The NationStates Feminist Thread II

[Giovenith]

So recently I watched bits of Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" and it left me feeling a little analytical. Labyrinth has always been an extremely weird and highly interpretable film, but it's also noteworthy for having been very popular among young girls. Now with David Bowie as one of the stars and scenes like the "As The World Falls Down" sequence that would seem obvious, but I've also felt that it went a little deeper than that, I think the movie speaks to young girls on a more psychological and social level that they might not necessarily be aware of. While on the surface it seems like your typical fantasy adventure filled with puppets and raw nightmare fuel that only the 1980s could provide, I also see it as dissection of some of the less talked about aspects of the female experience, one that has not been successfully replicated since.

In you aren't familiar with Labyrinth, it centers around a 15 year old girl named Sarah who at the beginning of the film is going through a bit of a rough period: Her mother has left her father in order to be with a fellow actor, leaving her father to remarry and he and his new wife have another child, Sarah's baby half-brother Toby. Although her new stepmother does not mistreat her or anything, Sarah finds herself at odds ends with her presence as is typical with early stepparent-child relations, and becomes frustrated with now having to cut into her own interests (mainly rehearsing her own acting skills) and free time in order to help out with Toby. One night when she is forced to babysit him, Toby starts acting particularly difficult as babies tend to do, and Sarah out of frustration wishes that he would be taken away by goblins. Her wish is unexpectedly granted by David Bowie I mean Jareth the Goblin King (played by David Bowie), and when Sarah immediately takes what she said back and demands that he return her little brother, Jareth tells her that she can have him back if she can find her way through his labyrinth in a set amount of time, and thus thrusts her into a dark and magical realm in order to go on a quest to rescue her brother. Throughout the movie, David Bowie I mean Jareth repeatedly acts a bit like a creepy stalker, demonstrating a kind of twisted infatuation with Sarah and eventually making it pretty clear that what he really wants is her to stay with him forever and allow him to use his sparkly fushigi powers to give her everything she's ever wanted. In the end Sarah rejects his offers to make her dreams come true and rescues her little brother, returning to the real world but still able to occasionally speak to the friends she made along the way.

To make it short, Labyrinth is at it's heart a story about learning to let go of your own personal fantasies in order to fulfill your real life responsibilities, and I believe a deconstruction of the lenient attitude towards overindulgence that we tend to instill in young girls and even adult women. What I mean by that is that at least in our society, there tends to be this implicit attitude that females have more of a right to behavior and expectations that we might otherwise consider selfish or entitled in men. "Daddy's little princess" is a common parenting attitude and women being obsessed with pursuing luxury is still a pretty persistent stereotype. In media aimed at females, there is a strong tendency to have the stories and themes revolve that around the main female character being intrinsically "special" in some way and the environment where she dwells needing to be forced to recognize that, often to the point where the female gets to leave her mundane environment completely and ascend to some higher life that always hers by right to begin with. In young media that's stories about discovering that you're a long lost princess, or being born with magical powers, or having a poorly explained talent for singing and/or dancing that will immediately rocket you to stardom just by performing on stage once. In older media that's the pandering stories you see in chick flicks like your, "Oh I was a terrible bad man until you opened my eyes with your love and your flower shop skills and now I will chase you down to the airport at the last possible minute and ask you to marry me," and your, "Oh I am an ancient sexy vampire with millions of dollars who has loved no one before until you came along because you're sooooo different from all the others," and your, "That's right girl, you're so selfless and pure, you'll let the man you were going to marry marry his best friend and be rewarded by finding three adorable puppies in your house which will lead you to a beach with a Christmas tree on it where your TRUE love will propose to you" (yes, yes that is a real movie.)

And there's nothing inherently wrong with that - it is just fantasy, there's nothing wrong with wanting a little escapism here and there, and it's far from unique to women. However, I think escapism tends to permeate women's media on a much heavier scale than it does men's media, and I think in general there is far less urgency to remind females that this can't actually be expected from real life. While again, this is not at all unique to either gender and does not apply universally, it is in my personal experience that women more often than men seem to get it in their heads that it's normal to be expectant of a luxurious life with little to no real work on their own part and that if it's not given to them this is some absolute miscarriage of justice. It's not uncommon to see love advice articles telling women that they deserve no less than a man who matches fairy tale perfection, and if he doesn't, he was just a narcissist or a sociopath or a toxic person anyway (seriously, go on Psychology Today online or just type "sociopath" in a Google search and watch how many discussions and articles are just scourned women diagnosing their exes with personality disorders for the most normal of asshole behavior). You haven't dealt with horror until you've dealt with late 30s - 60 year old divorcees with kids who still believe that they're just waiting for their "fairy tale wedding and happily ever after" to come and have developed a martyr complex over the fact that it hasn't yet (I've personally dealt with two, have seen more.) This probably ultimately stems from the time when women stayed at home and depended on their husbands to determine the quality of their lives, back when all a woman really could do to improve her life was hold herself to high standards and make demands of others, but it really, really doesn't mesh well with our modern gender dynamics. These ideals are not only annoying but hold women back, because you'll have control over your own life if you constantly expect others to reward you just for existing.

So how does this all relate back to Labyrinth? Labyrinth is basically the complete opposite of this message, stating instead that becoming too wrapped up in your own ideals and desires can cause you to abandon the things that actually matter. Before the movie even begins this is already at play, with Sarah's mother having an affair and leaving her husband in order to pursue a significantly more decadent and glamorous lifestyle with her new lover (who is, as we see in photos, also depicted by David Bowie). Despite disliking her parents' divorce, Sarah still in some ways wishes to imitate her mother by becoming an actress herself, and often gazes at newspaper clippings of her mother's success. Sarah's situation is actually a quite relateable one, to the point where I myself have gone through nearly identical circumstances, the frustration of having a stepparent that you do not like and having to rearrange your own comfort in order to cater to a new life setup that you never even wanted in the first place, and I'm sure many other girls have dealt with similar situations. You really do feel like you have been cheated in that scenario, and so it becomes more understandable as to why Sarah might be tempted to escape to a more self-focused life, especially when her circumstances are a direct result of others focusing on themselves. However, the way in which this happens quickly makes her see the error of her ways, as even for the most frustrated older siblings having your baby brother kidnapped is a pretty terrifying prospect - Sarah realizes that she can't blame her own sadness on innocent Toby, and by rejecting all of Jareth's advances and gifts in order to save him, rejects repeating her mother's mistake of abandoning the people who need you in order to satisfy your own dreams. After she has saved him, she gives him her childhood teddy bear that she had used as a security blanket for so long before stuffing away her mother's newsclippings and other fantasy-esque memorobilia into her drawer - accepting that it is time to grow up and start living in the real world, or at the very least, learn to temper her fantasies so they don't ever get in the way of doing what she needs to ever again.

I think that ultimately this is a pretty sobering but also empowering message for girls to take away. Getting to be the princess is not always the right path to take, offerings to be treated as special for the sake of it are typically only provided by less than trustworthy people that cause more problems than they solve; Jareth himself says that he will only give Sarah her dreams if she promises to always obey him, i.e., holding yourself to unreasonably high expectations can often leave you at the mercy of others in more ways than one. How many women out there stay in loveless or abusive relationships because of what the man provides? With self-determination and the choice to do the right thing comes accepting that you're not always going to get exactly what you want, but also maybe a chance to discover that you wanted wasn't really what you needed. It forces a lot of self-examination, which can really only ultimately build you up and help you to better achieve your potential.

If anyone hasn't seen the movie I would really encourage it, it's very well done and is trippy enough to warrant a huge variety of interpretations. Plus David Bowie guys, David Bowie.

Why is this necessary?

This is the feminist thread, this is my perspective on what I view to be feminist subject matter in a piece of media.

I occasionally get tired of just complaining about what feminism does wrong too you know.

[Mattopilos]

That's the thing - I am not sure myself if that will work. However, it is clear fighting them in groups hasn't worked, and simply makes them push back harder than before. I am no theorist of feminist thought or anything, so I couldn't really give a rigid and to-the-point solution on this if I tried. If anything, what I have said above is the strategy I would go for, because I have found 'talking on the level of the individual' makes them listen better than trying to engage a group, where people within it will sway the conversation in another direction. And honestly, they aren't ENTIRELY wrong on the 'female on male' abuse in the sense of numbers... for rape, maybe. For domestic violence, they have some distorted view of the numbers. Either way, they aren't very accepting of it being a problem at all, and placing it within their scope of 'what is unacceptable in our system' is the only way we can sway them - it is either 'their problem' or 'not a problem'.
TL;DR hasn't worked in any great capacity, but I place blame on the tactics used to push those views into their scope. It needs to be more 'personal' and less whole-gender based or they will push back again. We need to appeal to individualism to remove the stigma of the male victim of DV and rape.

That may work. I wonder if since we're focusing on things here if a new thread, focused on exploring this approach wouldn't be a good idea. At the men's resource center where I live, the center focuses on male survivors of chldhood sexual abuse by providing ashelter and counseling center, but it also supports the White Ribbon Campaign. One of the leaders there had a slogan on his door: Two of the historic problems in our society are women being owned and men being disposable. I felt that this approach was a good one, but I've often had it rejected by people who claim to be feminists and had few words of respect from others who also did.

On the other hand, there was a strong reaction here to Galloism's example being rejected and almost mocked by Chessmistress. So perhaps there is a pinprick of light at the end of hte tunnel. What do you think?

This seems like a good initiative, I agree.

[Mattopilos]

So recently I watched bits of Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" and it left me feeling a little analytical. Labyrinth has always been an extremely weird and highly interpretable film, but it's also noteworthy for having been very popular among young girls. Now with David Bowie as one of the stars and scenes like the "As The World Falls Down" sequence that would seem obvious, but I've also felt that it went a little deeper than that, I think the movie speaks to young girls on a more psychological and social level that they might not necessarily be aware of. While on the surface it seems like your typical fantasy adventure filled with puppets and raw nightmare fuel that only the 1980s could provide, I also see it as dissection of some of the less talked about aspects of the female experience, one that has not been successfully replicated since.

