Chapter 6

Blood, Breasts, and Beasts

The Feminist Liberation Gauntlet and Flexible Misogyny at the Dawn of Social Equality

That victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he, or she, has become a threat. The victim’s testimony must, therefore, be altered.… Once the victim’s testimony is delivered, however, there is, thereafter, forever, a witness somewhere: which is an irreducible inconvenience for the makers and shakers and accomplices of this world. These run together, in packs, and corroborate each other. They cannot bear the judgment in the eyes of the people whom they intend to hold in bondage forever.… This remote, public, and, as it were, principled, bondage is the indispensable justification of their own: when the prisoner is free, the jailer faces the void of himself.

—James Baldwin (1976)

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have not patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.

—Audre Lorde (1980)

Feminism with aggressive women is not going to be palatable in a mass market without tits and ass.

—Jane Schaffer (2010)

John Wayne’s populist-conservative regeneration of rugged individualism timelessly wove together the ideas, policies, and material outcomes inherited from the processes of settler colonialism, slavery, and its aftermath. This populist-conservative reaction against the welfare state shaped the momentum of the conservative culture war against social equality legislation, coalescing fortuitously with the ideas of individualism and freedom emanating from neoliberals. A decisive component of this rugged individualism rested on the imagined norm of the white male settler citizen, assertively directing his righteous violence against those deemed threatening to his family, community, homeland, and civilization. As Wayne’s contentious interviews in the 1970s make clear, rugged individualism made for a convenient identity to both defend against the intrusions of the welfare state—whether economic regulation or social equality legislation—as well as fuel an aggressive disciplinary gaze toward new internal threats, most often taking the shape of those historically marginalized who recently obtained equal status with white men. Alongside defending the legacies of slavery and settler colonialism, Wayne’s work consistently tapped into the traditional patriarchal framework from which masculinity could express itself as American rugged individualism. In defining the male individual struggling through the rugged frontier, masculinity drew upon the longue durée traditions—stretching back millennia—of patriarchy to recreate and reinforce proper—or “traditional”—roles for women in society.

In Wayne’s private life, he cherished the all-male environments of deep-sea fishing and drinking, where women—with the exception of actress Maureen O’Hara—were absent from masculine bonding over liquor.¹ His interviews underscored his anguish over legislated social equality toward women in the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly feminist demands for equal treatment and independence from men. Wayne was once asked why he had not learned Spanish, as he had married three Latinx women. Duke’s response was: “I guess I never listened to what they were saying.”² Something had changed between the height of his fame in the 1950s—coinciding with the height of an unacknowledged male, white nationalist social democracy—and the perceived undermining of social order in the 1960s.³ Indeed, the final scene in Wayne’s film McLintock! (1963) made clear the remedy for unruly and assertive women.⁴ After an aggressive chase throughout the frontier town named after Wayne’s character, McLintock publicly spanks his estranged wife, Maureen O’Hara’s character Katherine. Laughter abounds from the townspeople watching this disciplinary spectacle. Through the prism of settler colonialism, the final scene underscores the vitality of frontier masculinity reasserting its “naturally” superior will: Wayne and O’Hara reconcile amid reestablished patriarchal order through the lighthearted symbolic violence of spanking a woman, reassuring the community of her status as a dependent, a child. For some, this equation amounted to a good family film. Writer Jimmy Grant observed: “All you gotta have in a John Wayne picture is a hoity-toity dame with big tits that Duke can throw over his knee and spank.”⁵

In the 1970s, this deep ontological rudder in men’s lives found its challenge from women’s liberation as the second wave of feminism drew momentum from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Emerging in the first decade in the history of the United States when white men, especially those with property, were forced into legislated social equality with women and people of color, this abrupt shift in longue durée gender relationships triggered an anxious, conflict-ridden dialogue.⁶ As the oppressed mobilized the language and knowledge defining their Lockean “natural rights” for all humans, a new cultural reality slapped oppressors in the face, shattering the simplistic and delusional world of white male supremacy. With oppressors legislatively forced (they did not volunteer) to relinquish their hold on those they historically defined as inferior, a new dilemma arose: how would white masculinity define itself if the old meaning of masculinity—patriarchal dominance of women and all people of color—was now illegal? Historically, white masculinity defined itself through the practices of settler colonialism (rugged individualism and the vanquishing of “savages” whose lands were claimed by white men), slavery and its aftermath (white men’s freedom defined against a degraded Blackness tied to perpetual enslavement or second-class citizenship), and a patriarchy justifying racial antagonism toward people of color in the name of protecting white womanhood (including a woman’s choice to control their reproductive capacities). As James Baldwin points out, the dilemma presented in the wake of social equality legislation was simple: “when the prisoner is free, the jailer faces the void of himself.”⁷ The act of ceasing to defer to men’s authority sparked a reaction best captured in the folksy phrase, “If you want to be treated like a lady, you need to act like a lady”; or if a woman failed to submit or defer to male authority (the patriarchal contract for protection), this breach of patriarchy’s tradition could result in violence (male disciplining of unruly women). Wayne’s spanking of O’Hara in McLintock! represented a quaint version of this disciplining. As the first decade of legislated social equality unfolded, a market appeared in popular media for rhetoric and images reclaiming this dissolving masculine identity, often using the older language of subjugating supposed inferiors while embracing the film industry’s newly deregulated guidelines on violence and nudity.

This chapter explores the various contours of the exploitation film movement of the 1960s and 1970s, offering an unlikely, though useful, starting point for examining ways the conservative culture war interacted with the rise of neoliberalism. Economically, many producers of exploitation films transferred capital aboard much like multinational conglomerates, seeking cheaper labor and fewer regulations in developing nations overseas.⁸ Exploitation films, however, were more than mere calculated investment ventures aimed toward low-budget productions and an expectation of a healthy margin of profit. Producers capitalized on the tensions surrounding the unsettling of American social norms and taboos in the 1960s, offering viewers explicit explorations of the unease surrounding the “free love” drug-taking counterculture and the conservative backlash against hippies. Taking advantage of Hollywood’s deregulation of the production code and the implementation of the more flexible and demographic-specific ratings system, exploitation films’ use of the new permissiveness of the counterculture focused primarily on the spectacle of nudity and violence toward women. To further heighten the tension, producers capitalized on the Western civilization-savagery binary connected to exotic overseas jungle settings. At the same time, these low-budget exploitation film formulas opened the way for the rise of women action stars in Hollywood.⁹

A flexible misogyny (or what Doreen Massey called flexible sexism) surfaced in the 1970s as exploitation films combined feminism, action films, and the newly deregulated use of nudity, sexuality, and violence.¹⁰ The formula’s exploitative anchor rested on balancing the language of empowerment with older forms of patriarchal discipline presented through uncensored camera lenses. On the one hand, these films provided space in popular culture for empowered women and feminism to breach the boundaries previously reserved for assertive men. On the other hand, although the result was an unprecedented entry of women into action films in the 1970s, the call for equality with men appeared to demand this empowerment be juxtaposed with an unprecedented display of violence and nudity. In doing so, exploitation films—and other popular culture expressions—offered new spaces for the renewal and reform of patriarchal language, gestures, and behaviors woven through the unease over women’s liberation during the first decade of legislated social quality. The outcome: women would be punished for their insolence as the void in the jailer’s identity (following Baldwin’s argument) found renewal through the spectacle of achieving equality. The final product often magnified the array of racial and gendered representations associated with the violent procedures characterizing slavery, sexual exploitation, and misogyny. Viewed from the longue durée, captivity narratives—the recorded experiences of white women captured by Native Americans—between the 1600s and 1800s offer an early market precedent for the spectacle of punishment targeting women. Although toeing the line between dependent and assertive womanhood, these narratives were ultimately shaped into the deeply-embedded anchors upholding the “idea of white victimization,” turning the “invader into the invaded,” and portraying the aggressor as an innocent settler.¹¹ This precedent also shaped an acceptable space/context for violent women taking revenge. Popular media in the 1970s explored ways to curtail or discipline the more radical rhetoric arising out of second-wave feminism—particularly the redistributive, socialist argument for equality—while both empowering women in defeating their oppressors and casting a more positive light on the idea of “difference” (what later came to be called cultural diversity or multiculturalism after the 1980s).¹² Exploitation films embody a cultural manifestation of this impulse, a consumer commodity of flexible misogyny weaving together the empowerment of women via an equality imagined through the sadistic and sexualized violence of action films.

The flexible misogyny of exploitation films marked an important connection to the rise of neoliberalism as the production and technological apparatus of filmmaking found curious alignment with what David Harvey calls flexible accumulation.¹³ In Harvey’s account, flexible accumulation is a response to the Fordist model characterizing and guiding the Keynesian economics of the welfare state. Following the trends of American multinational corporations, overseas production and investment by the 1950s “had become essential elements in Hollywood’s financial survival.”¹⁴ This global Hollywood generated more than “half of their total revenue” overseas by the 1960s.¹⁵ As mostly independent productions, exploitation movies followed this economic trend at the height of the film industry’s postwar restructuring when many studios were purchased by multinational conglomerates (e.g., Gulf & Western bought the Paramount Pictures Corporation in 1966).¹⁶ With the rise of the merger movement, the studio system veered toward deregulation: Hollywood evolved from direct, in-house production to a more flexible role of financing and distributing films made by independent producers.¹⁷ Mirroring the trends of Giovanni Arrighi’s fourth accumulation cycle, this adjustment toward greater economic flexibility also represented the shift from production to finance.¹⁸ Moreover, this deregulation included changes in marketable mores across various demographics and different forms of media as the cultural upheavals of the 1960s unraveled into post-1960s multiculturalism.¹⁹

Consequently, a second element connecting exploitation films with neoliberalism included the embrace of the cultural and fashion trends emanating from the upheavals of the 1960s and the negotiation of cultural conflict tied to newly legislated social equality. The radicalism of the 1960s social justice movements evolved into a marketing tactic for a post-1960s generation of consumption.²⁰ Exploitation films exemplified this trend, targeting the youth demographic traversing this cultural tension by highlighting “difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification of cultural forms.”²¹ This exploration of difference, however, needs qualification: the normative baseline for this exploration was the Jim Crow welfare state, when social inequality was securely institutionalized. “We have not patterns for relating across our human differences as equals,” notes Audre Lorde, as the processes of patriarchy, settler colonialism, and slavery found renewal in the deregulations and reforms characterizing the 1960s and 1970s.²² For exploitation films, then, the representation of difference tied together new ideas of liberation with old patterns of sexual and racialized violence—packaged into a flexible, demographically specific product at the dawn of second-wave feminism and the neoliberal era.

