criterionforum.org

Posted: **Wed Oct 22, 2008 7:19 pm**

Antoine Doinel wrote:I think the term "misogyny" is thrown around far, far too easily.

Misogynist!

Posted: **Wed Oct 22, 2008 7:31 pm**

It's like calling Little Britain homophobic.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 3:12 am**

domino harvey wrote:Seth Rogen movie

To be fair he was hilarious on Undeclared. The most criminally underrated show of my lifetime. I still don't see how Monica Keena and to a lesser extent Carla Gallo aren't bigger stars.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 4:03 am**

You're arguing with a guy [domino] who thought Superbad was misogynist, just to set the scene, though I don't know if he ever got into detail when confronted. Also, I love how far my joke about Moe's statement of probability being the cancer movie has gotten.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 4:07 am**

mfunk9786 wrote: the cancer movie

As opposed to the movie cancer, which brings us back to Kramer.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 4:23 am**

mfunk9786 wrote:You're arguing with a guy [domino] who thought Superbad was misogynist, just to set the scene, though I don't know if he ever got into detail when confronted. Also, I love how far my joke about Moe's statement of probability being the cancer movie has gotten.

I'll admit to being slow on that one and I just got it. So for what it's worth, let me give you a belated

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 4:24 am**

mfunk9786 wrote:You're arguing with a guy [domino] who thought Superbad was misogynist, just to set the scene, though I don't know if he ever got into detail when confronted.

I just had to check and that was five years ago! Jesus, how long have you been carrying this around? Is it really that hard to conceive of someone finding that film's constant barrage of "Boys will be boys" sexist remarks between the leads as exhibiting a persistent hostility towards women? I get that they're young and projecting their inexperience and blah blah blah but there's a lot of different ways to get to the ultimately positive message that don't involve the persistent objectification of women the film espouses. If I didn't reply then it was because the incredulous responses to my comment were less-than-inviting. You and anyone else are free to disagree with my assessment, obviously, but to deny that these elements are in play and that it would be ludicrous for some one to respond negatively in this fashion seems rather disingenuous and churlish and not the start of a conversation I am interested in furthering. You and I have a different barometer for what's funny, and sometimes our tastes align, but my thin patience with this kind of stuff is hardly news.

And even if none of this were true for me, Seth Rogen would still be, for me, without question, the most obnoxious, unfunny, charmless, and revolting personality one could summon. Everyone has that star they cannot stand on a basic, elemental level, and he's mine. Could be worse: My dad hates Martin Short! Poor Martin Short. What did that guy ever do to anyone except give the world laughter?

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 4:27 am**

I always think it's fascinating the one actor seemingly everyone has that they just can't stand. That would be an interesting thread to read in the appropriate place which I don't know where it is and it might not be on this forum at all... *trails off*

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 4:53 am**

I actually stumbled onto that thread today poking around the forum by coincidence, even though I commented in there briefly, I hadn't even remembered it til I saw it today. The word misogyny sure is tossed around with reckless abandon these days, though. There's no hatred for women in that film - quite frankly, the women come off better than the men - smarter and more thoughtful - but I guess a man who's figuring out his sexuality and fear of interacting with the opposite sex automatically is a misogynist. That is a charged word that implies a good heap of sinister intentions and to see it used about something harmless and frankly thoughtful and responsible is disappointing to me. But hey, clearly it's a sore subject.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 5:07 am**

If it helps any, were I to write the same comment today, I'd say "Exhibits excessive hostility towards women" instead

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 5:14 am**

domino harvey wrote:If it helps any, were I to write the same comment today, I'd say "Exhibits excessive hostility towards women" instead

Nothing more hostile than wanting to figure out a way to have consensual sex when you're a teenager

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 11:58 am**

mfunk9786 wrote:
domino harvey wrote:If it helps any, were I to write the same comment today, I'd say "Exhibits excessive hostility towards women" instead
Nothing more hostile than wanting to figure out a way to have consensual sex when you're a teenager

[I apologize for dragging this further off-topic, but this conversation has sparked my interest]

It seems to me fairly inarguable that much of the dialogue in the film does indeed exhibit hostility toward women. Whether the film as a whole is hostile is perhaps more complicated, although I think I largely agree with Domino here. To me, the film is normalizing a cultural assumption that young adolescent boys must form their homosocial bonds through an objectification of women. It is not simply a matter of trying to have consensual sex; the two "protagonists" seem to only understand sex as something they must get from the women rather than enjoy with them. Their conception of sex seems to completely foreclose any understanding of female desire and the possibility that women might, ya know, enjoy sex too. Thus the major narrative strand of the film becomes a quest narrative in which they attempt to acquire alcohol to get the girls drunk enough to sleep with them.

