term when describing a conflict between women, “catwalk” is a type of fashion walk for female models, “pussy”, a word for a cat, also means vagina, and Catwoman, a female superhero/supervillain, who shares a special bond with cats, can be viewed as human-nonhuman hybrid. But only one cultural image is the most persistent when it comes to single women living with cats – a witch, an archetype of a dangerous woman. Portrayals of witches in the popular culture predominantly included cats as their companions, but this popular depiction is also rooted in the historical data where medieval women were prosecuted as witches and their cats were seen as witches’ helpers. However, today’s CCL is constructed more as a desexualised witch because ageism, or discrimination on the basis of age, does not allow women to be sexual or sexually appealing on their own terms after the age of 50.

Heteronormativity and compulsory coupling, societal notions about heterosexuality and marriage are part of the dominant cultural belief about proper adult identity. A single woman, whose sexuality is also ambiguous due to her singlehood because heteronormative and coupling ideologies does not allow women to be without men, is being pathologized for defying these expectations. These ideologies vilify any manifestation of affection or love that is not directed towards men or offspring. CCL symbolically fills this gap between societal expectations and single women’s living experiences by explaining their solo lifestyles as “odd” or “crazy” because women’s singlehood, non-heterosexualities or non-monogamies are still at odds with patriarchal conceptions about women who view them as useful to them – hetero wives and mothers.

The word “crazy”, still nonchalantly used by most people, is an ableist or sanist slur where its usage is being deployed with humorous intentions. Ableism or discrimination against people with disabilities that also include less visible ones (such as mental illnesses) in this particular syntagm only amplifies the traditional ideas about gender where women are defined as irrational (hence “crazy”). However, by ignorantly linking a certain lifestyle that does not include husband or kids as a mental problem, not only deepens the misconceptions about mental illnesses, but also reinforces the outdated gender ideas about inherently “emotional” women.

Ageism or discrimination, based on someone’s age is also present in the CCL label. A middle-aged woman is seen as useless in the youth-driven and sexist society where any societal benefit of a woman is narrowly viewed through their physical attributes: beauty, youth and reproductive abilities. Once those attributes start to fade away, woman’s value starts to decrease in an androcentric society. CCL can be therefore understood as a non-threatening symbolic depot for middle-aged women with nothing to offer to (patriarchal) society.

Words such as “poor”, “white trash” or “stinky” connote classist attitudes towards older women who are due to the lifelong wage gap more prone to poverty. The symbolic and material aspects of poverty and old age are mostly associated with dirt or bad smell, an abject matter which needs to be eliminated from the visible sight of society and just left alone. “Lonely” is another word that describes CCL, but maybe this loneliness is more of an economic that personal issue.

The last dimension of CCL label is that of speciesism or carnism. A person appreciating and living with cats should be called a cat person, a genderless and de-gendered word, which would merely imply a certain bond with other species than humans. To ridicule any human-nonhuman bonding only reiterate one of the major systems of oppression – carnism; the belief than some animals are allowed to be eaten, others can be held as pets, but none of them should be acknowledged as sentient beings. The more traditional view on women’s caretaking of cats enforces patriarchal ideas about maternal transference from non-existing humans to cats in need. But this notion conflates CCL’s caretaking with mothering and it reproduces traditional gender roles that associate women with caretaking or mothering as their nurtural calling.

The CCL label therefore represents a dangerous downfall for women, something that must be avoided at any price, a pitiful lifestyle that was driven by bad choices or a lack of (self-) control over woman’s life. CCL is a patriarchal warning sign to single women who are still young/ish and love animals (cats in particular) to abandon those solo lifestyles because they lead to the worst case scenarios for women – to be alone, mentally disabled, poor, societally overlooked and invisible. It is a tool of shaming or a disciplinary strategy for women whose personal choice, identity or social circumstances do not co-align with the current demands of marriage, motherhood, heteronormativity, age-appropriateness, middle-class mind-set, mental health disposition and/or philosophical ethics.

Historically, high-heeled shoes were men’s footwear, worn by men in horseback-riding cultures, where heels helped them stay in the stirrup (e.g. Persian shoes in 9^th century, vaquero boots in 16^th century or cowboy boots in 19^th century). High-heeled shoes were important for their functionality and practicality, two of the most traditional masculine traits when it comes to footwear.

However, in the 17^th century up until the 19^th century, high-heeled shoes became the symbol of upper class or aristocracy, where the height of the heel signified the height of the social class. The high heel indicated the luxury of the wearer and the inability to walk indicated the unnecessity to work. Only lower classes worked (and wore flats or no shoes). But with the rise of capitalism, a system that cherishes also sartorial modesty, men’s flamboyance (including wigs and heels) was suppressed. The lavishness of clothing was now associated with frivolity … and femininity.

