You Better Cry Like a Girl: Popular Culture Lessons On Gender-Appropriate Emotion

 The problematic binary that privileges reason over emotion (associating men with reason and women with emotion) has existed for centuries.  Different historical moments often resurrect and repurpose gendered portrayal of emotion for particular reasons.   That this current post-9/11 moment is doing this is not surprising.  While tracing narrative trends among the popular post-9/11 wave of dystopian fiction, television, and film, I noticed some surprising lessons concerning gender-appropriate emotion.   Although it’s too early to make any grand claims, I think these didactic moments within these narratives can be traced back to the representations of gender seen in the days and weeks immediately following September 11th.

In The Terror Dream and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, Susan Faludi convincingly showcases how feminism was attacked in the aftermath of 9/11 as one of the supposed reasons for the vulnerability of the United States. She is clear to note that 9/11 did not cause the sentiments that gave rise to the renewed feminist backlash, but that it revealed cultural conflicts that were already brewing underneath the surface.  In the days following 9/11, Faludi herself was bombarded by calls from various journalists who wanted her opinion on how “9/11 pushed feminism off the map” or sounded its “death knell.”  Reporters asked for her opinion on so-called phenomena such as “the return of the manly man” and the trend of women becoming “more feminine” after 9/11 (and, therefore, in their opinions, less feminist).  There was an oddly celebratory nature to some journalistic articles that predicted the death of feminism after the attacks.  For example, in a piece titled “Hooray for Men,” Mona Charen wrote:  “Perhaps the new climate of danger – danger from evil men – will quiet the anti-male agitation we’ve endured for so long.”  And, in an attack on specific feminists, such as Susan Sontag, articles went to press such as Ann Coulter’s “Women We’d Like to See… in Burkas” which certainly did not mask their animosity toward the women’s movement.

And, in the weeks and months after 9/11, it was not just self-identified feminists who felt the effects of this cultural shift.  Faludi notes, “soon after the World Trade Center vaporized into two biblical plumes of smoke, another vanishing act occurred on television sets and newspaper pages across the country.  Women began disappearing… Three weeks after 9/11, the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) counted the op-ed bylines in the nation’s major newspaper and reported” a drastic decrease in women’s public visibility.” For example, the number of opinion pieces written by female writers at The New York Times had dropped from 22 percent to 9 percent.   Across mediated divides on television, The Feminist White House Project noted that during this time frame women’s representation on Sunday news talk shows plummeted, decreasing by nearly 40 percent.  When women were featured in the media, it was not the strong women of before being showcased. 

      

Women who garnered the most attention needed to fit the script of the moment; they needed to be vulnerable and in need of (male) protection.  The 9/11 widows fit well into this narrative and, therefore, became the focus of the media frenzy.  These women were desirable because “they weren’t ambitious careerists trading commodities on the eighty-fourth floor [of the World Trade Center].  They were at home that day tending to the hearth, models of all-American housewifery.”  Along with these images of women in need of saving were, of course, those who could do the saving:  men.  Some of the most iconic images associated with 9/11 are of first responders who became symbolic representations of the nation’s courage and resilience. 

                

 

Years later it seems like some cultural representations still want to see the two genders along these lines.  Two examples of strong women being punished for not behaving according to gender norms can be found in popular post-9/11 dystopian narratives:  Susan Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy and AMC’s The Walking Dead.    Katniss Everdeen, the main character of Collins’s successful young adult-trilogy-turned-blockbuster-hit, is portrayed as having many traits associated with masculinity:  she is strong, resourceful, calm, and rational.  While her actions and skill sets are often linked to those of the masculine sphere (she is the provider for her family, a skilled hunter), it is her affective qualities that cause many to classify her as male-like.  When forced to enter into a national televised competition where she has to fight-to-the-death in an arena where only one can leave as a victor, Katniss remains (for the most part) emotionally reserved.  Besides for rare outbursts, she refuses to show the emotions one would expect.  For the most part any emotion one sees from her throughout the training process, pre-game ceremonial activities, and the game itself is performed.  She is told, quite explicitly, that she is “unlikeable” and she is only made “likeable” when she is recast into the role of the love-struck teen, the star-crossed lover, who has to enter the arena alongside of her male love interest.   She plays the role of the emotional girl in order to survive – because to deviate from this gender norm could mean death.

                                 

    

                                     

 

AMC’s Walking Dead is a television program set during a zombie apocalypse.  Comprised of an ensemble cast, one of the characters originating from the first season (and surviving into the fourth), is Carol Peletier.  Unlike Katniss, this character was originally portrayed as quite emotional:  her early storylines focused on her status as an abused wife and later a grieving mother.  As the seasons progress this emotionality slowly recedes as she becomes more emotionally hardened.  She is depicted as a strong “masculine”-like character gaining a leadership role among the survivor’s camp.  Season three finds her training the children of this in community survival tactics and eventually making the call to kill two fellow survivors who were infected by a plague that threatened to wipe out the entire group.  Despite the fact that the former leader, Rick, had made morally questionable, unilateral decisions on behalf of the group, he casts Carol out from the community as a punishment for her action.  In this example, Carol, who grows away from her status as “emotional woman” and into a symbolic stand in for the “rational man,” is punished for not behaving according to social norms. 

                            

        

                            

        

21^st century popular culture houses an array of strong female characters, but (as discussed in previous posts) they are often cast into emotional scenarios that undermine that strength or (as is evident in the examples above) their refusal to conform to expected emotional scripts causes them some sort of conflict within the narrative.  In an age where we’re trying to raise children to ignore the age-old conceptions of the rational male/emotional female, how do narratives such as these undercut those efforts?  I’m not sure, but I better go cry about it now.