Tiger Beatdown

I got a lot of my practice in debating Sexism in Art through dating and/or hanging out with dudes who liked Eminem. (“But the women he’s talking about are bitches and sluts!” Um, you’re seeing them entirely through his perspective; of course they’re portrayed that way. “But it’s satire!” Yeah, the point seems to be that when women get hurt, it’s funny. “But he’s just expressing his feelings!” His feelings are what I have a problem with; the fact that they are feelings doesn’t place them above criticism, especially not if he puts them out there in the form of “art.” “I mean, a lot of men feel that way about women or their moms.” Widen eyes, back away slowly, call police.) For a long time, the sight of his face or the sound of his name made me physically ill: it was proof of something I’d heard about but never really believed, that lots of people, maybe even the majority of people, did not regard women as fully human, because here was a guy who could just say that raping or killing us was OK if we hurt his feelings, and all he was getting was attention and movie deals and money and praise. It made no sense to me, because: hadn’t feminism happened? Wasn’t everything supposed to be OK now?

(3) HE TALKS ABOUT HIMSELF IN THE THIRD PERSON, STILL, BUT NOW MORE LIKE YODA. Sample lyrics: He does not mean to lesbian offend, but Lindsay, please come back to seeing men, Samantha’s a 2, you’re practically a 10. Um, aside from the fact that he clearly does mean to offend lesbians: “he does not mean to lesbian offend?” Does he to offend no longer seek? Sexually threatened by lesbians is he? The smooth face of a surly nine-year-old he has, to be a hairless monorchid suspect him I do; a woman teams for him to switch, improbable find I it. Smart his lyrics people do call when no books read they do.

(4) SERIOUSLY, HE’S REALLY THREATENED BY LESBIANS. Other sample lyrics: Portia, what’s Ellen DeGeneres got that I don’t? Um, a vagina? Valid reasons for not growing facial hair? A FUNCTIONING MARRIAGE?

(5) HE’S THREATENED BY VAGINAS IN GENERAL, ACTUALLY: So, yeah, he just sort of walks up to some woman dressed like Uhura and gives her the Vulcan Death Grip, stuffs Kim Kardashian in a woodchipper, notes (in the third person, again) that “the enforcer, looking for more women to torture, walk up to the cutest girl and Charlie Horse her,” and faces off with a bunch of butch girls in a threatening wasteland known only as Planet Womyn. You know, the usual. Then, later, in the same verse, he takes on noted wuss-rock champion John Mayer and his beige paramour, in the wussiest way humanly possible, as if attempting to out-wuss him in an epic Wuss-Off from which only one Wuss King can emerge wusstorious: “Forget them other men, girl pay them little attention, a little bit did I mention” – returned the Yoda-speak has! – “that Jennifer’s in love with me John Mayer, so sit on the bench, man I swear them other guys you give em an inch they take a mile.” That sound you hear – Eminem bragging about how he hates women, then pleading for the attention of women who are done with crude, unfeeling cads like that guy who sang “Your Body Is a Wonderland” – is Eminem frantically scrambling for an audience.

(6) EMINEM STILL THINKS THAT HE IS RELEVANT. OTHER THINGS THAT EMINEM THINKS ARE RELEVANT INCLUDE: Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson (over) John Mayer and Jennifer Aniston (over?), Sarah Palin (SO over), Rock of Love which initially aired in 2007, Kim Kardashian’s reality show which also initially aired in 2007, the 2007 film Transformers, the 2005 film Dukes of Hazzard, the 1988 film Rain Man, the 1960 film Psycho, the 1957 film Jailhouse Rock, that Star Trek movie that has been Coming Soon since approximately the dawn of time, and Amy Winehouse, who – have you heard about this? – is on The Drugs. Oh, and: the video opens with him dressed up like Brett Michaels. You know, some flavor-of-the moment musician who used to be shocking and threatening, and is now just some dim Ghost of Outrage Past, and can only get attention by participating in a celebrity-culture sideshow, of which joke he seems tragically unaware that he is the butt. It’s funny, because Eminem thought he needed to dress up.

