On banishing chivalry

Elegy to Chivalry

For my birthday last month, my boyfriend and I went out to dinner with my good friend and her partner. Anticipating the fact that our meals would be a bit pricey, I had offered ahead of time to split the bill with my boyfriend, even though I knew he would refuse, as it's important to him to treat me to supper on my birthday. Just as it's important to me to treat him to dinner on his. When our waiter arrived at our table to take our payment, I happened to be holding the bill, surveying the damage caused by a few glasses of wine and some seafood. I promptly passed the bill back to my boyfriend when I noticed the waiter standing alongside us. This prompted some staggering insight from him:

"Yeah, I thought that was weird that you had the bill. I was like 'Wait now...are the girls paying?' Because that'd be a first."

His tone wasn't insulting in any way. It was just a matter-of-fact statement of a universal truth: girls don't pay for boys' meals. I was floored.

Me: "Hang on. You can't be serious. It's that rare to see a woman paying for her meal?"
Him: "Oh yeah, I never see it. It's always the guy who pays." (nodding to my boyfriend as he left our table) "Guess chivalry isn't completely dead, hey?"

The whole exchange, seemingly innocuous and meant only as cheerful banter, left me feeling completely awkward. Cheap. Dependent. I wanted to call the waiter back and demand that I pay for my own meal. For my boyfriend's meal. For the entire restaurant's Goddamn meals. I wanted to declare that I was being treated to supper because of my birthday, not because of my vagina. I wanted to explain that my partner and I have a very egalitarian concept of money. That we treat each other on special occasions. That we split everything else 50/50.

It was that word that left a bad taste in my mouth. Chivalry. It seemed so archaic, so oddly insulting.

Because chivalry is literally a medieval concept, predicated on the notion that men, by dint of their physical, mental, and moral superiority are responsible for the underlings of society. For the weak. For the oppressed. For women.

Medieval conceptions of sexuality largely stemmed from the Ancients' "one-sex theory," which assumed that men and women were, biologically, identical. Women, however, were basically inverted men, their genitalia pushed inside rather than proudly displayed outside their bodies. Inherent to this theory was the idea that all bodies are male bodies, that women were, quite literally, imperfect men, their subordination rationalized as a biological inevitability.

Chivalry prescribed, in part, the appropriate relationships between the sexes, and thrived in this culture of entrenched and systemic gender inequality. Chivalric knights were pure of mind, body, and soul, and were taxed with the responsibility of defending the honour of women who were clearly incapable of defending it themselves. Within this chivalric ideal, Woman was both Dependant and Prize, something to be lusted after, protected, won.¹

So that word, "chivalry," is sexually and historically loaded. It's not just about your boyfriend buying you supper because it's your birthday. It's about your boyfriend buying you supper because your gender, your sex, your subservience, your incapacity render you incapable of buying it yourself.

As always, Mary Wollstonecraft says it best:

I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority [...] So ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me, that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles,when I see a man start with eager, and serious solicitude to lift a handkerchief, or shut a door, when the LADY could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two. (Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792)

You go, Mary Wollstonecraft. And Glen Coco.

Yes, I like being treated nicely. I like being taken out to supper. Being offered a coat when I look cold. Feeling a protective hand on my shoulder or the small of my back. I like it when I get a door held open for me, largely because I don't like getting doors slammed in my face. As such, I return the favour - to women and men alike. 

I like being treated nicely because I'm a person. Not because of my uterus, or breasts, or generally "feminine" appearance. But because being treated well is a human prerogative. Because the desire to be respected and cared for is universal and gender-neutral.

So can we just do away with "chivalry"? Can we banish the word and all its baggage from our lexicon? Put gender politics aside and focus on being good to each other? On being people who care about the feelings, comfort, and well-being of other people? 

You know what I say to you about chivalry being dead, waiter?

Here's hoping. 

---

1 I once wrote a paper for a second-year history course examining "conflicting medieval views of masculinity," so I'm basically an expert on this topic. That said, my inner academic won't let me pass up this opportunity to cite some of the works I've probably borrowed heavily from in these few paragraphs: namely, Bullough and Brundage's Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (2000), Schultz's Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (2006), and Kaeuper's Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999).^↩

On bodily celebrations

We've been talking a lot about women's bodies recently. From Elliott Roger's deranged, misogynistic rampage in Isla Vista to a case in Labrador, Canada, in which school girls were sent home for violating their school's dress code by showing their bra straps, women's bodies have gotten a lot of media attention in recent weeks. We're fascinated by how those bodies should look. How they should behave. What we should put in them and on them.

