Tiger Beatdown

Here are two things I love: Mad Men and Mean Girls. It is permissible to love one of these things, but not the other, and I will let you guess which one is which. The thing is, I love both of them for the same reason, and that reason is that they are both about how we are robbed of ourselves when we agree to perform traditional gender. They just tell that story from two different perspectives.

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OK, Mean Girls. I was watching this movie for perhaps the millionth time while cleaning my room yesterday, and it strikes me that when I see it now I see mostly the problems. This is a thing that happens to me when I look at something too much. Yes, it is dumb and formulaic in places, and painfully unfunny in others. But! Here, up front, is why it is just so good.

It is about a girl, Cady (as in, I think, Elizabeth Stanton) who was homeschooled (!) and is entering a real school for the first time and has basically no grasp of pop culture (!!) or performative femininity (!!!) and finds herself adopted by a girl named Janis Ian who dropped out of school briefly and came back as a foul-mouthed misfit rageball after having her social world wrecked by a rumor that she was in fact a lesbian (!!!!). So, like, already you could write this off as oh, Sara is going to have a Very Special Moment with this movie and have done with it, but that is not all.

You see, Cady is attractive, which means that she is quickly claimed by Regina George and her Plastics, a band of rich/hot/elite teen girls; these girls comprise the most powerful clique in school and are universally adored, in the way that people only ever adore someone who can destroy them. Cady agrees to act as a double agent for Janis, who is just never going to forgive Regina for her eighth-grade devastation, and together they scheme to infiltrate the Plastics and bring Regina down. So far, so formulaic, but this is merely a plot contrivance! For the real story is about how Cady learns to be a girl: how she learns to sexualize herself, to control while seeming to submit, to be smarter than everyone around her while seeming dumber, to handle rage and the lust for power by wrapping it all up in a little pink dress and some lip gloss, and how sooner or later she stops performing Mean Girl and starts being a Mean Girl, because it is the best way to get what she wants, and because beneath the “Diva”-printed tank top of every girl beats the heart of George Patton. That is the movie, and while it goes off in a lot of directions (this is a movie that will linger on a shot of a five-year-old girl watching a “Girls Gone Wild” commercial and lifting up her little nightie, that will let you think about how you learn what your body is worth and when you start to learn it) it is basically just that, femininity and aggression, how girls learn to look sexy and fun and lightweight and friendly while engaging in the most brutal forms of combat. Yeah, it’s a by-the-numbers teen comedy, but it is a by-the-numbers teen comedy that is much, much smarter than it looks.

Also, Tina Fey is in it! She wrote it! So that’s nice.

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Then, there’s Mad Men. It’s often said that the women on this show are more interesting than the men, and I agree that they are easier to identify with, because they represent such an accessible range of archetypes. You can be the sexy girl who’s starting to panic because sexiness loses its value at a certain age, or you can be the powerful girl who’s starting to panic because she needs to negotiate her own autonomy in a world where autonomy isn’t really an option, or you can be the girl who played by the rules her whole life and got the house and the kids and the husband and is starting to panic because that is all just so much more painful and lonely than they told her it would be, or you can be Peggy, and oh, how I love Peggy, the good Catholic girl from nowhere who is eternally confounded by her own body and her own desire and her own talent, which has gotten her somewhere, yes, but that somewhere is the break room behind the Xerox machine, and it’s just not fair, is it, in fact she’s starting to suspect that nothing is ever fair, and where she comes from people have manners, where she comes from you get rewarded for being good. These are all interesting characters. However, it’s not true that they’re more interesting than the men. They’re certainly not more interesting than Dick Whitman.

I told you that this was the same story from two different perspectives, and it’s true: if Mean Girls is about learning to perform “girl,” as exemplified by Cady, then Mad Men is about learning to perform “man,” as exemplified by Don Draper, who is not even Don, but Dick.

Everything about Don Draper is a lie: his name, his past, even the way he speaks and moves and inhabits his body. Watch Jon Hamm play Dick Whitman in Korea, and watch him play Don Draper in New York, and tell me those aren’t two different people. The fascinating thing is how perfectly Don exemplifies everything that a “real man” is or was supposed to be. It’s like he read a manual entitled “How To Construct Your American Masculinity” and just followed all of the instructions. You got your job, right, you’re in charge there because real men are in charge, and you got your wife, your kids, your house in the suburbs, you got your mistresses on the side, you got your drinking (rye, it’s good to have A Drink, a man’s drink, rye is that), you got your cigs, your suits, your deep voice and manner of command, most of all you got your emotional impenetrability, your basic opacity, because that’s the key thing there, you’ve got to be opaque, you’ve got to make sure no-one knows what’s going on in there, because men don’t open up or break down or confess or admit or cry out in pain, a man is a suit of armor worn by a suit of armor within which you find yet another suit of armor, because a man’s never weak.

