Because I was raised in a border city, being Canadian rather than American was an early, clearly made distinction. This distinction did not suggest Canadian superiority, at least in my family, but pride in British and French traditions and geographic differences. Like a lot of Windsorites, I learned that while most of the US begins south of the Canadian border, in our part of the world the City of Detroit sits on our northern horizon, the American city’s spectacular display of light at night casting diamonds up and down the Detroit River separating our two countries. I don’t know why, but I liked this anomaly and learned to relate to most places through their north-south axis.
Toronto, for instance, is bounded on the south by Lake Ontario. If you know that, then you can explore the city knowing where you are in relation to one of the Great Lakes. Not everyone cares about this, but for some of us, knowing where we are in the world is important. It sets up relationships, as for example, when people talk about British Columbia and the Canadian Rainforest, the Gaspe and the Eastern Townships, and Canada’s newest Northern Territory, Nunavut. Knowing where I am in the world in relation to other places has inspired my identification as an Earthling over all other possible identities. And this identification brings me to women as they are portrayed and revealed in US film and TV.
Movies ignited these reflections. Like many children of the fifties, my escape from duck-and-cover, air-raid terrors came with a twenty-five-cent piece and permission to “go to the movies.” It took me decades to understand what I really hungered for in those darkened theatres – meaningful, coherent stories. Like many children, I lived in chaotic incoherence that required a release valve. Movies were my first release valve, television my second. I make this introduction to explain that when I watch something, I am always decoding and attributing meaning. This is a way of saying I’m on the hunt for coherence. Like that distinctive north-south axis of my birthplace, stories feed my sense of knowing where others are in life and this in turn helps me to know where I am.
Over the two-weeks leading up to International Women’s Day 2025, I watched The Substance, The Last Showgirl, Pretend It’s a City, The Later Daters, and Julia’s Stepping Stones. These three films and two television series cohered into a mirror ball of insights that illuminated many dark corners in my mind. I have listed them in the order I discovered them because it was this order that inspired a coherent sense of patriarchal colonization that I will do my best to articulate with the intention of honouring women everywhere.
Women are the reason I am writing this post. Women living in unsafe and terrifying conditions are often the subject of the stories we watch. It saddens me to say this. My antidote to violence is simple. If we all lived as Earthlings, we would live far more happily and creatively and far less destructively. But that is my solution. For others, the solution is a better iPhone.
Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley have expertly planted The Substance’s indelibly horrific images in my psyche. The film exposes through exaggerated caricatures, a driving force of patriarchal colonization – western media. The presumption that predatory men have the right to control women and girls groomed to please them is evidenced in drama, documentary, and news programming. In patriarchal systems, girls and women are trained – like show dogs – to see themselves through men’s eyes. Focusing on compliance in childhood, this pleasing behaviour is created through advertising that emphasizes appearance and sexuality and availability and desirability, and, in rarer cases, a legacy position at an ivy league school. Through current patriarchal colonization efforts, we learn that it is okay to be smart as long as you are “hot.” All this emphasis on pleasing through appearance doesn’t leave much time to explore the actual self, the world, and larger issues. And that is why patriarchal systems prioritize criticizing the surface appearance of the girls and women they are determined to control.
Some girls and women, like Fran Lebowitz and Julia Reichert, exist within patriarchal systems on their own terms, defining themselves through their self-determined exploration of life’s possibilities. If I were to simplify this idea, I’d say their curiosity leads them to explore what they like and what they love and what they want to be and do. In the case of both women, their curiosity blossomed when they discovered they did not fit in to the standard formula of girl and womanhood established by patriarchal colonizers. If we aren’t considered conventionally pretty and, worse, if we are non-compliant, we are pretty much left to our own devices, if, that is, we are not intentionally marginalized, jailed, or murdered for our non-compliance. If we come from wealth, another story spins out because money is the symbol of power in patriarchal colonialization. A third story spins out should we be physically captured and sold into bondage.