In you aren't familiar with Labyrinth, it centers around a 15 year old girl named Sarah who at the beginning of the film is going through a bit of a rough period: Her mother has left her father in order to be with a fellow actor, leaving her father to remarry and he and his new wife have another child, Sarah's baby half-brother Toby. Although her new stepmother does not mistreat her or anything, Sarah finds herself at odds ends with her presence as is typical with early stepparent-child relations, and becomes frustrated with now having to cut into her own interests (mainly rehearsing her own acting skills) and free time in order to help out with Toby. One night when she is forced to babysit him, Toby starts acting particularly difficult as babies tend to do, and Sarah out of frustration wishes that he would be taken away by goblins. Her wish is unexpectedly granted by David Bowie I mean Jareth the Goblin King (played by David Bowie), and when Sarah immediately takes what she said back and demands that he return her little brother, Jareth tells her that she can have him back if she can find her way through his labyrinth in a set amount of time, and thus thrusts her into a dark and magical realm in order to go on a quest to rescue her brother. Throughout the movie, David Bowie I mean Jareth repeatedly acts a bit like a creepy stalker, demonstrating a kind of twisted infatuation with Sarah and eventually making it pretty clear that what he really wants is her to stay with him forever and allow him to use his sparkly fushigi powers to give her everything she's ever wanted. In the end Sarah rejects his offers to make her dreams come true and rescues her little brother, returning to the real world but still able to occasionally speak to the friends she made along the way.

To make it short, Labyrinth is at it's heart a story about learning to let go of your own personal fantasies in order to fulfill your real life responsibilities, and I believe a deconstruction of the lenient attitude towards overindulgence that we tend to instill in young girls and even adult women. What I mean by that is that at least in our society, there tends to be this implicit attitude that females have more of a right to behavior and expectations that we might otherwise consider selfish or entitled in men. "Daddy's little princess" is a common parenting attitude and women being obsessed with pursuing luxury is still a pretty persistent stereotype. In media aimed at females, there is a strong tendency to have the stories and themes revolve that around the main female character being intrinsically "special" in some way and the environment where she dwells needing to be forced to recognize that, often to the point where the female gets to leave her mundane environment completely and ascend to some higher life that always hers by right to begin with. In young media that's stories about discovering that you're a long lost princess, or being born with magical powers, or having a poorly explained talent for singing and/or dancing that will immediately rocket you to stardom just by performing on stage once. In older media that's the pandering stories you see in chick flicks like your, "Oh I was a terrible bad man until you opened my eyes with your love and your flower shop skills and now I will chase you down to the airport at the last possible minute and ask you to marry me," and your, "Oh I am an ancient sexy vampire with millions of dollars who has loved no one before until you came along because you're sooooo different from all the others," and your, "That's right girl, you're so selfless and pure, you'll let the man you were going to marry marry his best friend and be rewarded by finding three adorable puppies in your house which will lead you to a beach with a Christmas tree on it where your TRUE love will propose to you" (yes, yes that is a real movie.)

And there's nothing inherently wrong with that - it is just fantasy, there's nothing wrong with wanting a little escapism here and there, and it's far from unique to women. However, I think escapism tends to permeate women's media on a much heavier scale than it does men's media, and I think in general there is far less urgency to remind females that this can't actually be expected from real life. While again, this is not at all unique to either gender and does not apply universally, it is in my personal experience that women more often than men seem to get it in their heads that it's normal to be expectant of a luxurious life with little to no real work on their own part and that if it's not given to them this is some absolute miscarriage of justice. It's not uncommon to see love advice articles telling women that they deserve no less than a man who matches fairy tale perfection, and if he doesn't, he was just a narcissist or a sociopath or a toxic person anyway (seriously, go on Psychology Today online or just type "sociopath" in a Google search and watch how many discussions and articles are just scourned women diagnosing their exes with personality disorders for the most normal of asshole behavior). You haven't dealt with horror until you've dealt with late 30s - 60 year old divorcees with kids who still believe that they're just waiting for their "fairy tale wedding and happily ever after" to come and have developed a martyr complex over the fact that it hasn't yet (I've personally dealt with two, have seen more.) This probably ultimately stems from the time when women stayed at home and depended on their husbands to determine the quality of their lives, back when all a woman really could do to improve her life was hold herself to high standards and make demands of others, but it really, really doesn't mesh well with our modern gender dynamics. These ideals are not only annoying but hold women back, because you'll have control over your own life if you constantly expect others to reward you just for existing.

So how does this all relate back to Labyrinth? Labyrinth is basically the complete opposite of this message, stating instead that becoming too wrapped up in your own ideals and desires can cause you to abandon the things that actually matter. Before the movie even begins this is already at play, with Sarah's mother having an affair and leaving her husband in order to pursue a significantly more decadent and glamorous lifestyle with her new lover (who is, as we see in photos, also depicted by David Bowie). Despite disliking her parents' divorce, Sarah still in some ways wishes to imitate her mother by becoming an actress herself, and often gazes at newspaper clippings of her mother's success. Sarah's situation is actually a quite relateable one, to the point where I myself have gone through nearly identical circumstances, the frustration of having a stepparent that you do not like and having to rearrange your own comfort in order to cater to a new life setup that you never even wanted in the first place, and I'm sure many other girls have dealt with similar situations. You really do feel like you have been cheated in that scenario, and so it becomes more understandable as to why Sarah might be tempted to escape to a more self-focused life, especially when her circumstances are a direct result of others focusing on themselves. However, the way in which this happens quickly makes her see the error of her ways, as even for the most frustrated older siblings having your baby brother kidnapped is a pretty terrifying prospect - Sarah realizes that she can't blame her own sadness on innocent Toby, and by rejecting all of Jareth's advances and gifts in order to save him, rejects repeating her mother's mistake of abandoning the people who need you in order to satisfy your own dreams. After she has saved him, she gives him her childhood teddy bear that she had used as a security blanket for so long before stuffing away her mother's newsclippings and other fantasy-esque memorobilia into her drawer - accepting that it is time to grow up and start living in the real world, or at the very least, learn to temper her fantasies so they don't ever get in the way of doing what she needs to ever again.

I think that ultimately this is a pretty sobering but also empowering message for girls to take away. Getting to be the princess is not always the right path to take, offerings to be treated as special for the sake of it are typically only provided by less than trustworthy people that cause more problems than they solve; Jareth himself says that he will only give Sarah her dreams if she promises to always obey him, i.e., holding yourself to unreasonably high expectations can often leave you at the mercy of others in more ways than one. How many women out there stay in loveless or abusive relationships because of what the man provides? With self-determination and the choice to do the right thing comes accepting that you're not always going to get exactly what you want, but also maybe a chance to discover that you wanted wasn't really what you needed. It forces a lot of self-examination, which can really only ultimately build you up and help you to better achieve your potential.

If anyone hasn't seen the movie I would really encourage it, it's very well done and is trippy enough to warrant a huge variety of interpretations. Plus David Bowie guys, David Bowie.

Nice read, I enjoyed the analysis. Definitely goes into traditional gender roles that have been portrayed in media, both for children and adults.

[New Edom]

So recently I watched bits of Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" and it left me feeling a little analytical. Labyrinth has always been an extremely weird and highly interpretable film, but it's also noteworthy for having been very popular among young girls. Now with David Bowie as one of the stars and scenes like the "As The World Falls Down" sequence that would seem obvious, but I've also felt that it went a little deeper than that, I think the movie speaks to young girls on a more psychological and social level that they might not necessarily be aware of. While on the surface it seems like your typical fantasy adventure filled with puppets and raw nightmare fuel that only the 1980s could provide, I also see it as dissection of some of the less talked about aspects of the female experience, one that has not been successfully replicated since.

In you aren't familiar with Labyrinth, it centers around a 15 year old girl named Sarah who at the beginning of the film is going through a bit of a rough period: Her mother has left her father in order to be with a fellow actor, leaving her father to remarry and he and his new wife have another child, Sarah's baby half-brother Toby. Although her new stepmother does not mistreat her or anything, Sarah finds herself at odds ends with her presence as is typical with early stepparent-child relations, and becomes frustrated with now having to cut into her own interests (mainly rehearsing her own acting skills) and free time in order to help out with Toby. One night when she is forced to babysit him, Toby starts acting particularly difficult as babies tend to do, and Sarah out of frustration wishes that he would be taken away by goblins. Her wish is unexpectedly granted by David Bowie I mean Jareth the Goblin King (played by David Bowie), and when Sarah immediately takes what she said back and demands that he return her little brother, Jareth tells her that she can have him back if she can find her way through his labyrinth in a set amount of time, and thus thrusts her into a dark and magical realm in order to go on a quest to rescue her brother. Throughout the movie, David Bowie I mean Jareth repeatedly acts a bit like a creepy stalker, demonstrating a kind of twisted infatuation with Sarah and eventually making it pretty clear that what he really wants is her to stay with him forever and allow him to use his sparkly fushigi powers to give her everything she's ever wanted. In the end Sarah rejects his offers to make her dreams come true and rescues her little brother, returning to the real world but still able to occasionally speak to the friends she made along the way.

To make it short, Labyrinth is at it's heart a story about learning to let go of your own personal fantasies in order to fulfill your real life responsibilities, and I believe a deconstruction of the lenient attitude towards overindulgence that we tend to instill in young girls and even adult women. What I mean by that is that at least in our society, there tends to be this implicit attitude that females have more of a right to behavior and expectations that we might otherwise consider selfish or entitled in men. "Daddy's little princess" is a common parenting attitude and women being obsessed with pursuing luxury is still a pretty persistent stereotype. In media aimed at females, there is a strong tendency to have the stories and themes revolve that around the main female character being intrinsically "special" in some way and the environment where she dwells needing to be forced to recognize that, often to the point where the female gets to leave her mundane environment completely and ascend to some higher life that always hers by right to begin with. In young media that's stories about discovering that you're a long lost princess, or being born with magical powers, or having a poorly explained talent for singing and/or dancing that will immediately rocket you to stardom just by performing on stage once. In older media that's the pandering stories you see in chick flicks like your, "Oh I was a terrible bad man until you opened my eyes with your love and your flower shop skills and now I will chase you down to the airport at the last possible minute and ask you to marry me," and your, "Oh I am an ancient sexy vampire with millions of dollars who has loved no one before until you came along because you're sooooo different from all the others," and your, "That's right girl, you're so selfless and pure, you'll let the man you were going to marry marry his best friend and be rewarded by finding three adorable puppies in your house which will lead you to a beach with a Christmas tree on it where your TRUE love will propose to you" (yes, yes that is a real movie.)