I'm not sure exactly where, as a feminist, I stand on the purportedly inherent bond between women. I realize that, for some women, sex and gender are not synonymous. I don't feel compelled to be friends with or relate to another person because we have similar levels of estrogen in our bloodstreams. But I do think that women's bodies have ensured (for better or worse) that most of us experience the world in similar, or at least comparable, ways. Whether we're sharing stories about the sexual harassments we've encountered in our lives or complaining about how hard it is to find a flattering pair of jeans, many of us do create bonds with each other through our bodies.

My mom's dear friend was diagnosed with breast cancer about a month ago. It came as a total shock, as it always does, not least because this is the second dear friend my mom has supported through breast cancer. In addition to a number of acquaintances and family members and friends who have faced cancer. In addition to her own cancer diagnosis in 2012.

Our friend's surgery went well and her prognosis was good, although four chemotherapy treatments would be required that would cause her to lose all her hair. This is especially difficult news for most women, not just because we tend to have an overly sentimental attachment to our hair (due, in large part, to the pervasive theory that it is the primary source of our attractiveness and sex appeal), but because the loss of hair becomes physical proof of the presence of cancer.

Cancer is a largely invisible illness that is made visible through this loss of hair. Suddenly, a private, literally internal illness is made external and observable. It becomes an outward confirmation and constant reminder of sickness. A sign that your body has been invaded, compromised, defeated.

So my mother reclaimed her friend's diagnosis in the only way she knew how.

She threw a head shaving party. 

Many women will, at the outset of their chemotherapy treatments, choose to shave their heads. Practically speaking, it reduces the mess of balding, as it's hard to keep your clothes, bed, and house tidy when your hair is falling out in abundant clumps. Emotionally speaking, it lessens the shock when their hair does begin to fall out, as it will, rapidly and prolifically. 

The party was last weekend. There were cupcakes and pizza and pitchers of sangria. I made a playlist of bad 70s pop. There were pink feather boas, and pink paper lanterns, and pink flowers. But most of all, there was a group of women, women who were bonding over what they felt was a shared cancer diagnosis, and who were taking this step in their friend's recovery process together. When the hair clippers were brought out, there were tears and cheers, pictures and laughter. The honours were done by my mother's best friend, a former hair dresser and fourteen-year cancer survivor, in the kitchen where the three of us regularly gathered to have her cut and dye our hair. There were jokes about whether or not she should be given a mohawk. Exclamations about how perfectly round her head was under all that hair. Constant words of encouragement about how beautiful she looked. There was a palpable sense that they were all in this together, that it was unfathomable that a friend should have to go through this on her own.

It ended up being an incredibly empowering afternoon. It was the reaffirmation everyone needed that their friend would recover and thrive from her life-altering diagnosis. It was an opportunity to embrace the new, unexpected shape that her unique beauty had taken. But most importantly, it was a celebration of her body, of the trials it has weathered, the boundless strength it possesses, and its incredible capacity for regeneration. 

On True Detective's phallocentric brutality

Fair warning: if you haven't watched True Detective yet, I'm about to ruin some things for you.

I'm really, worryingly good at taking off my feminist hat when I invest in a TV show. I find myself chuckling and shaking my head as Don Draper horrendously neglects and subtly abuses the women in his life. I was nearly two seasons through The Newsroom before I realized that I'm supposed to be grossly offended by Aaron Sorkin's portrayal of women. 

So when my boyfriend and I settled down this weekend to watch True Detective, HBO's latest sausage fest, I was expecting to enjoy myself despite all my critical faculties urging me otherwise.

But what I saw really disturbed me.

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Yep, this happened. 

I understand that not every show is going to offer up empowered and empowering female characters, and this is a bit of a knee-jerk post, as I haven't given much thought to what I want to say or how I want to say it. But after watching a critically-acclaimed series in which women are systemically and unapologetically abused and brutalized over the course of eight episodes, I felt compelled to say something. Anything.

Season One follows detectives Marty Hart and Rustin Cohle (Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey) as they attempt to track down a murderer/rapist in rural Louisiana, and I should state from the outset that I wanted so badly to enjoy watching them do just that. I love detective dramas. I was drawn in by the show's aesthetic. I thought the soundtrack was great. I desperately wanted Matthew McConaughey to prove to me that he's anything other than a mumbling, greasy creep.

And I wasn't even offended when one of the first images I was assaulted with during the show's highly stylized opening credits was of a woman's bare backside resting gingerly on the spiked appliqués of her stilettos.

Or of another woman gyrating as she seductively unties her American flag one-piece.

Or as images of a deserted playground are projected onto another woman's naked rear.

...wait a minute. 

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Taken on its own, the intro isn't especially offensive. It's sexy and provocative and beautifully shot, and I appreciate that. And the gratuitous female nudity is exactly what I've come to expect from HBO. But within the larger context of the show, the intro sets up one of the primary dichotomies of True Detective: that of authoritative men with gravitas and furrowed brows in suits and ties, and vacant, naked, fetishized women. Or at least parts of women. 

