WHY I HATE AUDREY HEPBURN

The Feminine Impossible

“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to violence… the word and the act.  While violence cloaks itself in a plethora of disguises, its favorite mantle still remains sex.” 

— Introductory narration to “Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” 

“I don’t try anything, I just do it.” 

— Tura Satana 

“They let ‘em vote, smoke drive and wear pants, and what do we get? A Democrat in the White House.” 

— Old Man with Shotgun in “Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”

 I am absolutely sick to death of Audrey Hepburn, and the brand of itsy-bitsy adorably posh bourgeois femininity that she represents.  By the end of this essay, I hope you too will harbor fantasies of reanimating her sainted corpse just so you can slap her tiny head around like a Fabergé tether-ball. 

As an adult woman, Audrey Hepburn is as highly annoying as mosquitoes trapped in a light bulb.  She is all frailty and richly shined, pampered tininess. She has that mid-Atlantic accented, tiptoeing voice of the utmost gentility. She’s an 80 pound weakling who physically looks 11 years old and dresses as though she were at at a strict French convent school, in 5th grade. 

It’s not the pedophilia aspect of it that bothers me so much, but the notion that sex with Audrey Hepburn must have been like trying to fuck a Cornish game hen.

Audrey is desireless, sin-free, eternally wanted, an enchanted child who delights her audience in glamorous PG-rated ways.  A renegade princess on the back of a motor scooter in Rome, riding side-saddle.

She was the nun in “A Nun’s Story.” 

She was the virgin to Marilyn Monroe’s whore. 

In short, Audrey Hepburn is JonBenet Ramsey — an advertisement for a kind of Holy Virgin female that doesn’t, or shouldn’t, exist.     

   

I reject in general the deification of movie starlets who are such delicate-ass little childlike angel fairies, and the pure infantilism they

represent, mostly because it is such a nauseatingly conservative political type.  

I perhaps expressed my reservations best in my book, “Fear and Clothing,” when describing the kind of Rosemary’s Baby, kinder-whore fashions and ballet flats that always seem to attend Republican administrations, and the utter disdain and contempt Republicans have toward women in general.  I find these fragile and helpless female cues particularly disgusting now, because the Christian zealots of the conservative class are bombing women’s sexuality back to the fucking stone-age. 

Audrey Hepburn was never an adult. Never in her career has Audrey said the word “fuck” on camera.  She’d have sooner ripped her Givenchy gown off at a NASCAR colosseum. 

She was far too regal and singular for such vulgar displays of female humanity. Not Audrey.  Audrey crosses her legs and her ankles. She’s your mother prays to St. Bernadette for you to bring home. In terms of lust ignition, she’s somewhere on the spectrum between a harpsichord and an acorn squash.  Audrey never fucks. She has no rebellion, no wrongful desires. 

Now that I have actual human nieces, and the usual amount of protective fears for them,I’m starting to think that a better role model for young women than Audrey Hepburn is Tura Satana in Russ Meyer’s salacious classic cult hit, “Faster Pussycat!  Kill! Kill!” 

In“Faster Pussycat!  Kill! KIll!” Three treacherously buxom go-go dancers with fast cars speed around playing chicken on salt flats and getting in hair-pulling cat fights. Sure it’s prurient, but they’re in on the prurience — they’re driving it. They’re getting kicks, man. 

It’s a weaponized kind of femininity that makes its own rules. They move their stallion bodies around like great battleships.  Tura Satana, wearing short leather gloves and driving a dusty bathtub Porsche, challenges a strange man to a fist-fight, and wins it when she karate-chops him to death with her bare hands.  It is exhilarating. 

(Confessional Sidebar:  The first time I saw the movie “True Romance,” there is a moment when Patricia Arquette is being beaten up all over a hotel room by would-be assailant Tom Sizemore.  When she finally gets the best of the situation and blows his head off, her teeth are bloody, and she is screaming. The first time I saw it, in a theater, my soul actually left my body in some kind of wrongful elation, and I saw myself sitting far below.) 

Is effective self-defense not something we should be teaching women, who have been being raped since the dawn of time? Should our daughters not be taught to be delicate flowers, but lethal? 

The only reason Tura Satana would be loitering outside the window at Tiffany’s is if there was a brick in her purse.  She has other fish to fry. 

And don’t even talk to me about the women in Kill Bill compared to Audrey Hepburn.  The only thing Audrey Hepburn would be in Tarantino’s world is kindling.  They’d use Audrey’s tiny tapered fingers to stuff special child bullets.  She’d find everything so unsafe and pointy, she would fix her tiny chin in a heroic direction and her lip would tremble, and violins would swell as a single crystalline tear fell down her flawless cheekbone. 

Tura Satana wouldn’t be on the back of any man’s scooter.  She would have her own motorcycle, like Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill,” a film which I have adored ever since a friend of mine described it as a “metaphor for female emotional survival.” 

The women in “Faster, Pussycat” are masters of the art of survival. 

They own themselves sexually and can fuck up anyone who fucks with them. They have their own goals and missions, that don’t involve men, and generally involves stomping on them. 

Audrey Hepburn is always being dragged hither and yon across a vast expanse of enthusiastically polite, gentlemanly, chaste male suitors, or worse, men who transform her into someone reflecting their own ideals. 

Tura Satana fucks strangers in barns. Anyway, the point is: she’s in charge.  

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Artwork: “Dinner With Elagabalus,” oil on canvas, Cintra Wilson 2024