It Wouldn’t be Nothing Without a Woman or a Girl

I am not a feminist of the 21st Century. I don’t know who’s 100% right in the war of the sexes. What I do know is that I’m a woman and it’s hard out there for us. That to survive as a double XX chromosome carrier is and always will be about deft maneuverings. Shucking and jiving our way to get what we want and deserve. It’s a pitiful state, but Eve saw to it that along with dreadful cramps, we’d forever be fighting an unnecessary battle.

‍
I love a good mystery. The more suspenseful, the more intelligently thrilling the better. And if it’s one that examines the psychology of men and women, and the games played in the quest for sexual dominance, then I’m very much game. A couple of months ago, I stumbled upon Wiser Than Me, a fascinating podcast by Julia Louis-Dreyfus where she interviews famous older women. I haven’t finished all of them, but one episode replays in my mind constantly: the interview with Jane Fonda. I knew very little about Fonda before this episode. I’d seen her in a few films, sort of knew (yet didn’t and don’t understand) her Vietnam reputation, and was aware of her famous family. Famous family or otherwise, Fonda always came across as a singular entity to me, a woman who did what she wanted in an ultra-competitive environment, fighting and paying dearly for her autonomy. When during the podcast she spoke about her insecurities and regrets, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She candidly spoke about the mistakes she’d made and the lessons she’s still unsure to have learned from them. What I heard was that as much as her confessions were catharsis, they were also warnings to other women about the perils of doing things your way all the time. A revelation that resonated throughout my recent viewing of her superb performance as Bree Daniels in Klute.

‍
Like Fonda, Bree works in the very male world of high—class prostitution. She gives herself every day, an addiction she tells her therapist, she can’t stop because of the power she holds over her clients. Naively, Bree thinks she’s in control of the situations she’s in because she has something the men desperately want: sex. That by making them feel special in accepting and willingly giving them their kink, she has a particular hold over them. We, the audience, of course know she’s wrong, and to a certain extent I think Bree knows this too, yet we still watch her gain and lose power for the next ninety minutes until the very last frame. We see how she turns to those who say they care about her and do terrible things, while she walks away from those whose actions are consistently good but make no promises. I will not offer key plot points—though Roy Scheider is a gem--or reveal how the film actually ends—the synopsis you can Google--as I believe more than being about paranoia Klute is about the plight of women in the world. How even when we think we’re in control, the bigger man machine is at play, and the only way for us to survive is to tow the line. Or is it? On Wiser Than Me, Jane Fonda admits that her biggest regret—along with all the plastic surgeries—is that she never showed up for the men who asked her to. Life can very much imitate art, but for Fonda to have played Bree in 1971 with the ending it had, and then in 2023 to say what she did, sent a shudder down my spine.
It took me an unusually long time to understand the concept of male dominance. As a young woman I was too busy doing who knows what to pay attention,

unconsciously believing that my bullhead cockiness would get me where I thought I wanted to go. It wasn’t until I was older, in my early thirties when I started shaving my legs regularly and wearing make-up, that I began to understand the world in which I as a woman live in. A world where my ability to thrive was going to depend on how I learned to play the game of the sexes. It’s fucking unfair. It really, really sucks that because of the book of Genesis and the privilege of free will, we women have to make uncomfortable decisions every day. I’m never going to stop standing up for myself or stop wearing heels, it’s just that now I have a better understanding of the chess game. And I take solace in the fact that it may be a man’s world, but it wouldn’t be nothing, NOTHING, without a woman or a girl.