And there's nothing inherently wrong with that - it is just fantasy, there's nothing wrong with wanting a little escapism here and there, and it's far from unique to women. However, I think escapism tends to permeate women's media on a much heavier scale than it does men's media, and I think in general there is far less urgency to remind females that this can't actually be expected from real life. While again, this is not at all unique to either gender and does not apply universally, it is in my personal experience that women more often than men seem to get it in their heads that it's normal to be expectant of a luxurious life with little to no real work on their own part and that if it's not given to them this is some absolute miscarriage of justice. It's not uncommon to see love advice articles telling women that they deserve no less than a man who matches fairy tale perfection, and if he doesn't, he was just a narcissist or a sociopath or a toxic person anyway (seriously, go on Psychology Today online or just type "sociopath" in a Google search and watch how many discussions and articles are just scourned women diagnosing their exes with personality disorders for the most normal of asshole behavior). You haven't dealt with horror until you've dealt with late 30s - 60 year old divorcees with kids who still believe that they're just waiting for their "fairy tale wedding and happily ever after" to come and have developed a martyr complex over the fact that it hasn't yet (I've personally dealt with two, have seen more.) This probably ultimately stems from the time when women stayed at home and depended on their husbands to determine the quality of their lives, back when all a woman really could do to improve her life was hold herself to high standards and make demands of others, but it really, really doesn't mesh well with our modern gender dynamics. These ideals are not only annoying but hold women back, because you'll have control over your own life if you constantly expect others to reward you just for existing.

So how does this all relate back to Labyrinth? Labyrinth is basically the complete opposite of this message, stating instead that becoming too wrapped up in your own ideals and desires can cause you to abandon the things that actually matter. Before the movie even begins this is already at play, with Sarah's mother having an affair and leaving her husband in order to pursue a significantly more decadent and glamorous lifestyle with her new lover (who is, as we see in photos, also depicted by David Bowie). Despite disliking her parents' divorce, Sarah still in some ways wishes to imitate her mother by becoming an actress herself, and often gazes at newspaper clippings of her mother's success. Sarah's situation is actually a quite relateable one, to the point where I myself have gone through nearly identical circumstances, the frustration of having a stepparent that you do not like and having to rearrange your own comfort in order to cater to a new life setup that you never even wanted in the first place, and I'm sure many other girls have dealt with similar situations. You really do feel like you have been cheated in that scenario, and so it becomes more understandable as to why Sarah might be tempted to escape to a more self-focused life, especially when her circumstances are a direct result of others focusing on themselves. However, the way in which this happens quickly makes her see the error of her ways, as even for the most frustrated older siblings having your baby brother kidnapped is a pretty terrifying prospect - Sarah realizes that she can't blame her own sadness on innocent Toby, and by rejecting all of Jareth's advances and gifts in order to save him, rejects repeating her mother's mistake of abandoning the people who need you in order to satisfy your own dreams. After she has saved him, she gives him her childhood teddy bear that she had used as a security blanket for so long before stuffing away her mother's newsclippings and other fantasy-esque memorobilia into her drawer - accepting that it is time to grow up and start living in the real world, or at the very least, learn to temper her fantasies so they don't ever get in the way of doing what she needs to ever again.

I think that ultimately this is a pretty sobering but also empowering message for girls to take away. Getting to be the princess is not always the right path to take, offerings to be treated as special for the sake of it are typically only provided by less than trustworthy people that cause more problems than they solve; Jareth himself says that he will only give Sarah her dreams if she promises to always obey him, i.e., holding yourself to unreasonably high expectations can often leave you at the mercy of others in more ways than one. How many women out there stay in loveless or abusive relationships because of what the man provides? With self-determination and the choice to do the right thing comes accepting that you're not always going to get exactly what you want, but also maybe a chance to discover that you wanted wasn't really what you needed. It forces a lot of self-examination, which can really only ultimately build you up and help you to better achieve your potential.

If anyone hasn't seen the movie I would really encourage it, it's very well done and is trippy enough to warrant a huge variety of interpretations. Plus David Bowie guys, David Bowie.

Interesting analysis. I agree with much of this. Some peopel have complained about how selfishly Sarah comes across as being at the start, but I would argue that people can be selfish at times in their life and that she learns to be a more decent person by the end. I liked that she learns to balance her fantasy life with her real life, so that her magical friends will be there for her and her for them but that she has learned to be a devoted sister by going through all that weird shit to get Toby back.

I would add that it's interesting how in this film behaviour that is often acceptable in other stories--Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, True Blood etc where it is romantic to stalk your desired one that in this film David Bowie is depicted as charming, handsome--and a manipulative, controlling villain who turns out to be intensely needy at the end. I think that it would not be reasonable within the story if someone as charismatic as Bowie did not play him, because it SHOULD be tempting. Too many times bad guys in women's stories are transparent and silly.

[Gravlen]

I agree. To try and create a label for one's self purely from their gender (as gender roles do) is self-destructive in that sense. To express oneself by what you want to be expressed by is more important, imo. I mean, I hardly go around and 'act like a man' or to appear masculine because that is what is expected - do what you want. To underestimate someone on a single label, such as gender, is as bad as overestimating someone based on their gender.


Exactly - no one is perfect, and no one can ever be. To work on your weaknesses and make use of your strengths is important. To equalize the genders in the understanding there are strengths and weaknesses, whether that is part of their gender or part of the 'gender role', is an important thing to do, and a goal that should be aimed for. We must embrace ourselves on weaknesses and strengths.

For all the insistent talk about equality, many 3rd Wave feminists seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. They seem to want to be able to keep being vulnerable and protecred because they are women along with being able to challenge gender norms. They also do their best to control the conversation so that people cannot ask them hard questions they have to answer.

This discussion of sex is a good example. There are traditional behaviours that both men and women do that undermine consent, yet the female ones are not seen as undermining consent. For example if a woman starts grinding up against a stranger in a bar, is she not doing actions that in men are being condemned lately? If women on a television show or in a movie start ogling a man, talking about his body in a way that makes him visibly uncomfortable, are they not harassing him? Why is it cute if women do it?

It either needs to be true for everyone or maybe they--the zealots in the 3rd Wave--need to back off a little and let the conversation actually happen.

How are any of those "undermining consent"?

What do you actually mean when you say "undermining consent"?

[The Grene Knyght]

So recently I watched bits of Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" and it left me feeling a little analytical. Labyrinth has always been an extremely weird and highly interpretable film, but it's also noteworthy for having been very popular among young girls. Now with David Bowie as one of the stars and scenes like the "As The World Falls Down" sequence that would seem obvious, but I've also felt that it went a little deeper than that, I think the movie speaks to young girls on a more psychological and social level that they might not necessarily be aware of. While on the surface it seems like your typical fantasy adventure filled with puppets and raw nightmare fuel that only the 1980s could provide, I also see it as dissection of some of the less talked about aspects of the female experience, one that has not been successfully replicated since.

In you aren't familiar with Labyrinth, it centers around a 15 year old girl named Sarah who at the beginning of the film is going through a bit of a rough period: Her mother has left her father in order to be with a fellow actor, leaving her father to remarry and he and his new wife have another child, Sarah's baby half-brother Toby. Although her new stepmother does not mistreat her or anything, Sarah finds herself at odds ends with her presence as is typical with early stepparent-child relations, and becomes frustrated with now having to cut into her own interests (mainly rehearsing her own acting skills) and free time in order to help out with Toby. One night when she is forced to babysit him, Toby starts acting particularly difficult as babies tend to do, and Sarah out of frustration wishes that he would be taken away by goblins. Her wish is unexpectedly granted by David Bowie I mean Jareth the Goblin King (played by David Bowie), and when Sarah immediately takes what she said back and demands that he return her little brother, Jareth tells her that she can have him back if she can find her way through his labyrinth in a set amount of time, and thus thrusts her into a dark and magical realm in order to go on a quest to rescue her brother. Throughout the movie, David Bowie I mean Jareth repeatedly acts a bit like a creepy stalker, demonstrating a kind of twisted infatuation with Sarah and eventually making it pretty clear that what he really wants is her to stay with him forever and allow him to use his sparkly fushigi powers to give her everything she's ever wanted. In the end Sarah rejects his offers to make her dreams come true and rescues her little brother, returning to the real world but still able to occasionally speak to the friends she made along the way.

To make it short, Labyrinth is at it's heart a story about learning to let go of your own personal fantasies in order to fulfill your real life responsibilities, and I believe a deconstruction of the lenient attitude towards overindulgence that we tend to instill in young girls and even adult women. What I mean by that is that at least in our society, there tends to be this implicit attitude that females have more of a right to behavior and expectations that we might otherwise consider selfish or entitled in men. "Daddy's little princess" is a common parenting attitude and women being obsessed with pursuing luxury is still a pretty persistent stereotype. In media aimed at females, there is a strong tendency to have the stories and themes revolve that around the main female character being intrinsically "special" in some way and the environment where she dwells needing to be forced to recognize that, often to the point where the female gets to leave her mundane environment completely and ascend to some higher life that always hers by right to begin with. In young media that's stories about discovering that you're a long lost princess, or being born with magical powers, or having a poorly explained talent for singing and/or dancing that will immediately rocket you to stardom just by performing on stage once. In older media that's the pandering stories you see in chick flicks like your, "Oh I was a terrible bad man until you opened my eyes with your love and your flower shop skills and now I will chase you down to the airport at the last possible minute and ask you to marry me," and your, "Oh I am an ancient sexy vampire with millions of dollars who has loved no one before until you came along because you're sooooo different from all the others," and your, "That's right girl, you're so selfless and pure, you'll let the man you were going to marry marry his best friend and be rewarded by finding three adorable puppies in your house which will lead you to a beach with a Christmas tree on it where your TRUE love will propose to you" (yes, yes that is a real movie.)

