Ch 10. Popular Media: An Ecofeminist View
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Terry Leahy 2024
Now let us look at the ways in which these linked dualisms play out in more recent capitalist times. A dualism which allies women to nature is certainly a theme in some popular media. I will first take a look at two films made for children — ‘Bambi’ and ‘Babe’. In both, there is a link between women, mothering and empathy for non-human animals. In both, the film is urging us to take the women’s perspective and to reject men’s hostility to nature. To that extent they are aspects of an ecofeminist discourse of resistance. A discourse that takes these gendered links for granted and opts to defend the subaltern position.
Bambi
In ‘Bambi’ a cute young deer and its mother are gambolling in the forest, when a hunter comes along and shoots Bambi’s mother. Bambi is inconsolable. How this Disney cartoon was ever considered suitable for children is a mystery. It presents wild nature in the persona of the two deer, mother and child. The feminine. Their enemy and master is man, the hunter. A telling incident related to this took place in one of my environment and society classes. I arranged an excursion to a permaculture farm near the university. The farmer was a middle-class middle-aged permaculture enthusiast. He was deeply committed to trying to grow all the food his household required. As part of this, he had a cage for keeping huge white pigeons for food. There was no doubt that they were appealing, and pigeons are not typically eaten for food in Australia. My students were mostly young women. It was clear that they were not at all happy with this project. He angrily spoke to me on the side about the inappropriate ‘Bambi view of nature’ to which my students had fallen victim. Lest the reader think this scenario is typical of permaculture men, a later visit to a different farm was run by a very different couple. They were vegetarians and kept farm animals to help with the plant production, rather than for food.
Babe
Babe was made about thirty years later than Bambi. It also targeted a market of mothers and small children. Almost exclusively the audience when I went to see it. It has similar themes and a similar approach to gender and the natural world.
‘Babe’ does not immediately spring to mind as an ecofeminist film. On the face of it, the film is about a male pig, who proves his credentials by rounding up sheep and so wins the approval of Farmer Hoggett, the patriarchal boss of the farm. With the support of his pig, Farmer Hoggett goes on to win the approval of male authority in the national sheep dog trial, where Babe wins against all the dogs. What is worse is the comic portrayal of Mrs Hoggett as a bossy, conventional and flustered matron. The film perpetuates the anti-feminist myth that such women dominate their husbands, while the reality of the plot leaves Farmer Hoggett in charge.
The film certainly presents what is widely regarded as a ‘sentimental’ anthropomorphic view of animals, associated in this culture with women and children. There is no doubt about the environmentalist credentials of the film. The film follows the argument of Peter Singer’s famous book, ‘Animal Liberation’ (1990), very closely. Animals should be treated as equals. They should be respected and should not suffer needlessly to satisfy human desires. Animals have their own interests, which should be recognized; it is a travesty to regard them as merely instruments to satisfy human ends. This political message of the film is announced from the very beginning when the camera shows us mother pigs, suckling their young in confined stalls in a huge, dark barn. The sinister men come to collect the adult pigs for slaughter. The pigs are shown in their hundreds walking towards the huge truck which will take them to be slaughtered. The baby pigs are left to mourn their mothers and are forced to suckle on a machine teat that looks like an alien artifact. The narrative voice over during this sequence intones:
This is a tale about an unprejudiced heart, and how it changed our valley forever. There was a time, not so long ago, when pigs were afforded no respect, except by other pigs. They lived their whole lives in a cruel and sunless world.
The framing of this account in the past tense is itself a political message. It tells us that the horror of factory farming is a social choice; animals could be given respect by humans and these cruel conditions could be overturned. The animal liberationist message of the film is conveyed through the plot device of anthropomorphizing the animals and giving them human voices to present their views. For example, Babe is horrified to learn that the reason pigs are kept by humans is for food. The sheep inveigh against the cruelty of the dogs who round them up, describing them constantly as ‘wolves.’ Of course, all this is played for laughs, and it might be thought that audiences would dismiss the political message. I want to argue the opposite to this, suggesting that the comedy allows the audience to come to grips with a very painful topic. The largely female and child audience responds to the film in terms of discourses of femininity, childhood and sympathy for animals.
