Les Misérables: A Leg Over and a Leg Up?

My son had two free tickets to Les Misérables and kindly ‘shouted’ me.  Others who saw it earlier loved it, returned for more.  Ages ago I hadn’t got far with the book but knew the main story.  The wider story was quite new to me.

Les Miz stars Anne Hathaway, Amanda Seyfried and Hugh Jackman.

‘Had I enjoyed the film?’   A piece in the DomPost had warned of its shortcomings in respect of women’s roles.  At first I was too bemused to reply.  I did allow that the singing and the music were great.  I’d stayed awake throughout, quite a feat.  Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe astonished.  The romantic young hero had a glorious voice.  The women sang well.  The two ravenhaired women got polished off (oh god not the dispensable women I first noticed  in film and fiction in the post-feminist backlash of the 80s?).  The soppy blonde virgin, I presume, got a leg up into a well endowed aristocratic family. Nor did the saccharine Catholicism accord with the widespread punitive  Christianity of the times.

The warning article was written by  Princeton Professor Stacy Wolf, a theatre historian, who studies gender and sexuality in the American musical. She wrote that that “Les Miz” was ‘full of outdated gender roles’  and ‘idealised women through the persuasive, demeaning stereotype of the martyr’.   (As well as purifying the one who loved too much without benefit of the clergy?)

The women ‘are there only for the men to save, pity or forget’ and ‘trigger the men’s ethical struggles and bravery, but they don’t actually do anything’.   Amen to Stacy’s insights.  She allows she still loves “Les Miz”, lives with the contradictions but notes the women’s roles fared better in French productions of the musical and even better in the book.

The pursuit of Jean Valjean by Javert was well-realised.  But the young hero was as soppy as the heroine.  Once he got a sight of her his revolutionary ardour waned.  My son opined all he then wanted was to get his leg over.

I loved the fifties films of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals  ’Oklahoma’ and ‘South Pacific’.  The music is not comparable:  they are music hall tradition, while Les Misérables is closer to opera but, thankfully, the words are clearer.

In those stories the women play major roles, ostensibly stereotyped (both heroines are blonde) but are more complicated in fact.   Happy ever after was also the outcome but the character flaws produce painful self awareness in the heroine.  Prudery of the 1950s variety is wittily mocked in ‘Oklahoma’.  In both films a spotlight is shone on America’s dark underbelly:  xenophobia in ‘Oklahoma’ (thanks to Rod Steiger’s stunning performance) and racism in ‘South Pacific’.

So, why oh why in the second decade of the twenty-first century, did an otherwise fine production of a fine musical revert to sex stereotyping and an overly simplistic storyline?

Seven Sharp: Alison Mau Needs Two Male Nannies?

Why on earth has TVNZ flanked main presenter Alison Mau with two men.  I am assured they are nice guys but Paul Holmes didn’t need minders, neither did Mark Sainsbury.  Neither does TV3′s John Campbell who probably gets up more noses, especially of the rightwing nutter variety, than any other tv presenter to date.

From left, Greg Boyed, Alison Mau and Jesse Mulligan

Please TVNZ don’t feel the need to diminish women by catering for misogynists.  As it happens Mau is from your blonde stable and that  should offset some of the weeping and teethgnashing of male dodos.  I had thought the hair colour of your women presenters was becoming more diversified which could mean your male audience is developing  more self-confidence.  Let Mau go it alone and with the money saved on presenters put together some better stories.

All Blacks’ Defeat Linked to Disgrace?

In the early hours of Sunday morning I woke to thunder rumbling round and round Wellington’s harbour and hills.   Something nasty afoot in the natural world?  But it was just an unusual cloud arrangement.  Rain soon followed and bought some relief to parched plants.  I later concluded it was a symbolic groan followed by tears from All Blacks supporters in response to their defeat by England.

I think men, All Blacks included, are in the main pretty decent fellows.  They can even cry!  They have been re-evaluating their manliness since the 70s women’s movement gave them something to think about.  And not least because 80s kids started to change codes and, heaven forbid, took up soccer.   Thuggery became less acceptable.  And in soccer too.  Cameras have helped make it even less so.

I can’t be the only one to think a player’s thuggery can impact on other members of the team.   Andrew Hore’s inexplicable high swinging arm from behind that knocked out a Welsh player in the early minutes of the game the previous weekend attracted national and international condemnation and disgust.  Incredibly All Blacks’ management and coaches ducked and dived, failed to acknowledge the foul play and apologise.

Rereading de Beauvoir: History, Ch. 1

Part Two: History. Chapter 2: SdB opens this very short chapter like this: “This world has always belonged to males, and none of the reasons given for this have ever seemed sufficient.” (73) SdB points here, as she does throughout The Second Sex, (and as Existentialists do in general) to the fact that humanity isn’t a simple natural species like others in that “it does not seek to survive as a species; … it seeks to surpass itself.” (75)

And yet, at least during so-called primitive/nomadic times, bearing and raising children was certainly not a means of surpassing one’s mere biological imperatives. OK, but before you know it, she’s made a quick and rather odd segue to housework (from nomads practicing infanticide to middle class women doing the vacuuming?). “Housework alone is compatible with the duties of motherhood,” she writes, and because of that fact woman “is condemned to domestic labour, which locks her into repetition and immanence”. (75)

Perhaps it’s a 1940s thing, but this isn’t too convincing: surely there’s more out there than housework that’s possibly compatible with the duties of motherhood, even in the 1940s? After all, nomads were mothers, as were women who toiled in factories, on farms, in jungles. I think I must be missing something – which is what I usually think when I’m just not getting it.

