Friends: when is the right time to mourn the passing of something great? When, if that thing is specifically Sarah Palin’s political career, vital as it is to the Extremely Lazy Comedy Industry? Do we discuss it the day of its death? The day after? When whatever insane dirt caused this passing (LATE-TERM MOOSE ABORTIONS) eventually surfaces? Or just when about a week has passed and we are tired of dirt-waiting?

It turned out to be that last one, actually. For Sexist Beatdown is upon us again! In this edition, we repudiate blogging as usual as the highly unusual Amanda Hess of The Sexist and the slightly more uncomfortably unusual Me of Tiger Beatdown discuss the major events of the day. And how they relate to Megan Fox! Also: prepare yourselves, for one of us will make a shocking announcement.

BONUS VIDEO: Now, if only we could find some way to add blow-job miming dude strippers and GarageBand.

You guys? I think I really like the “Jennifer’s Body” trailer.

So, cool people: I would like to join you in not liking Diablo Cody. Unfortunately, I think you are huge sexists. Also, despite her grating attempts at cool cuteness, or cute coolness, or whatever, I keep getting this feeling that this Cody woman is actually far smarter – and, specifically, far more feminist – than she lets on. 

You guys, have I mentioned that I really think I like the trailer for “Jennifer’s Body?”

I know, right? It is so embarrassing. Because, “buff your situation?” No. “Phuking?” AIIIIIEEEEEEE, and also: no. Yet, consider!

1) THIS IS A MOVIE BY SOME LADIES. It came from a screenplay by a lady, and was directed by a lady. Also? It is a HORROR movie, by some ladies! Now: who here can name a genre of film which is typically gendered as uber-masculine, and yet is preoccupied with themes of sex, perversion, violence, victimization, freakish bodies, bodily invasion, female purity, and subjugation to transpersonal, malevolent and uncontrollable forces, and is therefore pretty much made for girls to play with? Was your answer “costume drama?” Because, if so, I doubt your reasoning. I am of the opinion that girls need to make more horror movies. If you can combine a subversive critique of patriarchal sexuality with some chainsaw murders, I am on your side. 

2) THE SUBVERSIVE CRITIQUE OF PATRIARCHAL SEXUALITY starts, in this trailer, right around the point when Naked Megan Fox, Professional Hot Lady, extends her mouth to about five times its natural size and eats a dude with it. Because: female sexual desirability is simultaneously prized and demonized. Female appetites, sexual or otherwise, are unilaterally feared and shamed. Women’s mouths, like most of our potentially dude-pleasuring orifices, are eroticized. Yet the “devouring” or “toothed” vagina is an ancient bogeyman. If you asked me to concretize all of that stuff in 1.5 seconds of trailer footage, I would have no idea how to go about it. I wouldn’t know what it ought to look like. As it turns out, however, it looks almost exactly like Naked Megan Fox, Professional Hot Lady, eating a dude with her giant scary mouth.

3) HEY, IS THAT AMANDA SEYFRIED? It totally is! Hi, Amanda Seyfried! You are wonderful! 

4) DID I MENTION THAT IT IS A MOVIE MADE BY SOME LADIES? Leaving aside the situation-buffing and Phuking (again: no, and no), there are actually two funny moments in this very trailer. In the first, Amanda Seyfried tells her friend, Currently Not Naked Megan Fox, that she’s “killing people.” Megan Fox rolls her eyes and says, “no, I’m killing BOYS.” In the second, Amanda Seyfried, whilst getting it on, shrieks in terror. Her exceedingly dorky-looking boyfriend asks her if he is “too big.” Now: men are lovely, and have written very lovely things in the past, and continue to write lovely things to this very day. However, here is one thing men cannot, if their track record is any indication, pull off: get the female (hetero)sexual experience to such a degree that they can write scenes like these. 

5) LET’S TALK SOME MORE ABOUT AMANDA SEYFRIED, AGAIN. Because, yes, there is the sexy sleepover, and also “I Go Both Ways,” and this causes me to go into a whole Katy-Perrian realm in which my thoughts are unhappy. (You guys! This is almost as bad as the “Phuking!”) Yet, if Jennifer and/or Naked Megan Fox represent unbridled female appetite, which is demonized and (in this movie) literally demonic, then Amanda Seyfried is the Last Girl Standing: the pretty blonde horror-movie fixture who survives because she resists sexuality. In most of these movies, the Last Girl Standing is the one who successfully runs away from or tricks a male monster who stands for predatory male sexuality – death for her would also, symbolically, be rape, what with all the penetration-y stabbings and such that are typical in this sort of movie. If “Jennifer’s Body” wanted to flip the script, it could have gone another, grosser way: a boy running scared of the toothy devouring lady-orifice, and eventually taming or destroying it. Yet that doesn’t happen here. The monster and the victim, the pure and the impure, are both girls. There is even complicity between them. But girls are afraid of female sexuality too – afraid of its consequences, or of the loss of control or purity that it represents. We’re afraid of it in each other, and we’re afraid of it in ourselves. The relationship between Jennifer and Not-Jennifer is about female relationships, yeah: about the way we can be drawn to other women, and be in awe of them, and fear or hate them at the same time. But it’s also about the psychological struggle that takes place within women (or, often, as in this case, adolescent girls) themselves. It’s not about running away from the killer/rapist. It’s about you: what you will permit yourself to want.

