Ozark Matrons: Actual Girl Power

From 7th to 10th grade, I lived in a place that looked like the world of Winter's Bone. I wasn't as poor as Ree Dolly. We had laundry machines, for instance. We also had meat that didn't come from the woods. But I recognized every single person in that movie. I recognized the neighbors skinning a deer in the driveway and the chained-up dog eating scraps from the fridge and the girl who knew, before she was old enough to drive, that no one was coming to save her. That girl could have been my friend.

It's a sharp contrast to how I feel when I look at young women on social media these days. Very often within just a few sentences from the mouth of an under-35 woman, I feel my lip curling. "Who are these people?" I ask myself. "How did they get like this? Who taught them this is what a woman is, or what she should aspire to?"

Having been a tomboy my whole life, I understand that the content these girls make is not made with me in mind. And the creators would happily agree. You know the kind: The sprinkle-sprinkle lady, the tradwife cosplayers, the "I'm just a girl" gigglers who brag about not being able to drive, manage money, or make decisions. It's all the same model of womanhood with different branding, and far, far from what I was raised with.

So it was strange to watch Debra Granik's 2010 film for the first time and resonate so strongly with how the women behaved. I had been reliably informed by every single review and thinkpiece about the movie that Winter's Bone was a feminist story about a brave girl defying a patriarchal system. But that's not what I saw at all.

Instead, this movie, taking place in a white trash meth town, showed a fully operational model of feminine authority, the kind that has been so thoroughly memory-holed by modern culture that most people watching this film couldn't even see it. And no wonder. Because if you go looking for femininity content on any social media site, the model of it you'll be presented with will look more like prostitution with extra steps than mature, independent adulthood.

I'm not girly, and I'm not rich, so I pondered for a moment if I had just missed out on what most girly girls aspire to. But it isn't; I see that now. I think the modern model of feminism/femininity is much more nefarious.

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Ree Dolly Ain't a Feminist. She's Just a Girl

The setup to Winter's Bone is simple in its desperation. Ree's father, a crank cooker, signed the family home over as collateral for his bail bond. Then he vanished. If he doesn't show for his court date, the bail bondsman takes the house, and Ree, her two young siblings, and her catatonic mother are out. She's seventeen, has no money, no father, and a mother who can't speak. The Army was her only way out, and she can't even enlist now because she can't leave the kids. Nor (as the kindly recruiter explains to her) can she take them along with her.

So she goes looking for her father herself. There's literally no other choice.