Tag: Comedy

Gender and Food Week: ‘Bridesmaids’: Brunch, Brazilian Food, Baking, and Best Friends

Bridesmaids
 
Guest post written by Laura A. Shamas.
The rituals of contemporary female friendship are punctuated with food and drink as signifiers in the 2011 comedy hit Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig. Many of the key emotional moments of the film involve food and drink. Intimate aspects of female friendship are revealed while eating; a female collective bonds over feasting (and its repercussions); and a developing romance is linked to carrots and cake. 
In the opening scene of Bridesmaids, set in Milwaukee, and written by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig, Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig) is sexually involved with Ted (Jon Hamm). Their encounters are casual, or so they say to each other. When Ted asks her to leave his home in the morning, the disappointment shows on Annie’s face. But later, over brunch with her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph), we learn how detrimental “the Ted thing” is for Annie. Annie tries to frame the torrid night with Ted as an “adult sleepover” but Lillian tells her she can do better: “You hate yourself after you see him.” The female friendship ritual of a weekend brunch with a girlfriend is highlighted here. Lillian’s loyalty to Annie is established through her candor, her desire to protect Annie, and her inspiring admonition to Annie to find a better partner. The scene ends with the goofy pair playing with their food, placing it in their teeth — a reflection of the playful nature of their bond and its longevity: they’ve been friends since childhood. They are comfortable and authentic with each other. 
In the next scene, as they walk away from the restaurant, Annie’s deeper tie with food is revealed. Lillian and Annie stroll past a deserted bakery named “Cake Baby,” a business Annie opened during the recession. Annie registers sadness as she sees the empty building again. To comfort her friend Lillian comments: “They were good cakes, Annie.” 
Annie is no longer a baker. She currently works in a jewelry store as a sales clerk, where she tells frequently customers that love doesn’t last — a philosophy that goes against the “eternal bliss” code needed to sell wedding rings to couples. And her home life is equally unsettled because her male roommate’s sister has moved in to the small apartment; the roommate’s sister is featured in a food-related scene when she pours an open package of green peas on her back in order to calm a new tattoo. 
Annie’s one bright spot in life is getting together with Lillian. She brings a bottle of wine over to Lillian’s apartment for an evening in with drinks and magazines. There’s a wire basket filled with apples on the coffee table, and Lillian, holding out her hand in a formal way, says: “I want to eat an apple.” It is then that Annie notices Lillian’s glittering ring. Lillian is newly engaged to Doug. Apples, as symbols, are present in many ancient stories, such as “The Golden Apples” from the Garden of Hesperides or the tale of Adam and Eve. Apples classically represent knowledge; according to legend, this comes from the five-point star present in the apple’s core (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 36). By becoming engaged, Lillian indicates she is ready to move on to another phase, to gain more knowledge, to individuate. This is underscored by the visual and textual reference to apples in this scene. Lillian asks Annie to be her Maid of Honor at the impending nuptials. 
When Annie goes to pick up her mom (Jill Clayburgh) to attend Lillian and Doug’s engagement party, her mother gently states that Annie is in a downward spiral: “Hitting bottom is a good thing…because there’s nowhere to go but up.” In Maureen Murdock’s book The Heroine’s Journey, Murdock differentiates the steps of a female hero’s journey from those of a male hero. One of Murdock’s vital points involves a “Descent to the Goddess” to heal aspects of a mother-daughter split. According to Murdock, a woman begins an initiation process on the descent arc of a heroine’s journey: “It may involve a seemingly endless period of wandering, grief, rage, dethroning kings, of looking for the lost pieces of herself, and meeting the dark feminine. It may take weeks, months or years” (8). These steps may be seen in Annie’s journey in “Bridesmaids.” Her fruitless dalliance with Ted, her aimless job and transient home life, her connection to a lost childhood through Lillian (and the mourning of childhood’s end) are all present in the early part of the film. Annie’s meeting of the “dark feminine” in Bridesmaidsis yet to come. 
At the subsequent fancy engagement party, another ritual of female friendship is revealed. In a sequence with Annie and the beautiful Helen (Rose Byrne), Lillian’s newer “best friend,” Annie and Helen compete with each other to deliver the best bridal toast, with alternate, escalating praise of Lillian in front of the gathered crowd. There, Annie drinks champagne, and reveals that Annie and Lillian have a ritual of “drunken Saturday nights at Rockin’ Sushi.” Saturday nights are times of revelry and letting loose; Annie and Lillian have a standing BFF hangout restaurant ritual on that night. We later learn that Helen longs for this: an ongoing invitation to female revelry and even the spontaneity involved in such female revelry. It’s something the seemingly perfect Helen doesn’t have. 
At the engagement party, the rest of the female collective in the film is 3 introduced: the “Bridesmaids.” Newlywed innocent Becca (Ellie Kemper), jaded mother-of-three Rita (Wendi McClendon-Covey), and the intrepid Megan, sister to the groom (Melissa McCarthy) are there. They, along with Helen and Annie, complete Lillian’s assembled group of female wedding supporters. It is through the activities of this group that the “dark feminine” is explored more fully in the film. 
In the hierarchy of a wedding, a bride and groom are the most important roles. Bridesmaids, taken as an archetypal female construction, may be seen to represent “sisterhood,” a unified group of female attendants to the bride. If so, the dysfunction of this specific collective, as revealed in Act Two, serves as wry, hilarious commentary on aspects of the dark feminine and our wedding rituals from the female gaze. 
Near the end of Act One, Annie is pulled over at night for a violation by a state policeman named Nathan Rhodes, his last name perhaps a commentary of Annie’s own life at a crossroads. Annie’s tail lights need to be repaired, a recurring metaphor reflecting Annie’s inner life. Rhodes (Chris O’Dowd) recognizes Annie from her bakery days. He tells her how much he admired her delicious pastries, especially her cream puffs. In this scene we learn that the bakery is connected to emotional pain for Annie — and not just for the financial devastation she suffered when it failed. Her boyfriend, who worked there, left her when it closed. Rhodes reminds her: “I appreciated your cakes.” 
After this encounter, a brief baking sequence follows for Annie. In the kitchen alone, she bakes a beautiful cupcake for herself, decorated with a gorgeous flower on top. Annie’s baking skills and her artistry are displayed. Pensively, she eats the single perfect cupcake, alone. 
A baker is someone who could be seen to work “alchemically”; the transformation of raw materials into something edible and wonderful involves the use of an oven, which, as an image, could resonate as “womb.” Annie begins, in the scene above, to try to reconnect with her baking skills, and the warmth of the womb. 
In Act Two, Annie meets the dark feminine as reflected by the bridesmaids — and her own psyche. It is in perhaps the most famous sequence in the film, involving feasting at an authentic Brazilian restaurant and subsequent scenes at an exclusive couture bridal shop named “Belle en Blanc,” that the dark feminine is revealed in a graphic, scatological way.
The competition between Annie and Helen is highlighted throughout this sequence. Whether it’s over the theme of the bridal shower, or where the bachelorette party should be held, Annie and Helen are at odds. Annie’s taste is seen as déclassé compared to Helen’s standards. After the meal at the Brazilian restaurant, presented as a communal feasting experience, Helen and Annie spar over the selection of the bridesmaids’ dresses. It is then that the group becomes sick with food poisoning, leading to the massive need for a bathroom, including a toilet, a sink, and in Lillian’s case, the city street. When Annie tries to pretend she does not feel sick, Helen tests her resolve by handing her a Jordan Almond to eat. 
The juxtaposition of the name of the shop, “Belle en Blanc,” compared to what happens to the collective, suggests an ironic commentary on aspects of the dark feminine. And it is related to food. The food poisoning underscores the feminine spiritual poisoning felt between Annie and Helen, and even Lillian, as revealed by competition and wedding stress. At one point, a character says that one of the dresses at “Belle en Blanc” is so pretty that it makes her stomach hurt. 
On Annie’s way home from another Ted encounter, she stops at a small liquor market, and reaches to buy a drink called “Calm.” There, she sees Rhodes again, and he offers her carrots. She ends up eating carrots with him, sitting on a car hood outside. He tells her she should be setting up a new bakery. Annie replies that she doesn’t bake anymore. A carrot is dropped on the ground, and Rhodes says that there is always one lucky, ugly carrot in the bag. He offers it to her. She won’t take it. But their fun continues into the dawn, as he shows her how to use his official radar gun to catch speeders. 
When the Bridesmaids return home prematurely — after a disastrous attempt to fly to Vegas for a bachelorette party — Annie encounters Rhodes. They go to a bar. Upon hearing her tale of woe, Rhodes dubs her the “Maid of Dishonor” and urges Annie to start baking again. Annie says it doesn’t make her happy anymore. She spends the night with Rhodes, and they become sexually involved. In the morning, he surprises her by assembling baking supplies to encourage her to bake again: “Your workshop awaits.” Angered, Annie refuses: “I don’t need you to fix me.” She leaves, declaring their encounter a mistake. 
After losing her job and apartment, Annie moves back in with her mother. She refuses Rhodes’ calls. Annie tells her mom that she hadn’t hit bottom before. Now, perhaps she finally has. This realization is underscored when she drives by her old bakery and sees the business name “Cake Baby” newly defaced with a sexual slur. 
At the elaborate French-toned bridal shower, arranged perfectly by Helen but stolen from Annie’s idea, is a chocolate fountain and a giant heart-shaped cookie. As a shower gift to Lillian, Annie assembled an amazing box of childhood memories. Helen tops Annie by giving Lillian a trip to Paris to meet with the couture wedding dress designer. At the party, Annie breaks down, and in a culminating Act Two event, attacks the giant heart cookie and the chocolate fountain. In a rant, Annie calls out Lillian for participating in such a pretentious social gathering. Lillian responds: she disinvites Annie from the wedding. By attacking the giant cookie heart, Annie embodies her own need to address matters of the heart, and even her “baking.” The dark chocolate fountain is perhaps an ironic visual callback to the dark feminine as seen earlier in the “Belle en Blanc” sequence. Annie’s rage could also be seen as a part of dark feminine power — her own. 
After Annie’s car is damaged in a hit and run, she’s depressed. With nowhere to go, she stays inside her mother’s home all the time — the ultimate “Return to the Womb.” Megan comes to visit, with the nine pups she stole from the bridal shower. Trying to encourage her, Megan tells Annie: “You’re your problem and you’re also your solution.” 
Annie starts baking. She cracks eggs, whisks, blends sugars. Her car is finally repaired, and it’s all gratis, thanks to a deal Rhodes made with the mechanic who owed him a favor. To show her appreciation, Annie leaves a beautiful cake with a carrot on top at Rhodes’ doorstep, a reference to the lucky carrot he told her about. This is a signifier that Annie is ascending, healing, back on her path. Her descent spiral is over. She can “bake” again. A carrot, in folklore, is related to fertility and seeding; it also is reputed to have medicinal qualities connected to “sight.” The carrot on the cake represents the renewal of Annie’s vision, her “warming,” and her outreach to Rhodes. But Rhodes leaves the box outside on his front step. Annie sees raccoons eating from the box, at one point. 
Further Act Three action involves trying to track down the missing Lillian, who has disappeared. Helen locates Annie at her mom’s house, and the two frenemies try to find Lillian. It is in through this activity we learn of Helen’s longing for true female friendship — that she’s never had a long term female friendship like Lillian’s and Annie’s relationship. 
Eventually, Lillian is found at her apartment. She walked out on her own rehearsal dinner. She tells Annie: “I outcrazied you.” On the brink of her own life — changing step, Lillian worries about what will happen to Annie in the future. 
Annie reassures Lillian: “I’m gonna be fine, I am fine” — an indication that Annie knows she’s better. Then she helps Lillian get ready for the ceremony. The wedding is back on track. 
Act Three culminates in entire wedding rocking out to Wilson Phillips’ performance of “Hold On,” an extravagance arranged by Helen. But after it all, Annie invites Helen to a Saturday evening out sometime at Rockin’ Sushi with Lillian and Annie — the ultimate girlfriend ritual. This makes Helen happy, and signals also that Annie has “warmed up” to Helen. Annie wants to include Helen in the drunken Rockin’ Sushi ritual of female friendship, including revelry and spontaneity. 
After Rhodes and Annie get together at the movie’s end — when he picks her up after the wedding and reveals “I ate your cake”– a final coda to the film involves Megan and Air Marshall Jon who use food, “a bear sandwich,” in bawdy foreplay. The rituals of contemporary female friendships are underscored by the use and presence of food and drink as signifiers at important emotional moments throughout Bridesmaids. Annie Walker’s journey in the movie, in a downward spiral or “descent motif” is healed through her encounters with aspects of the dark feminine as revealed in the shadow side of “sisterhood” and in her own psyche. Annie’s healing process, after failing at business and at love, is also reflected in her great talent to bake again in Act Three. But this time, she’s not baking for business or commerce — she’s baking to express herself, to be warm, to acknowledge finding the Lucky Carrot. 
Works Cited 
Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols. 
John Buchanan-Brown, trans. London: Penguin, 1996. Murdock, Maureen. 
The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. Boston: Shambala, 1990. 
———-
Laura Shamas is a writer, film consultant, and mythologist. Her newest book is Pop Mythology: Collected Essays.