6) YOU GUYS,  I REALLY THINK THIS MOVIE IS NOT AS STUPID AS IT LOOKS. Even with the “Phuking!” Damn that Diablo Cody. 

Ladies: I have bad news for you. Feminism is over.

No! I am serious! Feminism – that is, the belief that women deserve full autonomy, full participation in the public sphere, and the right to make their own choices – is totally dead. No sane person can believe in it now. Why is that, you ask? Well, because SOME OF YOU – and I am not naming names, here – made the choice to participate in the public sphere by starting the band “Millionaires.”

You know, Millionaires, I have some thoughts about this video. My thoughts are: WHAT.

Millionaires has been around for a year or more, apparently! Sometimes on a thing called “The Warped Tour”? I don’t know what the kids are up to today.

Now: I have been engaged in Millionaires Studies since 9:00 this morning, when the gentleman with whom I happen to date woke me up, with a manic gleam in his eye, and was like, “ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE A BLOG POST ABOUT MILLIONAIRES? YOU SHOULD TOTALLY DO IT. YOU SHOULD WRITE A BLOG POST ABOUT MILLIONAIRES. LOOK AT THIS MILLIONAIRES VIDEO I HAVE SEEN.” Also he showed me videos by Brokencyde and Attack Attack? I don’t get him.

Now: I will, indeed, write a blog post about Millionaires. (“CALL IT ‘MILLIONAIRES: THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM!'” No.) Because one of the most interesting things about Millionaires is that many of their songs are about how much people hate the music of the band Millionaires! The people that they envision as “haters” of the band Millionaires are, specifically, girls.

They have an entire song about this! It is called, “Talk Shit,” and it is available on their MySpace! Which is kind of what it would look like if one of those girls who self-tans a lot and wears the Playboy bunny shirts vomited out 19 apple martinis and also the contents of her subconscious onto your face! It has done a lot for me, in terms of illustrating how any dialogue with Millionaires might go.

“Seriously, Millionares: WHAT?” I would say. “Shut up, cunt! I’ll cut your tongue,” Millionaires would say. “Again, WHAT?” I would say. “I fucked your son,” they’d say. “I don’t even have a son! That makes no sense,” I would reply! “You can get [your boyfriend] back; look like this and fuck like that,” would be Millionaires’ response.

That’s where things would get serious. Because, seriously, Millionaires: what is up? Why all of the references to girls who think you are “annoying” because they are “jealous?” Do you really think that all of the women who have issues with you are upset because THEY are not the ones paying half-naked black men to play strippers who pour champagne directly from bottles into their mouths in what is more or less a direct rip from porn (THE BOTTLES SYMBOLIZE PENISES)? Is the problem just that we all wish we could be huge racists? Because I do not think that is the problem, actually, Millionaires.

I think the problem is that when you are including lyrics like “no talent, just lucky, they still want to fuck me” in your singles you are basically saying that there is nothing good about you outside of the fact that boys want to touch you with their boners, and selling your fuckability as literally the only valuable thing about your person – the badge of your worth, and the sum total of your accomplishment, in fact. Whereas a whole bunch of us are not so convinced. We know that you are actually probably having unsatisfying two-minute hump sessions with dudes who think that Brokencyde is the sound of their souls and also don’t want to use condoms because they might extend the hump sessions past two minutes, which would be AWFUL. We are not “jealous” of this! You will never believe it, but “jealousy” is actually the very last thing we experience when faced with such a prospect!

But that makes us cunts, right? Whereas the guys who are doing you or determining you to be a candidate for doing based on the fact that you pour play money over your boobs are totally awesome. Those are the dudes who are going to be there for you when the chips are down. Those are the people whose good opinion and respect and friendship it is not only desirable, but totally possible, to obtain.

