Pussy, Punches, and Patriarchy: Female Sexuality in “Charlie’s Angels” Promo Material

Fans of the film “Charlie’s Angels” have claimed that it represents a renewed understanding of female empowerment in its three action heroines, the “angels,” whose crime fighting successes are played out in displays of beauty, brains and biceps. Before making such a claim, however, one must take into account certain factors concerning such things as the motivation and methods in its production and the ideological nature of the medium through which it is “consumed,” which significantly impact its meaning and implications in a broader framework. The film trailers and posters are of particular interest because their purpose is to establish a certain set of expectations and mode of seeing which, upon actually viewing the film, would direct how meaning is attributed to symbols encountered.

With a culture of identity founded through consumption, particular reception of a product that is ideological can influence individual and collective identity, and even American cultural and social norms. The “Charlie’s Angels” promotional material is focused almost entirely on female sexuality with its attention to shapely physical forms, suggestive actions taken out of context and innuendo. Through investigation of its conception and reception, it can be argued that the overtly sexualized representation of women in the promotional campaign for “Charlie’s Angels” is not empowering, but is instead a perpetuation of the material and symbolic oppression of women within a patriarchal system that objectifies and devalues them. The significance of these representations as oppressive must be explored by first considering the character of industry in creating media products for marketing and consumption for profit, and the unique nature of film as a patriarchal medium.

The film “Charlie’s Angels” and its various promo materials are products of the Hollywood film industry, created with the purpose of making a profit. With this in mind, film industry movers and shakers make decisions on the content and style of their products in a way that will maximize return on the great investment made in production costs. Film content is often suited to the desires of consumer culture for a comprehensible universe that they can purchase. The very nature of film as a product is not the traditional selling of a tangible object, but rather the selling of an experience. This includes an exposure to a claim to reality, whose ideas and symbols both reflect and construct the cultural patterns of the society. In its early days, film sparked the question of how to go about marketing a product with no physical substance. The approach was to create a desire of some sort while providing a guarantee for satisfaction of that desire initially created.

As explained by writer Harold Franklin in 1930, “Film advertising affects demands…by altering the wants themselves…fabricat[ing] desires and fantasies of pleasure.” This concept of desire, pleasure and satisfaction through consumption of film is an act of a sexual nature in itself. There is a relationship, then, between the audience consumer as receiver of pleasure and the object to consume, that is, the film’s image which provides satisfaction. As a medium which makes a claim on reality through symbolic representation, the film producers ultimately decide what should be desired by becoming an object of the consumer’s gaze. Film then, as a media text, is greatly shaped by industry decisions and, as Franklin again once said, is used “not merely to win patrons, but [to] voice and interpret [their] ideals.” The structure of the film industry is patriarchal in that it is dominated by men in all levels who make decisions on not only film text content, but where and how women are placed within that content, often reinforcing traditional social and gender roles. The ideals within a patriarchal system often place women in contexts which make them the passive objects of the spectator’s gaze and at their mercy because it is a traditionally established social pattern. The industry’s bottom line is to turn a profit. To do so, methods such as target marketing is employed to provide a more stable prediction of profit by catering to the tastes and interests of a particular demographic. In the case of “Charlie’s Angels,” the market targeted is assumedly male. Providing content that reinforces social norms of gender roles clearly defined by concentrating on the physical body and sexual nature of the female, consumers, particularly men, are eager to “consume” because they feel a comfort in the stable delineation of the norm that keeps them in a position of power. They are also given an “ego-ideal”, a Freudian term for a figure with which to identify, in this case Charlie, the secret but wealthy and powerful holder and controller of the three women. This relationship is an example of the film’s “nakedly Oedipal obsession with father figures” reinforcing a patriarchal way of thinking.

Film is inherently patriarchal in every sense of the medium as it functions through the action of directed look in a defined relationship between the audience and the object film text. It is a male medium through which a male text is communicated with male language. The audience member can be female and the gaze still be male and objectifying if it directs itself toward and is pleasured by a woman functioning as an erotic object. Film is also a medium which, through its being consumed as an experience versus as an object, provides certain situational pleasures. For example, both voyeuristic pleasure, which suggests a kind of illicit action of watching someone without their knowing, and what Freud would call “scopophilic” pleasure, which comes from viewing another person as an erotic object, are disturbingly sexually charged and objectifying. It has become a cultural norm, also, to assume that “a woman’s presence on the screen presupposes the appreciative glace of a male spectator.”( Devereaux, 343)

There are a few points in which the objectification within the media texts is taken to another level in which the representation of women is handled in such a way that is debasing and devaluing. With human identity dependent on the interconnection of the psyche self and the body self, the advertising media texts devalue women by separating the two selves from one another, thus denying them significance that comes from the complex relation between them. This can be seen on the poster and in the trailer when the faces of the angels are lost in shadow and all that one is able to view are sultry silhouettes. This represents women as defined only through their bodies as objects of aesthetic judgment.

No image or representation of woman could hint at true empowerment when created through and at the mercy of men. Further, an expectation is set up in the film’s promotional materials by the establishment of a representation of women as sexual beings that influences his or her way of reading the main film text. While there may empowering images in the main film text, an individual may not read them as such as “seeing never escapes a way of seeing” and “observation is always conditioned by perspective and expectation.”(Devereaux,337) In a review of the film, one writer comments that “male audiences didn’t mind seeing the ladies on top.”(Larson,38) Yes they may have the illusion of empowerment in such a “position,” but it is still just that: a “position.” Women are granted permission to assume the position in which they are placed and posed by an external figure of power. The very idea of posing and positioning is a form of sexual objectification that one can see in the angel’s trailer fighting poses in which they “look more like dancers than fighters” and exist only as “pure spectacle” to the men who watch on with “amused indifference” when they tried to avoid stereotypes.(Coon,3) They are kept as “spectacle” to calm the threat, or “unpleasure” of a real tough, smart and independent woman. This is also done through female fetishization, a form of extreme sexual objectification. In the representations of women in “Charlie’s Angels” promotions, the woman is “on top” because she has some use in a man’s world, that of the lusty object with a plunging neckline and “technique you’ve never dreamed of.” In short, she’s “on top” only because a man allows her to be.

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Coon, David R. "Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: the Selling of "Charlie's Angels" and "Alias"" Journal of Popular Film and Television 33 (2005): 2-11.

Devereaux, Mary. "Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers and the Gendered Spectator: the New Aesthetics." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, 4, Feminism and Traditional Aesthetics. (Autumn, 1990): 337-347.

Doane, Mary Ann. "Woman's Stake: Filming the Female Body." October 17, The New Talkies. (Summer, 1981): 22-36.

Fernandes, Joyce. "Sex Into Sexuality: a Feminist Agenda for the 90's." Art Journal 50 (1991): 35-38.

Larson, Christina. "7 Mistakes Superheroines Make." The Washington Monthly 37 (2005): 37- 38.

Medhurst, Andy. "Charlie's Angels." Sight & Sound 11 (2001): 43-44.

Staiger, Janet. "Announcing Wares, Winning Patrons, Voicing Ideals: Thinking About the History and Theory of Film Advertising." Cinema Journal 29, 3. (Spring, 1990): 3-31.

[spring 2007]