Not too long ago I went to see Girlfight at the local Gigaplex. It was more or less what I expected -- a well told, albeit slightly moody story that repeatedly hit the audience over the head with a "girls are just as good as boys" moral. As you might expect from a Grumble staffer, I have something of a critical bone to pick with the movie: it goes on at great length demonstrating that a woman's victory or defeat inside the ring is irrelevant -- that it is the effort, desire and discipline it takes to make it there in the first place which validates her. But then the script creates a dramatic structure such that the heroine needs to win her final fight to achieve that validation. It's a bald-faced contradiction. But hey, I understand; if she lost the final fight but did so in such a way that proved to one and all that the concept of a woman boxer is a powerful and noble one, everyone would have walked away rightfully complaining that the movie was nothing more than a cross-dressed Rocky. So I can forgive its contradiction. But the one in the audience is a different matter.

At first blush, the audience as a whole seemed to buy into the whole "girls are just as good as boys" ideal. There were groups of women who were either lesbians or wouldn't have minded being mistaken as such, mixed-sex groups of Sensitive New Age Guys and Angry Young Women, and mixed-sex couples of young professionals enjoying their lives and looking for some intelligent entertainment. (I'll leave it up to you to guess which group Dr. and Ms. Wombat fall into.) If there was ever an audience ready to cheer a female boxer, this was it. Everyone's reactions were pretty much in line with the philosophical tenets underlying the movie -- jeers for the disempowering, verbally abusive and sexist father; cheers when the catty, back-stabbing hoochie-momma gets bitch-slapped by the heroine; more cheers when she levels a thug who beat up her brother; that sort of thing. Pretty unremarkable stuff. But then about halfway through the movie something really interesting happened. The predictable confrontation between the heroine and her father arrived. You know the one, you've seen it a hundred times in a hundred different movies. Our Hero (in this case, Our Heroine) finally has the courage and the tools to turn the tables on her oppressor (in this case, her father). Only in this movie, she almost kills him. The shot was clearly designed to rattle the audience -- there were reaction shots of the little brother looking terrified, the foley artist made a bunch of gritty crunching sounds when Dad hit the wall, and it was clear that if the heroine lost control of her anger she would also lose her tormented soul1. Heavy stuff. And if the lead character had been a guy played by someone scary and brooding like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, Edward Norton in American History X or John Malkovich in ... well ... in any movie he's ever made, the audience would have been truly frightened for both characters in the fight. Instead, the audience giggled. This very same audience quietly hissed at characters who giggled at Our Fearless Heroine as she climbed into the boxing ring. As soon as the venue changed, as soon as she was displaying her ferocity and strength in a situation not explicitly condoned by the premise of the movie, they saw it as silly. In other words, it's one thing for girls in a movie to box, because we all know it's just pretend. Real girls couldn't actually do any serious damage, not to a real man. Right?

 

Now it's not exactly news that young people tend to be a bunch of freakin' hypocrites. Nor is it news that a culture as a whole must understand intellectually that a long-held prejudice is immoral before it fully abandons that belief.2 But you'd think that people who chose to sit in a dark room for two hours for the express purpose of watching a meditation on sexist views of physical power, probably so they could congratulate themselves for holding Correct Thoughts, would at least pause to reflect on the disconnect between their intellectual beliefs and instinctual reactions. But apparently you'd be wrong. This group of people who professed equality of the sexes while behaving like sexists put me in mind of another group of people desperately in need of introspection who happen to be living out the exact opposite dilemma.

 

About a year ago I attended a wedding at a fairly fundamentalist church. And please set aside your images of rabid preachers foaming at the mouth to a bunch of slack-jawed yokels. To a person, the attendees were kind and thoughtful, intelligent and cosmopolitan3. The man leading the service was no puffy, alcoholic, middle-aged Bible-thumper on his third wife, either. He was soft-spoken, deferential and didn't look a day over twenty-five. But the service as a whole was as patriarchal as it comes. To be fair, it didn't go so far as to forbid the bride from speaking and having a dowry change hands, but it came mighty close. The sermon itself was basically a diatribe lifted straight from St. Paul, the Bible's resident bigoted cracker, about how a wife should obey her husband in all things and do whatever he tells her without question. I half expected to hear a sentence or two endorsing the beating of gays and telling us that the Jews were stealing Christian babies in the dead of night. It was that bad. Another attendee pointed out to me that the sermon should have been entitled "The Worst of St. Paul." Most of those critics present were quite content to say, "wow, what a load of misogynist malarkey" and hit the dance floor at the reception. But not Ms. Wombat. God love her, she may be long on charm, intelligence and good looks, but she's kind of short on tact. So during the post-ceremony photo shoot, she corners and questions the father of the bride. "Don't you realize that your daughter was just sold into slavery?" she asks. (Well, okay, she didn't use those words exactly, but that's what she meant.) The father of the bride then offered up the weakest bunch of half-hearted rationalizations since the O.J. Simpson defense and wound up by saying "look, we don't actually live this way. In fact, our wives basically control us, not vice-versa." And he's right, too. I've watched the bride and groom in action before and since4. She's no slave. They're a very modern couple. Major decisions are made by discussion and consensus, not by male decree. Instead of quitting her job to become a housewife, she's seeking an advanced professional degree and plans to put it to good use. And anyone who spends even five minutes with her would testify that should she one day decide to go the barefoot and pregnant route, it will be by her choice and no one else's.

 

So what's the deal? Why are all these intelligent and thoughtful people practicing a religion whose teachings fly in the face of the philosophical grounding of their behavior? It's not that they're intellectual featherweights and incapable of thinking things through; I just got their Christmas wish list, and it looks like the syllabus for a graduate level religious studies course5. And why are these sophisticated moviegoers congratulating themselves for holding beliefs that they obviously don't practice? To be honest, I have no idea. It's probably because most people lack the courage to lead an examined life -- to not only have the courage of their convictions, but also to have the courage to challenge those convictions when they discover a contradiction. But maybe I'm not being fair. Maybe it's just that they're all too busy dealing with mundane, everyday philosophical dilemmas to challenge the deeper ones. Me? I'm far too busy figuring out why I prefer playing NBA 2K to jogging when I want to be in better shape, and why I profess to hold as sacred the Pursuit of Happiness for all people yet secretly yearn for government commandos to swoop from the sky and bludgeon the idiots who drive slower than 55 m.p.h. in the passing lane to even notice my deeper contradictions. But then again, I do have Ms. Wombat to keep me in line.

1. Kind of like Luke would have joined the Dark Side had he given in to his hate. Only a lot less campy. 2. There were people at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 who pointed out that the "all men are created equal" ideal applies to people from Africa just as much as to people from Europe, yet African-Americans didn't really achieve full citizenship until the late 1960's. And it could be well argued that they still don't have it. 3. Well ... as cosmopolitan as people can get in Texas, anyway. 4. No, not that kind of action, you sick bastard. 5. Makes me feel kind of foolish for putting all those video games on mine.