Boys Don't Cry ignores root source of violence

Movie Review: Boys Don't Cry
Written and directed by Kimberly Peirce, 1999

Reviewed by MIM

"Boys Don't Cry" tells the somewhat fictionalized story of Brandon 
Teena (a.k.a. Teena Brandon), a young womyn who takes on the 
identity of a man in a small town in Nebraska. When two of 
Brandon's guy friends learn that Brandon is not a biological man, 
they rape and then kill her. "Boys Don't Cry" takes care to assure 
us that the Amerikan cops and courts eventually locked these two 
men up for life.

While the film captures the detestable violence caused by 
patriarchy, its reactionary take home message is that there are a 
few bad people in the world, and we should depend on the Amerikan 
(in)justice system to lock them up. A court-oriented strategy 
against patriarchal violence, rape, and harassment will fail for 
many reasons. For starters, patriarchy is a systemic problem and 
must be addressed on the systemic, not individual, level. We can 
run around putting out the fires caused by thousands of years of 
heterosexist, male chauvinist tradition and a billion-dollar-a-
year pornography industry -- or we can tackle that tradition and 
that industry head on.

Furthermore, reliance on Amerikan courts ignores the class nature 
of those courts. Cops, courts, and law are integral parts of the 
state. The state is simply an instrument used by one class -- in 
this case the Amerikan imperialist bourgeoisie -- to control other 
classes. As we discussed in our review of Stephen J. Gould's 
"Rocks of Ages", radicals cannot count on the bourgeoisie to 
combat the nexus of accumulated prejudices and superstitions 
called "religion." Neither can we rely on the bourgeoisie to 
combat patriarchal ideas (many of which overlap with religion). As 
communists have been saying since Marx, only the proletariat, the 
class with nothing to lose but its chains, can move to end all 
forms of oppression. Other classes will compromise to preserve 
their privileges.

Given the realities of the white-chauvinist, imperialist courts in 
Amerika, calls for tougher sentences on rapists and harassers now 
have led to increased imprisonment for men from oppressed nations, 
for acts white men generally get away with.(1)

The sad truth is that to get an Amerikan audience for this 
important subject matter, "Boys Don't Cry" has to revolve around 
love and murder, as well as the old mush that romantic love 
conquers all. The movie focuses on Brandon as an individual and 
his quest for persynal happiness. The film implies that a sex-
change operation would have saved his life. Because of the 
societal nature of patriarchy and heterosexism, MIM doubts whether 
that is true. Problems that involve huge groups of people cannot 
be solved on a case-by-case basis.

MIM also does not spend time agitating for increased access to 
expensive, voluntary surgeries or medications (such as sex change 
operations, facelifts, or Viagra). Our first task is to make sure 
that the people of the world have access to enough food and basic 
medicines. People in Amerika have the leisure time to obsess about 
their sex lives while the majority of the world's people can 
barely avoid starvation or murder by imperialist militarism. The 
fight against gender oppression -- which includes the fight 
against violence in the name of romance culture -- is part of the 
fight for communism, but the principal contradiction today is 
between the oppressed nations and oppressor nations. Anyone who 
wants to make huge advances in the lives of those who face gender 
oppression should take up the fight against imperialism and for 
the international proletariat.

 --  review edited by MC206

Notes: 1. See "Myth of the Black rapist," MIM Theory 2/3, p. 91.