Objectification, Power and Some Men Being Twats

Tonight, this tweet from Sunny made my timeline explode. The article it links to is about TubeCrush, a new craze that’s apparently taken London by storm. It bears similarity to the ‘Fitfinder’ website (now defunct) which took over university campuses (campi?) last summer, although Fitfinder was different in some ways.

The conversation turned to why, as a society, we accept and even encourage the objectification of men in this way, while the objectification of women is regarded far more suspiciously. From my perspective, the answer’s simple: women objectifying men is relatively harmless because men hold the power in terms of sex and more generally in terms of whatever comes between flirting and sexual harassment.

If a woman takes a picture of a man on a train and he sees her, one or both will be embarassed but very few men would feel threatened by such behaviour.

If, however, a man takes a picture of a woman on a train and she sees him, immediately she has to think about the possible dangers of the situation. Is this guy a creep? Is he a potential rapist? Is he going to follow up the action with some verbal or physical harassment?

The odds are that this guy isn’t a rapist, but if you’re in a room with 100 glasses of water, 1 of which is poisoned, the odds don’t really hold much comfort. The risk that the worst-case will happen is still scary, however slim the possibility.

I don’t want to expand too much on this – I’m sure there’s reams of wonderful feminist critique you can read if you want to. This article covers a lot of the issues (h/t Soph). What I do want to do is provide some examples of behaviour I’ve either seen or been told about which makes women act in the way they do (ie they are suspicious of men’s motives and intentions).

“I liked him but I wouldn’t let him walk me home because I didn’t want him to know where I lived.” < she met a guy on a night out, but still had to call me to walk her home because he might have been a stalker/worse. Girls have to think about this sort of thing all the time, which must be a serious burden.

I was walking someone home after a night out when two men walking in the opposite direction started “complementing” her. “Come home with us, love – we’ve got huge cocks, this guy you’re with (ie me) is a dickhead,” was probably the line of choice. One of them said he wanted to “eat ice-cream off her tits” as well. Even though I was right there and we were walking arm-in-arm, these two guys thought it was perfectly reasonable to objectify her in the most vulgar and violent terms and act like they were doing her a favour in the process. I can’t even work out what would have happened if she had been on her own.

Someone I know was walking back from lectures when a boy rode up next to her on a bike and just watched her walking for about 2 or 3 minutes. When she looked at him, he said something that made her realise that he would follow her back to the house if she didn’t do something. She had to dive into a pub and call her boyfriend to meet her there. For quite a few weeks she wouldn’t make the 5 minute walk from university to the house alone.

It was the height of revision season, and the university libraries were predictably full. She was sat down, making notes or whatever, when a man came and asked if he could sit next to her. This is pretty standard during exam season, and she said yes. About half an hour later she realised that he kept staring at her and felt really uncomfortable. When she started packing her things to leave, he said something along the lines of, “Don’t leave babe, I want to get you know you. And your ass.” I believe in this case she took a taxi home, she was that shaken up.

Add to this the countless times I’ve seen guys told to to piss off on dancefloors and at bars refuse to get the fuck away (which I can’t even be bothered to list individually) and you get the picture I’ve seen: Some Men Are Twats. Not all men, but some. Quite possibly most.

It affects how women behave, and it affects how decent men behave as well. Sometimes I think about something I want to say/do, and then think, Actually, that could be misconstrued. If we’re inclined to give the y-chromosomed the benefit of the doubt and say twattish men are in the minority, which probably isn’t the case, this minority are ruining stuff for everyone else by forcing women to treat all men as though they are as disrespectful, forceful, violent, insensitive and dangerous as the worst of us are. I, for one, don’t blame them.

Sucker Punch

I don’t do film reviews on this blog (yet). I don’t do film reviews because the world of film blogging has plenty more worthwhile voices in it, without mine adding to the clamour. But on Wednesday I saw a film so awful that I wanted to lash out physically. That film was Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch.

I want to make it clear that I quite like Zack Snyder’s previous work. 300 was silly enough and pretty enough to be watchable, and Watchmen is epic. But Sucker Punch is unfor-fucking-givably bad. It substitutes plotline for plotholes, and everything past the first 15 minutes is completely unwatchable. I have never, ever walked out of a film at the cinema, but I came damn close this time.

There is a point around half hour into the film when Sweet Pea says that dancing should be about more than just titillation, that it should tell a story, and that sums up Sucker Punch better than anything else. You can’t make a film with no clear plotline work using eye-candy and titillation. It turns out there’s only so far $82m worth of special effects and farcical amounts of bondage gear can get you.

And don’t even get me started on the semi-intelligible pretentious bullshit monologue that closes the whole affair. It made me gag. I’m not even joking. Sucker Punch almost became the second film this year I’ve thrown up in (the first being Black Swan, which really wasn’t helped by me feeling ill before we even went into the cinema). Seriously, whenever you think it can’t get any worse (and it gets bad quickly, right when The Pixies’ Where Is My Mind kicks in), it surprises you with some twist or badly-delivered one-liner that just drags the whole thing to a new level of awful. And the final 30 seconds take it from “Well, that was shit,” to, “Oh my god I can’t believe I paid money to see this monstrosity and supported this arsehole’s career.”

Now to the casting. I get it. Sex sells. But they might as well have called the asylum ‘Lennox House for the Unfeasibly Attractive (and Mentally Insane)’. Abbie Cornish couldn’t deliver a line if she worked for FedEx, Vanessa Hudgens did nothing but cry, gasp and have a hairstyle, and the token minority character was just that – relegated to pilot’s duties for the most part.

