Desire, I wanna turn into u.
Secretary: the film, othered women, and a woman's desire as a conduit for violence.
“I have stopped wanting to be heard. Instead I want to be feared. Perhaps then I can be left to my own devices.”
I am, and have always been, obsessed with desire. I see it at times as a cautionary tale of devilish temptation, and at others as a means of taking apart your insides and sowing them back together. One of my favourite movies that presented me with my earliest memories of desiring something was Secretary, the adaptation to Mary Gaitskill’s short story of the same name. It follows Lee, a woman recently released from a psychiatric ward getting a job as the secretary to a neurotic lawyer with whom she enters a sado/masochist relationship.
I revisited the film in many forms; video essays, written essays, and the source material. My conclusion is that the film doesn’t dissect the relationship so much as it exploits the novelty of early 2000s romcoms, using that as a foundation for this barrage of a movie. Many articles have critiqued the film, of course. To disclaim, I won’t be tackling the murky context behind the main relationship however ingrained it might be in the topic of desire, but rather I'm trying to understand the bad feminist, and the woman who desires what she isn’t meant to.
In the video essay SECRETARY (2000): A Spankingly Good Love Story, Antiheroines points out the opinions within post #metoo articles revisiting the film, which key words like “consent” “manipulation” “work place imbalance” and “abuse” were used to mark the film’s message.
“For some time I thought I had to feel the same way, and if I didn’t then I was a bad person, or worse, a bad feminist.”
the bad feminist
There’s a scene towards the end of Secretary where Lee is presumably hallucinating as she carries out Mr. Grey’s order of sitting still for days on end. A woman sits across from her and places down a stack of feminist texts, telling Lee to “read about women’s struggles.”
The bad feminist is a tale as old as time, the kind where a woman who chooses the thing not considered most equitable to her place in society is othered. See for instance: A woman’s choice to be a career minded individual is considered an undermining of her role as a mother and wife. A woman’s choice to be a housewife is an undermining of the progressive work feminism has undertaken to get women into the workplace. But is the evidence of choice not the goal? Is there no space for a woman that desires something outside of the expected pick?
There is no space for othered women, women who desire all of the above or neither. I’ve critiqued feminist media before for it’s shallow portrayals of women empowerment, sluice messaging slipping past the fingers with no effort. Secretary is not about female empowerment but the individual choice of one woman and her circumstances. Lee and her anxieties about the world is very relatable to me but would I enter an inappropriate sadomasochistic relationship with my boss? No. However the opinions of both this film and its preceding short story are marked as offensive portrayals of women, the movie more so.
“On one level, I want to recommend Secretary for its sheer audacity alone. On another, I want to dismiss it for its dumbfounding and offensive presentation of women. On yet another, I want to dismiss that previous thought because the film isn’t a big, broad social commentary; it’s an (extremely) offbeat tale of romance between two desperate, lonely, and very, very messed up people.”
To consider the film or the book in a broader conversation of social commentary is to do so at your own discretion, the way I’m doing so now, dissecting the woman’s desire within the context of the film.
Where is the line for a woman’s control over her own desire? Does this line exist? Are mentally ill women being taken advantage of in this movie? It depends. I think in one way, there are the worrying implications of Lee’s dependance falling on Mr. Grey, who is a man, who is her boss. I wouldn’t blame you for using this as the basis surrounding the assumptions of abuse within their relationship.
On the other hand, to assume that a mentally ill woman cannot make her own decisions takes away the choices she makes, in the same way everyone other than Mr. Grey does in the film. At the start we’re shown a mousy Lee, dressed like an overgrown child who’s never seen the world and remains shielded by her dependant mother. She is not control of anything but the harm she inflicts on herself.
I don’t think Lee matures over the course of the movie solely because of Edward (Mr. Grey), and sure, there could’ve been healthier ways for her to cope with the realities of life without engaging in kink. Edward of course, indulges her in the world of kinkdom and she enjoys it. There are stipulations pertaining to their relationship that should never exist outside of fiction but she enjoys being a masochist. It ties into her desire to be given orders, to carry out mundane, mindless tasks that require nothing but what is asked of her. In a way I also think there’s some neurodivergence in there but different topic, different time.
The hate this movie gets is largely centred on Lee being controlled by Edward. I won’t contest this given the nature of their relationship, however this inadvertent dismissal of her role in this the issue.
I think, when it comes to the topic of heterosexual relationships, there is a tendency to believe that the woman is never in control of her desire. For millennials, A woman’s desire was seen as a rebellion towards men, especially women who knew and utilised said desire. In the movie Teeth, a young woman experience’s Vagina Dentata, a folktale about vaginas with teeth, and castrates men when she’s subjected to male violence. The film symbolises the importance of consent more than it does the fear of a woman’s desire, but the element of control held by a woman still speaks to the fact of it being seeing as an oddity. Desire, in this context, is angry and powerful, something a woman should not be.
In Secretary, Lee is desperate for Mr. Grey’s attention after he calls off their relationship. She teases him with sexy photos, she shows up at his house, she’s committed to making him see her desire for him as something to take seriously. There are many instances in which she outright says “because I want to” at the questions of why she’s putting herself through debased acts.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a minute. I’ve come to enjoy books about horrific, untethered women. Women that are abject in their sorrow and do horrible things for their own gain. I find women like this interesting simply because I have never seen a woman like this. We know men as violent creatures, gold plated pieces in an unbalanced hierarchy they created. A concept like Vagina Dentata and The Monstrous Feminine simply flip the roles, but ends up containing more nuance.
