Hipster Versus Classic Douchebag: January Douche-Offs

DOUCHE MOVE #1: People like this, so I don't any more!

If you aspire to be cool and relevant, you really have to control the products you incorporate into your daily life, because you are of course defined by your tastes in media and/or clothing, and liking something that is popular puts you on the same level as the common rabble. Oh, and also the media on your 'approved' list will tend to be male-dominated and extremely white, and this has nothing to do with you because you voted for Obama? So, basically, listening to Santogold now that her music has shown up on the teevee is like having condomless sex with a hobo. No reason to dispute that!

In the above-linked post, Carles meditates on all of the above issues and also whether a band is "overrated," and is kind of right about some things, I think. I also think he is wayyyyyyyyy more interested in whether people might listen to the wrong band for the wrong reasons than he is in whether all the topless chicks of whom he posts photos on his blog are '2 young and drunk 2 realize the consequences of their actions' or 'being xploited by photographerbros who r older/more sober/male' or 'being mocked by blggrs without rlly acknowledging the role of photographerbros in the scenario, which contributes 2/is due 2 a cultural context of misogyny/shaming chicks 4 being "sluts".' IS CARLES KINDA LIKE JOE FRANCIS, YALL? Or is he just acknowledging that 'nothing has meaning'/'we r defined by our personal brands and anyone who doesn't believe this is creating a personal brand that opposes this reality there4 he wins'/'how weary, flat, stale + unprofitable seem 2 him all the uses of this world'/'bands r the most important things in the universe'?

DOUCHE MOVE #2: People don't like this any more, so I do!

Actually, tons of people like Tucker Max - we refer to them as "assholes" - but he has been made fun of enough, apparently, that the AV Club felt the need to write a thoughtful defense of his work:

Max isn't in the league of great storytellers who can make even mundane events entertaining, his prose is spare and usually witty. (He attended Duke Law School on scholarship, so he's no moron.) His eye for detail is limited to what interests him—what he was drinking, a woman's breast size, and which friends were there.

Ah, literature! His work, for the record, is found to be "refreshingly low on homophobia" (yes, a low content of the morally indefensible hatred which is responsible for many rapes and murders, and for the widespread denial of basic civil rights to American citizens - I, for one, am wildly refreshed) although he is "much less respectful" of "most women, whom he says he only treats like hos if they deserve it. The logic is flawed, and yet it's difficult to feel sympathy for a woman who contacts Max via his website." I'm so glad the AV Club is here to tell me which women deserve sympathy for being, say, videotaped during sex without their knowledge or permission. Aren't you? Ultimately, the writer (who is not even Scott Tobias, but some heretofore undiscovered ass named "Brett Singer" - WHAT IS THE WORLD AND/OR A.V. CLUB COMING TO?) concludes the following:

Max may be destroying his liver and the egos of many insecure women, but as long as he stays out of politics, his damage to the rest of the world will be limited to anyone who tries to emulate his bad behavior.

Say, speaking of flawed logic, here's a puzzler: if Tucker Max promotes shaming women, coercing women into sex, and also the emotional abuse and sexual degradation of women, and people emulate Tucker Max, which emulation of course includes doing all of the above, then Tucker Max damages... WHO? Yes, that's right, the answer is "dudes!" At least, it is if you write for the A.V. Club.

I Hath Some Fury: Criticism and the Boy's Club

One thing you can do, if you are bored, is to read the AV Club article entitled "Hell hath no fury: 22 films about vengeful women." While you are reading it, you might want to count the implications of and synonyms for sexist dog-whistles such as "irrational," "overreaction," "crazy," and "selfish." It turns out there are quite a few!