Louis XIV [credits: Wikipedia]

Men did toy with feminized looks and high heels in popular music, a realm of “queers” (i.e. odd, strange people), because anything goes in popular music. For example, David Bowie, Lux Interior from The Cramps, Yugoslavian 80s pop singer Oliver Mandić or Kazaky, all of them incorporated high heels as a part of their on-stage persona, but this performative behavior of gender bending did not make much of fuss. They are celebrities, not “real” people. However, casual (i.e. unquestioned or taken-for-granted) masculinity does not consist of wearing high heels, but there is one public person who sports women’s clothing in his private life.

Eddie Izzard, an English comedian, wears women’s clothing. He is a straight, cis gender male, who enjoys high heels, red lipstick, painted nails and fishnet stockings. Of course, his celebrity status is one of the extenuating circumstances – he is famous, maybe his “dress-up” is part of his comedy act – so his enjoyment in women’s attire is not taken seriously or is viewed as being eccentric. Eddie Izzard’s personal style is categorized as “cross-dressing”. When clothing carries so much gendered meaning that when a person of a different gender wears them and this behavior is defined as “transvestism” or “cross-dressing”, all these just subtly reaffirm that women’s clothes and femininity in general are Other/ed. No woman, who sports a two-piece suit, is viewed as a “cross-dresser” (although in not so recent past, they were). When Eddie Izzard was asked why he wears women’s clothing, he responded: “They’re not women’s clothes. They’re my clothes. I bought them.” In his answer, gender of the owner becomes irrelevant, only the capability or male entitlement to own things (i.e. his property rights – “my clothes”) is important.

Eddie Izzard [credits: Daily Mail/Wenn.com]

To conclude: when straight men cave into their sartorial choices without being ridiculed with homophobic or ableist comments (gender ≠ sexuality, wardrobe ≠ deviation) and if those choices will consist of what is now regarded as “feminine attire”, a progress towards more gender-free or at least genderfuck society can happen.

In the mainstream cinema industry, polyamory is rarely a central story plot, but when it is employed as an intimate arrangement between characters, it is usually irrelevant to the storyline; in some cases it is glorified as an “unconventional lifestyle”, in some latently disapproved and in some just created without any backstory.

The glorification of polyamory as merely an “artistic whim” occurs in films Henry and June (1990), Head in the Clouds (2004) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), where polyamory sinks into more important film narratives of human creativity (Henry and June), war (Head in the Clouds) or a woman’s indecisiveness (Vicky Cristina Barcelona – here it is, the bi-stigma of a bisexual’s inherent inability to pick sides).

Credits: Mediapro

The latent discursive disapproval of polyamory is depicted in Threesome (1994) and Savages (2012), where protagonists are being ridiculed by other students (Threesome) or are primarily labelled as savages – their “savageness” emerges from their criminal activities – they are drug smugglers (i.e. undisciplined citizens) or polyamory (i.e. “uncivilized” intimacy).

Credits: Relativity Media

In the monogamous society (and to some extent films do reflect general societal values), poly relationships or characters in films are prone to an inevitable ending or death; relationships dissolve, some characters die. The message is clear: poly relationships are not supposed to exist in our society because of their abjection (polyamory creates displeasure in others, but also stimulates curiosity) and potential disruption of the existing social, sexual, moral and emotional orders.

However, in the German film Three (Drei, 2010), directed by Tom Tykwer, it is quite the opposite; it is the monogamous relationship that is futile and headed for death just to be resurrected as a polyamorous relationship. Three is revolved around a high-profile upper class childfree couple (Hanna and Simon), based in Berlin, who are in their early 40s, when each of them gets sexually and emotionally involved with the same man (Adam), not being aware of each other’s involvements.

Credits: Tom Tykwer

What separates Three from other, aforementioned polyamorous films?

Firstly, it is the transformation of a relationship from dyadic to triadic, a film’s central premise, which happens very organically and poetically. The futility of Hanna and Simon’s monogamous relationship is quickly explained in the first sequence of the film – they are not having sex anymore and quarrel a lot which signals that their relationship of 20 years will either dissolve or mold into something else. If this was a monogamous narrative, they would engage in adultery, an “acceptable” solution that would keep the relationship artificially alive. However, both of them will later engage in “an affair” with Adam, but none of them is being labelled a “cheater” nor is the mood of the film condemning those actions.

