“American Reflexxx,” a short film showing mob hatred of gender ambiguity

Content warning: This short film contains extreme transmisogyny, a hostile mob, violence, and is disturbing.

The film has a style of editing that makes it difficult to watch, even apart from the content; if the editing makes it hard to watch for you, turning the volume down or off may help. (It’s subtitled.) If the content makes it hard to watch, well, then you’re a decent person.

Tom Hawking of Flaverwire summarizes the film:

“…A camera [follows] a woman as she walks through a public space, recording the reactions of the members of the public she encounters. In this case, the woman is Pierce and the space is Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Pierce certainly cuts a striking figure. She’s wearing a skimpy blue dress and neon yellow heels, and most strikingly, her face is entirely covered by a reflective mask. She’s also of apparently indeterminate gender; much of the video involves passersby trying to work out if she’s a cisgender man or woman, or a trans woman, or what. (I actually have no idea what Pierce’s gender identity is, which is kind of the point.)

The results are, as one might expect, pretty depressing. People seem genuinely terrified by her — several times groups of people scatter as she walks toward them, and at one point a girl shouts, “Oh hell no, don’t walk this way!” As the film progresses, the reactions become more violent — she has water thrown on her, someone attempts to trip her, and eventually she is pushed head-first into the pavement. Notably, all the acts of violence against her are carried out by women. The film ends with a sort of survey of her body, lingering on the blood streaming from the knee she gashed open when she hit the ground.

And a statement from the creators:

American Reflexxx is a short film documenting a social experiment that took place in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Alli Coates filmed performance artist Signe Pierce as she strutted down a busy oceanside street in stripper garb and a reflective mask. The pair agreed not to communicate until the experiment was completed, but never anticipated the horror that would unfold in under an hour.

The result is a heart wrenching technicolor spectacle that raises questions about gender stereotypes, mob mentality, and violence in America.

A few points:

1) In the comments at Pharyngula, “Janine” comments:

Just watched the film and I am still processing it. But I will say this, while I do not dress to call attention to myself and while I never had a crowd of people howling at me like that; I have heard everything shouted in that video shouted at me at some point.

Every single one.

… the editing, the stutter shots and the slowed down version of that rape anthem is all an attempt to show the disassociation that the person was feeling. When one is being yelled at and being assaulted, one sense of time and perception becomes distorted.

2) And in the same comments, “Caitiecat” writes:

And before anyone gets all righteous about how crappy the US is, you could shoot that same video in almost any city in the world, and it’d go the same way. I’ve encountered this kind of abuse in Canada, the US, the UK, France, Hong Kong and Thailand, also known as “every country I’ve been to since transition”.

3) The mirror-mask is interesting. It serves a bunch of functions: It implicitly says “you are the subject of this film, not me,” both to the people Pierce encounters, and to the viewers watching the film. It makes Pierce more gender-ambiguous. It draws attention to Pierce. A writer at Nylon comments, “Only after the deeply unsettling climax does the crowd begin to back off — away from themselves, really, considering the mirrored mask.”

4) In the sequence with the street preacher, I can’t tell if the preacher is responding to her, or is not reacting at all to her and just screaming what he would have been screaming regardless.

5) How different would the crowd have acted if there wasn’t a woman with a camera obviously filming their actions? Maybe some of them were performing for the camera, but I’m sure some would have acted worse if they hadn’t known they were being recorded.

6) The people we see physically attacking Pierce are all women or girls, apart from the guy who paws her right at the start of the video. One girl attacks Pierce three escalating times – first trying to slap her when running by (“I missed!”), then throwing water on her, then trying to trip her. But we can hear at least one man (and maybe multiple men) being warned not to attack her by their friends (“Don’t get arrested for her, man”).

7) “Goblinman,” in Pharyngula’s comments, had an interesting theory as to why the men in the crowd didn’t get violent:

I don’t think the women in the crowd were actually responding more negatively than the men. I think the men were holding back. It means something different, culturally-speaking, when men attack compared to when women attack (especially if we’re talking about a mob mentality). Women attacking someone doesn’t seem as “serious”: Men are “supposed” to be fighters. If the men had started attacking the person in the mask it would have been nearly the equivalent of someone drawing a weapon. It would have escalated things to a much more violent level.