When you've finished reading that article, you can ask yourself how often they frame male revenge in the same light (as an emotional, irrational, selfish, out of control - dare we say hysterical? - response) or whether this piece will be complemented by a list of 22 narratives about vengeful men. This, by the way, would be an easy list to compile, since huge chunks of literature and culture, from Hamlet and The Count of Monte Cristo to Memento and Star Wars, are predicated on men avenging something or other. Then again, revenge and aggression (and especially violent actions taken in the name of "defending one's honor") are assumed to be intrinsic to masculinity, whereas the same actions taken by women are assumed to be freakish, out-of-control, and frightening.

Finally, you can ask yourself why all the "vengeful women" films on the list are specifically about women revenging themselves on men - Heathers didn't even make the list, for example - and why six out of the eight writers who compiled the list were men (which is fairly reflective of the AV Club's overall gender balance). You may ask yourself what this says about how much men fear women's anger, and how they tell themselves stories about female anger which make women out to be far greater monsters than the men who anger them in the first place. Or, you may just roll your eyes.

If you really want to get depressed, you can think about this article within the context of the AV Club as a whole, including that awful recent attempt to defend the rape-exploitation flick Irreversible. (Plot summary: a woman refuses to have anal sex with her boyfriend; that same woman is anally raped by a different man in a graphic nine-minute-long scene. The rapist is a gay man - yeah, I KNOW - so the boyfriend tracks him to his gay club of choice and beats his face in with a fire extinguisher. Is there any way to read this movie as not fundamentally based in straight male sexual anxiety and corresponding hatred of women and queers? No. But that won't stop the AV Club from trying to find one!) There was also that cringe-inducing Fight Club article by the same writer (Scott Tobias) in which he proclaimed that Fight Club was "the quintessential Generation X film," just before asserting that it was "by men, for men, and about men."

Now, I agree that Fight Club is very specifically by, for, and about dudes, but let's do the math here. Women comprise roughly 51% of the population, so Fight Club is the quintessential movie of a generation - for slightly less than half of that generation. Actually, since Fight Club is entirely focused on heterosexual men, it's only "for" the straight portion of that male 49%; since it's an explicitly white movie, and "Generation X" as commonly conceptualized is a pretty white thing anyway, that makes the target group even smaller; since it's specifically about middle-class alienation, that makes the number smaller yet again. So, Fight Club is the quintessential movie of its generation, if you belong to the most privileged group within that generation, which is vastly outnumbered by all of those people who do not belong to it and are marginalized by that group's privilege.

Why are we celebrating that, again?

(Oh, and: did Scott Tobias play any role in writing that "Hell hath no fury" article? The answer will not surprise you.)

If you are someone who visits the AV Club frequently, as I am, you may be used to gritting your teeth a little when you read it - because the commenters use Amelie Gillette's anti-Joe-Francis piece to ask if there are any "hipster" equivalents to Girls Gone Wild (in response, someone else bemoans the fact that only "ugly" girls have good taste in music), or because every post concerning a moderately attractive woman elicits at least 5,000 comments about "getting a boner" or "jacking it," or because this post managed to stay up for about thirty seconds before the rape jokes started. Or, perhaps, because even Nathan Rabin - the most talented writer on the site, the guy whose work got me reading the AV Club in the first place - took the occasion, in a recent piece, to write this:

The book’s thin veneer of feminist outrage becomes even more ludicrous in light of the disquieting fact that most of the filthy whores in the book subsequently sued Dove Audio, the makers of the You’ll Never Make Love In This Town Again book-on-tape, for sexual harassment. Oh, the mixed messages!

Yes. That's right. Even Rabin, the single best writer on the staff - who might well be one of the best contemporary critics, period - will, if given the opportunity, opine that women who are openly and assertively sexual with some men must be sexually available to all men, and that they have no right to decline sexual service to anyone or to seek legal protection when their boundaries are violated in an unlawful manner. Basically, he will turn into Aaron P. Taylor right before your eyes.

