Fun girls are not completely unknown in the world of comedy.
Meghan O’Rourke tackles the stereotype of women in comedies, especially romantic comedies, as joy killers, after Katherine Heigl got pissed on in the media for telling the truth about how Knocked Up fed off the standard trope of men as fun-loving (if irresponsible) and women as responsible but tedious and boring. It was hard not to be defensive of Knocked Up, and not just because it was so funny, but also because Apatow at least tried to show the parallels between men’s fears and women’s fears about adulthood. He grasped that women do have inner lives, but he just failed to write the female characters with the same understanding he brought to the male characters. He showed a glimmer of understanding that the endless rotation of work in a woman’s life is not necessarily something that women want but have embraced because they feel they don’t have a choice, whereas most movies and shows and commercials that position the men as boisterous children and women as disapproving authority figures seem to think that women are mysterious non-human creatures who get off on being fundamentally unlikeable.
It’s a real disappointment to see this standard sitcom trope continue on into the movies made by bona fide Gen Xers, because one would hope that those of us growing up after the feminist revolution would have a view of women that posits that they are people, with inner lives and hopes and dreams and a sense of humor, instead of functional and oddly demanding appliances. But it’s a zombie sexism we’re dealing with here, and not so easy to kill.
This disparity is on display in a whole series of recent comedies, from School of Rock to High Fidelity. It’s also powerfully familiar to anyone who follows the so-called Mommy Wars. In that proliferating literature of family friction, women’s lives seem to shrink to a series of pragmatic decisions about achieving balance, while men are concerned with domestic stuff only to the degree that they choose to be. In this regard, Knocked Up is in keeping with the zeitgeist: If, as Heigl delicately put it, the movie is a “little sexist,” that is because it is the natural product of a culture evidently sold on the notion that women are so focused on domestic mechanics that they simply don’t know how to allow themselves the playful inner lives men do, whether they’re free-associating brilliantly with their friends, or lazily absorbed in video games. (The trope cuts both ways, of course: It allows men to be comedic geniuses, but it also means that husbands get portrayed right and left as childish dopes.) Just glance at a book like The Bitch in the House, where female essayists portray their male partners as slouches who don’t get the job done until they’re given a to-do list.
High Fidelity, both the book and the movie, were great pieces right up until the horribly disappointing ending that made no sense, with Rob and Laura getting back together even though they were clearly a terrible couple that had almost nothing in common. But, both the book and movie argued, Rob needs to grow up and settle, because apparently there’s no such thing as a woman who can actually be your lover and your friend, no women out there who had the capacity to get why you’d have a giant record collection that you obsess over. At best, you’ll find someone who tolerates it. (Why then the interlude with the musician, where you see that there are in fact plenty of women out there who have inner lives like Rob’s, was even in the movie baffles me. I suppose the point was not that there are no women out there, but Rob is fooling himself if he wants a more partner-like relationship instead of a shallow but functional one.) Knocked Up had the same problem.
I haven’t read Bitch in the House, but it’s worth noting that book is a book of personal essays by women, not fiction written by men where men get to be the outlaw heroes against women’s priggish authority, and thus it requires one to take a deeper look at this women-functional/men-playful dichotomy. Maybe there’s a flavor of it in the real world, and I suspect the reason is that having extraneous personality traits that are fun but occasionally inconvenient is a strong sign that someone has privilege, and men definitely do in this regard. Still, it’s really odd that there’s this perception of women as killjoys that infects so much otherwise smart entertainment, because a quick look around the real world shows that women are simply not like that. If there’s an obsession with “balance”, as O’Rourke says, it’s because women feel saddled with a lot of responsibility and have to work to make time for their inner lives, whereas men feel entitled to that time to begin with so don’t have to work nearly as hard at it. But that’s reason to think that women do have lives outside of their professional and domestic functions, lives that are constantly infringed on and have to be protected fiercely.
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I really liked her article, and it resonated with me a great deal. I have a wonderful, very thoughtful relationship, (and very different personalities) and we still battle a whole lot with this- me never feeling like I can just relax, and him thinking that he can relax, until prompted that there is something else he should do. I hate to see it treated as “the way things are”.
There is a tiny little crack at least — women are allowed to be funny now on a regular basis. And not just “well, she’s ugly so she has to be funny to make up for it,” but actual pretty women like Jenna Fischer and Isla Fisher (hmmm …) who get to be funny, too.