The only interesting element of the film is the way in which it frames this objectification of women as a displacement of properly homosexual desire (Eve Sedgewick's work on the triangulation of desire might be apropos here). Yet the film never seems to interrogate or complicate the objectification of women itself, treating it as the "natural" way for two 17 year-old boys to behave. And it is precisely this last element that bothers me so much.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 1:41 pm**

I actually agree with Domino wholeheartedly on Seth Rogen but Undeclared is awesome. Funny thing is that even tho he plays a college freshman in it there's far more thoughtfulness and nuance in that role than in anything else I've ever seen him in.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 2:10 pm**

I don't know about you all, but my experience with the atmosphere of high school wasn't much like an ABC Family show or something - it wasn't a cut and dried group of people going in and out of relationships with one another - there was some gray area with regards to how to approach a girl (and on their end, with how to approach a guy, if they did at all), and everyone was trying to determine where (and with whom) their sexuality fits in. I think that Superbad does a notably good job of showing a universe where high school students are having casual sexual encounters with one another, and there is a group of all-talk misfits on the outside looking in, who ultimately don't have the heart to pursue a sexual encounter that way, even though they desperately want to have sex. They go through the motions of what they think a casual encounter with a girl looks like - going to a party with alcohol and condoms and 'lube' in tow, and find out that they're not comfortable enough yet even interacting with someone of the opposite sex to have an actual sexual encounter with them. I don't see hostility there - I see actual innocence. There was no actual intention on the part of the characters to do anything sinister there, and the implication of high school being a universe where everyone chats each other up until they enter long term loving relationships and then engage in coitus is naive. That certainly exists, but there's a good amount of casual, alcohol-lubricated sexual congress that goes on mutually between male and female high school students who feel comfortable navigating those social waters - these characters weren't ready for it, weren't cut out for it, and them discovering that will ultimately be to their benefit in the long term, or so we think by the time the credits roll.

I was terrified of initiating a date, or a sexual encounter, or pretty much anything else with a woman early in my high school years, but I wouldn't chalk that up towards hostility. If anything, I think a lot of young men put women on a social pedestal that makes it difficult for them to even attempt to relate to them on equal footing. These characters weren't looking down at the girls they wanted to pursue, they were looking up at them hoping they wouldn't be rejected out of hand because the girls presumably had dozens of things better to do. If that's hostile - I'd better let LQ know now that I was extremely hostile towards women in my formative years and just didn't realize it, she might want to know that. Not every high school boy has a degree in Women's Studies from Elizabethtown, you know. They have to figure out for themselves that women are a lot more like them than they might think through actual life experience, like the exaggerated one in this film.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 2:48 pm**

I like how Domino writes

I get that they're young and projecting their inexperience and blah blah blah but there's a lot of different ways to get to the ultimately positive message that don't involve the persistent objectification of women the film espouses.

And then mfunk goes and talks all about how they're young and projecting their inexperience and blah blah blah and because there's an ultimately positive message this excuses the persistent objectification of women.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 2:50 pm**

When did I mention it excusing the objectification of women. Quite frankly, I don't see objectification of women here.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 2:53 pm**

mfunk9786 wrote: If anything, I think a lot of young men put women on a social pedestal that makes it difficult for them to even attempt to relate to them on equal footing.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 2:53 pm**

Yes, because they're up there on a pedestal being mindless objects. Has nothing to do with the fact that they tend to be more mature, more sensitive, more emotionally developed. They're just objects.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 3:02 pm**

Well ... yeah, pretty much. I take it the characters in the movie wouldn't be quite so terrified of the women that they didn't "desperately want to have sex" with.

Look, don't get me wrong - I totally hear what you're saying. Your high school experience and mine certainly had this aspect in common, and like most teen boys I spent a good amount of my time trying to deal with my own sexual frustration. It's not like I can't relate to the movie at all.

But eventually I, you know, grew up. And I realized that it's much easier to interact with people I actually saw as people than it was with people I had viewed primarily as sexual objects. It's pretty easy for me to acknowledge now that my own misogyny at the time was far from "innocence", it was pretty pernicious and something that really held me back socially. I'm not sure the filmmakers in this case really understand this point - like Dom says, I think it just kind of lazily falls back on the assumption of "boys will be boys" charm.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 3:06 pm**

High school was a nightmare and I will never understand why anyone wants to relive it or watch movies about it or speak of it ever again.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 3:10 pm**

Brian C wrote:Well ... yeah, pretty much. I take it the characters in the movie wouldn't be quite so terrified of the women that they didn't "desperately want to have sex" with.

Look, don't get me wrong - I totally hear what you're saying. Your high school experience and mine certainly had this aspect in common, and like most teen boys I spent a good amount of my time trying to deal with my own sexual frustration. It's not like I can't relate to the movie at all.

But eventually I, you know, grew up. And I realized that it's much easier to interact with people I actually saw as people than it was with people I had viewed primarily as sexual objects. It's pretty easy for me to acknowledge now that my own misogyny at the time was far from "innocence", it was pretty pernicious and something that really held me back socially. I'm not sure the filmmakers in this case really understand this point - like Dom says, I think it just kind of lazily falls back on the assumption of "boys will be boys" charm.

