Oh, Hell–Superbad
Most of you probably already know what I think of Superbad, the movie that came out last summer: it’s the perfect example of how misogyny and rape culture are so deeply part of our cultural landscape that the movie is seen an innocent, hilarious take on completely normal high school shenanigans. Bianca Reagan has a great post on how Superbad is an example of humor that gets its laughs from misogyny:
I could go into detail about how my assertions about the movie were correct: almost every female character was depicted as a potential sperm receptacle; every main character was a white male, and almost every supporting character was white; almost every person who speaks in the movie was white. But those realities only served to set up a context for my disgust.
…
Almost every verbal insult spewed in the movie involved attacking the other person’s masculinity by accusing them of not having a penis, being a gay male, being a woman or being a vagina. The loathing of anything female became more palpable as we learned about Bill Hader’s character’s ex-wife, who was an actual whore when he married her. But it was Jonah Hill’s “Seth” who took the cake by openly lusting for his best friend’s mother; repeatedly calling Becca “a bitch” because she told their elementary school teacher about his penis drawings; and losing his mind when the adulterous stranger Seth was grinding on menstruated on his leg. The people who created this movie–the directors, the writers and the producers–clearly have a simultaneous hatred, fear and ignorance of women, quite possibly due to their respective painful adolescences. But I repeat: you all are grown men now. Don’t just regurgitate your teenage fantasies on to the screen. Reflect on your thoughts and feelings with an adult mindset, then film them.
… Misogyny is acceptable and encouraged in our media because it’s “funny.” … For many of the viewers–both men and women, both boys and girls–that movie is reality. To them, all girls dress like prostitutes and therefore should be ogled; girls are always naturally lubricated; girls are stupid enough to believe that a pre-pubescent teenage boy is really a 25-year old Hawaiian man with a singular name more unbelievable than Sting, and will then inexplicably have sex with said boy; girls love to get drunk, strip for you, and offer you “blow-Js”; and, if you fail to get a girl drunk to have sex with her and tell her this, she’ll probably still be your girlfriend, even if you have no redeeming qualities. [emphasis mine]
The whole post is really good and worth reading. My take on the movie has more to do with its rape promotion and Bianca Reagan goes wider into how it relates to misogyny generally.
The movie is stuffed to overflowing with fearful, casual hatred of women, but the part that took my breath in sheer anger and amazement that this movie could get a national distribution deal was that it promotes rape:
Here is the premise of the movie: two teenage boys hatch a plan to acquire alcoholic beverages so that they can get two girls drunk and have sex with them.
Here is an excerpt from Section 261 of the California Penal code:
261. (a) Rape is an act of sexual intercourse accomplished with a person not the spouse of the perpetrator, under any of the following circumstances:
* (3) Where a person is prevented from resisting by any intoxicating or anesthetic substance, or any controlled substance, and this condition was known, or reasonably should have been known by the accused.
The driving plotline in the movie is that Seth is trying to get Julie drunk at her party so that he can fuck her, and then, once he’s fucked her, she’ll “have to be [his] girlfriend” and he’ll be able to fuck her the whole rest of the summer. A summer full of sex–rock on, dude! Except, well, no, because Seth repeatedly insists that he has to get Julie drunk to fuck her: he tells his friend Evan this when Evan says that Seth should just tell her how he feels; he even tells this to Julie flat out at the party, when he’s drunk. He says something like, “This was my last chance! I had to get you drunk to fuck you, so I could make you my girlfriend for the summer! You’d never fuck me otherwise! You’re–you’re gorgeous, and I’m not.” Of course, in the idealized, Seth-centric world of the movie, Julie says that getting her wasted and raping her isn’t Seth’s only chance, and the end of the movie implies that they get together. But anyway, the implications of the entire plotline are staggering:
That Seth wants to get Julie drunk so he can fuck her implies that she doesn’t want to fuck him, so he needs to get around that rejection, or, to phrase it differently, her denial of consent. He needs to get around that rejection by putting her in a state where she’s unable to refuse or consent. That’s rape. That’s Seth saying that he wants to fuck Julie and he deserves that sex, whether or not she wants it, whether or not she enjoys it or is sober during it. The only thing of importance is his pleasure and Julie isn’t a person in her own right, just a vehicle for giving him the sex he thinks he has a right to.
That Seth thinks he can “make” Julie “his girlfriend” is a classic tool used to get acquaintance rapists off the hook. He’s a predator banking on the fact that after the rape, Julie will think it was consensual; that she asked for it; or that if she stays with him, she can pretend it wasn’t really rape. All of these are understandable responses to trauma; after a violation of your body and person, there’s a desire to deny it. And Seth, with his talking of “making” Julie “his girlfriend,” is trying to exploit that vulnerability to entrap Julie. During the movie, he kept using the phrase, “make Julie my girlfriend.” It was extremely disturbing because it states the coercion outright. He’s not asking her to be his girlfriend, he’s not persuading her, he’s not wooing her, he’s making her, regardless of what she thinks or wants. Her desires and independent personhood are not relevant to him.
