You know, people, Tiger Beatdown is a social service. That is why I make a point of frequently checking the search terms people use to find it! It appears that, along with your more common random-phrase searches, such as “boy pleasure of the flesh” (huh), “cheap vagina tighter creams” (ick), “picture of women showing there boobies” (try searching for “pornography,” my underage friend!) and “sexy decapitated woman” (AAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHH), several people actually do type WHOLE ENTIRE QUESTIONS into the Google. Those questions lead them here, because they are misguided.
Well, accidental blog-readers, today is the day I answer you! Lo and behold, my very first Google-generated advice column, for the masses.
#1: do you really crap when you die
Excellent question, Timmy! Not only do you crap when you die (sometimes, or so I hear) you actually crap at regular intervals throughout your time as a living person. Crapping is very important, which is why you need to get plenty of fiber and preferably live in a home with modern plumbing.
This brings me to a very important point: the issue of why I smell so bad today. I smell very bad! The reason for this is quite simple: last night, while watching scary movies and contemplating whether to start a Tumblr (answer: yes), I heard a tremendous crashing noise coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE OH MY GOD OH MY FUCKING GOD, and naturally assumed that someone was coming to murder me. I didn’t want to make a big deal of that, though, because if I did that and then ended up not murdered I would be somewhat embarrassed, and so I cradled my phone in my hand (on the theory that, if I were murdered, I could… call someone to chat about it? I guess?) and locked my bedroom door and went to sleep. When I woke up, I found that I had not been murdered, and so went to investigate the source of the noise and/or take a shower, at which point I found that MY BATHROOM CEILING HAD COLLAPSED and a very large chunk of it had fallen off and into my bathtub, which made showering impractical.
And that is why I smell bad. Just a little human-interest story for you, there! Yes, you could argue that I’ve wasted your time with this, Timmy; I think we can agree, however, that the more important issue is that you have wasted mine. NEXT!
#2: does a&p support patriarchy?
A&P is a store which is inextricably bound to modern capitalism, which is in turn patriarchal. So, yes! Burn it. BURN IT TO THE GROUND. However, I suspect that you are not asking about A&P, but are in fact one of the nine million high school and college students who have Googled the short story “A&P” in order to plagiarize the essay that your teacher assigned you directly following the death of its author, John Updike. In that case, you should know that the short story “A&P,” which is rich in psychological content, symbolism, unreliable narrators, and other important literary qualities, is about a talking giraffe named Irving and how he breaks out of the zoo to rescue the beautiful Princess Patriarchy and become the 14th Wizard of Karthlingdome. Also, Harry Potter’s in it. NEXT!
#3: does april die in revolutionary road
So. Many. Iterations. Of. This. Question. So, for all of you: hoo boy, yes. She dies, her fetus dies, hope dies, love dies, the American Dream of moving to the suburbs and not eventually realizing how boring you are and how much you hate your spouse dies, it’s death death death all the way down. Oh, and then Frank Wheeler throws his magical necklace into the sea after telling the surprisingly salty tale of their courtship to a couple of pervs and/or Bill Paxton. Enjoy!
#4: does max hardcore rape women
This is actually a serious question, so: yes, he does. For more, read this.
#5a. does phillip roth beat women? #5b. john updike how tall?
Excellent and pertinent questions, both! On Phillip Roth; don’t know, hope not, sure does write some lady-hating books, though. On John Updike: he was tall, apparently, but now he is dead, leaving to readers of future generation only his vast catalogue of lady-hating books, which they will maybe pretend they’ve read before Googling plagiarizable essays. Say, do you read that Margaret Atwood lady? She has published many things, and I have never once been moved to wonder whether she beats women! So, read her books instead. Cat’s Eye, that’s a darn fine book for you.
#6: how do i make women think they’re crap?
What a provocative query, Billy! And so politely typed, with the question mark and all! I’ve done some research in this field, so I’m happy to provide you with a reliable and time-tested answer. The best way to make women think they’re crap is to nick yourself all over with razor blades and jump into a tank of sharks. My goodness, will the women in your life ever feel bad about themselves then! Another easy way to make women think they’re crap is to try the hilarious “spilling gasoline on your pants, then lighting your farts” move. It is explosively effective! At damaging women’s self-esteem, that is. Thanks for visiting Tiger Beatdown today, William, and be sure to come again! You know, after the shark thing.
Good afternoon! Are you aware that Caitlin Flanagan has LOST HER ENTIRE MIND?
Now, some of us may argue that Caitlin “Working Mothers Are Evil: Now, To Hire a Nanny So That I Can Write Professionally About This Fact” Flanagan had not much of a mind to lose. Regardless, she is in the Atlantic, arguing that you want to have sex with your entire family, so I would say that she has definitely progressed to the deep end of the already very deep pool of wrongness in which she is accustomed, like a nutty anti-feminist mermaid, to swim. The reason for this is that… she has read Alec Baldwin’s book? Or something? I don’t know.
Anyway, yeah, Alec Baldwin verbally abused and threatened his daughter Ireland and is just generally a guy I would not want around my kids, were I ever to spawn them. Caitlin Flanagan reads his harassment of his daughter as somehow “sexual,” based on the fact that he used the word “pig.” This is an occasion for her to reflect – at length! At terrible, terrible length! – about how sexy this abuse must be for the young lady in question:
This child must know that the endlessly engaging, personally attractive Alec Baldwin would instantly drop everything to come to her assistance if she ever needed him.
Ha ha, OR POSSIBLY BEAT HER UP, OR SOMETHING. But, whatever, Caitlin Flanagan maybe wants to bone Alec Baldwin. He is, as pointed out on 30 Rock, a man formerly possessed of a “Superman chest.” She’s a little swoony; creepy, but understandable. This is understandable. However, she can’t possibly attribute her own feelings to Ireland and turn this into some kind of justification of… oh, holy shit:
In his daughter a father discovers a person whose very bloodline ensures that she will be charming to him: at the precise moment that his wife is fading into middle age, her beauty resurges in the daughter—there’s that unlined face you fell in love with so long ago! And instead of nattering away about all the tedious things your wife is always going on about, this ravishing new version has been programmed (by you) to talk about and care about all the things you are interested in. As for the girl’s feelings about you—well, you’re everything. You’re not a man; you’re the measure of a man.
AIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
So, anyway, Caitlin Flanagan feels that incestuous feelings are totes cool – we all have them! Or maybe just Caitlin Flanagan does, and details them, at truly astonishing length – but how does this relate to divorce and family law, the ostensible subject of Alec Baldwin’s book? Well, here is the thing: Caitlin Flanagan believes that, should you ever find yourself married to a person with a history of abuse (real; documented; bad) and incestuous feelings toward your children (probably made up by Flanagan; still pretty bad, though), what you should do is at all costs avoid divorcing that person, because oh my Holy Christ she literally says this:
If your father thinks you’re enchanting, but he’s put your mother out to pasture—well, that’s just disturbing. You have somehow beguiled this powerful, grown man in a way your own mother could not; what’s wrong with you?
Oh, is it? Is it really, Caitlin Flanagan? Please, tell me more about what is disturbing, because you certainly seem capable of making those judgments!
