Pike and Affleck in “Gone Girl”
Thursday
Thanks to my student’s senior project on psychopathic slasher fiction, I have been introduced to a female slasher who is wildly popular amongst my female students: Amy Dunne from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Recently I came across a Salon article from a young Hillary Clinton fan who compares Hillary Clinton to this slasher, but she does so as a compliment. Hang on for a topsy-turvy discussion of a popular culture reference that could well play a role in an election that pits Clinton against Donald Trump.
I’ve reported in the past on Kate Hedrick’s project. A psychology-English double major, Kate argues that, while crime fiction and slasher films misrepresent psychopathy, they do so for understandable reasons: men worried about their manhood are sometimes drawn to slasher fiction like (depending on the decade) Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and Darkly Dreaming Dexter. That’s because the slashers allow them to vicariously act out their deep anger against women they experience as emasculating. In these particular novels, the slashed women are, respectively, Mary Crane (“Marion” in the Hitchcock film), a female senator and her sexually forward daughter, and Dexter’s incompetent boss, who is an affirmative action hire:
[Migdia DeGuerta] got into Homicide because she’s Cuban, plays politics, and knows how to kiss ass.
Kate notes that, in contrast, there are also non-threatening women in all three works who emerge intact: Mary Crane’s sister Lila in Psycho, Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs (she’s her own woman but takes proper direction from various male figures), and Dexter’s sister.
In the 1950s, Kate notes, men feared becoming mommy-coddled corporate drones. In the 1980s, male confidence was undermined by the end of “the great prosperity,” along with the rise of feminism, the loss of the Vietnam War, and the trauma of the Iran hostage crisis. In the 2000s, following 9-11, men worried that they couldn’t protect their loved ones against international terrorism.
Dexter is an understandable stand-in for this frightened and angry male reader/viewer. He doesn’t slash women himself because he follows a code. But he’s secretly glad when his dark double, his brother, does so. (Also, as with the Bush administration against suspected terrorists, fans of Dexter are willing to grant him permission to use extreme measures against serial killers.)
While men may be threatened by certain kinds of women, there’s another type of female that is no problem. This is the “cool girl,” and it is men’s insistence that women be cool girls that helps explain Gone Girl’s popularity amongst young women. Feeling pressure from such men, Amy Dunne finds ways to avenge herself against them, murdering a lover and cunningly blackmailing her husband. Here she is explaining her anger:
Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)
To sum it up so far: men fantasize about psychopaths slashing emasculating women and demand that women behave in ways that don’t trigger their fears. In reaction, women who are tired of insecure men fantasize about a woman turning the tables on them.
Sarah Palin is a cool girl, which helps explain why she was chosen as a vice presidential candidate. Hillary Clinton most definitely is not, as Elizabeth Hogg, author of the article, makes clear:
I am so tired of adopting an apologetic tone and a lack of eye-contact when I tell people my age that I’m with her. When my body and tone radiate defensiveness, I know, deep down and guiltily, that I am not apologizing for Bill or Benghazi — I am apologizing because Hillary Clinton is not a Cool Girl, and it is not cool that I like her. Hillary is not a Cool Girl, apparently, because she is cold, disaffected, a creepy robot, a feminist, a bitch.
The idea of the “Cool Girl” originated in Gillian Flynn’s bestselling 2012 novel Gone Girl, which gave a name to the idea of a woman who has been socially conditioned to please men by acting in such a way that combines masculinity and femininity. The Cool Girl does not rock the boat; she is not a threat to male authority. She is pretty, funny, and even smart, but she is not a serious challenge to the patriarchy.
Just as we saw a resurgence of overt racism in the 2008 election, we are going to see a resurgence of sexism in this one. In fact, it may be even worse than 2008. Barack Obama had a way of defusing race fears amongst moderates. Clinton does not have his touch.
Hogg has a suggestion for her: follow the example of Liz Lemon in 30 Rock and use humor:
Feminist scholar, poet, and all-around badass Audre Lorde tells us that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” We can try to redefine what’s cool, but sometimes the best way to do that is with a sense of humor. The Clinton Campaign picked the third option in giving out “Woman Cards” to its donors—Clinton took Trump’s attempts to make working for the rights of women uncool and completely turned it on its head. And according to her campaign, it’s working: $2.4 million raised from the initiative, with 40 percent coming from new donors. Maybe Hillary Clinton is a bitch, and maybe I am a bitch too. But as Tina Fey once said in another spectacular subversion of the patriarchy: “Bitches get stuff done.”
Or as Clinton recently put it, ““Well, if fighting for women’s health care and paid family leave and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal me in!”
