It was horrible to watch.

One of the characters, married with a wife and child, complains how he is slowly dying in side ever since he got married and had children.

Another makes a joke about his pedophile past (oh I can’t get within 200 yards of children) and later pretends to masturbate a baby?!?!

A third exploits a vulnerable female by engaging in a clichéd Vegas wedding and they  all drive around Vegas while blacked out from too much alcohol and drugs and because, according to the producer, the screenwriter, and the actor who hurls the line towards the end of the movie, “that’s just what men do.”

And this is a comedy?

Honest to God, we didn’t find anything funny about this movie and some of the scenes and commentary were frankly horrifying. In a world where between 1 in 5, and 1 in 3 women will experience some form of sexual abuse and assault before they are twenty, you do not makes jokes about pedophilia. In a world were ours sons and daughters are regularly run of the road and killed by drunk drivers, you do not condone getting behind the wheel while intoxicated. In a world were relationships fail at the rate of 1 in 2, and where children regularly experience the emotional pain of absent and unattached parents (can you imagine what a child watching this movie would think about his father, or feel about himself, after hearing the married man speak about his “slow death” at the hands of his wife and child?), you don’t make fifties style sexist jokes.  The movie was made in 2009, this is the 21st century, and culturally we are beyond the sexist, irresponsible, childish culture of a boozed up and hopped up sixties and seventies.

Or so we would have thought.

And this is not even to mention the disturbing scenes where they show children engaging in police condoned electrical torture.

Excuse us but this movie was just not funny. It was, however, a very good example of how Hollywood, as a cultural and socialization mega-machine, defines our gender roles for us.  The essence of the film is contained in Stu’s “manly”  comment to his girlfriend when he says, basically, that drinking, driving, going to Vegas, exploiting women, trashing hotel rooms, stealing live animals, urinating in public, dissing your family, engaging in gender segregated peer exclusion, leaving the women to take care of the arrangements, trespassing, kidnapping, masturbating babies, and generally engaging in the activities of an emotional seventeen year old is just the fun stuff that guys do. Hollywood, if you can treat Hollywood like a block like that, does this a lot. From the puerile attempt to define mens’ emotional responses in the 2009 I love you man, which emphasizes (as all Hollywood films do) the physical and emotional separation of the sexes,  to the Disney like attempt to bash us over the head with fantasy like scripts of relationships and marriages, Hollywood is in the business of telling us how to think and feel about each other, and how to act and behave. It’s also very clear from this movie that Hollywood is an irresponsible, immature, childish, offensive, and dated teacher with little sense of social responsibility, little concern for statistics about drunk driving, divorce, or sexual abuse, and an absent conscious and concern for the impact that garbage like this movie might have on society and the impressionable young people who watch it.

Personally, we think that’s the point though. While a lot of people might suffer whenever “the boys” go out and get drunk, or leave their families, or express their emotional disconnection, or kill someone while behind the wheel, bars don’t, and neither do casinos.  It certainly benefits Las Vegas if we (men and women) believe it’s ok to abscond with the family cash and go drop $5,000 a nite on villas in Vegas. It certainly benefits industry when the people who say it’s not OK (Stu’s wife, for example) are painted as monstrous, cheating shrews and the “reasonable spouses” are the ones who remain accepting and/or oblivious to what their spouses (or fiances) are really up to (i.e. Tracy the blushing bride).

In the end the movie was a thoroughly distasteful experience that left us with two questions. The first question was the most obvious one. For a movie that played like a 100 minute advertisement for Las Vegas we wondered, did a Vegas casino front the money to pay for the production of the movie? And the second question, less obvious, but more difficult, how did watching this movie make people feel? What was the expectation? Where we supposed to cheer as Alan Garner (the pedophile character who couldn’t come within 200 yards of children) pretends to masturbate a baby in public? Where we expected to LOL as police encourage children to torture prisoners? Where we supposed to nod in sympathy as Phil Wenneck tells the world his family is killing him, or think “how cool” when he steels money from his students to fund his Vegas debauchery?

Well, if these were the things we were supposed to feel then the movie failed because neither of us felt any of these things. Really it was just 100 minutes of head shaking wonderment that, in the 21st century, with a trillion bits of social research, and society that knows better, such cultural trash could ever make it onto the big Hollywood screen.

Further Reading

Little Warriors

What everyone needs to know about drunk driving

Teaching tolerance

Why?

Well, because gender based exclusion, one sex only activity, is quite literally the root of all female (and male) oppression in this world.  We’ll stop short of saying it is the root of all evil because as we all know, the root of all evil is love of money. But it is definitely the root of all gender based oppression.

Now we know that’s a pretty bold statement, but bare with me for a moment.

We all know that women are not treated equally in this world right? That’s the reality! Women perform 60% of work world wide, they earn 10% of income, and own 10% of the land (Eitzen and Baca-Zinn, 2003:243).  Women are segregated into pink collar occupations, enjoy less financial stability, lower rates of pay, and are generally expected to sacrifice their career paths while their men get ahead. Women are generally left at home to raise the children (an incredibly difficult and demanding job) with minimal help from their spouses and ironically, this is true even in relationships where the male and female are overtly egalitarian. You can go into a marriage with very high ideals but when the babies come, traditional scripts tend to come into play and it is the women who are the ones who bear the primary responsibility. Of course, you ladies take five or six years off your career path to raise children and what do you get? Fewer promotions! It’s a sacrifice that we” ave to make when we raise children, but it’s almost always the women who makes that sacrifice which can, ironically enough, be quite the slap in the face when the kids grow up, the marriage breaks up, and the women is left with nothing but the pink collar ghetto. As a result of the “sacrifices” they make, women experience higher rates of depression, poverty, and social stigmata. And not only that, women and girls are victims of spousal abuse and sexual violence far more often than men. Globally, around the world, women are oppressed and there is no denying that. If you were born female, you are born with a social and economic handicap that is going to make your life a lot harder than it needs to be if genders were treated equally.

