The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice by M. G. Lord

oil-rich) have been pressured to attend. Jordy expects the event to annoy him—and regrets agreeing to attend—but when the hotel beauty salon bars his wife, Juana, he hits the roof. The beautician is baffled by his anger: “She should have gone to Sanchez’ place, where they do her people.”
    Too furious to notice the thunderstorm through which he has slogged, Jordy, dripping, confronts Rink at the dinner in Rink’s honor. Portrayed with passion by Dennis Hopper, Jordy is a small, clenched bundle of indignation in a ballroom full of rangy, tuxedo-clad cowboys—the state’s petroleum elite. Rink sneers; he loathes Jordy’s education, idealism, and last name. He taunts Jordy about “marrying a squaw.” Then he orders his goons to hold Jordy back, so that he can avenge years of class resentment, throwing a punch to flatten the rich boy. Leslie winces when Jordy is struck; but she is proud that her son stood up to injustice. Bick, however, shamed, leaps to defend the Benedict family honor—not to demand respect for Jordy’s wife.
    Bick prides himself on being open-minded. But later, when he counsels Jordy to expect confrontation—that it comes with “marrying in that direction”—he exposes his prejudice. Bick is just a less-crude version of Rink. On the edge of tears, Jordy begs his father to hear what he has said—and to fight against the bigotry in his heart.
    At Sarge’s Diner, a roadside dump on the drive back to Reata, Jordy’s message sinks in. Sarge, the loutish white owner, grudgingly serves Leslie, Juana, Bick, and Bick’s biracial grandson. But when a Mexican couple sits down, Sarge evicts them. And Bick raises his fists—not for family honor or personal pride, but for something larger—racial justice—in which before this moment he had only superficially believed.
    Bick does not prevail. Sarge decks him; he crashes into a stack of dishes and topples to the floor. But in Leslie’s eyes, he is victorious. He has experienced a flicker of empathy. She has also triumphed. Her values don’t just reside in the Benedict children; they have taken root in her husband as well: “After a hundred years, the Benedict family is really a success.”
    Giant “depicts the erosion of sexual stereotyping,” critic Peter Biskind writes in Seeing Is Believing : How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties . “Leslie is more assertive, more a man than her mother back in Maryland, and she feminizes Bick, sees to it that he becomes more a woman than his father.” In 1956—the same year that Rebel Without a Cause blamed teenage delinquency on fathers who wear aprons—this itself was an achievement.
    But Stevens doesn’t just break down gender polarities. He implies that the innate values of women are nobler than those of men. He takes Leslie’s world—the world of women—and connects it to the “aggregate of pluralist values,” the “highest aspirations” toward which a civilization can strive: “tolerance, compromise, flexibility, and civility,” Biskind writes. He does this through Leslie’s commitment to social justice. In Giant , Biskind asserts, “woman’s world comes to be equated with nothing less than culture itself.”

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    1956–1959
    AS YOU CAN IMAGINE, Warner Brothers did not sell Giant as a feminist call to arms. It sold the film as a steamy love triangle—misrepresenting, often comically, the content of scenes. The ad campaign used “subliminal seduction,” a then-trendy technique for selling products by stealthily linking them to sex. The studio ran a half-page ad with three big pictures. In the first, Hudson, valiantly heterosexual, gazes longingly at Taylor. The caption: “Bick Benedict, owning so much except the one part of Leslie’s life that is no part of his.”
    The ad then shows Dean, shirt unbuttoned to the waist, oozing intensity, and Taylor on her knees before him. Although they are technically chaste, their positions hint at an act that would violate