Borat the Feminist?

A Village Mediation

While reviewing a legal aid program in Bangladesh 25 years ago, I visited a mediation between two families in the middle of a small town’s evening market. The issue in dispute was whether and how much the 17-year-old husband’s clan should compensate that of the 16-year-old wife for throwing her out of its household.

An all-male group of village elders presided over the literally and figuratively steaming session as the families traded barbs. Dozens of other local men, most having no connection to the session beyond being busybodies, shouted their unsolicited opinions. With the debate raging around her, the girl sat speechless and cowering in the middle of the marketplace, the only female in likely the last place on earth she wanted to be.

Such is justice in parts of rural Bangladesh and in too many other countries where courts are too distant, expensive, corrupt and incomprehensible to be turned to and where traditional processes predominate. Because of poor educations and poor parents who cannot support them beyond childhood, young girls’ status straddles property and liability. Many are typically married off while barely out of adolescence.

Subsequent Moviefilm

Which brings me to Borat. Or more specifically, to Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, the recently released sequel to comedian Sasha Baron Cohen’s 2006 original Borat film.

I found the film funny, better than its predecessor and a scorching commentary on Trump’s America and supporters. But that’s not my focus here.

Instead, I’ll address Borat and the status of women, as discordant as that combination of words may seem. The satire shines a harsh light on their situation around the world. But it also is upbeat in some surprising ways. (Warning: minor spoilers ahead.)

Tutar and the Prison of the Mind

The title character is now too easily recognized to dupe Americans as he did in 2006. So Baron Cohen makes Borat’s 15-year-old daughter Tutar  (played brilliantly and hilariously by 24-year-old Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova) a central focus of the story. At its outset, she’s ill-kempt and ill-fed, caged and considered the equivalent of livestock.

This is where, intentionally or not, Baron Cohen and Bakalova start to say so much about the actual condition of women in much of the world. Tutar is just as much property and liability as the Bangladeshi girl, though the Bangladeshi lacks the literal cage.

Tutar and that girl share a powerful prison of the mind. They’ve been taught – in Tutar’s case, with an official manual that Borat regularly cites – that they don’t deserve anything better than their fates. She’s thrilled when she learns she’ll have a large cage to herself and then when she’s allowed to sleep on the floor at the foot of the father’s bed.

The real life equivalent is not that far from Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’s sardonic mark. Research in Bangladesh, like in numerous other countries, indicates that many men and women alike consider it acceptable for a man to beat his wife for serving dinner late, talking back to him or committing other supposed transgressions.

I’m not at all suggesting that the women welcome such brutality. But some see it as their lot in life.

The sequel also reminded me of the many other limits women are taught and told to accept. During a break from a rural paralegal training session years ago in the Philippines – paralegals are non-lawyers who help their communities deal with land, family, labor and other issues – I chatted with an obviously intelligent female trainee. Despite the aptitude she’d shown during the session, the trainee informed me that she doubted she could take on the work because she was “just a simple housewife.”

Various Kinds of Oppression

And then there are the many cases where the imprisonment blends some combination of the physical, psychological, economic and cultural. Tutar accepted that Borat would give her as a gift to Vice President Pence. Poverty, brute force and societal indifference toward sex trafficking insidiously trap millions of young women and girls in exploitive and violent situations, including in America.

Thankfully, even in its extreme depiction of Tutar’s plight, the movie does not explore anything like female infanticide or the honor killings of innocent women whose conduct or circumstances affront their families.

An irony of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm flows from Baron Cohen’s rushing it to release shortly before our election. He could not anticipate the additional respect in which his timing was right: Our most misogynist president has just appointed a Supreme Court justice, perhaps a prisoner of her own orientation, who could ensure the curtailment of women’s reproductive and other rights. The film’s two themes – Trump’s America and Tutar’s situation – have come together in ways that Baron Cohen could not have anticipated.

A Tale of Two Tutars

But the story does not end there. Believe it or not – this is, after all, a Borat film – the sequel gradually segues into a tale of Tutar’s empowerment. Republican matrons inform her that women have equal rights and that, yes, men lie. To his amazement, Borat is assured that women have equal rights in America by, of all people, male QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Along with Tutar, the heroes of the film are two women featured in a couple of touching scenes. One of them immeasurably aids Tutar’s transformation from de facto slave to self-possessed person.

Now, having said all this, I don’t want to depict the sequel as any less gross than the original Borat movie. (My wife passed on viewing it, having found the original so offensive that she muttered to me, “Makes me wonder who I’m with” after I took her to see the original.) Nor is it any less manipulative of the folks it fools into participating, including the two heroic women I’ve just mentioned. Finally, to be clear, it is anything but a feminist manifesto.

Women to the Rescue

Still, in its own bizarre way, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm exemplifies both how far women have come and how far they need to go across the globe, 25 years since Hillary Clinton declared “women’s rights are human rights” at a global women’s conference in Beijing – around the same time  I saw that Bangladeshi girl huddled in that hostile marketplace. Tutar is an over-the-top character in an over-the-top film. But her initial plight in the movie is grounded in reality.

As is her growth over the course of her travels through America. Despite the ills I’ve portrayed here and the setbacks our own society faces, women around the world have made significant progress over the past quarter-century in terms of their rights, education, incomes and health, not least because of nongovernmental organizations that conduct programs and provide services in these and other fields.

That includes Bangladesh. Returning to the countryside in subsequent years since 1995, I saw many examples of mediation sessions in which many more women assertively participated, including as substitutes for the male village elders who had traditionally dominated such forums. As one such elder put it to me, “Women are coming up in the world.” A variety of legal aid and women’s groups have helped usher in these and other changes.

One key lesson that America and the world remain far from learning is that, just as women’s rights are human rights, women’s strength is society’s strength. A plethora of studies show that enhancing women’s equality can yield massive economic, health and other benefits for women, men and children alike.

This has implications in the United States as well. If our democracy is saved by the upcoming election, one big reason will be because women, far more than men, are turning out to turn a demagogue out of office.

If Tutar were a real person, they would make her proud.