I want to look at the film in relation to Chodorow’s analysis of masculinity, discussed in the previous chapter. In the context of the traditional family, coming of age for men means abandoning attachment to women as mothers and rejecting the nurturing qualities associated with mothering. It means distancing oneself emotionally from those over whom one would exercise power and competing with other men for mastery. In terms of this culture’s rejection of the natural world, it means rejecting ‘childish’ and ‘feminine’ concern for the well-being of other animals.
In ‘Babe’ this path to adult masculinity is challenged. The film can be seen as a coming-of-age story in which ‘Babe’ comes to age as an adult male. However, at every step of the way, Babe succeeds by rejecting patriarchal advice to be cruel to other animals. Instead, he listens to and is defended by a variety of nurturing mother figures. While Farmer Hoggett is initially the patriarchal and cruel farmer, he is seduced by Babe into a different way of looking at other animals. He ceases to see Babe as merely an instrument to satisfy human needs and comes to look on him with love and affection.
A few examples show how this plays out. The first sheep that Babe meets is called ‘Ma’. She takes a mothering role to Babe, warning him against the cruelty to sheep which is normal for sheep dogs.
Ma: Seem like a nice young pig. What be your name?
Babe: Babe.
Ma: Not like them wolves. Treat you like dirt they do. Bite you as soon as look at you … some wolves is so bad, they’ll run a sheep down and tear it to pieces.
Babe: Fly would never do that.
Ma: Fly, is it? Well, a right vicious creature she be, I tell you.
Babe: Not Fly.
Ma: The wolves is cruel to us sheep. Always have been. Brutal. Savages. That’s they be. Oh, I wouldn’t like to see a gentle soul like you, mixing with the likes of them, young’un.
At the time of this conversation, Fly is the mother sheep dog who is looking after Babe. Babe is thinking more and more that he would like to be a sheep pig himself. In this conversation he is made to realize that the sheep will see such a transition as joining with the enemy. Ma is like the old wise woman, advising the young boy to retain his identification and sympathy with women, and not to join the patriarchal club. Later, in the paddock, Babe tries to round up the sheep. Fly urges him to take control as follows:
Fly: You’re treating them like equals. They’re sheep. They’re inferior. We are their masters. Make them feel inferior. Abuse them. Insult them.
Babe: But they’ll laugh at me.
Fly: Then bite them. Be ruthless. Whatever it takes, bend them to your will.
He gets nowhere with these tactics and Ma admonishes Babe:
Ma: Enough wolves in the world already without a nice lad like you turning nasty. You haven’t got it in you, young’un. No need for all this wolf nonsense. All a nice little pig like you need do is ask.
Ma tells the other sheep that Babe really has a heart of gold. Babe asks the sheep politely and with great respect to walk out in two lines. When they do this Farmer Hoggett is amazed. The father sheep dog, Rex, is horrified at this departure from stern control. He reprimands his partner Fly, who has encouraged Babe to become a sheep pig:
You and I are descended from the great sheep dogs. We carry the blood line of the ancient Bahoo. We stand for something. And today, I watched in shame as all that was betrayed.
In these incidents, Rex represents the tradition of patriarchy and the social power that is associated with ruthless control over others. While Fly initially urges Babe to follow this model, she also comes to stand for the mother who supports her son’s departures from hegemonic masculinity. Ma, the sheep, is another mother figure who urges the son to retain his respect for women, the less powerful and the supposedly inferior animals.
In terms of the cultural construction of femininity in this society, Babe represents a wish fulfilment myth for women and children. In the myth, the women successfully oppose the son’s transition to adult hegemonic masculinity. In the end, Farmer Hoggett, as the leading patriarch, sees the error of his ways and comes to accept his unconventional son as a legitimate adult. Even Rex, the sheep dog patriarch, comes to love Babe. This theme is linked to issues concerned with the relationships between humans and nature. At the present time, ruthless control over nature is a part of hegemonic masculinity; a viewpoint on nature that is to some extent rejected by women and children. In the film, Farmer Hoggett, the patriarch, comes to reject this way of looking at the natural world. In coming to love Babe for his own sake, and not as a prospective meal, he accepts the point of view that Babe enunciates – that all the animals deserve respect and to be treated as equals. A key moment in the film is when Babe is sick and Farmer Hoggett feeds him with a bottle, taking the role of the mother. Following this Hoggett gets to his feet to sing the theme song of the film, a love song, which he addresses to Babe – ‘If I had words to make a day for you, I’d give you a morning, golden and new’.