"Pregnancy Brain" in Sitcoms

Alyson Hannigan as Lily Aldrin in “How I Met Your Mother”
Pregnancy brain. Momnesia. Preggo ladies be cray-cray. Call it what you want, but the idea that pregnant women lose their minds while their hormones go whack is a popular stereotype based on questionable evidence. Some mothers recall feeling forgetful during their pregnancy, while others don’t. (Wow, you’d think different women have different experiences with pregnancy, or something.)
Regardless of how true pregnancy brain is or isn’t, or how different women react to the changes in their bodies, sitcom writers have taken this idea and run with it. Last year, Lily Aldrin experienced an episode’s worth of pregnancy brain on How I Met Your Mother, and this year, Gloria Delgado-Pritchett struggled with her own pregnancy brain problems on Modern Family. The setups were similar: the women had short-term memory problems as a result of their pregnancy hormones. The results, however, were a little different.
On How I Met Your Mother, the characters first notice something different about Lily when she agreed to move to the suburbs, after years of insisting that she would never move to the suburbs and wanted to stay in New York. Marshall, suburban-born and raised, is thrilled that Lily has changed her mind, but Robin warns him that Lily only wants to move because of pregnancy brain. Marshall doubts that pregnancy brain is even a “thing,” and Robin insists that it is: “Her brain is marinating in a cocktail of hormones, mood swings, and jacked-up nesting instincts.” Then Marshall and Robin recall a few incidents of Lily acting strangely: putting her keys and wallet in the freezer and ice cubes in her purse, texting Robin to ask for directions back from the bathroom, and saying “fungus” instead of “fetus” and “metal factory” instead of “mental faculty.” Robin cautions Marshall against letting Lily make any major life choices while pregnant.
This is all just in the first five minutes of the episode, by the way. The point is clear: Lily, while pregnant, is completely incapable of making any decisions for herself and has a more impaired short-term memory than Dory from Finding Nemo. Robin doesn’t think “that moron” can do anything. (Sidebar: why is Robin “I never want kids and have no interest in ever being pregnant” Scherbatsky suddenly an expert in pregnancy brain, anyway?)
Fortunately, Lily has a man by her side! (Hannigan and Jason Segel)
A year later on Modern Family, Gloria experiences similar symptoms of pregnesia, at a much later stage at her pregnancy than Lily’s. She puts soap in the fridge and butter in the shower. Jay calls his daughter Claire to “babysit the stupid pregnant lady” (Gloria’s words), but he claims that Gloria called Claire and forgot, and she initially believes him. She drives with Claire to Costco and laments over her pregnesia: “I have two brains in my body and I’ve never been so dumb.” Claire tells her not to be too hard on herself: “You have another human being growing inside of you competing for resources.” Claire herself struggled with forgetfulness when pregnant with her daughter Alex (but not so much with her daughter Haley or son Luke). The women exchange a nice moment until Gloria tries to get out of a moving car.
The setup here is slightly different: Gloria is forgetful and scattered, but self-aware enough to know when people are pandering to her. Still, she’s not at her best.
Back on How I Met Your Mother, the plot continues with Lily acting even more ridiculous. She tries to make waffles using a laptop, and Marshall takes advantage of her lapse in judgment by convincing her to buy things for the apartment that she doesn’t really want. Soon, though, she turns the tables on him. She tricks him into thinking that she called a broker to sell her grandparents’ house in the suburbs. Instead, she’s led him to the suburbs on Halloween so they can hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. She’s trying to manipulate him with cute children to convince him to move to the suburbs. It looks like the silly pregnant lady has more “metal factories” than meets the eye.
Meanwhile, on Modern Family, Claire and Gloria go shopping at Costco. Claire has to run to a different part of the store to find a sweater to wear, because Gloria’s been standing in the frozen food aisle for half an hour and can’t remember what she wanted to buy. When the two women finally go to the parking lot after their shop, Gloria accidentally almost closes the door of the minivan on Claire’s head – after all that time, she forgot the eggs. Claire lectures Gloria: “You are purposely turning your brain off!” Then Claire is interrupted by a store’s security guard: she forgot to return the sweater she wore while Gloria stood in the frozen food aisle, and accidentally stole the sweater. Claire tries to plead her case, but the security guard takes her back inside the building.
Sofia Vergara as Gloria Delgado-Pritchett on “Modern Family”
In the third act of the Marshall/Lily plot on HIMYM, Lily has convinced Marshall to move to the suburbs. Then a few trick-or-treaters come to her door, and she hands them a stapler, scissors, and a bottle of pinot noir. She doesn’t realize what she’s done until Marshall points it out to her, and then she cries because she’s going to miss the stapler. Lily admits that she can’t make any big decisions right now, at least not until she’s done being affected by hormones.
On Modern Family, Claire argues with an overly vigilant store detective. Gloria stands, panicked, and announces that her water broke. Claire and the store detective rush her to the car. As Claire drives, Gloria reveals that she dumped a water bottle on the floor and pretended to go into labor in order to help Claire: “I couldn’t sit there and watch you suffer just because you turned your brain off.” Claire apologizes for pandering to Gloria and doubting her abilities.
Two sitcom episodes, less than a year apart from each other, both dealing with forgetful pregnant women who don’t know how to manage their lives without help, but the message of each episode is very different. The How I Met Your Mother episode is sexist and cliched, while the Modern Family episode attempts to treat the pregnant character with humanity, and mostly succeeds.
Look at the way the other characters talk about Lily and Gloria. Lily is “marinating in a cocktail of hormones,” a “moron,” and acting like the “drunk girl at the bar” – descriptors that would be perfect for a pregnant character on a darker or more satirical comedy, but seem out of place and mean-spirited on a feel-good show like How I Met Your Mother. Claire, on the other hand, initially sympathizes with Gloria, pointing out that pregnancy is draining and of course her memory would be on the fritz.
Lily is also treated like an infant during this pregnancy. She’s not just forgetful – she can’t make any major decisions while these hormones are affecting her brain. SHE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED. Gloria, meanwhile, is forgetful and scattered, but she hasn’t completely lost her mind, and cleverly saves Claire from the repercussions of her own brain fart.

 

More similar than you might think (Vergara and Julie Bowen)
But I think the biggest reason that the Modern Family storyline mostly succeeds and the How I Met Your Mother episode doesn’t is because the first show remembers to show the female perspective on a woman’s issue (imagine that). The episode of How I Met Your Mother isn’t about how Lily deals with pregnancy brain; it’s about how Marshall deals with Lily’s pregnancy brain. Let’s empathize with the poor, long-suffering husband while he deals with the changes in his wife’s body (yawn). Modern Family at least shows us pregnancy-related forgetfulness from the perspective of the female characters. I liked seeing two women bond over their different pregnancies, and I especially liked that Claire didn’t have the exact same experience with every pregnancy.
I don’t know if pregnancy brain is a real thing or not. I’m skeptical, but I’ve had at least two currently pregnant or formerly pregnant friends tell me that they were constantly forgetful during their pregnancies. My impression is that it’s true for some women and not true for others. Both shows exaggerate the concept for for comic effect, but How I Met Your Mother reduces the pregnant woman to an infant and Modern Family remembers that Gloria is still an adult. I know which episode I prefer.
Final thought: if walking into a room with a specific purpose, and then immediately forgetting said purpose for being in that room, is a sign of pregnancy brain, I have been pregnant for the last twenty-eight years. I do this at least twice a day. Maybe pregnant women and scatterbrained artist-writer types are cut from the same cloth.
Lady T is an aspiring writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.

"Pregnancy Brain" in Sitcoms

Alyson Hannigan as Lily Aldrin in “How I Met Your Mother”
Pregnancy brain. Momnesia. Preggo ladies be cray-cray. Call it what you want, but the idea that pregnant women lose their minds while their hormones go whack is a popular stereotype based on questionable evidence. Some mothers recall feeling forgetful during their pregnancy, while others don’t. (Wow, you’d think different women have different experiences with pregnancy, or something.)
Regardless of how true pregnancy brain is or isn’t, or how different women react to the changes in their bodies, sitcom writers have taken this idea and run with it. Last year, Lily Aldrin experienced an episode’s worth of pregnancy brain on How I Met Your Mother, and this year, Gloria Delgado-Pritchett struggled with her own pregnancy brain problems on Modern Family. The setups were similar: the women had short-term memory problems as a result of their pregnancy hormones. The results, however, were a little different.
On How I Met Your Mother, the characters first notice something different about Lily when she agreed to move to the suburbs, after years of insisting that she would never move to the suburbs and wanted to stay in New York. Marshall, suburban-born and raised, is thrilled that Lily has changed her mind, but Robin warns him that Lily only wants to move because of pregnancy brain. Marshall doubts that pregnancy brain is even a “thing,” and Robin insists that it is: “Her brain is marinating in a cocktail of hormones, mood swings, and jacked-up nesting instincts.” Then Marshall and Robin recall a few incidents of Lily acting strangely: putting her keys and wallet in the freezer and ice cubes in her purse, texting Robin to ask for directions back from the bathroom, and saying “fungus” instead of “fetus” and “metal factory” instead of “mental faculty.” Robin cautions Marshall against letting Lily make any major life choices while pregnant.
This is all just in the first five minutes of the episode, by the way. The point is clear: Lily, while pregnant, is completely incapable of making any decisions for herself and has a more impaired short-term memory than Dory from Finding Nemo. Robin doesn’t think “that moron” can do anything. (Sidebar: why is Robin “I never want kids and have no interest in ever being pregnant” Scherbatsky suddenly an expert in pregnancy brain, anyway?)
Fortunately, Lily has a man by her side! (Hannigan and Jason Segel)
A year later on Modern Family, Gloria experiences similar symptoms of pregnesia, at a much later stage at her pregnancy than Lily’s. She puts soap in the fridge and butter in the shower. Jay calls his daughter Claire to “babysit the stupid pregnant lady” (Gloria’s words), but he claims that Gloria called Claire and forgot, and she initially believes him. She drives with Claire to Costco and laments over her pregnesia: “I have two brains in my body and I’ve never been so dumb.” Claire tells her not to be too hard on herself: “You have another human being growing inside of you competing for resources.” Claire herself struggled with forgetfulness when pregnant with her daughter Alex (but not so much with her daughter Haley or son Luke). The women exchange a nice moment until Gloria tries to get out of a moving car.
The setup here is slightly different: Gloria is forgetful and scattered, but self-aware enough to know when people are pandering to her. Still, she’s not at her best.
Back on How I Met Your Mother, the plot continues with Lily acting even more ridiculous. She tries to make waffles using a laptop, and Marshall takes advantage of her lapse in judgment by convincing her to buy things for the apartment that she doesn’t really want. Soon, though, she turns the tables on him. She tricks him into thinking that she called a broker to sell her grandparents’ house in the suburbs. Instead, she’s led him to the suburbs on Halloween so they can hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. She’s trying to manipulate him with cute children to convince him to move to the suburbs. It looks like the silly pregnant lady has more “metal factories” than meets the eye.
Meanwhile, on Modern Family, Claire and Gloria go shopping at Costco. Claire has to run to a different part of the store to find a sweater to wear, because Gloria’s been standing in the frozen food aisle for half an hour and can’t remember what she wanted to buy. When the two women finally go to the parking lot after their shop, Gloria accidentally almost closes the door of the minivan on Claire’s head – after all that time, she forgot the eggs. Claire lectures Gloria: “You are purposely turning your brain off!” Then Claire is interrupted by a store’s security guard: she forgot to return the sweater she wore while Gloria stood in the frozen food aisle, and accidentally stole the sweater. Claire tries to plead her case, but the security guard takes her back inside the building.
Sofia Vergara as Gloria Delgado-Pritchett on “Modern Family”
In the third act of the Marshall/Lily plot on HIMYM, Lily has convinced Marshall to move to the suburbs. Then a few trick-or-treaters come to her door, and she hands them a stapler, scissors, and a bottle of pinot noir. She doesn’t realize what she’s done until Marshall points it out to her, and then she cries because she’s going to miss the stapler. Lily admits that she can’t make any big decisions right now, at least not until she’s done being affected by hormones.
On Modern Family, Claire argues with an overly vigilant store detective. Gloria stands, panicked, and announces that her water broke. Claire and the store detective rush her to the car. As Claire drives, Gloria reveals that she dumped a water bottle on the floor and pretended to go into labor in order to help Claire: “I couldn’t sit there and watch you suffer just because you turned your brain off.” Claire apologizes for pandering to Gloria and doubting her abilities.
Two sitcom episodes, less than a year apart from each other, both dealing with forgetful pregnant women who don’t know how to manage their lives without help, but the message of each episode is very different. The How I Met Your Mother episode is sexist and cliched, while the Modern Family episode attempts to treat the pregnant character with humanity, and mostly succeeds.
Look at the way the other characters talk about Lily and Gloria. Lily is “marinating in a cocktail of hormones,” a “moron,” and acting like the “drunk girl at the bar” – descriptors that would be perfect for a pregnant character on a darker or more satirical comedy, but seem out of place and mean-spirited on a feel-good show like How I Met Your Mother. Claire, on the other hand, initially sympathizes with Gloria, pointing out that pregnancy is draining and of course her memory would be on the fritz.
Lily is also treated like an infant during this pregnancy. She’s not just forgetful – she can’t make any major decisions while these hormones are affecting her brain. SHE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED. Gloria, meanwhile, is forgetful and scattered, but she hasn’t completely lost her mind, and cleverly saves Claire from the repercussions of her own brain fart.

