Promising Young Woman [Motion Picture]. Emerald Fennell (Director). United States: United International Pictures, 2020.
The film Promising Young Woman opens with a depiction of sexual predation that is familiar enough to be a cliché—a clearly intoxicated, barely conscious woman at a club is rescued from the hungry gaze of bystanding men by a clear-headed seemingly nice guy who is kindly offering to return her safely home. En route, he tests and nudges her, coaxing and luring her into his home and a position where he can assault her, seamlessly transitioning from rescuer to predator, a sequence of masks being removed that reveals another just beneath, each more sinister than the one before it. At some point, it becomes apparent that a line has been crossed. Then the woman, the protagonist named Cassie, played impeccably by Carey Mulligan, pulls the rug out from under all of us, and we are launched into a powerfully executed, 110-minute comedic exploration of the enduring components of the cultural phenomenon that is the kind of sexual predation that happens every day.
The topic of sexual assault and harassment re-entered my consciousness when I watched this film. I do not know how long it had been since I had thought about the subject, but the fact that it is not an important part of my existence gives me the privilege to spend extended periods in a world where sexual aggression in all its forms effectively does not exist. That's a privilege that I possess that is fairly well attached to the fact that I am a man.
I am not saying that, because I am a man, I could not ever be the victim of sexual aggression. When I was 18, before I had joined the Air Force, I had an employer attempt to groom me, using his position of authority to try to coerce me into sexual encounters. It was a gray area. He did not exactly cross any lines until one day I suddenly realized that he had, like those masks that are incrementally removed, turned into a predator. I did not realize what was happening until months in, and it made me feel stupid and ashamed. Up until that moment of realization, there was just discomfort, the slightest sense of something that would be entirely deniable and that it was nothing worth losing out on the opportunity I was being offered. There was also that constellation of coercive elements involved—my need for the generous income he provided, the genuinely interesting work he was having me do, and the prospects that I did not have anywhere else to turn, as an 18 year old with little education, trying to provide for a new family.
But this experience of grooming was an outlier for me. I do not generally feel under threat. I am free to be blind to the pervasiveness of this issue in our culture, our world, and in the Air Force where I serve as a Noncommissioned Officer. For me, it is as simple as looking the other way.
This film Promising Young Woman artfully depicts just how privileged this standpoint is. There are many who do not get to choose to be unaware of sexual aggression; it is a persistent part of their world. There is nowhere to look where it will not rush into view—few men who are not from moment to moment potentially removing and replacing masks, ulterior motives moving in and out of play. They are the targets, not mere bystanders of the jokes and comments, the objectification, the double standards, the microaggressions, and the drumbeat of a potentially impending threat, and they are not any safer in the military than out of it—they may even be a greater risk.
This movie is probably the darkest comedy I have ever seen, as one might expect from a clever jaunt about collective, cascading, compounding trauma and one woman’s vigilante campaign against those who inflict, those who perpetuate, and those who stand idly by. It hit me like a brick wall, affecting me more than I expected. I think that has to do with the efficacy with which it depicts the enabling aspects that extend well beyond that initial portrayal of the predator. There are more elements at work here than merely villains operating in a vacuum, and the bad guy framing may actually stand in the way of us addressing key drivers of this cultural phenomenon. We, who like to think ourselves good guys or allies, might find that we ourselves play a part in its perpetuation, and that’s where the most powerful message here lies.
Cassie’s rampage of retribution portrayed in the film begins with those apparent predators, mostly just holding a mirror up and forcing them to face the reality of what they are; then it spiders outward from there, tracing a path back from those cancerous branches to the nodes of cultural gatekeepers, friends, and allies who prevent such self-awareness and impede accountability to protect the self-image, livelihoods, and futures of men whose mundane, everyday predation up and down the continuum of harm does not ever seem to register as transgression enough to warrant actual consequence, despite the obvious consequence imposed on women by their actions.
A Systemic Issue
The film offered the opportunity to spend some time with this issue as it exists for so many, highlighting the disturbingly normalized truths about the constellations of factors that contribute well beyond just nefarious actors, how our culture systemically does not respond to sexual assault and harassment—how in fact it systemically enables them.
That word, "systemically" is an important component of the point I want to make. I am a sociology student, a fan of systems thinking and complexity theory, so I view culture as a complex system, modulated by institutional constraints (like policies and laws) and shared values—which can have a greater impact than law. For example, see how American schools and institutions failed to respond for decades after the passage of Brown v Board of Education, which made segregation illegal. Laws did not impact society because the dominant societal drivers remained unmoved. Laws and policies alone are not enough. Values and perceptions drive the implementation of those laws, and these are modulated by, among other things, the socialization process—how we are raised and socially programmed, within schools, churches, and communities, through the social enforcement of norms throughout our lives.
