In the scheme of things, female empowerment is just kicking off. Now that the Gaia principle has been safely miniaturised into girl power, there is space for an honest-to-God female middle class to take up their rightful places.
I've met a representative sample of the first-wavers and they are entrancing people. They have a sense of the mysticism of their accomplishments and generally exist completely outside of popular culture. If they hadn't they wouldn't have made it - unfortunately many of them never bother to reproduce.
Today, Fiona Sturges, a fine journalist, managed to completely miss the vital points in her i-arts column:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/why-does-reality-tv-hate-women-2213740.html
In it she lists the numerous indignities and chauvinisms of reality TV and chastises the programme makers, erroneously implying that shows such as Wife Swap, How Clean Is Your House, How To Look Good Naked etc. are male fantasy projects.
I have never met a heterosexual man who regularly watches anything like this excreta. I can list for you (if you care to contact me privately) around twenty women I know who do. This is not anecdote or skewed male superiority talking. Look at the ratings demography. This is female fantasy.
The point of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, is to allow women to feel superior to other women. This isn't strange or new. This phenomenon has been around forever and isn't going anywhere. Let us take (for my convenience) the works of Moliere and Shakespeare. These are among the earliest European works I know that employ the feminine character I mean to bring to your attention.
My favourite Shakespearean woman is Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing. She is witty, beautiful and is resolved never to marry. But when it comes to the matters of life, death and love, she goes full-on Gypsy:
Is a not approved in the height a villain, that 300
hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman?
O that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until
they come to take hands; and then, with public
accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancour,
--O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart 305
in the market-place.
MAAN - IV, i
The purpose of this display is not just cathartic. By acting in such a crazed fashion, she goads her suitor Benedick into mortal combat with his friend.
In Moliere's Misanthrope, Célimène with whom the protagonist Alceste is in love, seemingly spends her entire day performing spirited diatribes against the last person to attend on her for the benefit of her present attendee.
It would be very easy to say that these examples represent antiquated forms of female behaviour. They do. That in itself doesn't mean that it isn't also a contemporary form.
It would also be very easy to say that they have no relationship with the spectacles of reality TV. Unfortunately, they do.
Feminism began with the critique of patriarchy. Men were exposed as a bunch of sex-obsessed, neurotically competitive tribalists with a master-slave concept of romance. So we did our best to change. Where was the critique of the matriarch? Were the women of the past blameless? Or were there collaborators? To their credit, Fathers in the latter 20th century usually stepped back out of the way of our daughters. But what about mothers? What did they do?
Well lets see... dressed them in pink, bought them the same old kitchen-toys, taught them to cook, discouraged sport or books... and generally drummed it into them that they had far too many privileges to ever complain about anything.
This is anecdotal: I saw this all throughout my childhood and later in life. Women of my generation seemed nonplussed by an ineffable unhappiness that haunted them even though they had exceeded all the achievements of their mothers by their early twenties.
And who is it that watches the shows of Gok Wan and Shitface McKeith? UNHAPPY PEOPLE. Unhappy people looking for consolation in the deeper misery of others. I think it's time that Sturges revisited Feminist philosophy to take a closer look at the repressive influence of the matriarch.