In a show that ostensibly centres on pursuing justice for murdered and mistreated women, we are offered female characters who are choked, demeaned, slapped, and dominated by the very men who are supposedly their protectors. 

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The women of True Detective are vapid and transparent. They range from Dora Lange, whose naked corpse sparks the investigation that fuels the series, to Lisa Tragnetti and Beth, the equally buxom, stereotypically nymphomaniacal mistresses whose naked bodies are regularly shown pleasuring (a conspicuously clothed) Marty. Maggie, Marty's long-suffering wife, appears to have two objectives in life: to nag Marty about his prolonged absences from home, and to cook his suppers. I can't help but think that her (completely founded) tirades against Marty's neglect of his family are, in some way, meant to "justify" his extramarital affairs, and ultimately, Maggie, too, is reduced to and denigrated for her sex, relegated to a conniving jezebel who irrevocably terminates her disintegrated marriage by initiating sex with Cohle. Afterwards, Cohle, disgusted and furious, kicks a crying and apologetic Maggie out of his apartment. The implication here is that Maggie is somehow in the wrong, that she alone has initiated and performed this hasty, aggressive act, and it's infuriating to see a woman being vilified (however subtly) for taking a stand against a husband who has mistreated and humiliated her for nearly twenty years. 

Then there's Audrey, Marty's angst-ridden, promiscuous, Goth daughter. Audrey is a stereotypically taciturn teenager who is clearly harbouring some very complicated feelings toward her father. They are completely incomprehensible to each other, and over dinner one night, Marty turns his gaze on Audrey's body, attempting to impose on it some sort of order:

Marty: "I'm just trying to understand - what is it that you're going for? What's the message?"

Audrey: "There is no message. It's just me."

"What's you? Your hair? Your clothes?"

"Women don't have to look like you want them to, Dad."

"No, women, but I'm talking about my teenage daughter [...] I'm just trying to understand."

"Well who told you you had to understand?"

Audrey is reduced by her father to a mass of clothes and hair, relegated to a body that he owns ("my teenage daughter"), but neither controls nor understands. Clichéd though she may be, Audrey is the only woman in the show who actively resists Marty's domination, and she is tellingly and quickly silenced - shortly after the above scene, a disgraced Audrey is driven home by her father, who has been called to collect her after she is found having sex with two older boys in a parked car. Again, Audrey is dismissed as irrational, incomprehensible, defective: "This is something I'll never understand," jeers her father, "being the captain of the varsity slut team." Audrey receives her father's fist to the side of her face, and virtually disappears from the remainder of the series, appropriately suppressed, humiliated, slut shamed. Both Audrey's and Maggie's story arcs climax with dubious sex acts that leave the audience ambivalent about both women. 

True Detective's women are uninspiring at best and infuriating at worst, and while I understand that this is a show "about men," its phallocentric treatment of women and the female body is hackneyed in its brutality, deeply troubling in its ubiquity. The question that remains is: why? Why does True Detective make being "about men" synonymous with degrading women? Why am I being offered yet another show that alienates me as a female viewer, that makes me clench my thighs, raise my eyebrows, and feel uncomfortable in my own body? 

Feminist responses to True Detective flooded the Internet within days of the first episode's release, and the reception of the show's treatment of women seems to be divided into two camps: "Ew, gross," and "Get over it."

On the one hand is someone like The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum, who, like me, suggests that True Detective is essentially the same shit in a different pile. All the show does is repackage the shallow portrayal of women that's all too common on our television screens, depicting a series of  "Wives and sluts and daughters - none with any interior life." On the other hand is Slate's Willa Paskin, who argues that yes, True Detective treats its women terribly - and that's the point. The show is self-awarely sexist, and the audience is supposed to appreciate that what they're watching is wrong. It's a story about the terrible things men do to women, and its male leads aren't exempt.

Logically and rhetorically speaking, I "get" Paskin's line of thinking. She's essentially arguing that True Detective isn't a misogynistic show, it's a show about misogyny. But I don't think we're yet at a place in our mainstream depictions of women where the nuances of that distinction are fully appreciated or understood. The thing is: I don't want to have to step back and think critically about whether or not a show is being self-consciously misogynistic. I don't want to accept that its sadistic, fetishistic portrayal of its female characters may very well be "the point" of the series. I don't believe that film or television is obligated to teach morals or offer utopian alternatives to the way our world currently works. But if I wanted to see all the ways in which women can be sexually objectified and exploited, I'd watch porn. Or turn on the news. Or take a history course. Or read the tabloids while I wait in line at the supermarket. Or walk into an American Apparel. I am daily inundated with reminders that society tends and always has tended to treat women badly. It's so clichéd and so uninspired. And I'm oh, so tired of it. 