“In Russia, they know how to sell milk to men,” notes the website on which the pictures appear, and on whose editors I am maybe wishing a little bit of colon cancer right now. Yes, selling basic staple foods to men is a difficult task, to be sure, but Russia knows how to do it: with sexy sex sex sex airbrushed-out-nipple sex!

Yet the photos puzzle me a little, dear Reader. I mean, yeah, the milk looks like semen: that much, I get. But what the heck do they do with their semen in Russia? Because, seriously, these are the weirdest money shots I’ve ever seen. Explore with me, won’t you?

We’re all familiar with pony play. (Aren’t we? I mean, not familiar with it. I mean, it was on an episode of Bones once. I mean, not that I watch Bones or anything. Oh, come on, WHAT.) Here, we see an interesting alternative: cow play! It consists of putting a bell around a lady’s neck and watching her eat various salad garnishes, such as parsley. Because cows eat, um, parsley? ANYWAY. In cow play, there is no sexual contact whatsoever and you basically just jerk off into a lady’s coffee mug. Because cows all have… like… coffee mugs… oh, whatever, it’s SEXY.

I’ve always been fascinated with dudes’ fascination with competitive spooging. I mean, it’s a weird thing! You’re having an orgasm, I’m guessing it feels pretty good, but the whole Super Soaker aspect of it, the preoccupation with volume and distance, just seems goofy, and leads inevitably to bukkake where the whole fetish is visible sperm, or to that weird frat boy thing Fred Durst named his band after where guys all wank onto an Oreo and this bonds them in a way that is totally heterosexual and not at all based on certain sublimated desires. Anyway, dudes, if you are concerned about your rate of production, here is a solution: jerk off into the same receptacle several times a day for five years, then squirt all of that through a fire hose at your space dominatrix girlfriend just as she is putting on her swimsuit. She will be SO IMPRESSED! Because it is SEXY!

I’ve got a fever… for cow play! Bells, check; body paint, check; inexplicable yet sexy coffee mug, check also… but wait! Where is her salad garnish? Ah, I see, her mouth is otherwise employed. With SPITTING. Which is GROSS, and UNLADYLIKE, and REQUIRES ADDITIONAL CLEANUP because WHAT IF ALL THAT BUSINESS GETS ON YOUR SHEETS, then you will have to DO LAUNDRY. Basically, I’m not freaked out by sex, but I do think that any act which requires me to do additional laundry is a perversion of God’s Will. Uncool, Bessie! Uncool!

Here, a fairly specialized fetish: coming on a woman’s face against her will when she is clearly freaked out by it and afraid of getting it into her eye. This is an act most commonly performed by men who get off on having women punch them in the cock repeatedly until they can’t breathe. Or, at least, I hope they get off on it, because if you try that shit, that is what’s going to happen.

So, this week: the tragic tale of my time as the worst sex educator ever employed by the Nameless Sex-Positive Sex Toy Shop That Would Not Want Me To Represent Its Views, surprising things you can find up your butt, and how performance art pieces entitled “No, Seriously, Look Up In There, It’s Crazy: The Socio-Political Impact of My Vagina” have benefited our society today.

ILLUSTRATION: Can you guess which of these items I got to lovingly clean and/or caress with a damp cloth every day, for money? HINT: Which ones didn’t I, Jesus.

AMANDA: ok. so. sex sex sex sex feminism sex

SADY: Indeed! I have, at times – many, many, MANY times – identified as a “sex-positive” feminist. Yet your article demonstrated for me some of the reasons why that can be annoying even to my very own ears!

AMANDA: yeah, and the issue is actually a lot more interesting than the form it was presented in my post (“rant”)

SADY: Well, I feel like “sex-positive” is kind of a necessary construction, or was, at a certain point, when people were arguing with each other over whether porn, or heterosexual intercourse, was inherently oppressive to the ladies because of The Sexism. I even feel like right now we need to talk about ladies having sex drives and bodies that can enjoy sex and how that is not just necessarily some thing women inexplicably do to gratify man boners!

