From the toys we buy to the clothes we wear, there has always been a clear distinction between “girly” and “boyish” items, actions, and personalities in everything. But do we all still fit into either category? Do girls only like feminine things and boys masculine? No, that is not the case at all. In today’s society, girls like a lot of “boyish” things such as cars while still maintaining their femininity. Likewise, boys like “girly” things such as romantic comedies while maintaining their masculinity. These days it’s socially acceptable for a girl to be a mechanic or an engineer and it’s perfectly alright for a guy to go see a chick flick or care about the way he looks. Not everyone fits into the mold of the stereotypical boy or girl. We see this in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, The Rules of Attraction. Many of the characters in this book do not fit into the stereotypical gender roles. This becomes even more defined to us when we look at the movie Sweet Home Alabama in which the characters do fit into their stereotypical gender roles.
So what are the stereotypical boys and girls of today? According to Chris Barker, “Men are commonly held to be more ‘naturally’ domineering, heirarchally oriented and power-hungry, while women are seen as nurturing, child rearing and domestically inclined.” (285) Barker goes on to say that men take more risks, are more likely to have multiple partners, have more anger than empathy, and are less likely to talk about their emotions. (286) Based on this, we can say that the stereotypical guy doesn’t show or act on his emotions much, he is more likely to sleep with multiple people, he isn’t romantic, and he’ll act “macho” while the stereotypical girl is ruled by her emotions, prefers monogamy, and is more nurturing. So characters in Rules of Attraction are not stereotypical and how so?
I believe that the girls in this book are not stereotypical, with the exception of the unnamed girl that was in love with Sean Bateman, and the guys, with the exception of Paul, are mostly stereotypical. Looking at Lauren, the leading lady so to speak, I think it is clear that she is not stereotypical at all. She sleeps around with a different guy practically every week, she isn’t very open and talkative about her true feelings, and she definitely is not completely ruled by her emotions. Time and time again throughout the book, Lauren describes her night out partying and how she ended up with a different guy and slept with them even if she didn’t particularly like them. Sometimes she didn’t even know their names, as was the case when she lost her virginity at the beginning of the book. According to what Barker said, this is something expected of the stereotypical male, not female. Also, she tells us about her feelings for, or lack thereof, certain characters, but she doesn’t really go into them. She never talks to her friends about them either. She isn’t as open as the stereotypical girl. She just goes with the flow and doesn’t really act on her emotions very much. To see just how different from a stereotypical girl she is, let’s look at two completely stereotypical girls, Melanie Smooter played by Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama, and the unnamed girl from Rules of Attraction who was in love with Seam Bateman.
Looking at the unnamed girl first, we can see that none of the other girls in Ellis’s novel were remotely close to being like this girl, least of all Lauren. This girl did not have a major role in the book really, but I found her to be easy to connect with when she did have her parts. This girl was absolutely, one hundred percent obsessed and in love with Sean, who didn’t even know she existed. She put love notes in his box for him and he thought, or rather hoped that they were from Lauren. When this girl had a chance to tell us what was going on for her, we could see that she was very unsure of herself and she didn’t know how to get Sean to notice her. She was very emotional about the whole situation. And when she saw Sean leaving a party with Lauren the night she planned on meeting him, she committed suicide. While this is clearly an extreme, this is the perfect example of how she is the stereotypical girl. She is completely driven by her emotions. In her grief that Sean didn’t know who she was and at seeing him with another girl, she killed herself. Clearly, not all girls go to that extreme, so let’s look at one that doesn’t.
Melanie is a girl from a small town in Alabama who wanted to get out so much that she left her husband and moved to New York where she changed her name and started a fashion line. Her character is the stereotypical girl because she doesn’t sleep around with multiple people, she never forgot the first boy she ever kissed and the first boy she fell in love with. She is ruled by her emotions whether it’s anger, sadness, or joy. At one point, Melanie is so frustrated and angry with her estranged husband for not signing the divorce papers, that she goes and gets drunk at the bar that the same bar that her husband Jake and his date are at. In her anger she wants to get revenge on Jake and while she’s drunk she says some really hurtful things about Jake and their friends. All through the film we see how Melanie is a stereotypical girl, even if you have to look a little deeper than surface from time to time.