The real sorrow of Ireland’s young life is not that she has a father with an ugly temper; it’s that the circle has been broken. She cannot use her relationship with her father as a way of testing the waters of romance without bringing sorrow to her mother. Nor can she exalt in herself—as girls are wont to do—as the product of an epic love, because by now she has become the opposite: the animating force of a great enmity, the only reason these feuding adults are forced to contend with one another.
Yes, little Timmys and Suzies of the world, remember: when Mommy and Daddy get divorced, it is all your fault.
And now, as she casts around in her girlish way for a model on which to shape her own dream of marriage and enduring love, she must look elsewhere. Her own home—that contested piece of property, subject to her father’s mood and her mother’s caprice—can offer her nothing.
Nothing except the absence of her abusive parent that is! But what is that worth, when it means missing out on the attentions of your sexy, sexy Dad?
Excuse me, won’t you? I feel I may need to spend the next fourteen or so years barfing.
Here is a thing that will surprise you: I did not like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I know! I know! Everybody liked Buffy! Specifically, every pro-feminist lady who’s into Strong Female Characters and has a medium-to-high tolerance for nerdy science fiction stuff and had a hard time in high school, especially ladies who are aware that Joss Whedon, the show’s creator, identifies openly and specifically as a feminist and talks about how great feminism is pretty much all the time. I fit, in pretty much every way, the profile of somebody who should like Buffy – yet, for reasons I can’t quite articulate except in long-winded blog post form, I never connected to it in the ways I’ve been told I should.
Part of it was the cotton-candy sweetness of it all, the pandering to nerds and dorks and ladies in the form of delivering on-screen avatars who are far more articulate and charming and, in some cases, possessed of actual magical powers, than any of us could ever be. I, unlike a lot of feminist ladies, get annoyed with Strong Female Characters Who Kick Ass, because it seems to me that making your heroine actually magical and skilled in various made-up martial arts is a really silly way to go about delivering Female Empowerment to your viewers, who will have to be strong on a day-to-day basis without access to superpowers or magic. Yeah, yeah: it’s a metaphor. It just wasn’t a metaphor that worked for me. The strength was always just a little too superhuman, the magic too magical, the villains too obviously and literally demonic, and Buffy – most crucially – way too adorable for me to buy in. And perhaps it will help you to understand when I tell you that the only episode that I really connected with, on an emotional level, was “Ted,” which nobody seems to like, and this was because (a) it was, to a spooky degree, representative of my own interactions with a certain stepfather, and (b) for the first two acts, at least, Ted was not a monster.
Which leads me to: this new show, Dollhouse. Are you watching it? Oh my goodness, it is amazing. It is also the Whedon show that has drawn the most critique from other feminists: because it depicts rape of a very “gray” variety, because it doesn’t condemn the forced prostitution and human trafficking it conveys strongly enough, because its characters aren’t Strong or lovable in the way they have been in past Whedon shows. Fair points, all! Also: points with which I disagree.
Dollhouse is, pretty much specifically and entirely, a show about consent. It’s built around an organization – the titular Dollhouse – which erases volunteers’ personalities and memories and renders them childlike and passive, in order to implant them with new, built-to-order personalities custom made for wealthy clients who wish to order the “perfect” person for a specific job. The purpose for which these mind-wiped folks (called “dolls,” and I do not think that we are for a second supposed to miss how creepy that term is) are rented out is, primarily, sex. Also, they have no knowledge of or ability to consent to the “engagements” for which they are rented out. Also, they seem, in large part, to not really be volunteers at all – most of the ones we know about, including the central character, Echo, have become dolls in order to get out of jail time or worse, and one woman in particular was literally sold into the organization. Also, several Dolls have been used for sex by Dollhouse employees, sometimes with the illusion of consent in place and sometimes not.
So, at this point, people were like, “um, is noted feminist auteur Joss Whedon aware that he is making a show about forced prostitution and rape?” Whedon’s politics have repeatedly been called into question, and usually for damn good reason. (Here is the thing about doing stuff that appeals to politically engaged audiences: you cannot fuck up politically and have people fail to notice or just go, “oh well, par for the course, ha ha ha!” You get yelled at. Sorry. Deal.) Dollhouse, in particular, had the potential to be hugely offensive. Here is the thing: Whedon, unlike most folks and many feminist or progressive-identified dudes, seems to actually listen when he is called out and to improve his work accordingly. In the case of Dollhouse, I think he is doing smarter work than he ever was. Getting smarter about oppression, I would submit to you, requires making the visible manifestations of it or metaphors for it much, much uglier.
The answer to whether Joss Whedon and his showrunners know how rape-culturey the entire Dollhouse concept is would seem to be, at this point, a big huge Yes. The Dollhouse is a giant metaphor, not only for rape culture, but for patriarchy and oppression at large: even the boy dolls are girls, stripped of agency or access to power and cast in pre-defined roles to fulfill the fantasies of the folks who are actually in charge. When they have sex, they aren’t consenting – they’ve been made to think that they are consenting, by being made to think that they are the people who would consent to such things. They exist either in a state of infantilization and non-personhood (in which they are “cared for” by people who have a vested interest in continuing to use them) or implanted with false consciousness in which they are not aware of what’s being done to them. I mean, false consciousness: Whedon’s metaphors, they are rarely subtle. Their reactions to learning this, when they “wake up” (which Whedon has shown them doing, albeit briefly) are horror, disgust, and rage at how deeply they’ve been violated.
You can’t just stake the enemy or cast a spell at him or throw him into Hell this time. The enemy surrounds you and controls you and is much, much bigger than any one person. The enemy is in your head: it controls what you’re allowed to think, what you’re allowed to know, who you’re allowed to be. Resistance, this time, isn’t about throwing punches. It’s about getting your mind back. It’s about reclaiming your right to define who you are – your right to be a person.
That seems, to me, like a much bigger and more profound and all-encompassing metaphor than saying that some boys are vampires and will turn evil if you fuck them. Just saying.
One of Whedon’s perennial concerns is masculinity in a feminist era: if women are so powerful now, how are guys supposed to relate to them? It’s a good question, and one of the better themes a male writer can explore, if he’s willing to do it honestly. Whedon has offered solutions before but they’ve always been imperfect, because they haven’t addressed how pervasive gender inequality is, and how much we’re all complicit in it, how our thoughts and perceptions are informed by it from Day 1 simply because it is the context in which we live. In Dollhouse, he’s giving it deeper and more sustained focus than ever, and is more willing than ever to implicate masculinity: in parallel to the story of how the dolls work to reclaim their personhood, there’s the story of the people who take it away from them on a day-to-day basis, and how they justify their actions.
They tell themselves they’re protecting the dolls. They tell themselves that they’re doing the dolls a favor, by taking away the responsibilities of personhood. They tell themselves they’re doing society a favor by keeping the dolls’ services available. They tell themselves that the best way to fix the system is to work within the system. They tell themselves that the dolls aren’t really people, so none of it matters. Sometimes, they don’t have to tell themselves anything: they just like the thrill of being in charge.
