BREAKING: Lily Allen, I Apparently Had Exact Same Childhood

Hey! Do you care about Lily Allen's (apparently toolish) dad? NO? Well, here he is anyway:

"As a man, I could drink, snort, and fuck to my heart's content without major detriment to my career," Keith Allen says. "A girl cannot do that. The tabloids are shameless in trying to create a race to rehab between any girl out there who has a drink. But Lily's learning what Daddy learned long ago: Fame is a pain in the fucking arse. And I don't mind saying this, because I've told her already: She needs to know when to fucking shut up."

NOW. Were I in a contemplative mood, I could perhaps expound at length on the obvious double standard at play - when dudes go out and have a wild time, they are just boys being boys (which they will be, obvs) but when girls drink, or smoke, or go to a lot of parties, they are huge trainwreck messes who need to be brought in line.

I could also reflect on the culture of celebrity (which Lily Allen's Dad touches on here, albeit toolishly) as it relates to misogyny - the way we subject people, and especially women, to round-the-clock intense scrutiny, and then revel in demeaning them whenever they slip up or suffer, and how that often is linked very closely to promoting misogynist stereotypes that may or may not apply to the women in question. You know, Jennifer Aniston is a pathetic spinster who can't keep a man and will never have a lasting marriage or make babies (oh, noooo) and Angelina is one of those crazy women that you just know has to be good in the sack, huh, right, she'd probably let you stick it in her butt, heh heh, and Madonna is an aging woman who insists that she has a right to be sexual and to exercise power in her personal life and/or career and therefore is an ugly, domineering hag, and pretty much any young woman who is sexual in public is a stupid slut, and when famous women are thin they're anorexic, and when famous women are not thin they've let themselves go, and the best thing a female entertainer can do for her career these days is get all heteronormative and have a pretty pretty princess wedding and knock herself up and sell the baby photos for eighteen bazillion dollars, and the picture, when you put it all together, is (a) really ugly, and (b) insidious, because it is (c) fucking everywhere. I'm not saying I like any of these women - I don't, as a matter of fact, care about them either way - but tons of people actually do get their views on everything from Rick Warren to Lindsey Lohan's sexual orientation from Perez Hilton and his ilk, and that is a problem, because on sites like his the lady-hating runs rampant and stereotype is promoted as reportage.

Then, of course, there is the problematic relationship between fathers and daughters, a subject which I am told I should stop talking about! Because it makes me sound like I am about to promote my memoirs on Oprah! But it's not about personal suffering, it's about a pattern I have observed in lives other than my own, the lives of certain female friends and now maybe the life of Lily Allen: you've got your mom, and you've got your dad, and you understandably get large parts of yourself from both of them, but when you hit puberty, there is suddenly this antagonism that develops between you and Dear Old Dad, who is of course complicit in maintaining patriarchy (there's a reason it's called that, childrens) but needs to love you even as he demeans or degrades or looks down on other women, and who therefore develops this need to punish you for being a woman, for resembling in any way the other women in the world, and an equally great need to enforce correct gender roles as they relate to your behavior, because the only thing worse than a woman who acts like a woman is a woman who acts like a man, so when you start doing the very same things that your father does, like drinking or smoking or kissing people or speaking your mind unapologetically (and maybe occasionally giving an infelicitous quote or two to the press, MISTER ALLEN) you are punished for it, and it is all very screwed up and gives you Issues and also maybe an inability to tolerate the Oscar-winning film American Beauty, which I walked out of at the precise moment that Kevin Spacey tells his daughter "if you don't watch out, you're going to wind up a bitch just like your mother," and I understand that he comes around in the end and learns to appreciate plastic bags and the finer points of not being an abusive sonofabitch? But at that point he is dead, so Thora Birch really doesn't get anything out of the deal. Boooo.

I could go into all of this. However, it would be an overshare, which I have been instructed to avoid, and also I don't know the full context and don't want to jump to conclusions (which I never do, as you know) so I will simply say this: SPIN Magazine has only strengthened my abiding love for the persona and works of one Lily Allen.

Lily! Mon amour! We will wed in the South of France!

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?

Yet Another Reason to Envy Columbia Students

Roy Den Hollander, the man who exists solely to confirm your darkest fears about men who look like Roy Den Hollander, has filed suit against Columbia for having a Women's Studies program. Here, he explains:

“To me, Columbia is a bastion of feminism, a boot camp for turning out feminist stormtroopers who pervert the constitutional law and destroy men.”

WHAT.

Seriously, dudes: there's a feminist stormtrooper boot camp in town and no-one told me? Now I'll never get to command the Feminist Death Star! (It looks like this.) I hold each and every Columbia student responsible.

Of course, you know what the best part of getting your Stormtrooping degree at Columbia would be:


COLUMBIA SPRING BREAK! Yeah, SPRING BREAK, wooo.

Hello, It's Dick Whitman

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?