 

More similar than you might think (Vergara and Julie Bowen)
But I think the biggest reason that the Modern Family storyline mostly succeeds and the How I Met Your Mother episode doesn’t is because the first show remembers to show the female perspective on a woman’s issue (imagine that). The episode of How I Met Your Mother isn’t about how Lily deals with pregnancy brain; it’s about how Marshall deals with Lily’s pregnancy brain. Let’s empathize with the poor, long-suffering husband while he deals with the changes in his wife’s body (yawn). Modern Family at least shows us pregnancy-related forgetfulness from the perspective of the female characters. I liked seeing two women bond over their different pregnancies, and I especially liked that Claire didn’t have the exact same experience with every pregnancy.
I don’t know if pregnancy brain is a real thing or not. I’m skeptical, but I’ve had at least two currently pregnant or formerly pregnant friends tell me that they were constantly forgetful during their pregnancies. My impression is that it’s true for some women and not true for others. Both shows exaggerate the concept for for comic effect, but How I Met Your Mother reduces the pregnant woman to an infant and Modern Family remembers that Gloria is still an adult. I know which episode I prefer.
Final thought: if walking into a room with a specific purpose, and then immediately forgetting said purpose for being in that room, is a sign of pregnancy brain, I have been pregnant for the last twenty-eight years. I do this at least twice a day. Maybe pregnant women and scatterbrained artist-writer types are cut from the same cloth.
Lady T is a writer with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at www.theresabasile.com.

Indifferent To Suffering, Insensitive To Joy: ‘Network’s’ Dangerous Career Woman

Women In Politics Week: Indifferent To Suffering, Insensitive To Joy: ‘Network’s’ Dangerous Career Woman
By Myrna Waldron
Network DVD Art
For a while, I think people got the impression that I don’t like films if they’re not explicitly feminist. The reality is, most films are not feminist, but it doesn’t necessarily diminish their respective quality – Back to the Future, Casablanca and The Third Man are amongst my favourite films of all time, but I could not describe them as remotely feminist. Amongst that list of favourite films is the 1976 black comedy/satire Network, which is a scarily prescient skewering of the television industry. It won four Academy Awards, three for acting – Best Actress Faye Dunaway, Best Actor Peter Finch (which was awarded posthumously) and Best Supporting Actress Beatrice Straight. The fourth award was for its screenplay penned by Paddy Chayefsky.

The film’s “heroine,” Diana Christensen, played by Faye Dunaway, is very much a product of the 70s. She has directly benefitted from the second wave feminism movement, breaking the glass ceiling and becoming the sole female television executive at UBS, the fictional network depicted in this film. But…she is not a feminist character. Yes, she is strongly written, sexually confident, and an obvious success in her field, but she is also obsessive, emotionless, cynical and dangerous. In short, a ball-breaking career woman. She has achieved much based on the sheer power of her ambitions, but it is clear that her single-minded ambitions are meant to contrast negatively to the more idealistic and grounded outlooks of the male “heroes,” Howard Beale (Peter Finch) and Max Schumacher (William Holden).

Diana is the Vice President of UBS’s programming division, but eventually worms her way into taking Max Schumacher’s job, which was to be in charge of the news division. The news division gets lousy ratings and haemorrhages money, so they make the decision to fire their news anchor, Howard Beale. This instead causes Beale’s mind to snap, and he begins ranting about planning to commit suicide on air (which was based on a real-life event) and how he has “run out of bullshit.” The ratings spike, prompting the obsessive Diana to seize on the newscast and turn it into a combination variety show and talk show. The integrity of the news and the political system that it influences mean nothing to Diana – she is singularly obsessed with getting ratings and making money for UBS.

Diana Christensen
In her work to get better ratings for the network, she offers a deal to Laureen Hobbs, a leader of the Communist Party, to get video footage of a radical leftist terrorist group known as the Ecumenical Liberation Army (a parody of the terrorist group which kidnapped Patty Hearst). Both women are deeply cynical and sarcastic, and introduce themselves to each other as what they are stereotyped to be: “Hi, I’m Diana Christensen, a racist lackey of the imperialist ruling circles.” “I’m Laureen Hobbs, a bad-ass commie nigger.” (Hobbs is African-American) “Sounds like the basis of a firm friendship.” Diana does not care at all about the political ramifications of allowing the Communist Party an entire hour of weekly propaganda, or of glorifying the violent tactics of domestic terrorists. She even openly encourages Hobbs to put whatever content she likes in the show just so she can get the terrorists’ crime footage. Meanwhile, she has added several other kitschy segments to The Howard Beale Show, including a psychic who predicts the week’s news every Friday.

This same psychic tells Diana that she will be having an emotional affair with a craggy middle-aged gentleman. She interprets this man to be Max Schumacher, with whom she starts an affair. She knows that he has been married for 25 years and has children, and doesn’t care at all, she, in fact, was the one who initially approached him. Her cynicism and selfishness extend to her personal life as well. The affair abruptly ends when she steals Schumacher’s job and exploits the mentally ill Beale for ratings. They reconnect after an executive’s funeral – her attraction to Schumacher being the only thing besides television that she shows remote joy in (Schumacher is emotionally obsessed and infatuated with Diana). But even that joy is short lived, for she continually blathers about her job even while having sex.  To go along with how she has elbowed herself in to a social caste normally populated by men, she even describes herself as being sexually masculine: “I can’t tell you how many man have told me what a lousy lay I am. I apparently have a masculine temperament. I arouse quickly, consummate prematurely, and can’t wait to get my clothes back on and get out of that bedroom. I seem to be inept at everything except my work.”

Howard Beale’s Rant
Diana’s tenure as the producer of The Howard Beale show has significant political ramifications. Beale’s famous rant, in which he encourages his audience to scream, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” fosters an atmosphere of discontent with the status quo and outrage that their individualism is insidiously being taken away from them. It becomes a catchphrase, and Beale begins making daily rants, and eventually even believes himself as a kind of political prophet with the unique ability to communicate via the television. The angrier the audience gets, the more the ratings increase, and the more Diana likes it. The show eventually becomes the #1 most watched program in America, and Diana unabashedly takes all the credit for its success.

UBS is owned by a media conglomerate called the CCA (Communications Company of America), and the corporate influence of the conglomerate gradually takes over how the network is run. Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), Diana & Max’s direct supervisor, eventually becomes CEO after the original CEO dies of a heart condition. This marks the end of UBS’s journalistic credibility, for Hackett is a blatant corporate shill. Unfortunately for Beale, he makes an enemy of the CCA when he learns that the conglomerate is to be bought out by Saudi Arabians, and thus goes on a rant about how much of American property and commerce is owned by the Saudis. He demands that his audience send telegrams to the White House demanding that they put a stop to Saudi money taking over American culture. UBS is not a wealthy network, and absolutely depends on this merger to survive. The CEO of CCA, Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty) demands to see Beale, and goes on a thunderous rant about how there is no such thing as nations or individuals – that money is the only thing that matters, the only reality in the modern world.

He scares Howard Beale into promoting his own viewpoints, which are directly opposite to the previous subjects of Beale’s rants. The ratings begin to fall because the audience resents being told that they are only cogs in a great moneymaking machine, not the worthy individuals Beale originally told them they were. Laureen Hobbs, by this point, has been sucked in too by the temptations of the corporate system, and becomes so obsessed with earning enough money to continue her show she has, instead of being a Communist, become a classical Capitalist. Furious at how Howard Beale’s flagging ratings are damaging her show, she rants to Diana that Beale should be fired. Diana has already been planning to end Beale’s show.

Diana celebrating The Howard Beale Show’s success
Meanwhile, Diana’s cynicism and lack of emotional depth have taken a toll on her relationship with Max Schumacher. She defines their relationship, yet again, in relation to television: “It’s time to reevaluate our relationship, Max. I don’t like the way this script of ours is turning out. It’s turning into a seedy little drama. Middle-aged man leaves wife and family for young heartless woman, goes to pot.” Instead, Max turns the tables on her. Noting that she, unlike him, has grown up only knowing the artificiality of television, he realizes that she is completely unable to form or articulate genuine emotion. That television has destroyed her, destroyed Laureen Hobbs, and will destroy him too if he continues to have a relationship with her. He tells her that she is “…Indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality.” The man who left his wife of 25 years is apparently morally above a young woman who, by his own admission, is not to blame for the artificiality of her emotions. Instead, Diana’s single-minded ambition damns her.

Losing Max seems to spark a final unforgivable act of cynicism – Diana completely disregards the right to human life and orders Howard Beale’s assassination. Since Beale is now espousing the moral and political beliefs of Mr. Jensen, Jensen wants the show to continue, but the UBS executives are unable to ignore or forgive Beale’s flagging ratings. Instead of risking the wrath of CCA by firing Beale or allowing him to retire, they hire the Ecumenical Liberation Army to shoot him to death onscreen. Money is the only reality. The cynical, emotionless career woman says, “I don’t see that we have any options. Let’s kill the son of a bitch.” They can then dredge up one last ratings spike out of Beale. The footage of Beale being shot to death is broadcast over and over, next to other newscasts and commercials – in the end, even the murder of a mentally ill man is as meaningless as everything else when it comes to television.