On the other hand, the males in Ellis’s novel are mostly all stereotypical guys. The perfect example of this is in Sean Bateman. Sean sleeps around with tons of girls, even while he is dating Lauren who he claimed to be in love with, he doesn’t acknowledge or talk about his feelings, and he doesn’t empathize or care about anyone else really. At one point in the book, Sean is walking across campus towards his dorm when he decides to go see this girl he knows. He goes to her room and they end up having sex. When Sean was describing what he was thinking before the sex, he said that he didn’t really want to do it with her, but he just went ahead and did it anyways. He didn’t care enough to walk away. This is how Sean was throughout the book; he didn’t care about much of anything other getting drunk and high on whatever drug he had that night. In many ways, these are typical guy characteristics according to Barker.
Unlike Sean, however, we have Paul, the only non-stereotypical guy I saw in Rules of Attraction. Paul, to me, is the ultimate romantic. Sure, he falls for someone new quite often, yet when he falls for someone in the slightest bit, he lets himself fall and puts all of himself into the relationship. He falls for someone and then everything around him becomes about that person. When he goes to visit his mom for a weekend, everywhere he went someone or something reminded him of Sean, who he was currently in some sort of relationship with. Also, Paul opened up some and every so often discussed his feelings and he clearly told us when he had feelings for someone. We saw his emotions, unlike the other guys in the book. In order to really see how Sean and Paul fit into the stereotypical gender roles, we can look at Jake Perry from Sweet Home Alabama, played by Josh Lucas.
Jake is your stereotypical guy, and by looking at him, we can see the similarities between him and Sean that underlie Sean’s actions and the differences between him and Paul. In the movie, Jake is the typical manly, southern man. He doesn’t talk about his feelings for Melanie or how her leaving him affected him. Melanie found out about what he did and how hurt he was by her leaving from other people. He doesn’t act on his emotions, he suppresses them some. He goes out and does “guy” things, like shooting pool and having beer with the guys and going fishing. A major difference between him and the Camden kids in Ellis’s novel is that he doesn’t sleep around with various women. He is married, even if they are estranged, to Melanie and he still loves her. It is clear that he is a stereotypical guy that happens to be in love.
What do these two examples really have to do with gender roles in today’s society though? Well, both of these are modern interpretations of the general people in America. What this shows us is that people are very difficult not only to stereotype, but to assign specific gender roles to. According to Barker, gender is defined by culture while sex is defined biologically. That means that while males and females are biologically different, they do not have to be different in gender. We as a people have created “masculine” and “feminine”. We have defined them ourselves through our culture.
But does this mean that the characters in the book are not in some way stereotypical? Rules of Attraction is set at a small liberal arts college in the 1980’s. At this point in time, abortion was legal thanks to Roe vs. Wade and getting pregnant was not as much of an issue for young girls such as Lauren and the other girls of Ellis’s novel. With abortion as a legal form of birth control for these young women, having sex with multiple people wasn’t such a big deal to them. In fact, Lauren and one other girl got pregnant and both had abortions that year. So with girls in America having sex without fear of the consequences of getting pregnant, was it so non stereotypical for a girl to sleep around with lots of guys? Perhaps not when you look at it in that way. However, I still believe that it was a quality that made the girls not stereotypical because while it seemed to be happening, it wasn’t seen as a good thing and it was not expected of girls. At that point, the culture was just starting to change on that front and the gender definitions had not yet begun to change with it. This still would have been very radical at the time and perhaps in some ways still is today.
While reading The Rules of Attraction, it may not be clear exactly how stereotypical or not the characters are. But in comparing them to the characters in Sweet Home Alabama and reading what Barker had to say, I think it becomes clear that the girls in the novel are not stereotypical while the guys are, with the exception of Paul. The Camden kids are very interchangeable. They all do the same things and act the same way and sleep with the same people. None of them fit exactly into their specific gender roles completely, but the girls fall more into the stereotypical guy category. Ellis wrote a great novel showing how gender is very malleable and not everyone fits into a stereotype.