Whedon has done a lot of shows about magically powerful women and the men who protect them (Buffy had Giles, River had Simon and Mal), which is sweet – hey, at least they aren’t actively seeking to take power away from those women – but also paternalistic and troubling, and in Dollhouse he seems to know and specifically address just how creepy it is. Lots of parallels have been drawn between the “handler,” Boyd, who is a protective father figure to Echo, and Giles, who is a protective father figure to Buffy, and those parallels are correct. However, this time around, Boyd is also directly invested in keeping Echo powerless: he’s the guy in the creepy van, who takes her back to the Dollhouse to have her self taken away once she’s served her purpose, and if she were a whole person, she might not need him at all. The question of whether he loves her enough to help her free herself is continually raised. Paul Ballard, the FBI agent who wants to “save” Echo, is also implicated: a hero, sure, but also weirdly and sexually preoccupied with “saving” a girl he doesn’t know so that she will love him, a person just as involved in projecting his desires onto a blank slate as any Dollhouse client. The show doesn’t steer around that fact. You don’t hate these men – you love them, in fact – but Whedon is far more willing than ever before to implicate them in the oppression that he condemns. He’s toyed with ambiguity and complicity before, but this time around, ambiguity and complicity are what the show is about.
Because then, there’s Topher, the programmer, who is responsible for constructing the artificial personalities and implanting them in the dolls, who is a dorky blonde guy just like Whedon and who speaks in distinctly Whedonian cadences and lines, and who we are encouraged to dislike more than almost anyone else in the series. What you hear, when you hear Topher speaking about how difficult it is to construct a believable personality, how all of his creations have to be full and nuanced and have reasons for how they behave, how achievement is fueled by lack and he gave her asthma because that made her a more complete person and blah blah blah, is noted feminist auteur Joss Whedon reflecting, very consciously and very obviously, on his life’s work – hiring gorgeous women and making them into who he wants them to be – and saying that sometimes, he feels kind of icky about it. It’s a beautiful thing: brave, and self-questioning, and radical in a way that entertainment by dudes – even entertainment by dudes who identify as feminist – very rarely is, and in a way I trust more than I’m used to trusting my entertainment, and in a way that I’ve come to expect from the show as a whole.
Which, as I found out while writing this piece, has pretty much been cancelled.
I was halfway through watching the Twin Peaks again when it occurred to me to wonder why I like it.
One of the things that happens when you write about art you consider bad is that you start to encounter other folks’ defensiveness about their own taste: they like it, so it can’t be bad, so they need to accuse you of lying or advocating censorship or “not getting the context,” whatever gets them through the night and alleviates their fears that you are going to break into their houses in the middle of the night and steal all their DVDs in the name of Feminism. What it comes down to, all it comes down to, is people drawing the line in different places – one of my best friends is hugely into Tarantino, and liked Superbad, and I sure as hell can’t listen to the Country Teasers without getting irritated but I know and like folks who do – so I really am sick of people telling me I can’t draw my lines where I draw them or call them like I see them, because, shit: I don’t need to hear your 20,000-word dissertation on why you are allowed to like what you like. You were always allowed. I’m just calling stuff out, and letting you go wherever you go from there.
Still, when you hear this enough – and it comes from everybody, people you admire as well as your average Internet dick complaining about mouthy women – you start to examine your own taste a little more closely, wondering if you are the same kind of chicken. It’s rare, if not impossible, to find art in this problem-filled world that is not at least a little problematic. Still: it’s one thing to like something in spite of its problems. It’s another to like something and therefore insist that its problems do not exist.
Pretty much everything I complained about in that Tarantino post can be attributed directly to David Lynch: he’s a fetishist (Twin Peaks is, amongst other things, perhaps Lynch’s most extensive long-form documentation of his own foot fetish: shots of women’s shoes, shots of women’s feet, shots of people kissing or touching women’s feet, shots of female characters that begin with and pan up slowly from their feet, on and on and it just gets more disconcerting with each viewing), the characters do not act in any way that is recognizably human, everything is there on the screen because he likes it or because it alludes to other movies, and his female characters are memorably – and graphically, and sexually – brutalized on a fairly regular basis. The thing is, with Lynch – or maybe specifically with Twin Peaks, because God knows sometimes it is too much, I haven’t seen Fire Walk With Me because I’m really not looking forward to all the incest, and I don’t think I could sit through Blue Velvet again but if I did I would probably Have Some Issues with it – these things don’t register for me as problems.
My favorite moment in any Tarantino debate is when people accuse me of not “getting it” because I’m not into trash or camp or B-movies, because this is when I know these people have no idea what they’re talking about: I would rather watch an audaciously bad movie than a well-groomed and boringly competent movie any day, I look forward with great pleasure to the day when I can see Dead Snow (Nazi zombies! And you thought apolitical zombies were bad) but you couldn’t pay me to see The Reader. On this note, I would like to point out that one of the finer achievements of Twin Peaks is the hilarious way it riffs on teen films of the fifties and sixties, complete with thirty-two-year-old actors playing high school students, Homecoming Queens, Football Captains, sensitive motorcycling rebels named “James,” and the requisite scene wherein the heartthrob just out of nowhere sits down and sings a song:
Yes, there are microphones in the living room for no discernible reason. Let us never speak of this again.
Yet it’s not just that, not just intertextuality for its own sake or for the sake of being cute or cool or showing off all the awesome things you know: it’s complex and purposeful, silly and campy at the same time that it is sad and weird and deeply terrifying. Tarantino, for me, fails to be more interesting than his source material: I’d rather watch the stuff he is riffing on than the stuff he makes. That is not true of Lynch. When he uses something, he gives it more meaning than it had before he touched it, letting his images resonate in new and deeper and more interesting ways.
Here’s where we talk about the sexual brutality. Twin Peaks is built around a beautiful dead girl, Laura Palmer. She was the Homecoming Queen, she was pretty, she was perfect, everyone loved her, and no-one can believe that anyone would want to kill her. That’s how it stands in the first episode, anyway: after a few more have gone by, it’s apparent that pretty much anyone in the town could have killed her, that many of them preyed on her, and that her life was so filled with specifically sexual abuse and betrayal that she maybe even wanted to die.
It has been pretty widely pointed out that Blue Velvet is Sons & Lovers with oxygen masks: a story of family abuse and Oedipal pain, in which Mommy is Isabella Rosselini and Daddy is Dennis Hopper and you are a deeply troubled young man who hates what Daddy does to Mommy but kind of wants to do it also. What I haven’t seen pointed out to nearly the same degree is this: just as Blue Velvet is a story about men and their mothers, Twin Peaks is about girls and their fathers. SPOILER: Daddy is pretty bad news this time around, too.
Leland Palmer, Laura’s father, killed her. To be more specific, he killed her after raping her for most of her life. To be yet more specific, he did all of the above while possessed by the actual, literal Devil, who goes by the name of BOB. Yeah, it’s harsh to the point of being unbearable to think about, but what is most interesting is that the theme of daughter and abusive-father/predatory-father/dual-father is played out, again and again, throughout the show: Audrey Horne is Daddy’s little princess, and Daddy is the man who owns and patronizes the teen-prostitute brothel at which many of her classmates have been put to work. Donna thinks that her father is the lovable town doctor, but he’s actually brothel-owning Ben Horne. Laura turned to her therapist, Dr. Jacoby, for the care her father didn’t provide, and he repaid her by making her the star of his masturbatory stalker crush. Even the comic-relief plot, Lucy not knowing who the father of her child is and having to choose between adorable simpleton Andy and indeterminately European dandy fop Dick Tremaine, is about having two fathers and not knowing which one to trust. Young women are continually preyed on, hurt, fucked, and exploited in this show, specifically by older men in positions of authority and whom they have trusted to take care of or protect them: we can talk about scary scenes in Twin Peaks, because there are many of them, BOB in the mirror and the Black Lodge and the phantom bloodstain on the carpet, but for my money, the most terrifying scene in the series is Audrey Horne in the brothel, about to receive her first client, watching the door open and realizing that her father is coming into the room.