Don is the obvious construct, the conscious construct, and for that reason he is the most perfect. Yet all of the men around him are doing the same thing, on one level or another: hail-fellow-well-met Cosgrove, who got his instructions in the frat house, and Kinsey, who’s repping the Bohemian model this year, and Roger, who is so used to getting everything he wants that he has to find new and impermissible things to want so he can remember what it’s like, and Pete, whose problem is that he’s trying so hard you can actually see him trying, and Sal, oh God, poor Sal, who knows what he wants and who he is and will deny or destroy all of it so that no-one else can find out, because what he wants is not what a man wants, which means that what he wants makes him less than a man. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? This is the question Mad Men asks every week, and it provides the answer: privilege, acceptance, profit in the most literal sense of the word.

On Mad Men, the women are clearly suffering, and they are clearly wrestling with gender constructs, and that may be why they are easier to like. Femininity was associated with artifice and deception long before feminism ever happened, and feminism took it one step further by suggesting that the artifice and deception were in fact socially imposed, tactics of survival which kept women relatively safe while estranging them from themselves. The funny thing is the obvious thing which is the thing that people rarely if ever point out: men are doing all of this too, and have been all along. Femininity may be about artifice, but it is far more transparent than masculinity, because at least people are willing to point out or admit that it’s an act. Masculinity has long been founded on the idea that it is absolutely real – that men are in charge because men naturally take charge, and no they’re not faking, no they’re not panicking, yes they know exactly what to do, because that’s what men are about. It is only when we start taking that act apart that we make possible the things we really need: things like empathy and change.

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And, OK, I wanted to write more (shocker! I know) about the problems, about how the stories of people of color aren’t really told in either Mad Men or Mean Girls, and about how they both have huge issues regarding queer men’s masculinity, to the extent that the only gay male character in Mean Girls is essentially just presented as “one of the girls” and the only openly gay man on Mad Men actually comes over to Peggy’s house and gives her a makeover, like despite his background in advertising all he really wants to do is embrace the destiny of gay men everywhere which is to tell straight women how to be fabulous. And is there any chance, even the tiniest chance, that you can tell the whole story of the fucked-upness of gender without discussing the ways in which it has been denied to or used to hurt queers and people of color? No. But I want to end here, with empathy.

People think of Mean Girls as a story about how stupid and shallow ultra-feminine women are; they think of Mad Men as “man porn,” a story about how awesome it was to be a guy back in the golden years when men lived like men and women lived like whatever men wanted them to be. I can’t help but think that those people are engaging in some Olympic-level Missing of the Point. The point, as I see it, is this: what if no-one is as dumb or as happy as they seem? What if those “golden years” never happened? What if we were never the girls or the men that we tried to be? What if we were something else, all along – something much stranger, much scarier, something we didn’t know how to name or accept? What if that something else could save us?

Read the last panel of this comic.

Now, tell yourself I should not be saying those precise words every day of my life.

That’s right! You can’t! Because it is true – I should be.

Additional Fact: every time I think about posting a link to this blog on Facebook, I have this exact conversation in my own personal head.

There really is no point to my posting these things. You know, I JUST WANT TO SHARE.

You know, we can spend all day talking about “recaps” versus “reviews,” and adults reading YA lit, and nostalgia, and triviablogging, and whether those are good things or just a sign of how our generation has infantilized itself. OR – and this is the preferred option, here – we can just celebrate the fact that I was not making any of this up! 

Yesterday, I tried to write a post about this incident, in which a girl (on my street) was raped in a subway station while the man working the token booth watched. I tried to talk about this incident in the context of my own rape, and the prevalence of rape, and the context of our culture, in which rape is persistently either trivialized and eroticized or swept under the rug. I tried to argue that watching a woman get raped in front of you and trivializing or ignoring the widespread presence of rape in our society are not ultimately that different, in that both reactions essentially give rapists a free pass.

