Tropes of Femininity (Op-Docs)

 

    For this specific assignment I was extremely intimidated by the endless amounts of Op-Docs to choose from. Did I want to watch documentary about quarantine? Racial inequality? Or maybe war? The two Op-Docs that I chose, All Her Dying Lovers by Anna Benner and Birth Control Your Own Adventure by Sindha Agha ended up interesting me the most not only because of their creative animations but also due to their unique stories. They left me speculating underlying messages in the documentaries that both centralized around the same narrative: that women are expected to deal with their hardships while the rest of society remain ignorant to their problems.

After watching All Her Dying Lovers I felt there was so much to unpack from a short six minute video. The animation starts off with the heroine of the story doing her daily routine while being narrated by present day residents of the town in which the story takes place. The voices that are narrating the woman’s story seem to know as little as the audience, but as the documentary progresses there is more clarification as to what exactly the story is about. The animation helps to aid the confusion that is brought on by the narrators on who this woman was, if she was even real, and what her life consisted of. We realize that the woman in question is a nurse working in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia who faces tragic events that ultimately lead to her death. The short film depicts in a combination of delicate music and animation the tale of a nurse who contracts an STD after being raped, who then weaponizes her disease against the Nazi occupiers. The thing that captivated me the most about the short was the juxtaposition between the tragedy of the events and the mundane story-telling of the reality of her life. We follow the woman going about her daily activities such as preparing meals and getting dressed even after it is revealed that she was deliberately infecting soldiers by bedding them, as her own controversial way of resistance. I felt that the purpose of this was to play on the perceived roles of women and the harsh realities that they faced during this time period. One narrator stated that “rape is a part of war”, making it clear that getting assaulted by a soldier was a normal occurence for women during WW2, and that they were expected to go on with their normal lives knowing that no one could seek justice for them. The story allows the audience to make their own judgements on whether or not the character was a feminist hero, but perfectly depicts a woman who changed the narrative and sought out vengance for not only her personal rape, but the rape of her own country. 

The short film Birth Control Your Own Adventure is an autobiographical account of Sindhu Agha, who is forced to choose between horrible side effects of birth control and pain in the face of inadequate reproductive healthcare options. Up until the last minute and a half of the film, Agha takes us through her journey on finding a sufficient contraceptive that would treat the chronic pain she felt which was caused by endometriosis. She tried as many as six contraceptive methods from the pill to an IUD, but found that with every different method she was a new person. Since the start of her birth control journey at the age of 11 she noticed the fluctuations of her mood and personality, but also began struggling with depression for the next ten years of her life. Her doctors did not point to her birth control as being the cause but decided that it was due to lack of vitamins or being a teenage girl. As she kept cycling through different options she found herself dealing with even more side effects such as anxiety that were obviously caused by birth control. By the last couple minutes of the video she is left with two fairly terrifying options, removing her uterus or medically inducing menopause. This leaves us with the question, why aren’t there better options? After this clip the film cuts to an audio on how the study of male birth control has been cancelled because of the many side effects that it causes such as depression, mood swings, and acne. Agha specifically adds this to the very end of the film to leave the audience with the realization that systemic sexism is prevalent in American reproductive healthcare. Why is it that women are expected to accept these contraceptives as the only options without criticism to the endless list of side effects that they cause? Healthcare providers seem to remain ambiguous about the side effects of birth control when it comes to women, and simply turn a blind eye to the serious physical and mental debilitations that they cause. Ultimately the short film signifies the importance of seeking better birth control for women, and makes it a point to finding a better healthcare system that doesn’t consider what is unacceptable for men as the “golden standard” for women. 

Both Op-Docs focus on a single story with underlying messages that allow the audience to delve deeper into social issues that remain prevalent in our society. All Her Dying Lovers, which seems to be about the tragic story of a woman during WW2, is also the story of a hero who found a way to resist her oppressors while masking it under the expectations of her femininity. In similarity, Birth Control Your Own Adventure at the surface level is about a young woman who struggles to find adequate birth control, but evidently is about challenging the presumptions that women have to continue to suffer under poor reproductive healthcare.