On dietary dreams and the power of choice

At one point during my grandfather's wake in 2011, my grandmother took me around the room, introducing me to various neighbours, family friends, and long-lost cousins. Her introduction was consistent - "This is my granddaughter, Meaghan. She's the real smart one. She's gotten all kinds of scholarships from the university." This was largely met with empathetic smiling and nodding from well-wishers who really couldn't care less about my academic endeavours. "Well, she must get that from you," one distant relative kindly replied.

"Don't be so foolish. I never got to go to university," was my grandmother's immediate response.

It's a moment I'll never forget. My grandmother's answer was instant, matter-of-fact. There was no hesitation in her voice, no palpable sense of regret. I didn't get the impression that she had wanted to go to university but had been financially or intellectually unable (and let me assure you that the latter was most definitely not the case). Instead, the implied subtext was that university, quite simply, wasn't an option for girls of her generation like it is for girls of mine. That choice wasn't even in her cards.

I quickly realized that this idea of "choice" is integral to my definition of feminism. The ability to choose to get married. Or not. To have children. Or not. To opt out of university. To bypass beauty products. Or to wear Spanx under your graduation gown as you accept your Master's degree. The belief that people deserve the freedom to have choices, opinions, dreams, and the limitless ability to enact them without fear of prejudice is, for me, part of what it means to be a feminist.

So the latest Weight Watchers ad campaign is deeply troubling to me.

Each ad opens on a little girl enumerating her dreams for her adult self. "When I grow up, I want to float around in my big, pink bubble," one quips. "I want to be a dolphin tamer, and I want to swim to the bottom of the ocean," another declares. The tone of these commercials is silly, but optimistic and hopeful. These girls have opinions, unrealistic as they may be, on where they want their lives to go. They have unabashedly fantastical visions for their future selves, visions that are in no way restricted by their gender or their bodies.

The entire point of the campaign is about daring to dream. About capturing and reclaiming the boundless optimism that defines us as children. About refusing to let our own fears and feelings of inadequacy keep us from dreaming and hoping big and large.

Remember when you thought anything was possible? It still is.

It's about women making choices for themselves. And the choice is clear.

To be thin.

I'm not dismissing Weight Watchers' validity as a weight loss program. I know people who have achieved great success following Weight Watchers, and I do believe it's one of the better diet plans out there - inherent to the program isn't the idea of denying yourself food, but of instead learning healthy and balanced eating habits.

But there's something grossly disturbing about conflating the innocent and unapologetic optimism of a little girl with a grown woman's dissatisfaction with her body and her desire to fit the mainstream definition of beauty.

And this is very much a women's issue. None of the prospective clients in this commercial is visibly male. In fact, Weight Watchers is an exceptionally female-centred diet plan - out of all of its celebrity endorsers, I can't think of one who was a man. The entire brand centres on women encouraging women to lose weight, and if it's true that "real men don't diet," then the implicit suggestion is that real women do. And should. Nay, it's something we should all dream of doing one day. 

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I'm very confused by the marketing here. Do women, by contrast, not eat real food? Or achieve real weight loss? Is this man somehow superior to the riff-raff women who subscribe to plain ol' Weight Watchers? Does his penis make his diet theoretically better than mine? SO MANY QUESTIONS. 

What bothers me the most about these commercials is that they aren't depicting women who look as though they require a diet plan at all. I honestly don't think I would be as offended if the women in these ads were obese and desiring to make healthy changes in their lives - not because society expects them to be skinny, but because they, as people, have decided that they want to embrace a healthier lifestyle. Of course I know that "thinness" is not synonymous with "healthiness." But this commercial would be very different if the narrative suggested that by believing "anything is possible," women can believe in their ability and determination to take control of their lives and develop a positive relationship with food. If this were about aspiring toward healthiness, about Weight Watchers being a healthy choice, then that would be a positive, empowering message I could get behind.

Except the word "health" isn't mentioned once in these commercials. Neither is "nutrition." Or "empowerment." The image that the viewer is instead bombarded with for thirty seconds is of already thin women being inordinately excited at the prospect of getting thinner. The suggestion is that the little girls in these ads are merely part of a cycle - that one day, their sense of wonderment at their own boundless potential will subside, and that they too will look in the mirror and be dissatisfied with what they see. That it's inevitable. That we all end up hating our bodies eventually. The entire campaign feeds on women's ubiquitous sense of bodily imperfection - "You've always dreamed of being skinny, and now's the time."

The first time I saw this commercial, it made me truly and deeply sad.

I want so much more than this for my future daughter, or granddaughter, or daughter-in-law. I want her to have dreams and goals that aren't shaped by a socially-imposed sense of inadequacy. I never want her to stop being amazed by her body and her mind and what she can do with them. I hope her power of choice and her ability to dream is never compromised or sullied. 

And I hope that this post will seem as archaic to her as my grandmother's exclusion from university seemed to me.