Smut vs. Feminism
THE world is mourning the death of a supposed literary legend this week.
She was a feminist hero, we are told. She was a terrific guilty pleasure; she was a pathbreaking writer!
These are some of the accolades offered for a novelist who wrote trashy, sexfilled smut: Jackie Collins.
Neha Shaw writes at the UK Independent how she wanted to grow up to be just like Collins’ characters:
“Collins’ women were unlike any I’d ever read before. They were rich, sexy, empowered — women who weren’t embarrassed or inhibited by their sexuality, but instead reveled in it.
“Lucky Santangelo . . . wasn’t a manic pixie dream girl, or a sexually frustrated single mother ofthree; she was a freaking Mafia princess. She was exactly who I wanted to be.”
To be a feminist is now equated with being a lawflouting slut? I’m confused by this definition given that I was just reading in that empowermentbible Elle magazine that wearing glasses is the ultimate in “quiet” feminism.
So which is it: A feminist is rich, superficial and slutty or quietly bookish and geeky?
Jane Shilling takes a slightly more traditional approach to extolling Collins’ virtues by high lighting that female financial independence was one of Collins’ longtime themes; Shilling also observed that much of what was titillating and shocking when Collins’ books were first published in the late 1960s is now commonplace:
“From Jane Austen and George Sand to Virginia Woolf, women novelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries understood with excruciating clarity the importance to women’s personal freedom of an independent income . . .
“Jackie Collins never pretended to be a great writer, although she was a great entertainer. But she understood that those boundaries are still endlessly debated, and the frisson of scandal that reliably propelled her novels onto the bestseller lists has, in retrospect, an unexpected foundation of excellent good sense.”
Shilling is correct that hindsight is helpful when assessing Collins’, um, oeuvre.
The reality is that when her books were published, copious amounts of sex and celebrations of conspicuous consumption were novel and titillating.
Her depictions of life among the famous and fabulous were also new; her first novel was published in 1968, after all.
Collins’ books used to provide adults looking for celebrityobsessed, escapist fantasies with an outlet. Today, this seems quaint.
Long before the onset of adulthood, men and women are exposed to sexually explicit material (hello, Internet).
In fact, adulthood itself has been delayed and retarded by a decade or more while the sexualization of everyday life continues to erode childhood.
It has become an integral part of youth culture and advertising, music, movies, television and books for younger and younger consumers.
Compared to what passes for mainstream popular culture these days, Collins almost seems staid and stodgy.
It is this shift to a more explicit and permissive culture that allows people to proclaim Jackie Collins a feminist hero.
Feminism hasn’t been about women’s financial independence or opportunity in decades. It has succeeded so well by now that it is in dire need of a new cause (microaggressions, anyone?).
Feminist rhetoric can even turn smut, which was Collins’ specialty, into an example of supposed empowerment (rather than exploitation and misogyny).
This is what it’s come to? The next generation of young women being told that they should grow up to become Poor Little Bitch Girls?
RIP Jackie Collins.