A woman’s shameless desperation to be loved is something I judge only because I would never be brave enough to show that deep of an emotion. I get second hand embarrassment from women like Lee because I’m already trying to imagine myself doing that, hating what I see, and subsequently disliking the woman committing the act. I sit down with the reality of unlikable women often because as a former pick me, it’s difficult trying to separate a woman’s action from a man’s reaction. I’ve grown out of that, thankfully, and find it easier to sympathise with a scorned woman than a powerful man.
There is something withering about a woman feeling someway about you wholeheartedly. Mr. Grey is a clear representation of the self hating man, and how a woman who becomes as strong-willed as Lee makes him uncomfortable. Someone disgusted by their own sexual desire often disguises the wholeness of their hatred by depending on humour to deflect, or just straight up being a dick. Mr. Grey—played by James Spader, my favourite freak—is the dick variation, appalled by Lee’s genuine want to be used in the way he has always berated himself for. Her self-assurance is in full swing and she owns entirely her desire, something he could never do.
The victimisation of Lee removes her shameless behaviour, the fact that she been cheating on her boyfriend the entire span of her relationship with Mr. Grey and said in many instances that she wants to continue being degraded, even when Mr. Grey didn’t want to continue degrading her.
However this is not a thing of BDSM entirely. At the end of the video, Antiheroine concluded that:
“It’s not about the sex, and it’s not about the kinks or the lifestyle. It’s about this one specific person with whom she has this specific relationship with. She wants Mr. Grey. This movie is not about BDSM representation to begin with. It’s about two weirdos finding each other.”
You don’t need me to tell you that abuse victims getting into BDSM relationships is a thin line to traverse. But abuse victims who seek sexual freedom is a different thing altogether.
The woman’s desire is a thing left untouched.
A woman’s desire is always undermined by the expectations of what that desire is meant to look like. It seems as though many reviews to this day believe Lee to be a victim to Mr. Grey, that she’s exchanging one form of abuse for another.
You could argue that Lee has been brainwashed or that she’s being taken advantage of, but in my eyes Mr. Grey was the only person that saw her as an adult, which in the film she’s presumed to be.
There’s a wide culture of treating people with mental illnesses as though they’re incapable of making individual choices, and in some cases, that might be the case, but when it comes to women, especially women in media that are portrayed to be mentally ill, they’re commonly sexualised or infantilised.
There’s been a current increase of men saying they want to date a ‘crazy’ girl which often translates to someone they can control. It’s a blatant fetishisation of mentally ill women with the assumptions concerning the sexuality of these women garnered from popular media. Watch any Sam Levinson show and you’ll understand what I mean.
In Secretary, most of the infantilisation of Lee’s mental illness is done by her mother, who, in her own way, is trying to love her daughter by having Lee depend on her. Mr. Grey, whilst being a dick, is the only person that sees her for who she is. He recognises her oddities the first time they meet and as time goes on, he’s well adapted to her quirks, and despite being rude about it, helps her overcome her self harming.
The thing about Secretary: the film is that it’s not asking you to see any of it’s relationships as a representation of good or bad. Of course, the marketisation deters from the source material’s message of sexual abuse in the workplace, but also the film created it’s own identity. A fantastical, surreal world where all of these people can be weird together.
To me, the only fantasy present is the idea that I can be in control of my desire. The black body—my black body—is pushed as an object of hidden desire with many, many caveats. A black body is hot but not pretty. Sexy, but not beautiful. Fuckable, but never dateable. I was sexualised at a young age, but now in my 20s I find myself wanting to desire both myself and my version of sexual intimacy.
Of course, this societal regularity has changed quite drastically, and I really couldn’t care less about being desirable to society, only to someone I love and care about. Which brings me back to the film. Lee by the end of the movie is a completely different person. She’s more demanding of the things she wants, and what she wants is Mr. Grey. She wants their dynamic, uncaring about her ex boyfriend Peter’s frustration as to why she’s so obsessed with the lawyer. The world does not matter, only he does.
Secretary is a film I don’t relate to, but it’s one I appreciate simply for the fact that Lee didn’t come across as a victim—in terms of her relationship with Mr. Grey—to me. She was in an institution, she got out, she worked for a weird guy who made her weirdness feel validated and they fell in love.
There’s this odd belief that mentally ill women are never implicitly in control of their own desire, as though impossible. If Lee is seen as a victim for the majority of the movie, then what can we say for the women that find themselves enjoying BDSM? Does a woman have to be completely and utterly free of mental illness to be considered dominant over her desire? Women that enjoy perverted things and are looking for someone to be a little perverted with? How much power are we giving to abuse as a root cause for a woman’s want?
This isn’t to dissuade you from questioning the intentions of this movie. The writer of the original short story does so herself, citing that the film has a sort of “Pretty Woman” haze over it, shadowing the uncomfortable reality pointed out in the source material with a kinky and darkly comedic romance.
It’s important to mention that the film is not a faithful adaptation even though I find it a good film. In the book Debby (Lee) is broken by the experience with the lawyer. Its ending is perhaps the closest to what we’d see today, where a work place relationship would be treated as an issue rather than a “kinky rom-com”.
In a New York Times article, Mary Gaitskill revisits Secretary decades later with a note on the story’s protagonist Debby years later in her short story Minority Report, and the impact of the events in Secretary.
It’s hard, because, in a perverse way, what the lawyer did awakened her and made her feel more alive than ever before or since. But that aliveness came at a heavy price. For example, she came to believe that her sexuality had closed off the possibility of motherhood for her. Was that actually the case? Would that have been the case even if she hadn’t met the lawyer? She doesn’t know, and these thoughts may be chimerical. But very painfully so - Mary Gaitskill on Revisiting Her Story “Secretary”.
How much can a woman desire without it altering her perception of said desire in the future?
I think, and bare with me here, that you should watch and read Secretary once. I’ll understand if you hate it, but I’ll also understand if you love it.