Word: explaining
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This plague of injuries may help explain the laxwomen's current record of 0-8, but the explanation for the injuries is not obvious...
...film's chief complaint is that the male-dominated medical profession has always treated female patients like children or half-wits--diagnosing them summarily, making critical decisions without consulting them, and refusing to explain the risks and medical alternatives to such radical surgery as breast removal and hysterectomy. The women who made the film offer the solution of enlightenment; they clearly believe--and many of the women interviewed say this too--that when women are educated about their bodies, their physicians, and what they have a right to demand for their own medical safety, they can effectively challenge their doctors...
Deitch has woven a tapestry of wonderful footage of women talking about themselves. Prostitutes explain that they first turned tricks because they were starving. A clinical psychologist and lesbian talks about the discrimination she has suffered in her profession. An aging housewife sits on a park bench under a gray sky, and shows us the rag dolls she has made and sold for 25 years. Prostitutes in the San Francisco Women's Jail sit around a plastic table, smoke cigarettes, and say bitterly that they will have to turn another trick as soon as they get out, just to feed...
Much of the women's talk is descriptive--they explain their jobs, their families, and what they do all day. Only the prostitutes actually analyze their predicaments, but even their conclusions have, at times, an odd ring. One hooker traces society's intolerance of prostitution to the Bible. "It's the whole Puritan trip," she insists. "The Bible, which insists on chastity and monogamy, is for women the most oppressive book ever written." She smiles almost proudly then and says, "Hookers escape the double standard," adding simply, "and they get punished for it." The prostitutes sitting around the jailhouse coffee...
...further to the political left than she. It would be unfair to derogate her achievement just because she has left out socialist feminism. But there's something chilling about her choice of interviewees. When a whole group of prostitutes agree, tantalizingly, that "the system must be changed," and then explain that their idea of freedom from oppression is the freedom to be unmolested, legal whores, one can only wonder why Deitch stopped there--and hope that other women will go further...