At first glance, the individualized feminine hygiene waste receptacle appears ridiculous. On closer inspection it may just horrify.
All told, little good can be said about sanitary napkin disposal bags. That is, unless you care about gender equality. For these tiny, decorative, gore-encasement devices do more than any other product in the field of feminine hygiene to eliminate the earnings gap between men and women.
Nearly 4,000 patents include the phrase “feminine product disposal,” but very few of these have been awarded for bags created to house soiled feminine hygiene items. In sum, slightly fewer than fifty patents have been granted for sanitary napkin disposal bags—each, legally speaking, a unique approach to personal containers intended to whisk lady waste away from public view. Considering that they really are only bags, let’s keep in mind, it should perhaps astound that almost fifty different patents have been awarded for innovating methods of placing unseemly waste inside a container before it goes into a larger receptacle for regular garbage disposal.
In truth, receptacles intended for the exclusive disposal of used sanitary napkins are made largely unnecessary by Gilbreth’s extensive efforts. Menstrual products today continue to be self-contained, unnoticeable, and spill-proof, as per her 1926 recommendations and the subsequent slew of patents that arose from them. Most stalls in women’s restrooms do come equipped with small trash containers for such waste, which could, in a worst-case scenario, be wrapped in paper, conveniently located in the immediate vicinity of toilets throughout most of the Western world. If a small trash container, or any toilet paper, is for some reason absent in each individual stall, most likely there will still be a trash container in the restroom proper. In a worst-case scenario, it is true, in a public restroom, other women may see you and be forced to acknowledge that you menstruate, which they are also likely to do on a regular basis (and if they do not, they will certainly not be surprised that you do). Defenders of the sanitary napkin disposal bag—manufacturers, plumbers, and building owners, for the most part, with whom I have engaged in spirited online conversation—tell us that the primary purpose of such bags is to remind women that sanitary products are not to be flushed down the toilet. How shockingly inefficient! A sign in a stall would do just as well, or eliminating the potential for more paper waste entirely: include plumbing lessons for young women in home economics courses at the middle school level.
Sustained consideration will lead you to wonder whether sanitary napkin disposal bags might not be capitalism’s ideal form: an environmentally and emotionally destructive, eminently saleable, necessarily disposable, and cheaply manufactured good with little to no unique functional value around which a dedicated audience can be manufactured and endless profits derived therefrom. All part and parcel of a larger project, to mask the natural bodily processes of half the population. They are truly exemplary, these feminine hygiene products; all the moreso for being such a humble—even, dare I say it, useless—invention.
However fully the bags themselves perform and entrench misogyny, however, their design and manufacture promise a gender equitable future: of forty-six patents for feminine hygiene personal-sized waste containers, fourteen are held by teams including at least one man and at least one woman.6 Twelve are held by men, and twenty by women. Therefore a percentage of profits from the sani-waste bag industry ultimately go to 30 percent mixed-gender teams, 26 percent men, and 44 percent women. To get more specific, patents on bags that protect trash from truly offensive girl garbage are owned by a staggering 59 percent female inventors.
This is where capitalism gets interesting. Because the profits into which sanitary napkin disposal bags are eating are not those of the 2 percent of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, nor are sani-bags being purchased with the seventy-seven cents that women are taking home for each male coworkers’ dollar. A predominantly masculine economy, driven by a fear of girl blood, is funding a pool of nearly 60 percent female inventors.
Lillian Gilbreth would certainly have been proud. Gender equity is finally within reach! The question we must ask ourselves, ninety years since her efforts—not to overlook the uncredited labor of thousands of other women—saved the flailing feminine hygiene industry, is whether we want it under these conditions.
An earlier version of this essay was published at The Baffler.
Arguably, Lucky McKee’s The Woman—heralded in promotional materials as “The Most Controversial Film of 2011”—is merely a close study of justifiable misogyny. Not that low-level, “no girls allowed” stuff we see in locker rooms these days, either. Misogyny as ideology, as spirituality. An abiding rejection of femininity, manifested in a violence so wretched and grotesque it becomes all-consuming, self-explanatory, and deeply righteous. It leaks from onscreen characters and encompasses the theater, the living room—viewers of McKee’s film are placed, for a time, in the uncanny position of acquiescence. It is uncomfortable. For although I live in a world that demands my destruction in a myriad of ways every day and I have thus learned to follow the logic of misogyny, I have no desire to feel it.
McKee’s film lays groundwork carefully. A five-minute opening sequence follows a feral woman through the woods. She is nurturing and careful, but also bloodsucking and unkempt, so definitely wild. A jump cut to Peggy, the teenaged daughter of a happy-enough-seeming family at a backyard barbecue—isolated and inconsolate—establishes this film as one about gender issues. Heavy-handed, but not unclever, McKee then ticks off a list of familial dysfunctions as the rest of the clan parades across the screen. Peggy’s brother, Brian, watches with glazed eyes as his youngest sister, Darlin’, gets roughed up by neighborhood boys. Their mother Belle (played by an unusually unhinged Angela Bettis) acts deflective and abused around her husband, even in public, even at a party. Upon repeated viewings, it’s clear we are witnessing emotionally and sexually abused family members re-enact their domestic roles for neighborhood innocents, but you don’t so much notice this on first viewing.
