Recently, I sat in a theater for #4 on my list of favorite afternoon activities (the top three of that list are sex, napping, and reading a book, in no particular order), watching a movie. I let the rollicking fun that is Whip It wash over me and I soon realized two things as I tapped my boots against the empty seat in front of me:

1. I can relate too much to this movie.

2. Why aren’t more women seeing this?

I went into Whip It expecting about two hours of a fun time, girls being rowdy, skates, pop music. I did not expect to leave thinking about underlying issues of this movie days later. As you might have heard by this point in time, Whip It, based on the novel Derby Girl by Shauna Cross, centers around Bliss Cavendar, an awkward teenage girl in small town Texas who is going through the motions in local beauty pageants in order to please her domineering mother. Bliss finds her own footing, literally as well as figuratively, in the world of women’s roller derby. She tries out on a whim and makes the team, her small frame ideal for the speed required to weave through packs of shoving, hip checking women on skates. Bliss becomes comfortable in her own skin as she navigates that common, difficult part of growing up where you try to reconcile your chosen family and life with the one that you are born into.

I thought a lot about my mother during the movie. I felt like I was watching my childhood as I watched Bliss squirm at pageant dress fittings. My mom used to be a lot like Bliss’s mom, Brooke; she was a former dancer and beauty pageant contestant who wanted nothing more than for me to follow in her footsteps and make it big in the way that stars used to in the golden age of Hollywood. I was tiny when she found that I had a natural talent at singing and a fondness for my ballet classes and she pounced on it. From the age of two on, I spent any time I was not in school at any kind of lesson you can imagine: ballet, tap, jazz, acting for the stage, commercial acting, singing, violin, piano. I thought I was happy at the time because God knows it’s good to see your mom beam at your accomplishments but really, I wanted to do anything but the things I did every day after school.

I didn’t really do anything about these feelings until I was older. I was involved in this whole world, training and dancing with a ballet company until the age of 15 when my parents’ divorce gave me the out I needed to escape these things. Without these extracurricular activities, I was still the perfect child with straight A’s and never getting into too much trouble but I was still uncomfortable in my own skin. It wasn’t until I went away to college at 18 and then took time off of school for two years that I really began doing the things I liked, pursuing the things that I had kept myself from doing for fear of upsetting my mom. By almost 21, things had changed as a result of how much I had grown.

I remember coming home for the holidays just before my 21st birthday and my mom seeing the tattoos I had accumulated in the time I’d been away from home. I sat and explained each one to her and she sort of nodded quietly. We sat for a long time at my grandma’s kitchen table and didn’t say anything. She looked at my crossed legs in my knee length skirt, a big scar from a cycling accident still pink and raised moving in front of her eyes as I shook one Chuck-shod foot. My hair was shoulder length (no longer the fauxhawk she had despised) but messy and curly, my bangs falling into my eyes, smudged with black eyeliner. My fingernails were painted hot pink but I knew they were shorter than she would have liked.

“Are you happy?” She asked and looked at me, the lines on her face doing nothing but enhancing her beautiful face.

“What do you mean?” I wondered where this was going. My mom had never been one to ask a simple question.

“You’re just different than I expected you to turn out, I guess. You were a very girly little girl.”

“I still am, Mommy. I’m still girly in a lot of ways but I’m also just more myself. It’s hard to be yourself when you’re a kid.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She was defensive instantly. She never liked to hear about the things I didn’t like about my childhood.

“I liked the things I did during my childhood. Maybe I would have chosen different things but I think they sort of shaped who I am now. I guess they sort of helped me figure out the things I do like.” I sat back and tried to gauge her reaction.

“Yeah, I suppose.” She lifted her face to look at me closely. “You’re the prettiest girl in the world, Anaïs. I just want you to be happy.”

I knew she meant it and still does. I know that no matter how much she wishes that I hadn’t gotten tattoos and that I had really wanted to go to law school and that I wouldn’t have wanted to do so many of the things I’ve done, she is still my biggest fan in every area of my life. She has started to see that despite the fact that she brought me into this world, I have my own life to create as I go along, making my own errors.

I don’t have kids, I don’t really hope to have them for a while, but I’ve learned a lot just from being my mother’s only child. I think there’s a point where a parent sees that their child has grown into whoever he or she is going to be and from then on, all they can do is hope that they’ve done the best they can for that kid. It’s like that moment when your mom or dad lets go of the handlebars and lets you ride your bike on your own for better or for worse.There are moments like this in Whip It between Bliss and Brooke where you can see that despite their differences, they truly love and respect one another for the women they are. You don’t have to be a carbon copy of your mom to make her proud; you just have to honor and remember the work she put into raising you with every choice you make later on along the line.

While many movies struggle to portray interesting, strong, flawed women, Whip It has several ladies who fit this description. The roller derby ladies in this movie are fierce, tough athletes of different sizes and shapes, something refreshing from the majority of movies released. Kristen Wiig shines as Maggie Mayhem, team captain of the Hurl Scouts and mother figure to young Bliss. Far from the wackier characters she usually plays on SNL, Wiig gives a subtle yet fun performance in this film, a voice of reason in the mess Bliss finds herself in as she tries to balance her newfound passion with her past.

As Iron Maven, Juliette Lewis plays Bliss’s roller derby rival mostly for laughs, causing trouble between the roller derby teams and generally sporting a bad attitude. Yet we see her vulnerable at one point in the film, as she tells Bliss her real age and how she had found the one thing in her life she was good at late in life. There is a real feeling of the dedication these women have to this misunderstood sport that runs through the film. It’s an area of their lives far from their day jobs and responsibilities that allows them to shine and really have something that is their own.

One of the most refreshing things about Whip It was the fact that it was a story about a girl, about women. There was part of the plot that focused on Bliss’s romantic entanglement with a young musician she meets but this is neither the focus nor the grand resolution at the end of the film. Rather, Whip It focuses on Bliss finding her own identity and her own “tribe”, as director Drew Barrymore described. The fact that I have to think of who would be in my tribe of female friends makes me wonder at how deeply rooted this female socialization of competition lies.

I’m not saying Whip It is the best movie I’ve ever seen because it’s definitely not. To me, it was more than just fun but for many this movie will be just that, a while of fun. So I wonder again to myself, why aren’t more women seeing this movie? Whip It has not done impressively at the box office thus far and I have to think of reasons why. Why is it that women will turn out in droves and pay money to see the same insipid recycled romantic comedy again and again but won’t go see a movie made by women for women? I have to wonder if it’s because of the way we’re socialized growing up. We’re taught to view women as competition for everything whether it’s romantically or careerwise or just socially. Growing up suspicious of other women, we look at each other as fellow competitors in a race but for what? Do we all have the same end goal? I can’t imagine that this is true for all women so I wonder where the support is for each other. I wonder about my own female friends in this regard and wonder why it seems we talk about men so often. Are we guilty of this even when mostly self aware? Even comfortable in my own skin and questioning the ideas of femininity of past generations, it’s so easy to fall into the catty patterns women think are part of being female. Why aren’t we more proud of each other?

Damn.