Diana Christensen is a tremendously complicated character. It is hard to hate her, but the audience is meant to be repelled by the sheer scope of her ambition and obsession. It is quite revealing that Laureen Hobbs, the other major female character in the story, becomes just as cynical and hypocritical as Diana and abandons everything else for the sake of the mighty rating. Is it true that the generations that have grown up only knowing a world with television have become emotionally stunted? Does Chayefsky think all ambitious career women are as single-minded and emotionally/sexually stunted as Diana, or is she just a mere satirical exaggeration? What is apparent is how eerily this movie predicted the future – a fourth major television network that abandons all pretence of delivering objective news, instead relying on stunt footage, pundits, propaganda, cheap ratings ploys and answers to a dangerously powerful media conglomerate? Sounds familiar. Diana is not remotely a feminist character, but her creation has definitely been influenced by the second wave feminist movement. One thing, however, is clear from Network’s script: Beware the ambitious career woman.

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.

Women in Politics Week: ‘Election’: Female Power and the Failure of Desperate Masculinity

“I just think people are made uncomfortable by ambitious women.”

– Tom Perrotta, author of Election, the book that inspired the film

The 1999 film Election features Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), a power-hungry young woman who will stop at nothing to get what she wants and Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), an emasculated male high school teacher who loses everything trying to keep Flick out of power.
She wins. He loses. But he doesn’t realize it.
Election–which was nominated for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe and won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film–is a film that has been immortalized for its depiction of Tracy Flick, a high school junior who, after building a flourishing “career” in academics and extra-curricular activities, is running for Student Government President of George Washington Carver High School.
Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) running for Student Government President
At the beginning of the film, Flick and McAllister are narrating their own stories with pride. She is well-aware of her accomplishments, and he believes his position as a history and civics teacher is fulfilling and that he serves as an inspiration to his students. He thinks his is a position of power.
Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), Teacher of the Year
As their stories intertwine, McAllister pauses to let this audience in on some information about Flick.
“Her pussy gets so wet you can’t believe it.” McAllister flashes back to his best friend, Dave Novotny, sharing this detail about Flick. Novotny, who was a math teacher at the high school, had been having an affair with Flick (who at the time was a sophomore).  
Almost immediately, Flick begins telling her side of the story. “Our relationship was built on mutual respect and admiration,” she says in her confident, chipper and stern voice. He talked to her like she was an adult, and she reciprocated. She points out that she didn’t have a father growing up, and “you might assume I was psychologically looking for a father figure, but I wasn’t.” She goes on to say that he was strong and made her feel protected, which clearly shows that perhaps her self-analysis wasn’t fully realized.
That said, she is the one who ends the relationship. Novotny sends her a homemade love-letter booklet, and she and her mother turn it in to the principal. (He’d “gotten mushy” and acted like a baby, she later tells McAllister.)
“We’re in love,” pleads Novotny, sobbing to the principal. He is fired, his wife kicks him out and he’s forced to move home and live with his parents. Typically, this type of story line ends with the young woman feeling victimized and being ostracized at school; however, Flick’s involvement with him is kept secret, and she never acts like a victim.
These plots sound problematic, obviously, but it’s important to note that in this dark comedy, none of the characters is wholly likable or sympathetic.
These themes of threatened masculinity that permeate the film are not, as it might seem, criticisms of feminism. Instead, the emasculation of McAllister (and Novotny) is portrayed as their own failing, which makes them incapable of fully functioning and succeeding. Their desperate plight for masculinity and power–at work and in the bedroom–ultimately undoes them.
Flick knows the answers, although McAllister doesn’t want to hear them
Flick and McAllister’s stories continue, as the tension between their narratives grows. “Now that I have more life experience,” Flick says, “the more I feel sorry for McAllister.” He’s in the “same little room, in the same stupid clothes… and year after year after his students go to big colleges, big cities… make loads of money. He’s got to be jealous.”
“Like my mom says,” adds Flick, “the weak are always trying to sabotage the strong.”
She then mentions that she’s an only child of a single mother, and that her mom is really devoted to her and wants her to do all the things she couldn’t. She constantly writes to famous women to ask how they got where they are, and for advice for her daughter.
(While this sounds perfectly lovely and like an exception to the constant portrayal of strong women/female protagonists with absent mothers, Flick’s mother is imperfect, and is obviously pushing her daughter into the life she wishes she had had.)
McAllister becomes more and more obsessed with keeping Flick away from the presidency (he’s the advisor who she’d most closely work with) as he sees her thirst and push for the leadership position. While one may be tempted to think his obsession is tied to some kind of revenge for Novotny’s life being ruined, that doesn’t appear to be the case. McAllister asserts that Novotny was in the wrong. Instead, McAllister’s disdain for Flick is rooted in something deeper, something irrational.
Her power–sexual, academic and political–is threatening to him.
He begins a downward spiral of trying to take her down. He recruits a popular young man to run against Flick. In his personal life, he and his wife are having trouble conceiving (most reviews note that he is unable to impregnate his wife, which is an interesting conclusion, considering his infertility is never deemed the culprit, but this assumption is part of the emasculation), and he becomes enamored with Novotny’s ex wife, Linda (McAllister only seems to be stereotypically masculine in her home–mowing the lawn, doing household projects, fixing the drain, etc.). They have sex once, and instead of meeting him at a hotel after work like they plan, she tells Diane McAllister (her friend and his wife) that they’d had sex. He’s kicked out of the house, and continues down the spiral, waiting all night in his car at Linda’s house, where he urinates in the yard (sadly attempting to mark his territory?) the next morning. His right eye, which had been stung by a bee, is swollen shut and he’s an absolute mess. 
McAllister falls apart
His desperate grabs for power–sexually, politically and masculinity–are failures.
McAllister’s small beat-up car, his failed sexual exploits (even watching porn he is inactive and submissive), his dual attempts at control of and utter intimidation by Flick and his desire for affirmation are all indicative of some kind of masculine failure. His discomfort with female power sends his desperate need for control and some kind of stereotypical masculinity that is out of his reach and outdated.  
Other symbols that point to McAllister’s failure are his swollen eye (which can be symbolic of the antichrist in Christian and Islamic scripture), his choice of Pepsi (after Flick points out that Coca-Cola is always the no. 1 cola brand), his continued association with garbage from the beginning of the film to the end and his tiny basement apartment where he ends up after trying–and failing–to rig the election in Paul’s favor.
McAllister doesn’t see himself as a failure, though. His upbeat narration at the end of the film (after he has been fired from his teaching job and goes to New York City, where he’s working as a docent at the American Museum of Natural History) shows that he didn’t quite accept or understand the gravity of his actions. 
As the film cuts to his narration at the end, the image is a neanderthal penis, which pans out to a display at the museum where he works. When he’s introducing his new girlfriend, they are looking at a mirror image of two nude neanderthal figures. This image is indicative of his primal urges of masculinity that have served him so poorly and are so out of date.
Flick wins at the end. While the audience sees her disappointment at Georgetown University (she is still lonely, and has a hard time finding others like her), she’s successful. McAllister sees her in Washington D.C. getting in a limo with a Nebraska senator. While he seems to assume she’s sleeping her way to the top (even though her affair with Novotny didn’t help or hurt her), she appears to be in a professional capacity and secure in her career. She looks fulfilled.
So while we don’t have warm feelings about Flick (her tirades and poster-ripping aren’t character strengths, but they’re realistic), her dedicated hard work–lonely and alienating as it might be–takes her where she wants to be. Her mother and the years of letters of advice from powerful women helped pave her way.
When McAllister sees her, he thinks about her “getting up early to pursue her stupid dreams–I feel sorry for her.” His anger rises, and he thinks, “Who the fuck does she think she is?” before throwing his fast food drink at the limo.
She’s Tracy Flick, that’s who the fuck she thinks she is. And she won.
In a 2009 interview with Tom Perrotta (the author of Election, which was the basis for the screenplay) about the “evolution” of Tracy Flick, he says:
“What I was responding to with Tracy was new: a generation of hard-charging women, the daughters of first-generation feminists and unapologetic achievers. This was the late 80s and early 90s, and they were different than the girls I had grown up with, more willing to compete. The only other cultural reference points for women like that then were movie stars and entertainers. People like Madonna. Who was it going to be in politics? Golda? Indira? Thatcher? By default, there are few female political touchstones.” 
The 2012 election ushered in a record number of women in both the Senate and House of Representatives. There is movement, but the McAllister-like “traditional America” (as pundits mourning the loss of white male America call it) is holding strong. The House GOP recently released its list of committee chairs, all of whom are white men. 
This desperate masculinity can still keep pushing, and like McAllister, sadly try to mark its territory, but the Tracy Flicks will win. 
The very last scene of the film is McAllister giving a museum tour to a group of small schoolchildren. He asks a question, and the only hand raised is a young girl–she shoots her arm up in the air with pride and confidence, and he’s caught off guard, wanting anyone else to answer (just like he does with Flick at the beginning of the film). He may try to keep denying strong females and trying to reduce their power, but as Flick proved, that just won’t work.
Face of determination
Meanwhile, Flick “hardly ever thought about Mr. McAllister… it’s almost like he never existed in the first place.”
While Tracy Flick perhaps isn’t the best role model for young women (see: Leslie Knope), she is not the villain. McAllister, instead, in his desperate grab for control over these powerful young women, is. He just can’t see that through his privilege.

—

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

Damning ‘Ted’ with Faint Praise

Mark Wahlberg and Mila Kunis in Ted.
As I’ve written on Bitch Flicks before, I’m not a fan of Seth MacFarlane’s work. I must admit, when I selected his feature-film debut Ted for my in-flight entertainment during my long trip back to the States for Thanksgiving, I was expecting it to be a diverting “hate watch” that would give me fodder for an easy-to-write negative post for this site, something I could quickly crunch out in between turkey and pie without missing too much family time.
But, alas, I sort of enjoyed Ted. It made me laugh out loud over a dozen times, even though I was watching it through headphones surrounded by hundreds of strangers probably watching The Amazing Spider-Man, and even though every time I laugh at something Seth MacFarlane is responsible for I feel like a hypocrite at best, if not a morally reprehensible enemy of human decency and storytelling itself.
Then again, Ted proves that Seth MacFarlane is capable of presenting jokes within the confines of a meaningful narrative, and of deriving comedy from plot and character interaction instead of meaningless cutaways to pop cultural name-checks. This is a huge step forward for MacFarlane, finally putting him on par with, well, pretty much everyone who has ever told a story or a joke to any level of success, including your Uncle Morris at last night’s dinner when he regaled the family with the tale of how he almost got arrested during last year’s Black Friday.
Unfortunately, the story that Ted tells is an uninspired and sexist Apotovian tale of man-child John (Mark Wahlberg), whose failure to launch into adulthood threatens his relationship with a Good Woman (Mila Kunis). The “twist” is that John’s connections to his immature life of hedonism are represented by his relationship with his lifelong best friend and roommate, Ted (voiced by Seth MacFarlane), a plush teddy bear come to life from a childhood wish. [DO YOU GET IT? John can’t be an adult because of his relationship with a CHILDHOOD TOY.]
Perhaps I’m so enchanted by MacFarlane’s ability to stick to a narrative to begin with because I’m so tremendously BORED with the pedestrian sexism of his chosen narrative. The Man-Child’s struggle to adapt to the demands of his Mature and Responsible Woman who Improbably Tolerates Him is soooooo 2007. There is nothing more to say about the sexism of this trope. I’m falling asleep thinking about it.
Which leaves only semi-positive notes like, hey, that Mark Wahlberg sure is charming, and Mila Kunis really is doing all she can to redeem this crap role; and wow, this CGI is pretty great, at least on a 3-inch screen on an airplane seat back. It’s so astonishing to me that Ted is a competent film it becomes all too easy to dismiss its entirely expected and uninteresting sexism. So I won’t do that. Ted is sexist. But I’m still impressed and surprised that it isn’t entirely terrible.

Why I Love ‘Adventure Time’

Title Screen for Adventure Time
Warning: Spoilers up to the end of Season 3

Adventure Time is a Cartoon Network animated series that combines surrealistic comedy, fantasy and science-fiction. Based on a 2008 short by Pendleton Ward that went viral, it parodies the tropes, archetypes and cliches of fairy tales, video games and childhood action figure battles. The basic premise is about Finn, the last remaining human, and his best friend/adoptive brother Jake (a shape-shifting dog), going on your typical slay-the-monster-save-the-princess adventures. Now in its fourth season, it’s an enormous hit with all genders and age groups and shows no signs of slowing down. And let me tell you, as a feminist, why I am absolutely celebrating this show.