AMANDA: incidentally, i identify as a man boner gratifying feminist. i definitely agree with you, and i think the history of “sex positivity” and “feminist” is part of the reason it sort of nonsexually rubs me the wrong way. i just think at this point it’s so obvious that feminists are not sex-negative. but i am a young female feminist-identifying person, so maybe it’s not as obvious to, say, feminist-hating middle aged men.

SADY: RIGHT? They probably think you are out luring the man boners into wood chippers or something. OR marrying dudes so you can then divorce them, which I hear is quite popular. OR, you are a big old slutty slut slut boner slut. ALL OF THESE THINGS ARE TRUE, in the mind of the Middle-Aged-Feminist-Fearing-Dude.

Oh, wait, that’s not adorable. That is some lily-livered bullshit. Yet people do it, particularly when they’re boys: name a famous misogynist (Updike, Roth, Tarantino, Polanski, Apatow, LaBute, etc.) and I’ll name you an article or appraisal that contains some cowardly, passive-voiced admission that “some have called his work misogynist.” Um, some? Who are these “some?” What were their grounds for leveling this criticism? Can you, the professional critic, give us a well-reasoned argument for or against? Oh, never mind, that sentence is totally over and we’re back to talking about how this dude is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Because misogyny, whether or not it exists, is not a serious issue, because women aren’t important. Gotcha.

However, I have been instructed not to “read into things” too much! By dudes, no less! Since I always do exactly what dudes tell me, particularly when they seem weirdly insecure and defensive and eager to invalidate what I am saying, I have decided to take these statements at face value. When someone says that “some have called [X] misogynist,” without betraying any consciousness of why that might be important, and without delivering any appraisal of the misogyny or lack thereof in the work, I will take this to mean that (a) they don’t actually know what misogyny is or why it is important, (b) they have no understanding of how misogyny might be conveyed in the work of an artist and therefore cannot identify it when they see it, and (c) they are completely unfamiliar with the many, many, many works by feminist critics which they might have used to educate themselves on these matters. (Curious fact: even though they are available in pretty much every bookstore and library under the heading of “Women’s Studies,” dudes can actually read them, and it will not even cause their penises to fall off!) It’s OK, dudes: you’re not sexist, just really fucking ignorant! There, doesn’t that feel better?

“God, I hope he doesn’t become a better person and win her back,” I noted to my gentleman caller after the first episode, being all too familiar with the conventions of the genre, wherein the dude, like, does one nice thing, thereby causing the lady to forget what an asshole he is and fall deeply in love with him because women are stupid.

Katherine Heigl’s character in Knocked Up is maybe the most commented-upon case of “Because, Um…?”: yes, she’s way hotter and smarter and more successful than Seth Rogen, although she is still apparently so broke that she lives in her sister’s house, and yes, when some random distasteful stranger gets her pregnant she decides to have the baby, thereby endangering her career and further stretching her finances although the movie makes it clear that she can’t even pay for her own apartment, and yes, she decides to involve this stranger in the inexplicably carried-to-term pregnancy despite the fact that he’s not responsible enough to wear a condom when fucking a stranger (and she has a weird numb vagina that can’t tell the difference between a rubbered dick and a dick au naturel), and also to date him for no reason that is ever explained (do they just start fucking again as soon as she tells him she’s up the creek? I have no idea! All I know is, when I learned they were having sex again, it came as a total shock!), and yes, he has one of those last-five-minutes-of-the-movie turn-arounds which causes her to end up with him despite the fact that she dumped him earlier in what is perhaps her one understandable decision throughout the course of the film, and all of this is because, um…?

