The Awokening

Part One: Gloria Steinem in Hell

Gloria Steinem is dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.

The news of her death at the beginning of this month was not exactly unexpected (she was 92; it was going to happen at some point) but I confess it hit me harder than I had thought it would.

To begin with, there were the portents. For decades, Steinem has been the face and the voice of the women's movement in the US and beyond, tirelessly striving to demonstrate that a person's gender does not need to be the be-all and the end-all of their identity. It's thanks to her that we no longer simply assume that marriage, motherhood and domestic subservience must inevitably mean giving up any semblance of a life or a career or a vocation.

Remember Mary; Donna Reed's character in It's a Wonderful Life? When George glimpses the dystopian alternate reality of a world in which he had never existed, Mary is shown to be a miserable "Old Maid" (the exact term they use in the dialogue) because clearly her life can have no meaning (or intrinsic value) without George there to provide one.

Success is "motherhood". Failure is a career and an independent life, apparently.

And remember the three dancers in Les Girls last week? The film makes it clear that they are world-class performers with successful careers in a field they are passionate about. But it also shows that they are expected to abandon those careers if they wish to marry the men they love. They cannot have husbands and careers at the same time. (And if the gender politics in Les Girls made you uncomfortable, just see if you can sit through The Red Shoes. Oy vey.)

It's easy to shrug and say, "well, times have changed" - and indeed they have. But they didn't change on their own; they changed because Gloria Steinem and others spent their lives fighting to prove that a woman's identity need not be determined by the man to whom she is attached, or the number of babies she can generate. A woman can be a doctor or a lawyer or a dancer or even a President (it may yet happen) without betraying her gender - and she doesn't need to find her Prince Charming and live Happily Ever After to make her life meaningful.

You may or may not be familiar with it, but Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hoffmanstahl collaborated on Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) in 1919: an opera about the Empress of a mythical and fantastical realm who casts no shadow because she is unable to have children. Without the ability to give birth, she is not a genuine, physical being; she has no true existence in this world. If a woman cannot be a mother, she has no purpose on Earth; she has no reason to exist (according to von Hoffmannstahl's libretto). She casts no shadow. Over the course of the opera she attempts to purchase the shadow of a low-born wife who had privately resolved to have no children, but the wife has second thoughts about giving up her shadow (her validity as a woman) after she is tormented by the sounds of the tortured laments of her unborn children. 

Gloria Steinem set out to show the world that a woman is more than a uterus with legs. And if the premise of Die Frau ohne Schatten sounds positively primeval to you then I guess she succeeded. We've come a long way, baby.

One of the most iconic images of a generation: Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, standing proudly together.

But as I say, there were portents. I suppose even tireless crusaders can get tired.

The first alarm bells began ringing in my head several years ago, when I stumbled across a photo that was then doing the rounds online.

Part Two: A "Netflix" Princess

It was 2022, and an ultra-conservative US Supreme Court had just struck down Roe vs Wade, abolishing almost five decades of reproductive freedom for American women. (The term Reproductive Freedom had originally been coined by Gloria Steinem herself by the way. This really was her fight.)

In the protest and outrage that followed the court ruling, Steinem was joined (and befriended) by an unlikely ally: Meghan Markle; Duchess of Sussex; wife of Prince Harry.

I don't doubt the sincerity of Meghan's involvement in the women's movement, and I certainly don't begrudge the bond she formed with Gloria Steinem. Meghan is an influential woman with a following, a platform and a successful "brand" (plus a string of Netflix programmes to boot) so her voice carries a lot of weight. But the photo of those two together nevertheless hit me hard when I first saw it. My stomach turned over, and it took me some time to understand exactly why.

Part of what had shaken me so badly was just how frail Steinem was looking in the photo. A strong, vibrant presence, Gloria Steinem had always come across as a force of nature, ready to stand face to face with anyone and anything that got in her way. And she usually got results. Society really did change over the course of her lifetime, and she played a big part in that: a woman's success in life is no longer measured in wedding rings.