Second-Wave Feminism and Women’s Liberation

Before exploring exploitation films, a brief accounting of second-wave feminism is in order. Feminism’s early roots can be found in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1790), while first-wave feminism is cited as beginning with the First Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.²³ Struggling for the right to vote and equal rights, by the mid-1800s the Married Women’s Property Acts had been passed by states around the nation, giving rights to property for married women (who previously lost all rights of ownership to their property once they were married).²⁴ The ultimate victory of the first wave was the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920. A notable expression of pre-second-wave feminism came from Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 classic, The Second Sex, a work asserting that gender and sexuality was a social construction and that women need to challenge these constructions to escape oppression.²⁵ In much the same way abolitionism helped shape first-wave feminism, second-wave feminism found root in the resurgence of social justice activism connected to the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and the poignancy of the phrase, “The problem that has no name” (from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique).²⁶ Although some interracial organizing occurred after the Civil War, white supremacy and anti-Blackness often split white and Black women during the first wave, fashioning a legacy plaguing second-wave feminism in the 1960s.²⁷ As the civil rights movement gained steam in the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration released American Women: The Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and Other Publications of the Commission. Although moderate in tone, the fact of its existence proved important for the women’s movement.²⁸ Another unexpected boost came from segregationist representative Howard Smith’s (D-VA) inclusion of “sex” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a desperate bid to derail the bill.²⁹ The bill passed, and suddenly there was social equality legislation between white men, men of color, and all women. However, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) set up to implement the legislation generally ignored complaints against gender discrimination.³⁰

Feminism gained momentum out of the experiences of the civil rights movement, as women activists like Ella Baker often found themselves marginalized in male-dominated settings, despite often running the organization and forced to defer to the “decision-making authority of the exclusively male leadership group.”³¹ A revolution within a revolution was set in motion. In late November 1964, “Position Paper 24” was submitted anonymously (coauthored by Casey Hayden, Emmie Schrader Adams, Mary King, and Elaine Delott Baker) at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting in Waveland, Mississippi—subsequently called the Waveland memo.³² The memo offered a critique of sexism within the SNCC, locating “the struggle for sexual equality within the new left tradition of dissolving the barrier between the personal and the political.”³³ Representing the broader American patriarchal norms, male domination affected New Left organizations as well, leading to “women’s issues” finding voice in the New Left during the 1967 National Conference for a New Politics in Chicago. Another feminist group, the National Organization for Women (NOW), formed in 1966 to target the gender discrimination the EEOC ignored.³⁴ The often-negative reception toward ideas of equality eventually pushed women to begin meeting on their own and engaging in women’s demonstrations by 1968.³⁵ Women’s liberation gained mass media attention in September 1968, when a group of activists protested the Miss America pageant. The gendered, racial, and sexual politics emanating from women’s liberation added further tension to not only the conservative culture wars against desegregation in the 1960s but also within ostensibly more “progressive” groups such as social justice organizations, where patriarchal worldviews failed to attract the same level of analysis race or class received. In these early years, feminism even found expression in the Republican Party through pro-choice feminists such as Michigan state senator N. Lorraine Beebe.³⁶ In trying to legalize abortion, Republican feminists utilized a conservative precept of individual rights, arguing that “the right to control one’s own body is a basic human and democratic right.”³⁷ Republican feminist Lee Kefauver reflected years later about the underlining patriarchy pressing men to restrict women’s choice to control their bodies: “Collectively they [the male legislature] hate you as a woman because they are insecure as men.… If you are black, they can deal with you and go home to a segregated neighborhood. But most of these white, male legislators go home to a woman—a wife, daughter or whatever. And they’ll be damned if they’ll give up any power to women.”³⁸

The reactions to the rise of feminism and social equality legislation between men and women reinvigorated and reimagined many of the gendered and sexual norms rooted in American identity. Popular media’s response to women’s liberation in the 1970s represented a convergence of culture and economics, helping shape the evolving contours of patriarchy for the neoliberal era. These impulses marked the work of John Wayne, the apprehensive and alarming language of Business Week toward “feminists,” and the male imaginations of the conservative defenders of Western civilization. Facing legislated social equality with people of color and women for the first time, anxiety over upsetting centuries-old privileges and entitlements for white men bound these groups together.

The bureaucratic nature of the Jim Crow welfare state did more than encode a racial logic designating spaces white and Black. Gender also provided the rudder navigating federally subsidized postwar suburbanization.³⁹ Reinforced by Cold War anxiety, the normalization of this racial geography rested on the regeneration of the ideal of women naturally belonging within the private sphere where they fostered a safe home for their husband’s children—and protected from the racial dangers of the public sphere.⁴⁰ For women, especially white women, the business world of the postwar years subscribed, for the most part, to the mantra of the popular book Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947), warning that women’s transcendence of “nature’s” role for women would upend civilization; women needed “to stay out of ‘fields belonging to the male area of exploit or authority.’ ”⁴¹ An echo of Russell Kirk’s conservatism—“we should accept the station to which ‘a divine tactic’ has appointed us with humility and a sense of consecration”—and the well-worn “end of civilization” trope of conservatives and neoliberals, the racialized geography of white suburbs took the advice of Modern Woman at face value, mapping out the logical contours of white women’s containment in federally subsidized communities.⁴² Safely secured at home, with (white) men earning a family wage (that ostensibly included additional compensation for wife and children), the idealized white woman was wrapped in a twentieth-century update of the nineteenth-century model of the cult of domesticity.⁴³ The cult of domesticity, or the cult of true womanhood, represented the white middle-class ideal popularized in the nineteenth-century religious and popular literature outlining the proper roles for white women in American society as the market revolution took hold: “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.”⁴⁴ By the Gilded Age and the height of “laissez-faire individualism” (celebrated by Milton Friedman and Wayne), the buttressing of patriarchy coalesced with the onset of progressivism as “most states moved to restrict or outlaw common-law marriages, raised the age of consent, reestablished waiting periods for marriage, banned interracial unions, and criminalized abortion and contraception”—thus institutionalizing the guiding “moral order” of the Jim Crow welfare state.⁴⁵ The update for the postwar era arose through the instability of the Great Depression and the disruptions of World War II (especially married women working), with a vision of stability imagined through the reinstilling of “traditional gender roles” for “the ‘modern’ middle-class home” after the war.⁴⁶

The rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s placed these “norms” under siege, as the language articulating a proper woman’s life experience within the protected patriarchal confines of the public sphere found translation as oppression. In short, Baldwin’s “victim” articulated “the situation of the victim.”⁴⁷ As the neoliberal era took shape across the 1970s, the argument describing the naturalness of free markets demanded a renewal of what social conservatives considered feminism to be dismantling: the naturalness of women’s subjugation to men.⁴⁸ Thus, alongside similar attitudes toward business and government, yet another link in the partnership between conservatives and neoliberals formed. Melinda Cooper notes, “Neoliberalism and social conservativism are thus tethered together by a working relationship that is at once necessary and disavowed: as an ideology of power that only ever acknowledges its reliance on market mechanisms and their homologues, neoliberalism can only realize its objectives by proxy, that is by outsourcing the imposition of noncontractual obligations to social conservatives.”⁴⁹ With the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the mounting demand for equality, popular media adjusted portrayals of women in response to the changing politics. For the most part, these reforms ranged from the difficulties women faced trying to compete in a male-dominated world to the suggestion that feminism equated women’s rights to women’s domination of men—and the destruction of families. Both of these variations settled into the consensus of social conservatism, rather than the assertations of feminists merely asking for a choice in the matter.⁵⁰

As a market for disciplining women’s yearnings for social equality expanded in the 1970s, film representations of explicit violence toward assertive women grew more prevalent. These images provided warnings to women of the many dangers related to equality in the public sphere, with the rise of women’s liberation navigating this uneasy tension between activists producing language and knowledge reflecting the concerns of women’s equality with men and mass media’s uncertain translation of this increasingly commodified dialogue. Patricia Bradley notes, “The desire to meet the demands of the postwar generation prompted commercial underwriters of mass media to seek an inclusive audience, which led to some expression of emerging ideas. The commercial base of media was not an iron curtain erected against the postwar feminist impulse; rather, the commercial base allowed for—even demanded—the inclusion of postwar feminism as part of a mix that aimed to please and to please as many as possible.”⁵¹ Although there was an unfolding market for representations of independent women, there was also a lucrative market for the demographic most uneasy with social equality between men and women.⁵²

A renegotiation of the boundaries of acceptability characterized the changing historical context of the new era of legislated social equality. Longue durée impulses guided these reforms across the historical conjuncture of the neoliberal era. Social equality for women before the 1970s attempted to utilize the welfare state’s logic of fairness and justness representing the redistributionist reasoning of federal intervention after World War II. Meanwhile, the arrival of legislated rights for people of color and women in the 1960s was accompanied by Hollywood’s own deregulation of its censorship codes. Herein lies the complexity of the relationship between culture and economics: as the rise of neoliberalism after the 1960s shaped a marketplace governed by quantitative analysis rather than the fairness and justness of the welfare state, the deregulatory impulse usually attached to neoliberalism found life through the structures and cultural reaction to the welfare state. Thus, in the wake of social equality legislation, the film industry’s end to censorship of graphic violence and sexual objectification through explicit nudity surfaced simultaneously with women’s liberation.⁵³ In short, the deep history driving the neoliberal conjuncture witnessed both the arrival of legislated social equality (the deregulation of legally constructed social hierarchies) and the rise of a new market depicting women’s subjugation (the deregulation of acceptable commodities). In this sense, the old adage “Act like a lady” came true: if women turned their back on deferring to men’s authority (ironically under the “fairness and justness” mantle of the male-dominated welfare state era), then women who did not defer would not be treated like “ladies” on the screen. The public perception of women’s liberation would be conditioned by the cultural and economic changes of the 1970s, setting the dynamics for future feminist debates over “the right to be equal” and “the right to be different” in the 1980s and 1990s.⁵⁴

Popular media’s relationship with women’s liberation in the 1970s operated as a significant contributor to the culture war, representing one of the cultural contours of neoliberalism as the film industry deregulated the censorship rules erected during the era of the welfare state. At the dawn of women’s liberation, films embodied Friedrich August von Hayek’s proposition that the market acted as an “information processor,” seeking to satisfy markets and customers who were drawn to newly uncensored depictions of nudity and violence, particularly against women. Returning to Baldwin’s jailer analogy, as masculinity no longer could base itself on the legal subjugation of femininity, a new outlet filled the vacuum to regulate the freedom of the newly released prisoner—and the perfect vehicle for this regulation of freedom was the sexual and gendered violence of the liberation gauntlet in exploitation films.

Exploitation Films: Regulations, Realism, and the Liberation Gauntlet

Early exploitation films grew out of the regulatory Jim Crow welfare state era. Initially attracting a popular following in the 1930s, these films eluded the Hays Code regulations—Hollywood’s self-regulatory system—by offering lurid images under the banner of educational cinema (such as sex hygiene, drugs, vice, or nudist films).⁵⁵ Hollywood studios implemented the Hays Code in the early 1930s to thwart intrusive government censorship into Hollywood, with the aim of keeping movies moral and uncritical of law or religion.⁵⁶ An important impetus for this censorship was the brief era of pre-code films (1930–34), when movies depicted assertive women participating in activities usually reserved for men, including engaging with multiple sexual partners without moral consequence. During the Great Depression, these liberated films, along with gangster and horror movies brought in much needed revenue for Hollywood: the audience reacted enthusiastically to the realistic depictions of the rebellious spirit of 1920s liberated women. Consequently, this disruption of patriarchal order came to the attention of social conservatives anxious about independent women like Mae West and Barbara Stanwyck and images deemed lurid on the screen.

For the most part, exploitation films were nonmajor studio movies, usually created with low budgets and produced to capitalize on popular genres, contemporary issues, taboos, and anxieties, or merely “milk an existing market success.”⁵⁷ In some ways, exploitation films are related to their less controversial but similarly low-budget cousin: the B movie. B movies were the second billing to Hollywood productions, however, they did not venture into the controversial subject matter that defined the exploitation film.⁵⁸ John Wayne began his career acting in B movies, although he also played a minor role in the quintessential pre-code film Baby Face (1933), portraying one of Barbara Stanwyck’s conquests.⁵⁹ Nonetheless, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, exploitation films embraced the blossoming youth market and left behind their educational documentary past.⁶⁰ Director Stephanie Rothman, who worked for legendary exploitation film producer-director Roger Corman, notes, “The reason audiences came to see these low-budget films without stars was because they delivered scenes that you could not see in major studio films.”⁶¹ This formula of sensation proved extremely profitable.

