Yesterday i watched BBC4's Women documentary. It was mostly very good. It was really exciting to hear all these women from the beginning of the movement speak, and some of the old footage was fantastic. I had i bit of a problem with the film maker though. (Vanessa Engles, i think?) This probably isn't actually the case, but a lot of the time she seemed quite unimpressed with it all. In particular i found her very patronising when talking to Kate Millett, (I had to look her up. I don't really know enough about all these people, and only had a slight awareness of any of them.) talking to her like she was a senile old woman, when she was clearly still extremely intelligent and cogent. The first we saw of this interview was Engles complimenting Millett "I like your crocs." Perhaps i've missed the point with this. Was it meant to be humanising? Perhaps it was to show a feminist philosophy towards clothes? Maybe, but i found it hard to take it as either, and it just felt like an attempt to display this woman's eccentricity. I don't like to accuse her of belittling Millett, but i felt this was edging towards a rather negative portrayal.

There were a few other moments were the filming felt rather sarcastic. Asking various of these feminists about the state of their sex lives, Engles seemed archly surprised at the reluctance some of them felt to discuss it. And her approach to the interaction between lesbianism and feminism seemed not to be all that constructive. Addressing the pressure on women to adopt a homosexual identity in the early days of the movement, she seemed sneering. With some justification, of course. I find this quite a wrongheaded approach, certainly in modern feminism, but it's easy to see why people felt like this then. Quite apart from its political connotations in terms of feminism, this was really the first time women were presented with lesbianism as a viable identity. These women, suddenly able to express this part of themselves, may have been overzealous in their expectations of others, but all of a sudden these long-suppressed desires were permitted and even rationalised by the movement. I know that the time of my coming out was accompanied by expectations of upheaval in the ways i interacted with people, and changes in how i saw myself; coming out on such a massive scale can only have multiplied this.

Engles, talking about this trend, paraded women who'd flirted with lesbianism only to discover it wasn't right for them, saying how much easier that might have made things, implying they felt they'd let down the movement, before finally moving on to her queer interviewees, leaving the viewer to surmise that these women could only have adopted this sexuality out of a sense of obligation, rehashing the idea that lesbianism exists only as a political identity. I may be making a few too many assumptions about her intentions here, and any implications of this were certainly mild, but i did feel they existed.

But while i had a few problems with the documentarist, the feminists interviewed represented themselves fantastically despite these difficulties, (which i am perhaps exaggerating anyway (although i think now i just sound like i don't have the courage to stand by my convictions (is that interpretation wrong?))) and it was fascinating to see them, and to learn about a movement which i only really know in its modern, rather flaccid stages.