And that husband, Chris Cleek (Sean Bridgers). There is nothing remarkable about him. He is brash and aggravating, and believes his jokes to be very funny. You have met him at family barbecues several times yourself. He is a lawyer, and he likes to hunt. When he goes off into the woods, he finds The Woman there, in the wild, through the site of his rifle. A deep bass line kicks in, the scene goes slo-mo, and we are suddenly in a rock video. She emerges from the water and arches her back, sexually, for him, as she redresses herself. He wants her, and not just to fuck. He wants to own her; a possession, a catch, a prize.
So he takes her. Chains her up in the cellar, and eventually, introduces her to the family. Not as a person, but as his thing, to wash and feed and use at will. Of course for sex—she’s not a person in his mind, but a masturbation aid. She isn’t human, she’s a wild woman, but also just a woman. The metaphors fall away quickly, thin veils that, until this moment, have kept Chris Cleek and by extension every other self-important lawyer/hunter/father you’ve ever met at a backyard family barbecue from going on a rape-and-murder rampage. The veils are labeled: society, respect, family, love, and when the last one falls away, we have only the patriarch, finally unhinged but honest, ranting against womanhood as he pummels every female in spitting distance to the ground.
In the last twenty minutes of the film, there are no more metaphors, only raw and pure misogyny explored to its fullest, without restraint. It is messy and sticky, like an underserved man’s well-earned orgasm. Belle, too late, speaks up. This is not tolerated. A meddling lesbian teacher, interfering, accidently unearths a family secret. She is punished. Peggy balks. She is beaten. Brian, revealed to be the psychopath and rapist he has been trained to be for his entire life, is rewarded. Finally, the men—having imposed total dominion over the women—set to tearing each other apart. And then, the tables are turned, sort of, although maybe put back where they belong?
We’ll return to those, the discomfiting final moments of the film, and pause to answer the question surely for
ming in your mind: How is this not the most offensive and depraved hate speech ever dressed up as entertainment and put on public display in the history of man? The studio’s marketing team would like you to believe that it is, but it is not. Because this film is not exclusively a performance of misogyny; it posits that misogyny might emanate, also, from women. It therefore imagines an abiding detestastion of femininity as something over which women may have control, even agency. The Woman degenders the misogynist, allowing misogyny a pervasiveness and logic that very closely mirrors reality. Believe it or not, that misogyny might exist in all of us is, actually, quite a hopeful notion.
Let’s consider this about misogyny: if we want to lay all the blame for all the problems of the world at the feet of men—AKA “the patriarchy”—we certainly may. Plenty of people do and they make their arguments quite well, whether they are dusty academics or eleven-year-old girls. There exists plenty of evidence, after all, to back up such claims. The adoration of the masculine as protector must also decry the feminine in all non-submissive forms, and who better to advance such a ridiculous notion than men?
Unfortunately, “because men” doesn’t provide a terribly satisfactory answer to the question of how a deep, anti-feminine undercurrent came to run through all of culture and society, providing an ethos for our very socio-economic structure. To hold as true that misogyny is wholly inescapable but emanates exclusively from men, we must also believe one of two things: 1) that women, who truly do exist in every corner of society, even if we cannot see them or do not acknowledge them, in point of fact do have no power, or 2) that women are party to the same flawed thinking as anyone else, as men, as the patriarchy, and therefore tend to use what power they do have toward disastrous ends, at least where gender equality may be concerned. The first construct strips women of agency—itself a misogynist act—while the second degenders misogyny and makes women complicit in it, blaming them, in part, for their own oppression. Yet it also offers a modicum of control over an otherwise external, and often overwhelming, force.
Now these strokes are overly broad and the gender binary easily disprovable, but the question I’m getting at is this: Would we rather our cultural products perform misogyny, or hold folks accountable to it? We could push this question further, for even an abiding belief in the gender binary is an act of violence against those who do not fall neatly into it: Would we rather perform transmisogyny or hold folks accountable to it?1
Most of us familiar with the term, in hoping to ultimately eliminate the need for it, would likely prefer a notion of misogyny that held folks accountable to gender-based violence in all forms. For filmmakers, however, the question is not always so simple. Consider, for example, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. “Accusations of misogyny are routine in discussions of Mr. von Trier’s films,” the New York Times summarized in a 2014 review of Nymphomaniac, following a tally of the harsh brutalities his leads are forced to endure throughout his oeuvre. (Rape by gang of sailors, rape by entire town, genital mutilation, and murder are such standard von Trier fodder that many were disappointed that 2011’s Melancholia merely ended with the world melting.)
The Times, however, decreed von Trier not a misogynist, based on the ample evidence the director himself has supplied, proving he believes women to be capable of performing under the most extreme circumstances in his films, upholding their narratives in the entirety in almost every single case. Indeed, the evidence for von Trier’s non-misogyny grows, for he found his original draft of Antichrist to be not misogynist enough, so he hired “Misogyny Expert” Heidi Laura, a woman, to deepen the abiding woman-hatred in the film.