And there's nothing inherently wrong with that - it is just fantasy, there's nothing wrong with wanting a little escapism here and there, and it's far from unique to women. However, I think escapism tends to permeate women's media on a much heavier scale than it does men's media, and I think in general there is far less urgency to remind females that this can't actually be expected from real life. While again, this is not at all unique to either gender and does not apply universally, it is in my personal experience that women more often than men seem to get it in their heads that it's normal to be expectant of a luxurious life with little to no real work on their own part and that if it's not given to them this is some absolute miscarriage of justice. It's not uncommon to see love advice articles telling women that they deserve no less than a man who matches fairy tale perfection, and if he doesn't, he was just a narcissist or a sociopath or a toxic person anyway (seriously, go on Psychology Today online or just type "sociopath" in a Google search and watch how many discussions and articles are just scourned women diagnosing their exes with personality disorders for the most normal of asshole behavior). You haven't dealt with horror until you've dealt with late 30s - 60 year old divorcees with kids who still believe that they're just waiting for their "fairy tale wedding and happily ever after" to come and have developed a martyr complex over the fact that it hasn't yet (I've personally dealt with two, have seen more.) This probably ultimately stems from the time when women stayed at home and depended on their husbands to determine the quality of their lives, back when all a woman really could do to improve her life was hold herself to high standards and make demands of others, but it really, really doesn't mesh well with our modern gender dynamics. These ideals are not only annoying but hold women back, because you'll have control over your own life if you constantly expect others to reward you just for existing.

So how does this all relate back to Labyrinth? Labyrinth is basically the complete opposite of this message, stating instead that becoming too wrapped up in your own ideals and desires can cause you to abandon the things that actually matter. Before the movie even begins this is already at play, with Sarah's mother having an affair and leaving her husband in order to pursue a significantly more decadent and glamorous lifestyle with her new lover (who is, as we see in photos, also depicted by David Bowie). Despite disliking her parents' divorce, Sarah still in some ways wishes to imitate her mother by becoming an actress herself, and often gazes at newspaper clippings of her mother's success. Sarah's situation is actually a quite relateable one, to the point where I myself have gone through nearly identical circumstances, the frustration of having a stepparent that you do not like and having to rearrange your own comfort in order to cater to a new life setup that you never even wanted in the first place, and I'm sure many other girls have dealt with similar situations. You really do feel like you have been cheated in that scenario, and so it becomes more understandable as to why Sarah might be tempted to escape to a more self-focused life, especially when her circumstances are a direct result of others focusing on themselves. However, the way in which this happens quickly makes her see the error of her ways, as even for the most frustrated older siblings having your baby brother kidnapped is a pretty terrifying prospect - Sarah realizes that she can't blame her own sadness on innocent Toby, and by rejecting all of Jareth's advances and gifts in order to save him, rejects repeating her mother's mistake of abandoning the people who need you in order to satisfy your own dreams. After she has saved him, she gives him her childhood teddy bear that she had used as a security blanket for so long before stuffing away her mother's newsclippings and other fantasy-esque memorobilia into her drawer - accepting that it is time to grow up and start living in the real world, or at the very least, learn to temper her fantasies so they don't ever get in the way of doing what she needs to ever again.

I think that ultimately this is a pretty sobering but also empowering message for girls to take away. Getting to be the princess is not always the right path to take, offerings to be treated as special for the sake of it are typically only provided by less than trustworthy people that cause more problems than they solve; Jareth himself says that he will only give Sarah her dreams if she promises to always obey him, i.e., holding yourself to unreasonably high expectations can often leave you at the mercy of others in more ways than one. How many women out there stay in loveless or abusive relationships because of what the man provides? With self-determination and the choice to do the right thing comes accepting that you're not always going to get exactly what you want, but also maybe a chance to discover that you wanted wasn't really what you needed. It forces a lot of self-examination, which can really only ultimately build you up and help you to better achieve your potential.

If anyone hasn't seen the movie I would really encourage it, it's very well done and is trippy enough to warrant a huge variety of interpretations. Plus David Bowie guys, David Bowie.

Noice. Its probably been too long since I watched this movie to contribute to the discussion on it in any meaningful way, though.

So recently I watched bits of Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" and it left me feeling a little analytical. Labyrinth has always been an extremely weird and highly interpretable film, but it's also noteworthy for having been very popular among young girls. Now with David Bowie as one of the stars and scenes like the "As The World Falls Down" sequence that would seem obvious, but I've also felt that it went a little deeper than that, I think the movie speaks to young girls on a more psychological and social level that they might not necessarily be aware of. While on the surface it seems like your typical fantasy adventure filled with puppets and raw nightmare fuel that only the 1980s could provide, I also see it as dissection of some of the less talked about aspects of the female experience, one that has not been successfully replicated since.

In you aren't familiar with Labyrinth, it centers around a 15 year old girl named Sarah who at the beginning of the film is going through a bit of a rough period: Her mother has left her father in order to be with a fellow actor, leaving her father to remarry and he and his new wife have another child, Sarah's baby half-brother Toby. Although her new stepmother does not mistreat her or anything, Sarah finds herself at odds ends with her presence as is typical with early stepparent-child relations, and becomes frustrated with now having to cut into her own interests (mainly rehearsing her own acting skills) and free time in order to help out with Toby. One night when she is forced to babysit him, Toby starts acting particularly difficult as babies tend to do, and Sarah out of frustration wishes that he would be taken away by goblins. Her wish is unexpectedly granted by David Bowie I mean Jareth the Goblin King (played by David Bowie), and when Sarah immediately takes what she said back and demands that he return her little brother, Jareth tells her that she can have him back if she can find her way through his labyrinth in a set amount of time, and thus thrusts her into a dark and magical realm in order to go on a quest to rescue her brother. Throughout the movie, David Bowie I mean Jareth repeatedly acts a bit like a creepy stalker, demonstrating a kind of twisted infatuation with Sarah and eventually making it pretty clear that what he really wants is her to stay with him forever and allow him to use his sparkly fushigi powers to give her everything she's ever wanted. In the end Sarah rejects his offers to make her dreams come true and rescues her little brother, returning to the real world but still able to occasionally speak to the friends she made along the way.

To make it short, Labyrinth is at it's heart a story about learning to let go of your own personal fantasies in order to fulfill your real life responsibilities, and I believe a deconstruction of the lenient attitude towards overindulgence that we tend to instill in young girls and even adult women. What I mean by that is that at least in our society, there tends to be this implicit attitude that females have more of a right to behavior and expectations that we might otherwise consider selfish or entitled in men. "Daddy's little princess" is a common parenting attitude and women being obsessed with pursuing luxury is still a pretty persistent stereotype. In media aimed at females, there is a strong tendency to have the stories and themes revolve that around the main female character being intrinsically "special" in some way and the environment where she dwells needing to be forced to recognize that, often to the point where the female gets to leave her mundane environment completely and ascend to some higher life that always hers by right to begin with. In young media that's stories about discovering that you're a long lost princess, or being born with magical powers, or having a poorly explained talent for singing and/or dancing that will immediately rocket you to stardom just by performing on stage once. In older media that's the pandering stories you see in chick flicks like your, "Oh I was a terrible bad man until you opened my eyes with your love and your flower shop skills and now I will chase you down to the airport at the last possible minute and ask you to marry me," and your, "Oh I am an ancient sexy vampire with millions of dollars who has loved no one before until you came along because you're sooooo different from all the others," and your, "That's right girl, you're so selfless and pure, you'll let the man you were going to marry marry his best friend and be rewarded by finding three adorable puppies in your house which will lead you to a beach with a Christmas tree on it where your TRUE love will propose to you" (yes, yes that is a real movie.)

And there's nothing inherently wrong with that - it is just fantasy, there's nothing wrong with wanting a little escapism here and there, and it's far from unique to women. However, I think escapism tends to permeate women's media on a much heavier scale than it does men's media, and I think in general there is far less urgency to remind females that this can't actually be expected from real life. While again, this is not at all unique to either gender and does not apply universally, it is in my personal experience that women more often than men seem to get it in their heads that it's normal to be expectant of a luxurious life with little to no real work on their own part and that if it's not given to them this is some absolute miscarriage of justice. It's not uncommon to see love advice articles telling women that they deserve no less than a man who matches fairy tale perfection, and if he doesn't, he was just a narcissist or a sociopath or a toxic person anyway (seriously, go on Psychology Today online or just type "sociopath" in a Google search and watch how many discussions and articles are just scourned women diagnosing their exes with personality disorders for the most normal of asshole behavior). You haven't dealt with horror until you've dealt with late 30s - 60 year old divorcees with kids who still believe that they're just waiting for their "fairy tale wedding and happily ever after" to come and have developed a martyr complex over the fact that it hasn't yet (I've personally dealt with two, have seen more.) This probably ultimately stems from the time when women stayed at home and depended on their husbands to determine the quality of their lives, back when all a woman really could do to improve her life was hold herself to high standards and make demands of others, but it really, really doesn't mesh well with our modern gender dynamics. These ideals are not only annoying but hold women back, because you'll have control over your own life if you constantly expect others to reward you just for existing.

