Bad Feminist: Essays (25 page)

In the first book, Ana decides to visit her mother in Georgia. Christian offers to travel with Ana, but she refuses because she, understandably, needs a little time and space to clear her head so she can decide if the BDSM lifestyle is one she can handle. Christian has to have
some
control over the situation so he upgrades her to first class. We’re supposed to think this is romantic, but mostly it’s creepy because he has gone to the trouble of figuring out her itinerary and changing it without consulting her. Then he simply flies down to Georgia to join Ana because he cannot bear to be apart from her. He’s a man who knows what he wants; his needs are the only needs that matter.

As the story proceeds, Christian is jealous when Ana is merely in the presence of another man. He gets angry or pouts when she won’t pay enough attention to him. During a visit to his family’s home, Ana defies Christian in some obscure way so he drags her off to the boathouse to punish her. Her first instinct is to whisper, “Please don’t hit me.” This fear of being hit will come up more than once throughout the trilogy. He hires a security detail for her after one of his “crazy” (read: “heartbroken”) former submissives has a mental breakdown after her boyfriend dies, but mostly it’s an opportunity for him to control the boundaries of Ana’s world in every possible way. When Ana gets a job, Christian buys the company where she works to “protect” her. In the third book, on their honeymoon, Ana decides to sunbathe topless at a nude beach. Christian, of course, does not appreciate his woman revealing herself to the world. She’s not his submissive, but by God, she is his wife. He makes a scene. Later, they are making love in their hotel room and he leaves hickeys all over her breasts so not only can she no longer go topless, she cannot even wear a bikini top for the duration of their honeymoon. He literally marks his territory like a sixteen-year-old boy.

Christian Grey uses sex as a weapon. He takes real pleasure in fucking her into submission when he cannot otherwise will her into submission. Nearly every sexual encounter between the young couple ends with Ana drowsy and unable to move, her limbs heavy and satiated with pleasure. In a consensual BDSM relationship this dynamic would be fine, welcome even, but the overarching premise of the trilogy is that Ana doesn’t want a BDSM relationship, at least not the kind Christian wants. She certainly enjoys their kinky sexual relationship, but she consistently clarifies her overall disinterest in serving as Christian’s submissive. Their relationship is beyond refractory; Ana is, like Bella in Twilight, the vanquished, the undead, and Christian Grey is the proud vanquisher.

After each instance of abusive, controlling behavior, Ana gets righteously indignant but never for long. Time and again, she chooses to sacrifice what she really wants for the opportunity to be loved by her half-assed Prince Charming. We’re supposed to believe Ana is independent because she “defies” Christian by having very reasonable expectations and boundaries. He willfully ignores these boundaries, though, and she allows him to. She forgives all his trespasses.

The trilogy also relies heavily on the trope of the imperiled woman—in each book, Ana faces some kind of danger, either innocuous or quite serious, that reminds us she is a woman, and therefore in need of rescue by her Prince Charming. After each crisis, Christian clutches Ana desperately and says he doesn’t know what he would do if anything happened to her. If you look up the word “codependent” in the dictionary, this couple’s picture will be featured prominently.

I’m all for reading for pleasure. I’m a fan of dirty books and kink. I am down with female submission. By the end of
Fifty Shades Freed
, however, where Ana acknowledges that Christian is as controlling as ever even though they have found a happily-ever-after, his pattern of abusive, petty, and at times childish behavior is exhausting and far too familiar. This Prince Charming has lost all his charm.

When considering the overwhelming popularity of this trilogy, we cannot simply dismiss the flaws because the books are fun and the sex is hot. The damaging tone has too broad a reach. That tone reinforces pervasive cultural messages women are already swallowing about what they should tolerate in romantic relationships, about what they should tolerate to be loved by their Prince Charming.

Fifty Shades is a fairy tale. There’s a man and a woman, and an obstacle that eventually they are able to overcome. There is a happily-ever-after, but the price exacted is terribly high. It is frightening to consider how many women might be willing to pay that price.