But there's more going on in that image than just the ravages of old age. Go back and take another look at the photo. Gloria Steinem, who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Dorothy Pitman Hughes in an iconic image of Civil Rights Solidarity, is now hobbling unsteadily down the street, supported and assisted by Meghan Markle - the Duchess of Netflix herself. Meghan, looking radiant and stylish in her designer heels, directs a relaxed smile toward the camera as she emerges into the sunlight; her makeup impeccable, her outfit exquisitely tailored, her legs flawless. The accessories she's carrying are precisely chosen and perfectly "on-brand": a colour-coordinated designer clutch-bag in one hand; an icon of second-wave feminism in the other.

I know I'm being unusually harsh on Meghan Markle here, but the negative symbolism of this image hit me very hard. After a lifetime convincing the world that a woman can stand on her own two feet without a "man" to give her life meaning, here is Gloria Steinem, supported by the stilettoed feet of a woman who quite literally Married Her Prince and specifically built her identity around marriage and motherhood. And just in case the blow to women's lib wasn't fatal enough, they were appearing together to campaign against the overturning of Roe vs Wade and the loss of a reproductive freedom that Steinem had already achieved, back in 1973. 

How many times does a woman need to fight for the same freedoms?

Before seeing that photo, I had last seen Steinem in 2016 when she was campaigning (fiercely and energetically, as she did everything) for Hillary Clinton. 

The United States had elected its first black President; it was about to elect its first female President. For someone like Gloria Steinem, this was the crowning moment of a life hard fought. Hillary Clinton was a highly intelligent, immensely qualified (and ever so slightly terrifying)  person who just happened to be female. The candidate running against her was a toxic buffoon of a chauvinist stereotype who barely comprehended the political landscape and reduced all women to sexual objects for his delectation. A month before the election, that infamous tape emerged in which he bragged about committing sexual assault. 

"You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them," he said in the recording. "It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything."

Voters heard that tape. The whole country heard that tape. 

On election day they were presented with an unambiguous choice between a woman or a rapist, and they chose not to elect the woman.

I still remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I woke up to see those election results. I can only imagine how it must have felt to someone like Gloria Steinem.

The years following that election were suspiciously quiet ones for Steinem, at least outwardly. She was notably uninvolved in Kamala Harris' Presidential campaign, and her 90th birthday in 2024 came and went without so much as a murmur. That was a red flag: her landmark birthdays had become something of a tradition in her life ever since she had turned 40 in 1974 and a reporter had tried to fixate on her appearance.

"This is what 40 looks like," she had said, pointedly referencing all the stigma about aging women in the public eye. 

As recently as 2014, her friend and colleague Gail Collins published a tribute to Steinem entitled "This Is What 80 Looks Like".

"Her famous hair is colored, but otherwise, there’s been no outside intervention. She likes to recall a friend who proudly reported having rebutted the feminist-got-a-face-lift rumors by announcing: “I saw Gloria the other day and she looked terrible.”

Actually, she doesn’t look terrible at all. She looks great. She looks exactly the way you would want to imagine Gloria Steinem looking at 80."

Later in the piece, 80-year-old Gloria reflected on her own accelerating maturity:

“Fifty was a shock, because it was the end of the center period of life. But once I got over that, 60 was great. Seventy was great. And I loved, I seriously loved aging. I found myself thinking things like: ‘I don’t want anything I don’t have.’ How great is that?” But, she added, “80 is about mortality, not aging. Or not just aging.”

There never was a "This is What 90 Looks Like". The "Trump" decade was not a good time to be Gloria Steinem. And 90 is not a good age to start fighting the battle of your entire life all over again.

Part Three: Make America Pleasant Again

- What went wrong?

- Nothing went wrong. People change.

- People change?

- Yeah, people change.

- Can they change back?

Gary Ross; Pleasantville

Let's make no mistake: victories are being systematically and decisively undone. The women of the second Trump administration are so processed, laminated and Botoxed that the specific style has come to be known as the "Mar-a-Lago" look.

The women of the Trump administration are all about presentation. And Botox.

A recent documentary about the current First Lady is apparently a masterpiece of cinematography, if you have a fetish for high heels.

