Tomorrow—Friday—today, for all of you reading—my documentary Shy Woman goes live on CBC Gem. Three-thirty on Saturday afternoon, it shows at our hometown independent movie theatre, the Metro Cinema. I’ll do a Q&A afterward with a few of the subjects, and there will be pink doughnuts in the lobby. Saturday is International Women’s Day. It would be lovely to see you. If you can’t make it, you can stream the film on Gem for free, or for $5.99 a month if you don’t want to be interrupted by Shoppers Drug Mart commercials.
What is Shy Woman about? The “short summary” I sent the CBC reads like this: In Shy Woman, Lizzie Derksen investigates why her relationships with other women feel so strained—interviewing the very friends, ex-friends, relatives, teachers, nemeses, and former lovers that she has struggled to connect with.
The CBC is supposed to do internal cross-promotion of films like mine—when Dylan made Boys Will Be . . . Themselves for the same series, he was interviewed on local television, on the morning radio show. I have received no interview requests. My producer warned me that other producers might be scared of Shy Woman, and it seems that they are. Women are still scary, it seems. Who knows what embarrassing things we might say.
In my long synopsis, I wrote: “One of my earliest memories is of being in preschool and sitting at a table with two other little girls, one of whom reached over, took my hand in what I remember thinking was a possessive way, and announced to the other: “She’s my best friend.” I pulled my fingers free and said, “We’re not friends.” We weren’t. I couldn’t understand why my fellow toddler thought that we were.
In the thirty-one years that have elapsed since this episode, I’m not sure I can say that relating to other women has become much easier—or at least, it didn’t seem much easier when I started filming Shy Woman in early 2024. I wanted to make this documentary because I wanted to find out—once and for all—why the intimate, enjoyable, mutually supportive friendships I heard being described as the norm for women (as opposed to men) were so unlike my own relationships. Was it my fault? Was there something wrong with me? Or was I having a common experience that other women, for some reason, refused to acknowledge?
I noticed women being held up as counter-examples to anti-social men, damaged by toxic masculinity. But why, if it was so easy to recognize the impacts of patriarchy on men's relationships, was it seemingly impossible for anyone to admit that women’s relationships might be compromised by our culture’s dominant gender dynamics as well?
Above all: Why was no one talking about this? Surely we didn’t all feel like Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin all of the time.
I made a list of my most fraught relationships with other women: my semi-estranged youngest sister, the only friend I’d ever broken up with, a former professor whom I felt I had massively disappointed, my husband’s girlfriend, my best male friend’s partner, my mother-in-law, my oldest friend, the woman I hadn’t spoken with since she had a baby.
How did these women feel about the level of ease—or lack thereof—between us? Were they satisfied with their relationships with other women? What, from their perspective, was going on?
I built Shy Woman around the eight interviews that resulted from this very personal project of investigation. Through intensive (and sometimes terrifying) conversations and the subsequent process of organizing 30+ hours of my subjects’ responses and ideas into a 44-minute film, I’ve learned a lot about myself and other women, about what it means to grow up under patriarchy, and about what it takes to form authentic connections—with oneself and with others—in a society that teaches women to hate and mistrust themselves.
As I prepare for the release of Shy Woman, I’ve been contemplating some of the conclusions I’ve reached over the past year:
I’m not the only woman who feels this way.
The myth of the woman who’s “not like other girls” is a trap that both women and men fall into, that keeps women isolated and in competition with each other.
Older women seem to be able to form better relationships than younger women, and this seems directly attributable to their own increased sense of authenticity and self-worth.
The best way for me, as a 34-year-old, to connect with other women is to make sure that I am being myself. Sometimes that means admitting that I feel disconnected. And sometimes admitting disconnection is the best way to reconnect.”
Why did I make a documentary about my difficulties with women’s friendship? Because I didn’t know why I had so much trouble. Now I know. (“Capitalism and patriarchy” is the three-word answer. If you want more details, watch the film.) So the project worked, in that sense. I answered the questions I set out asking. Not that being able to explain something is any safeguard against falling into it. The reasons for women’s relationships to be difficult are real, and endemic in our society, and few of us are immune. I blew up a courteous relationship with my aunt while making this film. Distance grew between myself and some of my friends, some of the friends I interviewed, even. If my Oma (who declined to be interviewed) watches Shy Woman, she probably won’t yell at me, but she may giggle even more nervously next time she passes me a plate of fried stollen.
I wish it wasn’t like this with us. As I say in the documentary, I wish I had a better idea of who my Oma is, and was as a younger woman.
Just stop and think for a moment about the women in your life: How many of them do you really know? Why is it still so hard for us to recognize ourselves in each other?