A Double Standard for Male and Female Emotions on Film

No matter what film critics have to say about Callie Khouri’s “The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” one thing is certain: In the reviews and stories that characterize the movie, the tale of a group of mothers and daughters who bond despite their differences is bound to be labeled a “women’s picture,” a “melodrama” or a “weepie.”

On the other hand, male-centric films in which groups of guy friends do what guys do and wipe their noses on their sleeves before the end (or, more likely, have a fistfight or talk about their fathers) are never classified as “male weepies” except by determinedly courageous (and solitary) female film critics such as Molly Haskell.

The sexual revolution and the go-girl movement notwithstanding, the tradition of marginalizing and trivializing female experience is alive and well in popular culture.

“Women are compromised the day they’re born,” moans a remorseful Paulette Goddard in George Cukor’s 1939 film “The Women,” and the observation unhappily holds true in 2002, even if some of the circumstances have changed.

Films including “Ya-Ya Sisterhood,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” “Steel Magnolias,” “The Joy Luck Club,” “Waiting to Exhale,” “Thelma & Louise,” “Fried Green Tomatoes,” “Enchanted April,” “Nine to Five” and TV’s “The Women of Brewster Place” and “Sex and the City” have all borne the label “chick flick,” just as earlier films--from “Mildred Pierce” and “The Group” to “Stella Dallas” and “The Women”--were termed “women’s pictures,” “three-hanky melodramas.”

Inherent in the classification is the idea that issues governing women’s lives are somehow uninteresting or unimportant to male audience members, while the converse notion is rarely entertained (except in video stores, where couples frequently disagree over which titles to rent). Films about war, espionage, cowboys, mobsters, gang violence, sports teams and other favorite male-bonding motifs are typically reviewed and written about in a context that suggests this material constitutes general-audience entertainment. There is no accompanying “guy movie” or “boy’s stuff” label to diminish the themes or content in the minds of female audience members.

On the contrary, the predominantly male critical establishment legitimizes and sanctifies the life experiences of men as they are represented in film, never pausing to consider special--or marginal--classification status.

Writing about a perceived critical “bias against emotional fulfillment” in the February pre-Oscar edition of the New York Observer, film critic and author Haskell wrote, “I wonder, where are these skeptics when it comes to the alpha males bonding on the screen? If Achilles had spent as much time moaning over Patroclus as a character in ‘Lord of the Rings’ spends over an expiring comrade, it would have stopped ‘The Iliad’ dead in its tracks. The rehabilitation of the warrior culture has given grown men license to cry over prolonged deathbed embraces in ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘Black Hawk Down.’ In the latter, soldiers (non-star grunts) run after each other begging, ‘Let me die instead of you.’ And now Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson are the respective stars of three ... war movies, in which there will surely be, along with shoot’em-up gut-spilling gore, some hard-wrung male tears.

“Male weepies are as chock-full of emoting as any male-female romance, but the latter is conveniently relegated to a genre ghetto, the Chick Flick, while war films ... are presumably ennobled by their grim view of life as annihilation and despair.”

They are also ennobled by the notion that male tears have an intrinsically greater value than women’s, being tied to issues understood to be of larger importance to society at large. Men cry in battle; they cry at funerals for fallen comrades; they cry over ideals of liberty, justice and honor. Except in rare instances, female characters cry over a ruined dinner, the end of a relationship, conflicts with family members, and only rarely, over social or political malfeasance or the effects of war. Women’s tears rarely save the world; they just keep it running.

It is true that some films about women such as the recent “Crush” and “Waiting to Exhale” argue for marginal status because they are flawed pictures, but a handful of others have been unfairly relegated to secondary status simply by nature of the gender whose struggles they dramatize.

On the CineScene Web site, Chris Dashiell writes, “I have to admit that I have a hard time opening myself up to the pleasures of a ‘weepie’--the way the women in these stories suffer, suffer, and then suffer some more, seems almost like a form of sadism.”

And what of “Black Hawk Down”?

“L.A. Confidential”?

“Gladiator”?

“The Patriot”?

Stories That Mirror

Filmmakers’ Lives

How is the suffering of male characters in these films any more compelling or legitimate than what women go through in “Thelma & Louise” or “The Women of Brewster Place”?

The fact that filmmaking remains a male-dominated profession is a primary reason. Men--filmmakers and critics alike--naturally prefer stories that come closest to mirroring their lives.

Hurt men abound too, but their far-more-reluctant displays of emotion are seen as powerful and strong, while women’s are dismissed as “emotional,” “hormonal” or “sentimental.”

The typical male discomfort and fear of women who “go emo” continue to color opinions of cultural products.

Films like the recent Michael Apted-Jennifer Lopez collaboration “Enough” and last year’s “Tomb Raider” contrive circumstances in which women fight back by ridiculous and unbelievably elaborate means.

But part of every “weepie” is about women fighting back sans brass knuckles or martial arts. “The Women of Brewster Place” and “Steel Magnolias,” the women of “The Joy Luck Club” and “Enchanted April” fight back by carrying on, leaning on their friends and defining their lives by their own principles, just as men do.

If women are most often depicted carrying on in beauty parlors and kitchens and men are in battlefields and boardrooms, the substance of the scenes is essentially the same: Male-bonding films boil down to ideas about how difficult it is to be a man, how hard it is to be a son. Female-bonding films turn on the trials of being a woman, the problems of being some mother’s daughter.

It is only the continued dominance of the male point of view in our popular culture that gives these stories an unequal weight.