Bad news, ladies: you’re cunts, too. We’re all cunts, to those guys. We’re either cunts they’re going to fuck, or cunts they used to fuck (SHE WAS A PSYCHO, BRO. SHE GOT ALL MAD JUST BECAUSE I SLEPT WITH A BUNCH OF OTHER GIRLS AND DIDN’T TELL HER ABOUT IT) or cunts they don’t want to fuck, which are the worst cunts of all, of course, because the cunts they don’t want to fuck often scare the shit out of them, due to the fact that those cunts don’t constantly send out signals indicating that it would just be the bestest thing ever if boys such as themselves would honor them with a boner. And this is a survival tactic, for many cunts of the latter category: we’re actually, purposefully, trying to scare those guys off, so that we can determine which ones get freaked out by women who act like people, and maybe eventually end up dating ones who don’t get freaked out, who not only sleep with us and maybe have feelings for us that are of the romantical nature but actually like us, the way you would like a person.

Millionaires? Are you listening to me, young ladies? This is the voice of wisdom! I am TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD, so I can speak to the younger generation!

Oh, Jesus. “Let’s get fucked up?” This is not even a lyric. This is a vague mission plan for what a lyric might be, should you ever get around to writing lyrics. This is like if Nirvana (a band the old people once enjoyed!) wrote a song called “Let’s Do A Lot Of Heroin And Be Depressed.” It is like if there were a Ramones song called “This Is A Limited Number of Simple Chords, Played Really Really Fast.” If Eddie Vedder ever wrote a song called “I Will Now Bellow Earnestly Into Your Ear,” that is the equivalent of this lyric, I am telling you. Millionaires: WHAT?

You’re twelve years old. You’re twelve years old, aren’t you? Only a twelve-year-old thinks of White Zinfandel as the height of alcoholic debauchery. Well: you are either twelve years old, or my mom.

*** WARNING: IF YOU KNOW ME IN REAL LIFE, YOU SHOULDN’T READ THIS POST ***

*** WARNING: I AM SERIOUS, IF YOU KNOW ME AND WE GO OUT TO DINNER AND YOU HAVE TO MAKE POLITE CONVERSATION DURING WHICH IT IS NECESSARY TO LOOK ME IN THE EYE, YOU MIGHT REGRET HAVING READ THIS POST ***

***WARNING: ACTUALLY, MOST OF THE POSTS I HAVE PLANNED FOR THIS WEEK ARE OFF-LIMITS ***

*** WARNING: THEY’RE ALL ABOUT GETTING IT ON ***

The thing is: celebrities, they belong to you.

This isn’t completely true, of course. They’re people. They don’t, or shouldn’t, belong to anyone but themselves. But to be a writer, an artist, a musician, or any sort of entertainer, is to give people little shreds of yourself – over, and over, and over again. This is true no matter how commercial, or calculated, or patently artificial the stuff you produce might be: even if you’re putting on an act, even if you’re putting on an act that has a lot of creators, it’s still a document of you, what you said or did or how you moved or how you sounded at a certain time; it doesn’t exist without you.

If it works – this process of giving yourself to people – it works only because those pieces of you speak to people: they allow people to project their own meanings, or feelings, or needs, or actual or desired identities, onto you. Every single person who takes up that little shred of your life will end up putting more of themselves than of you into it (because they don’t know you, obviously) but what they end up with, in the end, is a version of you: a mental construct, maybe (generously) 5% actual You-the-Person and 95% You-as-Composed-of-Associations-and-Projections, some chimerical weird imaginary friend who somehow carries all of the feelings of solace or joy or excitement that they got from your work, and toward whom they feel all the kinship or gratitude or friendliness anyone would naturally feel toward someone who gave them all this, who gave it over and over, saying, implicitly: for you, for you, this is all for you, I love you. Of course, of course, they care about you. You, the Celebrity; You, the Imaginary Friend. Even if you might not actually be able to stand them. Even if they might not actually be able to stand you. Even if you are nothing like what they imagine.

And then you die.

Like: David Foster Wallace. As you can maybe imagine, due to the fact that I talk about him all the goddamn time, David Foster Wallace was someone with whom I had a firm and long-standing imaginary friendship. He died; he died unexpectedly, and young, and awfully; I read the post on Gawker. I texted the news to someone, then I sat there and said, aloud, “we’ll never get another book.”

We won’t. I won’t. Me, me, me. It was a completely narcissistic reaction, which I didn’t realize until much later, when I read the obituary on the AV Club and some knob was going off in the comments about how David Foster Wallace was just like him, you know, they were from the same state, and they thought alike, and if he were smarter and funnier he’d be David Foster Wallace, and I was sitting there hating the guy and then I realized: David Foster Wallace probably wouldn’t have liked me. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked him either. He went off on rants about political correctness; he had theories about language and usage that would irritate the pants off me if they came from any other source; he wrote that one piece about porn that had me swinging between admiration for his writing and empathy and rage at his elitist, Othering stance; I fucking hate math, sports, and abstract systems of thought that I can’t tie to lived experience or practice, and these things, if I understand correctly, were great and abiding passions for one David Foster Wallace, Writer. I had no greater claim to my DFW than this dude had to his, so how could I judge him? And why was I so willing to do so?