8) A fun fluff-piece about the home of the film’s creators: PAPERMAG Galleries: Inside the Hot Pink Barbie Bungalow of Artists, “Cyberfeminists” and Real-Life Couple Signe Pierce and Alli Coates.

This entry posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Transsexual and Transgender related issues. Bookmark the permalink. 

22 Responses to “American Reflexxx,” a short film showing mob hatred of gender ambiguity

  1. 1
    Pete Patriot says:

    I don’t think the women in the crowd were actually responding more negatively than the men.

    Oh my god. The mental acrobatics. Yes, attacking someone is more negative than not attacking them and letting them go about their business. I think what’s meant is they may have had the same views, but the men were responsible enough to not convert them into action and also to try and discourage women in doing so. That morally sound, not something to be explained away.

    And people aren’t adopting a mob mentality if they don’t follow the mob.

  2. 2
    Ampersand says:

    You’re quite right that “attacking someone is more negative than not”; you’re also, very obviously, right that Goblinman was saying that they may have held the same views, but the men were not attacking; reading him as denying that violence is not worse than non-violence, and then responding angrily to that misreading, seems flagrantly unfair.

    I don’t really want to turn this thread into a “feminists are mean to men! men are saints!” thread, which is (even if that’s not how you intended it) how your comment reads. Please don’t pursue that line in this thread any longer. Thanks.

    (ETA: The word “not” in “not worse than non-violence.”]

  3. 3
    Pete Patriot says:

    I’m not misreading him. I’m not trying to turn this into ‘feminists are mean to men’. I just disagree with the judgement he’s trying to make. Goblinman’s sentiment is common in feminism but also elsewhere:

    “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

    They didn’t commit assault, but in their hearts… actually the genuinely decent people here would be those who tried to stop her being attacked even though they absolutely hated her.

  4. 4
    Ampersand says:

    Pete, I asked you to drop the subject, and you ignored my request. Now I’m asking you to get off this thread, permanently. Thank you.

  5. 5
    desipis says:

    Service – Alli Coates Creative:


    BRAND IDENTITY
    MARKET STRATEGY

    DIGITAL ADVERTISING

    I’m… skeptical.

  6. 6
    Daran says:

    I’m surprised that nobody has mentioned the incident at 7:50 in which a woman is startled by a man who appears to attempt to grope her.

  7. 7
    Pesho says:

    Hmm… What does this prove, exactly? I can get assaulted in 10 minutes on any number of streets acting less provocatively than she does. I bet I can do it in 3 minutes in specific places in Las Vegas, Venice Beach and South L.A.

    And South Carolina is a shit hole. I had a thrown bottle nearly severing my finger while I was visiting a sick student in Rock Hill, SC, dressed in a conservative jacket, and absolutely not looking for trouble.

    If you find this kind of violence disturbing, and you are a man… you are a lucky one. Abhorrent, despicable, yes… Surprising and disturbing? No.

    And, by the way, there are many, many reasons that men are not attacking her. She is female (or at least she is not proved not be female), she is attractive, she is physically imposing, and of course, men are much less likely to get away with a crime, and know it. Furthermore, she is absolutely not threatening to any man in that video. She pushes a grabby asshole away (which I bet she had to do multiple times) but she does it in a way that is actually very easy on his ego.

    Women on the other hand are absolutely threatened by her. Men are expressing admiration ALL THE TIME, vocally. I bet many more are expressing it quietly. As a man, I would not be happy if a man was getting this much positive attention around me. Honestly, it has never happened to me. I’d like to think that, at no time in my life, even when I could have gotten away with it, would I have resorted to violence. On the other hand, I know that I have delayed helping someone who needed help, only because I disapproved of his arrogance and behavior.

    So, in conclusion, the video does not surprise me in any way. It would be a better world in which things like this do not happen, and videos like this may help to bring that world closer, but it is not the world in which we live.

  8. 8
    Pesho says:

    As for Goblinman, he must have been watching a different video. In the one I was watching, “the women in the crowd were actually responding more negatively than the men“, both verbally and physically. Men are not somehow better or worse, or more in control of themselves, they simply have no reason to respond negatively.

  9. 9
    Harlequin says:

    I only managed to get through about five minutes of the video, but, to reply quickly to Pesho:

    Women on the other hand are absolutely threatened by her. Men are expressing admiration ALL THE TIME, vocally. I bet many more are expressing it quietly. As a man, I would not be happy if a man was getting this much positive attention around me.