Though there were a lot of things wrong with “Wedding Crashers,” I really liked the Vince Vaughn/Isla Fisher relationship, where they end up together because she’s exactly like him, but even more so, and he loves it. Especially the revelation that when she claimed to be a virgin, she was basically just fucking with his head for the hell of it.
a culture evidently sold on the notion that women are so focused on domestic mechanics that they simply don’t know how to allow themselves the playful inner lives men do
See, I felt like Knocked up managed to show, at least a little bit, that it’s not so much that women don’t know how to allow themselves fun, but that someone has to clean the house/make dinner/parent the kids and when the men are children themselves, it falls on the women. So she wants to have fun, but she’s too busy making sure the things that need to get done, get done.
I guess Knocked Up was sexist in the sense that it played on gender stereotypes, but I didn’t feel it was sexist in the sense that it portrayed men in a better light than women - really, I felt the women came off better, because they were at least grown ups.
Mary-Louise Parker[*] is very funny in Weeds, and it’s not the ditzy “Lucy! You got some ’splainin to do!” kind of funny either. There are some real shifts taking place, but they inevitably start out in smaller markets where the audience is more self selecting. To make it on the big screen stories have to get past the studio zecks, who are a conservative bunch both politically and in terms of risk taking.
[*] the future Mrs. Togolosh, if the Great Cat smiles upon me.
He grasped that women do have inner lives, but he just failed to write the female characters with the same understanding he brought to the male characters.
I feel like, in large part, this is because Apatow is, well, a man. People write what they know, and men know men.
The challenge is that, because 95% of Hollywood writers are men, the analogous woman perspective is absent. It then becomes what I feel is an unfair onus on hip male writers like Aptaow to represent women from a woman’s perspective.
My feminist laser eyes are on full-blast when I consume media, and what I got from Knocked Up was a strong feminist bent, especially the fantasy baseball team scene. Ignoring the silly happy ending, I felt like the moral of the story is that men should NOT be allowed to get away with being immature fools.
Shit, wimmin, ya’ll a bunch of scolds or what?
Look at you, sitting there being good.
After two years you’re still dying for a cigarette.
And not drinking on weekdays, who thought that one up?
Don’t you want to run to the corner right now
for a fifth of vodka and have it with cranberry juice
and a nice lemon slice, wouldn’t the backyard
that you’re so sick of staring out into
look better then, the tidy yard your landlord tends
day and night — the fence with its fresh coat of paint,
the ash-free barbeque, the patio swept clean of small twigs — don’t you want to mess it all up, to roll around
like a dog in his flowerbeds? Aren’t you a dog anyway,
always groveling for love and begging to be petted?
You ought to get into the garbage and lick the insides
of the can, the greasy wrappers, the picked-over bones,
you ought to drive your snout into the coffee grounds.
Ah, coffee! Why not gulp some down with four cigarettes
and then blast naked into the streets, and leap on the first
beautiful man you find? The words Ruin me, haven’t they
been jailed in your throat for forty years, isn’t it time
you set them loose in slutty dresses and torn fishnets
to totter around in five-inch heels and slutty mascara?
Sure it’s time. You’ve rolled over long enough.
Forty, forty-one. At the end of all this
there’s one lousy biscuit, and it tastes like dirt.
So get going. Listen: they’re howling for you now:
up and down the block your neighbors’ dogs
burst into frenzied barking and won’t shut up.
Good Girl
by Kim Addonizio
http://www.kimaddonizio.com/
Rock rock rock rock rock and roll high school! Rock rock rock rock rock and roll high school! Rock rock rock rock rock and roll high school!
(Sorry, I just had to.)
I used to have a huge, huge, huge record collection like Rob’s in High Fidelity, and I similarly worried that guys were turned off by it. Or that I wasn’t pretty enough to “make up for it.” That’s the thing. Given the choice between a girl who looks like Laura and doesn’t do the collector-geek thing, and a girl who looks like me and does, who do you think they’re gonna go for?
I don’t necessarily agree that the ending of HF didn’t make any sense. For one thing, it was pretty obvious they weren’t perma-bonded; remember when he asked her to marry him and she just said, “Thank you”? For another, she was right to tell him he was capable of more than being “a professional appreciator of other people’s work,” that he had a creative drive of his own that he wasn’t fully expressing. Who else was going to tell him? Not his friends, and certainly not anyone else he’d ever been involved with.
In my experience, it is true that most often it is the women who, as a commenter said in some other thread, loose at housework/responsibility chicken.
We lose housework chicken because as we’re the ones who will be held responsible if the shit hits the fan.
The reason I didn’t like the film was not because it was feminist or sexist - it was because it seemed that almost everyone in that movie was incredibly selfish. Everyone was concerned with their own needs and wants, no one advocated for the expected child or seemed to take the child’s needs into consideration, beyond a few instances of consumerism. I think the fact Rogen’s character didn’t read The Baby Books was quite telling - he wanted the frills and benefits and coolness of being a dad, but was unconcerned with the work that actually goes into parenting a human being. Heigl kind of seemed to ‘get it’ a little bit, but was upset over the not-reading because she took it as a personal insult more than worry over his aptitude at being a father.