The thing is, Michael Jackson just died. I’m seeing loving tributes all over the place – some professionally written pieces, some personal testimonies. While I recognize that many of these people are paying tribute to their Michael Jacksons, their childhoods, all of that stuff that’s cathected in the first few notes of the bass on Beat It or the Thriller video, I can’t help feel that we have a responsibility to look past our own Michael Jacksons, and to the fact that it is absolutely, undoubtedly, certainly more likely than not that he committed sexual assault more than once in his lifetime – and that to do anything else is to contribute to a culture of silence surrounding sexual assault and abuse.

Because I’m seeing people arguing that there’s no plausible evidence that he ever did those things.

That’s a step too far.

Here’s the thing, here’s another guy with whom many people had intensely personal relationships based on his work, and who died, unexpectedly and young and awfully: John Lennon. John Lennon hit women, and was a misogynist for a very large portion of the time during which he produced this work. Before I read certain posts over at The Curvature, I did not know this. It was not part of the commonly told story of John Lennon. Now: this takes absolutely nothing away from his work, although “Run For Your Life” (I’d rather see you dead, girl, than see you with another man) will probably never, for me, be comfortable listening. I can also cite John Lennon as a man who became a feminist, who challenged and worked to unlearn his own misogyny, who wrote “Mother” (you didn’t want me… Mommy, don’t go) and maybe got all of his shit about Women out in the open and worked through it: a man who was, I would argue, actually substantially healed by feminism. This maybe makes it easier for me to look at and accept the fact that he did have those issues about Women, and that they (along with the fact that our culture accepts and encourages misogyny, and along with his enormous fame) resulted in him actually hurting actual women.

Now: Michael Jackson had issues about Childhood. You don’t have to know much to know that, right? It’s hard not to see his childhood as reflected in those old performances – this undeniably gifted, much-beloved little dude who was already performing in this eerily precise and adult way, as if he’d been trained to it, which he was, because it was the only value he had in the eyes of own father – without realizing that, for Michael Jackson, Childhood must have been a very weird mix of bliss and self-worth and self-loathing and terror. It’s hard not to feel empathy for him.

Here’s the thing, though: he publicly endangered his own children. He was clearly unstable and/or addicted in ways that meant he should in no way have been allowed to have custody of his children. He acted in clearly suspicious and predatory ways toward many, many children. He was in a position of authority and trust that allowed him to have access to many, many children. He was alleged to have sexually abused more than one child, and given both the fact that it is exceedingly difficult to successfully prosecute sexual assault and the fact that he had the money and resources necessary to settle the cases or bring on defense attorneys willing and able and gifted enough to utilize every single dirty trick that we all deplore in court, it would have likely been impossible to convict him even if, say, the assaults had been caught on tape.

And, given the fact that sexual abuse is common and underreported, and that false allegations are rare, and that children rarely if ever give coherent accounts of it because they are children, and have been raped, I consider the evidence against him to be so very overwhelming as to make any less-than-serious treatment of it – like, say, failing to address it, or minimizing it, or rationalizing it by pointing out that he had entirely understandable issues around Childhood – to be highly irresponsible, and to reinforce the rape culture in which we live, in which rape and sexual assault are regarded as private, umimportant, excusable transgressions, and in which confronting an abuser or talking about his history of abuse openly or insisting it must play an important, even central role in our evaluation of the abuser’s life and legacy, is somehow an attack on him.

I don’t want Michael Jackson to become another John Lennon. I don’t want him to be someone whose abusive behaviors are erased from the record. Something some feminist has to dredge up later. I used to think it was unlikely. Now, I just hope it is.

Some of this may have to do with the fact that I might be a little too young to have ever developed a personal Michael Jackson. “Beat It” was the first song I ever liked – the first song, in fact, that registered for me as a song, rather than as sound – and I remember trying to moonwalk, and I have vague memories about Captain EO just like everyone else. But my first real memories of him are of the first abuse allegations. Now, when I see the videos – people keep talking about how he danced – I see that he moved maybe, sort of, like David Foster Wallace wrote: there was the same elasticity, the same joy (I always thought of David Foster Wallace’s writing as, somehow, the most purely joyful that I had ever read; it was how he played with the language, not even necessarily what he said; I didn’t know him), the same simultaneous sense of “how the hell is he doing that? People can’t do that” and “oh, holy Christ, that looks good.” I can see why people are drawn to it; why they love it; why they might love, even, in a way, the man himself. For giving that to them.

But he was an abuser, both publicly and in ways that we can’t ever fully know. We have to make that part of the picture. Because the rest of it – the joy, or the solace, or the kinship – that was never only him. That was never even him.

That was you.

That was always you.