You can watch the series for the first time knowing about Leland or you can watch it for the first time not knowing: knowing, for me, makes it better, which is why I’m telling you about it now. When you watch it that way, you realize how much the series is commenting on or implicating the dynamics of abusive families. There’s a reason for Leland to be so hugely and creepily distraught throughout the series; there’s a reason why Laura’s mother, Sarah, keeps seeing “visions” of things she can’t or won’t acknowledge that she knows; there’s a reason she looks torn-up and on the verge of losing her mind from the first moment we see her, and there’s a reason she can’t stop screaming.
The thing is: when you watch this without knowing what’s going on, it’s pretty fucking weird. When you watch it knowing what’s going on, it is much, much weirder.
The figure of the beautiful virgin – Homecoming Queen, cheerleader, Good Girl – is a huge part of this particular patriarchy’s erotic consciousness. We fetishize the Good Girl and her purity, and we fetishize the idea of defiling that purity – often, but not always, by force – and the idea that there’s a dirty little slut in there, hungry and waiting for you, if you can just find it. Twin Peaks is, to a huge degree, about those two fetishes and how closely linked they are, and what betrayal and evil is inherent in playing that out on the bodies of actual young women. This, if I’m not missing something, is something we feminists have been harping on about for at least fifty or sixty years.
And because I want to Be The Change I Want To See In The World, which is people acknowledging that the things they like are problematic and calling them out, now is the time to address that Lynch’s handling of race, both in general and specifically in Twin Peaks, is just plain fucked. I mean, volumes could be written about Josie the Sexy Yet Treacherous Asian Woman and Hawk the Mystical Native American Man Who Shares the Legends of His People, let alone the fact that one of the white ladies on the show is pretty frequently in Asianface and at one point during a run of episodes I haven’t seen because the general consensus is that they are really, really bad, this white lady apparently forces Josie to become her housemaid, which: no, no, for oh so many reasons, no. It reminds me of this other show I like, and how it handles GLBT folks (short version: invisible or villains): I want to be having a good time, but here this is, and there’s no way around it. So, there you go.
(Here also is the point where I stopped writing to go re-read that David Foster Wallace piece on Lynch, because I worried that I was cribbing stuff from him. It is amazing, and you should read it! It turns out that, yes, I do agree with him on many substantial points, but there was way less focus on the father/daughter thing in Twin Peaks than I remembered, and that I’m actually disagreeing with him in several places, including his assertion that “we the audience” are titillated by the rape in Blue Velvet and that it “implicates us” – who is this “we” you speak of, sir? – and that the overwhelming whiteness of Lynch movies makes them “apolitical” because come on. What I did not remember, and the reason for this particular aside, is that the piece at several points unfavorably compares younger directors to Lynch and implies that they are imitating him without approaching his level of talent or his moral sense, and that the director he indicts most frequently, specifically, and hilariously is one “Q. Tarantino.”)
The female leads of Twin Peaks, Donna and Shelley and Audrey and Laura (who only exists in what people say and remember about her, and so is only presented to us as a mess of conflicting perceptions) cross back and forth over the good-girl/bad-girl, virgin/whore line so frequently, often several times within the space of an episode and without any apparent reason, that the line becomes completely blurred and we can’t categorize them as good or bad at all. They’re just girls: fetishized, confused, and trapped in roles that can’t begin to contain their actual complexity. The weight of transgression, indictment, and evil is always on the adult men who exploit, seduce, violate and betray them, not on the girls themselves, and the show doesn’t suggest that any kind of revenge can come close to erasing or making up for what those men have done. The show’s hero is Dale Cooper, and one of the reasons that we know he’s a good man is that, when Audrey propositions him – turning to an adult man for approval, and care, and protection, and thinking she can get all of this through sex and only through sex because HER NEGLECTFUL FATHER ROUTINELY FUCKS TEENAGE GIRLS, DUH – he says no.
I mean, I don’t think David Lynch or any of the writers and directors on Twin Peaks are specifically feminist. I have no reason to think that, and David Lynch is probably too weird to subscribe to any recognizably human political position. In fact, if I had to bet, I would say that Lynch, like most men and many women, has some severely fucked-up ideas about the ladies. I do, however, think that Twin Peaks is feminist: or, to be more specific, that it allows for my particular feminist reading. Which, after much self-interrogation, seems like a reasonably good explanation as to why I like it.
Hello! I do not know if you are aware of this, but today is Friday! This means it is time for another edition of Sexist Beatdown, starring the charismatic Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper’s The Sexist, and co-starring the slightly less charismatic Me of Tiger Beatdown.
This week: OMG! Boys! To be more specific, teen boys! What should we teach them about not being jerks to girls? Is it different from teaching them not to be jerks in general? What the heck is Perri Klass, M.D. talking about, anyway, and why is it so focused on elevators? And: why did I name my imaginary son of the future Timmy? Read on to learn!
ILLUSTRATION: Do not let this man give The Talk to your son.
SADY: hey lady! are you available to talk now? about BOYS?
AMANDA: i have so much to dish about. particularly, why is “when to get off the elevator” the only specific circumstance that story ventures to apply to its analysis of teaching girls and boys how to behave?
SADY: well, you know. clearly elevators are the most pressing sexual or gender issue for our nation today! i refer you, of course, to aerosmith’s “love in an elevator,” which explores these issues in depth.
AMANDA: “what can the most gender neutral experience ever teach us about how to teach boys not to rape people?”
SADY: that whole article weirds me out, because she’s talking about giving boys The Talk, yet stubbornly refuses to address anything in a specific or concrete manner.
AMANDA: yeah, anything. i was glad the Times decided to bring this issue to the forefront, after all the discussion lady publications have been giving to victim blaming / empowerment in domestic abuse situations. but it was mishandled
SADY: “you should know that there are certain people who will view you as dangerous in certain situations which are related to certain things.” she would give the worst Talk ever!
AMANDA: i know.
SADY: i mean, and i got this whole weird aura of defensiveness “people make MISTAKES [hitting people? raping?] and could be AUTOMATICALLY viewed as aggressors in AMBIGUOUS situations [again: hitting people? rape?]”
AMANDA: and, you know, maybe she really was just talking about getting out of the fucking way on an elevator? what was she talking about? the comment this piece begs to include is: well, girls learn about some things because they have to. boys will learn about them if we teach them.
SADY: ha. i think it’s important to address this stuff head-on with guys, because not only do they get messages that disrespecting girls is ok from the culture at large, they are likely to know other boys who ACT on that even if they personally do not. and, i mean, how awesome would it be if there were all these well-educated boys intervening with their friends to be like, “hey, perhaps you should not be such an asshole, for it is uncool?” god knows they won’t listen to GIRLS about this stuff, having already been told that girls should not be listened to, ever.
AMANDA: yeah, and of course there are more delicate ways to teach these lessons than say, you know, “you are a strong dangerous rapist in training, stop being the way you are!”