The slow collapse of the studio system after the 1948 Paramount decision coincided and influenced the easing of the Hays Production Code in the 1950s as major studios released films adopting more serious topics such as adultery and prostitution.⁶² Adjusting to the post–World War II demographic shift in the United States, the film industry sought to contend with the growth of suburbanites watching television (and not going to the movies).⁶³ A new form of exploitation emerged during these years to lure in the youth market, inaugurated by the “nudie-cutie” films of director Russ Meyer, beginning with The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959).⁶⁴ Meyer’s exploitation films in the 1960s—notably Faster, Pussycat! Kill! … Kill! (1965) and Mudhoney (1965)—depicted the objectification of women through sex role reversals where women dominate men.⁶⁵

Capitalizing on the success of mid-1960s exploitation films (what Peter Krämer calls youth-oriented taboo breakers), these policy adjustments in business and culture materialized out of the 1960s as representative commodities defining the arrival of the multinational media conglomerate and the embrace of the new cultural mores of the 1960s.⁶⁶ In a metaphoric sense, the studio system (ostensibly a Fordist institution) evolved into the conglomerate system (the defining institution of the neoliberal era) leading to a more flexible environment to create films. Important to this rearrangement was the intersection of the social revolutions of the 1960s, the dismantling of the Hays Codes, and the rise of the Code and Rating Administration system Hollywood utilized to review and rate films.⁶⁷ Together, these policies helped to deregulate the film industry from its pre-1960s form, with the added bonus of keeping their ratings system—the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)—under the control of Hollywood rather than an arm of government regulation.⁶⁸ Like the welfare state for multinationals, the film industry had outgrown the regulations of the Hays Code as the tastes of 1960s audiences had drastically changed from the 1950s. A “new” liberated Hollywood arose out of the rebelliousness of the 1960s, capitalizing on realistic depictions of sex and violence.⁶⁹ Realistic violence appeared initially in 1960s exploitation films, whereas mainstream productions picked up on the trend largely after 1966. Political unrest also found an outlet in film, as the rhetoric of Black Power, the counterculture, and women’s liberation entered popular culture expression in the late 1960s and early 1970s, representing another set of exploitable material.

Black Power and feminism took shape at the same time the “new cinema of sensation” arrived, stemming from director Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), as well as the taboo-breaking films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Dirty Dozen (1967), The Graduate (1967), Up Tight! (1968), and The Wild Bunch (1969).⁷⁰ Richard Slotkin describes how these sensations pushed the realist envelope: “Part of our excitement and terror comes from realizing that what is normally and traditionally concealed will at last be explicitly displayed.”⁷¹ Realism, Annette Kuhn notes, situates the viewer in a space where they are unaware that “she or he is making meanings: meaning seems to be there already in the film, the spectator’s only task being to sit back and take it in.”⁷² Unfolding with the turbulent events of the decade, realism both represented the deregulation of the film industry’s code of restrictions as well as that industry’s competition with television, as the reality of violence connected to the civil rights movement, the wave of urban uprisings, antiwar confrontations, and the Vietnam War was broadcasted into the homes of Americans on a nightly basis. The saturation of these events across various forms of media expanded the concept of experience. One could obviously experience their everyday life, including face-to-face interaction with the various 1960s movements. However, with its omnipresence, one could also vicariously experience these movements through the flow of television.⁷³ Film productions across the 1960s failed to reconcile this new oversaturation of information-based reality and the everyday experience projected into homes every night: the outdated fantasies of Hollywood now became comparatively unrealistic when juxtaposed against the conflict and violence of the evening television news.

The rise of violence, nudity, and sex in full color—and rated R—became a new norm for post-1960s Hollywood in serving the growing demand for realistic film narratives.⁷⁴ For the most part, elements of Black Power and women’s liberation entered movies as simplistic caricatures of angry Black men denouncing “the man” or women complaining of male chauvinists (with each character summoning older stereotypes set against the new politics). Containable within the film format, these representations of political movements became new commodities of spectacular “difference” to a public increasingly numb from the decade’s turmoil.⁷⁵

Although the initial response to the lowering of censorship posited a new liberated era, the baggage of patriarchy resituated itself in a similar manner as the reformation of race when confronted with the ideal of color blindness. In the name of realism, the incorporation of contemporary themes of women’s liberation by directors often suffered from their own deep-rooted patriarchal ideas, sometimes becoming more amplified and fantastic under the less regulated measures outlining what could be shown in films. Furthermore, the deregulation of film coincided with another trend: the most profitable movies between 1967 and 1976 marginalized women and focused primarily on male protagonists, with women forming only 26 percent of characters in movies (both major and minor).⁷⁶ Noting this systemic response to social equality legislation, Krämer adds, “It would appear, then, that male filmmakers in their productions, and male cinemagoers in their film selections, went against the trend of increasing support for women’s rights. Films seem to have fulfilled a compensatory function here. In the cinema, men could withdraw from social reality, in which they acknowledged the demands that women could legitimately make on them, into a world in which women were quite marginal or altogether absent.”⁷⁷

With some exceptions, the market for film realism and the filmmakers’ satisfaction of this market narrowed itself to a much more sensationalist vision of realistic depictions of sex and violence from a male perspective, invoking what appeared to be a reinvigoration of the “experiences of men in contemporary America.”⁷⁸ In short, the trend toward realism fixated on the rugged individual male, reaffirming the “male gaze” at the same moment women gained social equality with men.⁷⁹ Long an institutional norm in filmmaking history, the “male gaze” defined and contained women in film “as erotic object[s].”⁸⁰ Although the gaze characterizes the entire history of Hollywood film, once censorship was deregulated and the door was opened to the visual representation of violence and nudity, misogynist sentiments found greater and more explicit expression. Much like the limitations of the civil rights movement in significantly altering structural inequality, women’s liberation, too, operated from largely a symbolic base of power in the face of male-dominated institutions. It was easier to change the facade facing the street—removing explicit signs of racism and sexism—than to adequately address the longue durée ontological sentiments of a society wired to imagine women as naturally inferior. Mirroring the feminist criticisms toward the so-called sexual revolution, the freedoms of the 1960s in film more often equated to the freedom of male (and some female) filmmakers to further objectify women’s bodies through gratuitous nudity (without the comparable objectification of men) and graphic sexual violence rather than exemplifying some type of “revolution” confronting older patriarchal morals.⁸¹ Although a few films portrayed empowered women overcoming life obstacles—for example, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and Claudine (1974)—Hollywood’s dominant responses to feminism more often took shape in the form of disciplinary punishment, either in erasure or what I call the liberation gauntlet.⁸²

Exploitation movies drew on youth audiences’ identification with political-cultural concerns, generating the sort of excitement, relevance, and interest from audiences that stars once brought to larger budget Hollywood productions. The budget for these films allowed for no stars, notes director-producer Roger Corman, leaving filmmakers to “exploit the subject material” instead.⁸³ Squeezing out the surface essence inscribed in the manifestos and voices from social movements, exploitation films deployed the feminist rhetoric (however caricatured) of empowerment and engagement with patriarchy (the subject matter) through a narrative mixed with the violence and nudity desired from the target audience (the exploitation). As an alternative market to mainstream films primarily based upon the experiences of men, female-centered exploitation films wrapped stories of assertive women together with the threads of objectification and brutalization while simultaneously securing a feminist sense of empowerment through cathartic revenge sequences at the climax of the film.⁸⁴ The resulting commodity was a patchwork of images conjoining the spectacle of liberation manifested through caricatured representations of Black Power and feminism with the renewal of the very patriarchal violence the feminist movement sought to challenge. As Pam Cook notes, although there appears to be empowerment in “the possibility of woman becoming the subject rather than the object of desire, that desire is seen totally in terms of male phantasies and obsessions.”⁸⁵

Much like early 1970s sitcoms of single women, these works denoted the structural market limits of cultural productions depicting feminism in the post-1960s era.⁸⁶ At the same time, however, many films from this era offered an unprecedented array of lead roles for women in action films. A few exceptions to this rule occurred, particularly with Stephanie Rothman’s Terminal Island (1973), where a more egalitarian relationship exists within a prison setting despite the brutalizing images of women enslaved to the whims of the male inmates.⁸⁷ Switchblade Sisters (1975), a nonprison movie by exploitation film stalwart, director Jack Hill, offered glimpses of interracial solidarity against a misogynist white male gang.⁸⁸ As the films were intended to be drive-in “date movies,” a mixed audience separated these films from the male viewership of “grindhouse” movies.⁸⁹ The novelty for exploitation films, particularly those produced by Roger Corman, was the focus on “the actions, desires, goals, and interests of women.”⁹⁰ From this premise, filmmakers erected a liberation gauntlet filled with the vestiges of gender and racial violence to establish a path for their actresses to attain empowerment.

In defining the liberation gauntlet, the latter describes the end goal: to achieve liberation. The gauntlet, however, is the means by which one achieves the ends: it is the material and symbolic set of instruments, institutions, and obstacles framing the coercive path toward liberation through a series of public punishments and humiliations structuring one’s ordeal. To survive the gauntlet is to achieve liberation, but the body is marked and/or recorded with scars of the ordeal, reminding the viewer of the cost and punishment of liberation. Thus, an important component of the liberation gauntlet is its public process, a spectacle of calculated humiliation aimed toward disciplining women’s desire to be autonomous, at once violent and titillating. In 1983, film critic Richard Meyer noted the libidinal dynamics of exploitation films and their connection to realistic experience. “Exploitation films are the price we pay for, essentially, living a lie. Many would like to think that they are well-adjusted, considerate, intelligent people who would never enjoy—even revel—in the suffering of others. I know I would.… Like it or not, many receive a guilty, sometimes secret thrill out of witnessing savage action and titillating topics. I know I do.… In this case, exploitation films perform a much-needed service; they allow one to receive all of the perverted pleasure of looking at a car wreck without the guilt of knowing that the victims are real.”⁹¹ Realism now encompassed a cathartic flexible misogyny for filmgoers in the 1970s. Taking shape alongside other reforms as neoliberalism emerged in the 1970s, films projected what the conservative culture war rhetoric could never utter: equality would never be handed out as an inherent right (as John Locke suggested); women would need to earn their independence from men. Thus, if women sought to enter spaces previously reserved for men (the masculine genre of actions films), then the “protections” promised by patriarchy would be reversed: there would be a physical cost for women who sought liberation. Consequently, the liberation gauntlet provided men with their own revenge sequence by fostering a series of events showing women attempt to define a life outside the control of men but forced to negotiate a liberation gauntlet prescribed and under the control of men. As neoliberalism found implementation within institutional policies after the 1970s, the liberation gauntlet established itself as a profitable paradigm and a useful device during the Reagan era’s backlash against women, forming the contours of anti-feminist films throughout the 1980s.⁹²

When discussing 1970s exploitation films, attention to the most popular subgenre is required: Black action films, or so-called Blaxploitation.⁹³ Stephane Dunn’s approach to this genre underlines how these films often centered on a “hypermasculine machismo,” “envisioned in part through the accepted naming and treatment of women, black women in particular, as ‘bitches’ and ‘hos.’ ”⁹⁴ Although many of these films contained elements of Black Power, the “films never radically upset either the racial patriarchal politics implicit in their making … nor popular contemporary and historical notions about race.”⁹⁵ Fitting into the general film trend outlined by Krämer, the majority of these movies explored ways Black men fought back against organized crime, corrupt police, or simply becoming successful gangsters—often relegating women to roles as objects of the protagonist’s desires. A few films, however, did utilize strong women leads, such as Tamara Dobson in Cleopatra Jones (1973) and Nichelle Nichols in Truck Turner (1974).⁹⁶ For the most part, however, the protagonists of these films engaged in sensual violence that activated a misogyny that “defined the spectacle of race, sexual, and gender power”—resulting in the reinforcement of “traditional hierarchies.”⁹⁷

The biggest star to emerge from this early period of women action stars was undoubtedly Pam Grier, who first made her name starring in Roger Corman–produced exploitation films coming out of the Philippines in the early 1970s. Grier would often be cast as a lower-class Black woman, sexualized via the guise or disguise of a prostitute—and thus conjuring the myths and controlling images of the Jezebel (the oversexed Black woman) and the Sapphire (the scheming and deceptive Black woman)—which allowed for her empowerment or agency against villains in films such as Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974).⁹⁸ Unfortunately, these images often did appear empowering when placed in contrast to more masculine movies such as Shaft (1971) and Super Fly (1972).⁹⁹ Just as the sexually violent liberation gauntlet outlined the path for films exported from the Philippines, Grier’s characters were often “raped, beaten, and degraded along the path to ‘winning.’ ”¹⁰⁰ In other words, to attain empowerment, Grier’s characters traversed a liberation gauntlet lined with an inventory of sexual violence and humiliation.