The main cast of Adventure Time
  • Almost every female character is a princess, but the typical cliche Damsel In Distress and/or romance-obsessed girly-girl are parodied and subverted for all they’re worth. In several instances, the princess characters (Bubblegum especially) show little interest in romance, and far more interest in their own personal hobbies. Even more encouraging is that often the female characters are completely able to rescue themselves, and don’t need Finn & Jake’s help.
  • The characters are given genuine honest-to-goodness flaws. Finn is heroic, but has a terrible bad temper and an impulsive streak. Jake is easygoing, but not nearly as clever or level-headed as he thinks he is. Princess Bubblegum is a scientific genius, but can be incredibly callous about the feelings of others. Marceline is a talented musician, but also has deep insecurities about how her friends perceive her. Flame Princess is astoundingly powerful, but also has dangerously passionate emotions. In all of these cases, there’s no black and white morality. It’s an important lesson for children (since this is a children’s show) to present morality as it really is – in shades of grey.
  • I love all the female characters, including the gender flipped versions of Finn and Jake, Fionna and Cake. My main complaint with the series is that the female characters don’t appear nearly often enough, and especially not together. We eventually do get some Bechdel Test passing goodness (Bubblegum and Marceline don’t get along too well – and people have naturally interpreted this as sexual tension) but so far the three main female characters have not yet all appeared in the same story together. I suspect that the main reason for this is because each story is about 11-12 minutes in total, and there’s only so much time for introducing characters and conflicts.
Jake stretching around the other main cast members
  • Speaking of Fionna and Cake, I can see now why that episode is so astoundingly popular amongst the fandom. It’s easily my favourite one of the series. Fionna is an absolutely adorable character – slightly chubby instead of unrealistically slender, tomboyish instead of traditionally feminine, and she still retains her male counterpart’s bravery and heroicism. She still fights with a sword. For my fellow gamers, think of all the games you’ve played in which a female character is a sword fighter. Not very many, right? But there’s no reason they can’t, and this is one thing I really love about the gender flip episode. I also practically exploded with joy at the final scene where Fionna talks about how she has lots of guy friends, but isn’t interested in/isn’t ready to date them, and that there’s nothing wrong with that. THANK YOU. It’s incredibly frustrating how many people think that somehow something is missing if you don’t have an official romantic partner, or that men and women can’t have a platonic friendship. Shippers could do well to remember this – you can like someone without wanting to bang them. (Also, as a Sailor Moon fan, you can’t imagine my joy at seeing Fionna’s ballgown homage to Princess Serenity’s outfit) At any rate, I hope the Gender Swap episodes happen on a regular basis, rather than a once-a-season deal. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had more shows about an ass-kicking girl and her feline best friend? (*coughcoughSailorMooncoughcough*)
  • This is a fairly obvious point, but I really love how Princess Bubblegum’s interest in science is depicted. She’s an absolute genius – shattering the still pervasive stereotype that the sciences are the domain of men – and she also bucks the stereotype that nerdy/geeky people are unable to have fun or to relate to others. Similarly, Marceline’s interest in punk/indie rock also combats the stereotype that rock is a genre made by and for the enjoyment of men. Girls like to headbang too!
  • The Christmas special, which reveals that pseudo-antagonist Ice King was actually a human antique dealer driven insane by his find of a magic crown, is an interesting way of approaching and explaining his very archetypal tendency to kidnap and try to marry princesses. In the Ice King’s case, it’s not so much a wanting to stick to traditional fairy tale gender roles, but a manifestation of his grief over losing the fiance he used to nickname “Princess.” The Ice King is primarily a comic character, but this episode finally established him as being tragic.
Fionna and Cake
  • I appreciated that, for once, romantic tensions are resolved rather than dragged on, and on, and on, and on. They make it clear that while Princess Bubblegum likes Finn as a person, she feels she’s too old for him, and her sometimes callous treatment of his feelings proves that she isn’t the right partner for him. Flame Princess isn’t the perfect girlfriend either, but at least in their case, Finn and Flame got together very quickly, changing the romantic plotline from “Will they or won’t they?” to “What happens now they’ve got together?” I also like that Jake and Lady Rainicorn’s relationship is loving, positive, literally interracial, and well…adult. (Lady Rainicorn’s dialogue is only in Korean, and bilingual viewers have revealed she says some incredibly raunchy things that only Jake can understand)
  • In the “Memory of a Memory” episode, Marceline’s (ex) boyfriend tries to bully her into traditional gender roles. He even pulls the “Go back in the kitchen and make me a sandwich” bit. She finds out he tried to trick her, and kicks his ass. (Also, dear men who think this joke is funny: Wow. You’re original. YES I AM GOING TO GO IN THE KITCHEN AND I’M GOING TO MAKE LOTS OF DELICIOUS FOOD WHICH YOU CAN’T HAVE.)
  • In some ways, other than Marceline, Lumpy Space Princess is my favourite character. She is absolutely hilarious as a sassy valley girl type who, by most accounts, should not be as confident about her body and her sexiness as she “should” be. After all, she’s literally a purple ball of lumps. But this is an important message – you DON’T have to match cultural standards of beauty to be sexy. It’s all about confidence. I’m a fatass, and I’m friggin’ sexy if I do say so myself. And in her own way, LSP is sexy too. At least to fellow Space Lumps.
Finn
  • The show just keeps getting better every season. The quality of animation has spiked, the character arcs are realistic and well-defined, and the storylines are mature without losing their comedic edge. I’m absolutely hooked on this series, and it’s a refreshing feeling that this year, along with Gravity Falls, I got to watch some great new children’s shows that deserve every bit of praise they receive.
  • Lastly, I love the sense of humour in the show. I’ve always been a fan of surrealism, as well as referential humour. And I’m also a big fan of fart jokes, like the one where Jake morphs himself into a farting cheetah. I’m 25 years old, and fart jokes are still funny.

Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.

Summer Blockbusters Prove Women (Not Surprisingly) Enjoy Laughing and Gawking from Their Own Perspective

The Significance of Bridesmaids and Magic Mike in a Sea of Masculinity

Not this.


In Christopher Hitchens’s infamous essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” he points to a Stanford study that rated men and women’s reactions to cartoons on a “funniness” scale. The study found many similarities between men and women’s responses, but also found some marked differences. The author of the original report said, “Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon… So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it.”

When people–especially an entire group of people–have low expectations, and don’t expect “reward” from their entertainment, certainly this is the set-up of a self-fulfilling prophecy, leaving women pegged as unfunny, unable to get jokes, and generally un-stimulated by what the normal audience (men) is stimulated by. Hollywood has been working under that framework for too long, and women have learned to expect that men’s stories are the norm, and women’s stories are just for women.

However, two summer blockbusters–Bridesmaids in 2011 and Magic Mike in 2012–have proven that when women are rewarded, they are indeed pleased. 

While one can easily find wider representation in art house movie theaters, commercial, blockbuster films for the masses have long been entrenched in a sexist Hollywood boys’ club. While these commercial films had flaws, the audience support and huge profits should teach Hollywood a lesson about what women want.


Bridesmaids broke the mold of the R-rated comedy genre by being about women and from a woman’s point of view. While raunchy, raucous comedies about men and men’s stories have been dominating the big screen for years, a modern counterpart with a female protagonist was an anomaly until Bridesmaids. Judd Apatow, baron of bromance, asked Kristen Wiig for script ideas, and she and her writing partner Annie Mumolo created Bridesmaids, and Apatow produced it.

Bridesmaids featured a female protagonist and told a uniquely female story, while still attracting and entertaining male audiences.


Before the film was released, many were pushing going to see it on opening weekend as a “social responsibility,” as box-office activists knew that the numbers had to be there for studio executives to trust that a blockbuster from a woman’s point of view can work and be profitable. And it was. Bridesmaids went on to become Apatow’s highest-grossing film, and the top R-rated female comedy ever.

Within weeks, female comedy was said to have made a “comeback,” and there was already talk of a sequel. Certainly money talks, but audiences–men and women–genuinely found the film hilarious and engaging.

Kristen Wiig co-wrote the film.

Melissa Silverstein, in her piece “Why Bridesmaids Matters,” noted the high stakes of the film. In an interview after the film was a solid success, Silverstein said, when asked what the “promised land” might look like after Bridesmaids’ success, “We have been in the desert for so long that we don’t even know what the promised land looks like. Women have been so beaten down that they are happy with one success and are looking to build from there… If women could figure out how to band together and make more films a success, maybe the promised land will be in view sooner rather than later.”

Female audiences were desperate for this kind of a film. As the campaigns for opening-weekend attendance showed, the expectations weren’t even that high, but the fight for more female comedies lured audiences in. The fact that it was entertaining was a plus.

A little over a year later, (heterosexual) women flocked to their local theaters in droves to see what they hoped would be naked, grinding, gyrating men on the big screen. But wait–just as women aren’t supposed to be funny, they certainly aren’t supposed to flaunt sexual desire (and women aren’t visually stimulated, right?). Wrong again. Steven Soderbergh built it, and women came.

Magic Mike proved the female gaze is alive and well.


The marketing leading up to the film’s release didn’t always focus on drawing in women with butts and thrusts. Up until a few weeks before the release, the trailer was selling a familiar rom-com. Then came the international and red band trailers, which left the internet buzzing with anticipation for the film.

In its first weekend, the film made seven times its production budget, and women-dominated audiences crowded theaters. In what, anecdotally, is a perfect description of the audience, Dodai Stewart wrote at Jezebel that “they were positively giddy about seeing some naked dudes.”

The most common complaint by women about the film is that there was too much story. They wanted more stripping. What was that about what women want?

Many audience members were disappointed that there wasn’t more stripping.

Just as there was a collective outburst of laughter last summer, this summer brought audiences to a collective climax, proving to Hollywood that women aren’t just in the game to watch The Notebook or accompany their boyfriends to see Transformers. Women as audiences have agency and want women’s stories and men’s bodies just as much as men want men’s stories and women’s bodies. For too long, women have had to settle for what men want (or are presumed to want). 

In a recent conversation in The New York Times, critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis bring up the success of the two films. Scott says to Dargis: 
“You note that Magic Mike owes much of its box office potency to its popularity with women. As you suggested in your review it’s a ‘woman’s picture’ in two potentially radical ways. It caters to the kind of visual pleasure — the delight in ogling beautiful bodies in motion — that film theorists have long associated with the male gaze. And it tells what would have been, in an earlier era, the story of a woman, a good-hearted, hard-working striver selling sex appeal, pursuing dreams and looking for true love in difficult circumstances. The stuff of classic melodrama but with a hard-bodied hero in place of the softhearted heroine… Last summer the power of the female audience — and also perhaps the renewed willingness of male moviegoers to seek out stories about women — was demonstrated by the success of Bridesmaids… But something feels different about this year, and it may just be that such movies feel less anomalous, less like out-riders in a male-dominated entertainment universe. The ground may have shifted a little.”

Dargis answers, “Only if there’s enough money… The successes are promising, but I am going to wait until the numbers improve before I celebrate.”

As Dargis notes, we must not celebrate too quickly. Are these films perfect specimens of feminist film? Of course not. Both are entirely heteronormative. Bridesmaids‘ gross-out scenes felt clunky and out of sync (Apatow “retooled” some of Wiig/Mumolo’s script in places), and it didn’t pass the Bechdel test with flying colors.  The first nudity the audience sees in Magic Mike are Olivia Munn’s breasts (this male blogger, giving straight men reasons to go see it, includes all of the female nudity and the fact that it’s told from a man’s perspective). Magic Mike is largely told from a male gaze (men created and filmed it); it’s simply that the female gaze pushed and forced itself into the room. It also relies on the tired story line that women just want to save or fix men.