So how does this all relate back to Labyrinth? Labyrinth is basically the complete opposite of this message, stating instead that becoming too wrapped up in your own ideals and desires can cause you to abandon the things that actually matter. Before the movie even begins this is already at play, with Sarah's mother having an affair and leaving her husband in order to pursue a significantly more decadent and glamorous lifestyle with her new lover (who is, as we see in photos, also depicted by David Bowie). Despite disliking her parents' divorce, Sarah still in some ways wishes to imitate her mother by becoming an actress herself, and often gazes at newspaper clippings of her mother's success. Sarah's situation is actually a quite relateable one, to the point where I myself have gone through nearly identical circumstances, the frustration of having a stepparent that you do not like and having to rearrange your own comfort in order to cater to a new life setup that you never even wanted in the first place, and I'm sure many other girls have dealt with similar situations. You really do feel like you have been cheated in that scenario, and so it becomes more understandable as to why Sarah might be tempted to escape to a more self-focused life, especially when her circumstances are a direct result of others focusing on themselves. However, the way in which this happens quickly makes her see the error of her ways, as even for the most frustrated older siblings having your baby brother kidnapped is a pretty terrifying prospect - Sarah realizes that she can't blame her own sadness on innocent Toby, and by rejecting all of Jareth's advances and gifts in order to save him, rejects repeating her mother's mistake of abandoning the people who need you in order to satisfy your own dreams. After she has saved him, she gives him her childhood teddy bear that she had used as a security blanket for so long before stuffing away her mother's newsclippings and other fantasy-esque memorobilia into her drawer - accepting that it is time to grow up and start living in the real world, or at the very least, learn to temper her fantasies so they don't ever get in the way of doing what she needs to ever again.

I think that ultimately this is a pretty sobering but also empowering message for girls to take away. Getting to be the princess is not always the right path to take, offerings to be treated as special for the sake of it are typically only provided by less than trustworthy people that cause more problems than they solve; Jareth himself says that he will only give Sarah her dreams if she promises to always obey him, i.e., holding yourself to unreasonably high expectations can often leave you at the mercy of others in more ways than one. How many women out there stay in loveless or abusive relationships because of what the man provides? With self-determination and the choice to do the right thing comes accepting that you're not always going to get exactly what you want, but also maybe a chance to discover that you wanted wasn't really what you needed. It forces a lot of self-examination, which can really only ultimately build you up and help you to better achieve your potential.

If anyone hasn't seen the movie I would really encourage it, it's very well done and is trippy enough to warrant a huge variety of interpretations. Plus David Bowie guys, David Bowie.

Interesting analysis. I agree with much of this. Some peopel have complained about how selfishly Sarah comes across as being at the start, but I would argue that people can be selfish at times in their life and that she learns to be a more decent person by the end. I liked that she learns to balance her fantasy life with her real life, so that her magical friends will be there for her and her for them but that she has learned to be a devoted sister by going through all that weird shit to get Toby back.

I would add that it's interesting how in this film behaviour that is often acceptable in other stories--Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, True Blood etc where it is romantic to stalk your desired one that in this film David Bowie is depicted as charming, handsome--and a manipulative, controlling villain who turns out to be intensely needy at the end. I think that it would not be reasonable within the story if someone as charismatic as Bowie did not play him, because it SHOULD be tempting. Too many times bad guys in women's stories are transparent and silly.

Films like the ones you mentioned are pretty widely criticised by feminists (and a lot of other people too lol)

[New Edom]

For all the insistent talk about equality, many 3rd Wave feminists seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. They seem to want to be able to keep being vulnerable and protecred because they are women along with being able to challenge gender norms. They also do their best to control the conversation so that people cannot ask them hard questions they have to answer.

This discussion of sex is a good example. There are traditional behaviours that both men and women do that undermine consent, yet the female ones are not seen as undermining consent. For example if a woman starts grinding up against a stranger in a bar, is she not doing actions that in men are being condemned lately? If women on a television show or in a movie start ogling a man, talking about his body in a way that makes him visibly uncomfortable, are they not harassing him? Why is it cute if women do it?

It either needs to be true for everyone or maybe they--the zealots in the 3rd Wave--need to back off a little and let the conversation actually happen.

How are any of those "undermining consent"?

What do you actually mean when you say "undermining consent"?

Those feminists who claim to educate the public on consent often talk about making sexual comments to a woman, or touching a woman in a sexual manner as being harassment or sexual assault. So if they are to be consistent it should also be the same if women initiate the contact or comments.

[Gravlen]

How are any of those "undermining consent"?

What do you actually mean when you say "undermining consent"?

Those feminists who claim to educate the public on consent often talk about making sexual comments to a woman, or touching a woman in a sexual manner as being harassment or sexual assault. So if they are to be consistent it should also be the same if women initiate the contact or comments.

Sure.

What does that have to do with "undermining consent"?

[New Edom]

So recently I watched bits of Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" and it left me feeling a little analytical. Labyrinth has always been an extremely weird and highly interpretable film, but it's also noteworthy for having been very popular among young girls. Now with David Bowie as one of the stars and scenes like the "As The World Falls Down" sequence that would seem obvious, but I've also felt that it went a little deeper than that, I think the movie speaks to young girls on a more psychological and social level that they might not necessarily be aware of. While on the surface it seems like your typical fantasy adventure filled with puppets and raw nightmare fuel that only the 1980s could provide, I also see it as dissection of some of the less talked about aspects of the female experience, one that has not been successfully replicated since.

In you aren't familiar with Labyrinth, it centers around a 15 year old girl named Sarah who at the beginning of the film is going through a bit of a rough period: Her mother has left her father in order to be with a fellow actor, leaving her father to remarry and he and his new wife have another child, Sarah's baby half-brother Toby. Although her new stepmother does not mistreat her or anything, Sarah finds herself at odds ends with her presence as is typical with early stepparent-child relations, and becomes frustrated with now having to cut into her own interests (mainly rehearsing her own acting skills) and free time in order to help out with Toby. One night when she is forced to babysit him, Toby starts acting particularly difficult as babies tend to do, and Sarah out of frustration wishes that he would be taken away by goblins. Her wish is unexpectedly granted by David Bowie I mean Jareth the Goblin King (played by David Bowie), and when Sarah immediately takes what she said back and demands that he return her little brother, Jareth tells her that she can have him back if she can find her way through his labyrinth in a set amount of time, and thus thrusts her into a dark and magical realm in order to go on a quest to rescue her brother. Throughout the movie, David Bowie I mean Jareth repeatedly acts a bit like a creepy stalker, demonstrating a kind of twisted infatuation with Sarah and eventually making it pretty clear that what he really wants is her to stay with him forever and allow him to use his sparkly fushigi powers to give her everything she's ever wanted. In the end Sarah rejects his offers to make her dreams come true and rescues her little brother, returning to the real world but still able to occasionally speak to the friends she made along the way.

To make it short, Labyrinth is at it's heart a story about learning to let go of your own personal fantasies in order to fulfill your real life responsibilities, and I believe a deconstruction of the lenient attitude towards overindulgence that we tend to instill in young girls and even adult women. What I mean by that is that at least in our society, there tends to be this implicit attitude that females have more of a right to behavior and expectations that we might otherwise consider selfish or entitled in men. "Daddy's little princess" is a common parenting attitude and women being obsessed with pursuing luxury is still a pretty persistent stereotype. In media aimed at females, there is a strong tendency to have the stories and themes revolve that around the main female character being intrinsically "special" in some way and the environment where she dwells needing to be forced to recognize that, often to the point where the female gets to leave her mundane environment completely and ascend to some higher life that always hers by right to begin with. In young media that's stories about discovering that you're a long lost princess, or being born with magical powers, or having a poorly explained talent for singing and/or dancing that will immediately rocket you to stardom just by performing on stage once. In older media that's the pandering stories you see in chick flicks like your, "Oh I was a terrible bad man until you opened my eyes with your love and your flower shop skills and now I will chase you down to the airport at the last possible minute and ask you to marry me," and your, "Oh I am an ancient sexy vampire with millions of dollars who has loved no one before until you came along because you're sooooo different from all the others," and your, "That's right girl, you're so selfless and pure, you'll let the man you were going to marry marry his best friend and be rewarded by finding three adorable puppies in your house which will lead you to a beach with a Christmas tree on it where your TRUE love will propose to you" (yes, yes that is a real movie.)

And there's nothing inherently wrong with that - it is just fantasy, there's nothing wrong with wanting a little escapism here and there, and it's far from unique to women. However, I think escapism tends to permeate women's media on a much heavier scale than it does men's media, and I think in general there is far less urgency to remind females that this can't actually be expected from real life. While again, this is not at all unique to either gender and does not apply universally, it is in my personal experience that women more often than men seem to get it in their heads that it's normal to be expectant of a luxurious life with little to no real work on their own part and that if it's not given to them this is some absolute miscarriage of justice. It's not uncommon to see love advice articles telling women that they deserve no less than a man who matches fairy tale perfection, and if he doesn't, he was just a narcissist or a sociopath or a toxic person anyway (seriously, go on Psychology Today online or just type "sociopath" in a Google search and watch how many discussions and articles are just scourned women diagnosing their exes with personality disorders for the most normal of asshole behavior). You haven't dealt with horror until you've dealt with late 30s - 60 year old divorcees with kids who still believe that they're just waiting for their "fairy tale wedding and happily ever after" to come and have developed a martyr complex over the fact that it hasn't yet (I've personally dealt with two, have seen more.) This probably ultimately stems from the time when women stayed at home and depended on their husbands to determine the quality of their lives, back when all a woman really could do to improve her life was hold herself to high standards and make demands of others, but it really, really doesn't mesh well with our modern gender dynamics. These ideals are not only annoying but hold women back, because you'll have control over your own life if you constantly expect others to reward you just for existing.

