Women Friendships Through the Lens of Imagined Femininity

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What media sources guide our ideas of friendships, especially friendships among women? Who is teaching us how are women's friendships supposed to look like? How have the majority of male directors portrayed women's friendships in the past? 

In his text "Mass Culture as Woman", Hyussen brings out the fact that mass culture consumption has generally been associated with women whereas the so-called high, real, authentic art has been associated with men. Women have been shown to be the passive readers/consumers of inferior, subjective literature, and men as the creators of objective, scientific, authentic art. I want to focus on how this kind of association affects how male directors in power have generally portrayed women's friendships on-screen.

The mainstream media is full of examples of platonic women friendships centered around the "surface-level" bonding over the mass culture of reading fashion magazines, "chick-lits", painting nails, going to spas together, and talking about men. The women fighting over one guy. Or, being extremely jealous and vindictive towards each other, etc. It always comes with a certain amount of cattiness. 

Such representation of women by male directors leads to the creation of a hollow character without any kind of depth in character - as if there is nothing else these women care about. This comes from, as Hyussen suggests, the imagined femininity - how men imagine/perceive women's lives (or friendships, in this particular case) to be.
 
Here I list a couple of examples from popular media which immediately come to mind and use such narratives for women friendships during the whole or certain parts of the films: The Women (1939), Gossip Girl (2007), Mean Girls (2004), Legally Blonde (2001), The Layover (2017), How I Met Your Mother (2005), Stranger Things (2016), 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), and many, many more.

The most interesting effect of such representations rooted in imagined on-screen feminity is that these misrepresentations affect the real-life feminity. When one consumes these common narratives (or myths, if you will) surrounding women's friendships, one tends to start evaluating/shaping their own friendships through the same lens - consciously or subconsciously. I can recall many times talking with my friends during teenage about how we are probably not great friends because we are not acting certain ways, we are not spending so much time together gossiping about guys or painting nails together, maybe something is lacking in our friendship? This brings up an important question: who is ultimately 'controlling' women's friendships, directly or indirectly?












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