I have to say, this was one thing that stood out in the otherwise mediocre comedy “The Break-Up” for me. Jennifer Anniston finally gets herself together and gives up on the loser guy; he realizes he needs to grow up and cooks a big showy dinner to show her he’s sorry and wants her back, and she…leaves anyway. Gasp! The movie does end with them running into each other again a year later (with obvious hints of the possibility of getting back together), but the fact that she didn’t decide all of his behavior was okay in the end, and that she didn’t stay to reward him for maturing, really stood out to me.
The challenge is that, because 95% of Hollywood writers are men, the analogous woman perspective is absent. It then becomes what I feel is an unfair onus on hip male writers like Aptaow to represent women from a woman’s perspective.
Good call. It’s hard sometimes to critique sexism in Hollywood because while there is a lot of really blatant stuff, sometimes what you’re critiquing isn’t the presence of misogyny so much as the absence of female representation, which is due to the presence of sexism in the production line, but not so much the fault of individual artists all the time. Not all stories have to represent all view points, but we should be able to have a culture in which, cumulatively, all view point are represened. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with stupid buddy comedies that have predominantly male casts; what’s a problem is that while men get Harold & Kumar and Rush Hour and Superbad and just about every movie Owen Wilson has ever been in, ever, women get… what? Thelma and Louise? Joy.
So yeah, I agree–we saw more of the guys’ side of the story in Knocked Up because, well, it was their story. Judd Apatow is a guy. I’ve heard it argued that there’s something inherently problematic in making a comedy about unplanned pregnancy from the guy’s point of view, but I see it more as the story Apatow wanted to tell. What sucks isn’t that he did, but that no one was around in Hollywood to tell the other side (well, at the time. I hear Juno is really good).
Also, a side note about Knocked Up–I’ve heard a lot of self-described feminists, notably over at Feministing, argue that the movie was sexist in large part because the sister’s character was so totally unsympathetic. I find this a really weird argument because–and I saw Knocked Up very early, before any of the feminist debates about it online or else where showed up–I found the sister totally sympathetic, and if I’d heard out of context that someone found her unsympathetic I would have assumed it was a sexist dude who placed her in the “nagging shrew” category without taking into account her feelings, which were made pretty clear to the audience if not always to her husband. She wasn’t perfect, but neither was Paul Rudd; they were two decent people stuck in a terrible situation, and I liked and sympathized with both of them.
he just failed to write the female characters with the same understanding he brought to the male characters.
The opposite is true of, for example, Jane Austen. Maybe screenplays should be written by couples. But I’d like to see the female equivalent of Superbad.
“I’ve heard it argued that there’s something inherently problematic in making a comedy about unplanned pregnancy from the guy’s point of view, but I see it more as the story Apatow wanted to tell. What sucks isn’t that he did, but that no one was around in Hollywood to tell the other side (well, at the time. I hear Juno is really good.)”
I really liked Riding in Cars with Boys, honestly, if you want to talk about “the other side.”
I hadn’t heard much about Juno but just googled it–hey, Michael Cera is in it just like Superbad, nice.
The reason I didn’t like the film was not because it was feminist or sexist - it was because it seemed that almost everyone in that movie was incredibly selfish. Everyone was concerned with their own needs and wants, no one advocated for the expected child or seemed to take the child’s needs into consideration, beyond a few instances of consumerism.
I haven’t actually seen this movie, but… wasn’t that basically the source of the comedy in the first place?!
there have been some instances of girls living for themselves in pop culture. i really liked “my so called life” for that reason. and of course amanda posted the all time greatest. p.j soles absolutely rocked my world when i saw that as a kid. for one hot minute in the late 70’s early 80’s “Girls just want to have fun” actually made sense. then it all just disappeared in crazy backlash….nostalgia.is a curse…and a lie.
On the one hand, Juno looks refreshing because the female lead is allowed to be funny. On the other, it may be she gets an except because she’s a teenager. The one adult female character besides Juno’s mother is the typical killjoy. Which is too bad because the typical dissatisfied immature husband is Jason Bateman, who was on a sitcom where adult women were allowed to be goofy. I’ll still see it, but it would have been refreshing if Garner was the one into pop culture and secretly dreading responsibility and Bateman had been the killjoy.