But for now, the promised land looks a little closer. Perhaps the success of these films is a mirage in the desert, but we can hope that a new age of blockbuster films awaits us–one where women’s stories are told as simply stories, and women’s sexuality is celebrated. For too long, women have been cast aside as objects, as accessories. They are ready to be the subjects. If ticket sales mean anything, which we know they do, Hollywood should take note.

—

Leigh Kolb is an instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. She teaches composition, literature, and journalism courses. While working on her MFA in creative nonfiction writing, Leigh was the editor of a small-town newspaper. In her academic and professional life, she’s always gravitated toward the history and literature of the oppressed, and wants to see their stories properly inserted into our cultural dialogue. She believes that critically analyzing popular media is an important step in opening those conversations. Leigh lives on a small farm with her husband, dogs, cat and flock of chickens.

Movie Riffing: A White Man’s World

Last week, there was a RiffTrax live event all across the country. If you’re not familiar with RiffTrax, it’s what some of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew do now. If you’re not familiar with MST3K, well, you’re in for a (possibly life-changing) treat.
In all of its iterations – MST3K, the Film Crew, Cinematic Titanic, RiffTrax – the basic premise is the same: comedians watch movies and make fun of them. It’s a premise so simple, yet so relentlessly compelling, that it’s no wonder the eight main performers from MST3K are all still involved in the movie-riffing business, nearly 24 years after the show first premiered.
As well as releasing DVDs, video-on-demand downloads, and downloadable audio commentaries, both Cinematic Titanic and RiffTrax regularly perform live shows. In the case of last week’s event, the RiffTrax crew mocked MST3K stalwart (and current #4 movie in the IMDb Bottom 100) Manos: The Hands of Fate with all new jokes from a theater in Nashville, broadcasting the event to movie theaters nationally. It was a terrific good time – and if you missed it, never fear: it’s happening again in October, this time with a movie even dearer to my heart, the gloriously incompetent Birdemic: Shock and Terror– but, as devoted a fan as I am of these guys and their hilarious work, I am troubled by one thing:
They are almost all white dudes.
RiffTrax: funny white men.
Cinematic Titanic is composed of four white men and one white woman. RiffTrax comprises three white men and occasionally guest stars such as “Weird Al” Yankovic, Joel McHale, or Neil Patrick Harris.
Why is the movie-riffing business so white? Why is it so male? (Why is it so straight and cis?)
Of course, MST3K got its start in the late eighties in the Midwest, so that might explain why it was very white and mostly male. But it’s now 2012, and I live in the Bay Area. When I saw the RiffTrax live show at SF Sketchfest in January, the guest riffers were David Cross, Bruce McCulloch, Eugene Mirman, and Paul F. Tompkins. All very funny people whose work I enjoy enormously; all white men.
MST3K / Cinematic Titanic: mostly funny white men.
The broader problem, of course, is that the mainstream comedy world is still profoundly white-male-centric. Women and people of color are still tokenized on The Daily Show. Popular sitcoms like Two and Half Men and The Big Bang Theory are squarely focused on the white male experience, while shows that attempt diversity get it appallinglywrong. Even my beloved Community is a show created by and centering on a white man.
And who are the comedians who get their own basic-cable TV shows? Stephen Colbert. Russell Brand. Louis C.K. Daniel Tosh. W. Kamau Bell (which gives me some hope; are you watching Totally Biased? You should be!). The people who don’t get their own TV shows are Maria Bamford, Kristen Wiig, Margaret Cho (well, she once had a show, but let’s not talk about that).
OH MY GOD GIVE HER A SHOW ALREADY
 Of course, the success of 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation has spawned a number of sitcoms with female protagonists, but there still seems to be an entrenched cultural opposition to most feministcomedy. We feminists tend to put the weight of impossible expectations on any comedy that looks to be even the slightest bit feminist – remember how much of the discourse around Bridesmaids last year was centered on the notion that this movie provided proof positive now-and-forever-amen that women could be funny? Or the phenomenal outpouring of commentary this year on Girls? – and, with every passing internet-comedy twitstorm, it becomes clearer that we need to keep having this immensely frustrating conversation, assuring the wider world that comedy can indeed be both feminist and funny. The self-styled defenders of free speech, who seem to think that critique is the same as censorship, excuse the ugliest and most offensive jokes as fair game. Our best way of combating that is to keep proving that you can fight for justice andbe funny at the same time.
And I think movie riffing could be a very good way of doing this. It’s become a bit of a truism that riffing is at its best when it comes from a place of some genuine affection for the material being mocked, when it’s “funny and clever and occasionally a little more generous … not just too mean-spirited and sour.” MST3K and its successors are great because they’re made by people who love movies. The jokes express a sincere wish for the movie under scrutiny to be good.
In the same way, feminist pop-culture commentary isn’t just about slaying all fun so that we can all be miserable subjects of the fiefdom of Nofunnington. It’s a sincere cry for things to be better, a way of telling humankind: You can be better than this.
MST3K improved my critical analysis of film and TV. Feminist commentary improved my critical analysis of the kyriarchy, the myriad -isms woven throughout our culture. If there was a more overtly feminist-slanted, equally hilarious movie-riffing team, you can bet that I would be their biggest fan.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Stephanie‘s Picks:

Comic-Con 2012: Sexism in Hollywood: How Far Have We Come? by Lucas Shaw via The Wrap

Will Catwoman Be a Breakout Feminist Character? by Melissa Silverstein via Women and Hollywood

“Nice Guys” Contribute to Rape Culture by Ben Atherton-Zeman via Ms. Magazine

Women in Film by the Numbers via Reel Grrls (from Pinterest)

From ‘The Lion King’ to ‘Brave,’ Making Mothers Matter in Pop Culture by Alyssa Rosenberg via ThinkProgress

Bear, Bow, And Boy: Queering Pixar’s “Brave” by Rainicorn via Gay Christian Geek

Megan‘s Picks:

If Women Ran Hollywood by Martha Lauzen via Women’s Media Center

All the Funny Ladies: What the Emmy Nominations Tell Us About a Year of Women in Comedy by Alyssa Rosenberg via Slate’s XX Factor 

Considering the Rape Culture by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville 

‘Political Animals’ and Women’s Power Fantasies by Alyssa Rosenberg via ThinkProgress

Louis C.K. on Daniel Tosh’s Rape Joke: Are Comedy and Feminism Enemies?  by Jennifer L. Pozner via The Daily Beast

Filmmakers Find Surprises at an Islamic School for Girls in Syria by Amy DePaul via Women’s Media Center

A New Sleeping Beauty Adaptation Will Feature a Stalker Take on the Classic Tale by Alanna Bennett via The Mary Sue 

‘Brave’ Part II: The Radical Re-Writing of the Mother-Daughter Relationship by Didion via Feminema 

The Savior and the Vandal: Jerusalem Film Festival and Religious Fundamentalism: [the vandalism of women’s images] by Kyna Morgan via Her Film

Dear, Aaron Sorkin: Someone Please Fix You by Sasha Stone via Women and Hollywood   

What have you been reading this week? Tell us in the comments!

Daniel Tosh and Rape Culture: The Roundup

Daniel Tosh

Serious Trigger Warning for discussions of rape, rape culture, and sexual assault. 

———-

Last Thursday, Megan wrote a piece about the recent Daniel Tosh clusterfuck–“Dear Daniel Tosh: You Know What’s Even Less Funny Than Rape Jokes? Rape Threats“–in which she discusses “his misogynistic douchebaggery as he verbally attacked a female audience member.”

She writes:

But just in case you haven’t [heard] or if you need a refresher, the woman called Tosh out amidst his performance at The Laugh Factory. Here’s what the woman told her friend who posted it on her blog which has now gone viral:
“So Tosh then starts making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc. I don’t know why he was so repetitive about it but I felt provoked because I, for one, DON’T find them funny and never have. So I didnt appreciate Daniel Tosh (or anyone!) telling me I should find them funny. So I yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”
“I did it because, even though being “disruptive” is against my nature, I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman. I don’t sit there while someone tells me how I should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape.
“After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…”
Wow. What. The. Fuck. Rape jokes are never funny. Ever. Making a rape joke is bad enough. But attacking an audience member who calls bullshit on said rape joke?? Calling for her to be gang raped?? Horrifying and disgusting.
———-

Pretty much! We’ve written about the perpetuation of rape culture in the past, specifically after the New York Times essentially blamed an eleven-year-old girl for her own gang rape:
And we’ve noticed a few things here and there: rape being played for laughs in Observe and Report; the sexual trafficking of women used as a plot device in Taken; the constant dismemberment of women in movie posters; the damaging caricatures of women as sex objects in Black Snake Moan and The Social Network; and we’ve often pointed to discussions of sexism and misogyny around the net, like the sexual violence in Antichrist and, most recently, the sexualized corpses of women in Kanye West’s Monster video. It barely grazes the surface. I mean, it barely grazes the fucking surface of what a viewer sees during the commercial breaks of a 30-minute sitcom.

Yet, this constant, unchecked barrage of endless and obvious woman-hating undoubtedly contributes to the rape of women and girls.

The sudden idealization of Charlie Sheen as some bad boy to be envied, even though he has a violent history of beating up women, contributes to the rape of women and girls. Bills like H. R. 3 that seek to redefine rape and further the attack on women’s reproductive rights contributes to the rape of women and girls. Supposed liberal media personalities like Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann showing their support for Julian Assange by denigrating Assange’s alleged rape victims contributes to the rape of women and girls. The sexist commercials that advertisers pay millions of dollars to air on Super Bowl Sunday contribute to the rape of women and girls. And blaming Lara Logan for her gang rape by suggesting her attractiveness caused it, or the job was too dangerous for her, or she shouldn’t have been there in the first place, contributes to the rape of women and girls.  

It contributes to rape because it normalizes violence against women. Men rape to control, to overpower, to humiliate, to reinforce the patriarchal structure. And the media, which is vastly controlled by men, participates in reproducing already existing prejudices and inequalities, rather than seeking to transform them.
And it pisses me off.

Allow me to add the Daniel Tosh Rape Threat Controversy to the list. 

Below you’ll find a slew of excerpted articles written by feminists who oppose Tosh’s “joke” … and the controversy doesn’t seem to be letting up anytime soon. Stay tuned for updates, and please leave any links I’ve missed — or links to any pieces you’ve written — in the comments.

———-

Daniel Tosh Is a Rape Culture Enforcer by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville

There isn’t much I can say about this, at least nothing I haven’t already said literally hundreds of times before in every conceivable way I can imagine: Rape jokes are not funny. They potentially trigger survivors, and they uphold the rape culture. They tacitly convey approval of rape to rapists, who do not appreciate “rape irony.” There is no neutral in rape culture, and jokes that diminish or normalize rape empower rapists. Rape jokes are pro-rape.
Shakesville has written extensively about this. You can find more of McEwan’s commentary under the tag Toshgate.