Emily Browning wasn’t terrible as Baby Doll, but she’s very, very one-dimensional. There’s something really sexploitation-y about the incarnation of this virginal, child-like character who basically jiggles her bits around to distract men on a regular basis throughout the film. It’s the big male myth of that chaste virgin who’s secretly pure filth. And given that the cleavage-ridden dream-sequences in the film are supposed to be hers,  we have to conclude that she is ultimately no more than a hyper-sexualised masturbatory prop.

Segueing nicely into the issue of feminism… I’ve heard some people describe Sucker Punch as a feminist flick. It’s not. Not one fucking bit. All the “ass kicking” and “girl power” is: a) done in short, short skirts and high, high heels, and b) restricted to a fantasy realm in Baby Doll’s head. The central message is, “Yes, girls, have your fun, but sooner or later you have to live in the real world.” The real world where three of the five die, one is lobotomised, and the other is only saved by a completely random act of overwhelming kindness from a (male) bus driver. It’s not feminist – quite the opposite, it’s downright misogynistic and almost offensively so.

This film is all kinds of awful. I haven’t ever left a cinema wanting to punch someone before. It’s so bad, the hate kept me awake for 4 hours. It’s worse than anything I’ve seen on VHS or late, late, late on Film4. I would honestly rather watch live torture. I would rather be punched in the mouth than watch it again. Please don’t see it. Please don’t give your hard-earned money to a project which, in being made, has set cinema back 25 years. It is an obscene sexploitation flick which cost a staggering $80m to make kind of cool-looking.

Equality? What Equality?

Today I bought a copy of the FT, which is pretty rare for me (being on a student’s budget and all), and nestled towards the bottom of the front page was this story. In it, Lord Young (yes, that Lord Young) opposes Nick Clegg’s plans to encourage men to take paternity leave. His reasons for doing so highlight two reasons we should support Clegg’s initiative.

small companies were already thinking “two or three times before they take on a woman of childbearing age” and needed to be left in peace.

So he’s admitting that despite equality legislation and the advances we’ve made in women’s workplace rights, small businesses are still loath to employ women because they want to take maternity leave.

“You don’t have to make [maternity leave] interchangeable. Why should men take time off?”

Men should conform to existing gender roles, and keep earning the money to support their families, obviously. I suppose they should probably stay out of the room during childbirth as well, and not even bother trying to spend time and bond with their young children.

Let’s bear in mind that all the new rules do is say that a father can take paternity leave if the mother returns to work within 12 months. So we’re not talking about extending total parental leave, we’re just talking about giving parents the option of who takes the leave.

Business doesn’t want the legislation because it makes it more difficult to discriminate against people who might put their family before the company. With the old rules, you merely had to avoid employing women – under the new rules, you have to make a judgement about whether your potential employee would take the unthinkable decision to put their career on hold to spend time with their inconvenient sprog. Far more difficult for HR to evaluate, t’be sure.

It highlights why the change in the rules should be welcomed, and we must push to go even further, because the current system allowed discrimination against women by the back door, and business will always seek to limit the opportunities of those who will not willingly submit to its demands.

The Human Side of Westboro

Tonight, Louis Theroux’s greatly anticipated return to Westboro Baptist Church was shown on BBC2, and it was worth the licence fee on its own. Louis, as always, was a mixture of curious and impertinent, and managed to expose the a human side to a much-maligned portion of society.

This, for me, was the big payoff. It happened after the halfway point of the documentary, and there were two particular instances which really hit on what I wanted to see. Not the spectacle and confrontation that we all knew would be part of proceedings (enlightening as that content was), but the strange logic that underpins the Westboro Baptist Church’s single-minded hatred of homosexuals, and indeed anyone who does not share their point of view.

When Louis went to visit the niece who’d been expelled, and she broke down in tears because her expulsion meant she had no contact with her family, I felt awful – firstly because she seemed to blame herself to a certain extent, and secondly because she was basically thrown out for pointing out hypocrisy and double-standards within the church/family.

I was also moved by Louis’ visit to her parents, who were visibly uncomfortable about the way they had disowned their daughter, but had to parrot lines about “repentance” and accuse her of  “carousing”, whatever that may entail.

The second part that stirred my deep reservoir of compassion (sarcasm there, folks) as opposed to my volcano of rage (which erupted constantly throughout) was when Louis asked the Phelps girls about their Dutch film-maker friends. One expressed sadness that they would be going to Hell.

“Aren’t you supposed to rejoice over God’s judgements?” he asked.

“Oh… uh, we do. But it’s still sad.” (I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like that)

A little switch flicked then, because one of these hate-filled, shame-driven individuals had shown a glimmer of compassion. I stopped thinking of them as part of Westboro Baptist Church and its poisonous, hateful ministry and actually thought, “Hold on – they’re just kids.” It exposed the inhumane aspect of what they had been taught – that other people were being punished for falling short of an unattainable pedestal, but that up close, these people were the same as them.

But then I realised that I’d been halfway down the road they were on – I was starting to dehumanise the way I thought about WBC members because of their beliefs. And I haven’t been brainwashed to believe that some omnipotent being wants to punish everyone who doesn’t hate homosexuals with every fibre of their being – I was just watching an hour-long TV documentary. Just as it makes us inhuman, this kind of attitude also plays to something deep in our human psyche – the desire to dismiss and dehumanise those who don’t agree with us, or who we find morally repugnant, and I will be making more of an effort to guard against it in future.