The feminist liberation gauntlet embodied a range of methods and routes of punishment and disciplining received by women in popular culture in the 1970s for declaring either freedom, equality, or in the final instance, demanding an end to racist patriarchy. Different versions of these gauntlets appeared in media as narrative devices, providing counterpoints to proposed empowerment and often espousing the reinscription of oppression. Unlike male empowerment themes stressing contemporary constraints in the protagonist’s search for empowerment—bureaucratic meddling, male competition, repressive bosses, liberals being soft on crime, or castration by women—women’s constraints in popular media worked through ideas geared toward naturalizing the concept of gender. This included (1) underlining the notion that women were naturally weak (2) and thus are shown to be susceptible to violence in the outside world (public sphere), and (3) leaving the viewer with an impression that the public sphere, as it had under the cult of domesticity, was naturally male. Although the path toward empowerment offered white males a distinct security in the fact that the structures and institutions operated from the power base of the white male, women faced an intersecting set of challenges, largely determined through gender, race, class, and sexuality, as they sought to navigate through the white male–dominated structures and institutions relatively undisturbed by the gains of 1960s social movements.

In many ways, the liberation gauntlet operated as a device to assimilate the ideology of feminism into images more easily incorporated into the broader framework of post-1960s identity politics. If a woman seeks liberation, she must submit to a fantastic level of brutality to underscore the unnaturalness of this liberation and social equality. Rather than a systemic critique of capitalist patriarchy, the liberation gauntlet channeled the quest for equality and empowerment through a male-defined set of obstacles—a misogynist version of the masculine hero’s journey, where the hero negotiates various obstacles to achieve their goal.¹⁰¹ Although made to traverse similar gauntlets on their way to becoming the hero in films, male protagonists were hardly made to traverse the soul-destroying experience of sexual violence—with perhaps Deliverance (1972) being a notable exception. No one could have imagined Clint Eastwood or John Wayne being raped on their way to victory. Consequently, the liberation gauntlet acted as both a set of commonsense parameters by predominantly male directors and creators of popular culture, as well as a set of structural impediments identified by feminists as obstacles in their quest for liberation (a regeneration of patriarchal violence disciplining demands of social equality). Hardly the creation of producers and directors, the liberation gauntlet represented versions of patriarchal disciplinary measures associated with the longue durée history of gender inequality.¹⁰²

The liberation gauntlet embodied the updating of modernity’s ideas and ontology connected to gender and its intersections. An anchor of this logic is rooted in the Enlightenment’s social contract theory and its often-silenced sexual contract. Although the social contract theorizes a gender-blind concept of universal freedom—the same universalism attached to the concept of Western civilization—within the confines of abstraction, notes Carole Pateman, exists the embedded patriarchal notion of men’s rights over women’s bodies via the sexual contract. Men are born free—as a natural condition—and are thus able to enter contracts as the embodiment of freedom and equality. However, since the sexual difference assigned to women denotes the binary of men, women represent the antithesis of freedom and equality (an intersection directly related to the dynamics of whiteness and Blackness). Accordingly, women are not born free, as they belong to their father and future husband—and thus cannot claim the same natural rights as individuals defined as men. Or as Bruno Latour described the ontological conception of modernity, European men belonged to the category of human (and, thus, free) while women (and people of color) were placed within the unfree and physically exploitable category of nature: the object for human agency.¹⁰³ Therefore, women’s relationship to men is one of naturalized subjugation, falling under the contractual rights of other men—of individuals who either purchase a woman via dowry or “give their daughter’s hand away in marriage.” Pateman writes:

The original contract constitutes both freedom and domination. Men’s freedom and women’s subjugation are created through the original contract—and the character of civil freedom cannot be understood without the missing half of the story that reveals how men’s patriarchal right over women is established through contract. Civil freedom is not universal. Civil freedom is a masculine attribute and depends upon patriarchal right. The sons overturn paternal rule not merely to gain their liberty but to secure women for themselves. Their success in this endeavor is chronicled in the story of the sexual contract.… [T]he contract establishes men’s political right over women—and also sexual in the sense of establishing orderly access by men to women’s bodies.¹⁰⁴

This contractual access to women’s bodies formed the ontological core guiding white American civil society, ideas of rights and liberty, and access to space and political-economic opportunity. The intersectional aspects of race and sexuality compound this equation. Developed through centuries of colonialism, the Atlantic slave system, capitalism, the nation-state, and imperialism, the intersections of race and sexuality utilized differently categorized women as defining elements buttressing the norms of patriarchal culture through the 1960s and beyond.¹⁰⁵ These longue durée norms reacted swiftly when provoked in the 1970s, as “all the old habits of thinking and acting, the set patterns which do not break down easily” were “a long time dying.”¹⁰⁶ These norms found themselves abruptly challenged by the onrush of social justice movements in the 1960s, with previously legal—or legally ignored—practices such as discrimination, harassment, and violence articulated as injustice and crimes against humanity by the historic victims of American white male supremacy. As Baldwin noted above, once the victim articulated their condition as a victim, they ceased being a victim and now became a threat as the dominant and righteous ideas of liberty and equality celebrated in history textbooks were questioned. A reaction ensued as the voices of women and people of color made this condition self-conscious to the world.

The rekindling of violence toward women in popular culture both reinforced a sense of danger for women while simultaneously disciplining demands for equality through the spectacle of physical punishment. This ritual gesture underscored the deep contours of patriarchy, and the construction of the centuries-old cult of true womanhood, where women relinquished claims of equality and civil rights in exchange for male protection. According to Susan Faludi, this sentiment goes to the heart of anti-feminism: “women are better off ‘protected’ than equal.”¹⁰⁷ At the same time, precedents of violence against white women in popular media—and their fighting back—stretch back to the colonial era and the very construction of American identity. Returning to colonial captivity narratives mentioned earlier, in the wake of describing spectacular violence dealt by Native Americans on the bodies of white women—with scenes describing their children’s brains “dash’d out … against a tree”—women were given license to take on “warlike roles” to redeem themselves: “only in this way could women be hailed as ‘amazons’ for accomplishing murderous deeds in the wilderness.”¹⁰⁸ A gauntlet constructed through white male imaginations, then, has always set the conditions for liberation. And patriarchal discipline would police the line.

Sensibilities such as this were/are ingrained across the so-called generation gap and assorted ideologies. Many of the early debates of the women’s liberation movement included a conscious avoidance of “repeating the left’s pattern of routinely invoking egalitarianism, while often ignoring it in practice.”¹⁰⁹ An example of this contradiction inevitably arose during a New Left anti-inauguration rally sponsored by the National Mobilization Committee in 1969. As Marilyn Salzman Webb made a speech describing the oppression of women, scuffles broke out in the crowd, including taunts and threats toward the stage: “Fuck her! Take her off the stage! Rape her in a back alley,” followed by taunts such as “Take it off!”¹¹⁰ Underlying the patriarchy of the New Left, the articulation of the condition of sexism within the movement found immediate resistance among many men steeped in the traditional patriarchy of their families and communities.

The soundtracks of these students’ youth also operated through the logic women’s objectification. Since its inception, rock ’n’ roll borrowed the overbearing “figure of the matriarch as the chief organizer of conformism and mediocrity” from the 1950s.¹¹¹ This domineering matriarch trope neatly fit the women attempting to reframe the New Left struggle. Popular songs by the Rolling Stones, with titles such as “Under My Thumb” and “Stupid Girl,” fostered new appreciation for implicit violence toward women while providing the lucratively nostalgic soundtrack of the decade.¹¹² In their 1971 release, “Brown Sugar,” the Rolling Stones take a longue durée view of the intersectional violence against enslaved African American women:

Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields

Sold in a market down in New Orleans

Scarred old slaver knows he’s doing alright

Hear him whip the women just around midnight

Brown sugar

How come you taste so good?

Brown sugar

Just like a young girl should¹¹³

Once past the images of capitalism, the Atlantic slave system, and the sexualizing of the enslaved, the listener was greeted with the song, “Bitch,” on the B-Side. Even the countercultural icons, the Grateful Dead, sang of patriarchal free love in “Jack Straw” (1971), where the lyrics discuss the communal distribution of possessions: “We can share the women. We can share the wine.”¹¹⁴ The sexual revolution appeared more like a license for men’s lascivious behavior than overturning possessive ideas about men’s control over women.¹¹⁵

Country music, as well, was a bastion of popular culture patriarchy mixed with conservatism and often-racist populism.¹¹⁶ Despite this link to tradition, glimmers of feminism appeared as the style developed in the 1920s and 1930s, including the Carter Family’s “Single Girl, Married Girl” (1927).¹¹⁷ Although Loretta Lynn marked the beginning of a more assertive, liberated voice for women in country music during the 1960s, the symbolic radicalism of women’s liberation found itself in the sights of many country artists chafing at the criticism toward what would emerge after the 1970s as “traditional values” (or “family values”) based upon patriarchy. Major labels like RCA records released works like Billy Edd Wheeler’s “Woman’s Talkin’ Liberation Blues,” which described a fight between the singer’s parents after his mother threw down her apron and joined the women’s liberation movement.¹¹⁸ The song includes the singer’s father offering equality through a punch in the face of his mother. Following a scuffle on the ground, the song’s resolution finds his mother relenting, conceding “you wear the pants,” and volunteering to get back in the house to take care of the kids. “Woman’s Talkin’ Liberation Blues” was on Wheeler’s album titled Love, and pictured him lovingly holding his child.¹¹⁹ “Thanks to women’s liberation, we men are no longer free,” sing the Willis Brothers on their song “Women’s Liberation.” Co-opting the centuries-old slave-freedom metaphor, the Willis Brothers interpret women’s independence and critique of male dominance as an attack on men: “women are taking over this ol’ nation enslaving innocent guys like you and me.”¹²⁰ The language of innocence, the default stance of white male patriarchy at the dawn of liberation, disavowed the longue durée violence of patriarchy. Complaining about his wife’s night job, the singer notes that he has to not only drop off the children at school, but when he comes home, there is only a frozen dinner waiting for him. Like most of this subgenre, the songs usually end with the women reconsidering women’s liberation as a farce. Indeed, “the good Lord made a woman to fulfill the needs of man,” and filling his shoes is not in “nature’s plan.”¹²¹ The Willis Brothers’ innocent demand for subjugated labor and sexual access is finally restored. Not to be outdone, women country singers such as Lana Roush joined in as well:

I believe in having babies, and making apple pie,

and I like the way men look at me when I wiggle by.