AAUGH!!! Another person who writes “loose” when they mean “lose”! I HATE THAT! Hate it hate it hate it! People who use “loose” instead of “lose” make me want to do bad things. Terrible things! It makes me so mad that I post meaningless, off-topic rants in blog comments!
::gasp::
::pant::
Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system… yes, I too want to see the female equivalent of Superbad, or at least something with a female lead that’s 1) not horrible, 2) not a generic romantic comedy, and 3) doesn’t exist for the sake of Fan Service. Something more like Contact.
AAUGH!!! Another person who writes “loose” when they mean “lose”! I HATE THAT! Hate it hate it hate it! People who use “loose” instead of “lose” make me want to do bad things. Terrible things! It makes me so mad that I post meaningless, off-topic rants in blog comments!
::gasp::
::pant::
Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system… yes, I too want to see the female equivalent of Superbad, or at least something with a female lead that’s 1) not horrible, 2) not a generic romantic comedy, and 3) doesn’t exist for the sake of FanService. Something more like Contact, for example.
The opposite is true of, for example, Jane Austen.
That just isn’t true at all. I think you might be confusing “not centering the male characters” with “not writing them with sensitivity and insight.”
I have seen this meme before, that Jane Austen objectifies male charactes or is shallow about male characters, and I see it as just guys who don’t like having their privilege challenged,( in this case the privilege of having all the stories in the culture be about them), who have never actually read Jane Austen but they’re all like “chicks like it and guys don’t, plus, it’s not even about men, so it must be anti-men in some way.” If that doesn’t apply to this particular commenter I apologise– but when I’ve seen more fully fleshed out versions of this argument, that’s what it boiled down to.
Jane Austen’s books pass the reverse Bechtel test easily, which is almost unexpected for books that are told from the POV of female characters and centered on romance. She is very good on portraying male friendships and fraternal relationships. Just because she doesn’t spend a lot of time on, say the relationship between Robert and Edward Ferrars (and the dynamics of that were crucial to the plot) or spend as much time telling us what Mr Elton thinks of Mr Knightley as she did telling us what Emma thinks about him, doesn’t mean that those relationships are not fully fleshed out and three-dimensional, and there is just no way that her male characters are not written with sensitivity. It’s incredibly lazy and obtuse to say otherwise. I mean, half a second’s thought ought to remind you that her most famous book centres on the development and growth of two different characters, one male and one female, and that both the male and female character are referenced in the title.
“It then becomes what I feel is an unfair onus on hip male writers like Aptaow to represent women from a woman’s perspective.”
My feminist laser eyes are on full-blast when I consume media, and what I got from Knocked Up was a strong feminist bent, especially the fantasy baseball team scene. Ignoring the silly happy ending, I felt like the moral of the story is that men should NOT be allowed to get away with being immature fools. ”
Well, gee; i sat down wanting to just be entertained & wasnt able to *because* the movie was so aggressively sexist –& even beyond that– unfunny.
apatow SUCKS &should dry up & blow away, SOON.
the ‘moral of the story’? Please. the preceding 2 hours to that tacked on ending were all about what ‘bitches’ teh female characters were tothe hapless, clueless, puppy-dog-like men. apatow really is horrible, both in content & execution, in whatever he;s done.
theres a thread over on feministe about female directors and i want to repeat my shout out of love for “slums of beverly hills” which is such a fantastic smart funny film about growing up female from a female director. i just wish more movies like that came out.
ive heard really good things about “juno” too, and i think “saved” did a pretty nice job of dealing with unplanned pregnancy from a female point of view.
yup, funny movie.
Slums of Beverly Hills was an awesome movie.
Finally rented the latest Harry Potter movie last night and it reminded me what I find so dismaying about that series–Ron and Hermione are completely the slacker/striver dynamic, in miniature and with wands. Does anyone else hate that relationship as much as I do?
This discussion reminds me of something I have been noticing for years but have been unable to articulate with enough clarity for anyone else to understand what I am talking about.
I am an upper middle class career woman (rocket scientist, thank you very much) living in the ‘burbs with 2 children and, unfortunately, a husband. Anyway, I have been unfortunate enough to attend dozens of kid related parties over the years and I have always noticed that the other moms never, ever, ever look like they are ever having any fun or have ever had any fun in recent memory.
I personally love roller skating parties because I love to skate. I almost never see other moms skate with their kids. Maybe about 1/3 of the dads will get out and skate, but I am betting that it is about 1/100 of women who do. Similarly, at miniature golf parties, the moms never play.
I have always wondered why this is so. It seems like there is an expectation in soccer mom circles that women are not only expected not to have fun, but also that you are violating some kind of unspoken code if you do have the temerity to have fun. They look at me like I am an alien.
What ever is wrong with women, especially moms, having fun?
