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Description
I'll admit it wasn't my first choice, but after three months in Morocco, I was looking forward to a movie in which the leading female character had something other than her family to worry about. So I squeezed onto the living room couch shoulder-to-shoulder with the four other young women living in the apartment and we turned our attention to Miss Congeniality. We cheered and chuckled as a ten-year-old Grace Hart punched first a bully and then the boy she'd stuck up for after he said that he'd never live down being saved by a girl. We only wished we could do the same to the men on the streets who made walking to the corner hanout for coffee feel like walking naked into a men's locker room.

Then the love interest came on.

Now, we knew when we sat down that Miss Congeniality wasn't a smart movie or a statement movie—it's a just-for-fun movie, the kind you watch for cheap laughs when you don't really want to think. My friends and I were pretty well fed up with men by that point, but we figured that we could sit through the obligatory end-of-movie snog if it meant we got to see a female lead. But the future boyfriend, agent Eric Matthews (Benjamin Bratt), didn't just think of Grace Hart (Sandra Bullock) as nothing more than an agent and a friend. Before the plot even takes off, he tells her she looks like hell and that nobody thinks of her as "a woman in the FBI." When the argument about whether Grace will go undercover in the Miss United States pageant ends up in the wrestling room, Matthews takes advantage of the close quarters to slap her butt and touch her crotch. The five of us on the couch, already dumbfounded that we had forgotten these details from previous viewings, were then shocked into silence as Matthews won both the match and the argument. True, Grace kicked his feet out from under him—but he had already thrown her so low that the only option left to her was to bring him to her level, and only for one scene.

The worst part of that movie viewing was seeing how many details contradicted the supposedly go-women message and knowing that in the past we had taken issue only with those aspects that supported the most obvious problematic message—that women are expected to be beautiful. Now, with freshly sharpened understanding, the facts that Grace ends up romantically involved with a man who insults her, sells her ideas as his own, and refuses to stand up for her, were just the tip of the iceberg.

Let's start with one of the most basic attributes of a character: the name. Names usually mean something in fiction, if not always in real life, as do the versions of names that others use most often. Eric Matthews, like most of the (mostly male) FBI agents, usually goes by his last name. Matthews's boss also calls Grace by her last name, Hart, but Eric usually calls her "Grace" or "Gracie," even on the job and in the presence of coworkers, denying her a basic sign of respect and clearly dividing her from the rest of the agents. Then there's the fact that Grace's name happens to be one of the virtues, the one that means elegance, kindness, and mercy—all stereotypical feminine attributes—rather than Faith, Hope, or a different name altogether. Even her last name points to the womanliness she can't escape: "Hart" sounds much like "heart," a clear reference to the supposed dichotomy between intellect and emotion, and the side that most people assume women land on.

This assumption becomes clear when Grace reaches her breaking point while practicing for the Miss United States show with her coach, Victor. She says she sees no point in rehearsing when she has been assured a place in the top ten, and Victor's reply sets off the following exchange:

Victor: "Have you no pride in yourself, in your presentation?"
Grace: "Look, I am an FBI agent, not a performing monkey in heels."
Victor: "You are also a person, and an incomplete one at that. Instead of friends and relationships, you have sarcasm and a gun."

The unspoken assumptions are that Grace cannot have pride in herself except as an object on display, that she cannot be a complete person without the "friends and relationships" more associated with women than men, and that Victor's definition of what it means to be a person—or, let's be honest, a woman—must be Grace's. Yet how many young, hard-working men would be called "incomplete" because they are not perfectly coifed and dressed, because they are sarcastic, and because they do not have a significant other?

When Victor brings up three different "issues" he thinks Grace has, the one that sticks with her is telling. After storming out on Victor and informing Eric that she wants to quit, she spends a few moments expressing concern about her career before giving way to the heart of the problem: "I am the job. So what's wrong with me? I date. I go on dates." Grace has been stripped of her respect and authority as a competent and valuable agent, and the problem is with her, with her social life. Oh, yes, Eric responds with a pep talk. It's the only one he gives the whole movie, and it's all about him: "I've been waiting five years for my own op. You think I'd waste it on the wrong girl?" After assuring Grace that he chose her because she was smart and funny, he then invalidates her role as an agent by saying that she's easy to talk to when she's not armed...as in, when she is not doing the job she loves, the job that gives her whatever power and independence she has.

Of course, this is a movie about a beauty pageant--sorry, a scholarship program--and the obvious problematic idea that a woman's value rests mostly, if not solely, on her appearance, cannot go completely without comment. The two times she teases Eric about his newfound interest in her, Grace's first words are "You think I'm gorgeous," emphasizing once again the primacy that her appearance takes in the way he thinks about her. Also, please note that the person "transforming" Grace is a man, as is the person who convinced her to go along with the plan in the first place, suggesting that a woman can only be a real woman with the assistance and approval of a man in her life.

