Trigger warnings: 2016 presidential election, sexual assault, misogyny

 

It seems like the patriarchy has been receiving a lot of airtime lately, not least because of this harrowing election season. It has become truly draining to hear, day in and day out, on Facebook, on Twitter, on the radio, a never-ending parade of violence against women. I was going to write about something completely different, but I’m not feeling able to ignore this, and the Northwestern student production of NSFW by Lucy Kirkwood gave me an opportunity to address it. It’s a new approach, so bear with me.

NSFW (Not Safe For Work) is a 2012 play set in London, but the setting did not make its themes of the production any less accessible to the current Northwestern student. After opening in the office of a Playboy-esque publication, Doghouse, the major conflict centers on a staff member inadvertently choosing a 14-year-old girl as the “Local Lovely of 2016.” The staff member, Sam, ends up being fired as a result, so the final act of the play is his job interview at Electra, another magazine similar to Cosmopolitan.

The audience is meant to feel a surprising mirroring between the Doghouse and Electra offices. Aidan and Miranda, the bosses at Doghouse and Electra, respectively, are both jaded and unscrupulous. They claw at any way to stay in business in a contemporary “climate” so unfavorable to print media, and they are both horrible to their staff. Aidan constantly comes onto his much younger employee, Charlotte, in a way that is deeply unsettling and threatening, while Miranda similarly harasses her male secretary. The show drives home that Doghouse and Electra are in the very same business of objectifying women. Miranda asks Sam to point out all the physical flaws in a photo of a woman, because Electra needs women to be insecure in their appearances so they will buy beauty products. After a long moral struggle, he does it, because he needs the job to keep his apartment.

I left the show feeling empty. I went to the gym to decompress and wondered to myself why I was working out: to be healthier or to look a certain way? I felt my mood getting worse and worse.

On my way home, I stopped at the Dittmar Gallery in Norris Center to see the exhibition there: Build Her a Myth by Carrie Ann Schumacher. I had read that this show also tackled issues of feminism and misogyny, and I thought that seeing it might be a good way to reflect on the play that was still plaguing me. Perhaps the dialogue between the exhibition and play would be meaningful. The gallery space was full of white, feminine silhouettes. Mannequins, large and small, showed off various styles of ethereal white dresses, all made from cut up pages of romance novels. They are beautifully, meticulously made, with hole punches, folds, and fringes adding texture to the text-covered material.

I made my way over to the didactic introduction: “Build Her a Myth examines the demands that feminine culture places upon women.” Huh. Feminine culture. “The displayed dresses are seductively beautiful, but are created from the pages of romance novels, unable to be worn. Completely without function, they represent how useless feminine myths are in real life.” So women create this culture of romance novels and dreams of white dresses and perpetuate this “useless” way of thinking amongst themselves?

Suddenly I realized why I had been feeling so terrible: I felt like women were being unfairly blamed for perpetuating the patriarchy. I felt ashamed that I want the “feminine myth” of getting married in a white dress someday, and ashamed that I often wish I were 10 pounds lighter like Miranda in NSFW, the symbol of “bad feminism.” At one point, alone in her office, she strips down to her bra and black tights, puts Spanx on her perfect body, puts on a full face of makeup, and then puts on a white Suffragette dress and sash for a costume party. Hypocrisy concentrate. I know that both artists aim to convey the message that the patriarchy lives in us all, but Sam still gets to be the tragic hero of NSFW while the evil Miranda tears him down to her level.

Hyper-awareness of gender is a sensibility of sorts that we share today, especially on college campuses. I’m deeply conflicted, because while the impulse to hold women accountable for their wrongs along with men is fundamentally feminist, at this moment in time it is exhausting to me. Both artists in this comparison are women, but I feel that their artworks ultimately lay more of a burden on women. I know I might be wrong, and I know that workplace harassment is wrong whether the victim is male or female. But I guess that at the end of the day, despite this newfound societal awareness, the world doesn’t feel that much fairer to or safer for women. Between “locker room talk” and the female self-hatred I unexpectedly saw in these works of art, I’m left frustrated, tired, and sad.

 

Well, this went off the rails. November 8 can’t come soon enough.