“Kali
‘Unless you are utterly repulsive in some way then you will eventually meet a woman who would like to be more than your friend.’
Cold comfort indeed for the guy who wrote that letter!”
Everything that is not unending devotion and lashings of pussy in exchange for the tremendous condescension of his companionship is cold comfort for that guy.
Nice Guys are built on unrealistic expectations and the desire for an enormous return on a small investment.
Well, that and sour grapes.
and JESUS GODS your anti-spam thingie is bloody IMPOSSIBLE - is there not a way to request a new collection of numbers because one can’t fucking read the nasty little unclear thing as it stands?! ALWAYS three or four unavailing tries, and in order to get a new batch I have to close the window entirely and start over. ugh.
And goddamnit, that is how things end up in the wrong thread. Urgh.
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
I just saw Juno last night. I really liked it, and it certainly showed one main female character (Juno) and one side female character (her best friend) as fun-loving and with a good sense of humor. But what was interesting to me, and what no one has talked about in any review I’ve seen, is that the one character who is capable of being a parent is the sweet but humorless and desperate adoptive mom. The adoptive husband turns out to be totally immature and runs away. We’re not really supposed to approve of that, and it does show his cool, fun-loving self to be the flip side of his refusal to grow up. But still, the mom is the one who makes him keep all his stuff in a single room, and who tells him his rock band shirt is “stupid.” So while the movie certainly doesn’t CELEBRATE his immature, fun-loving self; neither does it show us mature people who can have a sense of humor. Juno and her crowd do, but they’re kids; they’re not supposed to be Serious yet. It’s like everyone who writes movies thinks that your funny bone gets thrown out with the afterbirth.
That’s not to be too hard on the movie; I really did enjoy it. It’s sweet and warm, though I think it presents an unprobably rosy picture of unplanned teenage pregnancy in which everything is just right - her parents don’t kick her out of the house; the boy still adores her; her cheerleader best friend is loyal and kind; she’s not torn up by giving away her baby. Also, the abortion clinic was implausibly icky. Oh well. But despite all this, it was well done, well acted, and had a good heart.
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
I just saw Juno last night. I really liked it, and it certainly showed one main female character (Juno) and one side female character (her best friend) as fun-loving and with a good sense of humor. But what was interesting to me, and what no one has talked about in any review I’ve seen, is that the one character who is capable of being a parent is the sweet but humorless and desperate adoptive mom. The adoptive husband turns out to be totally immature and runs away. We’re not really supposed to approve of that, and it does show his cool, fun-loving self to be the flip side of his refusal to grow up. But still, the mom is the one who makes him keep all his stuff in a single room, and who tells him his rock band shirt is “stupid.” So while the movie certainly doesn’t CELEBRATE his immature, fun-loving self; neither does it show us mature people who can have a sense of humor. Juno and her crowd do, but they’re kids; they’re not supposed to be Serious yet. It’s like everyone who writes movies thinks that your funny bone gets thrown out with the afterbirth.
That’s not to be too hard on the movie; I really did enjoy it. It’s sweet and warm, though I think it presents an unprobably rosy picture of unplanned teenage pregnancy in which everything is just right - her parents don’t kick her out of the house; the boy still adores her; her cheerleader best friend is loyal and kind; she’s not torn up by giving away her baby. Also, the abortion clinic was implausibly icky. Oh well. But despite all this, it was well done, well acted, and had a good heart.
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
I just saw Juno last night. I really liked it, and it certainly showed one main female character (Juno) and one side female character (her best friend) as fun-loving and with a good sense of humor. But what was interesting to me, and what no one has talked about in any review I’ve seen, is that the one character who is capable of being a parent is the sweet but humorless and desperate adoptive mom. The adoptive husband turns out to be totally immature and runs away. We’re not really supposed to approve of that, and it does show his cool, fun-loving self to be the flip side of his refusal to grow up. But still, the mom is the one who makes him keep all his stuff in a single room, and who tells him his rock band shirt is “stupid.” So while the movie certainly doesn’t CELEBRATE his immature, fun-loving self; neither does it show us mature people who can have a sense of humor. Juno and her crowd do, but they’re kids; they’re not supposed to be Serious yet. It’s like everyone who writes movies thinks that your funny bone gets thrown out with the afterbirth.
That’s not to be too hard on the movie; I really did enjoy it. It’s sweet and warm, though I think it presents an unprobably rosy picture of unplanned teenage pregnancy in which everything is just right - her parents don’t kick her out of the house; the boy still adores her; her cheerleader best friend is loyal and kind; she’s not torn up by giving away her baby. Also, the abortion clinic was implausibly icky. Oh well. But despite all this, it was well done, well acted, and had a good heart.