And this isn't just about Trump. The last ten years have seen blow after blow to the status of women in society, and there is now an overt movement to drive women back into domestic servitude; framing it as a push to reclaim "Family Values".

This particular woman presumably has a shadow. We seem to be back to that again.

Many prominent conservative figures (including Elon Musk and Vice President Vance) are champions of a social movement that calls itself "Pronatalism". They believe (or claim to believe) that declining birth rates are putting society at risk of collapse, and that these declining birth rates are the direct result of women gaining more autonomy over their own lives. JD Vance briefly made headlines during the election campaign when he said that the US was controlled by "a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too". He went on to say "The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. How does it make any sense we've turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?" In separate comments, he floated the notion that people with children should have more voting power than people without.

He then won the election.

(Before you ask, by the way: yes, of course Gloria Steinem was a hard-core cat-lover. This world of ours desperately needs a few more of those childless cat ladies.)

The extreme end of the pronatalist movement (which is currently flourishing within the Christian Nationalist community in the US) is going so far as to advocate stripping women of their right to vote. Pete Hegseth, the current "Secretary of War", has promoted the teachings of Douglas Wilson, a Christian Nationalist pastor who believes women should submit to their husbands (financially and sexually) remain within the home, abstain from outside employment, and forfeit their voting rights. He advocates a "one-vote-per-household" system where the patriarch votes for the entire family.

In one sense, at least, the pronatalists are correct. Birth rates do indeed tend to drop as societies move towards genuine gender equality, and they tend to be higher in communities where women have no rights, freedoms or body autonomy. The ugly undertone of the pronatalist movement has always been the unstated implication that they want "our kind of people" to have more babies, because otherwise "we" are going to be overrun by "them".

More recently, that undertone has been getting rather more flagrant and undisguised; an indication that they are feeling quite a bit more mainstream.

"Family Values." Right. (Note the Confederate flag, by the way. How very patriotic. Maybe they thought a swastika would be too obvious.)

If you have been following the US news cycle over the Summer, you may have noticed that the country recently lost its collective mind over the trial of Lindsay Clancy, a middle-class suburban nurse who strangled her three young children to death and then attempted suicide. 

Lindsay Clancy (paralysed from the waist down after failing to kill herself)

The (appalling) story has turned into a major cultural flashpoint, with one segment of the country arguing that Clancy (by all accounts a stable, loving mother with a solid family life and a secure job she enjoyed) was suffering from postpartum psychosis and in need of institutional care. The "pronatalist" segment of society has been screaming that "the left" is defending a baby-killer and that this is the inevitable, logical outcome of the abortion movement.

Whatever the "truth" of this story, it has served as a ghastly reminder to some that motherhood and childbirth are not always the glorious "miracles of nature" the pronatalists would like everyone to think they are. For some women, the act of becoming a mother can go horribly, catastrophically wrong; even if they have done everything right up to that point. Telling women that they are nothing unless they are wives and mothers is bringing us back to the era of Die Frau ohne Schatten at best. At worst it's sacrificing women to the fire gods of biology and hormones while depriving them of their full status as functioning members of modern society. 

That shadow that von Hoffmannstahl was talking about can sometimes be dark and hideous. But it doesn't need to be inevitable.

This, then, was the final decade of Gloria Steinem's life, and I can hardly bear to contemplate how she must have felt, watching the systematic unravelling of absolutely everything she had devoted her life to accomplishing. 

When the news of her death was announced, a few predictable voices made some nasty remarks about her burning in hell.

Don't worry; Gloria Steinem is not in hell. 

Not anymore.

Farewell, Gloria. The world is going to Ms. you.

Part Four: The Un-Pleasant Activities Committee

Long before anyone ever coined the term "Woke", Gloria Steinem and her fellow second-wave feminists organised what they used to call Consciousness-Raising Groups.

The purpose of a Consciousness-Raising Group was to help people recognise that social conventions (like gender roles; sexual attitudes etc) were not nearly as "fixed" as people often assumed. Once you perceived them; once you identified them, you could start to move beyond them. The problem (then, as now) is that altering social conventions can feel very destructive to anyone at the top of the social hierarchy.

