The Anti Room Film Club

Be there or be square

Media Slut Shaming began with Elizabeth Taylor

Outside the purity ring set (those who adhere to a nut-job religious worldview, the type to equate women’s sexual desire with the toppling of collective moral firmament) reasonable folk would concede that seven is not an excessive number of sexual partners for a woman to have, especially if she married them all. By leading accounts, Elizabeth Taylor was one of the least promiscuous women in Hollywood, yet she was the target of relentless slut shaming by the media over the years, a nefarious cultural dictate which bullies any woman who claims a degree of sexual agency beyond the narrow proscription outlined by the hoary old Madonna/Magdalene stereotypes. Elizabeth Taylor fit neither category; she defied the rote pigeonholes virgin or harlot to which other women such as Doris Day or Marilyn Monroe easily succumbed. Taylor was an iconoclast by comparison. She wasn’t just the good girl or the bad one. Elizabeth Taylor was a woman in love. She followed her passion, announced it publicly and then refused apology or conformity.

At 18 and a virgin on her wedding night to ultra-scumbag Nicky Hilton, Taylor placed an emphasis on general propriety within marriage and wifedom. Hollywood Babylon, the raunchy tell-all of the industry dishes copious dirt on plenty of otherwise wholesome star biographies, except the only names it can link to Taylor besides the men she married are Montgomery Clift and Frank Sinatra. Three book length treatments of Taylor’s life (Liz: An Intimate Biography, How to Be a Movie Star and Furious Love) contain no evidence or rumour of her lovers taken outside marriage. Extramarital affairs and sexual hijinks are the bread and butter of the celebrity biography circuit, but there’s little to whisper about La Liz.

Hedda Hopper, the Pope and the international press traded on calling Taylor a slut, a homewrecker, morally bankrupt and the rest, when really, she was a fairly conservative lady who conjoined sex and marriage. The sexual double standard at play reeks to the rafters. While men in the industry slated hundreds if not thousands of conquests, Taylor was vilified for less than ten. Taylor’s treatment illustrates women’s perpetual vulnerability to cultural scrutiny and judgment regarding sexuality. Virgin until marriage and no sex without a ring means little in the end. Slut shaming is fickle business, one that ultimately reserves the privilege to denounce women who have the temerity to claim bodily sovereignty and independent sexual desire. The grim overview of Taylor's post mortem in the press is a reductive assessment of the lady as the sum of husbands, rather than her true legacy as the most gifted and bewitching woman to ever grace the screen.

Omar in Glasses Triggers Guffaws

Mr. M knows how to tickle my funny bone.

There's No Irony in Sexism, Hipster

Among the criticisms levelled against hipsters, such as they’re shallow, derivative, overly privileged, snobby, or that they demonstrate a misguided fashion sense which equates hideous cast-offs from yesteryear as an opportunity for an ironic pose, not enough is written about sexism disseminated by some in the hipster scene. Sure, plenty of folks point out the sexism marketed in pornified campaigns by American Apparel, a favourite haunt for those aficionados of white canvas belts and all bright things lycra, when really, the lady-hating and belittlement extends far beyond the letchy toad that is Dov Charney.

The most recent example of hipster machismo occurs not in Vice as you would expect, but in the February 28th edition of The New Yorker, of all periodicals, a bastion of highbrow culture. Of the 14 contributors listed in the current issue, only two are women, in what continues to be a grim trend in the magazine’s standing record, as has VIDA has already documented. The new issue features Demetri Martin in the Shouts & Murmurs column, a comic beloved by hipsters, and one who also dons the style with schoolboy locks and ugly-on-purpose sweaters, begins his essay ‘Who Am I’ with the following winky Cartesian inspired account of himself:

‘Who am I? That is a simple question, yet it is one without a simple answer. I am many things—and I am one thing. But I am not a thing that is just lying around somewhere, like a pen, or a toaster, or a housewife. That is for sure. I am much more than that. I am a living, breathing thing, a thing that can draw with a pen and toast with a toaster and chat with a housewife, who is sitting on a couch eating toast. And still, I am so much more.
I am a man.’

The problem is that sexism rates as a poor host for satire because we have no point of distance or respite from it in a culture marked by bashing on women. We have not arrived at a place where a dude can refer to housewives--to women--as dull objects lying about for his perusal. Nor can a dude snigger that housewives sit around doing little else but eating toast, an update on the old bon-bons joke. Indeed, we have not safely disembarked the patriarchal steam liner that has navigated the course of history in order to accommodate an ‘I’m a Dude, Hear Me Roar’ stab at comedy. There is no parody here. Demetri Martin has more in common with Larry the Cable Guy than he would be willing to admit. A dude who regards his subjectivity as the centre of the universe, the sum of all parts, the definition of humanity warrants nary a chuckle. Martin highlights the prize tucked inside every blue birth announcement which all but says

IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU, FELLA!

