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On a very different note, on Tuesday I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with Zack and two ladies whom I presume are gracious. It's definitely a beautiful movie, and I agree with the praise for the fighting scenes, especially in the forest.
Crouching Tiger is interesting for addressing ancient mythical Chinese sexism: Jade Fox becomes evil because the founder of the Wudan school rejects her as a student and sees her only as a sexual partner (we could probably even say "sexual object"). And Jade Fox's student in turn rejects Wudan for its continuing sexism and begins to turn toward evil. There is the sense that Wudan is to blame for all this: if Wudan's founder had been willing to teach Jade Fox as an equal with his male students, the policeman's daughter would not have ended up as an orphan.
A lot of artistic works have been addressing sexism in somewhat cliched ways. The classic example for me is actually a Dar Williams song, "The Babysitter's Here":
And will they get married with kids of their own? He says
"Not if she's going to college we won't,"
And he kisses her, oh... some day I'll have a boyfriend just like that...
(Emphasis in original.) The young girl's misunderstanding of her babysitter's life
She says, "Do me a favor, don't go with a guy who would make you choose,"
And I don't understand, and she tries to explain
And all that mascara runs down in her pain
Cause she's leaving me...
(emphasis added) is tragic, but I think the presentation is a bit heavy-handed. Every single time I hear that song, I find it really jarring: it's the core and key to the song, but the little girl narrator has no idea of that. This is a traditional literary device, which Dar Williams wields powerfully, but what's being revealed this way is somehow too much for me.
Another sexism plot showed up at the beginning of Carl Sagan's Contact, which I read recently. The daughter wants to be a scientist. Her father encourages her and then dies tragically. Her (wicked) stepfather thinks women shouldn't be scientists. She keeps on studying science and nature against his wishes. So she becomes endearing, appealing, interesting; her stepfather rapidly becomes the bad guy, ignorant, even cruel. This is all laid out in just a few pages, but we can so quickly identify with the young woman in her enthusiasm and independence (we know that this is a character who will not care about convention, who will find her own path).
When I read the beginning of Contact, though, I felt manipulated, as though Sagan had picked out an unreasonably extreme situation just to polarize the beginning of the story and draw us in. But the problem is that I actually know of a young woman in real life who wants to be a scientist and whose parents are actively discouraging her because they believe women shouldn't be scientists. So "this is real, this is something that happens", and Sagan isn't just making it up.
