I LOVE Legally Blonde, and I can't TELL you how delighted I was to see this post. I have maintained since forever that it is a great feminist movie, and now I feel validated! I love how it's about, yes, owning who you are, being whatever the hell kind of woman you want to be and still being brilliant and successful, and the important things being kindness and commitment, not how you present to the world.
I too was for a long time guilty of that sort of internalized sexism where I thought that in order to value what I wanted to value about myself I had to reject stereotypical feminist traits like wearing pink and liking flowers and caring about external appearances etc - I love about Legally Blonde that it says that intelligence, ambition, toughness etc are traits that can go with any kind of gender presentation, and I don't need to reject my own femininity, however that might manifest itself, in order to value them in myself.
I'm interested in what you say about the gay stereotype - I mean, you're right of course, but one of the things I like about this film is how they're all stereotypes, and how much the film is about how performing those roles is a conscious choice in some ways, or something. I don't know, I have to think more about this. But you're right that the activist lesbian doesn't get to show depth/her true colours in the same way that Elle, Vivian and Warner do, and there are definitely not enough people of colour, that's probably the biggest problem with the movie. (altariel once pointed out to me that Legally Blonde is actually really structured as a romcom, but around the Vivian/Elle relationship - the dramatic fallout, the missing-you-montage and the reconciliation are all about Vivian. The only thing that could make the movie better is if they got together at the end, but the end-credits *does* say that they're BFF's now, which is close enough for me.)
Anyway, yay Legally Blonde. Me and opinion_rush used to watch it a lot. It's a wonderful oh-god-I'm-a-woman-in-grad-school solidarity movie. I'm so glad you like it too!
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-03-28 02:44 am (UTC)I too was for a long time guilty of that sort of internalized sexism where I thought that in order to value what I wanted to value about myself I had to reject stereotypical feminist traits like wearing pink and liking flowers and caring about external appearances etc - I love about Legally Blonde that it says that intelligence, ambition, toughness etc are traits that can go with any kind of gender presentation, and I don't need to reject my own femininity, however that might manifest itself, in order to value them in myself.
I'm interested in what you say about the gay stereotype - I mean, you're right of course, but one of the things I like about this film is how they're all stereotypes, and how much the film is about how performing those roles is a conscious choice in some ways, or something. I don't know, I have to think more about this. But you're right that the activist lesbian doesn't get to show depth/her true colours in the same way that Elle, Vivian and Warner do, and there are definitely not enough people of colour, that's probably the biggest problem with the movie. (
Anyway, yay Legally Blonde. Me and