Hipster sexism same as the rest.

My Sure-to-Lose Oscar Ballot

Best Picture:

Black Swan

Best Actress:

Natalie Portman

Best Actor:

James Franco

Best Supporting Actress:

Melissa Leo

Best Supporting Actor:

John Hawkes

Best Director:

Darren Aronofsky

I can't bring myself to watch either The King's Speech or The Social Network. Colin Firth radiates such smug detachment and that Jesse Eisenberg guy may mean well, but I don't enjoy sensitive dude entitlement any more than the macho version.

Even the Dudes are Subject to Photoshop

Maybe it had more of an impact as a large advertisement on the subway, because when I was staring at a nearly life-sized version of Liam Neeson in the promotion for 'Unknown' last night, I turned to the husband to remind him that said dude was 58 years-old, and not 35, as he appears to be while posed with a gun.

One line; one crease; plump cheek.

Even the dudes aren't allowed to look aged anymore.

Shrews & Doormats VS. Dude-Bro Heroes

At the end of the fifth instalment of Episodes, I could not help but shudder over how the pitch for this series by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik must have gone down. Did the pair approach Showtime intent on a script to complement the male privilege already celebrated in their fare such as Dexter, Californication, Shameless, Brotherhood and Penn & Teller? Showtime’s Sunday night line up in particular boasts Episodes, Californication and Shameless, in what amounts to a master study of male entitlement to treat women like garbage and behave as abusive dickwads. Is there any character type creepier than a misogynist who wants to get back at women by fucking as many as he can manage, as that Hank Moody character in Californication? And how many tear-rendered memoirs have been penned by folks who suffered drunken abusive fathers like the one William H. Macy plays in Shameless? Oh, and they gave him an Irish name, too. Way to break those gross stereotypes, Showtime.

At best, Episodes could be viewed as a cautionary tale for women with career aspirations in the entertainment industry. The show makes it clear that La-La Land is a mug’s game for women. Tamsin Greig plays a smart television writer, a transplanted Brit named Beverly Lincoln. Bev sports chic ensembles from Hobbs that underscore a London career-gal background. (In fact, one blouse she wears when they arrive in LA, a mustard in geometric print, I cheered to recognise the same hanging in my closet from our trip last year.) Bev’s predicament, as for all smart ladies in Hollywood, the show tells us, is that you can expect to be patronised, marginalised, excluded as the downer, the adult, the one who won’t laugh at kids with Tourettes. If you are the female lead in a sit-com, like Morning Randolph (played by Mircea Monroe) you will be the centre of on-set gossip about how you played William Shatner’s wife onscreen in the 80s. She’s old, plastic, shallow, a laughingstock. The central lady in the production team, Carol (Kathleen Rose Perkins,) is a toady, yes-woman doormat who carries on an affair with the network boss, Merc,(John Panklow) behind the back of his blind wife. The show thinks so little of the blind wife that I couldn’t locate the actor’s name at IMDB or the Showtime website. Merc ignores, humiliates and mocks his wife. Not only does the show make fun of a blind lady, it makes a direct connection between disability and being an insufferable pain in the ass. Politesse dictates that you can’t tell a blind lady to shut up with all the yackity-yack, so just roll eyes and make faces in order to indicate displeasure at a skirt taking up airspace. They made a woman’s spirit, resolve, and generous philanthropy a punch line. The same line of low-blow humour stages riffs during a fundraiser for a rape crisis centre. Yep. There’s nothing funnier than smug dudes making jokes while a woman onstage describes how she was raped.

Such unsparing and unkind characterisations are not shared out for the men in the cast. The one long-running joke for Matt LeBlanc is that he has a really big dick. Ouch. Now that casts quite the aspersion. Dudes, as we all know, are fun as a barrel of monkeys. They just want to go to Vegas, talk about chicks and how banging the nanny in front of the kids results in the bitch-ass ex keeping you from them. Joey-I-mean-Matt is presented as a good guy, a total bro, a misunderstood hero.

In Episodes, the sour and lazy jokes come at the expense of women while men get fantasy fulfilment. All crudity aside, none of this seems fresh or interesting. Women are a pain in the ass; Men want to fuck around. *Yawn*

Give us something we haven’t heard a gazillion times already, Showtime.