In any other film (Unfaithful, for example) the narrative would have been preoccupied with the crucifixion of cheaters and the restoration of monogamy. The semiotics of this film poster maintains the prevalence of monogamy as the only acceptable arrangement of intimacy through carefully positioned symbols. A husband is overlooking the “cheating” situation from above, almost godlike, a lover’s head is cut from this frame – because he is an element that should and will be eliminated, a cheating wife is positioned beneath her husband. The exclusive visibility of hetero monogamous couple is the strategic move that indicates that monogamous marriage will be restored and that the unequal dynamics of a dominant husband and submissive wife will stay intact.

Credits: Regency Enterprises

Three also defies the ageist assumption of who can be polyamorous (not only young and beautiful). Simon, Hanna and Adam are not young, they are in their 40s, and they are not too pretty, but still visually relatable. At the beginning of the film, the couple is childfree and at the end, the now poly family is expecting twins. Not only does this encourage the idea of polyamory as a more fertile relationship, it also resists the ageist notion of a woman being pregnant only if she is young/er.

One of the most important aspects in Three is the representation of bisexuality. It is men (Adam and Simon) who are bisexual and not Hanna. There is a lack of positive representations of male bisexuality that can be contributed to the overall cultural bi-invisibility. Adam as a bisexual man, comfortable with his sexuality, is more than just his sexual orientation; he is a human being with several hobbies (e.g. singing in a choir, playing football, being an avid football fan, successful at his profession, practicing karate) and good social skills. It is rare to see a portrayal of a bisexual man so realistic and positive. However, Simon, who was straight so far, must rethink his sexuality but ignorantly falls into a cultural trap of sexual binarism when he wants to redefine himself; after the second sexual encounter with Adam, he explains to Adam that he is not gay. Unfortunately, this bi-erasure is still a common cultural reaction when it comes to non-heterosexualities.

Intimate encounters with Adam leave both of them (Hanna & Simon) pleasantly confused – Hanna’s love for Simon didn’t fade despite her lust for Adam and Simon must also rethink his new sexual identity. Their fulfilled sex lives revitalised their dying monogamous relationship up to the point that they get married. Adam embodies the new relationship energy in now poly relationship.

There are a lot of symbols that indicate or imply the death of monogamous relationship and an ascendance of polyamorous one.

Death is an omnipresent theme in Three and its metaphors are encoded in the death of Simon’s mother (she had pancreatic cancer), Simon’s testicular cancer (he survives) and Hanna’s miscarriages that can be interpreted as futility of the monogamous relationship.

Credits: Tom Tykwer

Water as a symbol of rebirth is prevalent in Simon’s redesign of himself; he usually goes for a swim in the public swimming pool which is also the place where he meets Adam. Here, water  has a double meaning for Simon – he is “reborn” as a human being (still amongst the living after his cancer) with the new sexual identity (i.e. bisexual).

Credits: Tom Tykwer

There are several implications that 3 is the new form of intimacy; for example, the dance piece at the beginning of the film shows a triad, engaged with each other, “good things come in three”, said Adam when Hanna and he met for the third time and then there is an almost Amelie Poulain sequence that explains the nearly fatalistic importance of the number 3: Simon’s mother had only three months to live, but she died by taking 39 sleeping pills on September 3rd at 3:09, Simon’s sister moved to Stuttgart in 1993 and was aged 39, came to see dying mother by train at 9:30 at moonlight tariff 39 euros …

Credits: Tom Tykwer

Eventually, they do find out that they are in a triadic relationship with each other (Hanna + Simon, Simon + Adam and Hanna + Adam) and after the first shock and breaking up, they get back together, forming a poly relationship. The last scene shows their potential not just for a polyamorous relationship, but also for a poly family.

On the other hand, Three also has its weaknesses. Protagonists are quite privileged, they are white (despite the fact that the film was shot in multi-ethnic Berlin, there are no other ethnicities present but Caucasian or white), highly educated and well off (Simon is into building arts, Adam and Hanna are both Ph.D.’s.), all of them are cisgender, able-bodied and able-minded.

Three may not be a perfect film, but it manages to be a trailblazer for a more realistic and mature approach on how to represent poly relationships and families in the mainstream cinema.

Party Girl (2014, d.: M. Amachoukeli, C. Burger and S. Theis) is a French woman-centric film, focused on Angélique Litzenburger, a sixty-year-old unmarried cabaret dancer, who has decided to get married; however, she does not follow through with her marital plan. The film plot may sound simple, but the story narrative deals with the ‘marriage mandate’ (i.e. a societal urge for a woman to be married at some point) and reveals an implicit societal sexism, ageism and classism.