GODDAMMIT where is my comment going????
I am going to try one more bloody time to post this.
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER
I just saw Juno last night. I really liked it, and it certainly showed one main female character (Juno) and one side female character (her best friend) as fun-loving and with a good sense of humor. But what was interesting to me, and what no one has talked about in any review I’ve seen, is that the one character who is capable of being a parent is the sweet but humorless and desperate adoptive mom. The adoptive husband turns out to be totally immature and runs away. We’re not really supposed to approve of that, and it does show his cool, fun-loving self to be the flip side of his refusal to grow up. But still, the mom is the one who makes him keep all his stuff in a single room, and who tells him his rock band shirt is “stupid.” So while the movie certainly doesn’t CELEBRATE his immature, fun-loving self; neither does it show us mature people who can have a sense of humor. Juno and her crowd do, but they’re kids; they’re not supposed to be Serious yet. It’s like everyone who writes movies thinks that your funny bone gets thrown out with the afterbirth.
That’s not to be too hard on the movie; I really did enjoy it. It’s sweet and warm, though I think it presents an unprobably rosy picture of unplanned teenage pregnancy in which everything is just right - her parents don’t kick her out of the house; the boy still adores her; her cheerleader best friend is loyal and kind; she’s not torn up by giving away her baby. Also, the abortion clinic was implausibly icky. Oh well. But despite all this, it was well done, well acted, and had a good heart.
Ok, the comment gods do not want me to tell you all what I thought of Juno. It’s probably for the best - there were spoilers there.
To Shell Goddamnit and every other Pandagon regular who’s sick of dealing with the Capcha anti-spam device - do yourselves a favor and use the “REGISTER/Site Admin” menu choice to create a user ID with Pandagon.
Once you register, you don’t see the Capcha again, the sun shines, the birds sing, and the world is a sweeter place…
Oh dear - it looks like my comment did get through - 3 times. **blushing** my apologies for the bad netiquette.
Mrs Nice Guy here. Rocket Girl, as a mom with several “careers” one after another, and a whole lot of kids, I think it could just be that some of those moms are really glad when their kids’ relentless drive to have fun can be absorbed by a horde of other kids, and they can just sit down for a minute. Depends on how much energy you have left I suppose, after dealing with not just the kids, but the Energy Sink that is the average husband.
Right on, Mrs. Nice Guy. I don’t find miniature golf fun (and frankly the only kid on the planet I’m crazy about is my own). I’d rather let the kids go off and be left to my own thoughts. I find other stuff fun, like reading or playing piano or painting or…basically, doing stuff Ilike to do. Playing video games isn’t fun for me; neither is running around with squirt guns. If that makes me a terrible drag of a mother, so be it.
I spend several hours a day with my kid, I do stuff with him, if he’s at a party with other kids I’m delighted to watch them having fun without needing to jump in there, too.
(Though I have gone roller skating at the parties, and I drove go-carts when I had my son’s party at the fun center).
MikeEss
Oh well shit. I - uh…I’ll shut up now and go away and register. There’s one less thing I can bitch about in public & make a fool of meself…
Thanks!!
“though I think it presents an unprobably rosy picture of unplanned teenage pregnancy in which everything is just right …. Also, the abortion clinic was implausibly icky.”
Juno, Knocked Up…why are we getting these movies now? Im so fed up with people telling me how/what i should think about women in movies, eg.etc, that i am turned off by these premises before i have a chance to see the movie now. I actually sat down to have a good laugh at KU since it was getting so much buzz & the experience of seeing that movie was as unpleasant as being continually spit in the face for 2+hours… to go & see another movie about a girl who does ‘the right thing’ (because how fucking unforgivable would a female character be if she in the course of a movie had an abortion). i dont give a fuck HOW quirky-funny, optimistic, endearing ,,,etc BS, she is!! Honestly, im just so fucking fed up with female characters being what MEN want them to be; what SOME women like to mythologize them to be; & them not being what they ARE–fully developed, complex –& YES, fuck it!, FUNNY, human beings!
Ahem.
pussy tourmaline, you have saved my desk from yet another head-dent.
This is a strange coincidence seeing this thread here because I just got “Knocked Up” on DVD last night, ages after it came out. I just want to mention the attitude to abortion in the film - did you notice how the people who are for abortion are wanting to force it on her (as per anti-choice fantasy), plus, the main voice “for” abortion - Alison’s mum - is portrayed as the terrifying ball-busting Career Mom with an inch of makeup and a hairstyle which doesn’t move. While Ben’s dad, who wants them to keep the kid, is warm and sympathetic. The message is very obvious.
