Prefatory Note: I acknowledge I can never understand the suffering women have experienced and continue to experience in instances of domestic abuse. The following essay delves into tough subject matter, though I hope in a sincere and respectful way.
A few weeks ago, I got some DVDs out of storage. I’ll admit I’m a bit of a luddite—I never bought a Blu-ray player and I even miss the days of CD players in cars. Looking through some of the titles in my collection, I saw one movie I had thought about recently and wanted to rewatch but had found nowhere on streaming platforms to which I already subscribed, so I was elated to sit back down with what is, to me, a gem of a movie.
1993’s The Joy Luck Club, Wayne Wang’s adaptation of Amy Tan’s bestselling novel, has been a favorite of mine ever since it used to play constantly on cable television. A film that tells eight stories spanning two continents and concerning a group of women who commiserate and celebrate life at a mahjong table, I have always found the film deeply moving.
I have embraced Asian American culture since I was first turned onto the work of David Henry Hwang, who I’ve written about previously on the blog and, long before Crazy Rich Asians, The Joy Luck Club was a Hollywood watershed as a vehicle to show off the remarkable performances of Asian-descent actors such as Tsai Chen, Lauren Tom, Rosalind Chao, Victor Wong and many others who often get typecast into roles unbefitting of their talent.
But lurking behind Joy Luck’s sentimental tone and surprising success at the box office, there was always a problem that nagged at me—though I didn’t realize it also nagged its contemporary critics. I have always been disturbed by the portrayal of the Chinese and Chinese American men in the stories which make up the panoply. While essentially a display of female empowerment (or, at the very least, the attempt for Chinese American daughters to understand their immigrant mothers), Allen Soong, writing for the Harvard Crimson wrote of the film, “while the women in this film are fully fleshed-out characters…the male characters are merely additions to the long list of negative images of Asian men in our culture…[they] are either domineering and misogynist in the worst imaginable way, or they’re just clueless and aloof.”
Amy Tan, who adapted the book with Rain Man screenwriter Ronald Bass, has had to long shuffle off criticisms that she, in the words of novelist/playwright Frank Chin, played up racist stereotypes of Asian and Asian American culture in her books. I can’t speak to that, and I can’t speak for Asian Americans anyway, but I can find no direct response from her on her portrayal of men in her novel. All except for Ming-Na Wen’s kindhearted father (and the hapless, deaf piano teacher), the husbands and fathers in her work truly are either braggarts or cold-hearted menials. In a strange twist, the two daughters in the film who do marry Caucasian characters end up staying with them (despite struggles), while the others divorce their Asian husbands (albeit for partners of Asian ancestry). Again, I cannot speak to negative portrayals of Asian American men, although I know there to be many in our culture, but I can’t help lump The Joy Luck Club in with a particular era of feminism that, for lack of a better word, exhibited tremendous misandry (a word unfamiliar to most folks, but is the opposite of misogyny—man-hating).
In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the so-called third wave of feminism defined itself rather differently from the first waves, which could be described as waves that argued for simple equality—figures from those eras included Amelia Earhart who only wanted the chance to perform the same greatness as their male counterparts, without denigrating the accomplishments of men.
The following is a sampling of quotes from this era, provided by my playwriting professor Gladden Schrock, himself a Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist and noted expert on eras in our culture that can be described as exhibiting “mass hysteria:”
“I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He’s just incapable of it.”—former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan
“To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.”—Valerie Solanas
“I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig,”—Andrea Dworkin, Ice and Fire
“I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”—Robin Morgan, former editor, Ms. Magazine
“When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression.”—Sheila Jeffrys
I could list more, but you can see some of the vitriol of the statements made during the same era when members of the National Organization for Women (NOW) sent death threats to Bret Easton Ellis for his portrayal of violence against women in his novel American Psycho (later adapted into a successful film by a self-described feminist director) and a time where other feminists of the period often sprayed graffiti that read, “Women have their faults/men have only two:/everything they say/everything they do.”
While Tan herself (to my knowledge) has never considered herself an activist in any sense, she did come of an age with this kind of rhetoric which I can only describe as hateful and a way of matching contempt with contempt—hardly an answer to that time and a pitiful echo towards times like now, where the problems between the sexes have not only been amplified, but have gotten worse.
Despite all this, I found myself weeping openly during my last re-watch of The Joy Luck Club. It is not a perfect movie, but it is genuine, affecting—moving if you let it transport you into the lives of its characters.