‘Marriage mandate’ is something every western woman is seduced by with the help of ideological mechanisms (e.g. media, education system, religion, family, peers) that serve as self-disciplinary tools. Instead of someone directly commanding “You as a woman should get married”, an inside voice within a woman’s head (‘patriarchal other’) is gently whispering ‘Maybe I should be getting married because it is ____‘ (time, everyone else is, I don’t want to be alone …). And this is exactly what is happening to Angélique. She is is getting old(er), despite her single marital status she has four grown-up children, none of which prepared or able to take care of her in the future – emotionally, financially and physically, but the most important fact is that her job as an unregistered cabaret dancer did not enable her pension or retirement benefits. By not being entitled to any kind of pension, she could only collect a welfare support and live on the edge of poverty.

Her decision to marry a man at her age is a survival tactic, used by people of her economic underprivileged group. Although aging alone is a lonely experience, for a woman it is more of an economic risk, especially for low-income women, who also originate in a low socioeconomic class and could not climb upon the social ladder due to their socioeconomic and cultural limitations. This is where old age and inadequate financial power, gained through a person’s lifespan, meet and create an unfavourable living situation. For an uneducated woman, employment options are limited; she can only do jobs that require manual skills – and that also includes sex work.

Credits: Denis Carot & Marie Masmonteil

There is no sex-shaming in what Angélique and other women do on their account; it is a paid job and should be respected as any other one. However, this is not how her life is viewed through the eyes of a handful of young male clients, her children and soon-to-be-husband, who benevolently judges her nomadic lifestyle (“I live where I work”) and her thirst for fun. Her home is more with her women co-workers and the place where she works (public sphere) than a house where a woman of her age should spend her time (domestic sphere). Fun and self-indulgence (e.g. drinking, partying) of an older woman are not a picture society wants to paint. Women should abandon their need to have fun, to be irresponsible, reckless and spontaneous, because they must constantly think about their financial future (wage gap and limited options for work are almost every woman’s reality) and care about the social stigma for not being too sexual.

By marrying a man, she would gain more of the economic stability. But economic powerfulness of her fiancée is tricky – she immediately slips into the role of a housewife, which is a symbolic reminder of her economic dependency. A housewife in a traditional household has no status and no power, when it comes to economic decisions and even personal matters. Here is an example where a man’s economic power spills over into the personal control over a woman. There is a scene where her fiancée scolds her in front of his friends for smoking in the house. Surprisingly, his friends take her side arguing that it is now her house too, so she can do whatever she wants. Her fiancée does not share this view. “It is my house”, he stresses, “She just moved in.” It is clear that economic power overshadowed the romance. But (hetero) romance has always been about power – those who have more economic power, possess more power to command and control the other partner, even in such a trivial matter as someone’s behaviour. In this particular case, gender is amplified with economic privilege, so it constitutes rather traditional dynamics between a woman and a man, where Angélique should obey.

Another angle of their traditional coupling is fiancée’s overall possessiveness over her. Not only does he want to control her economically, he wants to eradicate any signs of her being a sexual being for anyone else but him. He gets upset when she is innocently flirting with a much younger man, although they never defined their relationship as monogamous. His suffocating sexual possessiveness results in her rejecting him sexually – she cannot have sex with him. The lack of emotional connectedness and his patriarchal views on marriage and women detach her from her sexual self and him. Angélique as a cabaret dancer is also stereotyped as a sexual worker – he expects ‘a wild animal’ in the sack, but she is not. She likes to perform seductiveness, not to live it. She enjoys the erotic overture, not the banal manifestation. She caters men’s fantasies, not their carnal fulfilment.

At the end, she does not go through with the marriage and walks away alone in the night. The equation between her being in a traditional marriage and her being a single nomad did not add up in her mind. She would have given up her joyfulness, emotional and mental independence, sexual vigor and … herself.

Credits: Denis Carot & Marie Masmonteil

Party Girl caters the premise of marriage as being emotionally, sexually and personally unbeneficial for a woman. When a woman must abandon parts of herself that do not fit into the simplistic and use-value model of a monogamous wife-sacrificial mother-dutiful housekeeper, then becoming a traditional wife can be compared to a social death of a woman, slowly withering away as a spiritual, sexual, emotional and economic being.