Consider the question posed originally by Jonathan Haidt: If an adult brother and sister decided to have non-reproductive sex with one-another in a country where incest is legal and they didn't tell anybody...would that be wrong? A majority of people would say yes, even if they couldn't explain why. They experience moral repugnance. We know something to be wrong based on a gut reaction—it violates a taboo that is socialized and enforced in our culture. Effective cultural systems rely on both of these aspects—the institutional and the perceptual. Board v Brown likely would have had an immediate impact institutionally had the dominant group felt moral repugnance about segregation; but it did not. Rather, many were morally repulsed by the idea of integration.
I have attended countless Sexual Assault Prevention and Response trainings over the years where a man raises the subject of false accusations against men and effectively hijacks the conversation. To me this serves as a clear depiction of the competing views and values at play in this issue. We are not morally repulsed by the idea of rape so much as we are by the idea of a man being the victim of a system that seeks to respond to it.
Looked at through the systemic lens, the pervasive problem of sexual assault and harassment in our culture is not one that we can simply attribute to individual nefarious actors or solely issues of insufficient laws or policy. Cultural systems perpetuate perceptions that offer affordances for their nefarious actions, and those systems are supported and perpetuated by reinforcing cultural feedback loops that we ourselves are complicit in, even those of us who bask in the glowing self-image of good guys.
These cultural systems that enable sexual assault and harassment appear to be even stronger and more entrenched in the military, as evidenced by the atrocious rate of sexual aggression[1] of and by military members, the normality of retaliation[2] against those who report sexual harassment and assault, the frequency and redundancy of the stories of those who were victimized by fellow servicemembers and then retraumatized by the system.
On Defensiveness
This movie reminded me that privilege is the affordance that our culture gives men to demean, objectify, predate, and victimize women, largely without repercussion. Just try to respond to those minor socializing elements that drive the cultural system of sexual aggression and press for equity; call someone out for a stupid sexist joke or casual objectification, and they will show you the face of the oppressed. Their response will be an offensive defense of their privilege, and they will make it clear that you are the outsider here, not them.
This film focuses in particular on the reflexive defensiveness of men being taken to account for their aggressions, a defensiveness which seems to effortlessly transition to outright attack once cornered by Cassie—a type of defensiveness that I would imagine some might feel welling up in response to some of the things I’ve said so far. Defensiveness is revealed to be a critical element of this system—an individually activated reflex often in the form of defending self-image, influence, or livelihood—agents performing a violent, flailing self-defense on behalf of the cultural systems that prop up their power, perpetuate and enable behaviors from the casually demeaning to the downright predatory.
Many of the cringey, aggressive, and defensive behaviors of the men in this film, portrayed as functional components of a larger system of sexual oppression, will look uncomfortably familiar to most of us, if not because we engage in them, then because of all the times we stood by, afraid of being cast out for calling out, as another compliant bystander failing to stand up for equity and dignity because that seemingly socially impotent act might come at the expense of privilege and belonging.
Watching Cassie corner predators, enablers, and their allies (both men and women) until they reveal to us, and to themselves, their true form and function is simultaneously satisfying and sickening. The film here isn’t just holding a mirror up to fictional characters. The mirror faces out at us as well, forcing us to reflect on how we act as components of this system in the real world. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a SAPR training really effectively convey this important element, that might help us abandon the “villains in a vacuum” framing of sexual assault that prevents us from doing the work of dismantling the actual cultural system at play here.
We need to be willing to push through the perception of oppression and subsequent defensiveness if we want to have any hope of creating a cultural system of respect and dignity, to combat and dismantle the firmly established and thriving cultural system that keeps women as unsafe as they are. Much of this work lies with us who like to consider ourselves clean-handed simply because we are not overt predators. We need to be in the arena and willing to fail embarrassingly in front of our peers, who will judge us, cast us out, and retaliate against us for violating their cultural system, the system built for us, and from which we benefit. We need to be brave enough to say, “No, I can’t take a joke.”
To take this system on, and build a stronger, competing system that upholds our ideals and values rather than this shit, perhaps a cultural system that instills an impactful sense of moral repugnance in response to behaviors up to and including sexual harassment and assault, to a degree that at the very least would outweigh the moral repugnance we feel about some man’s position, power, and privilege being put at risk.
If you do not already feel a sense of urgency about this issue, about the need to actively pull in the opposite direction, to counter the impossible momentum of this system, I encourage you to watch this film.
Daniel Hulter is a U.S. Air Force Non-Commissioned Officer, facilitator and designer at AF CyberWorx, and founder of the community of practice for facilitation, design, and sense-making in the DoD called Agitare. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or U.S. Government.
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Header Image: Promising Young Woman Logo, 2020 (Wikimedia Commons).
Notes:
[1] 25% of women in the military experience sexual assault and 50% experience sexual harassment per https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/magazine/military-sexual-assault.html#:~:text=Of%20the%20more%20than%206%2C200,many%20convictions%20as%20in%202019
[2] 52% rate of retaliation for reporting sexual assault per https://sapr.mil/public/docs/reports/FY14_Annual/FY14_Annual_Report_Annex_1_RAND.pdf