This isn't misogyny; it's not that simple, or that conscious. The men who comprise the majority of the AV Club's writing staff (along with the men who have similar jobs at other publications; let's be honest, pop criticism is a male-dominated field) don't frame their work specifically in the context of white, straight, male, middle-to-upper-class experience because they hate people who do not belong to that group, or even because they consciously believe that group to be more important than others. They do it because that's how privilege works. Privilege causes ignorance of the lived realities of non-privileged individuals, and a corresponding insensitivity to them; it grants the privileged individual the luxury of assuming that his own viewpoints and experiences are "authoritative" and "universal."

That is the tragedy: that no matter how smart or talented a specific man may be, he will always be working within a system that rewards him for not taking his own privilege into account, and that therefore deprives him of the full use of his intellect or talent. I believe that Nathan Rabin is smarter than the paragraph I just quoted. (As for Scott Tobias - I'm not so sure.) I just don't think Rabin's editors or peers will call him out on that paragraph in a way that allows him to learn from his mistakes. If they do, one hopes that he'll be thankful; however, in my experience, that's not usually how those conversations go.

Then, too, there is the fact that most people do not belong to the (incredibly small) demographic of white, straight, middle-class men at which most "mainstream" media is targeted; most of us will, at least once per day, be smacked in the face with a message that tells us we are unimportant or inferior, and most of us learn to shrug those messages off, because it would simply be too taxing to deconstruct, examine, and respond to every single one. Every once in a while, however, it becomes impossible not to react. None of the attitudes that I've described here are unique to the AV Club. However, it's especially hurtful to find them at the AV Club, because, in all other respects, it's a great site. These people are professional critics - good critics, who have a keen eye for the lazy, worn-out, stupid, and trite - and yet they can't see how lazy, stupid, and antiquated it is to privilege white, straight, middle-class, male experiences and attitudes above all others, either in art or in one's critical response to it. If they're not smart enough to see through the bullshit, what are the odds for everyone else?

Powers of Horror: Gore, Gender, & Abjection

Here is something you probably shouldn't try: defending that movie Irreversible. Yeah, you know - the rapey one. Unfortunately, nobody warned the AV Club, and their resulting examination is about as incoherent as you might expect.

As you can imagine, I got a wee bit testy after reading this piece and the resulting conversation. I will spare you the spiel about gendered violence, and appropriation, and about how artists laying claim to experiences they are protected from in order to show how edgy or deep they are is fucking Privilegetard 101, and about how said artists usually manage to demonstrate that they know nothing about the topic at hand in their Great Masterpieces. I want to blow past all this, and bring you to my only positive thought inspired by this article, which is as follows:

In My Skin is a damn fine picture. Seriously, it is! How many horror movies have inspired you to revisit Julia Kristeva? Probably very few, unless you've seen In My Skin.*

For those who have not seen it, here is a brief rundown: it centers on a woman, Esther, who rips her leg open on a shard of metal at a party. She doesn't feel the injury for some time. When she finally does notice it, it fascinates her; she becomes obsessed with cutting herself up, and she studies, plays with, or eats the parts of herself that she's cut away. Her body is not her any more: it acts without her permission, and she can't feel its pain as her own. Her relationships fall apart. (In one scene, she explains her compulsion to her boyfriend, and he decides to fuck her sane, saying, "can you feel this?" She says no.) She finally takes her body away to a motel room, and carves and eats it in front of a full-length mirror, in a scene that can't help but be sexual - a protracted and bloody jouissance.

It should be clear by now that this is a disturbing movie. I saw it with a man who loves gory horror movies, and it upset him to the point of nausea and tears. I think that In My Skin's capacity to sicken and disturb is one of its virtues; shock can be a valuable tool, as long as it makes you think about why you're shocked in the first place.

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva sets forth her theory of abjection. The abject which is anything that violates the binary of me/not me, or subject/object: shit, blood, filth, injury, death, madness, and our mothers, because we were part of them once and are not any more, among other things. We feel a special sort of terror and revulsion when we encounter the abject, because it threatens the foundation of our identities. We create rules, rituals and taboos in order to deal with that terror; we separate the "clean" from the "unclean" in order to experience ourselves as stable and fixed subjects.