One of the subtler, more poignant moments for the five of us in Morocco came about two thirds of the way into the movie. When Grace questions Cheryl, the contestant from Rhode Island, about whether she'd ever done anything illegal, Cheryl admits that she once stole red underwear…and then mentions "this other time" when she visited a professor's office for help and he attacked her. Every one of us had fallen into the trap of feeling personal responsibility for our harassment at least once--we were wearing short sleeves, we wore our hair down, we didn't have a guy with us--and we had to remind each other that it was not our fault. Back in the movie, Cheryl then used a variant of "This is normal," the dismissal that three of us had gotten from a female instructor, to downplay her experience: "I know that kind of thing happens all the time." Grace was with us: "No, it doesn't, Cheryl, it doesn't!" But that was all she said before offering to share some self-defense tricks. At no point did she say anything along the lines of, "that doesn't make it okay."

Which brings us back to the boyfriend-to-be. His belittling and physical harassment, though it occasionally makes Grace angry, is never cause for reproach from coworkers, superiors, or Grace herself. Nothing suggests that Matthew's behavior is in any way inappropriate, and when Grace ends up kissing him at the end of the film, the implicit message is that women have to put up with the way men treat them, that this is an acceptable way for a man to treat a woman he likes. I don't know anyone who would watch this movie expecting it to be a feminist tract, but the fact that Miss Congeniality isn't a smart movie or a statement movie should not mean that we have to expect this kind of tacit support for disrespecting women regardless of how beautiful or intelligent they are.

We finish at the end, with the last words heard before the screen fades to black, which happens to be a line from Tom Jones's "She's a Lady": "And the lady is mine." The film's parting shot reinforces all the movie's suggestions that a woman is little more than a thing of beauty to be possessed by one man and appreciated by everyone. It stung all the more in Morocco because we knew that the next time we walked to the library at least half a dozen unfamiliar men would be telling us how beautiful or sexy we were, how they wanted to marry us or fuck us crazy. But the fact that I won't have that experience when I walk around city streets here in the U.S. does not make the media's acceptance of women as objects for the pleasure of the male gaze any more comfortable.

Description
I'll admit it wasn't my first choice, but after three months in Morocco, I was looking forward to a movie in which the leading female character had something other than her family to worry about. So I squeezed onto the living room couch shoulder-to-shoulder with the four other young women living in the apartment and we turned our attention to Miss Congeniality. We cheered and chuckled as a ten-year-old Grace Hart punched first a bully and then the boy she'd stuck up for after he said that he'd never live down being saved by a girl. We only wished we could do the same to the men on the streets who made walking to the corner hanout for coffee feel like walking naked into a men's locker room.

Then the love interest came on.

Now, we knew when we sat down that Miss Congeniality wasn't a smart movie or a statement movie—it's a just-for-fun movie, the kind you watch for cheap laughs when you don't really want to think. My friends and I were pretty well fed up with men by that point, but we figured that we could sit through the obligatory end-of-movie snog if it meant we got to see a female lead. But the future boyfriend, agent Eric Matthews (Benjamin Bratt), didn't just think of Grace Hart (Sandra Bullock) as nothing more than an agent and a friend. Before the plot even takes off, he tells her she looks like hell and that nobody thinks of her as "a woman in the FBI." When the argument about whether Grace will go undercover in the Miss United States pageant ends up in the wrestling room, Matthews takes advantage of the close quarters to slap her butt and touch her crotch. The five of us on the couch, already dumbfounded that we had forgotten these details from previous viewings, were then shocked into silence as Matthews won both the match and the argument. True, Grace kicked his feet out from under him—but he had already thrown her so low that the only option left to her was to bring him to her level, and only for one scene.

The worst part of that movie viewing was seeing how many details contradicted the supposedly go-women message and knowing that in the past we had taken issue only with those aspects that supported the most obvious problematic message—that women are expected to be beautiful. Now, with freshly sharpened understanding, the facts that Grace ends up romantically involved with a man who insults her, sells her ideas as his own, and refuses to stand up for her, were just the tip of the iceberg.

