Women are meant to please?

As I was leaving the theater after watching the movie Gone Girl I found myself wrapped up in the story's plot. What kind of woman spends all that time plotting her own fake murder? But as I began replaying scenes over and over in my head it all made sense. The entire movie reflects back to the main character Amy’s perspective on her relationship with her husband. The movie made her out to be this crazy women who fakes her own death, pretends she got raped, and then proceeds to kill the man who she claims “raped” her (which I have to say is very psychotic). But what is the purpose of this movie? To show that women are crazy? I don’t think that was the purpose at all. The reason this movie left me feeling so confused was because it was actually about a women who felt as if she was not good enough for her husband. As if their marriage was failing because she was not able to live up to these expectations that all men like Nick (her husband) expect women to live up to. She was so crazed and obsessed with the idea of being “the cool” girlfriend that she forget what it was like to act normal around her boyfriend. She thought she needed to be innocent and calm, while providing her husband with exotic, spontaneous sex all the time. She thought that by being the perfect women for her husband, in turn she would receive endless love, when in reality all she had was a husband who was sleeping around with another women.  Following is the trailer to Gone Girl:

 

The whole aspect of this movie intrigued me because I found that these expectations of women are deeply woven in our society and do seem extremely relevant. In the article “Can Women Have Sex like a Man?”: Sexual Scripts in Sex and the City by Gail Markle, she talks about the scripts that are typically found of women and men and whether those scripts hold to be true. In the article Markle lays out the scripts of men and women, “The typical sexual script for men includes the active pursuit of sexual partners, peer validation of sexual activity, inability to control sexuality once aroused, and sex undertaken solely for the sake of pleasure (Frith and Kitzinger 2001, p. 214). The typical sexual script for women, on the other hand, includes waiting to be chosen instead of pursuing a partner, feeling affection or love, and a wish to please men”. When I read these I completely agreed with her. In my life from what I have heard from men, they imply that they want a women who is innocent, hasn’t slept with many men, cool with the guys, tough, emotionless, and a freak in the bedroom. It seems as if men have this specific perception of women, and if we don’t live up to those expectations it is somehow our fault and we are the ones who should be punished for it. Scripts in society imply that women are the ones who should be pleasing a man, and should be living up to a man’s expectations; which is exactly what Markle refers to in her article in which she uses Sex and the City to compare these typical scripts and show how they are laid out in the TV series to comply as well as contradict these typical scripts.

In Gone Girl these typical scripts are played out by Amy and she ends up finding her husband having an affair. Why is all the pressure put on women to act a certain way while it is justified for men to have an affair because they are unsatisfied with the way their woman is acting? Yet the moment a woman shows that she is upset or doubting a relationship she is told that she is overreacting, crazy, so emotional, and acting like a “huge girl”. That’s why I find this movie so intriguing because it raises these concerns presented in women and completely makes the woman go psychotic while secretly revealing that the man in the relationship has used stereotypical scripts to justify his actions.

This movie obviously completely exaggerates the effects of such scripts but I think it is important to acknowledge that society has created certain traits of men and women that enable unethical actions to be justifiable. For example the fact that it is seen as acceptable for men to sleep with many women yet a man would never want to be with a women who has gotten around. At the same time men want a woman who they can claim all to themselves and who many other man have not been able to call theirs, while on the flip side they want their woman to be a slut for them in bed. And while this sounds crazy, women tend to abide by these guidelines and still try to please their man, and in turn some get enjoyment out of it. I think if our society’s morals and values were more evenly split then it would be a pleasurable experience to cater your man/woman. But when all the pressure is placed on women to be the “cool”, drama free, eye candy for their man, then it is a little more difficult to spend so much energy on being the perfect womanly figure for a man that every man seems to crave and search.

 

References:

Markle, G. (2008.).  Can Women Have Sex Like a Man?”: Sexual Scripts in Sex and the City. Volume 12, Issue 1, pp 45-57