This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

Police officer to his colleagues: “She says he didn’t rape her.”
Anaïs: “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to.”

The last lines of the film ‘Fat Girl’ by Catherine Breillat, 2001. An interesting twist on what women and girls have always experienced when they report a rape.

Since I was old enough to be out and about on my own, I’ve always gravitated towards art house and repertory cinemas – quirky and sometimes grubby little movie theatres with mismatched and uncomfortable seats, cheap tickets, low-cost nibbles or even the possibility to bring in your own snacks. They usually have a single screen, maybe two if they are a little posher, and they show classic films, less new or less popular films, foreign films, cult films and sometimes just weird-ass stuff chosen based on the whim of the cinema’s manager. This is my kind of place. I hate blockbuster venues and multiplexes and happily ever after films starring the same overpaid, plastic bimbos and himbos. And I almost always go to these rep cinemas by myself, and I usually sit in the back row with my smuggled-in munchies and relative anonymity. I’m not sure how I got into these kinds of places or how I found the one and only in my hometown tucked away on a side-street near the university, but I suppose it was inevitable given my father’s devil-may-care, close-your-eyes-and-pick approach to choosing films that I mentioned in a past post. Nevertheless, I remember, with fondness, my favourite little cinemas from various places I’ve lived, and during periods of my life involving intense workloads and insane schedules, these solitary outings even became a highly enjoyable escape ritual.

I remember an early educational experience in cinema when I was 19 that gave me food for thought at the time. After writing the third ‘R is for Rape’ post, I recalled a film I had watched in a repertory cinema back in 2001, and decided to rewatch it to see if what I recalled actually tied into this post’s topic. Several times, I’ve returned to books and films I consumed in my youth, frequently to find that my recollections were coloured by inexperience or naiveté. It’s not really a surprise, and this is an interesting and separate topic that I want to write more about as it is extremely relevant to the female experience of sexuality and relationships. Suffice it to say that after watching the film in question, I decided that despite my more mature, analytical, and critical eye, I still agreed with the core of my 19-year-old assessment of the content.

This film in question was the 2001 French film: À ma sœur! which was strangely named Fat Girl for American audiences, despite the fact that the title could easily have been translated to To My Sister! and still would have made sense. But sociopolitical agendas were likely at work in this rebranding and refocusing, and thus the point of the film was likely at least partially lost to most American viewers.

The film was written and directed by Frenchwoman, Catherine Breillat, known for her controversial works on sibling rivalry and female coming-of-age stories, with a heavy focus on the politics of sex and sexuality for girls. For some, especially liberal feminist types, this might automatically indicate that she is feminist – having a female protagonist, especially one exploring her sexuality, means the content is feminist, right? Well, not really. There is nothing positive or liberating about her girls’ stories – they’re just depressing and extremely limited in their truth. And while I prefer truth to lies, I find it sad that all of girls’ and women’s truths are such downers. There isn’t the rich range of character-building experiences that boys have available to them when they are approaching adulthood. So while Breillat is a truth-teller of sorts, I personally find her very male-identified as well, and indeed, she has indicated in interviews that she was heavily influenced in her youth by writers Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade, both of whom saw sex and violence as inseparable and wrote extensively on the pleasure taken in violating and destroying women. I’ve read many of de Sade’s works, and I felt, like I do after encountering so many of men’s creative endeavours, that they have waaay too much time on their hands. But at the same time, I think these are some of the most honest men on the planet, and they depict male sexuality accurately. Males do have a death drive and cannot separate sex and violence, and you mess with them at your peril. Unfortunately, in order for women to get any attention in the arts and literature world, they need to espouse the male point-of-view, even if they think they are liberating themselves or putting themselves on equal footing with men. The problem is that, like I’ve maintained throughout this mini-series, females don’t have the upper hand in heterosexual sex or any dealings with males for that matter. In the violence that is heterosexual sex, females have so much more to lose, and I don’t think girls can achieve anything positive from exploring sexuality through dealings with males. And this truth makes for very limited and disheartening female stories – perhaps why we have so few of them and so many princess fairy tales. Boring as shit.

À ma sœur! or Fat Girl is about 15-year-old Elena and her 12-year-old sister, Anaïs. Both are suffering various delusions resulting from living in a patriarchal society and a dysfunctional family, and are well-prepared for the ravages of heterosexual life. They both have worrisome obsessions with losing their so-called virginity. The older one, classically pretty, is looking for a love and respect that doesn’t exist, and the younger, overweight and a little strange, wants to get the whole virginity thing out of the way as she mistakenly believes that experienced women have more value. Anaïs spends time talking to herself and her imagined future lover and spying, with much derision, on her sister during her sexual pursuits. Elena ends up with an Italian man who employs every consensual rape tactic in the book to get what he wants, and Anaïs ends up forcibly raped by a stranger, which she twists to fit her fantasy of giving it up to a man who means nothing – sort of a fucked up consensual raping. So, ultimately, both girls get what they want, but don’t make out well. Sort of anti-princess fairy tales – or, more basically, versions of reality that most girls end up with.

Now, at 19, despite plenty of exposure to the nastiness that the male-dominated world had to offer, I was still very inexperienced and completely untrained in critical thinking. Thus, at that time, I could easily sit through offensive content without experiencing the knee-jerk moral outrage of, say, a biologically mature, but intellectually immature religious person, but I wasn’t well equipped to dissect it and offer a deep analysis. Rewatching this film at 52 was interesting. First, I found it extremely cringe-worthy and difficult to sit through, partly because I have lost patience with and tolerance of heterosexual female problems, which I now consider to be almost completely avoidable, but are endlessly talked about as if they are not, and partly because Breillat’s depiction of what girls go through in negotiating with straight males is so completely spot on. Second, I realized that I’ve been thinking about the issue of consensual rape for over 30 years, although I didn’t have a name for it until recently.

There was apparently a feminist uproar after the film came out. I don’t recall all the details, but I was a budding feminist and didn’t feel the same way as they did. Likely, some women got mad that it was the fat girl who needed to be forcibly raped in order to achieve something sexually, and that she accepted that. Perhaps some were opposed to the graphic depictions of sex with a minor, although neither actress was an actual minor. Whatever the opposition, I find that the vast majority of self-proclaimed feminists do not like the unveiling of truths. While Breillat is decidedly not a feminist, she baldly showed us the truth about how girls are formed into what male-dominated society wants them to be. I think many feminists want to think that males and females are equal, and not all men are rapists, and that heterosexuality can be healthy and good for women. But that is just not how things work. It never has worked that way, and it never will. So you either have to go along to get along, or you create a different path for yourself and model it in a way to offer better options for girls of the future. And by different path, I mean separatism and forging better relationships with women and girls. We no longer have to accept violence to survive.

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