Girls let’s tell it like it is, we don’t feel oppressed.

The good Lord knew what he was doing when he made the weaker sex.

Don’t liberate me, please dominate me.¹²²

The language of patriarchy and its naturalization of gender equality litters the common sense of these works, underscoring the cultural efforts to reinstill a sense of inequality based on “nature.” For Roush—and conservative women following Phyllis Schlafly’s lead in fighting against the Equal Rights Amendment—the role of the submissive, deferent housewife protected women. Indeed, as many evangelical Christians suggested, patriarchy was God’s plan—and formed the essence of civilization.¹²³

As noted by the song “Brown Sugar,” Black women found themselves caught within this patriarchal network with the additional weight of racial antagonism. In 1960s social justice movements, Black women (much like white women in the New Left) ran into difficulties with male activists who embraced the dominant forms of patriarchal understandings of the place of women.¹²⁴ As Black Panther Party member Chaka Walls asserted in 1969, “The way women contribute is by getting laid,” a more bluntly updated assertion of the persistently misconstrued thoughts (by activists and historians) about the position of women in SNCC echoed a few years earlier by Stokely Carmichael: “prone.”¹²⁵ Although joking, Carmichael’s comment reflected much of the sentiment across a significant portion of the New Left and Black Power social justice movements. As Brian Ward points out, with repression escalating in the late 1960s toward Black Power groups, an outlet of frustration formed against Black women, who had been hugely important in organizing and strategizing the civil rights movement.¹²⁶ Antagonism toward Black women gained federal backing in 1965 through the myth of the Black matriarch in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action” (aka the Moynihan Report).¹²⁷ Circulated and constantly highlighted by conservatives like William F. Buckley Jr., this theme continued to place Black women within their historic role as symbols anchoring ideas of race and anti-Blackness—and assigning blame to them for the effects of institutional racism.

Much like the sexism permeating other popular culture, R&B and soul utilized tropes sexualizing women at the same time a new militancy entered music after 1968. Epitomizing this trend was James Brown.¹²⁸ Along with his mid-1960s frank notion, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” in a track from 1970 Brown adopted a similar defense of patriarchy as country music in the wake of the new demands of women (a year noted for an increased gap in the pay ratio between men and women since 1960):

Fellas, things done got too far gone.

We gotta let the girls know what they gotta do for us!

It’s done gotten to be a drag, man, a man can’t do nothin’ no more!

Girl, let me tell you what you got to do,

T.C.B. so mellow, so nobody can get through.

When he has to do your lovin’, smile and kiss his cheek,

Walk away and twist your hip, make sure you keep him weak.

Don’t let nobody take care o’ your business better than you do,

Do what he wants, give what he wants, expect ’em come to you.

And then you can hold your men, you can hold your men, you can hold your men.¹²⁹

The guiding assumption in most of these songs (from country to rock ’n’ roll to soul and funk) imagines women already possessing power over men—a situation magnified for Black women confronted with the state-sanctioned matriarchy myth and the reality of longue durée intersectional antagonism. Through this conservative male-centric worldview, the idea of legislative social equality between men and women immediately conjures images of women replicating the patriarchal relationship of men dominating women, a similar idea fueling white fears over Black Power.¹³⁰

Representations of women in television presented a subtler reaction. Strong, independent women appeared in sitcoms, including Mary Richards of the Mary Tyler Moore Show to Maude Findlay in Maude to Florida Evans of Good Times. However, in early 1970s film, strong women occupying traditionally male spaces most often appeared as caricatures of man-hating women who would see their family, and thus children, suffer for the sake of a career or personal empowerment. An exemplary illustration of this was Faye Dunaway’s character Diana Christensen in Network (1976), the television producer whose ruthless, cold-hearted drive replicated the older lessons of femmes fatales from the film noir era: alienation and loneliness (or death in most film noirs).¹³¹ With men’s loss of control over women’s sexuality, these charges sometimes linked second-wave feminism to homosexuality.¹³² These homophobic indictments came from the backlash outside the women’s movement as well as from within.¹³³ For example, Friedan’s declaration of a “lavender menace” echoed the persecution of gays and lesbians by the federal government in the 1950s, though NOW disavowed Friedan’s position in 1971 after vigorous efforts by lesbians.¹³⁴ Even women-in-prison exploitation films used lesbianism as an ultimate personification of villainy and the upending of civilizational norms.¹³⁵ Women connected to domesticity continued to operate as a normative value, as independent women became amoral, masculine corporate villains (like in Network) or selfishly confused about their identity as in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979).¹³⁶ Finally, the assertion of women’s agency surfaced most spectacularly in the violent genre of revenge fantasy films featuring the psychotic murder of males after abuse or sexual assault, such as the made-for-TV movie The Girl Most Likely to … (1973), Hannie Caulder (1971), Rape Squad (1974), I Spit on Your Grave (1978), and Ms. 45 (1981).¹³⁷ The ratings system allowed producers to force viewers to sit through the liberation gauntlet of sexual assault as it unfolded.

This symbolic disciplining from the film industry arose in various forms, though frequently assuming a similar rhetorical shape as the anti–women’s liberation narratives in music. Films most often established a sense of equality by equating equal treatment through a masculine-directed test of violence. Adriana Cavarero outlines how “modern political thought” modeled the “male subject” as the universal, allowing two paradigms: exclusion, which films during this period did, or “a homologizing, assimilating inclusion,” where women are included through the model of men and thus have their difference silenced or magnified through the spectacle of ritually inscribed violence (symbolic or physical).¹³⁸ An equation of equality emerged: if women wanted equality, then the baseline of male-imagined equality—the coercion and violence shaping patriarchal relations—is highlighted and placed in the path of women seeking liberation. Since the rules of agency within film still adhere to the male gaze and dominance over narrative and production decisions (with a few exceptions), equal physical punishment on par with men extended into the masculine-driven dimension of sexual assault. Within the “liberated” bargain of equality is the relinquishing of the promise of male protection denoted in the “act like a lady” maxim. With patriarchy’s romantic bargain in tatters, open season on women commenced.¹³⁹ The result for women in action films released amid the deregulation of censorship: a hypersurreal assault on body and mind wrapped in titillation.

Second-wave feminism’s work against, and theorization of, sexual violence helped to pave the way for a broader understanding of the intersections between gender, sexuality, class, and race, particularly the publication of Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will and Angela Y. Davis’s “Joan Little: The Dialectics of Rape” in 1975 (as well as Davis’s later work criticizing the “racist ideas” pervading Brownmiller’s arguments regarding Black men).¹⁴⁰ Previously framed as an issue where “women are said to invite rape and murder and abuse by not being submissive enough, or by being too seductive, or too …,” feminists in the 1970s reframed the “she asked for it” commonsense response to sexual violence: theorized as a male social act, rape projected control and power by men over women’s bodies.¹⁴¹ As Maria Mies points out, “Women began to understand that rape, wife-beating, harassment, molestation of women, sexist jokes, etc., were not just expressions of deviant behaviour on the part of some men, but were part and parcel of a whole system of male, or rather patriarchal, dominance over women. In this system both direct physical violence and indirect or structural violence were still commonly used as a method to ‘keep women in their place.’ ”¹⁴² Rape operated as both an acquaintance-driven, though sometimes random, selection of victims acting as a reinforcement of a particular hierarchy through extralegal measures. Indeed, these acts are intimately linked through their intersectional relationships to the various hierarchies embedded in patriarchy—race, class, sexuality, and so forth. The long history of white men raping women of African descent often failed to be classified as a crime, acting as another tool of domination in the arsenal of slavery.¹⁴³ In the name of realism, then, the sets of policies unveiled in post-censorship Hollywood brought previously censored depictions of explicit violence to the fore as exploitative marketing gestures to attract audiences.

These depictions grew graphic within cinema as the Hays Code ceased to exist. Rape within popular culture, what Tanya Horeck calls public rape, is represented in sexual assaults that “serve as cultural fantasies of power and domination, gender and sexuality, and class and ethnicity.”¹⁴⁴ These filmed fantasies of sexual violence by men against women served—as it always has—“as a means of forging social bonds, and of mapping out public space.”¹⁴⁵ For exploitation films in the 1970s, especially the less campy horror pictures like Rape Squad or I Spit on Your Grave, the act of rape is the ultimate motivating factor for women’s empowerment toward the end of the film. Operating as a trigger for role reversals with men, these scenes reinforced the idea that women could not achieve liberation without the violent body and soul assault of sexual violence. Examples of this dynamic include Jackson County Jail (1976), which initiates the literal liberation of a woman prisoner after she kills a sheriff’s deputy who raped her; more disturbingly grotesque, I Spit on Your Grave contains a gratuitous twenty-five-minute rape scene preceding the protagonist’s violent spree against her male assailants.¹⁴⁶

To make sense of these 1970s gestures and representations, American masculinity’s patriarchal drive needs to be contextualized within the longue durée legacies of settler colonialism and slavery. Settler colonialism’s contribution to patriarchy included the masculinity associated with men’s protection of women and children from so-called savages on the frontier.¹⁴⁷ Thus, an equation infused with intersecting sexual, gendered, and racial ideas guiding the violent displacement of Indigenous people from their land while controlling women through the language of “protection” became a vital part of the defense of the homeland. Sexual violence against Indigenous women, moreover, formed a counterpoint to the “protection” of white settler women, with rape actively aiding the process of ethnic cleansing within the zero-sum nature of settler colonialism.¹⁴⁸ Slavery and the ideas of race and anti-Blackness formed yet another pillar of American patriarchal masculinity: from seventeenth-century laws forbidding Black men to possess firearms to the barring of people of African descent from testifying against white people, the law carried swift verdicts establishing the inflated worth of white men, especially white men with property.¹⁴⁹ Working off the white ideal of citizenship inscribed in the Naturalization Act of 1790, the Dred Scott decision consolidated these customs under a Supreme Court ruling, with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney arguing, “[African Americans] had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”¹⁵⁰

Meanwhile, lynch law extended these practices in the wake of emancipation after the Civil War through the twentieth century, specifically the threat of Black men raping white women justifying the “festivals of violence.”¹⁵¹ The white American embrace and defense of the lynching of Black Americans extended to the perverse commodification of the image of Black death through the selling and circulation of postcard photos of lynchings sent around the nation by white Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁵² Science provided a new “objective” justification for racial antagonism through eugenics and statistics in the early twentieth century, codifying the criminalization of Blackness up through the twenty-first century.¹⁵³

These dynamics legitimized violence against African Americans via the guise of the Black rapist or brute as well as reinforcing the curtailment of white women’s rights in the name of white male protection.¹⁵⁴ For Black women within the structures of slavery, anti-Black patriarchal ideology foreclosed equality from the positions of both race and gender—with sexuality, moreover, adding yet another layer to the gauntlet of the American “racial dictatorship.”¹⁵⁵ Within the legacy of slavery, anti-Black patriarchal ideology suggests multiple, simultaneously occurring acts. First, the notion erases the role of sexual coercion as “an essential dimension of the social relations between slave master and slave. In other words,” as pointed out by Angela Y. Davis, “the right claimed by slaveowners and their agents over the bodies of female slaves was a direct expression of their presumed property rights over Black people as a whole.”¹⁵⁶ Furthermore, the outcome of this sexual underpinning of race, class, and gender buttressed the unstable category of the cult of true womanhood developed during the height of slavery’s profitability (the era of “cotton is king”), becoming a critical component of the rise of bourgeois patriarchy.¹⁵⁷ Other spectacles of violence toward women preceding the nineteenth century include the rituals of witch burning after accusations of witchcraft.¹⁵⁸ These early modern ideas expressed themselves in colonial North America, where the concept of rape defined the sexual relations between a Black man and a white woman—and not white men and Black women.¹⁵⁹ Finally, controlling images such as the Jezebel justified the act of rape, alongside a host of other oppressive institutionalized features of racial slavery, including “medical experimentation … and unwanted childbearing.”¹⁶⁰ Within this contradiction, where Black women were raped in act (not by definition) only, this power relationship undoubtedly spilled into practices between white men and white women. In short, sexual coercion under the weight of racial slavery formed an important pillar upholding American patriarchy. Davis writes, “For once white men were persuaded that they could commit sexual assaults against Black women with impunity, their conduct toward women of their own race could not have remained unmarred. Racism has always served as a provocation to rape, and white women in the United States have necessarily suffered the ricochet fire of these attacks. This is one of the many ways in which racism nourishes sexism, causing white women to be indirectly victimized by the special oppression aimed at their sisters of color.”¹⁶¹

