Misogyny and Madame Butterfly... But, Really, Who's Surprised?

I should start by saying that I no slightly more than nothing about opera. I'm not actually particularly fond on opera, though I did see one I liked at the Met in NYC. Thus, I'm not sure if I should have been surprised to note the blatant misogyny of Puccini's Madame Butterfly. I wasn't surprised only because I'm generally not surprised by the objectification of women. (Someday, I hope it's rare enough that I can be surprised by it.)

So, here's the thing. This opera is HUGE. I think I hear people mention it almost every time opera is discussed. It's supposedly such a beautiful, tragic love story. Only the tragic part is right. The antagonist is an American soldier, B.F. Pinkerton, in Japan who arrives at the beginning to rent an apartment for 999 years, announcing that he knows he can break the contract on a whim. And the woman he's about to "marry"? Yup, he has the same attitude about the marriage as he does about the apartment. He can break either contract at a whim and intends to before long. And just as he does not find it sad for the apartment if he does not hold his end of the deal, he never considers the impact it will have on his wife (or his "toy" as he calls her) when he leaves without intending to return.

Classic story, right? Man finds woman, man possesses woman, man leaves woman, man never returns, and woman spends her life pining. In the end, she kills herself rather than live with the shame of knowing her husband has chosen another woman, rather than live knowing that her dream was a sham. And we consider this a great love story? The man broke her. He broke her like a young boy breaks a toy that he no longer intends to use. A toy that has served its purpose. A toy that cannot feel.

That is how women are treated all over the world. Whether it is by forcing them to live under countless yards of cloth until they forget what the sun looks like, cutting off a young girl's clitoris to keep her chaste (female genital mutilation), making them eat scraps after men have eaten, or raping and invading their bodies, this is what happens all over the world. Sure, in Madame Butterfly, Pinkerton doesn't seem overtly violent on the surface. Maybe he's just a little uncaring. A little selfish. But as I mentioned in the entry about Happy Feet, it is the devaluation that leads to violence. By that notion, the devaluation itself is violence. He had promised to return to her, to be her husband, but he treated her like property and then discarded of her and returned to take her child. It isn't until the end, when she kills herself, that he even considers that she has feelings. This attitude opens the door to so much violence. And we call it entertainment and pay hundreds of dollars to watch it. And we laugh and we clap and we cry.

And now I'm getting on a ranting soapbox, but that's why one has a blog. Besides, I'm pissed off. I'm allowed to be pissed off. I'm tired of people not being pissed off AND of those people who are pissed off not taking the next step to make some changes. Or holding it all in.

technorati tags: takebackthetech

The World is Not a Cartoon Utopia

I found blog-able material this last week during a couple of random, very different cultural experiences, and I was suddenly struck by the fact that I have failed in one of my main purposes with this blog. What purpose is that? Making connections. If there’s one thing I’m supposedly good at (so I’ve been told), it’s drawing the lines between dots everyone thinks are disconnected. Perhaps I can do some of that now.

Most of the cultural issues I’ve written about are the ones that are obviously connected in some way to violence against women - not much of a stretch to see how regarding women as objects/property, the perpetuation of rape myths, and victim blaming could create a world where violence against women is rampant. Ok, so then what does Happy Feet have to do with violence against women? Yes, I am talking about the cartoon Happy Feet. I went to see this the day before Thanksgiving, and all I could think about through most of the movie was that I needed to point out how the subjugation of animals and the environment are intrinsically related to the subjugation of women. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you might want to read this later because I will give the ending away.

There are essentially two main storylines in the film – one about Mumble (Happy Feet) not fitting in because the way he expresses his “heartsong” is through dancing and not singing. He is eventually banished from his home and told that he is the reason the penguins cannot find fish. (I’m not going to go into detail about this storyline right now despite the fact that it is an obvious parallel to the way our society treats individuals who are not heterosexual.)

Of course, Mumble discovers that it is humans (“aliens”) that are taking all of the fish – due of course to environmentally unfriendly fishing practices that are meant to reap the largest bounty for the least time and work no matter how much destruction is caused. (Google “trawling” or check out the Greenpeace Ocean site for some good, yet disturbing information on these practices). This is an obvious, and unfortunately not unusual example of how humans, in general, regard the land and the other inhabitants of this world as expendable property that only exist to serve our purposes and needs. Sound familiar? There is no oppression that is disconnected from any other oppression because they all stem from the same problem. Hierarchy. (Which I would argue stems from patriarchy but that’s another discussion). The ability to look upon some other entity as “less than” or as mere objects is exactly what enables violence to occur – whether it is violence against women, violence against the earth, violence against animals, violence against sexual minorities, or violence against any other entity. If we see some part of ourselves in another being or acknowledge them as equal to us, it would be to threatening to violate them.

And in the Utopian world that exists in cartoons, once the humans realized that they were stealing the food of these fabulously entertaining penguins, they rallied and very quickly set up a no fishing zone to help replenish the penguins food supply. In some senses, I applaud the social consciousness of this movie; it points out the very sad reality of what we humans are doing to the earth in the name of profit and ease. Unfortunately, it takes the easy way out. I’m offended by the presumption that the people of the world just need to know the damage their actions cause in order to change. We know. The rich white men in charge have heard from activists for the environment, from the men and women who are trying to end violence against women, and they choose to ignore what they hear. They choose not to believe it. And because they’re in power, the can make that choice. They don’t have to see the direct impact of their actions because they don’t live on our level, and they won’t live long enough to see the long term impact. And there are millions of us already fighting to make change on all of these fronts, so for a cartoon to assume that a bit of knowledge will force those in power to relinquish their profit for the good of another being is insulting.

For more information on the way the search for profit and the developed world's increasing consumption have caused disastrous subjugation of the land and its resources, I highly recommend checking out Jane Goodall's new book Harvest for Hope. For an interesting look at the connection between violence against women and the consumption of meat, try Carol Adams' book The Sexual Politics of Meat.

Next installment… The Opera. No, really.