The Most Womany Woman Episode Ever | Songs for the Struggling Artist on WordPress.com
The Most Womany Woman Episode Ever
I’ve been watching GLOW — the Netflix series about the women’s wrestling show of the 80s and I’ve been enjoying how many women there are on the show and how different they are from one another. It is refreshing to watch a group of ladies figure out how to make something — even if that something that they’re making is kind of kitschy and weird and also racist and sexist a lot of the time.
It has been enjoyable viewing thus far but then I watched an episode that switched my experience from enjoyable to revolutionary. It blew my mind a little bit. Or a lot. I don’t know yet what impact this episode will have on me.
At first I wondered if I was having an experience similar to my reaction to Call the Midwife — a sense of “Wow. Is this what being a man feels like? Seeing you and your friends’ experience reflected on screen all the time?” But then, no…I realized that GLOW isn’t showing me what it’s like to be a man. (Or rather what it would be like if women had authority and dominated the storytelling landscape.) GLOW just showed me what it’s like to be a woman. Right now. And 32 years ago when the show takes place.
Episode 8 (“Maybe It’s All the Disco“) was the womany-est woman story I have ever seen on TV. Or in film. Or anywhere. It’s not just the menstrual cycle plot line or the pregnancy test or the abortion under consideration — it was the extraordinary community of women that finds a way to come together under the clumsy patriarchal sexist authority. It took eight episodes to get here — but after the initial jockeying for the limited slots in the job, the women of Glow have started to do what I have seen women do again and again — work together to support each other and deal with difficult situations even without the authority to do so.
Earlier in the day, I’d listened to a podcast about collective intelligence — the show went on at some length about all the different factors in creating a group that can solve a problem most effectively. They talked about equal distribution of contribution and emotional intelligence but they saved the real kicker for last. This is that scientific evidence suggests that if your goal is to have an effective group — you should work to include the following: creating an environment wherein everyone feels they can contribute, stack your team with emotionally intelligent people and include as many women as possible.
That’s right. According to several different studies, groups of women solve problems of many varieties faster and more effectively than groups of men. And the more women in your group, the better off you are. This does not surprise me What does surprise me is hearing two men say it. What does surprise me is seeing that experience of extraordinary community intelligence reflected in a TV show alongside some basic female body experiences.
I am surprised by my own surprise in watching a collective feminine experience on a TV show. But it really did set off an explosion in my head. What if we lived in a world where it was common to see the accouterments of our menstrual cycles within our narratives? What if the female experience were so often revealed that an abortion story could become commonplace and one day maybe even a cliché? What if we regularly saw women of a multiplicity of backgrounds come together to celebrate each other? Like we do in real life. What would that world be like? Really. What would that world be like?
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Originally published at artiststruggle.wordpress.com on October 27, 2017.