It could be said that every woman lives in a state of abjection. Think about how we bleed and grow other bodies within our own bodies, or all of the products and procedures designed to ensure that women, and especially women's genitals, remain "clean," or the persistent identification of women with madness, both in art and mythology and in more current ideas of "hysteria" or period-related "craziness" or "irrational" behavior. Fear of the mother becomes fear of all women, because all women are perceived as mothers or potential mothers themselves. There is a reason that we eroticize women who look as if they've never reproduced.

Moreover, it can be said that every woman experiences her own body as abject. Say what you like about the theory of the male gaze, but the fact is that women's bodies are presented as Other and object in most art and discourse, simply because the people who have produced art and controlled discourse for most of recorded history have not inhabited female bodies. Women internalize this, and therefore live in the uncomfortable position of perceiving our bodies as objects while also having our subjectivity inextricably bound to them. Lots of female trouble arises from this predicament - anorexia, inorgasmia, many complex and varied forms of shame and self-loathing - and so does In My Skin.

Someone on the Internet called In My Skin the female version of American Psycho. While I think that's limiting, I do agree with it, in a sense: if American Psycho is about the masculine prerogative of establishing everyone and everything as Object, with oneself as the supreme Subject, and about taking that premise to its logical extreme, then In My Skin is about the female experience of being embodied as both subject and object, and about the logical extremes of that position. The question is posed, not only by the movie, but by the way in which it was made: Marina de Van, who wrote and directed the movie, also plays Esther, and I'm told that she actually did cut herself at times to save money on special effects. I don't know if that's true - if it is, it raises a host of other questions - but I am fascinated by how she plays with being the woman who creates the image and the woman who comprises the image, the watcher and the watched.

In My Skin isn't about self-mutilation as we understand it. It's never clinical or therapeutic (in the vulgar sense) in how it approaches Esther's behavior. It's got more in common with certain Cronenberg movies than it does with Girl, Interrupted. (While we are on the subjects of abjection and gender and body horror in film, here is a great scene from a so-so movie: Jude Law, in Cronenberg's eXistenZ, explaining to Jennifer Jason Leigh that, "I just have this phobia of being... penetrated." Jennifer tries to convince him that it's great, it's fun, everyone does it, he should let her stick it in. He gets very prissy as he explains that just because everyone does it, there's no reason he has to do it, too. He's trying to keep himself clean! This scene, in context, has absolutely nothing to do with sex, and I love it very much.) In fact, Esther's boyfriend stands in for the concerned audience, and functions as a way to dismantle their preconceptions: as he tells Esther to think of herself, or think of him, or be for God's sake a little bit rational, the audience is brought to the uncomfortable realization that he has no clue what's going on.

Esther doesn't hate herself or her body; she simply doesn't identify self with body any more. She's puzzled by the body, and she wants to figure it out. The AV Club review quotes her as saying, "If I am no longer my body, what am I?" Here is another way to phrase that question: if your body is no longer you, what is it? Meat, project, enemy, lover? When Esther has answered these questions to her satisfaction - or at least taken her investigation as far as it can go - she puts her clothes on and walks away.

*Or, you know, Alien. Forced male pregnancy, ahoy!

Why They Hate Us, or: If Celebrities Were From the Midwest...

... ha, ha, they'd be fat! Oh, and poor. They probably wouldn't have very good record collections, either. You'd be all like, "the new Silver Jews record really isn't very good," and they'd be like, "I don't care, because our cultures are very different, yet in the upcoming election American adults from all walks of life will be voting in (one hopes) the belief that they can elect a politician who will promote the 'best interests of this country,' although widespread use of divisive culture-war rhetoric has made it impossible to even conceive of Americans as having a common interest to which their government can attend. Corn dog?"

Ha ha ha, God, people who aren't us are so lame.