So, I decided to finally give Orange is the New Black a go (I know, I know, I am way late to the party). It’s not bad. I got sucked in quite quickly. However, suffering as I do from wanderlust, I wanted to give something else a try.
I landed on Bridgerton. I am very much enjoying it. It takes place in an early-nineteenth-century England that I’m not sure ever existed. This is fine, I am okay with a richly diverse early-nineteenth-century England. There are Black actors all over the series—the queen is even Black (the actual Queen Charlotte, some speculate, had African ancestry, though scholars are skeptical).
Now, these two series could not be more different. They both feature humans; that’s about where the similarity comes to a grinding halt.
That said, both series are exceptional feminist studies. They offer excellent glimpses into just how much crap women have had to historically put up with (Bridgerton) and what they still have to endure (Orange).
It’s not the specifics that have been on my mind. In Bridgerton, young women (debutantes) show up to ball after ball in search of future husbands. Your job as a young woman is to be charming and get pregnant. In some cases, the family arranges the marriage, and the girl is horse-traded and eventually raped—let’s just call it what it is.
In Orange, it’s creepy, lecherous prison guards. And it’s the social stigma: the female ex-con. This is even worse than a male one.
But this is not what I am talking about. Yes, the be-charming-and-get-pregnant life is a kind of prison sentence. Perhaps the two shows have more in common than I originally thought: they’re both about prison.
The issue I wish to discuss is the position of women in a given society. The context they exist in. A context that produces the specifics of creepy prison guards and debutante balls where young girls worry about their shame and honor (which can be blemished by the very slightest “offense”—unchaperoned with a man!). This context is male dominated and women simply reside in a lower class. They are inferior to men. They are, at best, children, but the stakes are not the stuff of child’s play. They pertain to purity, virginity, pregnancy, producing children that are not “halfwits” or “idiots.” This all exists in violent, coercive circumstances. The girls are just along for the ride. They are bodies that are expected to look a certain way and produce the requisite yield.
And this gets to the heart of the matter. Women do not have minds; they are not minds. They are physicality; they are nothing else. Everything flows from this presupposition. If a person is not a person, you treat “it” anyway you wish. Its treatment is irrelevant. This is not dissimilar to when animals were viewed as mechanical entities, so animals were treated horribly because one can do whatever one wishes with a mechanical entity. This is the framework in which women have been viewed.
The particular cruelties dealt out by men, historically and contemporaneously, take place in this all-encompassing miasma, if you like. This is not to deemphasize the cruelties, but only to try and better understand them analytically. They do not occur discretely; they are part of a larger structure. The structure makes the individual cruelties possible—it encourages them; they issue forth from this structure.
There is a scene in Bridgerton where a woman is giving birth. The woman is in agony and losing a lot of blood. The husband is in the next room shouting, “Is it a boy??” The husband could not care less about his wife. Her job is to produce a son. An heir. Period. She dies. Does the husband care? He got his son, the machine that was his wife did its job and then broke. No matter. Machines break. They are produced for a specific function and then sometimes they break.
Women seem to historically provide two functions: pleasure and pregnancy. Men can enjoy women in a pleasurable context or find a respectable one to marry and impregnate. Those are basically the options. The woman’s body is a vessel—for pleasure or pregnancy—and little more. Small wonder women are viewed in a reductive way, “objectified,” not given a fair shake in business and in the marketplace, viewed as emotional, and viewed as intellectually deficient.
Women have been submerged in this structure. And men have been allowed great latitude and basically to do whatever they want—though such a superstructure, such an ideology, such a poisonous fog is bound to negatively affect everyone. Not just women. Men, too, bear a moral injury. They are something less in this context. Can one truly flourish in such circumstances? Is there room for virtue? Can one even achieve moral virtue when half the people are thus reduced? When one is enslaved, or hungry, or lessened, all are damaged, by the sheer fact of living amidst such conditions. As the poet Emma Lazarus put it, “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”
Yes, there have been improvements. Certainly, since 1813, women now live in a different reality. However, the context lingers. The shadows cast by history are long.
