It’s not about sex.

Carmen and a feminist walk into a bar.

The second of three articles about Carmen, along with What’s In the Cards and The Carmen Who Lives.

Greetings from Hanoi. I spent my first weekend in my room studying Carmen and subsisting off of the huge tray of food my landlady brought up as a welcome present.

When the food ran out, and I was forced to head out into the city and figure out how to feed myself. Step 1: Get some cash. I punched “ATM” into Google Maps and walked out the door with blind confidence.

I’ve done this many times in many cities. Google never fails. Except… in the chaos that is Hanoi, which even Google can’t handle. It directed me to one non-existent ATM, and then another, and then another. But, on the upside, I learned how to cross the street in Hanoi: step into traffic and pray.

I was epically, conspicuously lost. I hesitated a loonnnnggg time before stepping into that unending wave of cars and mopeds -  so long that a moped taxi driver swung around and asked if I needed a ride. (How much would you charge to drive this white lady across the street, my friend?)

I wandered through a gate into a rundown concrete courtyard - following Google’s brilliant instructions. A guy immediately came out of an office and politely spoke to me in Vietnamese. (Translation: leave.)

I walked up the stairs of what looked like a bank, thinking this must be the place. Nope. Another guy in a uniform came out of a booth - same conversation. I showed him the map on my phone. He shook his head and pointed me down the street and around the corner.

Et voilà. The ATM.

It’s like the universe was giving me my own little Act 1, Scene 1 from Carmen. Busy city center? Check. Woman with deer-in-headlights vibes? Present and accounted for.

Luckily, that’s where the similarities end, because Carmen opens with a scene of blatant sexual harassment. Michaela, the opera’s Good Girl, wanders into the city square. Some soldiers notice that she looks very lost and ask her if she’d like to, you know…. come inside…with them. They don’t take no for an answer.  She has to literally run away.

It might surprise you to learn that, as operas go, I don’t find Carmen all that problematic. Yes, the opera starts with harassment and ends with fatal domestic violence. Yes, it plays with the old virgin and whore tropes.

But the work directs all our sympathy toward the women - both of them - and that matters. On a musical level, Bizet lets us know that the harassment is gross. The music turns slow and smarmy during the scene. And while Carmen is murdered by an ex who thinks he’s entitled to her affection, she also dies a hero. Just like a toreador, she does not flinch.

What performers and audiences project onto Carmen is a different story. Take the idea that Carmen is about sex - or worse, that the character is a female Don Giovanni. (100% incorrect, despite how often that line shows up in program notes. Don Giovanni is a serial rapist. Carmen is not. It’s alarming that so many opera folks are still fuzzy on the distinction.)

Carmen is every marketing department’s dream. The tunes are great, but more importantly - sex sells. The problem is - there’s absolutely no sex in the plot. We can assume Carmen sleeps with her lovers, but we don’t actually know.  She, after all, sings about finding love. It’s not the language of a woman in search of hook-ups.

Sure, crowds of men shout her name. But those same guys are willing to corner a lost 17-year-old girl in broad daylight. The men who adore Carmen can - and will - get sex anywhere. What they want from her - what they can only get from her - is the attention of a woman with incomparable charisma. What’s so bold about Carmen is that it shows the overwhelming force of the female gaze.

But there’s absolutely nothing to suggest that Carmen’s mission in life is finding her next good roll in the hay - or chasing men at all. She’s not Dorabella or Fiordiligi. You won’t find her neurotically obsessing about a boyfriend while her maid serves her chocolate. Carmen doesn’t have that kind of privilege. She’s a hustler at the bottom of the food chain.

And she says what she wants, out loud and more than once. Liberté. Freedom. Are love and sex part of that? No doubt. But they’re clearly side dishes for her, not the main course. I mean, come on, she tells Don Jose to get lost because he’s clingy and slowing down the smuggling operation. Carmen is a woman with priorities.

We’ve had over a century to understand Carmen - a woman who sings, dances, escapes the police, earns her own living, smuggles contraband, tells fortunes, gets in knife fights, and stares down her own murderer. Nearly 150 years to understand opera’s greatest badass. And somehow we’ve still decided that Carmen - the opera and the woman herself -  are about sex. Or passion and desire, as the polite classical crowd likes to put it.

Carmen is about a woman’s freedom - and its all-consuming cost. Somehow we still can’t come to grips with that. It’s a 19th-century opera with a complex and bracingly confident woman in the title role. It has its problems, but it’s not nearly as sexist as a 21st-century opera business that reduces her to a sex symbol. The actual historical work is far more nuanced and progressive than much of the artistic culture that brings it to life today.

Opera is a tough place to be a feminist. There are works whose misogyny is irredeemable, in my view. (Così being one of them. I’m never going to be okay with rape scene in a comedy or an openly sexist title in bold print on the program. I’m not sure why everybody else is.)

But - Carmen is not that. There’s a lot of interesting territory to explore. The production with VNOB is rolling along, and with any luck, I’ll have a morning or two to sit down with some Vietnamese coffee and do just that. Stay tuned.

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P.S. - Tarot reading coming soon - still time to send your questions.

P.P.S - Speaking of irredeemable misogyny, the Eastman School of Music has still said and done absolutely nothing about this whole situation. Crickets. I still have no clear path to completing my degree in a reasonable, equitable environment. The official institutional strategy is turning off the lights, hitting the floor, and pretending not to hear the doorbell ringing. Please do keep ringing it.

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