The western understanding of a woman’s body is – alongside with its reproductive power – also built around its aesthetic (decorative) and mobile (inactive) nature. It is expected for a girl to be pretty and a woman to be attractive, so to stay pretty/beautiful, a girl/woman should not engage in activities (sports mostly) that could ‘ruin’ her appearances. Bruises ruin skin to a degree of transforming skin colour from natural to ‘unnatural’ – blue, green, violet, yellowish. But most of all, they bluntly expose the fragility and mortality of the human body.

To gain a bruise is a positive message about body vitality and reaffirmation of the corporeal toughness for boys and men only; girls can be covered with bruises until they reach puberty. Puberty is a gender game-changer for girls, because it is assumed that a girl should abandon her free-spirit roaming and willingly submit herself to the docile young femininity – to be looked at as a ‘beautiful object’ instead of being primarily a looking subject. Bruises, scars or pimples on the body can be compared with cracks on the porcelain – they are a sign of imperfection or failure, something that is not well received in the western neoliberal society that strives for permanent success and cannot or will not see ‘defeat’ as a time to recess, recuperate or grow.

The societal imperative to be beautiful and perfect (although disguised as a woman’s choice and not an obligation) is a heavy burden in every woman’s life. Despite the fact that beauty standards vary in society, every culture and subculture has the ideal upon other members are measured and valued (e.g. too butch or too femme for a lesbian, too dark or too light for a black person, too masculine for a straight woman …). Women’s bodies should aim to be beautiful – impeccable and “bruiseless” to conform to the arbitrarily established standard(s).

Philosopher Iris Marion Young claims that adult women are caught between states of immanence (i.e. being an ‘object’ or immobile) and transcendence (i.e. being a subject or motile). Every time women are predominantly defined as immanence, their autonomy, creativity and subjectivity (e.g. voice, mind and body) are being destroyed or rejected. The model of conventional femininity does exactly that; it gently forbids any opportunity for a woman to be ‘outside’ of her inactive role if she wants to remain a feminine and beautiful insider.

When a woman engages in sports, she is expanding her spatial, motile, behavioural and physical limits and by not squeamishly avoiding the potential injuries, she is experiencing and embracing physical pain, produced by her own actions. Culturally, there is only one type of physical pain all women are allowed to participate in – childbirth, so by exploring her own pain thresholds besides the imposed one, she transgresses her gender role of a beautiful object and positions herself as an active agent of her own body, possibly covered with bruises, scars and dirt.

Not only does an adult woman, who is getting bruised, transgress her gender role of a delicate flower, she also deconstructs the dominant belief that when a woman’s body is bruised, it must be the case of domestic violence (e.g. intimate, family or elderly abuse). Bruise as an age-specific injury is quite unproblematic with pre-pubescent girls, but over time that fleshy symbol of an active life becomes an undisputable marker of an abuse. When a woman is abused, she is ultimately objectified yet her objectification is intensified with random people’s glances at her bruises and assumptions about getting them.

Bruises are and should only be “kisses” between the flesh and inanimate objects, never between two human bodies – an objectified subject and an abusive subject. But the naming of bruises as kisses is not mine. Finnish photographer Riikka Hyvönen has beautifully documented bruises of roller derby players, a now revived all-female (and feminist) sport, whose global recognisability can also be contributed to Drew Barrymore’s Whip it (USA, 2009), a film that celebrates independence, companionship, wit and women.

Babe Ruthless (Credits: Mandate Pictures)

With portraying bruises as “kisses”, the discourse of what is producing women’s bruises is changing. Instead of being exclusively embedded into a paradigm of an abuse, women’s bruises can arise from pleasurable fun.

Some sources say that there were more than five (!) millions women sentenced to death by hanging, burning at stakes or drowning.

Why these numbers are vague and why there hasn’t been a worldwide rehabilitation of women killed, the answer is obvious – it is the gender of victims. Witch-hunts and trails were gender-related and gender-based, but most important is the fact that it was a case of an intentional gendered violence against women, accused by fabricated allegations of being ”witches” and prosecuted as such.

Accusations were centred around the female sexuality or female work (midwifery, household chores), but most of them were unsubstantial figments of imagination and ignorance. Midwives, for example, were accused of witchcraft because of their nature of work (i.e. sexuality, female bodies, reproduction) and for possessing experiential knowledge about the birth regulation, which was by clerical authorities of the Catholic Church (CC) understood as interfering with their ‘natural’ demographics. Other factors for witch-hunt mass hysteria can be found in (1) religious wars, which left many women single with no paternal or marital protection and economically helpless, (2) women’s economic dependence and vulnerability,(3) the emerge of natural sciences, (4) medieval catastrophes (e.g. plague, syphilis, wars) and (5) CC’s attempts to preserve their religious and legislative power. Those were social amplifiers that created the climate of damnation, something an average person could not comprehend. Yet the CC had abused those cross-fertilizing events to reinforce their own doctrines of hell, sin, devil and heretics (witches included).