Petraeus, Prurience, Machiavellian Politics?

Like most of us I suspect I was drawn to the Petraeus affair when it first broke.  Why on earth did the two principal players risk communicating by email and possibly breaching security.  And isn’t it long past time we stopped prying into private lives and indiscretions?  With one exception:  if the players – usually men who once hid behind what was so tastefully described as ‘a gentleman’s agreement’ with the press –  are downright hypocrites who can vote and exercise considerable influence to retain or advance laws that punish others for being less observant of conservative sexual codes.

Ooops! Denver’s 7News grabbed the wrong image of the Petraeus bio from the Web to illustrate its news coverage.

One story indicated there was a risk to national security but it hasn’t been entirely verified.  Can such risk be accurately determined? Why were the parties so naive?  Communicating about sexual intimacy by email or celllphone if you are seriously important or a celebrity is surely crackers.   How could adults (thousands of emails?) be so unrelentingly lacking in judgment?  Or have the spare time come to think of it.

A woman commentator points to narcissism in Petraeus’s case.   The older man seeks to regain youth, the younger woman provides the mirror image he wants to believe in.  It is only in my dotage that I realised men are huge and compulsive narcissists and highly emotional.  They can bawl their eyes out if ‘betrayed’ or rejected and are more likely to enact violent revenge.   Women’s alleged vanity and emotions seem to pale into insignificance by comparison. Our efforts at allurement-come-near nudity today,  and in the past, still reflect mainly male needs/desires.   We had the excuse wayback that a woman’s imperative was to belong to a man to avoid ridicule and starvation status – often quite literally – in the food chain. We were not equals in any sphere in theory or practice.

Missing: Women Opinion Shapers

I want more commentary from women throughout the media and on issues other than motherhood, juggling work and children, sex and sex stereotyping.  I am damn sure it is not mischance that more columnists and panel guests on current affairs programmes appear to be men in New Zealand.   Age seems to make for more informed comment and older women are less besieged by childrearing.  The Guardian has methodically looked at the numbers of women doing opinion pieces in the UK  and come up with a figure of around 30%.  It wouldn’t surprise me if that figure also applied here.

For years I’ve randomly counted letters to the editor in The DomPost from women.   The general tone catches my attention.   If it is fairly temperate the proportion of women writers is higher.   If there is spittle up shoots the contribution of men.  Overall I reckon 20-40% of letters are from women.  This irks.  Maybe fewer women write in.

I was even more irked by a huge banner headline (same paper) ‘NO MEN ALLOWED’.   But less than surprised that the story was paltry.  The part council-funded Dowse Gallery in Lower Hutt was showing a short film by a Muslim woman about Muslim women in their private quarters.  It was to be shown only to women, one at a time, in a small room.  It probably breached  Human Rights Commission protocols.  A few men were sufficiently stirred to complain.

Bungles Galore, Spittle, Spite and National’s Poster Girls

In my analysis of National’s road map to the next election I overlooked the very marketable Hekia Parata.

I did note that Paula Bennett, cheerleader for anti-beneficiary spittle, was called to the rescue when National surrendered to headwinds and delayed asset sales.

Anti-beneficiary spittle took off in the 1980s and tapped into the dread of many men that they might end up paying for another man’s child whether in-house or on a benefit.  I surmise that is why a longstanding double standard of sexual proprietary developed in the West with harsh treatment for wandering women but excuses – greater sexual need and/or seduction by a wicked temptress – for frail men.

Arguably asset sales were always a very bad idea.  During the election out came the cosmetics and we were informed hospitals and schools would be helped.  Originally it was paying off debt and rescuing the sharemarket.   Paying off debt if the share price and interest rates are low is a no-brainer.  The sharemarket may be on the up.

I believe sales won’t go ahead unless driven by spite of the we won, you lost variety.   Therein lies the difference between a supposedly democratic government (where the party who can patch together a majority in Parliament, however slim, takes the spoils) and a truly mandated government where the views of voters are very carefully considered.  The we win, you lose approach is in the divine right of kings tradition and they were wont to get the pip with disagreeable subjects and lop off heads.

More bungles have followed  the sales delay:  the unsatisfactory revisit of the John Banks and Dotcom relationship followed hot on the heels by revelations of the illegal spying on Dotcom.  What gives between Key and deputy English?  The handy juxtaposition of all these events confuses media hounds but they have worked hard to oust the facts and truth.

So who could cool the blaze?    The very marketable Hekia Parata? It didn’t work last time.  And if anything the outcome is even worse this time.   Christchurch parents are rightly furious.   Her subsequent efforts to define consultation were well short of even the seemingly fluent but meaningless market babble we are normally bombarded with.

So out with the league tables to assuage the middle classes’ sense of  selfworth and entitlement and confirming what everybody knew – that poverty and family background are key factors in education. Some media puzzled by suggesting teachers, their unions and social activists, would be shaken by this revelation.   Rubbish.  They they  question the point of endless research confirming this when there are no plans to redress the problems.   Putting the cart before the horse ain’t a lot of use.  The alarming news of more closures, job losses and downsizing which – a major factor in those problems – has been overshadowed.

When Hekia met up with teachers she looked as though she had the pip big time.  It has been a baptism of fire for National’s poster girls but you can’t say they are not willing.   Or, as was the case of Maggie Thatcher,  does a religious fervour for self-belief and empowerment  render critical faculties useless?  Poster girls need to pay far more attention to those attributes than new age waffle.