Gender’s Cruelty

Cruel Intentions, released in 1999, is about a group of rich college aged kids living in New York City. The main characters, Kathryn and Sebastian are step-siblings who live in a mansion with no parents. Kathryn is the class president and seen as the perfect student; the complete opposite reputation her step brother has. Kathryn mentors Cecile, a prospective student at her school, however with devious intentions. Her plan is to use Cecile as revenge for her ex boyfriend who left Kathryn for Cecile. Kathryn manipulates Cecile into believing that she should have sex with as many men as possible, and naïve Cecile listens to her. This is where Sebastian comes in. He is known to sleep with a different woman every night. Kathryn asks Sebastian to help her in seducing Cecile while he is working towards sleeping with Annette, a virgin who wrote a personal essay in a magazine about waiting till marriage to have sex and true love. Annette happens to be going to the same school as Kathryn and Sebastian and staying with Sebastian’s aunt’s house for the summer.

Eventually, Cecile sleeps with Sebastian however Cecile’s music teacher, Ronald has fallen for her. Kathryn continues to manipulate Cecile with the help of Sebastian while he is really falling in love with Annette. He continues to pursue her knowing that his chances of sleeping with her are slim to none, but he is now falling in love with her. In the meantime, Kathryn was sleeping with Ronald and eventually, Ronald got together with Cecile. While these two are together, Sebastian and Annette finally get together and she loses her virginity to him. Kathryn now feels lonely and jealous, and in a selfish manipulation by Kathryn, Ronald and Sebastian get into a fight about Cecile by a major road in NYC and Sebastian gets hit by a car and dies. Sebastian had already given his heart to Annette and Kathryn became more jealous. Eventually all of her lies come out and even Cecile turns against her. At the end of the movie, Kathryn spoke to the student body about the death of her step-brother and then was humiliated when everyone found out the truth about her. She was a crack-addict, very sexual and not the student body president she was sought out to be. She is left with nothing while Annette has Sebastian’s car and journal and Cecile has Ronald. The reason I chose this movie was because there are a lot of smaller details entailing gender roles, identity, behaviors and norms. The two perspectives I chose for this movie are gender bending and doing gender. The rest of the paper will show in detail examples of each of these perspectives.

Gender bending, an idea from Judith Lorber (1994), is violating societal norms that people are constantly reinforcing, such as in the movie Cruel Intentions. In this perspective, acting or having characteristics of a certain sex doesn’t mean you are specifically a male or a female. Lorber says by acting outside of your gender role, it only enforces the role. (Lorber, 1994) By this, she means to say that by acting outside of something that isn’t a norm for that gender is only going to enforce that role because of the need to act outside of the role in the first place, for it to be considered gender bending. In Cruel Intentions, Kathryn throws herself at her step-brother, Sebastian, over a bet. The norm is out of the box in this example because women who throw themselves at men are bending gender because the most common scenario is a man trying to sleep with a woman. Though Kathryn is not trying to sleep with Sebastian, she is making a suggestion for it in terms of betting rules.

In this perspective, gender identity is formed when we distinguish ourselves as a particular gender based on actions, despite the chance of this action being outside of biological sex. By this, sexual identity is distinguished. In addition, acting a certain way is perceived a certain way from others. Kathryn puts on an act when she is with everyone else except Sebastian. In the beginning of the movie when talking with Cecile, a mentee of hers, and Cecile’s mother, she is a polite young lady sitting with her legs crossed and speaking appropriately. As soon as they leave the scene and Sebastian enters, she gets more clothes-comfortable, uses less elegant language and uses drugs. She is seen as a female to others by the way she acts and behaves, therefore her gender identity is distinguished by the way she acts because it’s the way she wants to act. By acting outside of the norms of the gender which you show, as opposed to act, gender bending is happening. (England, 1999) The gender perception from others has a lot to do with gender bending because what we see is how we form societal norms.

