As a girl, it’s important to reflect on how the patriarchy personally affects your day-to-day life. We all experience it in varying shades and forms, ever since we were able to say the word CBeebies. You may encounter it in an unequal family dynamic, where you are held to completely different standards to your brother. It may manifest at your new job, where the male staff start icing you out after you rejected their advances. I think every girl who plays netball is familiar with the tone in a boy’s voice whilst he adamantly jabbers on about how netball isn’t a real sport. Maybe your grandparents pester you every family gathering with the “when will you find a nice boy?” Maybe you have been spiked on a night out and told that if you weren’t so drunk in the first place you would have been able to avoid it.
No matter how many wine nights with the girls end in rants about misogyny, it doesn’t make the situation better. However, I am eternally grateful to be able to identify and complain about these issues at all. I also count my blessings because I remember that no matter how badly I suffer at the hands of the patriarchy, being a white girl from a middle-class background and good family, there are girls out there suffering a lot more. I realised that living in my little southeastern English bubble, I didn’t know the ins and outs of how misogyny affects women differently around the world. And so, I began watching films to paint a better picture of how the patriarchy mistreats women in circumstances very different from my own. I have compiled for you three great ones to start with.
Mustang (2015)
Mustang has been referred to as the Turkish Virgin Suicides, following a group of five sisters in a conservative Turkish village after a scandal about them circles around town. After being seen by a disapproving neighbour playing with boys in the sea (waist deep and fully clothed) on their last day of school, word spreads that they were seen pleasuring themselves on the boys’ necks (playfighting on their shoulders). This leads to a house lockdown imposed by their guardians, their grandma and uncle. This acts both as a punishment for disgracing the family, and an imprisonment to avoid “further corruption”. They begin lessons grooming them for marriage, teaching them how to be desirable wives in a desperate hope that they will be chosen by a man and his family. Their grandmother isn’t completely demonised, for she just wants what she believes is best for her granddaughters. It brings to light how much power patriarchal beliefs have in certain traditional places that are yet to be able to shed them. I think the shocking element in this film is the modern landscape in which it is set: the sisters will be dressed in Adidas leggings on their way to a virginity inspection.
Unlike the Virgin Suicides, Mustang provides a distinctly female perspective away from the male gaze, portraying what it is like growing up as a girl surrounded by girls. They are disobedient, loud, lazy; they bicker and fight; they lie sprawled on each other in their underwear and mismatched socks; they tease each other for having smaller boobs; they rebel and stand up for each other. Female solidarity in the form of sisterhood is ever-present throughout the film, alongside themes of conservatism, sexuality, child marriage, and femininity among others. As the sisters are married off and the family structure unravels, the girls’ actions become more desperate and dramatic, leading the youngest, Lale, to do anything she can to escape her sisters’ fates.
Parched (2015)
I found Parched to be an extremely valuable watch, giving me an understanding of a life so different to my own. Set in a fictitious village in northwest India, it follows four women navigating their lives, which are governed by the deeply entrenched misogyny of the village.
It covers incredibly difficult themes of child marriage, sexual and domestic abuse, and intergenerational trauma, but the overarching theme of friendship weaves through it all, holding the film and the women together. They find sanctuary in each other, able to speak about the things girls speak with their friends: sex, anger, love, dissatisfaction, desire, away from the scorning judgement and outright punishment of the village. Women won’t stop being women just because their village tells them not to be. The portrayal of girlhood is so familiar to every woman watching that it reminds us that it could easily be us born into such a suffocating life.
Rani is a young widow who put her savings towards a dowry for her son, who at 15 is already picking up the chauvinistic and violent nature of the men in the village. Janaki is the child bride who cut her hair before the wedding, leading her, her newly betrothed, and Rani to be ridiculed in the village, inciting anger from Rani and severe mistreatment from her son. Bijili is a sex worker who is ostracised and shamed by the village but liberated to a certain extent. Her unorthodox lifestyle has granted her certain economic freedom but hopes to free herself entirely from relying on men for her financial success. Confident and sexual, the other women envy her freedom and the fact she’s getting some. Lajjo is trapped in a marriage where she is consistently battered by her husband for their lack of luck falling pregnant.
The title encapsulates the life of these women, parched of love, sexuality and freedom. This they find within each other, and the message of finding solidarity in your girls is powerful throughout.
The Moolaadé
The Moolaadé covers the topic of female genital mutilation. This horrifying practice seems self-explanatory by the title, but this film is critical for seeing how it affects girls’ everyday lives. I remember it being briefly covered in one PSHE lesson back in my all-girls’ secondary school, but hadn’t given it any thought since, because to my 13-year-old self it was just another statistic about girls suffering in a way and in a place I couldn’t imagine. This film humanises those statistics, putting faces and voices to the figures. Hearing the screams of an 11-year-old girl as a knife is brought down and her legs are held apart so that she may be “purified” adds more weight behind the numbers.
This film follows a woman, Collé, who refuses to let her daughter be cut, prompting a group of girls from the village to seek refuge in her home. Collé casts a protection spell: the Moolaadé, which prohibits anyone from coming in and hurting them. Their mothers come to the door demanding them back, but Collé says she won’t let them come to harm. It does not depict these mothers as evil and sadistic but shows how what is presented as a timeless cultural tradition can be detrimental to women, especially in a patriarchal society where they are isolated from outside perspectives. They believe that if their daughters aren’t purified, they will not find a husband. Collé’s teenage daughter even reprimands her mother for making her undesirable to men. The film covers themes of tradition, child marriage, abuse, and the isolation of women from wider society. When the men in the village believe the women are becoming too resistant, they burn their radios. They know that too much knowledge will disrupt the patriarchal order. But like in Parched, the women find strength in solidarity with one another.
These films all explore how patriarchal ideals continue to control women in rural communities, where traditional values still dictate everyday life. It can be hard to remember that communities shaped by age-old traditions exist outside our current reality of next-day-delivery SHEIN hauls and strawberry matcha iced lattes. But they do exist, and unfortunately, many come packaged with patriarchal mindsets and practices that continue infringing on women’s lives.
The themes in these films may seem at the extreme end of the patriarchal spectrum, but they are rooted in the same problem. Some of the themes are completely alien to us, but many overlap with experiences closer to home. And although there are many different circumstances, they all stem from the same issue: the control over women’s bodies and choices.
I urge you to learn about how other girls suffer around the world at the hands of the same enemy as ours. I urge you further to continue identifying, calling out and challenging the misogyny in your own lives, because when women come together, there is strength in solidarity.
Image credit: Pexels
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