“We lose housework chicken because as we’re the ones who will be held responsible if the shit hits the fan.”
I think you lose ‘cuz (sadly) you’re the ones that CARE.
Go see Waitress.
@eric, rejector of memes
that is such an f’n cop out. men care just as much. the just expect someone else to do it for them.
apologies to those men out there who actually do take on their fair share of household responsibilities. but you really do seem to be few and far between.
“Once you register, you don’t see the Capcha again, the sun shines, the birds sing, and the world is a sweeter place…”
But if you share the computer, you have to do it all over again every time, or just give up and all use the same name.
Mrs Nice Guy
“But if you share the computer, you have to do it all over again every time, or just give up and all use the same name.”
Once you register, it’s true that the PC you’re on will remember you. However, if you choose the “REGISTER/Admin” menu item again, there’s a “logout” option available.
Log your husband out, make your own ID/password, and post as yourself. Logout again, and he can log back in again under his ID.
(at least in theory - I’d try it here but I’m the only one who uses Pandagon here…)
:)
“We lose housework chicken because as we’re the ones who will be held responsible if the shit hits the fan.”
I think you lose ‘cuz (sadly) you’re the ones that CARE.
And a good part of the reason that we do care is that we’re the ones who are held responsible when the housework isn’t done. Christ on a pogo stick, how hard is that to figure out?
Helen (or should I say “the good Helen” with the several Dr. Helen posts we’ve had lately)–
that was actually a central theme of at least one of the times we discussed the movie:
http://pandagon.blogsome.com/2007/06/03/movie-review-knocked-up/
Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann were the real stars of the movie for me with their tumultuous marriage…
Had the Heigl character in Knocked Up had an abortion, the movie would have been about 30 minutes long (which, based on these comments, would have been dandy for some of you).
I perceived the discussions in the movie about abortion to be realistic. People don’t talk about abortion like they talk about cars or sports; they’re ashamed of it, and use euphemisms like “take care of it.” Ultimately, the Heigl character made her own choice, which is all a pro-choice advocate could ask for. Can you imagine how horrified we’d be if Rogen’s character had asked her to get an abortion? He’d have to be a major dickhead to do that.
Rocket Girl see “The Feminine Mystique” because it sounds like you just replicated it.
and bingo, anonymous Kate and nadai
women may care more than men but it’s because of the social expectation that we must, it’s not particularly liberating.
And a good part of the reason that we do care is that we’re the ones who are held responsible when the housework isn’t done. Christ on a pogo stick, how hard is that to figure out?
I am going to try and be careful here because I don’t want to be misunderstood, but who holds you responsible? I agree that most men don’t shoulder their share of the housework, but the answer is to find a balance between the man not doing a thing and spending the whole weekend cleaning. We split the housework around our place and try and clean up once a week or so. It is reasonably clean, but not Ozzie and Harriet. I suppose someone might find it not to their standards, but frankly, there just isn’t anyone we care about who is going make us feel guilty for it. There are no housework police who fine you for dust bunnies under the couch or cobwebs in that corner you missed.
*testing the new registration feature*
Rebecca C., I think the problem isn’t that Knocked Up was about a woman who decided to keep the movie. It’s that there don’t seem to be any where the woman doesn’t. (Much like the points made above about buddy movies about men not being bad, but it just being really frustrating that women don’t get anywhere near the equivalent.) We don’t get any depictions of women making the other choice–so in movieland, there IS no real choice (that is shown, or considered valid).
I haven’t seen Knocked Up yet, but I do kind of want to. Though now that I’ve seen so much discussion of it, I wonder if I’ll be able to enjoy it as just a movie or not. Oh, well.
Col Bat Guano–I hear (I don’t have much direct experience, but I hear) that there are people whose family and friends will look down on them if they don’t keep everything Ozzie & Harriet. My mom once knew a woman who would come into her house and look under the kids’ beds to make sure there weren’t dust bunnies. Since my mother is an artistic type, much more about drawing or crafting or writing than making her house Just So, you can imagine what she thought of that! (But didn’t have the guts to say, alas. Luckily it was only an occasional visitor. But my mom to this day still feels guilty about her messy house, even though her kids and husband are pretty fine with it, and though my dad when it gets too messy will take a mop or a dishcloth to it himself without making a big deal of it.)
Omg HURRAY no spam captcha! Looks like registration worked.
(Also looks like Pandagon ate my post, but I’ll wait a few hours to see if it went through before reposting.)