Another element of the liberation gauntlet for Black women and men included the expanded use of the racial epithet n****r on screen.¹⁶² The word’s value for the United States translated to immense wealth for the new nation, a psychological boost for poor whites—fomenting a dependable safety valve for class conflict—and a license for the murder of Black people without retribution.¹⁶³ The word also proved important in achieving direct realism in entertainment, with many exploitation and 1970s action movies setting the term loose into public discourse against the backdrop of films set in the inner city, intermingled amongst representations of Black criminality and other spectacles of violence and nudity. Successful films such as The Godfather (1972) and The French Connection (1971) utilized the word as a sign of street authenticity and the blunt racism of the films’ white protagonists. In The French Connection, for instance, the roughhewn protagonist, Doyle, represents the conservative mantra of law and order, wielding blatantly anti-Black views—“Never trust a n****r,” he tells his more liberal partner. Although the viewer cheers the antihero Doyle on in his chase after a heroin supplier, his mundane racism is a literal depiction of the policing mindset the Kerner Commission outlined in their 1968 report as being one of the most prescient reasons for “riots.”¹⁶⁴ Indeed, actor Roy Scheider remembers sitting in a Black theater in Manhattan and listening to the audience cheering after the utterance, as their charges of racism from the police were voiced on the big screen.¹⁶⁵ Moreover, these views were deployed in the name of artistic aesthetics and creating a realistic depiction of policing that even the liberal Gene Hackman came around to see as necessary in society (he won an Academy Award for playing the protagonist).¹⁶⁶

In some cases, like Across 110th Street (1972) and many films that fell into the Blaxploitation category, white cops or authorities who used the epithet often signified their corruption.¹⁶⁷ Ideologically, this isolates the blunt post-1960s racism to working-class people, corrupt police, or criminals, rather than the actual power structure creating legislation and enforcing policies—who do not need epithets to assert power. In short, films ignored the sort of institutional racism buttressing the Northern or Western white suburbs, reassuring viewers that only individual racism survived after the 1960s, as institutional racism ostensibly disappeared with civil rights legislation. This equation helped reinforce the new paradigm of color blindness in the mainstream (ostensibly uncorrupted by “ignorant” white working-class prejudices toward inner-city Blacks) while signaling the individualistic racism associated with the use of the racial epithet as atypical in the new post–civil rights era. Finally, the term operated simultaneously as a reinforcement of anti-Black attitudes unacceptable within polite (or public) society, a reformed controlling image aimed toward inner-city African Americans caught within a desperately bleak postindustrial America. The new film realism allowed audience members to vicariously utter the epithet through white movie characters—reestablishing the fraternal ties of American anti-Blackness. As an important element of the liberation gauntlet, the resuscitation of the word n****r into renewed use in the public sphere of entertainment underlined the term’s ongoing importance to white American identity creation.

Utilizing the new range of acceptable representations in film such as mixing sexual violence with female empowerment, assertive Blackness alongside feminism, and the renegotiation of anti-Black imagery, exploitation films in the early 1970s offered both a preview of life after the collapse of the Hays Code and provided an exaggerated path of possibilities for 1970s popular culture. As David A. Cook notes, “The replacement of the Production Code by the MPAA ratings system, led the majors to embrace exploitation as a mainstream practice, elevating such previous B genres as science fiction and horror to A-film status, retrofitting ‘race cinema’ as ‘blaxploitation,’ and competing with the pornography industry for ‘sexploitation’ market share.”¹⁶⁸

American-Philippine Exploitation Films and the Liberation Gauntlet

American directors in the late 1960s found the Philippines to be a lucrative site for low-budget exploitation movies. The sometimes gruesome, often titillating flood of films fashioned a powerful phalanx capitalizing on youth demand for the deregulated social mores of the post–Hays Code film industry: it was “what the market wanted,” noted legendary Filipino director Eddie Romero.¹⁶⁹ The jungle setting of the Philippines added a turn-of-the-century imperialist aura to the imagery defining the binary between Western civilization (the Global North) and the savagery of the jungle (the Global South).¹⁷⁰ Thus, filming in the Philippines involved both an economic motive in relocating production overseas as well as Grace Kyungwon Hong’s “fetishization of difference,” where the jungle location provided a type of setting conducive to the story and cast of characters in Corman’s movies.¹⁷¹ Finally, the American production of exploitation films in the Philippines also marked the way cultural production comingled with the economic shifts of multinationals and the rise of neoliberalism.

After almost half a century of colonial ties to the United States, the film industry in the Philippines had established deep roots by the end of World War II.¹⁷² Even John Wayne visited the Philippines to film Back to Bataan (1945), an homage to the heroism of Philippine resistance to the Japanese occupation that both downplayed the brutality of U.S. colonization and emphasized “the benefits of U.S. colonialism.”¹⁷³ Beginning in the late 1950s, Philippine filmmakers such as Romero, Cirio Santiago, Gerardo de Leon, along with American expatriate Kane Lynn (who, with Romero, would form Hemisphere Pictures to distribute films in the United States) actively sought an international audience.¹⁷⁴ Most of these films—including Brides of Blood (1968)—were horror exploitation pictures, filled with violence and gore intended to shock audiences.¹⁷⁵ One of the important precedents these late-1960s films set included the use of white American actors—particularly actor John Ashley—set against the exotic jungles of the Philippines. The primary market for these films was the Midwestern drive-in movie theaters.¹⁷⁶ As Henry Jenkins notes of the drive-in, “People don’t typically go to drive-in to watch a story. They go to see moments of spectacle, particularly erotic and violent spectacle.”¹⁷⁷

Although made in the Philippines (with Filipino crews), the films, as Filipino director Eddie Romero suggests, “were American pictures made by Filipinos, financed entirely by Americans.”¹⁷⁸ Mirroring the strategic outsourcing of American multinationals, the relocation of U.S. filmmakers to the Philippines led to increased profit margins through low costs, nonunion labor, and nonexistent regulations (e.g., safety or pay scale). Directors could also count on the close cooperation of the nation’s pro-American authoritarian government (especially after the 1972 coup) looking for foreign investment.¹⁷⁹ For many American directors who produced movies in the Philippines, the culture and economics went hand in hand. A blunt Jon Davison (producer) reminisced, “Human life was cheap, film was cheap. It was a great place to make a picture,” while director John Landis unabashedly exclaimed, “You’ve got jungles, you’ve got girls who you can exploit. You’ve got everything and you get it cheap.”¹⁸⁰

The momentum of American capital transferring overseas and the exploitation of women represented a global trend for multinational corporations whose policies created the networks for the rise of Philippines-produced American exploitation films.¹⁸¹ An Intel Corporation personnel officer echoed John Landis’s excitement about exploiting women in developing nations: “We hire women because they have less energy, are more disciplined and are easier to control.”¹⁸² One advertisement for investment in Malaysia said this about its women workforce: “The manual dexterity of the oriental female is famous the world over. Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care. Who, therefore, could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench-assembly production line than the oriental girl.”¹⁸³ Accordingly, this overseas setting established a baseline imagination in sync with the ideas emanating from imperialism and the postwar American brand of orientalism built on the sentimental bridging of differences.¹⁸⁴ Based off these popular perceptions, exploitation films offered a blunt, sensational, facetious, and campy fantasy, often relying on Filipino “Otherness” to drive the tension even further.¹⁸⁵ Effectively provoking a slew of gendered violence crucial to the anchoring processes of patriarchy, these films wove together the brutalizing techniques of racial slavery via the prison context with the agency of multicultural casts espousing liberationist rhetoric. In short, the “three Bs” of Philippines-made horror pictures from the 1960s—“blood, breasts, and beasts”—made their way into 1970s American Philippines-made movies, underlining the intersectional politics of both the American culture war and the relocation of multinationals overseas, where women were viewed as “disposable” and the ideal labor source.¹⁸⁶

One of the first exploitation movies inaugurating the flood of American-Philippine productions was The Big Doll House (1971), a film by Roger Corman.¹⁸⁷ Corman helped convert the content of exploitation movies of the 1950s and 1960s into the era of ratings and the incorporation of feminist and Black Power rhetoric into film. Corman’s range of pictures included sci-fi and horror, biker and counterculture films, and even a foray into Black action films: The Final Comedown (1972).¹⁸⁸ Corman started making movies for Allied Artists and American-International Pictures in the late 1950s through the 1960s. In 1970, he started his own company, New World Pictures, Ltd. Besides making cheap films, Corman also provided opportunities for women to direct, produce, and write scripts in the infamously male-dominated film industry. Not necessarily “altruistic,” notes Jenkins, “these women would work long hours for little money, hoping to get the film credits needed to break into Hollywood.”¹⁸⁹ Corman’s style has been compared to the older Hollywood studio system, churning out more than four cheap and quickly made films a year between the late 1950s and 1960s.¹⁹⁰ Although his work mirrored the old ways of Hollywood, putting out “raw ‘product’ devoid of any personal stamp or unique vision,” Corman did create a style of his own by the time he started New World Pictures.¹⁹¹

The majority of Corman’s movies were shot in the United States, but his pictures produced in the Philippines point to the larger shifts occurring in the film industry. When asked about the reason for shooting films in the Philippines in 1973, Corman described two main factors: “the look for an interesting, unusual location, and the economics as well.”¹⁹² These films also cast a significant number of Filipino extras, whose racial presence against the threatening jungle backdrop foregrounded the danger faced by the American cast. As Amy K. King writes, “These films exploit images of Filipinos as ‘the subaltern’ in the context of US imperialism, which is essential to the films’ strategies to export ‘deviant’ US women for punishment in the Philippine prison-plantation system.”¹⁹³ The Big Doll House’s enormous success revived the women-in-prison movie genre, a film trend rooted in the 1920s and taking modern shape in the 1950 film Caged.¹⁹⁴ In an interview, Corman comments on the economic morality of producing women-in-prison films overseas: “At first, I didn’t like The Big Doll House. I thought it had gone a little too far with the sex and the violence. It cost about $100,000 and it grossed something like $4 million. When I saw the grosses, I have to admit, my scruples faded away and I said, ‘Let’s make another one.’ ”¹⁹⁵ Outsourcing and the raw material of the liberation gauntlet produced impressive profits. Other projects set in the Philippine jungle—and often preoccupied with a prison setting—quickly fell into production, including Women in Cages (1971), The Big Bird Cage (1972), The Hot Box (1972), Night of the Cobra Woman (1972), Black Mama, White Mama (1972), The Woman Hunt (1973), T.N.T. Jackson (1974), Savage Sisters (1974), and one of the first action films to use four Black female lead actresses, The Muthers (1976).¹⁹⁶

The core trends of women-in-prison films include scenes of women arrested, violently stripped, tortured and raped, and then, as was often the case, a sequence of revenge acts by the brutalized women against their tormentors. Women antagonists sometimes played the tormentors running the prison, often coded as “lesbian” and interested in sadistic torture (the “predatory lesbian” caricature).¹⁹⁷ As the films take place in the Philippines, the ideas associated with the culture of imperialism highlight the “danger” the white American actresses face in the context of jeering Filipino men.¹⁹⁸ The tension of interracial sexual violence—long a Western civilization and American barometer fueling racial antagonism—occurred as the plot unfolded amid humorous, ironic, and campy banter as women were brought together in cells.¹⁹⁹ At the same time, male characters also sometimes appear as buffoonish or comic fodder in light of the obstacles facing the women; in a gesture toward camp, sometimes the guards were represented as homosexual men. In further role reversals—and production cost cutting—the roles of guards were often played by Filipino women.