Enough gender bending could lead to a wider acceptance of actions for particular genders. Gender acting, which is the act of behaving within masculine or feminine traits, is another way of gender bending because the traits don’t have to match up to actual gender or sex. In the movie, Kathryn suggests to Cecile to “sleep with as many men as possible and that practice makes perfect.” (Cruel Intentions) To sleep with as many people as possible for a woman is not accepted because women are given negative sexual labels which are double standards. It’s surprising the men can sleep around whereas women cannot. The statement made by Kathryn here shows that by Cecile sleeping around, this particular action could widen the acceptance for this action for a woman. The term “secret society” was used in the movie, which described the actions and personal behaviors of women who sleep with multiple partners. By having this as a secret, the double standard is prevalent again. The inequality shows in this movie by the mass amounts of issues related with the women as opposed to the men, and is shown through the doing gender perspective.

The doing gender perspective says that its something you do with interaction with people. This makes society very structurally gendered and makes distinguishes between the two genders, such as women’s bathrooms and men’s bathrooms and shoe/clothing style. In this perspective, there is more structure and tradition. The tradition, however, is part of what makes norms the way they are. Doing gender emphasizes the roles men and women should play, which is beneficial to society for structure, but limits individualism. In the doing gender perspective, men naturally have more power because this is a male run society, so women are limited and stay submissive, such as some of the relationships between the men and women in this movie.

In the movie, Sebastian takes a woman he just met out to lunch. This shows Sebastian is doing gender in that he is taking the initiative of asking the woman out. Traditionally, men ask women out on a date and this is reinforced in this scene. According to Candace West (1987), “the notion of gender as a role obscures the work that is involved in producing gender in everyday activities.” In this, the role of the man doing gender is taking the woman out to lunch, but if the woman takes a man out to lunch, that is acting outside of the norms of how women do gender. The idea West is trying to get across is that there isn’t a wrong or right in doing gender because it can overlap between individuals, whether they are male or female.

There are many power struggles involved with doing gender because of the categories women and men are placed in and also the inequality between what is acceptable for men versus what is acceptable for women. According to Paula England, “women’s subordination to men is a natural and inevitable result of innate difference between men and women.” The power struggle in this movie lies within the female characters. Kathryn exclaims that it’s okay for men to have a casual physical relationship with no emotional attachments but not for women. The inequality is that because she is a woman, she cant have the same purely physical excitement men have only because of the societal norms women have to abide by to be accepted into the women network. Generally, gender activities depend on an individuals association with a certain gender.

To extrapolate, another event in the movie involved Kathryn calling a male to help defend her. This is due to gender socialization, which explains that people are the way they are because that is how they are raised based on thoughts and beliefs of parents and guardians. (England, 1999) Gender socialization teaches females to have strong male friends to help them. At the end, men are usually seen as the defenders anyways which is why Kathryn did what she did in the movie. Looking back at evolution, the male was the one who hunted and gathered the major stuff while the females also hunted and gathered, however their duties required less physical strain. This would be part of gender autonomy, where women are exploited by patriarchy. Women and female gendered people in general are weighed down with other responsibilities such as child bearing and domestic duties traditionally. This is due to their lack of physical exuberance. It is also true that Kathryn called a man because her physical stature is not that of a man. Since she was telling this man that she was being abused and she was physically afraid, a man, who has larger physical attributes would be best to call because he would be better at physically protecting someone or something.

The theory which best fits into the movie would be doing gender. This theory can be individualistic because men and women behave the way they do based on their situation. In this movie, Kathryn decides to sabotage Cecile to get what she wants and tries to manipulate Sebastian because it makes her feel better. This is doing gender in a negative way because women use indirect and passive aggression to fight. Also, Sebastian and another male character, Ronald, fight at the very end of the movie. This is also doing gender because men use physical aggression to fight. Both of these are helpful in identifying and distinguishing between sex and gender. The reason both of these groups were fighting were for their opposite sex. Not only are they displaying gender, which is showing gender as an action, it’s more individual so there can be exceptions to norms for both males and females. Overall, the doing gender perspective best applies in explaining this movie and the interactions and events which occur in it.

Reference

England, Paula. 1999. “The Impact of Feminist Thought on Sociology.”

Contemporary Sociology 28(3): 263-268.

Cruel Intentions. Dir. Roger Kumble. Perf. Ryan Phillippe, Sarah Michelle Gellar,

Reese Witherspoon, Selma Blair. 1999.

Lorber, Judith. 1994. “’Night to his day’ The Social Construct of Gender.”

Paradoxes of Gender 1

West, Candace. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society 1(2): 125 – 151.