Unfortunately, as often happens, I got mad, and the writing got messy. I also got pretty messy, by the end, and I learned that the “save” button is dangerously close to the “publish” button, and that the “dear God, get this off Google Reader” button does not exist. I’d really rather not tell you guys about my experience of sexual assault, right now or ever, because I am not a precious little flower, and my personal experience is not the point. The point is that it happens to many women, and it is considered acceptable to dismiss or make fun of that fact.

So, let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about Max Hardcore. He’s a porn director, producer, and “actor” (that last word is HIGHLY iffy, in his case) who was recently sentenced to 46 months in prison for “obscenity.” Unfortunately, this means that some folks – including folks at Gawker and Salon – are referring to him as a “first-amendment martyr.”

Now, I’ve done some time in proximity to the porn industry. I know about Max Hardcore. I know the men who like Max Hardcore. I’ve heard those men talk about why they like him. And before we start talking about the terrible things that have been done to Max Hardcore – before we start talking about his fucking martyrdom – I think it behooves us to talk about what Max Hardcore has done.

Susannah Breslin, in her excellent post on the subject, points to a Hardcore fan’s list (not linking here, because I can’t visit it right now) of “extreme scenes” he’s done. I encourage you to read it. See how far you can make it down the list. Here, I’ll give you some highlights, which I copied last night:

* Pamela Dee; In 1992, Little sent performer Pamela Dee to the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank “after she suffered vaginal hemmhoraging during a taping,” writes Nick Ravo in the 2/98 ICON magazine. Dee, a writer in Reno, Nevada told Ravo that Paul came up behind her and, without warning, rammed his fist into her vagina. “I never heard of anything like that being done to anyone before. I felt ripped open… He could kill someone – he should be behind bars… he really screwed me up.”

* Ryan: She is pissed on and anally raped in her scene. Matt wrote in his review for the film. “severely mouth rapes her. Man what a segment that was. She begs for him to slow up or stop and is definitely crying in agony! That only infuriates him more along with her wiping away/spitting saliva in disgust and he pounds harder into her mouth leaning backwards on his chair.” I’ve watched this scene and the girl is in no way faking it, she is crying and begging Max to stop. “Can’t you take your prick out.” She cries to Max, he keeps saying, “A little bit longer,” while continuing to pump away.

* Melody Love pisses onto ground for Max. “after the normal start suddenly the music wells up and overlays the human voices and at this point Max tries to anal her. She’s pushing him away and obviously saying no with her face contorted in apparent agony (facially she’s not too attractive anyway but this makes her look really ugly). He holds her down and continues anyway, at one stage choking her. She seems to appeal to the cameraguy but of course he just continues videotaping. Then Max goes back to vaginal sex and the music dies down and is replaced by normal human noises.” – Patrick Riley.

* Olivia; Actress Olivia claimed that she was coerced into sex during this shoot. All copies of this film were pulled. “After a while he tries to get her to do an ass to mouth and she won’t do it. She says “no no no no no”. Max sort of pushes her mouth towards his cock, but she resists. She then looks up at him and at the camera man, then gives in and does the ass to mouth. It’s pretty compelling to watch. I wouldn’t say they forced her to do it, but I think they made it clear that she should. I would think she would have known beforehand that ass to mouth was part of the deal but who knows. There’s more to the story here. Later in the scene, Max has her upside down and he’s forcing his cock down her throat. After a few minutes of this, she tries to get up and says “that’s it, I’ve had enough.” But Max just keeps going. I have to admit, that was a bit distrubing. Actually, quite distrubing. Max ignored her when she said she wanted the scene to stop. That’s just wrong. The only other notable part of the scene is when she says something like “god, I’m such a whore” and looks off the set at the camera people as if she’s shocked at what she’s doing.” – bofnyc. Max also pissed on Olivia’s face during the scene. Some of which goes up her nose.

Let us be clear here: Max Hardcore is a rapist. He rapes sex workers, who are notably less protected from rape than other women, but that does not in any way lessen the seriousness of his crime. In fact, since those women have less access to legal recourse – remember, we are operating within a justice system where proving a woman is a “slut” can get you off the hook, and monetary exchange or contractual agreement stands in for consent, regardless of whether the sex worker consented to the specific acts which took place in the transaction – it makes his crime greater. He is a rapist, and he is in jail, and it is acceptable to be happy about that.

