Aren’t we living in the 21st century? Haven’t we made several strides in the last hundred years towards women’s empowerment and emancipation? Why then does a movie like ‘Promising Young Woman’ hit a nerve? I’ll tell you why. Because it reveals an unpalatable truth.
For those of you who haven’t seen this powerful, shocking, brilliant film scroll away now because I am going to be talking a LOT about it. About what it means, how relevant it is to our times and also, why the rage that permeates the film is a good thing.
Let’s look around ourselves for a moment. How do you think we’re doing, as women? Are we free to go where we want, do what we want, be who we want? You think yes? Scratch a little beneath the surface and you will discover no. I’m going to take the example of three countries, the three that I have the most to do with.
Let’s begin with India, my birthplace. If the many instances of patriarchy and misogyny aren’t bad enough, how’s this for some additional disgust: A 43-year-old woman, a coronavirus patient, was raped in the hospital by a male nurse while awaiting treatment. She died within 24 hours.
Read the article here.
How about the UK, where I reside: Sarah Everard, a 33-year-old, vanished as she walked home in Clapham, south London. Her body was found a week later near Ashford, Kent. PC Couzens pleaded guilty to kidnapping and rape and accepted responsibility for killing her.
And finally, the US, where I work: In 2016 the Stanford Rape Case made headlines when two male Stanford graduate students riding their bikes spotted a man on top of a woman near a dumpster. The woman did not appear to be moving. When they approached the man, he fled. He was later identified as Brock Turner, an “All-American swimmer,” while the victim was relegated to a ten-syllable description of an “unconscious intoxicated woman”. The judge in the case, Aaron Persky, gave Turner a six-month sentence despite the prosecutors pushing for a six-year sentence.
Read the article here.
Notice any similarities? These people (aside from Turner) were meant to protect, care for and safeguard women. Instead, they failed them, and how!
‘Promising Young Woman’ begins with the premise that a lone, intoxicated woman is fair-game to predators, even the wolves who parade around in sheep’s clothing. Because, after all, she put herself in that position, didn’t she? Shouldn’t she have gotten home at a decent hour, dressed less provocatively and been tucked up safely in bed? If then, she is taken advantage of, it’s her own fault, isn’t it?
To dismiss this film as a revenge drama would seriously undermine the hugely important message it is trying to convey. When Cassie, a medical-school dropout, entices “nice” men to take an apparently blind-drunk woman back to their homes to ensure her safety, she has an interesting little surprise in store for them – her sobriety. Cassie confronts that part of the male ego that has long shouted #NotAllMen in response to the #MeToo movement. Not all men will attack a vulnerable woman, but given the right circumstances, can you be sure?
More importantly though, it’s what happens after an attack such as this which is spine-tingling. As in the Brock Turner case, a man can get away with a slap on the wrist, because, after all, there was alcohol and opportunity, plus the bonus of a woman’s ‘stupidity’.
Angry yet?
Emerald Fennell’s astonishing indictment of what it means to be a woman today is meant to provoke rage. It’s a feminist manifesto that urges us to stand up to the status quo, to defend our freedoms and to question what consent means. The title itself is a play on the long touted expression that many of these graduates (Brock Turner included) are promising young men whose future lives and careers can be ruined because of “twenty minutes of action” or some such expression reducing sexual assault to a banality. As for the woman, well, she was “asking for it”, wasn’t she? Her promise, her future, her health and her identity don’t matter a jot. It’s a man’s world, after all!
Which begs the question that when a woman is unimpeachably behaved and still gets raped or assaulted thanks to being in the wrong place at the wrong time (Sarah Everard) then who is to blame? What about date rape? Or the rape of minors?
Fact of the matter is that rape is less to do with sexual fulfilment and everything to do with power dynamics. In the western world, which considers itself far ahead of the more ‘backward’ countries, where men feel emasculated by their female peers, this power struggle takes on an even more insidious nature. On the face of it there is outrage, but behind the scenes, there is the locker-room talk, the upholding of male entitlement and an unspoken understanding that women’s rights can be trampled all over by men placed in a position to do so.
Which is why watching Cassie deliver vigilante justice is so damn fulfilling! Yes, it’s just a movie, and yes, there’s a lot that’s far-fetched in it, but my goodness, do we need to identify with the rage that underpins it? Yes, by golly gosh we do!
None of us go out looking for trouble. None of us want to be assaulted. But if it does happen, what we want is that the perpetrators are given a punishment commensurate with the crime. What we want is that it’s their character, their motives and their actions that are questioned, not ours! As women – wives, girlfriends, sisters, daughters, mothers, grandmothers – we deserve the same rights to the same freedoms that our male counterparts enjoy.
Ultimately, Cassie’s sociopathic behaviour ends in a fitting denouement. She is unable to move on from the incident that led her life to devolve into a vendetta. There is no ‘out’ for her as there is for the people who committed the crime. This story is symptomatic of a larger malaise that plagues society – patriarchy and internalised misogyny – which allows men to get away with words, deeds and actions that betray the fact that ultimately, it still considers women to be the inferior sex.
Watch ‘Promising Young Woman’ and be angry. Be very, very angry indeed.