    Leaving aside that the men are doing something other than “expressing admiration”, this argument seems to be “Women can be violently jealous to another woman because she receives more male attention”, which…bears no relation to reality as I know it? I have seen a lot of social behaviors, but I have never seen anything that could be classified as the thing you just described. There is, of course, judgment from women about other women acting in so-called “slutty” ways or something–but that’s about the inappropriateness of the sexuality and the attention-seeking, not the success of the attention-seeking.

    As a general comment: There’s a lot going on in this video. Pierce is dressed differently from everyone, and is acting differently too, which I think makes it more likely that these latent attitudes will be expressed–basically there are a ton of othering markers here, not just the mask. I wonder, too, what it means that Pierce was being filmed throughout this.

    But, mostly, I’m stunned by how many people wanted to speculate about Pierce’s gender identity. Why would anybody care about a random passerby? *sigh*

  10. 10
    Daran says:

    There is, of course, judgment from women about other women acting in so-called “slutty” ways or something–but that’s about the inappropriateness of the sexuality and the attention-seeking, not the success of the attention-seeking.

    I’m not sure if you saw enough of the video, but Pierce acted in so-called “slutty” ways throughout the incident. Your remark also begs the question: why do women judge other women for their so-called “slutty” ways? Pesho’s conjecture that this is because they feel threatened by the behaviour seems a reasonable one to me, but as a man, I’m not the best person to evaluate it. I’d be very interested to know your view on the matter.

    I disagree with Pesho that the men didn’t feel threatened by her. I think they did. Specifically the threat to heterosexual men is that they might be attracted to or sexually aroused by someone who isn’t, in their view, an authentic woman, which is a major squick for some men.

    Note that these two conjectures, taken together, make a testable prediction: I predict that men will be more likely to question whether she is male or female, because if she’s really female then it’s ok for them to be attracted to her. Women will be more likely to denounce her as male, because that makes her less attractive to men, hence less effective competition. I haven’t reviewed the video to see if this is true.

  11. 11
    Diatryma says:

    I also noticed the surprise grope and thought that was a better demonstration of what the video might be about than most of the video. I would like it better if the performer were not so clearly interacting with the crowd rather than passing through it. That makes it too easy to rationalize the behavior– provoking, possibility of being a street performer and thus there’s going to be something happening or at least passing the hat, being dressed very differently from everyone else, the camera. That said, oh hell no that batch of young women with their friend who keeps attacking. Not okay.

  12. 12
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    But, mostly, I’m stunned by how many people wanted to speculate about Pierce’s gender identity. Why would anybody care about a random passerby?

    Who knows? This was a person walking down the street in a manner designed to attract attention, discussion, reaction, and/or speculation.

    “Random passerby” =/ “person strutting down a busy oceanside street in stripper garb and a reflective mask, followed by a film crew.”

    Also: Are folks entirely sure that this isn’t actually a viral marketing scheme; political film (with actors,) or otherwise some sort of not-what-it-seems setup? I don’t dispute for a moment that this sort of thing could (and does) happen in all sorts of places; I am just wondering about this particular film.

  13. 13
    Ampersand says:

    Well, if it’s a viral marketing scheme, they sure did a lot of set-up; both the filmmakers are known performance artists going back years, and the film was shown at art festivals 2 years ago (there are dated reviews online) but only released on Youtube recently.

    You can never know for sure, I suppose, but it’s likely this is what it seems to be.

  14. 14
    Pesho says:

    this argument seems to be “Women can be violently jealous to another woman because she receives more male attention”, which…bears no relation to reality as I know it?

    I have personally investigated two separate accidents that were literally “groups of ethnic minority women assault and grievously harm a woman for breaking social norms as to what is allowed in the game of attracting males”, and most of the people whom we interrogated were absolutely open about why they did it.

    While I was still clubbing, I have on a few separate occasions seen women pour their drinks on other women that were wearing outfits more attention grabbing than the norm. In one case, I saw a woman ‘trip’, and tear a sort of a belt off the back of another, forcing the latter woman to leave. I have heard innumerable comments from women as to “she may as well go around naked, look at her shoving her boobs in their faces, etc, etc, etc…” including from my dates. Amongst men, the escalation from strong, shared disapproval to violence is pretty easy, absent the threat of repercussion. Judging from Youtube (and this video) women are pretty similar to men in this respect, but hey, what do I know about women, being a man and all?