This brings up an interesting point. In the novel American Psycho (1991), Ellis felt his portrayal of the degradation of women’s bodies was a statement on what society often does to women and, as we found out later, as a gay man, he was disheartened by the actions of NOW and his status as a feminist at heart was challenged/distorted. Ellis and I attended the same alma mater—a place where an overwhelming majority of women still educate and are educated—Bennington College, which began as an all-women institution. Unfortunately, Bennington also produced the above-quoted Andrea Dworkin for which it should, ultimately, be ashamed as she believed, ridiculously, that any heterosexual sex was an act of rape.
Ellis was within his right to portrayal his misogynist character Patrick Bateman in the way he so chose. Tan also, I suppose, had the right to portrayal her male characters the way she did because neither author could be said to be condoning misogyny or misandry, but creating characters who exist in real life. And there are misogynists and misandrists among us today, believe you me, although the latter are largely ignored in times of great strife (such as the time we’re reliving now).
Still, the fact that Tan’s portrayal bothered men of Asian descent from Frank Chin to Hwang, another source of Chin’s criticism albeit for different reasons, I feel compelled to take their side. Why couldn’t more of Tan’s Asian/Asian American men be reasonable, rational, understanding—more like the female characters of her work? And why wouldn’t Wang, Bass and Oliver Stone (who executive produced the picture) at least bat a critical eye as they brought the project to the screen?
Which leads us to a far more complicated novel and film that has been accused of the same misandry and happened to emerge from one of the more vocal artist-activists of our age.
Recently, I came across a trailer for an upcoming film adaptation of Brenda Russell, Alee Willis, Stephen Bray, and Marsha Norman’s 2005 musical The Color Purple, adapted from Alice Walker’s 1982 novel and Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated 1985 film adaptation. I’m sure there are many African American women celebrating that this story is being retold on film again as it has become a touchstone of female empowerment, specifically empowerment of women of color. But I find myself troubled that Walker’s story is finding a new voice in 2023 for reasons which I hope will seem reasonable even if you disagree with them.
Unlike my response to The Joy Luck Club, my reaction upon first seeing Spielberg’s film was mixed at best. Like the whole world, I was impressed with Whoopi Goldberg’s screen debut. She is now known mostly as a political pundit, but it is often forgotten she’s an actress of extraordinary power—and if you’re not convinced, track down a copy of her solo Broadway show from 1983 and you will find yourself both laughing hysterically and crying in ways you never thought you could cry.
The Color Purple was a turning point in Spielberg’s career. Until then, he was known as the maker of the most polished high fantasy from Tinseltown—Jaws, the Indiana Jones pictures, and E. T. became the nexus from which Hollywood changed from the era of director-driven pictures to producer-driven moneymakers. In short, he (and George Lucas) is the reason small, personal pictures are today the stuff of Netflix and glossy juvenile entertainment for alleged adults fill the cineplexes. After Jaws, movies were judged not on their worth as art, but on how much money they made opening weekend, whereas, before, a picture drawn from simple life could slowly build word-of-mouth over several months before finding its audience.
With The Color Purple, Spielberg turned to “realism” and the dramatic genre. Though a seemingly curious choice, it is possible The Color Purple would have never been made without a name like his, even though he was not African American, not a woman, and had virtually no connection to the world to where the story takes place. In today’s world, it would be considered sacrilege for such a film to be made by anybody other than a person of color, but it troubles me that the new film version is still being made by a man for one simple reason:
Every male character in The Color Purple is an incestuous, rapist asshole and the ones that aren’t (Harpo, for example) are, at the very least, domineering.
Unlike The Joy Luck Club, there is not a single redeeming male in the pages of Alice Walker’s novel, and I even recall a short story of hers in which a male character consistently calls women “’omen” (dialect for “woman”), evoking the word omen, which echoes The Color Purple’s singular attribution of one character as “Mister,” evoking not one man, but all men.
Alice Walker is in a different class from Amy Tan, literarily speaking. While Tan is a novelist of popular literature, Walker writes literary fiction, and The Color Purple is an epistolary novel that has simultaneously been challenged in schools (mainly for its portrayal of violence) and beloved as a work of seminal African American literature. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, it won her the National Book Award for Fiction.
Spielberg largely softened the lesbian aspects of the novel for the big screen but kept its rapacious appetite for portraying men of the lowest order on full display. As a viewer/human, I found it surprising that men of such moral caliber—the director, composer Quincy Jones, actor/activist Danny Glover—could bring themselves to not even question the vile representation of African American men in her novel. A contemporary article in the Chicago Tribune even questioned the notion in its piece “Does Purple Hate Men?” and essays such as T. J. Curry’s “Making mister: Anti-black misandry in Alice Walker’s portrayal of black men in The Color Purple” (2021) echo a sentiment that has been around for many years, but which has truly never been given its proper attention.