I hated this movie so much. I couldn’t believe the sheer, unadulterated rape promotion message, I couldn’t believe that rape was portrayed as a normal shenanigan for teenage boys, I couldn’t believe how the three schlubby male characters felt they were entitled to gorgeous girlfriends for sex purposes, just because they were male and they deserved hot chicks to bang.
The one exception to the overwhelming disgust I had for this movie was Evan, who is the nice boy who respects the girl he has a crush on, wants to be straight up and tell her how he feels, and doesn’t jump to take advantage of her when she’s drunk. However, he’s portrayed as a loser for these beliefs and his best friend Seth constantly makes fun of him, telling Evan to just fuck Becca already, she’s a horny slut who’d be a really good fuck. Becca also gets drunk at the party and comes on to Evan, doing a striptease, trying to get him to fuck her, and insulting him when he says it’s not a good idea because they’re drunk. The message here is that nice boys who think of girls as people and respect them, don’t try to rape them, and don’t think of them solely as things to fuck, are losers that will never get laid. They’ll be mocked by their friends and by the girls, who apparently don’t respect boys who won’t fuck them when they’re drunk. The message is that girls don’t deserve such consideration anyway, since they–or Becca, at least–want to have sex when they’re intoxicated and can’t give consent.
I said this in a comment on the post, but it’s worth repeating: “I hate this movie so much, and how it’s specifically targeted at adolescents who don’t know much better because they’re certainly not getting reliable sex ed and or being taught respect for their partners at school. I hate how it’s popular and how it could even be produced–who financed this film? Who produced it? Who brokered the national distribution deal? Among all those people, why didn’t a single person notice how incredibly misogynist, rape-promoting, and vile this movie was?”
Bianca Reagan said,
2008 January 27 at 7:28 pm
Thanks for linking to me! I’m very excited, and I like your post too!
sahiya said,
2008 January 28 at 12:57 am
I haven’t seen it, but yeah, it disturbs me how popular it was and how many people on my flist saw it and were just amused, considering what I’d heard you and other people say about it as well. This is the sort of thing I think of when I hear people talk about “post-feminism” and how we don’t need a women’s movement anymore. BS. Total BS. You take movies like this and articles like the one I read a few weeks about by the moron comparing pretty American women with ugly British women and you get an idea of the underlying misogynism in American that disturbs me greatly. Because you’re right – misogynism is treated as funny, similar, maybe, to the way racism is occasionally treated as funny.
Anyway, thanks for linking ot the article and for posting your own thoughts.
pizzadiavola said,
2008 February 5 at 11:31 am
Ugh, ugh, ugh. I saw someone on my flist rec Superbad just a few days after I made this post, and I had a really hard time not saying exactly why I hated the movie so much. Yes, it’s a slasher’s delight. Yes, it portrays the friendship of two boys and their hijinks together. However, it’s the kind of slashiness that relies on excluding and degrading women rather than simply focusing on the male friendship. It’s like the worst shipper wars where HP/DM writers hate on Cho, Ginny, et feminae aliae because those bitches canonically disrupt the gay lurve. And the movie is one long, extended rape joke that promotes rape. I can’t get over that, no matter how slashy the movie is.
In the end, I decided it would be rude to piss in someone else’s LJ sandbox. I’m perfectly willing to have arguments about the movie here, but not everyone is willing to do that in their own journals, and I hate it when people respond to my squee by saying, “Oh, that’s stupid/I don’t understand/that sucked,” so it would be mean to do that to someone else.
In my experience, people who think the feminist movement (in the general pro-equality sense) is no longer necessary are extremely idealistic and don’t want to believe that there’s still sexism today; naive and sheltered, so they haven’t personally experienced sexism; or conservatives who are tired of uppity women disturbing the status quo.
Redstar said,
2008 February 8 at 6:34 am
My boyfriend and I rented this movie, we’d heard the hype of how *hilarious* it was. We were shocked with how unfunny and infantile it was. It was TOO digusting for my ears, and I was shocked that THIS was the movie that people loved.
This is an excellent post that really gets at what’s wrong with this movie. And what’s wrong w/Hollywood that they think it’s a good idea to greenlight what’s essentially the disturbed fantasy of two 15 year old boys? Awful.
pizzadiavola said,
2008 February 8 at 4:52 pm
Yup! Rape promotion is funny! Penis jokes are funny! Hahahaha…ha?
I just could not believe what I was hearing, and that intelligent people had recommended the film to me as a “realistic” take on teenager boys. My god.