    If you think that this has no relation to reality, well, what can I say? We have to agree that we live in different reality. Or maybe you are a saint that makes everyone around you saintly.

    Heh, I nearly forgot. One of our Accounts Receivable clerks got drunk one Christmas party, and performed a striptease in the parking lot. When the owners and her supervisor freaked out, and asked her to stop, she moved two steps outside of company property, and continued. Someone called the police, but she got dressed in time to suffer no more than a ride home. A few days later, maybe even the first day after we resumed work she got beaten and all of her clothes were ruined in the women’s restroom. This costs the company quite a bit, and while I do not know what the investigation concluded, everyone thought it was over the striptease. No one that talked about it thought the idea bore no relation to reality. The assault itself was documented by Chino PD, and we ended up firing a lot of people at once over it.

    ————-

    By the way, if the assault was a setup, it was an insanely dangerous stunt that could have turned deadly very easily. If she had fallen mask first into that lamp post, and she could have, she could have suffered injuries including death. I have only one single reason to believe that this was a setup:

    The camera woman must have filmed constantly. It is unthinkable that the assailant did not appear in the raw footage, because this assault was premeditated, and I think it is very likely that assailant followed the disturbance from awhile.

    Back in the day, if I had had witnesses describing to me what I saw in this video, I would have arrested the assailant for attempted murder, premeditated. Not that it would have stuck, unless there was more to it, but she would have spent some time in jail, for sure. I tried to find information about the accident, and the fact that there is no publicly available data about an investigation is the only thing that makes me think that the assault might have been a setup. Otherwise, I find is absolutely plausible.

  15. 15
    Harlequin says:

    Daran:

    Your remark also begs the question: why do women judge other women for their so-called “slutty” ways? Pesho’s conjecture that this is because they feel threatened by the behaviour seems a reasonable one to me, but as a man, I’m not the best person to evaluate it. I’d be very interested to know your view on the matter.

    I mean, there are a few obvious explanations: behavior outside the social norms is judged by any group, regardless of what that behavior is; we make moral judgments about women who have sex or are interested in sex; there may be fear that if too many women behave that way everyone will have to; it may be seen as inappropriate for the venue, depending on where the woman is; and there’s also some element, sometimes, of trying to protect the woman from herself, although the behavior portrayed in the video wouldn’t fit this definition. Note that most of these reasons are also, AFAICT, why men judge women for so-called “slutty” behavior, it’s just that the ways they show it are different.

    g&w: The question was rhetorical. I know why people judge random passersby this way, I just think the reasons are stupid.

    Pesho: It wasn’t the “responding violently” part I was disagreeing with, it was the reasoning implied by your paragraph structure, that it was motivated by jealousy over male attention. (And no need to limit this to “ethnic minority” women, I’ve seen plenty of white women be awful too–although I know you were just discussing the cases you had been part of, thought it was worth saying.)

  16. 16
    veronica d says:

    Well this is a depressing comments section.

    “Performance art” stunts usually have problems, but usually the creators will say they are trying to “start a conversation,” which is maybe a bit precious, but this time it seems to have worked. In any case, the mob of horrible did not end that night at that place.

    The women clearly behaved worse than the men. But on the other hand, there was much sexual harassment from men, including at least one sexual assault of a woman who was not the subject of the piece.

    Which, WTF!

    Most harassment I receive in public spaces is from men. Some is sexual harassment, much is simply hostile transphobia. However, every so often it is from women. The thing is, the women who do are always working class women, usually black women.

    Which is ugly, but that’s the way it is. We live in an economically and racially divided society, and the classes and races police gender differently.

    This is part of the intersectionality thing. Shit’s complicated.

    If those filmmakers had tried this in a upscale fashion mall, most folks would have assumed it was some elaborate marketing ploy from some fashion house. That said, the police or mall security might intervene, once they figure out it is not one of the designer houses pulling a stunt. Such antics are reserved for capitalism.

    I have little doubt this video is honest. Which, there is no way that entire mob were plants, and the assault seems to emerge spontaneously as the mood degraded. People are monsters.

    Of course, anyone is free to express suspicion, but that suspicion becomes part of the performance. “Woman is assaulted but people would rather attack her honesty” is kind of a familiar refrain.

