I’ve been harping to my friends about Judd Apatow for a long time, but I’ve been unwilling endure the torture of watching his movies so that I could knowledgeably write about ‘em. Luckily, there’s a braver person than I (and an awesome writer) out there, and you can see her post on 40-Year-Old-Virgin here. Also, her blog has a sweet name: Tiger Beatdown.
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*ctrl-d*
[just posted this comment on tiger-beatdown(!)'s blog]
i’m feeling foolish. i remember liking this movie. i saw it shortly after it came out, so it’s been a few years, but still, i’d like to think i was old enough to know better. maybe not?
i do remember thinking his friends sucked. but the message i read in the movie was something like this:
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all the hypermasculine douchbagery might get you laid, but it comes at a price… your relationships will be empty and shallow, and you will be lonely and unfulfilled.
however, if you stay true to yourself, your innocence, your decency, and if you treat women with respect, and see them as peers to bond with emotionally rather than mere objects, you might not get laid as often, but you will find happiness, fulfillment, and love.
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like i said, it’s been a few years since i seen it, but i do think that message IS there in the movie. unfortunately, this good message is mixed in with all this other shit that you pointed out… the sexism, the racism, the homophobia… the pro-rape propaganda.
did you (or anyone else who saw this movie) also catch whif of this message that i saw? or was i deluding myself?
i remember a friend of mine saw this movie, one of those guys who felt grouchy because he felt he was a nice guy who finished last (he’d once been turned down by a woman he liked very much who outright told him he was “too nice”), and he said it helped him be comfortable with remaining “nice” (i.e. not a manipulative player) even if it meant he struck out with women a little more often than he might if he changed his ways to be more of a douche. i don’t think he was planning on becoming a douche, but he did sometimes express bitterness that women he knew tended to go out with douches.
anyways, i’m wondering if other people who saw this movie agree it can be read in this more positive way? or must we “throw the baby out with the bathwater”? or is there no baby at all and just pure bathwater?
i think when i first watched this movie i over-focused on the good message, and blocked out and minimized all the crap. like i said, i feel pretty foolish about that. your critique of the movie is scathing, and well deserved.
also, it’s funny i’m asking this question since i rather disdain post-modernist arguments about multiple readings, multiple truths, etc…. not because i disagree that there are multiple truths or multiple ways of reading things, but because i think some truths are more true than others, and most things have a particular way in which they are most likely to be read.
but yeah, damn postmodernism is usually used to justify the worst sorts of crud, such as bdsm-porn, or “married…with children” …so i feel a little hypocrtical to be even bringing up this multiple readings / multiple truths thing.
anyways, what do you-all think?
~Harmony~
[p.s. hi syndicalist702... are you an anarcho-syndicalist?]
Hello. Indeed, anarcho-syndicalism is what I’d like to see societies world wide put into practice. I’m not holding my breath, though.
Enough about me. I have been on both sides of what you’re talking about:
“all the hypermasculine douchbagery might get you laid, but it comes at a price… your relationships will be empty and shallow, and you will be lonely and unfulfilled.
however, if you stay true to yourself, your innocence, your decency, and if you treat women with respect, and see them as peers to bond with emotionally rather than mere objects, you might not get laid as often, but you will find happiness, fulfillment, and love. “
I like the “true to yourself…” side of it much better. It’s a lot more fulfilling – like you said.
awesome! i’ve been looking a bit into anarcho-platfomism lately and think this is the way to go. it retains much from anarcho-syndicalism. in fact, i would say it builds on it without taking anything away. (then again, i’m no *expert*, but this is my impression.)
we should talk anarchism sometime! i guess here wouldn’t be the appropriate place. do you have a blog?
Sure do. If you click on my name it’ll take you right to it.
Judd Apatow is such a fucking republican it’s not even funny. 40 Year Old Virgin is abstinence-only sex ed. Knocked Up is anti-choice rhetoric. Superbad is pro-rape MRA drivel. I’ve had no desire to subject myself to any more of his movies, but I don’t expect him to have evolved to, say, women-as-human status since the opposite has made him so. much. fucking. cash.
(I actually loved Forgetting Sarah Marshall – which I don’t think was Apatow but kind of the same thing – if I tried really hard to overlook the glaring misogyny. But was also in the process of an excruciating breakup, so my judgment was clouded.)
Tiger Beatdown is one of the greatest blogs on the ‘nets. True love.
@harmony I missed a ton of shit watching this film as well. It just goes to show how normalized the Madonna/Whore complex and the rape culture have become. I did pick p on some of the things mentioned but I totally missed the implications of the woman masturbating in the bathtub. A total duh moment for me. I can only blame it on liking Steve Carrell.
thanks for admitting to it. i feel a little less clueless now. :P
You should read this: http://tigerbeatdown.blogspot.com/2009/04/tiger-beatdown-explains-it-all.html
“You know, people, Tiger Beatdown is a social service. That is why I make a point of frequently checking the search terms people use to find it! It appears that, along with your more common random-phrase searches, such as “boy pleasure of the flesh” (huh), “cheap vagina tighter creams” (ick), “picture of women showing there boobies” (try searching for “pornography,” my underage friend!) and “sexy decapitated woman” (AAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHH), several people actually do type WHOLE ENTIRE QUESTIONS into the Google”
Now what those questions are is told in the article. But about the random-phrase searches….. urgh. Sexy decapitated women?