Witches had become an omnipresent evil that needed to be gone but their soon-to-be-doomed existence also served a CC’s campaign to destroy any religious competition: alternative readings of Bible, paganism or even Judaism. The CC’s contempt for Judaism is evident discursively; the naming of witch gatherings is called ”sabbat”, ”synagogue” was the place of such get-togethers. Their message was clear: do not mess with CC.

Not to forget the political and economic aspects of witch hunts which were used as a disciplinary method to consolidate the power of church and feuds and as a profitable business for every party involved: judges, executioners, innkeepers, professional witch hunters.

For a successful prosecution of witches, a manual for an inquisition (or investigators) and jurists (or judges) was written, now known as Malleus Maleficarum (1486). This manual consolidated witchcraft as woman’s civil crime, so the myth of a woman as ‘maleficia’ (i.e. witch) became a ‘scientific’ fact and no one did disbelieve the (new) authority of science.

Witch-hunts and trials were misogynistic feasts; women were accused by men, trials were held by male juries, searched by male prickers, sentenced by male judges, tortured by male jailers and burned to death by male executioners. Witch-hunts were the first documented victim blaming strategies of the male ruling class (i.e. theology, wealth, elite), a strategy that justifies the violence against its victims as something that a victim has ‘attracted’.

Women, accused of being witches, were Othered as a group and for the first time in history, they had been collectively prosecuted. Any woman could have been accused of being a witch for just being a woman. From the beginnings of the witch-hunt epidemics, old/er women were the main culprits of the witchcraft, but later the age structure had changed, so the paradigm of witchcraft also included young girls, due to their allure and beauty, and catholic nuns for belonging to the ‘wrong’ gender. Unlike other systematic eliminations in history (Holocaust for Jewish people or Porajmos for Romani people), victims of witch-hunts do not have group history or group identity, because those acts were undetected as a strategy to exterminate women and unfortunately, that led to the depoliticization of witch-hunts.

Among other victims – apart from women – were also other socially and morally Othered persons: disabled people, petty criminals, sex workers, animal lovers, beggars, vagabonds, thieves, drunks, homosexuals. Albeit their identities were associated with magic or sorcery, Roma people or Jewish people were never accused for crimes of the witchcraft.

Opening the monument, which is dedicated to women, that were burned, hanged and drowned, sends a clear message of an acknowledgement of historical injustice that had been made upon those women, and what witch trials were – a gynocide; but more essentially, it means rehabilitation of their image. The reason for not massively rehabilitating them must lie in the gender of victims. Apparently, misogyny doesn’t age.

P.S. One of the first witch trials in my country took place in my hometown in 1546. More than ten women were accused of poisoning meals, copulating with the devil, riding brooms, influencing the weather, having cats and dogs as their helpers … All of them were burnt at the stake.

References:

Brian P. Levack: New perspectives on witchcraft, magic and demonology, New York: Routledge, 2001.

Marjeta Tratnik Volasko, Matevž Košir: Čarovnice: Predstave, procesi, pregoni v evropskih in slovenskih deželah, Ljubljana: Znanstveno in publicistično središče, 1995.

Femininity is something that I, women or persons, who identify as women, do every day by embodying the cultural script of gender(ed) expectations and norms; how to look, behave, feel, think, what to expect from a society and what society expects from us. The cultural script of what femininity is, modifies historically (i.e. through time in the society) and biographically (i.e. through time in an individual life), producing an array of femininities, differing themselves on the basis of intersecting gender expression, sexual identity, skin colour, ethnicity, class (social, economic, cultural capital), religious background, age, body ability etc. An individual femininity is therefore a cumulation of different social positions, for example: androgynous, bisexual second generation Asian woman, living in Germany, originating from lower middle class with M.A. degree.

There is one golden standard that all cumulated femininities are subjected to; it is so called ‘good’ femininity. Sociologist Raewyn Connell named it ‘compliant’, scholar Mimi Schippers coined a term ‘hegemonic femininity’ but all in all, it is femininity with many privileges, embodied in whiteness, heterosexuality, middle class, body ability and youth, together with the fulfilment of all woman-constituting roles – a mother, wife, caregiver, housewife.