Some observers suggest that there was the presence of feminism in the women-in-prison film genre, as it offered “spectacles of female bonding, female rage, and female communities, with strong doses of camp and irony.”²⁰⁰ In these settings, women gain empowerment through homosocial bonding under oppressive conditions, leading to a mobilization against their oppressors. In retrospective interviews, this flexible feminism is on display. For example, director Jack Hill (The Big Doll House, The Big Bird Cage, Coffy, Foxy Brown, and Switchblade Sisters) notes that “some people started to see feminist messages in these movies. I was certainly a feminist, but I can’t really say it was intentional. They were exploitation movies where you’re basically exploiting women sexually. But I just felt that, in this case, it was going to work because the women were kind of in control—they were turning on the men.”²⁰¹ Actress Cheri Caffaro (Savage Sisters) explicitly underlines the flexibility of using women leads in exploitation action films: “Women were never looked upon as the lead role in a movie. It was always the guy first, and the woman maybe two or three down the line. Having women do action was unusual then. And it became a craze, thanks to Roger [Corman]. Movies like the one I did, Too Hot to Handle, and Pam’s movies, they became couples’ movies. Guys got to see women fighting and nude scenes, which I never minded doing, and the girls got to see a heroine. It made them stronger to see another woman portrayed like that. It empowered them.”²⁰² Undoubtedly empowering, there is, however, a logic guiding women through the liberation gauntlet on the way to empowerment. According to Hill, the structural requirements for women-in-prison films demanded certain scene obligations: (1) “Naked Girls in a Shower,” (2) “Girls Fighting in the Mud,” (3) “Women Being Tortured,” and (4) “Hosing Scene (optional)”—note the change in description from “Girls” to “Women” according to the punishment.²⁰³ The actresses of these films, for the most part, interviewed almost forty years later, attest to the excitement and thrill of the location of the Philippines and the various trials and tribulations their characters maneuvered through.²⁰⁴

In reinscribing the historical legacy of misogynist images, sexual assault is a continuous theme in these exploitation films. Often, these acts include women sexually violating other women—particularly early scenes when inmates are brought to the prison and female wardens call for full-body searches. Rape is also used in The Big Doll House as a reversed threat, with tongue-in-cheek lines spoken by actor Sid Haig regarding the possibility of being raped in the prison by the women inmates. Haig’s business partner in the film faces this reality, when his female attacker threatens him: “Get it up, or I’ll cut it off!”²⁰⁵ One line from The Big Bird Cage echoed the racist logic of the controlling image of the hypersexual Black women and the patriarchal imagination that rape was not about the control and disciplining of women: “You can’t rape me; I like sex.”²⁰⁶ The logic of this display of sexual and violent titillation on screen illustrated the paradox of women’s liberation, as producer Jane Schaffer remarked: “Feminism with aggressive women is not going to be palatable in a mass market without tits and ass.”²⁰⁷ Nevertheless, the women-in-prison genre was so successful that even the family-friendly feminism of the hit television program Charlie’s Angels contained an episode in its first season (1976) that took place in a women’s prison in the South. Titled “Angels in Chains,” the episode adapted these attributes for prime time, including scenes (censored through camera angles and props) of strip searches, shower scenes, being hosed down (with antiseptic), work in the (potato) fields, and forced prostitution.²⁰⁸

Taking a closer look at The Big Doll House, Corman and director Jack Hill’s successful film tells the story of six women planning their escape from a brutal prison controlled by a sadistic female warden in an unnamed, ostensibly Latin American banana republic (in the Philippines with Filipino actors and actresses). The women prisoners’ crimes ranged from killing their philandering husband, to infanticide (possibly code for abortion), to drug addiction and prostitution, as well as being a political prisoner whose love interest was a revolutionary figure fighting the government. The conjoining of the charges of prostitution with lesbianism by the only African American character in the film, Grear (played by future Black action film star Pam Grier), adds a racialized sexual “deviance” to the film through the performance of the historical controlling image of the Jezebel filtered through the newer construction of the hip street swagger of Black Power (Grier would also play a prostitute in Black Mama, White Mama).²⁰⁹ Incidentally, Grier’s character in the script did not originally call for an African American actress. Another white character, Alcott (played by Roberta Collins), offered a second set of sexual “deviance” as the nymphomaniac who attempts to rape a civilian male supplier. All of these ideals form a wide-ranging critique of the outcome of women’s liberation. The prison embodied the necessary space for the viewer to watch the disciplining of these women back to the patriarchal fold at the same time they are allowed to see them make empowering gestures against their captors.

These “crimes” regenerated certain norms for audiences, as the women’s flight from patriarchal authority had led them to the criminal justice system. By establishing the binary between normal and deviancy, a “cognitive framework” performs a disciplining function across race (white normativity), gender (masculinity dominates; femininity submits), and sexuality (heterosexuality = normal; homosexuality = abnormal), resulting in “the core hegemonic White masculinity.”²¹⁰ Despite the unplanned casting, anti-Blackness designates the character of Grear to manifest the most symptoms of deviancy and, by association, savagery: she not only is the predatory lesbian seeking control of her women—first, Harrad, the heroin-addicted cellmate who committed infanticide, and second, the new inmate, Collier—but Grear is also the source of betrayal for the others in their escape scheme. With The Big Doll House as the successful archetype, Corman (with Hill) helped to popularize profitable films highlighting the “aggressive positive heroine obsessed with revenge.”²¹¹

With the juxtaposition of caged, dehumanized, and disciplined Black, white, and Filipino women’s bodies, these films conjured a selection of libidinal images mapped across the processes of modernity. Within the setting of a foreign prison in a non-white nation with predominately white female inmates, the historical association of torture and rape woven through the processes of settler colonialism (women’s captivity narratives) and the Atlantic slave system (both the abuse of Black women, the Black rapist brute, and the white slavery scare of the early twentieth century) were turned on their head for 1970s exploitation cinema.²¹² The violence of slavery is deployed through role reversal, allowing the very set of gendered and sexual power relations marking settler colonialism and the Atlantic slave system—including the incessant fear of white women being raped by men of color—to operate as the corrupting driving force for the film. Rather than using slavery as a means to understand contemporary oppressions, the system’s coercion merely acted as a theater set for the objectification of an attractive, multicultural cast performing in a space filled with the mechanisms of violence associated with slavery, further enhancing the spectacle of role reversals, gratuitous nudity, violence, and torture/rape.

Women-in-prison films set within jungle-like prison plantations twisted the use of racial slavery as the white female members of the cast assume yet another role reversal when juxtaposed with their Black counterparts: they are presented as slaves within a plantation setting, an ahistorical impossibility adding to the films’ spectacular nature.²¹³ The resurrection of plantation imagery is a striking element. In films ranging from Big Doll House to The Big Bird Cage, work regimes include harvesting rice, cutting sugarcane, and working sugar trapiches. They also highlight the wardens’ and overseers’ perverse fascination over the control of imprisoned and enslaved bodies, with many women forced to trade their sexual submission for lighter duties, while replicating the historical framework defining the master-slave dialectic for Black women.²¹⁴ Torture devices are sexualized, with fire, steam, and poisonous snakes encompassing various punishments. Finally, whips or batons are frequently used in mobilizing prisoners within chain gang settings.

Alongside the slave plantation-prison motif in these films, the background of the jungle stirred anxieties long defining its space as the antithesis of civilization and the target for taming via imperialism and resource extraction—as well as reminding audiences of the ongoing war in Vietnam. Associated with the jungles of sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia, in many ways these films revived the 1920s and 1930s imperialist jungle film genre (with its conjoining notions of Africa and savagery), providing titillating spectacle of nudity and violence to the consumers occupying the movie genre’s primary audience space: Midwestern drive-in theaters in the United States catering to a mostly white audience.²¹⁵

The jungle films of the first third of the century and the exploitation films shot in the Philippines share a patchwork of intergenerational, historical projections.²¹⁶ First, during the early part of the twentieth century, U.S. imperialism—ranging from the conquest and occupation of the Philippines to the cultural-economic ties with nations such as Liberia—helped create a U.S.-derived fantasy of the “white man’s burden” disseminated through literature, films, and photography.²¹⁷ During this era, the jungle film genre worked in tandem with the plantation film genre in representing Blackness on the big screen. Although differentiating the plantation genre from the jungle film genre of the 1930s, Cedric Robinson suggests that the two types “collaborated in general and differed in particulars.”²¹⁸ Robinson continues, “The jungle film fashioned the present and the quite distant past into a racial pageant. The plantation genre policed the civic body and domestic labor; the jungle film patrolled the frontier.”²¹⁹ In short, the two models provided viewers with dominant controlling images of Blackness at the height of Jim Crow. Coming of age in the aftermath of these multilayered tropes—raised on Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and King Kong (1933)—filmmakers built on these ideas, updating the exotic sexual tension with the contemporary circumstances of the 1970s. The women-in-prison genre, then, deftly tapped into the libidinal energies and historical projections encompassing the desires mapped throughout the twentieth century’s fascination with the gendered and sexual civilization-savagery binary and transnational whiteness.²²⁰ Through the combination of ticket sales and low budgets, the Philippines provided an ideal location to produce films based around the exploitation of young, mostly white women and a lurid jungle setting with “exotic” peoples—a sort of Playboy magazine photo shoot twisted through the imperialist visions of a Rudyard Kipling tale and the demented fantasies of dominating women through the techniques and practices of slavery and patriarchy.

The physical relocation of filmmaking to the Philippines offered a material analogy to the economic shifts occurring in American business expansion overseas during the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, the depictions of women in these films represented key manifestations of the culture war—and shaped the cultural contours of the ascending logics of neoliberalism. As the nation entered an identity crisis related to the Vietnam War, civil rights–Black Power, and second-wave feminism, the culture war found raw material for selling antiestablishment political rhetoric as the emerging reality of social equality between men and women unfolded in the 1970s.

Liberation Gauntlets and Mainstream Masculinity

There is an admitted absurdity in using low-budget exploitation films to explain the culture of neoliberalism. However, the cultural and economic context of 1970s exploitation films represent an exaggerated comment on, and reaction to, the particular moment in which they were created: the film production followed the trends of multinational corporations, outsourcing their production to unregulated nations with cheap labor, while its aesthetic content conjured the ghosts of cultural and economic processes from the past in an attempt to tap into the desires and anxieties of the present. In short, exploitation films offer cultural-economic signposts marking the historical conjuncture of neoliberalism’s ascension to dominance in the 1970s and 1980s.