Science, technology and masculinity
In late capitalism, masculine ‘culture’ is often opposed to feminine ‘nature’ through the gendered division of labour. Men have had almost exclusive domain in work where powerful technologies are used to subordinate a resisting wild nature. Or at least that is how it is portrayed. The muscle car and SUV as an expression of masculinity. Also, bulldozers, trucks, guns and chainsaws, not to mention bombs and warplanes.
Let us look at some ads from the late nineties. An advertisement for ‘Greg Norman’ products shows a back view of Norman standing up on the seat of a small yellow open top jeep with a roll bar. To emphasize Greg’s courage and his confident control over machinery, the jeep is perched facing downhill on a rocky slope with a big drop directly in front of it. Greg’s power and control in this perilous situation is indicated by his nonchalant standing position. On the top of his vehicle is his kayak. In front of Greg and, importantly, below him, is a grand vista stretching into the distance, with rocky hills at the horizon. It is a desert scene but in the foreground is a green golf course, complete with small pines and a glistening pond. In big block letters plastered across this vista are the words ‘Attack Life’. What is suggested is that Greg is a master of this approach and that he has attacked and conquered the natural landscape in front of him. He has mastered it. This impression is reinforced by the presence of the golf course, a lush green civilized lawn established within a desert, an anomaly within nature that reveals the civilizing work of our hero. In terms of the way the ad addresses its readers, it invites the reader to reveal himself to be the kind of man that Greg Norman is – by buying Greg Norman’s products. In terms of hegemonic masculinity, Greg represents an ideal of hegemonic masculinity which, it can be safely assumed, the reader endorses as a model for his own life. Fearless, aggressive and technically assisted mastery of nature is a key ingredient of this hegemonic ideal.
Another advertisement with the same message is an advertisement for a four-wheel drive (SUV), a large red car. The slogan is ‘Deep in thought.’. The advertisement is designed to appeal to the middle class professional and re-assure him that a masculinized control of nature is possible for a member of the middle class. It is peppered with links between science and the control of nature. In that way it is a popularization of the association between science, masculinity and the control of nature that Merchant traces in the modern western tradition:
Only one 4WD has the intelligence to get you out of deep water without even thinking about it. Ford Explorer with Control-Trac; the smart 4WD system that constantly monitors terrain, senses loss of traction and automatically adjusts the power applied to the front and rear wheels. All in milliseconds … In addition, Explorer XL’s powerful 4 litre fuel injected V6 or the Explorer XLT’s 4 litre overhead cam V6 and unique 5 speed automatic lets you dive into just about anything that crosses your path.
Here nature is portrayed as a dangerous, or at least annoying, other. However, it can be overcome through the power of scientific intelligence and through the power of machinery. The masculine owner of the car, the ‘explorer’, and the masculine reader are identified with the qualities of the car. The owner must be intelligent if his car is intelligent, and the reader would likewise express his superior intelligence by buying this vehicle! Linked to this appeal to the reader as intelligent is the depiction of science as the intelligent control of nature. The use of difficult scientific terminology congratulates the reader – he is the kind of powerful and intelligent middle-class man who can understand science and the power over nature that it offers. Science is identified with the control and surveillance of nature – the phrase ‘monitors terrain’ objectifies nature as an obstacle to transport. The scientific terminology of ‘milliseconds’ assures the reader that the car embodies the latest technological developments.
The picture shows the car forging ahead through water, with its bow wave washing over the top of the wheel. Nature here is ‘deep water’, something that you need to get out of. Later, you are urged to ‘dive into’ anything that ‘crosses your path’. Again, nature is something that may inhibit the free access of the ‘Explorer’. It is personalised as something that may oppose or ‘cross’ you. Nature is an enemy to be overcome by the real man and his car.
At four litres the engine size of this vehicle is immense, especially as most of the time its buyers will be just using it to get around in city traffic. All that extra power is extra carbon dioxide, exacerbating the greenhouse effect. But here it is offered to the reader as an appropriate symbol of his own personal power, of his masculinity. The environmental consequences of cars have of course often been the target of the green movement, something which is neglected completely in this ad.