When not occupying these privileged social locations (e.g. skin colour or class), ill-performing or deliberately rejecting women’s roles (e.g. being a single woman), Othering occurs as a milder or stronger sort of the social repercussion.

First among those femininities is Clara‘s femininity (Meryl Streep). She could be the visual and behavioural prototype of the ‘good’ one – she is a mother and wife, has long, blonde hair, white skin, fragile figure, is dressed in a whitish clothes, she is coming from the upper class, her personality is non-conflicting, peaceful, angelic, almost virginal. But Clara has a flaw.

She is clairvoyant (her name can be interpreted as ‘clear’ or ‘clear-eyed’, unpolluted by material/istic society and unattached to her physical body) and telekinetic (she can potentially rearrange things with her mind). This specific personal trait labels her as a liminal being but her spiritual Otherness is protected by her upper class and skin colour; in a less privileged context, she would be vilified as a mad woman or stigmatised as a person with an (invisible) impairment (‘a freak’).

Her clairvoyance and deliberate muteness can be interpreted as an exaggeration of a gendered expectation for a good woman to be ‘pure’, moral, spiritual and silent. And by this, she has intentionally withdrawn herself from the patriarchal order, a system where women’s visions or voices are anyway dismissed as silly or unnecessary.

Ferula and Clara

Ferula (Glenn Close), Esteban‘s (Jeremy Irons) sister and Clara‘s sister in law, is double Othered femininity – for being unmarried and queer (or latent lesbian). If Clara is depicted as the white angel, then is Ferula a dark antagonist; dressed in almost monastic attire, consisted of black, thick clothes, crucifix, hanging around her neck with mousy coloured hair, firmly styled into a prudish bun. Being socially forced to be unmarried due to her gendered caregiving obligations towards her disabled mother and misogynous brother, her singleness is deepened with her closeted lesbianism.

Ferula personifies the stereotypical cinematic trope of a dangerous lesbian who can lure a straight wife (Clara) into lesbianism and disrupt heterosexual marriage. Her queer affection for Clara stretches from her motherly care to purely lustful tendencies (e.g. she explains while in the confession that she wants to climb into Clara‘s bed and feel her warm skin). It is never directly revealed if those two women have a sexual relationship (they definitely share an emotional one, a quasi-Boston marriage perhaps?), however when Esteban catches them in the same bed (fully clothed though), he decides to send Ferula away. Ferula as a double Othered woman is sentenced to a life of poverty and social isolation which is an expected punishment for a queer singlehood in homophobic cinematic narratives. A lesbian is fruitless for the heteronormative patriarchy.

Pancha Garcia (Sarita Choudhury) is one of Esteban‘s Latina woman workers and multiple Othered on grounds of her skin, nationality, class and gender. The cumulated Othering results in the portrayal of her as a nameless (nobody addresses her by her name) and voiceless (she doesn’t speak, only screams in pain when being assaulted) Othered beauty (i.e. dark-haired, brown-skinned, sensual, young) whose powerlessness toughens Esteban‘s (male) entitlement over her body – he brutally rapes her. Pancha is the tragic reminder of the white male history where women of colour were being animalised, dehumanised and objectified.

Pancha Garcia (Credits: Miramax Films)

Less obviously deviant and protected by their privileges (or status shield) femininities (e.g. Clara) are also less Othered than those with cumulated disadvantages (e.g. Ferula and Pancha).

But when women distance themselves by choice or social conditions from the standard of good femininity, the annihilation of trespassers is expected. THOTS, based on the novel by Isabel Allende, just continues the literary discourse of magic realism, a genre where gender roles are rarely challenged and by this, any deviation from the norm is met with the social powerlessness (i.e. muteness, social isolation, poverty, sexual assault).

In a masculine world, nothing a woman is or does “wrong”, goes unpunished.

However, this is not how the story goes in Magic Mike XXL (MM XXL). MM XXL (2015, d.: Gregory Jacobs) is build around male sex work (i.e. stripping), masculinity as a fluid concept and women as central guilt- and shame-free pleasure seekers with spending power.

In a Western society, some professions are Othered; they are low-positioned in the work hierarchy, lacking social prestige or power and perceived as ‘dirty’. A job is unjustly branded as dirty if a person handles with physical (e.g. garbage, waste, excrement), social (i.e. servility to others) and/or moral (i.e. sex-related work) dirt. Sex work or stripping, to be precise, is one of those Othered professions that are filled with social (serving others by dancing for payment) and moral (sexualised entertainment) aversion. Stripping as a part of sex work nomenclature is primarily a gendered profession, considered as feminine sex entertainment service because dancing, sexual servility and body-as-instrument are elements of women’s work script. Men are not supposed to dance, because dancing invokes uninhibited body moves, affiliated with chaos, freedom and pleasure as opposed to the disciplinary regimes of walking or military marching. When men fully engage on the dancefloor for their own pleasure, they are bending gender rules of an appropriate masculine conduct of moving.

