For Better or For Worse: Post-feminism and perpetuation of exploitation in Mean Girls

Inescapable Chauvinist Code
Mean Girls is complicated because a woman wrote the screenplay, and the main characters are female, but it was created in a patriarchal system and the screenwriter, actors, and audience have been influenced and produced by this same system. Mulvey describes this in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema:” “Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order.” (p. 713) The language of this patriarchal order is coded by the male gaze and the scopophilic themes in a multitude of mainstream movie scenes. As Tina Fey takes off her sweater, her spilt coffee causes her shirt to come off as well, revealing her bare skin and bra. The male principal enters the room at this moment and allows for narcissistic identification for the male audience.

Pseudo Agency

“But Tina Fey wrote this in! She’s choosing to sexually exploit herself so that makes it okay,” come the cries of the post-feminists. McRobbie explains this post-feminist idea as she describes a “self-consciously ‘sexist ad’” in her essay “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture.” “There is no exploitation here [because] there is nothing remotely naïve about this striptease. She seems to be doing it out of choice and for her own enjoyment; the advert works on the basis of its audience knowing Claudia to be one of the world’s most famous and highly paid supermodels.” (McRobbie, p. 259) But it goes back to the patriarchal order that controls the system. The system has trained women to believe that they will only be respected by disrespecting themselves, and to believe that they're not being disrespectful to themselves because they're choosing it. The media is covering up that we don't actually have agency because we've been brainwashed by them to be objects, and to think that that's what we want. Feminists are losing the fight because women are choosing to uphold the patriarchal media by choosing to portray themselves the same way media has viewed them. Now it's with their consent. Women are becoming submissive by thinking they're in control. A prime example outside of Mean Girls is Miley Cyrus. She thinks she's proving herself by overthrowing her Disney persona, but she's going from one system to another. And Tina Fey is like the supermodel Claudia. She has the perspective, the position and the power to start social commentary, but instead becomes part of it. "The new female subject is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl, or indeed this withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom." (McRobbie, p. 260)

Man Motivated
Another idea that shows women are actually reliquishing their agency and supporting the stereotypical "passive female" role is their motivation behind what they're doing. The Mean Girls may be choosing what they wear on Halloween, but why are they dressing scantily clad? Men are “still the active one… forwarding the story making things happen” (Mulvey, p. 716) because the reason Cady is put into motion is because of the competition with Regina for Aaron. This goes along with McRobbie’s essay as she poses Bridget Jones as an example of one who is also sexually “liberated.” “She has benefited from those institutions (education) which have loosened the ties of tradition and community for women, making it possible for them to be disembedded and re-located to the city to earn an independent living without shame or danger. However, this also gives rise to new anxieties. There is the fear of loneliness, for example, the stigma of remaining single, and the risks and uncertainties of not finding the right partner to be a father to children as well as a husband.” (McRobbie, p. 261) Or, as summarized on Wikipedia's entry on post-feminism, “[They] claim to be liberated and clearly enjoy their sexuality, but what they are constantly searching for is the one man who will make everything worthwhile.”

Self-Imposed Sexist Set Backs
Post-feminists is used to refer to women "who are though to benefit from the women's movement through expanded access to employment and education and new family arrangements, but at the same time do not push for further political change." (Pamela Aronson, "Feminists or Postfeminists? Gender & Society, 2003) Tina Fey, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus, the Spice Girls have all been able to succeed because of  what our feminist foremothers have done, and then they throw those freedoms right in our foremothers' faces by perpetuating the male gaze by choosing to be exploited and being driven by the "to-be-looked-at-ness," (Mulvey) basing success on being cared for by man. "For years feminists campaigned for sexual liberation. But here, one of their leaders admits all they have created is a new generation of women for whom sex is utterly joyless and hollow." (Fay Weldon, "Look what we've done," Daily Mail, pp. 12-13, 2003)

Really? Is that really what you want? Or is it what a male controlled media has told you what you "really, really want" (and, ironically, what feminist movements made possible for you to demand)?