 
Male Comics: Stop Enabling Rape Culture by Molly Jane Knefel via Salon

Indeed, like one of those terrifying millipedes, this controversy gave birth to a thousand little baby controversies once it was opened up. It has led to conversations about if and how rape jokes can ever be funny; it has illuminated Tosh’s history of laughing at violence against women; it has called attention to the horrifying statistic that one in four women has experienced sexual assault, and that those women are in the audiences of comedy shows. It’s made some question whether it is ever right — or only right — for women like Sarah Silverman to make these jokes. It has also prompted comics to defend satire, to defend setups, to explain why interrupting a comic mid-joke is disrespectful and to remember all the terrible things they have said to hecklers to shut them down. But there is one really important controversy that we cannot let get away from the comedians: Why are there so many rape jokes in the first place?
This is about whether comedy, and the world at large really, will allow women to push back against rape culture. This woman felt uncomfortable with Tosh’s rape comments because we live in a world where rape is expected, and she doesn’t find that funny. Tosh’s response, and the responses of his colleagues, aren’t about defending rape jokes—we live in a society where, unfortunately, they don’t need defending—they’re about shutting this woman up. They’re about maintaining the status quo—the one where men are allowed to rape women who talk back, who dress like sluts, who “ask for it”—at all costs, even if it means threatening someone with gang rape. If she tries to fight back then she just doesn’t get it. And if others call out this behavior, then they don’t get it either.
When Rape Jokes Are Never Funny by Meghan O’Keefe via Huffington Post
If this is what Tosh wanted to do artistically, then, well, he has every right as a comedian to do so. The fact that he backpedaled on the joke on twitter however suggests that he doesn’t want to be seen as that kind of comic. Again, Tosh wants to be liked. He wants to be popular, and so we circle back to the fact that the problem isn’t Daniel Tosh. The problem is that our society is still a rape culture where a large percentage of people think that rape’s OK and that a girl in a short skirt is asking for it and that it’s funny to assault someone. Not for the sake of satire, but for one person’s amusement over another person’s real life victimization.
Do You Laugh at Rape Jokes? by Soraya Chemaly via Fem2.0
Culture is why Tosh is just a symptom. He’s simply doing what works to generate a small fortune, capture six million Twitter followers and be a number one rated comedian. That’s why this isn’t a First Amendment problem but one of market demand. The First Amendment gives people the right to make rape jokes and this right is critical and non-negotiable. But, it doesn’t obligate comedians to tell these jokes, nor does it obligate others to pay to hear them because they find them entertaining. That’s a matter of our culture and what is considered the current norm for human decency and empathy. Tosh in this way is no different from Facebook – which chose to keep rape joke pages up (in violation of its own guidelines prohibiting hate speech, if they apply to women) but removed a picture of an asexualized woman walking down the street topless in NY for being obscene. I’m not letting him off the hook, though. He has no (meaningless) corporate guidelines to follow, but he has an ethical choice about the jokes he makes and how he makes them.  Rape jokes aren’t simply R-rated antics.

Yes, many comedians take life’s tragedies and make fun of them; they use humor as a way of coping with the awful things that happen to people. It’s actually similar to my own defense that bringing the funny into feminism and social justice makes it all the more accessible and fun, and can be a way for us to collectively laugh at the injustice that we have to deal with on a daily basis.
What Tosh did was not that.

But would it be funny if this girl got gang raped right this moment, like right now right now? That’s not a joke. It’s an invitation. It’s a celebration of a violent crime, which is itself another violation. It’s not a way to cope. It’s a “this is something we can do and then laugh about it, no big deal.” When you reiterate these half-truths (there are girls in the world getting raped by like five guys right now), they authenticate themselves, as if by magic. To promote the insidious—“rape is hilarious”—is to join the crime at its own filthy level.
Anatomy of a Successful Rape Joke by Jessica Valenti via The Nation
Those supporting Tosh are outraged that anyone would dare tell a comedian how to be funny. (There’s also been a lot of “if you can’t take the heat” sentiment aimed at this woman, given that she heckled Tosh.) Many of his defenders insist that his joke—and other jokes about rape—are simply edgy and controversial, which is what a comedian is supposed to be.
But here’s the thing: threatening women with rape, making light of rape, and suggesting that women who speak up be raped is not edgy or controversial. It’s the norm. This is what women deal with every day. Maintaining the status quo around violence against women isn’t exactly revolutionary.
How to Make a Rape Joke by Lindy West via Jezebel
That said, a comedy club is not some sacred space. It’s a guy with a microphone standing on a stage that’s only one foot above the ground. And the flip-side of that awesome microphone power you have—wow, you can seriously say whatever you want!—is that audiences get to react to your words however we want. The defensive refrains currently echoing around the internet are, “You just don’t get it—comedians need freedom. That’s how comedy gets made. If you don’t want to be offended, then stay out of comedy clubs.” (Search for “comedians,” “freedom,” “offended,” and “comedy clubs” on Twitter if you don’t believe me.) You’re exactly right. That is how comedy gets made. So CONSIDER THIS YOUR FUCKING FEEDBACK. Ninety percent of your rape material is not working, and you can tell it’s not working because your audience is telling you that they hate those jokes. This is the feedback you asked for.

And I know that when it comes to subjects as complex as rape, using exceptions can seem like slippery logic. That if we let one slip, then another, we might end up right back where we started. That “good” jokes and “bad” jokes seem too subjective, too flimsy a compass in which to measure.
But we also forget that anger is not the only response to social injustice. That we are also allowed to–and desperately need–a space of our own to talk back to it, make fun of it, not let it get to us.
I think the point of Lindy West’s article, in the end, is that when it comes to comedy, context is everything. With it, we have the most dangerous and clever kind of power. And without it, we have, well–Tosh.
Many online observers were quick to criticize Tosh’s comments but comedians were just as quick to back him up.
Alex Edelman, a professional stand-up comedian based in New York, told the Guardian: “I find rape to be a really serious topic, but on the other hand I think a comedian should be allowed to say almost whatever he wants and that the audience should be able to manifest their dislike in the form of not laughing at something if they find it offensive.”

Daniel Tosh Jokes About Seeing a Heckler Get Gang Raped by Alyssa Rosenberg via Think Progress
A good comedian is an alchemist who can turn heckling into a transformative extended riff. Here it sounds like Tosh just doubled down on the same points he was making rather than actually responding, or providing an example of a rape joke that his heckler might find funny, undermining her objection. As I’ve written before, I think there is a case to be made that rape jokes that make fun of perpetrators can be very funny. Tosh didn’t go there, though. He just took the quickest route to run his heckler out of the club, and in using an image of her getting raped to mock and intimidate her, kind of made her point instead of his own. If rape was just hilarious and uproarious and trivial, it wouldn’t be a very effective rhetorical or literal weapon. Tosh isn’t just failing at civility here. He’s being a bad comedian.

We’ve had a lot of conversation on this blog about the way Daniel Tosh handled a woman who told him rape jokes weren’t funny at a recent show. There are a lot of threads to parse here—how people handle heckling (and how clubs should handle them)*, whether rape jokes can be funny under any circumstances, why comedians close ranks around their own. But I want to separate those issues out and talk very specifically about another strain of argument. One thread of conversation here has suggested that the woman who related her story was wrong, or oversensitive to feel threatened when Tosh suggested it would be funny if she were gang raped. The idea behind those objections is that no one would ever act based on Tosh’s words, and that because there isn’t a real prospect of her being actually assaulted, there is no impact to his words. This is wrong on two levels.

Comedian Daniel Tosh and the Culture of Rape in America by Beth via Veracity Stew

So, while comedians like Tosh shrug this off and say, It was just a joke, I will say, this isn’t a laughing matter anymore — not that it ever was — especially in a climate where women are being vilified and degraded for standing up for their most basic of rights, and to defend Daniel Tosh and his comments based solely on the fact that he’s a comedian, is unacceptable and inexcusable.
  • 44% of rape victims are under the age of 18
  • 80% are under the age of 30
  • Every two minutes, a person is raped in the U.S.
  • Each year, 207,754 victims are raped
  • 54% of sexual assaults are not reported to police
  • 97% of rapists will never spend a day in jail
These victims are mothers and daughters, sisters and wives, best friends and colleagues…in short, someone you may know and love. And you can rest assured that they probably will not see the “humor” in their plight.
When that woman stood up and said, “No, rape is not funny,” she did not consent to participating in a culture that encourages lax attitudes toward sexual violence and the concerns of women. Rape humor is what encourages a man to feel comfortable tweeting to Daniel Tosh, “the only ppl who are mad at you are the feminist bitches who never get laid and hope they get raped so they can get laid,” which is one of the idiotic, Pavlovian responses a certain kind of person has when women have the nerve to suggest that they don’t find sexual violence amusing. In that man’s universe, women who get properly laid are totally fine with rape humor. A satisfied vagina is a balm in Gilead.
Three Points About Rape Jokes and Rape Culture by Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre via Feministing
These “little” things add up—maybe it’s a rape joke at the comedy club, plus a newspaper op-ed blaming the victim, plus a music video turning women into objects, plus a fellow student saying “that test raped me,” plus movies or TV shows that glamorize the “tough anti-hero taking what he wants without apology,” plus a family culture of silence and shame around sex, plus a police force who just goes through the motions when it comes to investigating or working to prevent sexual assault, plus a million other things—it’s a tsunami of shit. And you can add to it, or you can fight against it.
The “Context” of Daniel Tosh’s Rape Joke by Imran Siddiquee via MissRepresentation
Imagine you’re in a country where people are still consistently assaulted for having dark skin. In this context you suggest that the lighter skinned people in the room whip a brown man into submission after he complains that jokes about darker people being persecuted aren’t funny. Might this make us uncomfortable? Probably, because when the brown man steps out into the real night outside the comedy club, there is a good chance he could actually get beaten and murdered. There’s also a history of this kind of violence actually happening around the world.
Does the “right” to joke about anything trump the realities of the place in which those jokes are being made?
Or imagine you are a heterosexual comedian in present-day Senegal (where being homosexual is illegal and gay men are often killed for being gay), speaking in front of an audience that includes people of various sexual preferences, and you make a joke about how killing gay people is always funny. And then a person in the audience shouts back “I’m gay and I don’t think it’s always funny.” And you proceed to say, hey, what if we beat up that gay guy right now? Wouldn’t that be hilarious?

I Know Funny and Rape Jokes Are NOT. by Cristy Cardinal via UpRoot
As we would expect, his defensiveness is couched in “It’s just a joke” and the “I make fun of everyone” and “You’re too sensitive” rhetoric that is the stock in trade of hurtful comedians who want license to tell tired jokes that weren’t funny the first time they were told 100 years ago, but make people slightly uncomfortable so they must be saying something important.  Comedians like Tosh compare themselves to guys like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, who said “offensive” things all the time.  The difference, however, is that Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor were exposing the truth of our culture as wrong and in need of redirection, and comedians like Tosh merely reflect back the worst of us in a bald-faced and uncritical way.  The way Tosh tells a racist joke venerates the racism, the way Pryor talked about racism made us aware that racism hurt people (while making us laugh).  There’s an ocean of difference in that.
Still Here by Cristy Cardinal via UpRoot
Daniel Tosh tried to make joke out of rape, and when someone protested, he shut her down with a threat of rape, which was not a joke but actual violence.  When I, as well as other feminist bloggers, spoke up in support of this woman, we were threatened with rape to shut us down.  It is ironic (and not in the cute hipster irony, but in the real deal kind), that the complaint many of Tosh’s supporters are making is that we are trampling on his creative process or freedom of expression by expecting him to be a decent human being.  And they are using violent and cruel rape rhetoric to try to get us to shut up.  We can’t use our freedom of speech to say, “What Daniel Tosh said crossed the line, and here’s why” but he, and his supporters, can use their freedom of speech to annihilate our humanity.  IRONY!
For Daniel Tosh, Actually Assaulting Women Is Comedy by Angus Johnston via Student Activism
What this confirms is that the whole Tosh thing isn’t about jokes. Tosh isn’t just a guy who tells stories on stage. He’s a guy whose comedy includes actually physically assaulting women, and directing his fans to do the same. And this is the guy who, after a woman challenged his rape jokes, mused aloud about how funny it would be if she “got raped by like, five” of those same fans, right then and there.
“Right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?”
Damn.
Tosh uses some classic tricks to apologize, without really apologizing.

Trick One: I was misquoted. Tosh seeks to relieve himself of any responsibility, since, hey, he didn’t even say it.

Trick Two: I was the victim. Tosh seeks to undermins his apology by defending the point that started the entire interaction. He did nothing wrong but defend himself of a heinous violation–heckling! This is a weak apology at best and a passive aggressive dig at worst.

Does he really think people will not see the trickery he is employing to NOT apologize but say he is? Well, if he does, he’s right, because the media has reported his non-apology as the real thing.