Male strippers, performers, who are using their dancing skills to sexually seduce female audience, are further gender-bending the accepted notions of male stoic heteronormativity that deprive men from being seductive towards women by displaying their bodies. Women are (western) culturally predestined to be seductresses with their ornamented and exposed bodies. It is strange (Othered?) for a man to be half-naked, seducing women and making money out of it.

Magic Mike

MM XXL is one of the rare cinematic representations of male stripping where portrayals of male strippers doesn’t fall into the category of comedic (usually homophobic) giggles or social seriousness. What they do for living, is normal. Despite a constant visibility of male bulked bodies, MM XXL men are not being objectified. The concept of an objectification derives from the fact that a person is reduced to his/her/their body parts and intentionally dehumanized by it. MM XXL men’s ripped bodies are part of their personhood and the work they do, but they are also individuals with their own stories, ambitions, world views and problems. Mike (C. Tatum) is an entreprenur, Ken (M. Bomer) is a spiritual healer, Big Dick Richie (J. Manganiello) struggles with the fire-phobia and oversized penis problem (here it is – the ending of the myth that women want big cocks), Tarzan (K. Nash) is facing with ageism and his own mortality, Tito (A. Rodríguez) is also an entreprenur. MM XXL men are fully aware of their less privileged socio-economic position and that their economic well-being depends on their healthy, fit and young(ish) bodies. Bodies are fickle entities – they tend to get old, a fact that nobody has control over it and this creates a permanent anxiety, present in their day-to-day living. An aging body anxiety affects everybody who are in body-related professions (e.g. sports, fashion, entertainment – acting, dancing) because they must be thoughful about the future which will not include their main means of support – a body.

Stripping demands a visible body (exposed, naked) and for the dominant or hegemonic masculinity (white, heterosexual, middle class, able-bodied, educated) that is an anomaly, the Other. Male is not culturally constructed as Body (or nature), but as the Mind (or culture) and by using their bodies instead of minds,  male strippers are transgressing their gender and approaching towards their ‘antagonist’ – femininity. Furthermore, male performers also subvert the angle of the male gaze – they do not look at other (women), they are looked by other (women). By abdicating their socially given entitlement to ogle women’s bodies, they position themselves as ”objects” of the female gaze. MM XXL men perform for ‘her pleasure’ and they fulfil an array of women’s (hetero)sexual desires from romantic wedding fantasies, cunnilingus (btw. Mike’s head is pretty often located between women’s thighs) to group sex and BDSM episodes. Nothing is othered, everything is welcomed, but too bad that female same-sex desire is absent.

Women’s desire is rarely depicted so deliberately non-judgmental in the cinema; usually, sexually active woman falls into the category of a ‘bad’ woman – mentally unstable, promiscuous, dangerous and in need for ‘correction’ (marriage or death). In MM XXL, the male desire to perform sexually and women’s readiness to consume it creates a realm of sexual equality between parties involved, a little sexual paradise, free from gender roles and forced purity. Female consumers – being presented as actively sexual beings – also embody a spectrum of diverse femininities (e.g. black, brown, white, thin, fat, young, old/er), but furthermore, MM XXL women are self-reliant, confident and … mature: strip club owner Rome (J. Pinkett Smith), middle-aged Southern belle Nancy (A. McDowell), convention organizer Paris (E. Banks) and tomboyish photographer Zoe (A. Heard), all of them sexually literate. To dilute overall female heterosexual climate, there is a queer moment between Rome and Paris, but this is as far as the film goes.

MM XXL men are pioneers of the newer, more fluid masculinity; empathy, communication, companionship, support and respect for each other and Others (women in general: clients, ex-bosses, potential lovers) are their main traits. These men, so comfortable in their bodies and their heterosexuality, are constantly touching each other and yet there isn’t one homophobic, sexist, racist or ageist joke made, because they do not need to validate their masculinity by degrading the Other. In MM XXL, toxic masculinity has been discarded as an unnecessary and outdated waste that has polluted everyone for far too long.

MM XXL is a campy, positive, gender-bending (e.g. their attendance at drag club is for their own dance pleasure and not for making fun out of transgressive identities), but mostly, a pro-sex feminist film where women come (or cum) first.