http://www.vulture.com/2014/02/mean-girls-director-spills-10-juicy-stories.html
One of my favorite movies that has become such a pop cultural phenomenon would be Mean Girls. Obvious spoiler alert for anyone who has not seen this movie, but this movie definitely has its moments that are very reflective of feminist society and the importance of emphasizing a feminist society in the classroom. Women obviously face oppression in America's patriarchal society. Nevertheless, Mean Girls emphasizes how a lot of that oppression stems from internal struggles in the movement i.e. girl-on-girl hate. Because of this, I think Mean Girls in a unique, humorous, and sexual manner emphasizes the importance of achieving equality by first tackling those internal struggles that the feminist movement has endured from the very beginning, whether it is disagreements in voting rights, representative rights, and even reproductive rights.
The main reason I also attached this particular article to the blog post is because the scrutiny that Mean Girls faced due to have a female-centralized cast. The MPAA wanted to give Mean Girls a rated 'R' rating. As Mean Girls director Waters said, "The line in the sand that I drew was the joke about the wide-set vagina. The ratings board said, 'We can't give you a PG-13 unless you cut that line.' We ended up playing the card that the ratings board was sexist, because Anchorman had just come out, and Ron Burgundy had an erection in one scene, and that was PG-13. We told them, 'You're only saying this because it's a girl, and she's talking about a part of her anatomy. There's no sexual context whatsoever, and to say this is restrictive to an audience of girls is demeaning to all women.' And they eventually had to back down."
I thought that this goes into the portrayal of women in the media in the fact that women talking about their sexual experiences tend to be "taboo," but if men discuss their sexual experiences, they are seen as cool. What do you guys think? How do you feel about the portrayal of feminism in Mean Girls?
I love that movie! I recently watched it again and got a lot more from it than I did before. I found it especially interesting that Cadie always envisioned solving problems in a stereotypically "masculine" way, yet it ended up making more sense (in a kind of twisted way I suppose) than all the catty infighting the girls did that focused on wrecking the image of one's femininity (like the bar incident). I also noticed the part where feminism is mentioned and that pursuing a friend's ex goes against it, which I couldn't really make sense of (still can't). Is it really counter feministic?
ReplyDeleteI also started thinking about that when we talked about Tina Fey and how she wants more woman in comedy. She was a actor in this and I think she was a writer too.
ReplyDelete