“A desire to devour, punish, humiliate, or surrender seems to be a primal part of human nature, and it’s certainly a big part of sex,” observes Charlotte Rampling in this week’s New Yorker. “To discover what normal means, you have to surf a tide of weirdness.”
Rampling is speaking here of her new movie Heading South (Vers le Sud; Laurent Cantet, director), in which she plays the part of Ellen, a 55-year-old Wellesley French professor who spends her summers in Haiti, where she pays a young man for sex. Rampling’s comments on the nature of normality, therefore, are framed by her strong feelings of personal distaste for the character she plays in the film:
None of the deeply disturbing characters I’ve played were as unnatural to me as this one. I find it infuriating that a beautiful, smart woman like Ellen is—at any age—so invisible to the men of her own world that she has to pay.
Although Rampling’s remarks on “discover[ing] what normal means” are made in the context of her critique of the “unnatural” sexual attitudes and practices of her fictional character in the movie, they are also relevant to our understanding of the status of normality and normativity within discourses of sexual difference.
More specifically, this summer’s US release of Heading South (the film entered the international film circuit last September, but was not officially released in the US until last week) coincides with two controversies over the use of statistics to specify (and challenge) the normative position of women in our society. These two controversies, moreover, resonate quite directly with Ellen’s status in the film as an unmarried woman of a certain age, on the one hand, and as a professor at a women’s college, on the other.
First, in early June, Newsweek formally retracted its notorious “Marriage Crunch” cover story from almost precisely twenty years earlier, in which it had direly predicted that a woman who remained single at the age of 30 had only a 20% chance of ever marrying, and only a 5% chance of marriage if she remained single at the age of 35.
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