In their ability to provoke sensibilities, exploitation films represented a balancing act between “radically divergent potentials for pleasure and fantasy” and their depictions of liberation.²²¹ These products catered to the thirst for the taboo, the violent, the sexual—all elements weaving through the polarizing nature of the culture war. Although Richard Meyers’s thoughts above about exploitation films are unsettling, there is a sad truth to his words: the suffering of others, especially those defined against one’s identity, all too often provides meaning or an outlet for frustration—most grotesquely illustrated in early-twentieth-century lynching photos, or the staged Abu Ghraib prisoner photos during the Iraq occupation in the early 2000s. As Baldwin astutely noted, it’s difficult for those who have obtained power through subjugation and oppression to suddenly relinquish this unequal relationship that comprises the very basis for one’s identity: “They cannot because they have always existed in relation to a force which they have had to subdue. This subjugation is the key to their identity and the triumph and justification of their history, and it is also on this continued subjugation that their material well-being depends.”²²² As the portrayal of violence and sexuality found deregulation amid the end of legislated white male supremacy, an anxious audience thirsting for catharsis appeared as they negotiated the onset of social equality with those who were formerly contained and seen as dependent on men. This juggling of titillating and violent subject matter based on deep historical antagonisms made exploitation films a perfect match for the new ratings system, helping to create a more efficient marketing device catering to increasingly segmented popular markets. Mainstream Hollywood quickly took notice. If women’s independence found expression through the liberation gauntlet of exploitation films, mainstream cinema found an inversion to this via the rise of a more explicit masculine violence portrayed in the action film genre.²²³

White men have always dominated mainstream Hollywood, as Krämer noted, with male-centric films being the norm up through the 1970s.²²⁴ Against the backdrop of the deregulated mores of Hollywood, many male-centered action films in the late 1960s and 1970s depicted male protagonists administering the liberation gauntlet to women who, apparently, were no longer “ladies.” The result unleashed misogynist contempt toward the social justice challenge against patriarchal legal constraints and social norms. For many conservatives and liberals, this offense against “tradition” and its romanticized “patriarchy” demanded contestation. And much like the way the welfare state found itself imagined as unfairly benefiting people of color, the culture war against women associated the undermining of patriarchy with a political challenge toward men, family (code for patriarchy), and of course, Western civilization.

Just like Wayne’s McQ, culture war films wove “law and order” into narratives focused on the breakdown of urban spaces in conjunction with the rise of the civil rights movement and Black Power.²²⁵ One aspect drew on the newly established “rights of criminals,” particularly Miranda v. Arizona (1966). For many Americans criticizing boisterous social justice movements, marchers were no different than street criminals, and thus felt that the authorities were “coddling” protesters and criminals. These were the impulses driving Wayne’s frustration with American society, as he, along with those identifying with the “silent majority,” felt like they—white men—were losing the country they previously held a legislatively-sanctioned monopoly on before 1964.

As a pivotal anchor in the Southern strategy of Nixon, this reframing of the civil rights debate replaced the legacy of white nationalist ideas, policies, and material outcomes with a veneer of innocence: law and order implied equal protection under the law if you adhered to the law. As a truism, law and order also implied that there was never unequal discrimination in the criminal justice system—past or present—or at least not as much as Wayne’s liberal “do-gooders” suggested. Indeed, “all men were created equal.” This possession of history cast the innocent light of Manifest Destiny on those holding the line against social justice. In cinema, this law and order sentiment justified the cinematic unleashing of Wayne-inspired white masculine retribution against the “bad guys” hiding behind the liberal protections of the welfare state. With the rise of deregulated trends in Hollywood, these frustrations grew to embrace elements of the liberation gauntlet, including titillating nude and sexual scenes highlighting the permissiveness of the post-1960s counterculture.

In the early years of legislated social equality, these intersections of “law and order” and misogyny came together as themes in mainstream films, becoming a balm for an increasingly impotent white masculinity no longer legally able to generate their identity through the subjugation of others. Films such as Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Joe (1970), Dirty Harry (1971), The French Connection (1971), Death Wish (1974), as well as an array of Black action films tapped into the contemporary anxieties orbiting discussions of “law and order” and masculine (white) control.²²⁶ To represent power, directors melded the application of explicit violence—guns, raping, hand-to-hand struggles, explosions, and car chases—in neat alignment with sexual analogies: phallic power, domination of women, bodily contact, orgasms, and courtship. The thrill of these action films—the inversion of the liberation gauntlet—traced an imagined ideal for sullen men newly equalized with women (especially those facing the loss of skilled labor jobs as multinational corporations relocated production overseas). The result: desperate caricatures of individual heroism based off an earlier era of confidence and power—what Tom Engelhardt calls victory culture.²²⁷ Although these distressed images of lonely brooding men arose from the confident symbolism of Wayne riding the tide of “victory culture,” within the context of legislated social equality these feats of masculinity could only unfold through the guise of the antihero. The antihero appeared as a populist-conservative avatar for the culture war’s antipathy toward an interfering bureaucratic government overly regulating the character’s ability to save society. Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry personified this archetype:

District Attorney: Where the hell does it say you’ve got a right to kick down doors, torture suspects, deny medical attention and legal counsel. Where have you been? Does Escobedo ring a bell? Miranda? I mean, you must have heard of the Fourth Amendment. What I’m saying is, that man had rights.

Harry Callahan: Well, I’m all broken up about that man’s rights.

Molly Haskell calls this reaction the “virility cult,” a response to a range of social disruptions to a white male–dominated nation. The “virility cult,” explains Haskell, was composed of men who worried “far more about assuring the world and one another of their masculinity than John Wayne ever felt called upon to do.”²²⁸ Wayne’s career peak, of course, was during the height of the Jim Crow welfare state, when patriarchal white nationalism was the “American way of life.”

Coogan’s Bluff and Joe represent two early examples exhibiting the embrace of the new realism to help reconstitute white masculinity through the inversion of the liberation gauntlet. Both films offered responses to Black Power, the sexual revolution of the counterculture, and independent women. In particular, the white male counterculture became a target, with both films framing the movement as depraved, drug-addled, and effeminate (men wearing sandals and having long hair). As a crucial marker of the culture war, the counterculture challenged the Cold War patriarchal nuclear family structure with its embrace of alternative living situations (i.e., communal living). The protagonists in each film search for their respective fugitives within these counterculture circles: Coogan’s Bluff’s white male Arizona deputy (Clint Eastwood) going after a criminal hiding away in New York City; in Joe, an angry white working-class man (Peter Boyle) aids a white upper-middle-class man’s (Dennis Patrick) search for his daughter—an updating of the captivity narrative (e.g., Wayne’s The Searchers [1956]).²²⁹ Both films exploit an encounter with the “free love,” sexual revolution aspect of the counterculture as an Odyssey-like waypoint on their journey. The protagonists in each film engage in sexual intercourse with young women, allowing audience members critical of 1960s sexuality to engage vicariously in an elicit fantasy involving casual sex and participation in the sexual revolution they despise. With sin, however, comes repentance: in both films, these sexual encounters quickly turn violent, as the protagonists attack the women they just had sexual intercourse with in order to obtain information for the protagonist’s search. Acts of classic misogyny—slaps, violent grabbing, cold interrogation—reinstills proper social order. Unlike exploitation films, however, the gauntlet these women traverse fails to provide liberation.

A viewer sympathetic to the conservative culture war might interpret the episode as a corrective disciplinary device aimed toward punishing the “loose” women of the counterculture: “If you want to be treated like a lady, you need to act like a lady.” Haskell notes the logic of these moments in the early 1970s: “When women were ‘liberated’ on the screen—that is, exposed and made to be sexually responsive to the males in the vicinity—it was in order to comply with male fantasies or … to confirm men’s worst fears.”²³⁰ Older men conquering younger women underscores the hypervirility of the individual protagonist while simultaneously reinforcing the patriarchal notion of men controlling women’s bodies as the aftermath of sexual intercourse turns to a violent interrogation. Though suggesting hypervirility, Christopher Lasch suggests something else is at work: “As male supremacy becomes ideologically untenable, incapable of justifying itself as protection, men assert their domination more directly, in fantasies and occasionally in acts of raw violence.”²³¹ Thus, the “rape-in-reverse” performance helps the viewer to understand the encounter as consensual—a romantic seduction even—between an older male protagonist and his younger female opposite. Once sexually satisfied, however, the protagonist engages in physical and psychological violence to extract the information he requires: a combination of power and lust connected to the so-called sexual revolution, with patriarchal anger triggered by the need for control—to gain information as well as punishing the women for sexually misbehaving. This desperate act for Hollywood’s leading men pointed to the existential crisis confronting American masculinity in the 1970s.

These acts pose a critical question for men at the dawn of liberation: could social equality with women really mean relinquishing control over their bodies? As the inheritor of Wayne’s symbolic presence as the personification of the American settler, Clint Eastwood embodied the model for treating liberated women in the 1970s. Eastwood’s character in The Enforcer (1976)—the third film of the Dirty Harry series—inhabits a film that punishes his “affirmative action” partner, white female detective Kate Moore (Tyne Daly), for an intrusion into an all-male world of policing. Unlike other partners from the Dirty Harry film series who get hurt but not killed in their lesson on who is “fit” to be a cop in San Francisco (mirroring culture war resentment, the first two partners in the series were Chicano and African American men), Detective Moore is brutally gunned down saving Harry Callahan from an ambush attack.²³² The lesson here is that the stakes were too high for social equality—especially artificially applied through a political bureaucracy—as these performances underline the dangers of women, despite bravery, transgressing the older boundaries of American patriarchy so thoroughly unsettled by second-wave feminism. In High Plains Drifter (1973), directed by and starring Eastwood, the film’s protagonist (Eastwood) teaches a lesson to a woman who deliberately bumps into him (to highlight her impulse to infidelity) by raping her within minutes of entering town.²³³ The frontier, it appeared, continued to be too violent for women, as films renewed the patriarchal pledge of security for women over social equality. As Wayne told his love interest in Red River, it’s “too much for a woman.”²³⁴

This virility cult masqueraded as therapy for those uneasy about social equality, a new baseline narrative for men’s behavior in the post–civil rights, post–Vietnam War world. As neoliberal policies coalesced with the culture wars, the liberation gauntlet operated as a visual narrative, an emotional-libidinal mechanism outlining the constraints in depicting how independent, liberated women challenged patriarchy. As Pateman outlines this disciplining secured a post-1960s cultural pact or contract, where one may enter the arena of (public) masculine conflict if one is prepared to pay the ultimate cost of entering the space: sexual objectification and/or violence.²³⁵ For emerging neoliberalism, this disciplining in popular culture helped frame what exactly women could expect from women’s liberation: either a place within the system acceptable to an anxious male status quo or exile from the “protections” of patriarchal capitalism and into a realm of social equality defined through explicit sexual violence and humiliation in the name of post-1960s sexual freedom.

The relationship of feminism to the early 1970s culture wars was a longue durée extension of the series of debates and policies shaping the national identities and hierarchies since the foundation of the colonies in the seventeenth century. As John Adams wrote to Abigail Adams bemoaning the advancement of liberty beyond white men of property (and politely denying Abigail’s request to “Remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors”), “We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bands of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters.”²³⁶ In short, freedom extended beyond white men with property removed the very core defining both “order” and an American identity rooted in a hierarchy of white male supremacy. It is this array of patriarchal essence cultivated through the Atlantic slave system and settler colonialism that informed the militia-like “virility cult” patrolling and policing the liberation gauntlet as it converged with the 1970s conjuncture: overseas outsourcing, the wider trend of U.S. business mergers (including Hollywood studios), the emasculation of working-class men losing their factory jobs, and the rise of neoliberal economic policies. These intersectional views of the products created within the context of the rapid expansion of multinational capitalism in relation to music, films, and television is the cultural shadow accompanying the ideas and policies of neoliberalism.