When my brothers and I have a particularly frustrating day with white people, we’ll call one another and say, “Today is a
Rosewood
day.” Nothing more needs to be said.
Rosewood
is set in 1923 and tells the story of Rosewood, a deeply segregated, primarily black town in Florida. A married white woman in nearby Sumner is beaten by her lover. With no other way to explain the marks on her body to her husband, she cries rape, and when the townsmen ask her who has done this terrible thing, the white woman, predictably, shrieks, “It was a nigger.”

The white men proceed to lose their minds, surrender to a mob mentality, and create a lot of havoc, lynching an innocent black man and tormenting the townsfolk of Rosewood. The angry mob destroys nearly every home and other structure in the town. There are some heartbreaking subplots, but mostly the story hinges on a little white lie, so to speak. It’s all very distressing, and the injustice of what happened in Rosewood is, at times, unbearable because it is based on a true story. The first time I saw
Rosewood
, I turned to my friend and said, “I don’t want to see a white person for three days.” She said, “That’s not fair,” but she was white so that was to be expected. Fortunately, it was a Friday, so I locked myself in my apartment and by Monday I was mostly ready to reengage with the world.

If
Rosewood
demands a three-day window of voluntary segregation,
The Help
demands three weeks, maybe longer.

Watching historical movies about the black experience (or white interpretations of the black experience) have become nearly impossible for the same reason I hope I never read another slave narrative. It’s too much. It’s too painful. Too frustrating and infuriating. The history is too recent and too close. I watch movies like
Rosewood
or
The Help
and realize that if I had been born to different parents, at a different time, I too could have been picking cotton or raising a white woman’s babies for less than minimum wage or enduring any number of intolerable circumstances far beyond my control. More than that, though, I am troubled by how little has changed. I am troubled by how complacently we are willing to consume these often revisionist stories of this country’s complex and painful racial history. History is important, but sometimes the past renders me hopeless and helpless.

When I first saw the trailer for
The Help
, I was not familiar with the book. The moment I saw the first maid’s uniform grace the screen, I knew I was going to be upset. By the end of the trailer, which contained all the familiar, reductive elements of a movie about the segregated South, I had worked myself into a nice, frothy rage. In the following months, I continued to see the trailer, only now it was plastered all over the Internet and on television, and the reprinted tie-in book version was heavily hyped, even climbing back to the top of the Amazon bestseller list because this is one of those books nearly everyone seems to love. After seeing the movie, I borrowed the book from a friend, read it, and raged more.

The Help
is billed as inspirational, charming, and heartwarming. That’s all true if your heart is warmed by narrow, condescending, mostly racist depictions of black people in 1960s Mississippi; overly sympathetic depictions of the white women who employed
the help
; the excessive, inaccurate use of dialect; and the glaring omissions with regards to the stirring civil rights movement in which, as Martha Southgate points out in
Entertainment Weekly
, “white people were the help”: “the architects, visionaries, prime movers, and most of the on-the-ground laborers of the civil rights movement were African-American.”
The Help
, I have decided, is science fiction, creating an alternate universe.

Hollywood has long been enamored with the magical negro—the insertion of a black character into a narrative who bestows upon the protagonist the wisdom he or she needs to move forward in some way—or, as Matthew Hughey defines the phenomenon in a 2009 article in
Social Problems
,

The [magical negro] has become a stock character that often appears as a lower class, uneducated black person who possesses supernatural or magical powers. These powers are used to save and transform disheveled, uncultured, lost, or broken whites (almost exclusively white men) into competent, successful, and content people within the context of the American myth of redemption and salvation.

(See:
Ghost
,
The Legend of Bagger Vance
,
Unbreakable
,
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
,
The Secret Life of Bees
,
Sex and the City: The Movie, The Green Mile
,
Corrina, Corrina
, etc.)