And why is this?

Well, there are a lot of reasons why it happens but they all come down to the fact that we (and by “we” we mean the people of this earth) have convinced ourselves that boys and girls are different and because of that we then have a ready made JUSTIFICATION for just about any gender based inequality, exclusion, or oppression that you might want to think of.

Why do women stay home and look after the babies? Because girls are different. They are the ones who nurture.

Why can’t girls be doctors? Because boys are different. They are smarter and more capable.

Why don’t men participate more in cooking? Because men are different. They like mechanical things while girls like to bake.

Why don’t women get paid as much as men? Because they are different.

Why don’t women get promoted as fast? Because they are different.

You get the picture?

Of course at this point some of you will be thinking, well the genders are different. Boys will be boys and girls will be boys. Girls are emotional, irrational, weak. Boys are tough, strong, achievers. Girls like dolls, boys like cars (though tell that to Danica Patrick). Girls are like this, boys are like that. Honestly though, all that’s a load of pseudo-scientific horseshit. There’s really no “scientific” basis to suggest that boys are all that much different than girls. For one, the scientific academy has a huge gender bias that makes any scientific defense of gender differences useless and indefensible. And you can’t argue this. When Mike did his psychology undergraduate degree twenty years ago, we knew there was a bad gender bias in psychology and psychologists knew they had to do something about it. Sad thing is, they didn’t! In fact after twenty or thirty years of awareness, the gender bias is still there. And for two, when you put out the sacred and holy BELL CURVE and compare that by gender, you find what’s most interesting is the massive overlap. There may be difference in the extremes in abilities, sometimes, but really what’s so remarkable about the genders is their similarities. The truth is, male or female, we all have two arms, two legs, two eyes, a brain, an intellect, emotions, feelings, and all the things that make us human. It’s not our differences that are important (though admittedly they can be a lot of fun), it’s our similarities and these similarities far outweigh any superficial sexual characteristics that might differentiate us.

Of course, the pseudo-scientific clap trap about gender differences, or the fact that we all chose to focus on difference rather than similarity, isn’t the main point here. The main point is that once you do that, once you allow for the idea that men and women are different (even though it’s their similarities that are remarkable) then you have created the necessary ideological support (i.e. the rationalization and justification) for gender oppression on this planet. You buy into that dichotomy, you become the oppressor (even if you are the sex being oppressed).  It really is as simple as that.

And what does this have to do with gendered activity? Well, gendered activity is the prototypical gender oppression. It is the prototypical exclusion upon which all other exclusions are based.  Of course, I understand you might have a hard time swallowing this. I mean, what does a girls only baby shower, or a boys only hockey club, have to do with the violent suppression of women on this planet? Well, everything. Once you polarize the genders, once you create a distinction, once you allow exclusion and sorting based on difference, then it becomes possible to rank, and sort, and organize and deny and exclude along any other indices you can care to think about. If you say, only girls can play or only boys can play then by default you give legitimacy to the mythology of gender difference.  And if you give legitimacy to the myth of gender difference, then you have provided support for the reality of gender oppression.  Of course, you may not like to hear this. You may be sitting comfortably in a life organized around gender based activities, but that doesn’t change the fact that if that is your life, then you are supporting the gender based oppression of women on this planet, even if you don’t want to. It is exactly like the feminists say, the personal is political.

So what are you going to do about it? Well, if you are a male and you have a wife, or a sister, or a mother, or a daughter, and you are interested in seeing them treated equally in this world, then you have to stop thinking about gender differences, and stop supporting gendered activities, and start working towards gender inclusion. If you do anything else you are a part of the problem, and a component of the oppression. If you need help, take a page out of this grade school lesson book on peer exclusion and just say no (http://www.tolerance.org/activity/peer-exclusion)

Problem: Sometimes a group of children won’t let another kid play with them just because of their gender. Gender is whether you are a boy or a girl. Sometimes boys will say that a girl can’t play with them. Sometimes girls will say that boys can’t play with them.

Rationale: This isn’t nice. It is wrong to exclude someone just because they are a boy or a girl, or because of their gender. Not letting someone play with you just because of their gender is called bullying, and bullying is not allowed…

If you’re a female and you don’t like the social, political, economic and (even) spiritual inequality that becomes possible when we allow gender difference and gender exclusion, if you don’t like the idea of maybe one day finding yourself on the wrong end of a glass ceiling, submerged in a pink collar ghetto, or crying as your husband of twenty years, whom you sacrificed your entire life and career for, leaves you to go hang with a younger female because “that’s what men do,” then take a page out of the same grade school lesson book on peer exclusion and just say no. You can’t say “you can’t play just because you’re a boy.”

And just to be clear, just because you are female doesn’t give you free pass. You don’t get to engage gender inclusions and then complain about the sorry state of this world, or your life, or your daughter’s awful marriage to that “typical male,” down the road. The personal is political and change starts with you.

Oh an incidentally, everything we’ve said here about gender difference and exclusion applies equally well to ageism, racism, or any of the other exclusions, based on difference, that make the inequality of this world go around. As long as we keep thinking of ourselves as different and not as a unified human race, as long as we hang onto our “we and they” mentality, we create the wedge that allows the inequality that causes the suffering that ruins the lives of the vast majority of people on this earth.

And that’s the Truth.

Mike and Gina

References

Eitzen, D. Stanley and Maxine Baca-Zinn.
2003 Social Problems. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Additional Reading

http://www.delmar.edu/socsci/rlong/problems/chap-09.htm

http://www.tolerance.org/activity/peer-exclusion

http://personalispolitical.tripod.com/