Women Reply (1975): Our bodies and our sex by Agnès Varda
Timeless and intense. If I could define this short movie by Agnès Varda in just two words, it would be timeless for dealing with women’s issues that are still relevant nowadays and intense for being able to, in less than 8 minutes,defy our patriarchal society. Our body and our sex, according to society, are not exactly ours. If you claim them, you’re hysterical. If you sell them, you are applauded. The film was produced at a time when female sexual freedom was widely discussed. However, the discourses regarding it were shifted to the immediate sexist view. That is why we still struggle so much for the deconstruction of the feminine molded by society. We are seen as the second sex, like Beauvoir pointed out in her feminist bible of the same title. Our demands are still mocked by those who have the power to maintain us as the “other’’ .Varda’s complaint is a rupture to an imposed silence. Women from different generations answer simple, yet complex questions about what it means to be a woman.
Being a woman seems to be intrinsically connected to our body, specially to our genitalia, in a way that it is subjected to men’s desires . The capitalist system, allied with the media,objectifies it, determining its roles and, therefore, its limitations. The private space, motherhood, in other words, our destiny. But biology is not destiny as quoted again by Beauvoir’s relevant work. Media would portray women as professionally successful if they looked pretty enough to seduce a man in his position of power. We are talking about the 70s. Of course a lot has changed since then but if you take a look back at that time and even today, it is easier to claim that a woman can only reach a powerful position with the help of a man, than when she is not sleeping with him. At the same time, women have proved that they can reach any place without using their appearance. Working women today are faced with a paradox. Even though we have accomplished a lot, society demands us to look good, with a smile on our faces and no flaws allowed.
The woman from the 60s onward longs for autonomy in her choices and thus a new definition of what it is to be a woman. Varda’s main claim in her filmed protest is that there should be a redefinition of what we perceive as women. Despite displaying women from different ages, the film lacks intersectionality and it becomes difficult to understand her message. One possible interpretation is that the patriarchal notions of women, specially western and middle-class ones, should be transformed into their own terms and needs. We do not need to disregard Women Reply because of this. It contributes enormously to women’s voice and demands in a time of feminist effervescence today and back then when the second-wave was at its peak. The men that appear on the screen all look angry and silent before women’s questions. It is just how we have felt for so long when all we could do was to be angry while the reasons why we were not happy had no chance to be heard by society. There are voices that are yet to be heard and it only became a later worry in the feminist movement. If our body does not define our destiny, imagine a trans woman talking about this to a conservative audience. Imagine if this movie was remade today with indigenous and black women for example. Would their demands be the same as the ones presented by the white women ?
What I love most about the short movies is that one issue leads to another . After all, women’s issues are yet posed by question marks while society attempts to shut us with a period stop.
This post is an adaption from its original version found on my other blog below:
The Second Sex (French: Le Deuxième Sexe) by Simone de Beauvoir was mentioned in this post.