    It is interesting to see people try to mentally “compartmentalize” this, such as saying “Well, SC is a cesspool” or “she was acting weird anyway.” Of course those things might be true, but so what? This shows well what life is like for those of us who stand out in sexually disapproved ways. Yes, the filmmakers “turned the knob,” but if I walk out of the house in an attractive outfit, am I inviting the same harassment?

    I mean, in my day-in-day-out, each day, all the time, the little moments that add up. It only takes “that one time” for a mob to form.

    I recall once a group of men watching me, and one of the men was upset at my existence. He had very hostile body language and was saying shit to his friends, which I could not hear, but was clearly about me and how angry my existence made him.

    One of the men in the group scolded the angry men, told him not to worry about it. “Whatever. He’s [sic] not bothering anyone. Leave him [sic] alone.” The man who hated me seemed to listen to the man who spoke. He calmed down and did not say anything to me.

    When trans women are murdered, and when we have any clue who the assailant was, it is (almost) always a man.

    (I say “almost” cuz I’m sure if you searched long enough you’d find a trans woman murdered by a woman. It must have happened sometime. Enough of us get killed each year. But that said, I’ve never heard of it. From what I hear, it’s always men.)

    I’ve been sexually assaulted three times. Once was by a woman.

  17. 17
    Pesho says:

    I guess I should have stayed away from the “ethnic minority”. Just to make a few things clear:
    – these people were as white as I am, and whether we are white is a subject of debate in the States, but not anywhere else I’ve been.
    – my unit would not have dealt with the incidents if minorities had not been involved.
    – one of the reason for me being part of the investigation was that I was, myself, part of a minority in my country, and could easily pass for a member for the minority in question, as long as my pants stayed up.

    So, just to make it absolutely clear, the women being minorities had only bearing on the cases because the social norms were particular to their religion. Unfortunately, and that is shameful, the incidents were investigated as well as they were only because the people in power at the time were looking to weaken the religion’s hold over the young.

    I am in no way under the illusion that any race, religion, gender, or political affiliation is free of horrible people. Which is part of the reason I am by default sympathetic to anyone working in law enforcement – it’s a nice illusion to have.

  18. 18
    Daran says:

    To test my prediction, I’ve just reviewed the video and counted every instance of men and women saying “it’s a man”, or otherwise communicating their view that Pierce is male. Included within these totals are utterances where tone or other language imply a question, i.e., “that’s a man?”, “that’s a man, right?”. Separately I counted instances of people asking “is that a (wo)man?”, “what is that?” Here are the results. (“male” or female” refers to the apparent sex of the speaker.)

    Male statement: 3
    Male question: 1
    Female statement: 15
    Female question: 0

    It can be quite difficult to make out what is being said, so it’s possible that I missed some. At one point multiple voices spoke in unison. I counted this as two, but it’s possible that there were more. It’s also possible that I have misclassified some adolescent male voices as female. There were also a small number of “she’s female” statements, or other utterances conveying that view. All of these were from women. Not counted was the casual use of gender pronouns. Almost all were female.

    Something else that hasn’t been mentioned, so people who didn’t watch to the end won’t know about, is that after Pierce was pushed over, while she was lying motionless on the ground, a man stepped forward, bent down and reached out as if to check to see if she was OK. He seemed reluctatant to actually touch her (as I would be in his situation. After all, she hasn’t consented to his touch), so his check looks ineffective, though he may have seen movement that I could not. The man also verbally rebuked the crowd. Several male voices then discussed the incident in tones which seemed sympathetic or perhaps neutral, but not hostile.

    The first time I watched the video through, I was left with the impression that, with the exception of the physical assaults, men and women behaved more-or-less equally badly. On rewatching a couple of time it now seems that a significant majority of the microagressions came from women, while the only compassion or concern for her welfare came from men.

  19. 19
    Harlequin says:

    Sorry, veronica, you’re right. I apologize for getting into those topics.

  20. 20
    Ben Lehman says:

    veronica: thanks. good post.
    sorry i can’t add anything more.

  21. 21
    northierthanthou says:

    The sheer license these people assume for teating her as they wish is amazing. It is indeed hard to watch.

  22. 22
    femmeadmirer says:

    veronica,

    “This is part of the intersectionality thing. Shit’s complicated.”

    Yes. And thank you.