OMG! Boys! They are so adorable, right? For example, here is an adorable thing boys like to do: sort of deny or dance around the presence of misogyny, no matter how blatant it happens to be, when it comes from somebody they want to like!
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?
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?
Well, I am here to educate and entertain. Hence, the return of TIGER BEATDOWN FOR DUDES! In this ongoing series, we will learn how to identify sexism, and also to not be total dicks about it. This week, we will focus on Art, because y'all seem to have some problems in that sphere. We will start with a fairly obnoxious, seemingly innocuous sexist trope, which I like to call
TODAY'S CONCEPT: THE "BECAUSE, UM....?" GIRL; OR, APATOW AND HIS DISCONTENTS
Here is an indirect way to start today's lesson: I have been watching - and enjoying! Sort of - the televised comedy series Eastbound & Down for several weeks. For those unfamiliar, it is the story of a racist, homophobic, sexist, and in all other ways loathsome ex-pro baseball player, and how he returns to his hometown and is ceaselessly humiliated therein. Now, this may come as a surprise to you, but I am fond of laughing at and/or humiliating loathsome men! So, for maybe two or three episodes, Eastbound & Down and I were cool with each other. The problem came when I realized that I was meant to root for the dude; that he was going to be rewarded; that the show, which initially tried to represent his misogyny as one of his many glaring character flaws, actually endorsed it. This problem was manifested to me through the show's most glaring flaw, which is:
Yeah, her. She is the former high-school girlfriend of the main character, Kenny Powers, played by Danny "Face for Radio" McBride. She is engaged to another dude in the show's first episode; and, in the show's first episode, which is her finest hour, she views him with the absolute disdain which is merited and necessary, given his stupidity, hatefulness, narcissism, and eye-searing lack of any remotely attractive physical characteristic.
"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.
"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.
Well, he doesn't become a better person, anyway. He's hateful, stupid, narcissistic, and resoundingly homely throughout. He calls her a "bitch" to her face, he makes it clear that he's primarily attracted to her because she has big breasts, his speeches about how she deserves respect and love are always portrayed as dishonest and self-serving and so out-of-character only a complete idiot would fall for them (they're also primarily directed at her boyfriend, because he's the one who needs to hear them, apparently) and when they make out, he comes in his pants, thereby demonstrating that he is not only mentally and emotionally and morally and visually but also sexually inadequate, and that she stands to gain absolutely nothing whatsoever by entering into a relationship with him. By the end of the series, she's totally in love with him, and willing to start life anew with him in a different town. (This comes directly after the "bitch" thing, by the way.) Because, um...?
The "Because, Um...?" Girl is a frequent feature in your Apatow-Brand comedies (and Jack Nicholson movies, and ugly dude/hot wife sitcoms, and basically any movie Woody Allen has ever made). She is the character who gets together with the main dude for no apparent reason other than that the filmmaker feels dudes like him deserve hot pussy. Eastbound & Down is decidedly Apatow-Brand, despite his apparent lack of involvement: the main creative players are Danny McBride (Pineapple Express), David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), and Will Ferrell (Talladega Nights, Anchorman, Stepbrothers, etcetera). Apatovian cinema, much like herpes, spreads through contact. Also like herpes, it really burns my crotch. (Joke! I do not, in fact, have genital sores! That I know of!)
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.
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.
Fear and contempt of women are the only motivating factors to write a character this way. In Apatow-Brand comedies, the girls who are not "Because, Um...?" girls are either bitches (wives; sexually unavailable women; professional women; ex-girlfriends) or sluts, typically of the crazy drunk variety. (Woody Allen, another prominent "Because, Um...?" writer, uses Manhattan to compress all of the above-listed "bitch" characteristics into a successful lesbian ex-wife, whom he hilariously confesses to having tried to run over with his car. HA! A man trying to murder a woman because she ended their relationship and/or is not heterosexual! It's funny, 'cause that's how a lot of women actually die!) Eastbound & Down takes this tack by having literally only two other female characters, a wife whom we're encouraged to think of as an uptight bitch and a "fuckbuddy" whose only defining characteristic is that she is such a crazy drunk slut all the time. The "Because, Um...?" girl can only exist in the negative space created by this double bind. If women have standards, they're bitches; if they don't have standards, they're sluts: try to write yourself out of this, and you find that the only feasible way to create a non-threatening female character is to give her no motivations or personality whatsoever, to turn her into a cipher who provides love or sex simply because the plot demands it.
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.
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.
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