Walker is famous as an advocate for womanism (her term), a particular brand of feminism specifically for African American women and certainly there are differences between hatred of white women and hatred of women of color. One need look no further than the curious appropriation in the way white women co-opted the #metoo movement for themselves although it was created for women of color by a woman of color (Tarana Burke). One can easily see how the subject gets short shrift. But there is a sinister side of Alice Walker’s “advocacy” that gets even less attention and makes me question her sense of morality in the way she views humanity. While I find it surprising that the Caucasian Southern playwright, Marsha Norman, was given the responsibility of writing the book for the 2005 Broadway musical version (a responsibility which most certainly today would have gone to Suzan-Lori Parks or any number of capable Black female dramatists), every time The Color Purple gets re-branded, its appeal for solidarity and understanding from/of African American women gets top-billing while Walker’s open antisemitism gets swept under the rug.
Walker is a noted fan of the work of David Icke, a British sports broadcaster-turned conspiracy theorist who believes he is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and writes volumes of books which espouse antisemitic tropes. In an interview with The New York Times Book Review, Walker mentioned Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free as a book on her nightstand. Icke’s book draws on a famous antisemitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and adopts the cliché of an international Jewish conspiracy that has led him to re-fashion such ideas into the notion that Earth is run by “Rothschild Zionists” who he portrays as “shapeshifting reptilian humanoids.” Surely, you’ve seen Youtube videos which propagate this absurd theory and, if you have, you’re familiar with Icke even if you’ve never seen his name in print.
Now you may find it absurd that I call out Walker’s antisemitism while I “defended” Richard Wagner’s work despite his openly antisemitic text On Jewishness in Music. Can I not afford Walker the same benefit of the doubt, especially given she’s a woman of color in a world where such people feel consistently threatened?
It is hard to do so.
In Wagner’s time, he was a product of his age—the preeminent thinkers of nineteenth century Germany were antisemitic and their inspiration dates back to the works of Martin Luther, whose anti-Jewish writings make Wagner’s pale sheepishly in comparison; Walker, on the other hand, should know better. Having been married to a prominent Jewish civil rights lawyer, Melvin Rosenman Leventhal (though later admitting to a lesbian relationship with singer Tracy Chapman—is the lesbianism in The Color Purple a cure for the scourge of men?) and having her most famous novel directed by one of the most respected Jewish filmmakers in the world, Walker seems to me (at least) to be wanting of a certain brand of character that one might call understanding, loving, and most especially human.
That Walker’s personal reading list gets left out of much discussion of her and that, given its hatred, unbelievably, the upcoming musical film version of The Color Purple is written and directed by two African American men, seems a mystery to me that I can’t begin to fathom.
But perhaps there is something I’m missing. Like with Asian-descent men, I cannot speak to the African American male struggle, but I feel I’m open enough as a human being to at least listen to their struggles as human beings; they are regularly discriminated against—they are openly disparaged for absence in fathering, their overwhelming population in the prison systems, the list goes on. Hell, even one of the most famous films of all time, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation, exhibits stereotypes of Black men I wouldn’t wish on cockroaches.
But I wonder if Alice Walker is any different given that there is such a blindness in her thinking.
Could I not afford her the same rights as I did above with Ellis and Tan? Perhaps her experiences (or her characters’ experiences) at the hands of African American men are simply a portrayal of a certain type of man and, perhaps, I am making a mountain out of a molehill. Then, yet again, regardless of my race, am I simply hoping for an age where feminism or womanism can exist without the denigration of men en masse?
Can there be a feminism which exudes female empowerment without the portrayal of men as automatic evil hindrances to their progress? Given that The Joy Luck Club and The Color Purple come from very different ethnic experiences, am I left to believe that the central problem is men (who have only two problems: everything they say and everything they do)?
Or must we simply wait on an age where equality has finally emerged, and these arguments will be relics of the past? Where we can all live in a society (even as different human specimens) and can co-exist peacefully? Are Tan’s book and Walker’s book wake up calls or do they perpetuate stereotypes that hold us all back to more primordial times?
I don’t bring answers, just questions. That’s really all I ever try to do in my non-fiction. But does fiction hold a bigger sway over the public who will consistently think of men as the problem? I leave that for you to decide.
Note: I am gratefully in debt to a reader who examined this piece prior to its publication and am thankful for her support and suggestions.