So how does this all relate back to Labyrinth? Labyrinth is basically the complete opposite of this message, stating instead that becoming too wrapped up in your own ideals and desires can cause you to abandon the things that actually matter. Before the movie even begins this is already at play, with Sarah's mother having an affair and leaving her husband in order to pursue a significantly more decadent and glamorous lifestyle with her new lover (who is, as we see in photos, also depicted by David Bowie). Despite disliking her parents' divorce, Sarah still in some ways wishes to imitate her mother by becoming an actress herself, and often gazes at newspaper clippings of her mother's success. Sarah's situation is actually a quite relateable one, to the point where I myself have gone through nearly identical circumstances, the frustration of having a stepparent that you do not like and having to rearrange your own comfort in order to cater to a new life setup that you never even wanted in the first place, and I'm sure many other girls have dealt with similar situations. You really do feel like you have been cheated in that scenario, and so it becomes more understandable as to why Sarah might be tempted to escape to a more self-focused life, especially when her circumstances are a direct result of others focusing on themselves. However, the way in which this happens quickly makes her see the error of her ways, as even for the most frustrated older siblings having your baby brother kidnapped is a pretty terrifying prospect - Sarah realizes that she can't blame her own sadness on innocent Toby, and by rejecting all of Jareth's advances and gifts in order to save him, rejects repeating her mother's mistake of abandoning the people who need you in order to satisfy your own dreams. After she has saved him, she gives him her childhood teddy bear that she had used as a security blanket for so long before stuffing away her mother's newsclippings and other fantasy-esque memorobilia into her drawer - accepting that it is time to grow up and start living in the real world, or at the very least, learn to temper her fantasies so they don't ever get in the way of doing what she needs to ever again.

I think that ultimately this is a pretty sobering but also empowering message for girls to take away. Getting to be the princess is not always the right path to take, offerings to be treated as special for the sake of it are typically only provided by less than trustworthy people that cause more problems than they solve; Jareth himself says that he will only give Sarah her dreams if she promises to always obey him, i.e., holding yourself to unreasonably high expectations can often leave you at the mercy of others in more ways than one. How many women out there stay in loveless or abusive relationships because of what the man provides? With self-determination and the choice to do the right thing comes accepting that you're not always going to get exactly what you want, but also maybe a chance to discover that you wanted wasn't really what you needed. It forces a lot of self-examination, which can really only ultimately build you up and help you to better achieve your potential.

If anyone hasn't seen the movie I would really encourage it, it's very well done and is trippy enough to warrant a huge variety of interpretations. Plus David Bowie guys, David Bowie.

Noice. Its probably been too long since I watched this movie to contribute to the discussion on it in any meaningful way, though.

Interesting analysis. I agree with much of this. Some peopel have complained about how selfishly Sarah comes across as being at the start, but I would argue that people can be selfish at times in their life and that she learns to be a more decent person by the end. I liked that she learns to balance her fantasy life with her real life, so that her magical friends will be there for her and her for them but that she has learned to be a devoted sister by going through all that weird shit to get Toby back.

I would add that it's interesting how in this film behaviour that is often acceptable in other stories--Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, True Blood etc where it is romantic to stalk your desired one that in this film David Bowie is depicted as charming, handsome--and a manipulative, controlling villain who turns out to be intensely needy at the end. I think that it would not be reasonable within the story if someone as charismatic as Bowie did not play him, because it SHOULD be tempting. Too many times bad guys in women's stories are transparent and silly.

Films like the ones you mentioned are pretty widely criticised by feminists (and a lot of other people too lol)

I think that the criticisms often don't focus on women's own choices though; most feminists criticize such stories as though it's part of the Patriarchy Conspiracy Theory rather than as issues women have that they need to grow out of.

[Giovenith]

So recently I watched bits of Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" and it left me feeling a little analytical. Labyrinth has always been an extremely weird and highly interpretable film, but it's also noteworthy for having been very popular among young girls. Now with David Bowie as one of the stars and scenes like the "As The World Falls Down" sequence that would seem obvious, but I've also felt that it went a little deeper than that, I think the movie speaks to young girls on a more psychological and social level that they might not necessarily be aware of. While on the surface it seems like your typical fantasy adventure filled with puppets and raw nightmare fuel that only the 1980s could provide, I also see it as dissection of some of the less talked about aspects of the female experience, one that has not been successfully replicated since.

In you aren't familiar with Labyrinth, it centers around a 15 year old girl named Sarah who at the beginning of the film is going through a bit of a rough period: Her mother has left her father in order to be with a fellow actor, leaving her father to remarry and he and his new wife have another child, Sarah's baby half-brother Toby. Although her new stepmother does not mistreat her or anything, Sarah finds herself at odds ends with her presence as is typical with early stepparent-child relations, and becomes frustrated with now having to cut into her own interests (mainly rehearsing her own acting skills) and free time in order to help out with Toby. One night when she is forced to babysit him, Toby starts acting particularly difficult as babies tend to do, and Sarah out of frustration wishes that he would be taken away by goblins. Her wish is unexpectedly granted by David Bowie I mean Jareth the Goblin King (played by David Bowie), and when Sarah immediately takes what she said back and demands that he return her little brother, Jareth tells her that she can have him back if she can find her way through his labyrinth in a set amount of time, and thus thrusts her into a dark and magical realm in order to go on a quest to rescue her brother. Throughout the movie, David Bowie I mean Jareth repeatedly acts a bit like a creepy stalker, demonstrating a kind of twisted infatuation with Sarah and eventually making it pretty clear that what he really wants is her to stay with him forever and allow him to use his sparkly fushigi powers to give her everything she's ever wanted. In the end Sarah rejects his offers to make her dreams come true and rescues her little brother, returning to the real world but still able to occasionally speak to the friends she made along the way.

To make it short, Labyrinth is at it's heart a story about learning to let go of your own personal fantasies in order to fulfill your real life responsibilities, and I believe a deconstruction of the lenient attitude towards overindulgence that we tend to instill in young girls and even adult women. What I mean by that is that at least in our society, there tends to be this implicit attitude that females have more of a right to behavior and expectations that we might otherwise consider selfish or entitled in men. "Daddy's little princess" is a common parenting attitude and women being obsessed with pursuing luxury is still a pretty persistent stereotype. In media aimed at females, there is a strong tendency to have the stories and themes revolve that around the main female character being intrinsically "special" in some way and the environment where she dwells needing to be forced to recognize that, often to the point where the female gets to leave her mundane environment completely and ascend to some higher life that always hers by right to begin with. In young media that's stories about discovering that you're a long lost princess, or being born with magical powers, or having a poorly explained talent for singing and/or dancing that will immediately rocket you to stardom just by performing on stage once. In older media that's the pandering stories you see in chick flicks like your, "Oh I was a terrible bad man until you opened my eyes with your love and your flower shop skills and now I will chase you down to the airport at the last possible minute and ask you to marry me," and your, "Oh I am an ancient sexy vampire with millions of dollars who has loved no one before until you came along because you're sooooo different from all the others," and your, "That's right girl, you're so selfless and pure, you'll let the man you were going to marry marry his best friend and be rewarded by finding three adorable puppies in your house which will lead you to a beach with a Christmas tree on it where your TRUE love will propose to you" (yes, yes that is a real movie.)

And there's nothing inherently wrong with that - it is just fantasy, there's nothing wrong with wanting a little escapism here and there, and it's far from unique to women. However, I think escapism tends to permeate women's media on a much heavier scale than it does men's media, and I think in general there is far less urgency to remind females that this can't actually be expected from real life. While again, this is not at all unique to either gender and does not apply universally, it is in my personal experience that women more often than men seem to get it in their heads that it's normal to be expectant of a luxurious life with little to no real work on their own part and that if it's not given to them this is some absolute miscarriage of justice. It's not uncommon to see love advice articles telling women that they deserve no less than a man who matches fairy tale perfection, and if he doesn't, he was just a narcissist or a sociopath or a toxic person anyway (seriously, go on Psychology Today online or just type "sociopath" in a Google search and watch how many discussions and articles are just scourned women diagnosing their exes with personality disorders for the most normal of asshole behavior). You haven't dealt with horror until you've dealt with late 30s - 60 year old divorcees with kids who still believe that they're just waiting for their "fairy tale wedding and happily ever after" to come and have developed a martyr complex over the fact that it hasn't yet (I've personally dealt with two, have seen more.) This probably ultimately stems from the time when women stayed at home and depended on their husbands to determine the quality of their lives, back when all a woman really could do to improve her life was hold herself to high standards and make demands of others, but it really, really doesn't mesh well with our modern gender dynamics. These ideals are not only annoying but hold women back, because you'll have control over your own life if you constantly expect others to reward you just for existing.

So how does this all relate back to Labyrinth? Labyrinth is basically the complete opposite of this message, stating instead that becoming too wrapped up in your own ideals and desires can cause you to abandon the things that actually matter. Before the movie even begins this is already at play, with Sarah's mother having an affair and leaving her husband in order to pursue a significantly more decadent and glamorous lifestyle with her new lover (who is, as we see in photos, also depicted by David Bowie). Despite disliking her parents' divorce, Sarah still in some ways wishes to imitate her mother by becoming an actress herself, and often gazes at newspaper clippings of her mother's success. Sarah's situation is actually a quite relateable one, to the point where I myself have gone through nearly identical circumstances, the frustration of having a stepparent that you do not like and having to rearrange your own comfort in order to cater to a new life setup that you never even wanted in the first place, and I'm sure many other girls have dealt with similar situations. You really do feel like you have been cheated in that scenario, and so it becomes more understandable as to why Sarah might be tempted to escape to a more self-focused life, especially when her circumstances are a direct result of others focusing on themselves. However, the way in which this happens quickly makes her see the error of her ways, as even for the most frustrated older siblings having your baby brother kidnapped is a pretty terrifying prospect - Sarah realizes that she can't blame her own sadness on innocent Toby, and by rejecting all of Jareth's advances and gifts in order to save him, rejects repeating her mother's mistake of abandoning the people who need you in order to satisfy your own dreams. After she has saved him, she gives him her childhood teddy bear that she had used as a security blanket for so long before stuffing away her mother's newsclippings and other fantasy-esque memorobilia into her drawer - accepting that it is time to grow up and start living in the real world, or at the very least, learn to temper her fantasies so they don't ever get in the way of doing what she needs to ever again.

