It’s always a given that when Mark goes out of town, I won’t sleep at all the first night. Some of that is just that we’ve gotten so used to one another, and some of it is that being something of a natural insomniac, I think that my own sleep schedule — and having one at all — is often reliant on having other people around me who are sleeping. In fact, I seem to fall into step with the sleep schedule of others quite precisely: if I live with people who like to sleep in, I’m a bit more capable of it myself. Since I moved, daylight issues notwithstanding, I can certainly say I’ve been getting a lot more sleep that usual.

Last night was no exception to the no-sleep rule: I didn’t get to sleep until 4:30 this morning (and woke up at 11, annoyed with myself for sleeping so late). But, knowing that was in store for me in advance, I just made a nice dinner, a roaring fire, plopped a pile of films on the coffee table and snuggled up with the dog for the night.

I have what is perhaps a fairly odd collection of films I keep round. Of course, there’s every episode of everything Joss Whedon has ever done, and a copy of Harold and Maude (I think at this point in my life I’ve probably seen that flick 50 times, but it reamins my favorite: in fact, in high school, when Matthew died, my wonderful counselor asked what I need for her to bring over — she spent the whole day and night with me, bless her heart — and a copy of that was the top of the list, however too perfect a fit it was for the situation). There’s some fun stuff in there, but overall, I’m one of those people — is there a “these” kind of people with this? — who you probably don’t come to the house of all stoked for a fun movie marathon. Most of what I own is the very antithesis of fun.

I’m not really sure why it is or how it happened that I felt it was vital for me to own or rent films that are very hard to watch, but it’s been a growing theme. In part, I feel like it’s important for me to have films I can quickly show or borrow in case somone doesn’t understand how important the issues that are most important to me are. But I will often sit and watch really touch stuff for myself, back to back, for hours on end sometimes, tears running down my face, a lump in my throat, anger in my belly.

Last night it was Allison Anders’ (who I worship) Things Behind the Sun — amazing film, by the by, for anyone who wants some understanding about how childhood gang rape can effect a person, though if you have rape triggers, you will likely, as I do, need to step into the other room during the final flashback scene — followed by Petter Mullen’s The Magdalene Sisters. I picked up the latter a few weeks ago, having seen it once before when it came out, noticing that they’d attached Sex in a Cold Climate, the documentary which contains the three women’s stories it was based on. That I had not seen before, and had wanted to.

Seeing that documentary, after such a powerfully done film, after that text that precedes the credits which recognizes the over 30,000 women and girls who were enslaved by the laundries until 1996 when they finally shut down (which makes the eyes and heart burn, even if you knew that already — text is so potent in that way), finally made me have to go to bed because even I just couldn’t take anymore.

It’s one thing to read about things like the Magdalene Laundries, to watch a fine dramatization, or to play Joni Mitchell’s incredible take on it. It’s entirely another to watch old Irish women who could be your granny unable to say the word “rape,” unable to keep from weeping about something so terrible she went through that even forty years seems not to have dulled the pain much. I had to finally put myself to bed because it was completely unbearable not to be able to reach out and give these beautiful old women a hug, especially considering how much both films explore women’s inhumanity to other women (and without falling into the typical trap of presenting it as something separate from what is done to women at large to create and encourage those dynamics).

In my case, too, this particular group of women and what they went through feels personal to me beyond them just being women, beyond them being maligned for same: I see so much of the foundation for the way rape, abuse, sex and accidental pregnancy was handled (or rather, denied) in my mother’s Irish family and how much that hurt and placed both she and myself right in harm’s way.

I have to prod Mark often to watch some of these films with me: thank christ he’s a director, otherwise it might be an entirely futile effort. Once he finally does watch them, he’s often outwardly thankful for my insistence, but his inclination is usually to avoid seeing real brutality: not because he’s an arse, but because he’s still getting his sea legs when it comes to facing the world’s hard stuff. I have the privilege, if you can call it that, of a lifetime of looking so much of this square in the eye — sometimes having no choice in the matter — he’s not in that same space, and to boot, my upset and sorrow over these things, I think, makes it even harder. So, when he’s not here, I’ll often watch them more often, or watch more in a row, than I would when he is.

Maybe I keep films like this around — besides the obvious matter that films like this, like Monster, like The Accused,, like Boys Don’t Cry, what have you, are brilliant films — because I really need them. This week, for instance, I got an email from a man who had started posting at Scarleteen who was asking me (a pretty presumptuous request) to give him a women’s studies primer one-on-one to explain, as he said, the psychological impetus for misogyny specifically because, as he said, that bias hasn’t played out in the same way others have and thus must be different somehow than racism or xenophobia because, he said, there haven’t been any genocides of women or “anything like that.” I honestly couldn’t even respond after that bit there because I was just sitting over here with my mouth hanging open, much in the same way I sit when I hear or read those folks clearly convinced that nothing at all of consequence happened to Jews during World War II.

(Note: that link to Hoffman above is beyond deeply infuriating, and should likely not be read if you don’t want your day utterly ruined. On the other hand, if you haven’t heard revisionist arguments before, it is educational in that respect, and it’s also a fine illustration of the sorts of arguments feminist women have to hear all the time about how rape statistics are overinflated, domestic abuse can’t really be the major cause of death for pregnant women, sex trafficking isn’t really a problem because all women and girls in it choose it, things were just fine before Roe Vs. Wade and things like the laundries were just women being whiners, etc.)

Much in the same way I sit every time that I have to hear someone around me or within earshot talking about how women as a class really haven’t had it so bad, have we?

I think I sometimes need films like this because I need a full sensory reminder that some people get it. That there are plenty of people who know and are enraged and mortified by the treatment of women, the treatment of sex, the way dysfunctional and dangerous cultural treatments of sex have always hurt women the most. In part, I think I watch these things to feel validated in what I do: in part I watch these things to feel not so lonely in doing them as I often do. Perhaps, too, I need to just be able to cry openly and without reservation about them sometimes: rather than trying to fix them, I need to just fully feel them.

I think I need the fuel that being immersed for a couple hours in just deeply feeling them — without having to explain or defend; without having to intellectualize, subjectify or make palatable for someone else — gives me.

filed under Heather Corinna | home | feminism | women | sexuality
posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 1:04 pm

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