Here’s the thing: Katherine Heigl’s character is not even remotely the most offensive or blatant case of this problem. In Superbad, the entire plot revolves around two dudes planning to get girls so drunk that the boys can fuck them, in spite of the fact that they know those girls wouldn’t fuck them sober and with corresponding full and informed consent, which, if I’m not mistaken, is what we commonly refer to as “date rape,” and at some point Jonah Hill confesses to a girl that he was going to get her drunk in order to rape her because he knows she wouldn’t fuck him otherwise, because he likes her so much, and she is okay with this, because, um…? In Stepbrothers, there are not one but two ladies who are irresistibly drawn to the sexual charisma of Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, in spite of the fact that the characters are clearly written as, in the parlance of the times, developmentally disabled, and also they look like Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, because, um…? In Pineapple Express, Seth Rogen actually commits rape of the statutory variety, by maintaining a sexual relationship with a high school student, and insofar as the script acknowledges this to be a problem at all, it is supposed to be a problem relating to his “immaturity,” rather than a problem relating to his being an adult man who fucks kids, and of course he never faces any consequences, and of course the girl is portrayed as oh so very Muriel-Hemingway-in-Manhattan eager to submit to the sexual advances of a future To Catch a Predator star (if there’s one good thing to be said for Diablo Cody, it’s that she consciously subverts this; hence Juno’s lovable indie-rock pedophile being (a) refused by his teenage lust object and (b) divorced by his adult wife, thank God) and of course the relationship doesn’t even end until he decides that she is not commitment-worthy, because, um…?

The skeeviest of these examples, Superbad and Pineapple Express, are both written by Seth Rogen, so I suppose you could argue that he’s the real problem, but he seems to only be the most curdled and malevolent example of the misogyny underlying the “Because, Um…?” girls throughout the catalogue. In the non-Rogen-scripted Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the whole message seems to be that women who break the rules and dare to have standards for their sexual partners must pay the price. For lo, it does come to pass that the lovely and admirable and in-no-way-deserving-of-this-shit-role Kristin Bell has to offer to suck off Jason Segel in order to obtain his “forgiveness” for the mortal sin of ending a relationship that was not making her happy, and he can’t get hard, which is her fault, and so he calls her the “goddamn Devil.” It begins by forgetting to write reasons for women to like or fuck men; it proceeds by arguing that men are entitled to have women like or fuck them, reasons or no (hence the whole, you know, wacky-rape-hijinks thing); it ends by saying that women who don’t like you or fuck you in the absence of reasons to do so need to get on their knees and suck your dick, unless they can’t even do that right, in which case they’re pure fucking evil. It’s an old, old, old, old story: good women give sex, bad women withhold sex, and truly worthless women don’t inspire men to have sex with them at all.

So then, of course, you have Eastbound & Down, where a man calls a woman a “bitch” and promises to “fuck her up (with some truth),” because she doesn’t want to immediately jump into a relationship with him, and her reaction to this is to dump her fiance and move to a new city with him about five seconds later, so he basically verbally abuses her into being his girlfriend, which, if we were encouraged to look into her motivations to the same extent that we’re allowed to examine the motivations of the other (male) characters on the show, would be some spooky tragic cycle-of-abuse bullshit – the show emphasizes that the only other characters who are drawn to him are deeply fucked up, I would take “deeply fucked up” as an answer here – but in the context of the show, it’s all cool. Because she’s not a person; she’s a plot point. Because she’s a woman.

Which, if you’re a dude – particularly a dude threatened by women! – might just be a hilarious way to vent your gender anxiety and give your male character some pussy without having him face the complications inherent in dealing with actual individual female humans. If you are a female human, however, and are faced every day with people who are threatened by your existence, who are continually sorting you into the bitch/slut categories, if you know how painful and enraging it is to realize that the guy you’re dating (or working for, or working with, or hanging out with at a party) is somehow incapable of recognizing that you have a subjective existence, just as deeply felt and worthy as his own, and do not exist simply as an extension of his own needs or desires, it’s not that funny. It’s pretty fucking bleak, in fact. Particularly when you know that your culture backs him up, and tells him that women actually do exist for his pleasure because they actually are not people like himself, and that these attitudes are so fucking normalized that even objecting to them makes you sound kind of crazy and extremist and, of course, bitchy, and that no matter how hard you work to explain and deconstruct these attitudes within the culture, no matter how prominent or successful you are in the field of said deconstruction, you’re always going to be reduced to a nameless “some” who “have called [X] misogynist” in a one-sentence aside in an otherwise 100% adulatory appraisal.

So, gentlemen: the next time you see the “Because, Um…?” girl, I ask that you actually identify her as such, and recognize that she signifies both bad writing and some really reprehensible ideology, and perhaps even that you grow a ball or two and speak out against it! Because, um, it’s fucking wrong.