I think that ultimately this is a pretty sobering but also empowering message for girls to take away. Getting to be the princess is not always the right path to take, offerings to be treated as special for the sake of it are typically only provided by less than trustworthy people that cause more problems than they solve; Jareth himself says that he will only give Sarah her dreams if she promises to always obey him, i.e., holding yourself to unreasonably high expectations can often leave you at the mercy of others in more ways than one. How many women out there stay in loveless or abusive relationships because of what the man provides? With self-determination and the choice to do the right thing comes accepting that you're not always going to get exactly what you want, but also maybe a chance to discover that you wanted wasn't really what you needed. It forces a lot of self-examination, which can really only ultimately build you up and help you to better achieve your potential.

If anyone hasn't seen the movie I would really encourage it, it's very well done and is trippy enough to warrant a huge variety of interpretations. Plus David Bowie guys, David Bowie.

Interesting analysis. I agree with much of this. Some peopel have complained about how selfishly Sarah comes across as being at the start, but I would argue that people can be selfish at times in their life and that she learns to be a more decent person by the end. I liked that she learns to balance her fantasy life with her real life, so that her magical friends will be there for her and her for them but that she has learned to be a devoted sister by going through all that weird shit to get Toby back.

I would add that it's interesting how in this film behaviour that is often acceptable in other stories--Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, True Blood etc where it is romantic to stalk your desired one that in this film David Bowie is depicted as charming, handsome--and a manipulative, controlling villain who turns out to be intensely needy at the end. I think that it would not be reasonable within the story if someone as charismatic as Bowie did not play him, because it SHOULD be tempting. Too many times bad guys in women's stories are transparent and silly.

It always strikes me as silly when a story is clearly about overcoming a negative trait and then people complain about that trait being displayed at all in the beginning. Those people probably can't relate to the situation either. I became somewhat selfish and escapist during my stepparent's marriage too, but it was because I felt like nobody in my house was going to give me the attention that I needed (and they admit now that they really weren't) and so the only dependent happiness I could have was that which I gave myself. I could either "be selfish" and be happy or "be good" and be miserable. Children becoming spoiled is often a sign of emotional neglect, it's their way of trying to support themselves where their parents aren't.

Noice. Its probably been too long since I watched this movie to contribute to the discussion on it in any meaningful way, though.


Films like the ones you mentioned are pretty widely criticised by feminists (and a lot of other people too lol)

I think that the criticisms often don't focus on women's own choices though; most feminists criticize such stories as though it's part of the Patriarchy Conspiracy Theory rather than as issues women have that they need to grow out of.

I've seen a pretty good degree of focus on criticizing Bella Swan. Mostly about how she's such a huge embodiment of all the .negative stereotypes associated with women: she's mopey, manipulative, selfish, pretentious, and uses self-destruction as a means of dealing with sadness and guilting the men around her into doing what she wants. She regards men through a very shallow lens despite what she and her author might claim, interpreting the exact same behavior from two different guys in different ways depending on their attractiveness - when a nerd says hello and offers to show her around, he's "clingy" and "overeager." When a decently good looking guy does the same thing, he's praised for being so nice and helpful. We're expected to cheer her on for wanting to go through with a blatantly lethal vampire pregnancy and her delusional regard for what is pretty clearly a monster of nature as a "baby."

Of course that doesn't justify how Edward and Jacob behave, but still. Twilight is just a really big clusterfuck of horrible people being horrible to each other while the narration praises them as intelligent, selfless heroes.

[Nioya]

Why don't we just call women being bitchy on their periods what it is?

Rape culture.

[Giovenith]

Why don't we just call women being bitchy on their periods what it is?

Rape culture.

We should keep a scoreboard for all the people who come in this thread without reading thinking that they're prepared to take on legions of "SJWs."

[The Grene Knyght]

Why don't we just call women being bitchy on their periods what it is?

Rape culture.

We should keep a scoreboard for all the people who come in this thread without reading thinking that they're prepared to take on legions of "SJWs."

definitely lol

[New Edom]

Interesting analysis. I agree with much of this. Some peopel have complained about how selfishly Sarah comes across as being at the start, but I would argue that people can be selfish at times in their life and that she learns to be a more decent person by the end. I liked that she learns to balance her fantasy life with her real life, so that her magical friends will be there for her and her for them but that she has learned to be a devoted sister by going through all that weird shit to get Toby back.

I would add that it's interesting how in this film behaviour that is often acceptable in other stories--Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight, True Blood etc where it is romantic to stalk your desired one that in this film David Bowie is depicted as charming, handsome--and a manipulative, controlling villain who turns out to be intensely needy at the end. I think that it would not be reasonable within the story if someone as charismatic as Bowie did not play him, because it SHOULD be tempting. Too many times bad guys in women's stories are transparent and silly.

It always strikes me as silly when a story is clearly about overcoming a negative trait and then people complain about that trait being displayed at all in the beginning. Those people probably can't relate to the situation either. I became somewhat selfish and escapist during my stepparent's marriage too, but it was because I felt like nobody in my house was going to give me the attention that I needed (and they admit now that they really weren't) and so the only dependent happiness I could have was that which I gave myself. I could either "be selfish" and be happy or "be good" and be miserable. Children becoming spoiled is often a sign of emotional neglect, it's their way of trying to support themselves where their parents aren't.

I think that the criticisms often don't focus on women's own choices though; most feminists criticize such stories as though it's part of the Patriarchy Conspiracy Theory rather than as issues women have that they need to grow out of.

I've seen a pretty good degree of focus on criticizing Bella Swan. Mostly about how she's such a huge embodiment of all the .negative stereotypes associated with women: she's mopey, manipulative, selfish, pretentious, and uses self-destruction as a means of dealing with sadness and guilting the men around her into doing what she wants. She regards men through a very shallow lens despite what she and her author might claim, interpreting the exact same behavior from two different guys in different ways depending on their attractiveness - when a nerd says hello and offers to show her around, he's "clingy" and "overeager." When a decently good looking guy does the same thing, he's praised for being so nice and helpful. We're expected to cheer her on for wanting to go through with a blatantly lethal vampire pregnancy and her delusional regard for what is pretty clearly a monster of nature as a "baby."

Of course that doesn't justify how Edward and Jacob behave, but still. Twilight is just a really big clusterfuck of horrible people being horrible to each other while the narration praises them as intelligent, selfless heroes.

It doesn't justify it. However I also wish feminists would recognize that women like bell Swan actually exist. I've met some, I even dated one. Shows like that wold not even be popular if as you say they did not feed into popular fantasies.

I think that some such fantasies can be harmless--I've called "Mamma Mia" the "Army of Darkness" for women. In that it's ridiculous and fantastical but also fun for those who like it. But I think most men would say that "Army of Darkness" is pure escapism--wouldn't it be fun if you could deal with all your problems with sarcasm and violence? whereas the more feminine fantasies tend to lean more towards things that could actually happen in real life, so I think they are more insidious.

BTW, I'd be interested in seeing more film and book reviews from you.

[Gravlen]

*snip*

I posted a response to you on this page, did you miss it?

[Blue Pinkerton]

Welcome to men's opinions NSG.

[The Grene Knyght]

Welcome to men's opinions NSG.

yeah... believe it or not this thread isn't nearly as bad as it used to be...

[FelrikTheDeleted]

Welcome to men's opinions NSG.

Welcome to NSG, a large portion of the population is comprised of males. Males who are extremely active within threads concerning identity politics, my apologies if this upsets you.

[Des-Bal]

And on this issue feminism can do better. You're right about that.


Are you saying the ones who started the fight are the bigger problem? If so, the analogy applies to the traditional narrative, as it was there first.

If you're saying that feminism should stop pretending to be a viable solution to the problem then I agree.

I'm saying the exact opposite and that pointing out there was already a beating taking place does nothing to absolve you of barbarism.

[New Edom]

*snip*

I posted a response to you on this page, did you miss it?

I wrote a response, I don't know what happened to it.

Anyway: some things women do that undermine consent are things which are only seen as okay because they are women. Touching people, making sexual remarks etc are rarely discussed in feminist circles in the same light as similar actions by men are. So for instance if a woman starts talking openly about her sexuality in a flirtatious way on a show or in a movie, it is empowering according to how many feminist reviewers talk about it. If she and other women ogle a man and objectify him, that's okay. It's not okay if men do it according to them. It's a double standard.

[Neutraligon]

That may work. I wonder if since we're focusing on things here if a new thread, focused on exploring this approach wouldn't be a good idea. At the men's resource center where I live, the center focuses on male survivors of chldhood sexual abuse by providing ashelter and counseling center, but it also supports the White Ribbon Campaign. One of the leaders there had a slogan on his door: Two of the historic problems in our society are women being owned and men being disposable. I felt that this approach was a good one, but I've often had it rejected by people who claim to be feminists and had few words of respect from others who also did.

On the other hand, there was a strong reaction here to Galloism's example being rejected and almost mocked by Chessmistress. So perhaps there is a pinprick of light at the end of hte tunnel. What do you think?

This seems like a good initiative, I agree.

I like this idea. I have always hated the women (and children) first thing. I get the children first, but why women? I think most people on here disagree with Chess. I know I find that version of feminism to be toxic and essentially a cancer on the feminist movement, one that has grown all to prominent.

[Giovenith]

It doesn't justify it. However I also wish feminists would recognize that women like bell Swan actually exist. I've met some, I even dated one. Shows like that wold not even be popular if as you say they did not feed into popular fantasies.

I think that some such fantasies can be harmless--I've called "Mamma Mia" the "Army of Darkness" for women. In that it's ridiculous and fantastical but also fun for those who like it. But I think most men would say that "Army of Darkness" is pure escapism--wouldn't it be fun if you could deal with all your problems with sarcasm and violence? whereas the more feminine fantasies tend to lean more towards things that could actually happen in real life, so I think they are more insidious.

BTW, I'd be interested in seeing more film and book reviews from you.