Mozena Greezin said,
2008 April 22 at 6:51 am
Wow. Sounds like a fucked up piece of shit movie. Thanks for the warning; I will avoid it.
pizzadiavola said,
2008 April 22 at 9:06 am
Sounds like a fucked up piece of shit movie.
Mozena Greezin | 2008 April 22 at 6:51 am
That’s a fair description of the movie.
Lindsay said,
2008 April 23 at 10:38 am
i feel sad that, as a woman, when i first saw this movie, i did not pick up on the rape evidence.
i’m not kidding when i say that i feel ashamed.
pizzadiavola said,
2008 April 23 at 11:05 am
Lindsay | 2008 April 23 at 10:38 am
I think that your experience points more to how rape is perceived primarily as violent stranger assault, and how the essence of what makes rape rape (”having sex” with someone who says no or is unable to give consent, such as a drunk person) is obfuscated. Boys getting women drunk and “having sex” with them is portrayed as such a normal, ordinary thing to do that the fact that it’s rape gets lost. When I was watching the movie, I felt uneasy but it didn’t really click for me until near the end that Seth wanted to rape his crush–and he didn’t even realize it was rape, it was just portrayed as normal high school boy antics.
In other words, we live in a culture where rape is normalized and it can be very difficult to see through that to see things for what they really are. The struggle is worth it, though.
bluestar said,
2008 July 9 at 12:01 pm
Hi, I’m like a few months behind the curve here, but I had to leave a comment…I was trying to explain to a male friend of mine the other day why it REALLY was a movie about this guy trying to rape this girl…I will say first that I did laugh at this movie, and I’m ashamed for it, but that I’ve also tried to temper the humor I found in it by being really vocal (especially with male friends) about why it’s still so profoundly disturbing…
Anyway, he was really fighting me on the issue, insisting that the character (seth) didn’t ‘mean it that way’ or whatever and finally I was like look, imagine that the movie ended differently and that in the last scene he gets the girl really good and drunk – she passes out, and he is shown having sex with her passed out body. Would that make you uncomfortable? Yes he said, that would be really awful to watch, that would be…..ohhhhhhh. Suddenly light dawned. I just thought it was interesting and the perfect example of why it’s important not just to gloss over the details often hidden behind cheap laughs and the rape culture. If you actually witnessed the thing happening that he’s been talking about the ENTIRE movie, it would be a whole different movie.
pizzadiavola said,
2008 July 15 at 2:20 pm
Hi Bluestar, props to you for speaking up with your friend!
Suddenly light dawned. I just thought it was interesting and the perfect example of why it’s important not just to gloss over the details often hidden behind cheap laughs and the rape culture.
Absolutely. That was a great teaching moment, btw, to carry the logical premise of the movie to its conclusion, where there’s no escaping that the entire damned thing was about trying to rape the girl. It’s only ‘humorous’ if you think rape is funny or if you’re sufficiently privileged or misogynist that you can pretend it isn’t rape.
Cortney said,
2008 July 20 at 12:44 pm
Thanks for writing about this wretched film. I have feminist friends who told me that Superbad was a sweet movie about the bond between young men. When I saw it I was so disgusted and you put into words very well exactly why I felt that way!
Human said,
2008 August 12 at 5:51 am
It has nothing to do with belittling women! It’s the exact opposite! It’s revealing to society the inner-workings of the mind of a teenage male, desperately searching to find a way to replicate its genes before they are unapologetically weeded out of existence.
Guess what? Women are sperm recepticles. Didn’t anyone ever tell you how babies were made? (I love and respect women, but the fact remains that that’s what women are for, and men are for providing the sperm – both pointless and cyclic existences; any other achievements or purposes are temporal)
I loved the movie, funniest thing in existence.
Where in merry hell did you get rape from? You’re all just looking for excuses to beat on about feminism.
I hope this angers a lot of people – maybe it will drive them into using their brains, if for just a second, and seeing that shit dribbling from the corners of their mouths.
Unintentional Hilarity « Pizza Diavola said,
2008 August 12 at 7:35 am
[...] August 12 *snicker* In response to my post on Superbad, this comment popped up in my inbox this morning: Guess what? Women are sperm recepticles. Didn’t [...]
amandaw said,
2008 September 12 at 9:38 am
this post is amazing. you are a great writer, chica. watching this kind of movie makes me feel itchy and slimy. you pinned it, the reason why it makes you squirm. it’s rape. they’re having fun and merryment and male bonding over violence against women. and that is all kind of FUCKED UP.
pizzadiavola said,
2008 September 13 at 10:53 pm
Thanks, amanda!
they’re having fun and merryment and male bonding over violence against women.
Yes, and it’s so normalized! It’s so normalized that many people either don’t see it or refuse to see it, because doing so would mean accepting that they’re implicated in having enjoyed and endorsed rape culture.