I'm sort of filling in for someone else tonight, and decided to write a new diary even though I didn't have a lot of time to do it, so if this isn't exactly as profound as you've come to expect from this series, I apologize. The other diary I'm working on is a slow-cooker that needs more thought before I'll feel like it's worthy.
Instead, I thought it'd be cool to talk about James Bond.
There was a James Bond marathon on some channel recently and my husband Tivo'd all the old ones, so we've been watching themm for the last week or so. Besides the fact that I'm a (not-so-secret) fan of pulp movies like that, I found them interesting from a feminist perspective as well.
At first, it just cracked me up how all kinds of beautiful girls were fawning all over the famous spy; his magnetism seemed overplayed, to put it mildly. But then came a short, insignificant scene that changed my perspective completely:
Bond is outside of his boss's office talking to the famous secretary, Ms. Moneypenny. She is flirting with Bond and he is flirting back, though with less earnestness than she is. She takes his hat from him and throws it on the hat rack across the room, where it lands perfectly on one of the hooks. Bond raises his eyebrows but keeps talking as if nothing happened, while Moneypenny smiles at him indulgently.
My brain went, "What if Moneypenny is the spy?"
Besides the incredibly unrealistic, male-fantasy interactions between Bond and every single female he ever crosses paths with, I had already begun to question a lot of his spy activities too. The most important activity for a spy, it seems, is to gather information; that's kind of hard to do while shooting at bad guys, seducing every woman you meet, walking into people's houses like you own the place, using some fancy gadgets to get out of silly scrapes you would have never gotten yourself into to begin with if you had half a brain, and all the other things Bond does besides gather information. (In fact, if finding the bad guys, insinuating yourself into their life, and bringing them down was as easy as it is in a James Bond movie, we wouldn't have to worry about bad guys anymore.)
On the other hand, Moneypenny always seems to know exactly what was going on, even though she is "just a secretary". On top of that, the fact that she could toss a hat so casually and yet so expertly implied to me that she had a lot more talent and/or training than the movies ever seem to let on.
My next thought was: "How would I write this story?"
Bond transformed suddenly into Jimmy Bond, a completely unimportant working class bloke from Manchester. He's got some insignificant paper-pusher job and an overblown imagination. He has no friends, or only a few at the pub who are as pathetic as he is, and can't get a girlfriend (you know the type, always assuming you're interested in him when you're being nice but distant-on-purpose). His way of coping with the complete failures of his life is to make up this crazy fantasy world where his job is actually to save the world while all of us carry on obliviously and every woman is constantly trying to get him into bed with her. Of course, this fantasy world has no basis in reality because he's not actually a spy, nor does he have any clue what a spy actually does, but at least it isn't as boring as his real life. In my story, Moneypenny barely even knows he exists; she's a manager who has a lot of people to keep an eye on, and since Jimmy does his work neither exceptionally well nor exceptionally poorly, she barely even notices him. All the girls that James Bond beds are actually all the girls that reject Jimmy. The gadgets are silly toys that Jimmy constructs when he's at home alone....
That's as far as I've gotten with my alternative story, but it makes a great context for the movies that makes me appreciate them even more as an example of an extreme male fantasy.
This isn't the only story that one could do this with. My first encounter of such a feminist take on another story was reading Wide Sargasso Sea and then revisiting my long-time favorite, Jane Eyre. The shift of perspective from the sexist and racist environment that Jane Eyre takes place in to the female- and Caribbean-oriented atmosphere of Wide Sargasso Sea, plus the change of focus on certain characters, was eye-opening to say the least.
I'm sure there are lots of other stories this could be attempted with as well. It's easy to point out what is wrong with a story, but I think it's more fun to come up with your own, unique version. So how would you rewrite any of the stories you know in order to make them more feminist, more female-oriented, or aimed more towards women's interest?