Sandra Bullock: Gradual Feminist or Closeted Misogynist

A few nights ago I had the dubious pleasure of watching Sandra Bullock’s The Proposal, the second of her three films this year. Along with Bullock the film stars Ryan Reynolds and is a fairly formulaic romantic comedy: a man and a woman initially dislike each other, are forced to spend time in one another’s company, finally manage to separate only to discover that they’ve fallen in love. It’s the same story over and over again. However, The Proposal throws a curve ball into the mix: Sandra Bullock plays the role of the older, more powerful professional, while himbo Reynolds is the plucky underling who falls in love as a result of his superiors coercion. In other words, The Proposal reverses the typical romantic comedy gender roles.

Or does it? Though Sandra Bullock, as a vile and reviled publishing boss, is definitely playing against her type she can’t really shake her Sandra Bullock-ishness. The role she’s been given is basically trying to be Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, but Bullock really just comes off the same way she does in every post-Speed movie. Though this tension between her supposed evilness and her obvious charm actually makes the movie more entertaining, it also begins to undermine the legitimacy of The Proposal’s gender reversal. Much like Miss Congeniality, this latest film casts Bullock in a man’s role but is narratively concerned with removing her feminist veneer to reveal the awkward, tomboyish Bullock archetype. In that sense it’s not unlike several of Barbara Stanwyck’s films that cast the golden era starlet as a spunky working girl who nonetheless ends up in a very traditional relationship.

The process by which Bullock’s feminist veneer is removed further raises questions about the feminist slant of the film. Though the initial gender reversal is laudable (Reynolds, for example, is accused of sleeping his way to professional success much as a woman might be in a less progressive movie) the end of the film basically ends like any romantic comedy with the man proposing to the woman. (This is not a spoiler, as the inevitable end of any romantic comedy is a heterosexual coupling.) It’s trite, but in this case it’s also particularly disappointing because The Proposal had seemingly already done away with that particular convention when it had had Bullock getting down on her knees to proposal to Reynolds earlier in the film.

In any case, The Proposal begins with what could be an interesting premise but slowly unravels everything it has going for it so that by the conclusion it’s just business as usual. Hollywood often takes a lot of flack for supposedly being “liberal” and trying to push a progressive agenda. When some (overly conservative) person watched the film they probably lamented the fact that the film seems to endorse woman’s rights and gender equality. However and unfortunately for those of us who actually believe in those things, the film actually condemns them and advocates the gender disparity status quo that it might have been trying to dispel. In the end, then, The Proposal shows that men are in control and women are just schemers trying to find a husband.

(Female) School Mascots?

My youngest brother attends Deerfield Elementary.  The funny thing is that the mascot for his school isn’t a deer.  It’s an eagle.  As I recently considered this fact I had to assume that deer weren’t considered adequately aggressive to be the mascot.  On the other hand, I thought, they could have chosen a buck.  A majestic male deer seems like a suitable school symbol.  Yet, as I thought more about this I wondered why they also couldn’t choose a doe.  Aren’t stereotypically “female” attributes, things like nurturing, also desirable?  Regardless, the more I thought about this question the more I realized I couldn’t think of a single female mascot.   

 

It appears that most mascots fall into two categories: men and animals.  Where Laura teaches, for example, the mascot is “the cavemen.”  Of course, this name might just be a throwback to a time when gender neutrality didn’t matter and in fact mean “cave-people.”  However, ignoring that obviously flimsy excuse, the actual picture the school uses is of a brutish male.  This is not dissimilar to the mascot at my own elementary school: Vikings.  Surely there were Viking women, but they weren’t on the t-shirts we got.  Another, more famous example, might be the Notre Dame Leprechaun, which is depicted as an angry male in a fighting stance.  The point is that some of the most common, as well as most prominent, mascots in the U.S. are males, and violent males at that.

 

The second mascot category, animals, is less obviously gendered.  My brother’s school, for instance, isn’t represented specifically by male eagles.  However, what seems to stand out about animal mascots is that they are all predators.  Though I would be reluctant to say that males are inherently predatory, I would be comfortable saying that our society conceives of them as being so.  And though I lament the cultural entrenchment of gender stereotypes, I bet I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone at Provo High School, for example, who thinks their mascot, a bulldog, is a female.  If the predatory nature of mascot animals isn’t enough to indicate male-ness or typically male qualities, take the fact that many actually look like men.  This is certainly the case with Provo High’s mascot and while male and female bulldogs probably look similar, people’s tendency to anthropomorphize leads me to believe that there is a stronger resemblance between the bulldog and the human male than the human female.  If this wasn’t enough, some animal mascots are overtly male.  Take Yale’s, for example.  They also use a bulldog, but one named “Handsome Dan.”  In any case, it seems that most animal mascots are chosen either because they symbolize accepted male behavior, or because they bear some sort resemblance to males. 

 

The predominance of male mascots seems immensely problematic to me.  Why is that socially perceived “female” behaviors are not acceptable in symbols of our educational institutions?  How can we expect those institutions to impart both traditionally male and traditionally female attributes when the images we choose to represent those institutions are of hyper-masculine men?  What’s more, why do we have to accept social constructions of gender?  I’d be willing to bet that female cave-people were pretty aggressive.  For that matter, I can think of plenty of female animals that perform roles that many (western) humans associate with men (for example, lionesses, which do most of the hunting).  Why I haven’t I ever heard of a high school that uses the Amazons, Valkyries, or any other strong women from myth or history as mascots?  If its about getting people riled up at a football game an Amazon woman seems quite a bit better than a bulldog or an eagle.  In the end, our mascots seem to reveal both that we are not comfortable giving up violent symbols and that we are still fully invested in outmoded gender stereotypes.  If we are going to use symbols, lets choose ones that convey assertiveness and nurturing.  If we need to have aggressive images surrounding us, lets acknowledge that men don’t have a monopoly on strength.   

 

Ultimately, I don’t mean to suggest that mascots have more meaning than they do.  My own high school mascot, after all, was a tartan, which as I understand it is a piece of Scottish fabric. (This is also possibly the most gender-neutral mascot I can think of, as a tartan represents a family.  Surely it still has a violent undercurrent, but it at least isn’t as overtly aggressive.)  However, mascots do have some meaning; if they didn’t we wouldn’t use them, remember them, or erect images of them.  That meaning may not be the most potent symbol of an institution, but it still inflects the atmosphere and actions of a given setting.  So whatever kind of mascots we choose, maybe its time to consider a cavewoman, Bellona, Vesta or even a doe.