These ads do not obviously personalize nature as a woman. Instead, women are absent. Nature stands in as the antagonist which masculinity must conquer.
Nature and the Red Riding Hood myth
There is a strange paradox in the way gender and non-human nature are conceived in current capitalism. Epitomized in the Trump, MAGA circus. On the one hand, Trump paints migrants from the south as barbarians. Dangerous, violent, criminals and rapists. He stands as the saviour of American women from these uncivilized hordes. At the same time, during the riot at the Capitol, the iconic image is of a MAGA supporter wearing a fur round his shoulders with bull horns sprouting from his fur hat. At Trump’s recent rally, Hulk Hogan rips off his shirt, posing bare chested. Even Elon Musk grunts. In the chapter so far, we have characterised civilisation as a repression of the ‘animal’ in the human psyche. The triumph of reason over the emotions, the appetites. Along with control over non-human nature portrayed as feminine. Yet, there is a bizarre undercurrent in which men are wild — and women are Dresden porcelain, to be protected.
We could see this as a cultural invention of puritan capitalism. Women are god’s police. Preserving the innocence of children. Implementing a repressive socialisation into docile subjects of capital. While men are out in the competitive world of business and politics.
But maybe this is a more generalized ambivalence in class societies. The ruling class represents itself as the civilized repression of wild nature. At the same time, it claims the mantle of apex predator where enemies are concerned. As an untamed beast. In the Cahokia civilisation of the Mississippi, archaeologists uncovered a burial site for a king. Surrounding his skeleton was a collection of the skeletons of young women. He was buried in a cloak of shiny shells splayed out in the shape of a falcon, a bird of prey. The symbol of the Roman army was an eagle. The British empire, a lion. Masculine power can be demonstrated through the killing of an apex predator — I am the real predator here. The man posed next to the dead lion.
I find Anne Cranny Francis’ analysis of the Red Riding Hood myth very useful to get a sense of the structure of this discourse of gender and nature. As Cranny Francis points out, a myth which represents the traditional view of masculinity is Red Riding Hood. The good woodsman saves Red Riding Hood and her grandmother from the bad wolf:
There is the admired patriarch, the hunter – the male authority figure, who will protect women – apparently from the wolf, though actually from themselves (that is, from any transgressive expression of their own sexuality). The other character is the animalistic, uncontrollable beast within man, who preys on women.
An interesting feature of this psychoanalytic analysis is that the suppressed sexual side of the civilized masculine personality is represented as a ‘wild animal’ that must be controlled by the responsible superego of the civilized man. In doing this, the civilized man rescues the helpless female from wild nature and also from his own unsocialized instinctual self.
As Cranny-Francis points out, men can also identify with the aggressive wild animal self. This certainly complicates the understanding of traditional hegemonic masculinity in relation to the environment. For example, in the film ‘Rambo, First Blood Part Two’, Stallone plays an American soldier who rejects the authority of the army – the civilized man – and follows his animalistic aggressive side – represented in the film as Rambo’s Native American forebears, and shown in his use of a bow and arrow, his long hair and headband, the jade stone worn round his neck, his muddy appearance and so on. There is a class element of this version of Red Riding Hood. The working class is demeaned as closer to nature, as uncivilized. The reversed discourse of ‘Rambo’ allocates moral virtue to this untamed wildness. To working class rebellion against the middle-class. As in the working class MAGA followers of Trump.
Conclusions
This excursion reminds us of several things. We can characterize the dominant discourses of capitalism in line with an ecofeminist analysis. The way these dualisms line up and are linked. Men versus women. Civilisation versus the barbarians. Man versus nature. While this is all true, a poststructuralist take suggests that the elements of these discourses are moveable pieces, with different roles in different political contexts. Trump promotes a scientific triumphalism to repel environmental constraints. Man subdues nature. He employs the civilized versus barbarian dualism to stigmatize the lesser races. White Americans subdue the Latins. At the same time, he is the wolf as he ravages the effeminate professional classes. This raises another issue. You can look at capitalism’s destruction of the natural world as an instance of emotional distancing — premised on the prior distancing of men from women. But it is also premised on an economic structure that corrals people within standpoints related to their class interests. More on these points in later chapters.