I ran out of the room when somebody played The 40-Year Old Virgin, after about the first 20 seconds. I haven’t read your friend’s review, but I already know it is a vile, misogynistic, unfunny, unsophisticated piece of garbage.
I was left with a negative feeling after watching this movie. So many little things got under my skin. Yet I know I’m supposed to ‘relax’.. it’s ‘just a comedy’.
Anyway- I love her posts. I’m totally going to read.
Has anyone else noticed our beloved Sady drifting into some rather uncomfortable doldrums of late?
Such as … getting pissed when people talk about the personal being political?
And delving into shades of sex-pozziness?
I may be too sensitive, but I am extremely confused at this point.
See, here I thought the personal WAS political, and that when I get, say, sexually harassed on the street … it actually IS indicative of a larger and ickier trend.
And that if I don’t want to bag a bunch of dudes, it still doesn’t make me a traditional monogamy-loving prude.
Feel free to pick me apart and discuss this, because I could just be reading it wrong.
I think I’m in the minority re Sady in that I’m not at all interested in her conversations with Amanda Hess from Washington City Paper (although I enjoy The Sexist enormously) and I’m really irritated by the ridiculous voices they adopt and the extreme punctuation they employ to denote SARCASM! It can be exhausting and it makes me feel old and curmudgeonly, even though, from what I gather, Sady and Hess and I are around the same age. I enjoy the pop culture stuff Sady writes because she’s incisive and bitter and very, very funny, but I’m wary of her posts about The State of Feminism, as they do seem, as you say, joy, blithely heteronormative, sex positive, and sometimes downright unsophisticated (sometimes the peen enthusiasm can be overwhelming, and sometimes people who don’t care for peen or are uninterested in discussing sexy sex with the men are confused with slut-shamers). The Dworkin post from last year on the old blog also really put me off, unfortunately.
Saurs, indeed.
I’m around the same age and deeply ironic, m’self; I find that sometimes putting on a show with a caricature of myself as the comic relief is amusing, but only if I am deeply terrified of the people I’m around.
In other words, my stage persona is hyperbolic and over-the-top ironic, and it disarms people and often makes them laugh. However, it is decidedly a stage persona that I adopt to keep people from, oh, you know, killing me. I feel that Sady and Amanda may be doing the same thing, so that is how I read it.
So I laugh really hard at a lot of what she writes. Then I cringe really hard too.
The new feature with the mtf transperson actually really grates me, and not because of any transphobia — but because the writer is very gender-essentialist, clearly still white-male-privileged, etc, and the irony of hir writing on a blog that deals with these same issues …
well, to say this Tiger Beatdown Style — OH HOW IT BURNS.
PS — I have posted these concerns over there as well, so it’s not as though I am internet-talking-behind-anyone’s-back.
You can imagine how well that went over, though. Hint, as I recall, I got called a slut-shamer or something. Sigh.
I’m awkward and self-conscious in person, and as a result I normally adopt an overly stoic, verging on humorless, attitude, to guard against slights. I suppose I never contemplated the regular irony-fest between Sady and Hess as a performance, exactly, but it does make a good deal of sense. I still don’t understand half of what they’re saying when they conceive those conversations, though.
I cringe sometimes, as well, when I’m reading a TB rant because most of the time I’m completely with Sady until she happens to qualify or later clarify a point in such a way that makes me completely against her, or at least in complete, diametric philosophical opposition to her. I’m also a bit wary of Feminist Guardianship as it manifests itself once in awhile over there, wherein readers are told why they aren’t, say, activist enough for Sady’s liking. I tend to put more trust in (and hence become more devoted to) weblogging radfem types who admit that by virtue of who they are in real life (generally that’s the point where they cop to being cis, or being het, owning white privilege or whatever big bad bogey criterion you can think of) they can’t and refuse to pretend that they possess the capacity to speak on behalf of every woman. Guestblogging doesn’t change that (for me) and can actually conceal those very real limitations.
(I have not posted such concerns, however, anywhere because I’m not really certain anyone’s interested, and I’m not comfortable articulating precisely my complaints. But I did want to respond to your comment here, because I’m of a similar mind and you asked and all.)
Saurs, I’m late to respond to you, but yes. Thanks for responding to me.
Since my initial commentary on this topic, I’ve sworn off all feminist blogs except ND’s and factcheckme’s. And some of the other blogs that get less traffic.
Yep. I am now too radical for even IBTP. The padded van is coming (back) any day now, I’m sure.