Spiralling out of the Mike Leigh discussion, Blissblog, despite having co-written a book about the virtue of pissing all over gender roles in music, is strangely normative:

'Carl's most interesting point, about how the women in Leigh's films are always grounded and sensible and stolidly supportive, how they're "stoical and conservative, making do and getting by," whereas the men are "tortured" by ideals and obsessions. That's a very perceptive point, but then again, thinking about the men and women I've known in my life, by and large, the women do seem more grounded.'

Is this just the way it is? Nothing ideological going on here? Business as usual?

Now, I don't like this, as you might expect. I don't like it in Mike Leigh either, and think that Carl is absolutely right to mock it - from Vera Drake's 'Oo, I'll just put the kettle on, Dearie...' to Life is Sweet's Wendy, tutting relentlessly at the silly men around her who (surprise) she just can't help but love.

Still, Leigh's stoical tea-makers are not nearly as bad as when he tries to do unhappy women (and if I ever have to see Jane Horrocks' character screeching 'fascist' ever again, I'm going to bomb the BFI). The only 'crazy woman' character he gets right is Sophie in Naked, and that's far more to do with Katrin Cartlidge than it is Leigh ('Cos, let's face it right, what are rockets? I mean, they're just big metal pricks, you know I mean the bastards aren't satisfied with fucking the earth up, they've got to fuck space and all').

You get a similar kind of nonsense in Almodovar (who, like cos he's a gay man, totally 'gets' women. Are lesbians conversely supposed to be good at directing films about straight men? I somehow doubt it). All these 'strong' characters ploughing on with their lives - such an inspiration! (There is a very good argument to be made for having weak, but interesting female characters. It is made in this excellent piece, which also features this picture):



Anyway, this grounded thing. I mean, most people are 'pretty grounded' (if you mean pay the rent when they can, eat occasionally, get some rest when tired), I don't think it's a man/woman thing. The idea that women are the 'sensible' ones, as opposed to bohemian, imaginative men has a history, and it's quite a weird one. The 'genius' typically possesses feminine characteristics - imagination, intuition, emotion, madness - but is not of course an actual woman: 'The great artist is a feminine male', but not a feminine female or a masculine female (see Christine Battersby's Gender and Genius for this argument). Women can be mad, but not aesthetically inspired, or they can be sane, and provide comfort for the true creators, who are a little bit womanish, but not too much.



But are women really more sensible? It's not enough to say that I can think of lots of women who are batshit crazy in one way or another, although I definitely can. I don't think women are inherently more stable than men, and historically at various points they definitely weren't supposed to be (the 'hysterical' woman of the 19th century, the Soviet divorce and abortion laws of 1917-18 that recognised that women were just as uncommitted to the bourgeois family set-up as men, Friedan's 'the problem with no name' of the 1950s and 60s). I mean, sometimes women were supposed to be demented harpies with wombs full of devils and other times they were supposed to fold up nicely like the ironing board in a suburban bungalow.

There's long been a kind of forum/blog trope among male writers to refer to their other halves in passing as 'er indoors - the women who supposedly disapprove of their silly male obsessions with record collecting, who drag the boys away from playing with their toys and make them do 'family things' instead. It's always seemed disingenuous to me, a kind of cover story to mask the fact that, among other things, they might actually enjoy playing with their kids or hanging out with their partner. It also subtly perpetuates the idea that it's men who really have obsessions, even if they mock themselves a bit about it. It's like a safety net - you can like the most avant-garde music/films/literature, but go home to a perfectly normal little family with all its little sexual edicts and dull domesticities. Men have ideas and arguments and fixations, women are balanced and well-rounded. Cos women are so much more worldly, aren't they? They just know how things work. 'Cup of tea, love?'


My machine is better than you!

As Simon says:

'Examples spring to mind of situations where the whole thing is basically held together by the woman; at the extreme there's a co-dependency/enabling syndrome in terms of the woman propping up the man's self-delusions.'

Certainly, there is a prevalent image of the successful, sorted young woman with enough enthusiasm and emotional reserves after passing all those A levels to look after a fragile, tortured young man. She beams down at us from the billboards of prospective luxury flats all over town. But I can't help but think we're being sold a pup, and the pup is barking: 'get a job! get a car! get a flat! buy stuff! be relatively successful but not quite the boss!'. It's a lot to do with the kind of work we're supposed to be doing in the UK and the US, all mental labour and tele-marketing and emails and meetings. All that womanish chatting and stuff, but you get paid for it. No wonder all the poor young men are retreating into mental illness and substance abuse. Apart from, um, all the ones who aren't.

Anyway, it's all bollocks - women no more know what's going on than men do, and they certainly don't have a insight into nice, stable normality (as if anyone does). The current sorted young woman imago is rather conveniently the sort of worker best suited for the type of jobs on offer, but it doesn't mean that in a few years time women won't go back to being depicted as deranged Jezebels hell-bent on fucking society up with their roaming womb-induced crazy-thoughts.

Incidentally, 'a highly-strung female genius with no life skills' sounds exactly like my kind of person.