A Gender Bias in ‘Short Cuts’? Debate Goes On : Men’s Pain Has Been Overlooked

The Counterpunch attack on Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” as being misogynist (“Robert Altman’s ‘Short Cuts’ Is a Blunt Attack on Women,” Calendar, Nov. 29) is stunning. When a film portrays women as powerless, it is called misogynist; when it portrays women as powerful, it is called misogynist. The column’s author, Sandy de Grijs, even tells us that Altman’s portrayal of Tim Robbins as a blatant philanderer and Madeleine Stowe as the powerful one is yet another example of misogyny.

The men in “Short Cuts” were portrayed repeatedly not only as prisoners of their hormones, but as irresponsible, immature self-destructive and female-destructive. But de Grijs saw misogyny only in the women’s portrayal as less-than-perfect. Nor did she acknowledge Altman’s genius for giving us a slice of both sexes’ shadow sides.

Our hypersensitivity to slights against women leads us to calling virtually any portrayal of women misogynist, while our insensitivity to the ubiquity of male-bashing leaves us without even a word called “misandronist” (hater of males).

Likewise, in another current film, “The Piano,” this blindness to men’s pain is so pervasive that it is being described as portraying a world in which women struggle to find a voice, with no sensitivity for the husband’s struggle to find love, or his role in a world in which he was expected to support a mute woman and her daughter while the woman was expected to do nothing to support him--no cooking, no cleaning, no caring--just rejecting him, playing a piano and having an affair.

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Let us, for a minute, reverse the roles: If a woman were expected to support and feed a mute man and his child from another relationship--and the man never gave her a kind look, was having an affair, got a woman to pay him for sex, focused on his piano from which he made no attempt to earn money, denied his wife affection, did no cooking, no cleaning and made no contribution whatsoever to her life or needs--would we describe the film as portraying a world in which a man struggles to find his voice or, rather, a film in which a female masochist with low self-esteem took care of a deadbeat husband?

In fact, “The Piano” can be seen in part as a film in which two men compete in two different ways to hear a woman: her husband providing for her survival needs, a more primal man providing for her more primal needs. The more primal man, freer from providing for her, was freer to spend time with her and to hear her art.

She heard neither man’s art nor heart.

Why are we so blind to men’s struggles to find love and, due to our blindness, fail to understand the volcano of hurt and rage that is incrementally fermenting? Why do we not even ask ourselves, “Where is this man’s piano? Who supports him to pursue his passion and have an affair?” Why don’t men speak up?

Maybe today, we live in a nation of men who have so little hope of having their piano that they find it more realistic to be mute. Maybe men are also struggling to find a voice.