It is also acceptable to advocate banning Max Hardcore’s work on the basis that he is selling authentic footage of rape and abuse, and must commit acts of rape and abuse in order to produce the footage. This is the same argument that we’ve used to ban child porn and snuff films, and it is not incompatible with a pro-sex or pro-porn viewpoint. To argue that Max is a victim of prejudice against sex work is to ignore the fact that, in his films, he aims to degrade the actresses (not their “characters,” but the actresses themselves) specifically because they are sex workers – “whores,” in his preferred language, who are “stupid” for agreeing to do the scenes and are therefore “get[ting] what they deserve.” Max Hardcore is not a victim of anti-sex-worker prejudice; he actively perpetuates it. Women have the right to have sex when they choose, and in the ways that they choose, and that freedom does not end once a woman enters the sex industry. People have been working for decades to make porn safe and fun and sexy for women – those who consume it and those who make it – and getting people like Max Hardcore out of the business is essential to the success of that project.

It is not acceptable to make like Glenn Greenwald and get all OMG WTF WHAT ABOUT TEH ABU GHRAIBS. As if people who object to Max Hardcore don’t care about Abu Ghraib. We do. We care precisely because we believe that torture and forced sexual humiliation are unacceptable. We do not believe that it is any MORE acceptable to torture an American female sex worker than it is to torture a Middle Eastern man.

It is not acceptable to refer to Max Hardcore’s films as merely “distasteful,” without addressing the fact that Max Hardcore’s work rests on the infliction of severe and unfaked pain, and sometimes on rape. It is unconscionable to say, as Greenwald does, that “there was no suggestion that any serious violence was ever inflicted or that the adult actors in the film were anything other than completely consensual.” Olivia’s rape is on record. The tapes were pulled, which is as close to a public admission of guilt as one can get. Pamela Dee’s vaginal hemorrhage is, likewise, a matter of public knowledge. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence from within the industry to support the fact that, with Hardcore, the pain is real and there is no safeword. Any journalist who makes Greenwald’s argument, or one like it, is either bending the facts to make a point, or else publishing his work without checking to make sure that his article is factually correct. In either case, such a journalist is unprofessional, if not downright dishonest.

Yes, obscenity laws are bad. They use definitions which are broad and subjective, they criminalize sex no matter what level of consent is involved, they are selectively enforced, and they can very easily be used to punish folks who are already marginalized, such as sex workers and queers. Andrea Fucking DWORKIN didn’t support obscenity laws. So we can talk about obscenity laws, and we can talk about freedom of speech, but one thing we cannot do, if we want to be honest and accurate, is to argue that Max Hardcore is anything other than a dangerous criminal. Max Hardcore went to jail for obscenity; Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion. Neither one was convicted for his most severe crime, but both were bad men who got caught.

I am not smoking! Well: I’m not smoking much. This is very exciting, for several reasons, the chief of which is that I’ve spent the entire day straddling some sort of barbed-wire fence between panic and irritation. (That is what we call a metaphor, and it is one of many things that you cannot do well when you are trying to overcome your weird emotional/physical dependency on something that makes you smelly and unattractive and also might kill you.) Yes, lots of things are hard when you do not smoke: talking, working, and not whining constantly about how much you want a cigarette would be my top three. But also writing, it turns out, is pretty hard! Which is why it is so, so gratifying when someone else manages to sum up – in only one sentence! – that one thing you just keep bitching about re: popular culture but can’t quite communicate in a clear or succinct fashion (do you ever communicate in a clear or succinct fashion, Sara? probably not!) and that you just keep trying to communicate, awkwardly, thereby wasting endless time and space and making everyone think you are kind of a sour nag. Are you ready for the sentence? Here it is!

Thank God we have another film about the fantasies, hang-ups, unintentional cruelties, and eventual redemption of a fucked-up straight white guy.
– Dana Stevens, first sentence in her review of Choke.

Ha ha ha, AWESOME. But can she keep it up? Let’s check in with the second sentence:

For a moment there, I had almost forgotten to keep such dudes at the forefront of my concerns.
– Dana Stevens, second sentence in her review of Choke.

Oh, snap!

It’s not that I don’t care about FUSWGs. I do! They are a part of our human community. Some of them are quite talented. It’s just that these stories dominate the landscape, in a way that often makes me feel that other perspectives aren’t valued, and at a certain point my relationship to the culture at large starts to feel like hanging out with a dude who has to tell me everything about everything and quite blithely and confidently cuts me off when I start to speak. At some point, my willingness to listen wears thin, and I excuse myself so that I can step outside and smoke.