Pamela Anderson brings to life the poignant end of the road for pretty, compliant girls and women colonized by patriarchal toxicity. In a world where news anchors are fired for letting their hair change with age, imagine what happens to the girls and women who mature in the toxic patriarchal death traps set out to lure men and male-identified women into casinos and other “entertainment” hubs that thrive on the exploitation of people only valued as money making assets. Toward the end of the film, Anderson’s character, Shelly, erupts with the tortured confession of the damned: Being seen, by men, being adored, by men, made her feel good, made her feel pretty, gave her life meaning. It is a very heady draw when you are a good-looking woman living under patriarchal control to be selected as adored sex goddess. Norma Jeane didn’t try to escape her killers because her killers created Marilyn Monroe and told her she had value because she was the sexiest woman in the world. They didn’t tell her it was only her momentary surface beauty they exploited for money and power. Her talent was an inconvenience they denied, ridiculing her suffering and tossing her on to the sex-goddess trash heap when she became less compliant and more herself.
Both Substance and Showgirl depict women coming to the end of the road of that hideous determination “hotness.” In Substance, the self-hatred at the heart of meeting patriarchy’s grotesque standards is dramatized as an all-out war between a younger and older self. We cringe during this battle to the death. We may even laugh. But this film’s truth is a gut punch we can never get over: the demeaning status of women in patriarchy threatens to kill us and far too often succeeds.
Julia’s Stepping Stones, the last film I viewed, is Julia Reichert’s brief and thoughtful look at how she became a documentary film maker. Through this window onto her creative life, Reichert reveals how she escaped patriarchal colonization by thinking about belonging, and class differences, and how to create meaning in a chaotic world. Throughout the film, she asks questions about what is happening around her. She discovers what she likes and how she feels and what floods her life with meaning. Early on, she loses any desire for the “hotness” that patriarchal colonizers so highly value. She takes photos. She drops out. She regroups. She returns to college. She discovers film. Yes, she says to herself, this is what I’m interested in; I want to know about others and I want to share what I learn through film.
Before viewing Julia’s Stepping Stones, I watched a reality tv series I wouldn’t have watched had it not been produced by Michelle Obama. Over her years as First Lady, I found much to admire, including her advocacy for girls and women, nutritious foods in schools, and general decorum when faced with adolescent, ignorant behaviour. I watched the series waiting for something that would take me to a new place regarding coupledom. What I found instead, was the “hotness” factor run rampant. At one point, a participant confesses to having a PhD because it is important to her to claim her accomplishments. Does she reveal what her grad work is in? No. Does she share her passion in hopes of finding another with whom to grow? No. She packages herself in the typical “tits and ass” mode, as her daughter describes her mother’s look, and goes out in search of an equally good-looking man. She finds him, of course, because “hotness” is an all-inclusive gender disease.
How do we break out of the patriarchal colonization that has led to this reductive preoccupation with “hotness” in the eyes of others, with superficiality, with vanity, with plastic surgery, with false nails and false hair and false eyelashes and false butts? First, we recognize it. We name it as the prison it is, a prison we ourselves create through our willingness to measure up to the absurdist Barbie-Doll “hotness” standard. We talk about it with other women. We see films that explore what leads a girl to surrender her life to the whims of boys and men. With other women, we take a stand against those forces that reduce us to a well packaged commodity to be consumed and discarded when the “hotness” becomes the grotesquerie played out in The Substance. We need each other if we are ever to take back our lives in sufficient numbers to influence decision making locally and globally.
All the explosions of women’s activism against authoritarianism – patriarchal system’s enforcer playbook – prove that we are so much more complex than these stories emphasizing superficiality and domination and humiliation. We need to tell our own stories and the stories of other women as Julia Reichert does. We need to stand together, wherever we may find our north-south axis, to affirm that we belong to ourselves and our beautiful planet, not as corporate pawns or colonized prisoners, but as Earthlings actively fighting for ourselves, one another, and our Home.
Until next time
Jane