For the film performers von Trier works with, the answer to the question I pose above is easy: they would rather perform misogyny—that is, perform the experience of it. They do so commendably. It is not in their job description to hold anyone accountable to anything, and performing actual misogyny has got to be a far cry more interesting than mildly reflecting it as the girlfriend or mother of a protagonist, who may not even have a name, much less a battle scar. The hope of such women actors, expressed in countless interviews and public statements, is to perform something well enough that indictment will follow—although by others, and later.
For von Trier, however, the question is more complicated: he wants to perform misogyny, but he wants to do it deliberately. So well, in fact, that he will find the folks who know the most about its effects and pay them to provide pointers on the stuff, even if they are women, because there are many many things that they are better at than men. (Suffering, apparently, is another skill he evidently believes women hold unique talent in.) His is a thoughtful performance of misogyny, and I submit that we are intended to believe that its aim is to hold others accountable for unchecked, undeliberate, unthoughtful misogyny elsewhere.
Yet the women in von Trier’s films all accept devastation, and that’s worth considering too—even Justine, Kirsten Dunst’s lead in Melancholia, submits to the world-ending scenario despite her otherwise fully narcissistic behavior, making no effort to shift the course of nature toward something more befitting her own interests, which otherwise dominate the plotline of the film. Von Trier may be performing misogyny with a considered delivery and purposeful intent, but his leading ladies hardly bother kicking against the pricks, as it were. The world they envision either allows for a great deal of unchecked feminine disapproval, or it will destroy itself and they will submit to it. Von Trier’s misogyny may be intentionally constructed, in other words, but without agency, his female characters are still left to its whims. They are not hopeful films.
Lucky McKee, arguably a lesser artist with a much tinier vision—certainly a genre filmmaker—takes a far more expansive view. His horrific universe is filled with horrible people committing horrible acts, too, although in his films can be detected another possibility: a future in which misogyny may be eradicated. What might it take to build that world? At the end of The Woman, we begin to have a sense.
“We belong to the gender of fear, of humiliation,” French theorist and filmmaker Virginie Despentes writes in King Kong Theory. “The other gender. Masculinity, that legendary masculine solidarity is formed in these moments and is built on this exclusion of our bodies. Pact based on our inferiority.”
What Despentes is posing is observation, but also prescription. By acknowledging the precise site of misogyny—as based in women’s own fear, humiliation, and inferiority—she perceives her own complicity in it.
Despentes also offers a corrective. She suggests eliminating that wellspring of gendered fear and humiliation with a display of power. “Going to gigs was the most important thing in my life,” she writes, in a passage describing her own violent rape after hitchhiking to a show. “Worth putting myself in danger for. Nothing could be worse than staying in my room, far from life, when so much was happening.” She will not apologize for her brazenness, or dwell in her naïveté. Despentes has simply weighed the options available to her, as a member of the “gender of fear,” and opts to acknowledge the danger by walking toward it. Experiencing it. During her own rape, she had a knife that she did not use. She writes:
A powerful and ancient political strategy has taught women not to defend themselves. . . . But women still feel the need to say that violence is not the answer. And yet, if men were to fear having their dicks slashed to pieces with a carpet knife should they try to force a woman, they would soon become much better at controlling their “masculine” urges, and understanding that “no” does mean “no.”2
Her knowledge of the political strategy used to keep women acquiescent, even when bodily integrity is at stake, is personal and deep: “I wish I’d been able to escape the values instilled in my gender that night,” she writes, “and slit each of their throats, one by one. Instead of having to live with being someone who didn’t dare defend herself, because she’s a woman and violence is not her domain, and the physical integrity of the male body is more important than that of the female.”
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p; Despentes detects, in other words, her own misogyny. She was complacent to it, and allowed it to take place on her own body, allowed herself to become evidence of it, proof that it lived within her. Not a condition she was all that amenable to, in the end: she writes that she would prefer to carve it from the necks of her attackers—cutting it symbolically out of herself—than live with it inside her.
My own rape was less violent, and not the site of awakening to my own misogyny. That took more time. The realization that, as an editor, I tended to discredit submissions of women writers contributed. My disregard for feminized labor—care work like nursing and early childhood education—started to become clear. Additionally, my sense as a very young person that other young women were “competition” instead of “allies” helped me see that “the patriarchy” wasn’t keeping “women” down—I was. Learning to hate other women had taken time, too: My complacency to misogyny was honed over years of watching good, kind, well-meaning friends comply to the gender-based oppression on display in others, then embodying it themselves. My own rape should probably have been years earlier, in fact, as I was trained by a violent, racist, overbearing, alcoholic father to comply to his every whim from birth. Yet by the time it happened (at a party, there was drinking, everyone was acting crazy, verbal consent impossible in a foreign country where language skills are shaky), it felt so thoroughly natural that it took a decade to notice a violation had occurred. By the time I named it rape, it was already far in the past. By accepting it, unnamed, for so many years, I know that I have the capacity to overlook it if it happens again right in front of me. It is possible that I will let it happen to someone else. Perhaps I already have.
Body Horror Page 6
