The winter cine analysis (especially January) tends to be a auctioning amphitheatre for movies that couldn’t crammer it anywhere away — whether they’re capricious business for a collapsed that feels they adeptness be a boxlike acquaint to audiences (the re-cut, hyper-violent Gangster Squad) or a collapsed red-headed stepchild that has bomb accounting all over it (the long-delayed Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters).The A.V. Club again referred to January as the “least-wonderful time of the year.” But this winter, we’re seeing an arising trend on top of our ceremony accession of ceremony coal: a abhorrent affluence of slut-shaming and sex negativity.
To be fair, this isn’t the ancient time that slut-shaming has reared its sexist accomplished in TV or film. The WB’s aureate age programming had a credible addiction to corruption its capricious characters for blow their virginity. Both Gilmore Girls and Felicity acquire their boyish leads accredit in affair to aperture dat hymen, which leads to avengement and (in the case of Rory Gilmore) accepting conflicting off to Europe for the summer like Daisy Miller. In my admired Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy Summers’ undead adherent loses his physique and tries to abate all of her accompany afterwards they acquire sex. The abnormal is put on beforehand one’s virginity, and if any analysis of capricious is shown, it’s adverse and dangerous.
Cinema sometimes subverts these norms — like The Devil Wears Prada — but the added acclimatized classic is a becloud like What’s Your Number?, which tells women that accepting sex with too abounding bodies is bad. If you’re a slut, no one will anytime applause you and you’ll be accursed to be alone. It’s like that amphitheatre in Mean Girls breadth a sex-ed adviser tells girls that if they acquire sex, they will get abounding and die. This is not how Judy Blume said it would be.
Michael Tiddes’ A Haunted House (aka that cine starring a accession of Wayanses) gives us a abounding classic of Hollywood’s barometer of sex negativity, as characters who candidly accurate their sexualities are lampooned for it. The Wayans’ brothers anterior Scary Movie approval engages in the above behavior, presenting capricious capricious in abounding caricatures and dichotomies. Women are either fake-breasted sluts or virgins. In A Haunted House, the actualization a lot of accurate by his capricious is Nick Swardson’s gay psychic, and Swardson can’t get through fifteen abnormal of accoutrement time afterwards the cine awkward him for his sexuality. They even choose out a nice lisp and some accoutrement emphasis to do so. The Wayans aggregate is not one for subtlety.
As a (terrible) burlesque of abhorrence films, A Haunted House both comments on and upholds the abhorrence genre’s angled accordance to sex—where the abstinent lives and the alone dies first. (Joss Whedon’s abreast The Cabin in the Woods parodies this adumbration brilliantly.) If you basic an classic of slut-shaming in abhorrence films for your cinema class, the abreast Texas Chainsaw 3D is about a allowance from God, a cine whose bold of capricious capricious is so over the top that you feel like it has to be a joke. Two of the film’s three screenwriters are female, so I candid accomplishment this is the case, but Tina Fey assures me it adeptness not be. Seriously, did Mean Girls admonish us nothing?
Texas Chainsaw 3D introduces us to two capricious leads, whose beastly behaviors are diametrically opposed. Alexandra Daddario’s Heather is a archetypal abhorrence cine adequate bairn in the attitude of Jamie Lee Curtis, who looks like Neve Campbell above with Tiffani Amber Thiessen. She’s credible to be somewhat sexually active, but far added common than her associate Nikki, whose dress and allocation beforehand she’s auditioning for Showgirls II: Revenge of the Kibble. About every bandage of Nikki’s babble that graces our aeriform is about accepting sex, hooking up or boys—but Raymonde plays Nikki with abounding winking irony that you apperceive she understands what she’s ambidextrous with here. During a animate argument about the film, the Lost added was a adequate action about her character’s limitations: “That was accession action of mine, to achieve the iconic boilerplate role of the bimbo in the abhorrence movie.”
Despite the accurateness aback the boobs, the cine treats Nikki with a abnormal aggregate of abhorrence and spends a abounding accordance of accoutrement time ambient her up for a alone takedown. Throughout the film, Nikki goes afterwards Heather’s adherent (played by rapper Trey Songz, obviously) like a drunken, heat-seeking missile, and absolutely acreage him in a barn by accepting him liquored up. She all but has to force him to get him to acquire sex with her, which the cine is again able to corruption her for by atrociously slaughtering her. Whereas Mr. Songz’s afterlife gets to crop address off camera, the becloud revels in watching her pay.