In
The Help
, there are not one but twelve or thirteen magical negroes who use their mystical powers to make the world a better place by sharing their stories of servitude and helping Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan grow out of her awkwardness and insecurity into a confident, racially aware, independent career woman. It’s an embarrassment of riches for fans of the magical negro trope.

The theater was crowded for the screening of
The Help
I attended. Women came in groups of three or four or more, many of them clutching their well-worn copies of the book. As we waited for the movie to start, and a long wait it would be because the projector was malfunctioning (a sign perhaps), I listened to the women around me, certainly well meaning, many of them of the
Golden Girls
demographic, chattering about how much they loved the book and how excited they were and how long they had been waiting for this movie to open. I wondered if they were reminiscing about the
good old days
, then decided that was unfair of me. Still, they were quite enthusiastic. My fellow moviegoers applauded when the movie began, and they applauded when the movie ended. They applauded during inspiring moments and gasped or groaned or clucked their tongues during the uncomfortable or painful moments. Their animated response to the movie was not mild. My faith in humanity was tested. I was the only black person in the theater, though to be fair, that mostly speaks to where I live. As I walked to my car, I came to the bitter realization that
The Help
would make a whole lot of money and be really well received by many.

If you go to the theater without your brain (leave it in the glove compartment),
The Help
is a good movie. The production is competent. The cast is uniformly excellent and includes the immensely talented supporting cast of Cicely Tyson, Allison Janney, and Sissy Spacek. Both Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer received Oscar nominations because they do excellent work in the movie and Hollywood loves to reward black women for playing magical negroes. Spencer would go on to win, and deservedly, the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. While I wondered how so many talented people signed on to this movie, the cast is not the problem here. As others have noted,
The Help
is endemic of a much bigger problem, one where even today, a prime role for a two-time Tony Award winner and one-time Oscar nominee like Viola Davis is that of a maid.

Davis, who is always sublime, brings intelligence, gravitas, and heart to the role of Aibileen Clark, an older maid who has just lost her only son to a mill accident and has worked her whole life as a maid and nanny, raising seventeen white children. When we meet her, Aibileen is mourning her son and working as the maid for Elizabeth Leefolt and her daughter, Mae Mobley, a chubby, homely girl who is often neglected by her mother. Aibileen’s magical power is making young white children feel good about
theyselves
. Whenever Mae Mobley is feeling down, Aibileen chants, “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” She showers the child with love and affection even while having to listen to young white women discuss black people as a subhuman species, dealing with the indignity of using a bathroom outside of the main house, and coping with her grief. Magic, magic, magic. At the end of the movie, Aibileen offers her inspirational incantation to young Mae Mobley even after she is fired for an infraction she did not commit because that’s what the magical negro does—she uses her magic for her white charge and rarely for herself.

Spencer is also formidable as Minny Jackson, the “sassy” maid (where “sassy” is code for “uppity”), who works, at the beginning of the movie, for the petty, vindictive, and socially powerful Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), president of the Junior League. Hilly Holbrook’s claim to fame is, among other cruelties, proposing an initiative ordering all white homes to provide separate bathrooms for the “colored” help. After Minny is fired from her job where she uses her negro magic to look after Hilly’s elderly mother, she goes to work for Celia Foote. The women of the Junior League in Jackson ostracize Celia because she was pregnant when she married, is considered white trash, and has committed other petty social sins. Minny uses her mystical negritude to help Celia cope with several miscarriages and learn how to cook, and at the end of the movie, the narrative leads you to believe that Celia indirectly empowers Minny to leave her abusive husband, as if a woman of Minny’s strength and character couldn’t do that on her own. Then Celia cooks a whole spread for Minny and allows the help to sit at her dining room table just like white folk, aww shucks. Minny asks, “I’m not losing my job?,” and Celia’s husband says, “You have a job here for the rest of your life.” Minny, of course, beams gratefully because a lifetime of servitude to a white family, doing backbreaking work for terrible pay, is like winning the lottery and the best a black woman could hope for in the alternate science fiction universe of
The Help
.