I don't want to speak for you, because I don't want to read between the lines of what you're saying too much, but my discomfort approaching women didn't come from sexual frustration and some sort of pent up hostility - if anything I was self-loathing beyond my years enough not to trouble someone I respected and realized was a pretty tremendous individual compared to my work-in-progress with having to do touch body parts with me. Obviously I know now that that's immaturity in and of itself, but I wasn't walking around thinking that women were somehow shrinkwrapped for the sexual pleasure of those with less cowardice than I - though I had some acquaintances who's frustration with the sexual successes of "stupid jocks" quickly turned into hostility towards the woman involved.

I saw women as people who had it together a lot more than I did, had a lot more confidence and a lot more control over their bodies and their destinies, and it was difficult to come to terms with the idea that I might try to inject myself into their otherwise comfortable existence. Like you said, I grew up - what I needed to realize is that it's a lot easier to interact with people when you realize that they have some of the same insecurities and apprehensions and difficulties growing up that I did. I think the encounter at the much-anticipated party in this film (and I think we're all discussing a movie we haven't seen in a few years now) did a smart job of portraying this equal footing, and that wasn't lost on the characters involved.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 3:23 pm**

mfunk9786 wrote:Yes, because they're up there on a pedestal being mindless objects. Has nothing to do with the fact that they tend to be more mature, more sensitive, more emotionally developed. They're just objects.

But I don't think that the film depicts the two lead characters as believing that women are more mature, sensitive, and emotionally developed and thus putting them on a pedestal. An example (I used the IMDB quotes section to refresh my memory as I haven't seen the film since it came out): The film opens with them discussing porn sites. During this discussion, one of the characters describes a site that "doesn't show dick going in." He asks his friend if he's "ever seen a vagina by itself" and then confesses that it's "not for him." In this exchange, the two lead characters have set up a symbolic universe in which women or "vaginas" only have value in relation to penises. (Aside: I don't mean this to sound like a Dworkin-esque anti-porn thing. The objectification in this scene has nothing to do with porn as such, but rather their exchange about porn). Obviously the joke here sets up the homoeroticism of the film, but it does so through an objectification of women that I don't believe is ever interrogated. This exchange is by no means an outlier, either, but very much in tune with the dialogue in the rest of the film

The assumption that goes unquestioned throughout the film is that it is okay for seventeen year-old boys to talk like this; that it is somehow a natural phase in their maturity that they will grow out of. I don't think this is a malicious attempt to demean women by the filmmakers, but the fact is that the film naturalizes/fails to question an assumption that teenage boys must verbally treat women as objects in order to strengthen their homosocial ties.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 3:55 pm**

mfunk9786 wrote:Obviously I know now that that's immaturity in and of itself, but I wasn't walking around thinking that women were somehow shrinkwrapped for the sexual pleasure of those with less cowardice than I - though I had some acquaintances who's frustration with the sexual successes of "stupid jocks" quickly turned into hostility towards the woman involved.

I think you're perhaps guilty of looking at misogyny as a binary thing here, as in a person is either misogynistic or they're not. Either they hate women overtly or they're innocent and just putting them on a pedestal because women are so awesome.

But it's really more of a spectrum, isn't it? Most men are somewhere between the extremes, neither the kind of guy who walks around thinking of women solely as shrinkwrapped pleasurebots nor an infallible feminist. I think that Dom's initial diagnosis (years ago) of "overwhelming misogyny" was hyperbolic, but I also think he's dead-on right about the male-centric perspective towards and sexual objectification of the women in the film. Granted, it's been awhile since I saw the film, but as I recall it is not a film whose makers seem all that interested in its female characters, beyond the practical point that they need to be there in order to serve as vehicles of personal fulfillment for the males. Essentially, they're Manic Pixie Dream Girls, without the manic pixie part, and I don't think it's all that out of line to suggest that it leans to the wrong side of the misogyny scale.

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 4:03 pm**

There's only one solution to our disagreement: Everyone has to rewatch this in the next two weeks and come here to chat. FILM CLUB TIME!!

Posted: **Thu Aug 15, 2013 4:16 pm**

Brian, I'd like to ask you this honest question before (and if) I chime in with my two cents: how is your critique of Superbad different than a critique of heterosexual teenage men in general? I'm truly not trying to condescend, and would love your answer on this.

Full disclosure: I love this movie dearly, though I haven't revisited it in years (and probably not once since I really "started getting into" film a few years ago). I found it to be a very accurate portrayal of modern high school for my age group (2001-2005) and certainly more honest than any other "honest" teenager movie I'd seen (e.g. American Pie).

criterionforum.org

Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Guess the November 2013 Releases

Re: Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Re: Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Re: Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Re: Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Re: Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Re: Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Re: Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Re: Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Re: Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Re: Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)

Re: Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007)