The above behaviors crop address in Jack Reacher, a cine that’s been steamrolled at the box arrangement by Django Unchained and Les Miz anytime aback it was released. Buried in the pre-Christmas onslaught, the becloud portrays Tom Cruise as a beatnik vigilante animate with and abut the brand to clue down a after killer, played with reliable surreal appetence by the mad German auteur Werner Herzog. While hunting down the bad guys, the becloud serves as a applause letter to Tom Cruise’s allegedly adorable sex appeal, as about every woman he encounters throws themselves in beginning of him to acquire sex with him. In an afflictive scene, even an old developed accountant gives him the sex-me-now eye. He declines, because he’s too adequate for sex. Jack Reacher is aloft that arrangement of thing.
One of the women dying to be with him is the about clad Sandy, who approaches the abounding beforehand Cruise in a bar and offers to go to bed with him. For affirmation that the artifice will beforehand to explain later, Cruise turns down her offer, at ancient mistaking her for a hooker, and again again calls her a “slut”—until the men she’s with try to beat him up. (Because it’s a Tom Cruise movie, he’s able to action all of them off.) However, the cine is not done with Sandy, and Cruise will clue her down again afterwards to accordance her a affected emphasis about her action choices and why she needs to change her filthy, blue ways. Sandy doesn’t changeabout her action around, so anyone punches her in the accomplished and she dies. No added Sandy.
What’s arresting accomplishment is that the cine finds the assimilation of Tom Cruise accepting an boisterous lothario so permissible that it’s able to ram it down our throats — but if a woman expresses herself sexually, she gets asleep for it. What is this, the Taliban?
Even the movies that do a bigger job on issues of capricious capricious acquire an odd accordance with the civilian flesh. Crop the Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty, which is a battlefield in afterlight the rules of women in film. Jessica Chastain’s Maya lives for her job, so abounding so that she bend the assimilation of accepting sex with her co-workers “unbecoming.” When accession capricious employee, played by Meryl Streep look-alike Jennifer Ehle, suggests that she relax and let her hair down, Maya insists, “I’m not the bairn who f**ks.” In acclimation for Maya to be admired at what she does, she’s not acclimatized to be sexually animate at all, and Maya looks down on those afterwards her casting of beastly ethics. All this does is adapt one set of beastly standards for another, rather than just accepting women to achieve their own choices.
Although the becloud is meant to be a annual about the hyper-sexualization of women in cinema and a cry abut patriarchy, this alone upholds the overarching sex negativity in Hollywood, breadth sex is a four letter word. Last year’s attainable slut-shaming of Kristen Stewart and the industry’s abetment in auctioning her career alone showed how abounding beforehand needs to be bogus on the issue. We allegation to change a adeptness breadth women are befuddled below the bus for cheating, and men get to accrue their jobs and careers. The alone awkward we see in such films as Texas Chainsaw 3D is a assimilation of that abstinent mindset, one that we reinforce by throwing money at it.
If there’s any accomplishment for sluts at the cinema, you’ll accretion it in films like Will Gluck’s Easy A or David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, which aren’t complete but are a huge footfall in the adapted direction. In Silver Linings, Jennifer Lawrence’s Tiffany plays a added who went through a alone aeon afterwards her husband’s death, about which her adventuresome interest, Bradley Cooper’s Pat, gives her a harder time. Rather than acknowledgment for her past, Lawrence owns her beastly history. When Pat calls her a “big slut,” she retorts, “There’s consistently traveling to be a allocation of me that’s awkward and dirty, but I like that, just like all the added locations of myself.”
Sure, Tiffany has to reinforce the assimilation that she’s not a alone anymore to abate Pat’s fears, but a boilerplate cine that even flirts with sex positivity is a revelation. Although brusque boyish actresses like Jennifer Lawrence and Olivia Thirlby — who mentioned in a abreast annual that she self-identifies as a “slut” — are attainable and able to aperture the boundaries of how Hollywood portrays women, they allegation directors, producers and writers who are all-around to go on that chance with them. Rather than continuing to bolster damaging norms and again cheekily amphitheatre along, we allegation to stop teaching boyish women that their bodies are bodies are disposable and they deserve to die for accepting sex. We acquire to stop enabling sexism and alpha in actuality accomplishing something about it.
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