Pain, Porn and Complicity: Women Heroes from Pygmalion to Twilight by Kathleen McConnell (review)

Feminism is enjoying something of a resurgence, perhaps less as a political movement than as a cultural framing device to understand what’s up with women these days. Are they emancipated? Empowered? Enslaved? Are they owning their sexuality or giving it away with often dire consequences? Are women protagonists in popular texts challenging the gender and sexual hierarchies that have dominated Western culture? Or is “kick-ass feminism” just a hegemonic reiteration of a masculinist ethos that derives pleasure from a woman’s willingness to be everything to a man and nothing to herself?

Kathleen McConnell sets out to explore the problem of the contemporary woman hero in her ambitious book, Pain, Porn and Complicity: Women Heroes from Pygmalion to Twilight. Her focus is on a subset of post-feminist popular texts mostly from the early to mid-2000s: Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), the much beloved television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Joss Whedon, 1997–2003), the forgettably camp Catwoman (Jean-Christophe “Pitof” Comar, 2004), the failed cult classic Dark Angel (James Cameron, 2000–2002), and the insanely successful young adult fiction series Twilight (Stephenie Meyer, 2005–2010).

McConnell binds these disparate texts not in a socio-historical context of post-feminist popular culture nor in any claims of canonical significance. Rather, she reimagines them through a unique lens of her own making. Her analysis weaves together strands from Freud’s “The Uncanny,” Gothic fiction’s tropes of women’s pleasure through masochism, and the Pygmalion myth of objectified female perfection, as well as other classic works of literary fiction through the ages. In the process, a connection is made between contemporary and classical women protagonists that underscores a limited agency based on male objectification and domestic containment.

The best moment in the book is the chapter on Catwoman, written according to the conventional structure of an academic essay in the decidedly unconventional form of a poem cycle. McConnell dissects the codified form of feminist analysis in both scholarly and media discourse. “Sinkers” is particularly clever as it rehearses the requisite references to post-feminist heroics that go into the rote analysis of how popular culture’s depiction of women’s liberation is dependent on a concomitant masochistic streak. However, McConnell does not take up her own critique, and the result is that most of the book applies that same analysis with varying results.

The least compelling chapter is on the wildly popular but critically panned series Twilight. McConnell incorporates Ann Barr Snitow’s now classic 1979 essay, “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women Is Different,” to suggest that the novels are a retrograde mishmash of Harlequin romance tropes and Golden Age pornography that links women’s pleasure to their capitulation to pain. While that thesis is certainly tenable, it doesn’t move the discussion much further than what Snitow originally argued. I wonder what possible new insights into women’s sexual explorations through fiction could have been gained by analyzing Twilight alongside the cutting-edge work of feminist pornography activists, artists, and scholars. Instead, the chapter suggests uncontroversially that Twilight isn’t very good and Bella is a bad role model for young women.

Thus, while the book is a very engaging read and its method of analysis original, the “conceptual substructures” that are revealed don’t seem to take us very far from where we already are. Buffy is criticized for her voluptuousness, Bella for her ordinariness. While Max from Dark Angel is celebrated for her diversity, the series itself is criticized for “demonizing” white men. The final analysis – which is left up to the reader since there is no conclusion in the book – is that popular culture is a fraught pleasure with multiple political valences, not all of them progressive.

Current feminist activism around rape culture, transgressive gender and sexual identities, the calling out of prevalent sexist and misogynist attitudes in corporate and political cultures, intersectionality, and ally politics demands more from us in...