Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies. Hadley Freeman

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СКАЧАТЬ many movies – and books, and TV shows and magazine articles – that operate under this premise that to list them all would render this book a size that would give the whole of the nineteenth century’s literary world put together an inferiority complex. It is always the men and boys in movies who are desperate to lose their virginity (American Pie, Meatballs, The Virginity Hit) because for women, of course, not only is virginity not an embarrassment but a commodity, and women, such movies infer, aren’t actually that keen on sex anyway and only do it to please the men. I like to think that Stephen Fry’s infamous claim that ‘The only reason women will have sex with [men] is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man,’¹⁴ came from watching American Pie too many times, doubtless in between his heavy schedule these days of tweeting and writing puff pieces about Apple products. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how this generation’s Oscar Wilde spends his time.

      Leaving Stephen Fry to the side, this trope about men’s desire for sex and women’s reluctance to have it has nothing to do with reflecting whatever differences may or may not exist between men and women’s sex drives (and some of us would argue that differences between sex drives are more individually based than gender based, but particulars are so much more finicky than sweeping generalisations). It might well have more to do with the fact that most filmmakers are men who need to justify their lack of sexual success by portraying women as terrifyingly frigid as opposed to, just maybe, resistant to getting naked with a self-obsessed filmmaker.

      What it mainly has to do with is laziness when it comes to thinking up new narratives. This trope is a barely updated version on the premise of centuries-old fairy tales: a princess lies imprisoned in a tower, helplessly, virginally, and the prince vigorously pursues her, thwacking away through her thicket of celibacy (they didn’t have bikini waxes in Once-Upon-a-Time). This in itself comes from the ancient and reassuring (to some men) idea that men are the pursuers and women are the pursued because women do not enjoy sex. That is the male preserve. Therefore, women won’t ever be sexually unfaithful and the man can rest assured that, yes, all his wife’s children must be his. Pizzas for everyone!

      Now, clearly, American Pie et al. were not attempting to make some comment on paternity insecurities, but it is a shame that they unthinkingly made do with a cliché that comes from a misogynistic fear and is worn down to a nub through overuse.

      Presumably, for men, one consolation for being portrayed as hopeless, hapless, desperate hound dogs is that it explains away all female rejection as merely the downside to them being delicate princesses (making any eventual scoring with them even more of an achievement). Nonetheless, it is pretty insulting to them.

      For women, this trope, while seemingly, sort of, complimentary, can only be hurtful. First, there is the insinuation that a guy will sleep with anyone so, you know, your prince may have come but, to be honest, he would come with anyone. Then there’s the very overt suggestion that frigidity is, ironically, sexually attractive and, of course, feminine. But most of all, if you are a woman, it makes sexual rejection even more humiliating than it already is.

      I mean, Christ, how ugly must you be if he turned you down? A guy would probably have sex with a bagel. And the hole in a bagel is just nothing. Your vagina is less than nothing. You are disgusting.

      Well, here’s an amazing little secret: almost all women have been sexually rejected at some point, and the only ones who haven’t are nuns although, thinking about it, seeing as they’re the brides of Christ in what is, presumably, an unconsummated union, then they must have been rejected too. So there it is: at some point in every woman’s life, a guy – possibly even Jesus – declined the invitation to the party in her pudenda.

      It even – yes, even! – happens to women in relationships. Movies often depict women in relationships as being especially resistant to putting out to their poor desperate husbands or boyfriends. After all, the only reason women enter relationships is to steal men’s sperm and make sure they don’t die alone. So once you locked the guy down, phew, you don’t have to bother with THAT any more! This in turn explains why the only roles open to women in comedies are the shrewish wife/fiancée who spoils all the fun or the hot single girl (who presumably will release her inner shrew once she gets that ring on her finger – The Hangover, Knocked Up). Any woman in movies who does have a high sex drive is usually depicted as laughable, desperate and possibly crazy.

      However, back on Planet Real World, some women’s sex drives are higher than some men’s, and sometimes he simply isn’t in what Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid would call ‘da mood’. But because this is a scenario that so rarely gets portrayed in popular culture, it can feel unique, and uniquely shameful.

      While being rejected probably won’t rank as the experience you would choose to go back and relive should God grant the opportunity in the moments before death, it is actually, beneath the waves of mortification and disappointment, quite reassuring. Namely, it proves that men, actually, won’t have sex with just anything. Thus, while this man at this moment might not choose to have sex with you, the next one who does, or the next time he does, is doing so because you’re you, not because you happen to have a couple of hole-shaped openings on your body. Isn’t that romantic?

       2. Popular kids are evil and will end up miserable

      One of the myriad reasons that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is such a remarkable movie is that it turns over so many cinematic stereotypes about teenagers, which is not, to be brutally frank, something one can say of many of the late and undoubtedly great John Hughes’s movies.¹⁵ For example, when Ferris, Sloane and Cameron¹⁶ manage to evade grown-up supervision, they don’t cause chemical havoc (Weird Science); they don’t get high, dance on their desks to eighties music and sneak around school for no apparent reason (The Breakfast Club): they go to a French restaurant, a museum and a parade. These are not cunning teenagers enjoying a rare day of freedom, this is an elderly couple on vacation enjoying their final years of mobility.

      This in turn reflects the most interesting stereotype that this film craftily overturns: that popular kids are inherently evil. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is the only movie – and certainly the only 1980s or 1990s comedy – I can think of in which a teenager who is deemed by his peers to be cool is not portrayed as a rich bullying jerk who will eventually get his or her comeuppance by being killed in a fight (Edward Scissorhands), losing a sports match (Teen Wolf), spending the rest of his life washing his former victim’s car (Back to the Future), being humiliated at the school reunion (Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion), being humiliated by and then having to go out with Judd Nelson (The Breakfast Club), being killed (Heathers), getting tricked into becoming fat (Mean Girls), sinking into probable alcoholism (Pretty in Pink), being humiliated at his own party (Some Kind of Wonderful), or working for ever for his dad (Peggy Sue Got Married). Underdogs are an obvious protagonist staple for most narratives because, obviously, the kid who is being bullied is more sympathetic than the kid who is doing the bullying. But considering what a bad rep popular kids now have thanks to the movies, one could argue that they are actually now the underdogs.

      Ferris Bueller is a slightly odd, funny, tech-smart boy with a weak spot for Wayne Newton. In short, he is exactly the kind of boy who is usually portrayed in films, and especially films by Hughes in the eighties, as the bullied geek. Duckie in Pretty in Pink, which came out right before Ferris Bueller, is basically the nerd version of Ferris, down to his sweater vests and fondness for singing along to old songs, and the fact that both characters are played by actors (Jon Cryer and Matthew Broderick) who look, quite frankly, identical only underlines this. Yet in Ferris Bueller – which Hughes directed, unlike Pretty in Pink, which he ‘only’ wrote – the geek inherits the earth.

      That this СКАЧАТЬ