MIM Notes 203 
Boys Don't Cry ignores root source of violence

Boys Don't Cry 
Written and directed by Kimberly Peirce 
1999 

Reviewed by MIM

"Boys Don't Cry" tells the somewhat fictionalized 
story of Brandon Teena (a.k.a. Teena Brandon), a 
young womyn who takes on the identity of a man in 
a small town in Nebraska. When two of Brandon's 
guy friends learn that Brandon is not a biological 
man, they rape and then kill her. "Boys Don't Cry" 
takes care to assure us that the Amerikan cops and 
courts eventually locked these two men up for 
life. 

While the film captures the detestable 
violence caused by patriarchy, its reactionary 
take home message is that there are a few bad 
people in the world, and we should depend on the 
Amerikan (in)justice system to lock them up. A 
court-oriented strategy against patriarchal 
violence, rape, and harassment will fail for many 
reasons. For starters, patriarchy is a systemic 
problem and must be addressed on the systemic, not 
individual, level. We can run around putting out 
the fires caused by thousands of years of 
heterosexist, male chauvinist tradition and a 
billion-dollar-a-year pornography industry -- or 
we can tackle that tradition and that industry 
head on. Furthermore, reliance on Amerikan courts 
ignores the class nature of those courts. Cops, 
courts, and law are integral parts of the state. 
The state is simply an instrument used by one 
class -- in this case the Amerikan imperialist 
bourgeoisie -- to control other classes. As we 
discussed in our review of Stephen J. Gould's 
"Rocks of Ages", radicals cannot count on the 
bourgeoisie to combat the nexus of accumulated 
prejudices and superstitions called "religion." 
Neither can we rely on the bourgeoisie to combat 
patriarchal ideas (many of which overlap with 
religion). 

As communists have been saying since 
Marx, only the proletariat, the class with nothing 
to lose but its chains, can move to end all forms 
of oppression. Other classes will compromise to 
preserve their privileges. 

Given the realities of 
the white-chauvinist, imperialist courts in 
Amerika, calls for tougher sentences on rapists 
and harassers now have led to increased 
imprisonment for men from oppressed nations, for 
acts white men generally get away with.(1) The sad 
truth is that to get an Amerikan audience for this 
important subject matter, "Boys Don't Cry" has to 
revolve around love and murder, as well as the old 
mush that romantic love conquers all. 

The movie 
focuses on Brandon as an individual and his quest 
for persynal happiness. The film implies that a 
sex-change operation would have saved his life. 
Because of the societal nature of patriarchy and 
heterosexism, MIM doubts whether that is true. 

Problems that involve huge groups of people cannot 
be solved on a case-by-case basis. MIM also does 
not spend time agitating for increased access to 
expensive, voluntary surgeries or medications 
(such as sex change operations, facelifts, or 
Viagra). Our first task is to make sure that the 
people of the world have access to enough food and 
basic medicines. 

People in Amerika have the 
leisure time to obsess about their sex lives while 
the majority of the world's people can barely 
avoid starvation or murder by imperialist 
militarism. The fight against gender oppression --
which includes the fight against violence in the 
name of romance culture -- is part of the fight 
for communism, but the principal contradiction 
today is between the oppressed nations and 
oppressor nations. Anyone who wants to make huge 
advances in the lives of those who face gender 
oppression should take up the fight against 
imperialism and for the international proletariat. 
--  review edited by MC206

Notes: 
1. See "Myth of the Black rapist," MIM 
Theory 2/3, p. 91.