The film Easy A addresses the sexual double standard head on. In 1986 Sue Lees, investigating girls’ school experiences in England, wrote: “All unattached girls have to be constantly aware that the category ‘slag’ may be applied to them. There is no hard and fast distinction between the categories, since the status is always disputable, the gossip often unreliable, the criteria obscure. If a girl does get the reputation of being a slag, all the girls interviewed agreed that the one thing she could do about it to redeem herself would be to get a steady boyfriend”. This film is clearly arguing that nothing’s changed except the language, with skank replacing slag as the terminology of chocie for a ‘fallen’ woman.
Easy A’s central character Olive Prenderghast lies about having sex to her best friend and is overhead going into the (imaginary) graphic details by the school’s chief ‘bible-basher’. The ‘news’ spreads round the school with the rapidity of a video on fast-forward and Olive emerges from teenage anonymity to become the centre of her fellow high school students’ attention.
Enjoying her new-found notoriety, Olive is persuaded by a fellow student who suffers daily homophobic abuse to not have sex with him but say she did. Following this, she begins selling a range of imagined sexual favours. This gains her a double reputation. She’s famous amongst male outsiders as someone who will give you the right kind of reputation in exchange for money (or at least discount vouchers) and infamous amongst (nearly) everyone else as a ‘skank’.
Although initially appealing, this position becomes increasingly uncomfortable for Olive who, in self-conscious echoes of Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter sews a red A on to all her new outfits – she’s taken to wearing clothes which, in the words of her father, make her look like a ‘high class stripper’.
Olive is a smart, empathic and engaging young woman who manages to get herself into a horrible mess and out of it again with her dignity intact (she reminded me of Winona Ryder in Heathers and Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls). She is simultaneously contemporary, the film being structured around her webcast, and old fashioned, as she hankers after the happy endings in John Hughes’ 1980s films. The script and look of the film are razor sharp and there are some great cameos (Malcolm MacDowell as the principal gets to deliver the line: “This is public school – if I keep the girls off the pole and the boys off the pipe I get a bonus”). But there’s a but…
Although I loved this film I was left wondering if, despite appearances to the contrary, it didn’t have an underlying sexual conservatism. After all, Olive never actually does have sex (she never even kisses anyone) and this is clearly presented as a good thing. When her mother, wonderfully played by Patricia Clarkson, admits to earning a similar reputation in high school she ascribes her promiscuity to low self-esteem. Mainstream depictions of young men enjoying meaningless sexual activity may be commonplace but those of young women doing the same remain rare. Also Olive’s redemption is accompanied by her getting a steady boyfriend, someone with whom she can have sex without risking falling back into the category of skank. The film rejects alternative routes to her redemption, for example, through female friendship and solidarity. However, just as Mean Girls raised interesting questions about girls’ friendships, so Easy A raises interesting questions about the policing of girls’ sexuality in an entertaining way.
Heather Mendick, Goldsmiths, University of London