Dear Comedians, and People Like Me Who Think They’re Comedians: Please Stop by Jonnie Marbles via Anarch*ish*

What made me stop telling rape jokes? I wish it had been what my sister told me, I wish I’d stopped that day instead of spending around a year loftily telling women why words couldn’t hurt them, that they should lighten up and that they didn’t get it. At first I felt I had to keep telling the jokes – had to! – simply because someone didn’t want me to. Otherwise I wasn’t being true to my art. It would be self-censorship. Comedians had to be free to say anything. Most importantly, how could I stay friends with the godawful, cowardly dickheads who told these jokes on a nightly basis if I turned around and said I wouldn’t? Sooner or later, though, I just couldn’t. Perhaps it was the jaw locking, knuckle clenching effect these jokes were having on the friends I brought along to shows. I’d sit next to them in the audience, see their discomfort, their disgust and realise I was doing the exact same thing up there, whether I knew it or not. Perhaps it was realising just how rarely rape is reported, and how making fun of it makes that less likely still.
Calculating by scatx [Note: this post contains discussions of rape culture via Twitter]
What it’s like to be a woman living in rape culture. OR why I tweeted about the Tosh situation for 24 hours.
You can’t watch TV without being subjected to a rape joke. You can’t listen to the radio. You can’t browse Twitter trending topics. You can’t walk down the street without some jackass asking you, “Do I look like a rapist?” through his t-shirt. (And the answer is yes, yes you do.)
People use “rape” to describe how they were ripped off, or talk about “raping” the replay button on YouTube.
And you can’t discuss any of these cultural artifacts without people painting the purveyors of this brand of comedy in a golden, harmless light, while erasing the experiences of millions upon millions of sexual assault survivors—most of whom never report their assaults for fear of not being taken seriously. Hmm, now how can that be?

What Tosh and people supporting him don’t seem to get is that it’s not about freedom of speech or censorship or what’s funny and what’s not. Although I still contend rape jokes aren’t funny. But what’s really at the core of this situation is how we trivialize and disregard people’s pain, trauma and wounds. 1 in 4 women are raped. As I said before, Tosh crossed the line the moment he disregarded that woman’s concerns, asserted his male privilege and tried to humiliate her with a rape threat.
So why am I posting all these negative tweets? Is it just to call people out? Yes. But what’s more important is when we look at them as a collective. Then you begin to see just how prevalent and insidious rape culture truly is.
Tosh, you are currently at an amazing and terrible moment in your career. It’s terrible for (hopefully by now) obvious reasons. It could be amazing because at this moment, you have the opportunity to apologize (in a version that’s longer than 140 characters) and also to make an example of your situation and stop being offensive in your humor. You can show the world and comedians that there are more complex, interesting, and (ultimately) better ways to make someone laugh than by being offensive. And you can do it while people are watching and waiting to hear from you in the fallout of this event.

Good Comedy and Bad Comedy by Lauren Kay Gilmore via The Eternal Sunshine of the Scholastic Mind
Molly Ivins once said “Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful… when satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel — it’s vulgar.”

I stand behind that 100%. Humor in the hands of a bully is just much less appealing than humor used to point out how ridiculous the bully is being. It may technically still be humor, and it may still be the Constitutional right of that bully to make those jokes, but thinking that a bully’s jokes aren’t funny doesn’t make me a stick in the mud, it makes me a decent person.

Rape culture is when self-appointed guardians of “traditional values” like Rick Santorum tell rape victims that, yes, rape is horrible, but if your rapist impregnates you, it’s “nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you.” Aw, rape victims no doubt think to themselves, an unwanted pregnancy conceived in rape? For me? From God? Awesome! After all, despite the ugliness of rape, says Rick, “We have to make the best out of a bad situation.” As even the most causal readers of this series know, according to Mr. High and Mighty, making the best out of bad situation means passing laws to force women who’ve been raped to carry their rape-babies to term. And a “Gee, thanks, God!” wouldn’t hurt, you ungrateful, selfish bitches. Just because you’ve been raped is no excuse to be thinking about yourself. There are more important considerations than the trauma of your violent assault—like how male politicians feel about your violent assault and how they feel that you should feel about it. That’s rape culture.
15 Rape Jokes That Work by Kate Harding
Not everyone’s going to agree, and some people are going to think I’m a bad feminist, which, what else is new. But I want to be able to link to this post in the future, when this happens again–because it always does–and hordes of young men start screaming–because they always do–that feminists are trying to take all the funny out of comedy AGAIN.

I am a feminist. I have been raped. And I think the following 15 rape jokes are hilarious. So please fuck all the way the fuck off with your “You just don’t understand comedy” bullshit. (Here’s an alternative proposal: Maybe you just don’t understand being a decent human being.)

Here’s what YOU need to understand:

1) Rape is way, WAY more prevalent than you seem to think it is. Are there more than five women in your audience? You do the math, and then you run the little fantasy scenario that I just put together in your head, and you tell me how it feels.

2) I ain’t buying any of that “If I can make jokes about genocide, why can’t I make jokes about rape?” Horseshit, unless you made those genocide jokes during a gig at the Srebrenica Funny Bone. You got away with making a joke about genocide because your odds of having a holocaust survivor’s kid in the audience were pretty fucking low.

And if you did happen to have one in the audience, and he heckled you, walked out, and wrote something nasty on the internet… would you be more likely to be a human being and say “Wow. I can understand why that person’s authentic response to what I was doing was so emotional and negative. Maybe my genocide material just isn’t good enough to justify the pain that it inflicts. Maybe I need more skill in order to pull this off.” Or are you gonna be a lousy piece of shit and say, “Yeah, I apologize, I guess, IF YOU WERE OFFENDED.”

Offended hasn’t got anything to do with it, moron.

I’m not a comedian, and am only occasionally (mostly not on purpose) funny. I’m not here to comment on humor or what passes as a joke these days. However, an unintended conversation on Twitter yesterday, coupled with a story from a friend got me thinking.
Last night I found myself engaged with a comedian who didn’t quite understand why everyone was so up in arms over Tosh’s “joke.” Relax. Take a chill pill. You’re overreacting. You have no sense of humor, etc… I did my best to not engage, but when he verbally attacked a friend of mine, I stepped in. I was rational. I was calm. I made some logical points. And yet…
(I’ve chosen not to share screen caps of our conversation because I don’t need to give this guy any more attention. The bolding/color highlighting are my doing).

Can Rape Jokes Ever Be Funny? by Sarah Seltzer via AlterNet [includes video]
The answer to this bogus claim, of course, is that humor is at its best when it subverts the norm. In a rape culture such as ours, the norm is to pile scorn and disbelief upon victims and excuse perpetrators. So rape jokes that further humiliate victims aren’t edgy, they’re just bullying. But jokes that call attention to rape culture can be funny and even receive the feminist seal of approval.
A number of awesome feminist friends of AlterNet from the Women’s Media Center, PopCulturePirate, Women In Media & News, and Fem2pt0 teamed up this week to create a “supercut” of a variety of rape jokes, including several from Daniel Tosh which in my mind show exactly on which side of the line his particularsense of humor lies. The video, however, makes no overt judgments, but asks audience members to decide for themselves where that line is, what makes them laugh, and what makes them uncomfortable.

It seems that the heart of this incident is the question of whether or not it is appropriate for comedians to joke about rape. It could be argued that in this case, people defending Tosh are arguing it is appropriate to threaten someone with rape in a comedy club (since, if we use their logic, supposedly in the context of a comedy club, this is not meant to be taken seriously since it is just “a joke” that you might not “get”).
But the real heart of this, and the reason it has struck a chord with so many people, is that it is a simple sad illustration of rape culture at work.

Daniel has made jokes about black men, Latino men, and other non-white men raping women because they’re all animals who can’t control their dicks.

When his rape jokes were rooted in racism, no one gave a fuck.

I wonder if this spurt of rape jokes/threats/insults is not as out of the blue as we would all like to think. I see it as starting with prison-rape jokes. No one seemed to bat an eyelash when we used jokes like “don’t drop the soap” or “you’ll end up with a cellmate named Bubba” or even “they have a way of taking care of people who fight dogs/pedophiles/wife-abusers in jail.”
Then along came movies and television shows in which male rape was funny. I was appalled by a scene in Get Him To The Greek in which a male star is anally raped by a woman wielding a large dildo. Then came True Blood in which Jason Stackhouse was gang raped by women. His trauma was minimized and the rape(s) were written as a humorous comeuppance for a serial womanizer.
Daniel Tosh, Rape Jokes and Hecklers by Margaret Lyons via Vulture
First, let’s get a few quick things out of the way: (1) This is totally in keeping with Daniel Tosh’s humor and style. He’s a lousy Reddit thread come to life, which is why he is so popular! (Just ask Jeff Dunham.) (2) Don’t heckle comedians, no matter how offensive and crappy you think their material is. (3) There’s no such thing as off-limits in comedy, and comedians are always — always — entitled to make jokes about whatever they want. But “entitled to” and “obligated to” are not the same thing, and comedy is not immune to criticism.
That’s 30 rape jokes in one segment. One segment in a half-hour show on Comedy Central. That averages one rape joke per minute. I’d love to know the demographics of his viewing audience, but I don’t even have to look to feel confident they skew heavily in the 18-34 range. Which is terrifying to me.
Sure, one can find humor in anything, but I’d like to think that humor is most often found by those who have experienced something. Humor in healing, humor in dealing. Not aggressive, unnecessary and belittling humor that essentially robs the victims (in general as well as those specified) of the fact that they. were. victimized.
When Rape Jokes Aren’t Funny by Julie Burton and Michelle Kinsey Bruns via CNN
Nonetheless, the significant overlap between the gender divide and the rape-joke empathy gap is real, and it seems inevitable when media coverage of rape so often focuses on what a victim should have done differently to try harder not to get raped. Such shoddy framing creates a fictional image that there’s a certain type of woman who gets raped. Women know that’s a lie, because they live the truth, but men may never have occasion to question that image, and so when they laugh at rape jokes, they’re laughing at an abstraction that’s all too real for many women.
Tosh and all those with the privilege to hold a microphone have a responsibility to shine a light on the reality behind the abstraction — not to perpetuate it, and certainly not to silence those who bear its burden.

Nope by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville
UPDATE: I also want to quickly address the argument I’m seeing a lot that Louis CK should be given “credit,” or some variation thereof, for either “evolving” on rape culture and/or speaking about rape culture on a national platform, despite the rest of his objectionable shtick.

First of all, contemplating rape culture for the first time as a 44-year-old man with two daughters, and patting oneself on the back for it instead of framing it as the profoundly regrettable evidence of privilege that is is, isn’t something that ought to be praised—and praising it breathes life into the terrible idea that rape culture is difficult for “men” to understand. That is not accurate. It’s not difficult for lots of male survivors; it’s not difficult for lots of trans* men; it’s not difficult for lots of gay men; it’s not difficult for lots of men who have been incarcerated; it’s not difficult for lots of men who are vulnerable by virtue of physical disability; it’s not difficult for lots of highly privileged men who simply have the willingness to listen to women.

Let us not confuse “difficult to understand” for “easy to ignore by virtue of privilege.”

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Stephanie‘s Picks:

Daniel Tosh Is a Rape Culture Enforcer by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville

Sheila Heti, Lena Dunham, and the Challenges of Telling “Girly” Stories in Film and Television by Alyssa Rosenberg via Slate

Let’s Talk About Sexism in Movie Reviews, You Guys! by Tyler Coates via Black Book

Megan‘s Picks:

When Rape Jokes Are Never Funny by Meghan O’Keefe via The Huffington Post

NBC’s New Head Drama Exec is a Black Woman by Dodai Stewart via Jezebel

Anita Sarkeesian Responds to Beat-Up Game, Online Harassment and Stephanie Guthrie’s Death Threats by Anita Sarkeesian via Toronto Standard

Teens Protest ‘Teen Vogue’ Photoshop Use; Editors “Rude” in Response by Amy Odell via Buzzfeed

Nicki Minaj on Sexism in the Music Industry by Samhita Mukhopadhyay via Feministing

Do You Laugh at Rape Jokes? by Soraya Chemaly via Fem2pt0

Cross-Post: In Mainstream Films, Dead Moms Don’t Count by Scott Mendelson via Women and Hollywood 

J Lo Bringing Lesbian Moms to ABC Family by Alex Cranz via FemPop

‘Brave’ Still Teaching Girls the Wrong Lessons by Abigail Collazo via Fem2pt0