SADY: right. i mean, i too would probably give the worst Talk ever, because I would be like: Timmy, you have Urges. Girls also have Urges. Your Urges are OK and you should not treat anyone like crap because they respond or fail to respond to them. One day you will meet a nice person with Urges like yours – maybe a lady, maybe not – and on that day you can act on your Urges together in a mutually respectful manner. I apologize for naming you Timmy. The End.
AMANDA: haha. so i had forgotten what Perri Klass, MD’s conclusion was.
SADY: that we should teach boys AND girls to get off the damn elevator?
AMANDA: yeah (that also made absolutely no sense), but right before that: “It’s too bad that one side of teaching our children about sex and relationships means reminding them that there are bad people in the world; stay away from them, stay safe, speak up if someone hurts you or pushes you. But everyone needs that information, and that promise of adult support. We have to get that message across without defining some of our children as obvious perpetrators and others as obvious victims, because that insults everyone.”
SADY: yeah, and teaching both genders to protect themselves from predators is a nice message, or, to be more precise, FIFTY PERCENT of a very nice message. because teaching people not to BE predators is important too.
AMANDA: yeah, and nobody is saying, “don’t tell girls that their strength can be used for hurting.” i just can’t really see where klass is coming from here. she seems to think it’s a widespread problem that parents are only teaching their boys not to be bad citizens, not to rape, not to hit, not to be fucking jerks about the abortion. is that happening? i’m all for teaching girls not to be jerks about the abortion too, but i don’t think these conversations are happening at all, much less that there is a huge gender disparity in them. she seems to still be focused way back in time, on chivalry, which is horrifically misleading and not important.
SADY: yeah, exactly. lots of boys can be very courtly on a date, but courtly does not equal actual respect. i mean, yeah, i’m sorry, teen boys are getting messages that being predatory and violent specifically towards teen girls is acceptable. so addressing those messages head on (how do your friends talk about girls? Ah, I see, your friends are dicks) is maybe the only way to counteract that, and we can’t be afraid of HURTING SOMEONE’S FEELINGS by telling them that it’s not OK to hurt someone else. if she’s thinking that guys are getting traumatized by folks telling them that women are people and no means no, i really don’t get where she’s coming from.
AMANDA: agreed. it comes from the same place as the idea that like, teaching men about these things will emasculate them and they’ll turn into puny feminine gay boys. we don’t want oversensitive boys running around!
SADY: yes, if your son is taught to talk to ladies like they are people, his male parts will wither and he may BECOME a lady overnight. sad, but true.
AMANDA: it’s just funny that after months of conversations about the Celebrity Domestic Violence Incident that Klass Shall Not Name that focused on the idea of victim blaming and making women responsible for ending violence, we see this response—“hmm, awkward, should we really be blaming boys before they’ve actually done the violence?” ??? who is doing that?
SADY: yeah, right? because all i hear about these days is how it’s the lady’s responsibility and [via that crazy Linda Hirshman lady] ladies who get into abusive relationships should just leave – leave! LEAVE RIGHT NOW! – or else they are weak. i hear about nine million things each day about “don’t get drunk, don’t walk home alone at night, leave immediately if abuse happens, take responsibility or your raping/abuse/whatever will be YOUR FAULT for letting your guard down.” and women do have so many things they do to protect themselves. but one way? one REALLY EFFECTIVE WAY to make sure rape and abuse don’t happen? is to make dudes take responsibility for not abusing or attacking women. and to intervene with friends or peers when they see something like that take place.
AMANDA: “awkward”!
SADY: perri klass seems to think it’s incredibly sad that some people are scared of boys. i agree. so why not teach your boy to be someone people don’t need to be scared of?
Filed in Uncategorized||Comments Off on SEXIST BEATDOWN: Your Body Is Blooming Like a Spring Flower, So Don’t Punch Anyone In The Face With It Edition
You know, I fancy myself quite the expert on men. Rarely do I confuse men with other bipedal creatures, such as birds, kangaroos, velociraptors, or Michelangelo’s “David.” No, I am chock full of man-related knowledge: so expert am I, in fact, that I can typically identify a man (or a humanoid non-man, also sometimes known as “a lady”) within the space of a brief conversation, or on sight!
How do I accomplish this, you ask? Why, through the use of the nigh-superhuman skills I have honed over the years, including paying attention to someone’s gender presentation, name, and preferred pronoun. “He,” is the pronoun that men use! Just a little bit of expert man-knowledge for you there. Tell your friends.
So, when I first heard of Esquire’s much-discussed cover story, “What is a Man?” I naturally assumed it had little to teach me. After all, I am pretty sure of what men are. (Candice Bergen, Angela Merkel, a peanut butter sandwich, and John Deere tractors, for example, are not men – the tractors are confusing, because they are all named “John!” Nevertheless, they are tractors.) Then I read it.
Oh! My goodness! There is so much I did not know about men! For example:
1. MEN HAVE PSYCHIC POWERS, AND CAN DOG-WHISPER. “A man can speak to dogs… A man can look you up and down and figure some things out. Before you say a word, he makes you. From your suitcase, from your watch, from your posture.” Yes, men are magical creatures. Never cross a man, for he can read your mind and sic his army of talking dogs upon you! You may think this an unlikely scenario, but I assure you: according to infallible news source Esquire, all men everywhere have an army of dogs, and psychic powers with which to sic them.
2. MEN NEVER GET FIRED. “A man is good at his job… It doesn’t matter what his job is, because if a man doesn’t like his job, he gets a new one.” Yes, not only are men always employed and always competent, they all love the jobs to which they apply their manly competence. I suppose I could have guessed this one, based on the radiant joy on the face of the guy who just fixed my toilet.
3. MEN ARE ALL HETEROSEXUAL; ALSO, REALLY CREEPY. “ A man knows how to sneak a look at cleavage and doesn’t care if he gets busted once in a while… A man loves the human body, the revelation of nakedness. He loves the sight of the pale breast… He is thrilled by the snatch… When his woman bends to pick up her underwear, he feels that thrum that only a man can feel.” No word on whether “his woman” is the person whose bathroom window he is currently peering into with a high-powered telescope whilst masturbating furiously. One simply assumes. Whoever she is, we know that she’s a white lady! No leering at non-pale breasts for men, no sir. Men are all also, apparently, white and racist.
4. ANGIE AND EMILY DICKINSON ARE BOTH MEN. “This is the state policeman. This is the poet. Men, both of them.” Also men: Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Lucille Clifton, Anne Carson, Anna Akhmatova, Audre Lorde, Diane DiPrima, Marina Tsvetaeva, Margaret Atwood, and Adrienne Rich, along with everyone ever employed by a police force. Now, some of these men will try to fool you, with their poems about their uteruses and breast cancer and motherhood and feminist perspectives and such, but ask yourself: how could they possibly write poems if they were not dudes? Yeah, I thought so.
5. MEN ARE KIND OF DUMB. “He does not rely on rationalizations or explanations. He doesn’t winnow, winnow, winnow until truths can be humbly categorized, or intellectualized… A man does not know everything. He doesn’t try.” This is sad, because I thought I knew some very smart men. Turns out they were not men at all, but androids sent to destroy the planet! Explaining things, understanding things, learning things: that’s just not what men are about.
6. THERE ARE NO MEN IN ANY POLITICAL PARTY; IF THERE WERE, THEY WOULD ALL BE REPUBLICAN. “He doesn’t see himself lost in some great maw of humanity, some grand sweep. That’s the liberal thread; it’s why men won’t line up as liberals… men won’t forever line up with conservatives, either.” Joe Biden is a lady! You heard it here first!