I don't think many feminists would claim that they don't believe toxic women exist, but I do agree that there's not a lot of serious discussion about toxic behavior that is more often utilized by females. There is some though, "Mean Girls" is a movie that not many people realize was based on one of the first legit psychological studies on adolescent girl behavior. It was notable for being one of the first attempts at actually treating the social structures and politics of middle and high school girls seriously instead of just brushing them off as trivial, and as a result uncovered shockingly Machiavellian tendencies among that age/gender group that wind up having long lasting negative effects well into adulthood.

I might actually do "Mean Girls" next when I get the time.

Welcome to men's opinions NSG.

My vagina says to stop erasing it's existence while thinking that you're sticking up for it.

Seriously, don't start mounting a high horse about women's voices being eclipsed or ignored while you yourself overlook female voices because of your own assumptions and biases about the nature of these discussions. Disagree if you must disagree, but don't implicitly wrap your arm around my shoulders and try to claim me for your side all because I possess a fabulous pair of titties, that's not cool.

Oh, and men have every right to opinions, even possibly terrible ones. I don't like being told that women should be seen and not heard, do you? "*scoff* Women's opinions! As if we need more of those! *rolls eyes*" If it sounds misogynistic when said about women, you shouldn't be saying it about men. And while it's true that male voices do outnumber females on NSG, it is in my experience that one's gender demographic usually has little to no effect on how seriously they're taken, so I don't think it matters. My strength is in my individual intellect not my numbers.

[Cerillium]

So recently I watched bits of Jim Henson's "Labyrinth" and it left me feeling a little analytical. Labyrinth has always been an extremely weird and highly interpretable film, but it's also noteworthy for having been very popular among young girls. Now with David Bowie as one of the stars and scenes like the "As The World Falls Down" sequence that would seem obvious, but I've also felt that it went a little deeper than that, I think the movie speaks to young girls on a more psychological and social level that they might not necessarily be aware of. While on the surface it seems like your typical fantasy adventure filled with puppets and raw nightmare fuel that only the 1980s could provide, I also see it as dissection of some of the less talked about aspects of the female experience, one that has not been successfully replicated since.

In you aren't familiar with Labyrinth, it centers around a 15 year old girl named Sarah who at the beginning of the film is going through a bit of a rough period: Her mother has left her father in order to be with a fellow actor, leaving her father to remarry and he and his new wife have another child, Sarah's baby half-brother Toby. Although her new stepmother does not mistreat her or anything, Sarah finds herself at odds ends with her presence as is typical with early stepparent-child relations, and becomes frustrated with now having to cut into her own interests (mainly rehearsing her own acting skills) and free time in order to help out with Toby. One night when she is forced to babysit him, Toby starts acting particularly difficult as babies tend to do, and Sarah out of frustration wishes that he would be taken away by goblins. Her wish is unexpectedly granted by David Bowie I mean Jareth the Goblin King (played by David Bowie), and when Sarah immediately takes what she said back and demands that he return her little brother, Jareth tells her that she can have him back if she can find her way through his labyrinth in a set amount of time, and thus thrusts her into a dark and magical realm in order to go on a quest to rescue her brother. Throughout the movie, David Bowie I mean Jareth repeatedly acts a bit like a creepy stalker, demonstrating a kind of twisted infatuation with Sarah and eventually making it pretty clear that what he really wants is her to stay with him forever and allow him to use his sparkly fushigi powers to give her everything she's ever wanted. In the end Sarah rejects his offers to make her dreams come true and rescues her little brother, returning to the real world but still able to occasionally speak to the friends she made along the way.

To make it short, Labyrinth is at it's heart a story about learning to let go of your own personal fantasies in order to fulfill your real life responsibilities, and I believe a deconstruction of the lenient attitude towards overindulgence that we tend to instill in young girls and even adult women. What I mean by that is that at least in our society, there tends to be this implicit attitude that females have more of a right to behavior and expectations that we might otherwise consider selfish or entitled in men. "Daddy's little princess" is a common parenting attitude and women being obsessed with pursuing luxury is still a pretty persistent stereotype. In media aimed at females, there is a strong tendency to have the stories and themes revolve that around the main female character being intrinsically "special" in some way and the environment where she dwells needing to be forced to recognize that, often to the point where the female gets to leave her mundane environment completely and ascend to some higher life that always hers by right to begin with. In young media that's stories about discovering that you're a long lost princess, or being born with magical powers, or having a poorly explained talent for singing and/or dancing that will immediately rocket you to stardom just by performing on stage once. In older media that's the pandering stories you see in chick flicks like your, "Oh I was a terrible bad man until you opened my eyes with your love and your flower shop skills and now I will chase you down to the airport at the last possible minute and ask you to marry me," and your, "Oh I am an ancient sexy vampire with millions of dollars who has loved no one before until you came along because you're sooooo different from all the others," and your, "That's right girl, you're so selfless and pure, you'll let the man you were going to marry marry his best friend and be rewarded by finding three adorable puppies in your house which will lead you to a beach with a Christmas tree on it where your TRUE love will propose to you" (yes, yes that is a real movie.)

And there's nothing inherently wrong with that - it is just fantasy, there's nothing wrong with wanting a little escapism here and there, and it's far from unique to women. However, I think escapism tends to permeate women's media on a much heavier scale than it does men's media, and I think in general there is far less urgency to remind females that this can't actually be expected from real life. While again, this is not at all unique to either gender and does not apply universally, it is in my personal experience that women more often than men seem to get it in their heads that it's normal to be expectant of a luxurious life with little to no real work on their own part and that if it's not given to them this is some absolute miscarriage of justice. It's not uncommon to see love advice articles telling women that they deserve no less than a man who matches fairy tale perfection, and if he doesn't, he was just a narcissist or a sociopath or a toxic person anyway (seriously, go on Psychology Today online or just type "sociopath" in a Google search and watch how many discussions and articles are just scourned women diagnosing their exes with personality disorders for the most normal of asshole behavior). You haven't dealt with horror until you've dealt with late 30s - 60 year old divorcees with kids who still believe that they're just waiting for their "fairy tale wedding and happily ever after" to come and have developed a martyr complex over the fact that it hasn't yet (I've personally dealt with two, have seen more.) This probably ultimately stems from the time when women stayed at home and depended on their husbands to determine the quality of their lives, back when all a woman really could do to improve her life was hold herself to high standards and make demands of others, but it really, really doesn't mesh well with our modern gender dynamics. These ideals are not only annoying but hold women back, because you'll have control over your own life if you constantly expect others to reward you just for existing.

So how does this all relate back to Labyrinth? Labyrinth is basically the complete opposite of this message, stating instead that becoming too wrapped up in your own ideals and desires can cause you to abandon the things that actually matter. Before the movie even begins this is already at play, with Sarah's mother having an affair and leaving her husband in order to pursue a significantly more decadent and glamorous lifestyle with her new lover (who is, as we see in photos, also depicted by David Bowie). Despite disliking her parents' divorce, Sarah still in some ways wishes to imitate her mother by becoming an actress herself, and often gazes at newspaper clippings of her mother's success. Sarah's situation is actually a quite relateable one, to the point where I myself have gone through nearly identical circumstances, the frustration of having a stepparent that you do not like and having to rearrange your own comfort in order to cater to a new life setup that you never even wanted in the first place, and I'm sure many other girls have dealt with similar situations. You really do feel like you have been cheated in that scenario, and so it becomes more understandable as to why Sarah might be tempted to escape to a more self-focused life, especially when her circumstances are a direct result of others focusing on themselves. However, the way in which this happens quickly makes her see the error of her ways, as even for the most frustrated older siblings having your baby brother kidnapped is a pretty terrifying prospect - Sarah realizes that she can't blame her own sadness on innocent Toby, and by rejecting all of Jareth's advances and gifts in order to save him, rejects repeating her mother's mistake of abandoning the people who need you in order to satisfy your own dreams. After she has saved him, she gives him her childhood teddy bear that she had used as a security blanket for so long before stuffing away her mother's newsclippings and other fantasy-esque memorobilia into her drawer - accepting that it is time to grow up and start living in the real world, or at the very least, learn to temper her fantasies so they don't ever get in the way of doing what she needs to ever again.

I think that ultimately this is a pretty sobering but also empowering message for girls to take away. Getting to be the princess is not always the right path to take, offerings to be treated as special for the sake of it are typically only provided by less than trustworthy people that cause more problems than they solve; Jareth himself says that he will only give Sarah her dreams if she promises to always obey him, i.e., holding yourself to unreasonably high expectations can often leave you at the mercy of others in more ways than one. How many women out there stay in loveless or abusive relationships because of what the man provides? With self-determination and the choice to do the right thing comes accepting that you're not always going to get exactly what you want, but also maybe a chance to discover that you wanted wasn't really what you needed. It forces a lot of self-examination, which can really only ultimately build you up and help you to better achieve your potential.

If anyone hasn't seen the movie I would really encourage it, it's very well done and is trippy enough to warrant a huge variety of interpretations. Plus David Bowie guys, David Bowie.

Fantastic analysis, Gio.

As for Bella? The character was portrayed poorly by Kristen Stewart. The performance was underwhelming and thus Bella herself remained shallow and 2D. Bella might have come across much differently with a competent actress in her skin.

[The Grene Knyght]

This seems like a good initiative, I agree.

I like this idea. I have always hated the women (and children) first thing. I get the children first, but why women? I think most people on here disagree with Chess. I know I find that version of feminism to be toxic and essentially a cancer on the feminist movement, one that has grown all to prominent.

Yeah I hate that sort of rhetoric. Not only does it make men out to be dispoable, but it also equates women with weakness and fragility. Two-fold problematicness

[FelrikTheDeleted]

I like this idea. I have always hated the women (and children) first thing. I get the children first, but why women? I think most people on here disagree with Chess. I know I find that version of feminism to be toxic and essentially a cancer on the feminist movement, one that has grown all to prominent.

Yeah I hate that sort of rhetoric. Not only does it make men out to be dispoable, but it also equates women with weakness and fragility. Two-fold problematicness

Have you ever noticed the news, "108 people were killed, including women and children,". It pisses me off, I find it acceptable to have children mentioned, but I find the exclusion of men annoying.