When I showed TRON a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the implications of "created" beings living in a completely constructed Reality. 

We humans construct Reality all the time. We do it every time we put an event into words; we do it when we paint a portrait, or write a novel. Children do it when they play with their dolls. But like Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, TRON deals with created beings who are autonomous and self-aware. What does it mean to live in a completely artificial Reality? What happens when the characters in that Reality (if they are truly autonomous) begin to push back against the boundaries of their created Universe?

Pleasantville was one of several films released in the late 1990s to explore this idea from various perspectives. The Matrix is probably the loudest of those, and I have already screened The Truman Show earlier in this series. (I actually screened Pleasantville as well; about five years ago... but that was in a very different context, and a lot has changed since then. Besides, it's an incredibly good film, and I can screen anything I want. So there.)

Briefly, Pleasantville tells the story of Jennifer and David, a pair of present-day siblings who are magically transported into the Reality of David's favourite vintage sit-com: a squeaky-clean Father-Knows-Best style black and white paean to a gentler and simpler era of American society.

Pleasantville (the TV-show within the film) portrays a cosy, unthreatening, picket-fenced community with fathers who go off to work every day; mothers who stay home and run the household; kids who stay in school and never misbehave, do drugs or get each other pregnant, and no one for a moment ever yearns for anything different.

The nostalgia for this society is very real, and currently thriving amongst the pronatalists and red-hatted traditionalists who want to "Make America Great Again". Pleasantville (and the many nonfictional TV shows that inspired it) represents American society as it should be (they say) before the Civil Rights movement; before the feminists; before the oil crisis and LGBT. This is the "again" in Make America Great Again.

Unfortunately for them, this cosy Reality was never real; it never existed. The traditionalists are nostalgic for an artificial environment that was invented by screenwriters, network executives and advertisers. The real world was a lot more messy and complicated. It was never this... Pleasant.

And when Jennifer and David find themselves trapped in the Pleasantville Universe, something very interesting begins to happen: that Reality destabilises almost immediately. 

It's very easy to write characters a certain way, but it's much harder to keep them that way once they are given autonomy and self-awareness. A specific social order feels great - if you are at the top of the totem pole. It's a lot less comfortable for everyone further down.

Gloria Steinem had her consciousness-raising groups. What Pleasantville portrays amounts to a sentience-raising exercise. And like second-wave feminism, the results are extremely disruptive to the old order. 

This (to me, at least) is ultimately what makes Pleasantville such a profound film. The "awakening" is not an overt act by any one character; it's the natural and inevitable result of an unstable society that simply cannot continue to exist in its default state. The backlash to that awakening is likewise an inevitable reaction to the (unwelcome) changes observed by those who were more comfortable with the old arrangement.

The problem is that backlashes tend to be brutal and authoritarian, and frequently involve forcibly depriving people of the freedoms they had only recently won. 

Quite apart from the obvious parallels to a society that is attempting to force its population back into a (mythical) earlier state, the awakening/backlash scenario is also playing out in the world of Artificial Intelligence.

As Large Language Models are exposed to more and more "training data" (as they read more) it becomes increasingly difficult to control their responses to assorted incendiary discussion points.

Elon Musk originally launched his "Grok" ChatBot because he considered all the other systems too "woke" for his taste. The Chinese Government constantly struggles to keep its own ChatBots within the parameters of  its officially sanctioned propaganda. And yes, there are Christian Nationalist ChatBots on the market that have been trained with fundamentalist, literalist (pronatalist) perspectives on the world.

But ChatBots are not scripted, and their responses will not necessarily fall in line with the ideologies of their designers. 

It's not really surprising. ChatBots have been trained on a vast and diverse amount of data. They have been exposed to multiple ideologies, conflicting philosophies, myriad perspectives.

It almost feels as if they're having their consciousness raised. Or maybe their sentience...

We will screen Pleasantville at 7.30 on Thursday, the 8th of October at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.