7. FINALLY, “THE MAN IS LIKE A ZOO ANIMAL: BOTH CAPTIVE AND FREE.” That’s funny, because the entire article reminded me of this:
You know, it’s hard to say why this New York Times article irritates me. Granted, a large part of the problem may be that everything irritates me. However, this is special! It is about educating teenage boys about sex and “courtesy,” and it is also about all of those folks who think we should be specifically teaching young men not to be sexually violent.
But wait, this article asks: what if, by teaching them not to be violent, we hurt their feelings? No, seriously, it actually asks that. So, while I get that its writer, Perri Klass, thinks we should teach boys to protect themselves from predators, and teach girls not to be violent assholes, and totally agree with her on these points, her constant worries that “you may get an official worldview in which boys are viewed as potential criminals and girls as potential victims,” or that “boys need to understand that there are people — male and female — who will see them as potential predators, and judge them automatically at fault in any ambiguous situation,” along with the whole let’s-not-talk-about-the-fact-that-lots-of-girls-actually-are-assaulted-or-abused-by-male-peers aspect of her article, makes the whole piece, um, not my favorite.
I mean, I get it: you love your teenager, you don’t want to think ill of him, and therefore you don’t teach him not to be violent or to avoid treating girls like crap because you are afraid of offending his tender sensibilities, and that is the story of how you became that lady on the news segment about the Highway Chainsaw Lady-Dismemberer who says, “oh, but he was always such a nice boy.”* I feel for you, I do.
Say, you know who doesn’t love your teenagers? Me! I was also a teenager myself at one point, and dated boys of that age! For this reason, I am entirely qualified to teach them lessons about how to treat the ladies.** Therefore, free of charge, I am offering this comprehensive blog-based sexual and dating education platform, which will soon be taught in schools across this great nation, assuming (as I always do) that teachers are extremely irresponsible and want to get sued. Behold my various not-at-all inappropriate tips!
1) NO, IT DOES NOT SMELL WEIRD. “It” being the vagina, of course! Or rather, it kind of does, and this is an entirely valid reason to avoid reciprocating oral sex if you live in an alternate universe wherein the male testicles smell like a fresh breeze in a rose garden and spunk tastes like God put a rainbow in your mouth. If not: sorry, dude. It is time to deal.
2) YOU ARE NOT TOO TIRED TO PUT ON A CONDOM. It takes five seconds, and if this physical exertion is too much for you, may I suggest you refrain from the demanding exercise known as sexual intercourse? You are also not too numb in the weiner to put on a condom; even if it takes five, ten, or fifteen additional minutes for you to have an orgasm, this may actually be a good thing, and if you are mystified as to why that might be, again: I suggest not fucking. Finally, as a man once suggested to a friend of mine in what has become my Very Favorite Bad Sex Story of All Time, it is not “useless” for you to wear a condom because you “probably have STDs anyway.” A gentleman does not boast about the quantity and variety of diseases contracted by his member, let alone offer to rub them up against a lady because, heck, he’s got nothing to lose. A gentleman puts on the damn condom – which, if he had been doing it all along, would have prevented him from contracting such remarkably variegated crotch rot in the first place.
3) YOUR FRIENDS ARE DICKS. Actually, this is not universally true. When it is true, however, it explains a puzzling aspect of high-school dating life: the phenomenon whereby a young man is perfectly nice to his girlfriend when they are alone together, but feels the need to put her down, say sexist stuff to or about her, or otherwise treat her like some unwelcome substance he has unwittingly stepped in when he invites her to hang out with his friends. This is a thing that boys do, I am told, to prove that they are not “pussy-whipped!” Or “loving!” Or “decent people!” If your friends are so threatened by girls that they lose respect for you when you treat one well, here are two options: (1) don’t date girls, or (2) get better friends.
4) GUESS WHO GETS TO DECIDE WHETHER TO HAVE AN ABORTION? Hint: she has a fetus in her hoo-ha!
5) SERIOUSLY, JUST PUT ON THE CONDOM. Why are we still talking about this? Bag your groceries, dude.
6) AUGH, BUT TAKE IT OFF AGAIN RIGHT AFTER! AUGH! The stuff drips back out! It is terrible!
7) YOUR VIRGINITY IS A PRECIOUS GIFT FROM BABY JESUS. For that reason, don’t have sex until you are ready to not act like a complete tool about it afterwards. Baby Jesus doesn’t want to overhear you talking about how you banged [X], possibly in the butt (no, you didn’t), and it was awesome. Baby Jesus, like the rest of us, is not that impressed.
8) I HAVE AN AWESOME SEDUCTION TACTIC FOR FOOLING OTHERWISE UNWILLING WOMEN INTO SLEEPING WITH YOU. IT IS: (1) Realize that seeking out seduction tactics for fooling otherwise unwitting women into sleeping with you makes you a bad person. (2) Feel bad about that. (3) Become a better person.
9) EVERYONE MAKES BAD DECISIONS, AND HAS REGRETS. In the end, I must agree with New York Times columnist Perri Klass, M.D, who says that “sometimes people make dumb decisions. Sometimes you decide to do something and then you wish you hadn’t done it, and that doesn’t necessarily make you bad or good, though it may make you sadder and wiser.” I would further add that some bad decisions, such as hitting a lady to express your disapproval of her, or stalking her, or fucking her without her explicit and enthusiastic consent, are so widely regarded as bad that they actually occupy a special category of bad decisions, known as “crimes!” When people commit these “crimes,” we send them to a special place, where they can take a court-mandated amount of time to think about and regret them. It is called “jail,” and if you do these things, it is where you will go. One hopes.
10) CHICKS DIG TATTOOS. So get a tattoo! Get this one. Remember: the Internet said it was OK. Trust the Internet, and all will be well!
— AND NOW, AN UPDATE: BONUS POINT! —
11) HUMAN SEXUALITY IS A MANY-SPLENDORED THING. DOUCHEBAGGERY LACKS ALL SPLENDOR. As you are probably aware, sometimes dudes like to date the dudes, just as some ladies prefer to date the ladies. Should you want to make a person switch from dating dudes to dating ladies, or vice versa, here is what you can do to make that happen: absolutely fucking nothing. Not shaming people, not hitting people, not suggesting to the lady-dating ladies that perhaps if they had an opportunity to see and touch your penis they would rethink their positions re: penises in general. In fact, doing those things makes you a tool! Youth of America, if there is one thing I have to teach you, it is this: stop being tools. Also, if you want to date the dudes or the ladies, don’t let tools change your mind on this very important issue. You get to date who you want to date, people in general are going to date who they want to date, and that is always awesome and commendable so long as they treat their dates with respect, because dating is like having a field of sunflowers in your heart. In fact, if you are not a hateful meathead bully, someday people may even want to date you. Note: this is not guaranteed.
*There is a slight chance that this is not actually what will happen, and that your son will either learn how not to be a weiner without your help, or will just be a weiner of normal, non-chainsaw-wielding proportions. I would like to emphasize, however, that the chances of this are SLIGHT! He will probably kill people! I am pretty sure! **This statement is factually inaccurate.
Ladies! Not finding much to laugh at lately? Don’t worry: it is not your fault, but the fault of your addled, feeble lady-brain!