Let's start with one of the most basic attributes of a character: the name. Names usually mean something in fiction, if not always in real life, as do the versions of names that others use most often. Eric Matthews, like most of the (mostly male) FBI agents, usually goes by his last name. Matthews's boss also calls Grace by her last name, Hart, but Eric usually calls her "Grace" or "Gracie," even on the job and in the presence of coworkers, denying her a basic sign of respect and clearly dividing her from the rest of the agents. Then there's the fact that Grace's name happens to be one of the virtues, the one that means elegance, kindness, and mercy—all stereotypical feminine attributes—rather than Faith, Hope, or a different name altogether. Even her last name points to the womanliness she can't escape: "Hart" sounds much like "heart," a clear reference to the supposed dichotomy between intellect and emotion, and the side that most people assume women land on.

This assumption becomes clear when Grace reaches her breaking point while practicing for the Miss United States show with her coach, Victor. She says she sees no point in rehearsing when she has been assured a place in the top ten, and Victor's reply sets off the following exchange:

Victor: "Have you no pride in yourself, in your presentation?"
Grace: "Look, I am an FBI agent, not a performing monkey in heels."
Victor: "You are also a person, and an incomplete one at that. Instead of friends and relationships, you have sarcasm and a gun."

The unspoken assumptions are that Grace cannot have pride in herself except as an object on display, that she cannot be a complete person without the "friends and relationships" more associated with women than men, and that Victor's definition of what it means to be a person—or, let's be honest, a woman—must be Grace's. Yet how many young, hard-working men would be called "incomplete" because they are not perfectly coifed and dressed, because they are sarcastic, and because they do not have a significant other?

When Victor brings up three different "issues" he thinks Grace has, the one that sticks with her is telling. After storming out on Victor and informing Eric that she wants to quit, she spends a few moments expressing concern about her career before giving way to the heart of the problem: "I am the job. So what's wrong with me? I date. I go on dates." Grace has been stripped of her respect and authority as a competent and valuable agent, and the problem is with her, with her social life. Oh, yes, Eric responds with a pep talk. It's the only one he gives the whole movie, and it's all about him: "I've been waiting five years for my own op. You think I'd waste it on the wrong girl?" After assuring Grace that he chose her because she was smart and funny, he then invalidates her role as an agent by saying that she's easy to talk to when she's not armed...as in, when she is not doing the job she loves, the job that gives her whatever power and independence she has.

Of course, this is a movie about a beauty pageant--sorry, a scholarship program--and the obvious problematic idea that a woman's value rests mostly, if not solely, on her appearance, cannot go completely without comment. The two times she teases Eric about his newfound interest in her, Grace's first words are "You think I'm gorgeous," emphasizing once again the primacy that her appearance takes in the way he thinks about her. Also, please note that the person "transforming" Grace is a man, as is the person who convinced her to go along with the plan in the first place, suggesting that a woman can only be a real woman with the assistance and approval of a man in her life.

One of the subtler, more poignant moments for the five of us in Morocco came about two thirds of the way into the movie. When Grace questions Cheryl, the contestant from Rhode Island, about whether she'd ever done anything illegal, Cheryl admits that she once stole red underwear…and then mentions "this other time" when she visited a professor's office for help and he attacked her. Every one of us had fallen into the trap of feeling personal responsibility for our harassment at least once--we were wearing short sleeves, we wore our hair down, we didn't have a guy with us--and we had to remind each other that it was not our fault. Back in the movie, Cheryl then used a variant of "This is normal," the dismissal that three of us had gotten from a female instructor, to downplay her experience: "I know that kind of thing happens all the time." Grace was with us: "No, it doesn't, Cheryl, it doesn't!" But that was all she said before offering to share some self-defense tricks. At no point did she say anything along the lines of, "that doesn't make it okay."

Which brings us back to the boyfriend-to-be. His belittling and physical harassment, though it occasionally makes Grace angry, is never cause for reproach from coworkers, superiors, or Grace herself. Nothing suggests that Matthew's behavior is in any way inappropriate, and when Grace ends up kissing him at the end of the film, the implicit message is that women have to put up with the way men treat them, that this is an acceptable way for a man to treat a woman he likes. I don't know anyone who would watch this movie expecting it to be a feminist tract, but the fact that Miss Congeniality isn't a smart movie or a statement movie should not mean that we have to expect this kind of tacit support for disrespecting women regardless of how beautiful or intelligent they are.

We finish at the end, with the last words heard before the screen fades to black, which happens to be a line from Tom Jones's "She's a Lady": "And the lady is mine." The film's parting shot reinforces all the movie's suggestions that a woman is little more than a thing of beauty to be possessed by one man and appreciated by everyone. It stung all the more in Morocco because we knew that the next time we walked to the library at least half a dozen unfamiliar men would be telling us how beautiful or sexy we were, how they wanted to marry us or fuck us crazy. But the fact that I won't have that experience when I walk around city streets here in the U.S. does not make the media's acceptance of women as objects for the pleasure of the male gaze any more comfortable.