@Col Bat Guano
Dude, I am not talking about Ozzie and Harriet clean here. I’m just talking about dishes washed before they get moldy. Vaccuming and changing the sheets every few weeks or so. Occaisionally wiping down a surface or two before they get crusty. I wouldn’t recommend anybody looking under the bed. About twice a year I clean under there just to retrieve all the books and odd socks. My Dad would not approve of my living conditions. But he lives miles away and I hang out with people who have better things to do then come over my house and open the oven to see that in 3yrs I’ve never cleaned it.
In short, my standards are pretty f’n low, but still the number 1 thing my boy and I fought over was housework. Always the cop out he used was some variation of the “Well you care more than I do.” And always my response was, “You just expect me to do it. That’s why you don’t care.” So finally I determined to win the housework chicken game with him. OMG you wouldn’t believe how really gross our house got. If we had children the state would have taken them for neglect. The dirtier it got the more mad he would get. He’d come home and complain, “The kitchen is so gross I can’t even eat in here.” Me, “Well I guess you should probably clean it then.” Finally there was one great big, end all be all fight, where he admitted to me that it hurt his feelings I didn’t keep the house clean. Because it made him feel like I didn’t care about our relationship. My response, “Well how do you think I feel, when you don’t do your share?” *Light Bulb* Realization that feelings stem from stupid gender role expectations.
Okay, admittedly this is merely an anecdote. But I imagine it’s a whole lot closer to the truth than the whole “Women notice dirt more” Bullshit.
I guess a more precise version of what I’m trying to say is:
Men care about a clean house and see dirt just as much as women do. It’s just that when they see a mess it automatically goes into the “somebody elses problem” file in their brain. With women it’s a personal problem. I think this construct is from traditional gender roles. Not because of some inborn aversion to dirt do to a double x chromosome.
I know a whole lot of adult single men who keep their house alot cleaner than I ever did as a single woman. Keep in mind I said adult and not college boys.
Ugh the housework debate. Probably a derail, but…seriously. Many guys feel entitled to either live in filth or have someone clean it for them. But clean clothes and dishes have to come from somewhere, and eventually the roaches will become a problem. Forcing your partner to either do your scutwork or live at the roaches-and-mold level because you are too goddamn lazy to clean up? Douchey. My kudos to somegirls for being able to do it. But it was still douchey of her partner to put her through that.
Cleaning up after yourself is a sign of maturity; filth makes you sick and causes vermin problems, not to mention making coming to your home a fearful experience for other people. It shows lack of consideration and a lack of socialization; in the same way that refusing to have personal hygiene is a sign of hostility to other people, refusal to clean and care for your living area is a sign of hostility to others in your home and to visitors. Only men feel privileged to be immature in this regard, and I despise them when they do that. It’s not cute, it’s disgusting.
What most men aren’t taught/can’t deal with is just how much work goes into keeping a moderately sized house clean, and how much of it…scrubbing toilets, getting hair out of drains, cleaning up cat puke…is pretty damn disgusting. But still necessary.
@emjaybee
yeah, the whole thing was rather disgusting. it definately showed his most douchey side. but he’s got some other traits that aren’t so douchey. i felt bad that i wasn’t able to explain myself to him without that very gross demonstration and i definately had to exercise my most pig-headed ugly side to pull it off. it revealed some very nasty old school misogyny that he’s generally pretty good at suppressing. in general the whole experience didn’t show either of us at our best.
btw, I don’t think the whole housework debate is a thread jack. I think it’s a very real everday experience of alot of people that exposes how deeply ingrained the whole, “Women are the responsible ones that exist to tame (and clean up after) those crazy boys.”
American Psycho was directed by a woman. I always found that one of the most interesting examples because you can tell the perspective is different but the subject matter is not any sort of giveaway.
You seem to be vehemently agreeing with the notion that “women care more.”
It’s one thing for a man to be a slob and expect the woman in his life to keep things clean - obviously lame. But a male slob who expects his partner to be equally slobby and demands nothing as far as cleanliness - I don’t see the problem in that, and your explanation appears to be that women do in fact just care more.
These two things are entirely different. Only the latter is entitlement.
MikeEss, bless you for you great advice! Let’s see if the birds sing……
………….and they do!
Both my husband and I thought Knocked Up was just not that funny.
On the housework tip, he mows and I clean the bathrooms, but all that means is that he gets to use gas-powered equipment and I get to use Products and Devices, which makes us both happy. And we pay someone to dust because I HATE f***ing dusting. It’s done and it never looks done, so how can you tell that you did all that hard work?
Also, he’s an adult, not a boy, which is so fricking refreshing that I just can’t stand myself. He’s just a little to old to be part of that generation of males that think life is one long, nay perpetual, adolescence. He’s had a mortgage since 1985. He’s a grownup.