Yes, ladies, SCIENCE has come through for us once more by proving conclusively that humor – like sex, beer, rational thought, and monster trucks – is essentially male. A Scientist (one Sam Shuster by name!) has determined that Humor is caused by male aggression which is in turn caused by all the angry man-chemicals that are floating around in men’s brains all the time. Women, not having these man-chemicals, do not make jokes, Sam Shuster has discovered!
Anyway, it was mostly dudes who made fun of him! To his face. They said hilarious things such as “have you lost a wheel,” thereby proving unequivocally that men are the more humorous and witty gender. I will admit, however, that I don’t find the concept of unicycles inherently funny, unless people crash into things with them and die, and that this is probably due to my vagina.
It’s a troubling thought: what if there is an entire category of hilarious cycles that I am unable to laugh at? Am I simply not angry or aggressive enough to participate in bike-themed humor? Which of the following bikes is more inherently humorous? I present to you the following reader survey:
BIKES I AM NOT SURE I SHOULD FIND FUNNY
PENNY-FARTHINGS
PROS: One wheel is much larger than another, and also the people who ride them would probs have monocles and knickers and top hats. CONS: Not really around any more. FUNNY? (Y/N)
MOTORCYCLES
PROS: Once associated with teen rebellion, now ridden by gross old dads who want to prove they can still Get Crazy. CONS: Not actually bicycles. FUNNY? (Y/N)
FIXED-GEAR BIKES
PROS: They are quite popular with the kids these days. Like the text messaging, and the baggy pants! Also they often don’t have brakes, which could potentially lead to some good-natured ribbing. “Oh, I just finished building my new fixed-gear bicycle,” they’d say. “No you didn’t; you forgot to add brakes, which are a commonly accepted feature of most bicycles,” you’d say. That could be funny, right? CONS: No, it couldn’t. I’ve tried it. You just sound lame. FUNNY? (Y/N)
RECUMBENT BICYCLES PROS: Ha ha ha ha ha, DORK. CONS: NONE! Ha ha ha ha, what an awesome bike, FOR DORKS. FUNNY? Yes. No vagina, however powerful, can resist this essential truth.
[UPDATE: Oh, snap! It would appear that I’ve been played! Commenter Blue Epiphany alerts me – thank you, Blue! You win today’s Officially Smarter Than the Person Who Writes This Blog Award – that the British Medical Journal article upon which this article was based was, in fact, A HILARIOUS JOKE, which was subsequently reported as a real study. In my defense, I found the link in the Twitter feed of an actual professional writer – who writes about science, even! – and the BRAIN MYSTERIES article to which he linked was not, apparently, in on the joke. So, my question to you is: the fact that this FAKE HUMOR STUDY is no more or less ridiculous than any of the zillions of other “man-chemicals make men better for X reason” studies I have read and/or blogged about, and was perhaps reported as Real News for that very reason: FUNNY? (Y/N)]
I don’t talk about rape very often. Granted, if you read this blog – or if you specifically started reading this blog in the last few weeks, which I get the sense that a lot of people have – you might get the sense that I talk about it all the time, like I am pretty much constantly inviting people out for dinner and then being all like, “rape! What are your thoughts on this? Because I have some to share!” This is, sadly, untrue.
Nevertheless, a few months ago, over dinner with an acquaintance, I talked about rape.
“I mean, I don’t know, I think feminists have to be careful about using the word ‘rape’ too much,” she said. “Like, if you maybe wanted to have sex with the guy, but you get drunk and pass out first and he does it anyway, is that really rape? Because you did want to have sex with him.”
I said the obvious: yes, it’s rape, because wanting to have sex with a guy at some point, or having had sex with a guy at some point, does not mean that he has the right to just stick it in without your explicit consent whenever he pleases, because consent means “yes,” not the absence of “no,” and because when a guy does that to your unconscious body what he is saying is that your consent fundamentally does not matter, that he is fine with fucking you when you are incapable of consenting or enjoying yourself, that maybe your lack of consent or enjoyment is what he prefers.
“Oh,” she said. “Because a guy did that to me last weekend.”
At a certain point, you have to ask yourself: how many stories like this am I going to hear? Girls who wake up naked and they don’t know why, girls who wake up with their boyfriends’ dicks in them, girls who said “no” but he just kept going, girls who didn’t fight back or run away because they knew they would get hurt if they fought back or ran away, girls who don’t use the word “rape,” girls who just think of it as that one time they had sex when they really didn’t want to have sex – or maybe he just touched them, maybe he just showed them his dick, that’s not “rape,” right, that’s just a guy being a little too aggressive – and why are they so angry? Why are they so scared? Why can’t they get up in the morning any more, why don’t they trust anyone, why do certain sights or sounds or words or scenes in movies trigger these huge panic attacks, emotions beyond their capacity to understand or withstand or just plain stand, this sudden 100% certainty that they are powerless and they are going to be hurt, humiliated, made subject to a cruelty that is beyond human comprehension, or maybe it’s not that this is about to happen, maybe it’s that it has happened already?
I mean, it would make sense, if you’d been raped. But what happened to you wasn’t really rape: it was just that time when a guy fucked you and you didn’t want him to. Rape only happens between strangers; rape only happens when you say no; rape only happens when you say no enough; rape is what happens when you physically fight back, and give him a chance to physically beat the shit out of you or kill you in addition to raping you. Rape only ever happens these ways, we tell ourselves, because that’s how we are able to tell ourselves that rape hardly ever happens.
So, then, Observe & Report: a movie with a scene of rape in which the joke is that it’s not really rape, in which the joke is that you can fuck a heavily drugged, unconscious woman and the only problem will happen when you stop – she will urge you to keep going, in the one second that she is verbal or capable of response, before she slips back into unconsciousness – and in which the joke, the hilarious gutsy edgy laugh line that sets audiences roaring, is that you should have just raped her without hesitation, because look how upset she is when you stop the rape!
And all the girls who’ve been there go: huh.
Because you weren’t really raped, you see? He just fucked you without your consent, you probably would have given your consent anyway, maybe you did give your consent and you just didn’t know it, maybe your consent was all of those drinks you had or all of those drugs you did or the fact that you agreed to go home with him or the fact that you kissed him or your outfit or just the fact that you’re a woman and he got a hard-on in your presence, maybe that is consent, maybe that’s all it takes, so really: you weren’t raped, it was just some guy fucking you when you didn’t want him to, so why are you so upset about it, why is this the thing that’s killing you?
So the critics parse and debate whether it was rape, and for the most part, they say that it’s not: she did tell him not to stop, after all! Maybe she just got drugged so that he could fuck her while she was unconscious, maybe that’s her thing! You’ve got the miraculously and no-doubt-coincidentally all-dude panel over at the AV Club talking about how “edgy” the scene is, that it’s a “new kind of comedy,” that classifying that scene as a rape is a little… and they don’t want the conversation to, um, get out of hand, you know… and these men are so clearly so very uncomfortable with defending the scene that you can literally hear them squirming in their seats, talking about the “irony” of this “new kind of comedy” and how they certainly hope the irony is there because otherwise it would be kind of… but the point is, as Sensitive and Non-Sexist and uncomfortable as they are, they are not uncomfortable enough to stop defending the scene, not uncomfortable enough to point out that, even if Anna Faris, in complete contra-representation to all of the thousands of scenes like this that happen everywhere and every day, tells her rapist not to stop, the scene would certainly seem to indicate that she didn’t tell him to start, making it, de facto, a “real” rape in progress.
Which, Jody Hill would have been fine with removing that line, he would have been fine with removing even a little bit of ambiguity, he thinks that rape is its own punchline:
I would have been happy without any dialogue in that scene. I wanted to show them just having sex and her passed out, and I thought that would have been funnier. But I think I have a darker sense of humor than most people. So at the end, [Faris’ character] is okay with it. [Laughs.] And that was like, “I’ll shoot it both ways.” So I actually shot it both ways. I just kept the camera rolling.. I think if you’re really pushing the envelope, you have to not include everybody, if that makes sense. Or else it’s not really pushing the envelope.
Multiple-choice question: the “everybody” that he is fine with not including is (a) women, (b) rape survivors, (c) people who get that “having sex” while one partner is unconscious is not, in fact, “sex,” but rape, and that this is inexcusable, or (d) all of the above, and Jody Hill can go fuck himself.
I believe that women like to fuck. I believe that people like to fuck, and that this holds true even when the people in question are women. I believe that women can pursue, initiate, and enjoy sex. I know this to be true because – shocker! – I’ve done it. However, in a society that does not truly or deeply believe these things, that believes sexual desire is essentially male, that condemns women for the pursuit, initiation, or enjoyment of sex, this is the end result: a belief that women’s pursuit, initiation, enjoyment, or basic consent to sex is irrelevant, that sex can be a thing a man does to a woman whether or not she actively takes part in it or wants it, and that this is, somehow, not rape.
I mean, I get the “joke” of the scene in Observe and Report. The joke is that it’s not rape because she wants to be fucked while drugged and unconscious and unable to move or to take bodily pleasure in the act. (Or, in Jody Hill’s Very Special Edgy-Pushing-the-Envelope Director’s Cut, the joke is that it is rape, which is hilarious in and of itself.) The problem is that this is a joke you can’t make unless you fundamentally misunderstand the nature of sexual consent, or the nature of rape. Anyone who does understand it knows that a single phrase blurted out by a semi-conscious, incoherent, out-of-her-mind high character who can’t really even know what’s going on, let alone respond to it in a way that is “full and informed,” does not mitigate the fact that the male character in the scene is raping her. Anyone who doesn’t understand that is capable of getting rape and consent confused – and, for that reason, may be entirely capable of committing rape. This joke doesn’t just rely on our misunderstandings of rape; it actively promulgates them. That’s the problem. That’s why I’m not laughing.
This will be my last post on Observe & Report. The conversation has been taken up elsewhere. I believe it is making a difference, and that it’s a conversation worth having, because I think that when filmmakers and critics gloss over these things, and try to find reasons to call the rape less than “real” or somehow excusable, one of the things they are doing is participating in the conversation that keeps us from openly addressing these attitudes, and the fact that they are held by many, many people who may be considered – and who almost certainly consider themselves – normal and harmless. A commenter pointed out that the conversations around Observe & Report are a microcosm of our society’s attitudes about rape in general, which is true. We need to change the rules of that conversation. When we talk about the rape in Observe & Report, and the misunderstandings upon which it relies, and the people who act upon these misunderstandings, we need to call those people what they are.
Seriously, haven’t we done this already? Like, a lot? And recently? Not enough, apparently, and not at sufficient length: for, lo and behold, the New York Times (“all the news that’s fit to print – as long as it contains scandalous vagina usage!”) has seen fit to publish a seven-page article about some new website where rich dudes can find girls to, essentially, pay for sex, and to not, at any point, unambiguously identify what these women are doing as sex work.
I mean, you could read the article itself, which is all full of depressing quotes by men who talk about their “assets,” right here is maybe the most depressing part of all in case you are interested and it concerns the founder of the site (UPDATE: actually some random douche who is unceremoniously introduced in a paragraph directly following one about the founder of the site, sorry) and how he defines “love”:
He was falling in love.
From the start, Lola was clear that her heart lay elsewhere. Her boyfriend of four years lives 1,000 miles away, and though they see each other only a few times a year, Lola maintains that she is deeply in love with him. When B. K. asked Lola what gift she wanted for Christmas, she demurred, but when pressed, she asked if he would pay for plane fare to visit her boyfriend. B. K. said yes — and felt great about it. “Isn’t that what love is?” he told me later. “It’s not about trying to own someone.”
Ha ha, no, IT IS ABOUT RENTING THEM. ACTUALLY, LITERALLY RENTING THEM. WITH YOUR ACTUAL MONEY.
But then, you’ve read all of this before, I’ve read all of this before, so what would the point be?
What’s fascinating here is how much of the conversation is determined by class. If a poor woman has sex for money, particularly if she’s of color or trans, she’s a “streetwalker,” a whore, a criminal, a victim, unrapeable, subhuman, stupid, etcetera: all those comfortable cliches we don’t really need to address because sex workers aren’t anyone we’d know and definitely no-one we need to worry about. If a middle-class or comfortably wealthy girl does it (there’s a reason why those “Hipster Hooker” and virgin-auction stories always focus on how very college-educated and middle-class and white and cisgendered and just, well, normal the women are) there’s a solid chance that the words “sex worker” or “prostitute” will not even be mentioned in the story, or that the prostitution will be framed as somehow debatable (whereas, if I know my definitions, “receiving payment for sex” is kind of exactly what prostitution is) and that the sex work will be framed, not as a job wherein one exchanges one’s services for money, but about a woman’s daring and scandalous and oh-so-empowerful voyage into the realms of getting money for sex.
Which is just what women are all about anyway, right, fellas, ha ha? Because women are all essentially prostitutes: because guys go for looks and girls go for bank accounts: because women are happier when their partners make more money than they do and evenhave better orgasms: because women don’t have a sexuality, they have a response to male sexuality, and sex is something that women dispense and men receive, so the idea of exchanging payment (what women want) for sex (what men want) can blend pretty easily into our conceptions of what heterosexual relationships are all about, to the point that we can look at a blatant economic exchange and not even identify it as such or wonder what it says about how little women’s subjective sexual experience or desire is valued by the society in which they live or by the very men who fuck them.
So, right about here is where I start to think about the fact that we live in a society where men are so highly valued that we have created an entire industry to ensure their sexual access to women (if you can’t pay for a girlfriend, you can pay for a single sexual encounter, and if you can’t pay for that, you can pay for phone sex or a lap dance, and if you can’t even pay for that, you can get porn on the internet for free), and about the fact that women are paid less than men in most industries but that sex work typically pays much more than any other kind of “unskilled” female labor (which is why we’re not tolerating crapping on or judging sex workers in Ye Olde Tiger Beatdowne Comments Section, now or ever: this is the world we live in, and it requires us to pay our bills), and I think about how much women’s economic dependency on men has always, in marriage or in prostitution or now in the ridiculous media-created “gray area” of dating for money, been about getting dudes off, and here is the point where I think I might take a break because Andrea Dworkin is actually making sense to me, holy crap, and when that happens I have to take a walk in the sunshine and calm down and remember that I do, too, have a sexuality, and I also get to enjoy my life, because reclaiming this stuff is what I do.
This weekend, Reclaiming Act #1 will be avoiding the New York Times.
