Hey Baby

I've finally come across something about which I feel compelled to write: a video game that offers "feminist commentary." As illustrated in the great Grand Theft Auto debates of 2008 (which remains the most viewed, commented on and spammed of all my posts), I am no great fan of video games. But this I had to see.

Finally, there is relief for women plagued by catcalls hollered from speeding car windows, unsolicited innuendos offered by complete strangers, and proverbial one-liners greasy enough to make you gag.

Most women experience street harassment at one point or another. I can imagine feeling some pleasure at virtually kicking some ass, especially since it doesn't have the same consequences of hollering back in real life. However, a game like this does little to address systemic issues like gender based oppression, violence against women, commodification of feminine bodies or race and class issues that inform street harassment.

As you may know, I am the moderator of the Chicago Hollaback site so I do have some authority to say that street harassment is no laughing matter. A game like this exists for a reason. As Karen Garcia says in the above mentioned article, this is something that we should be talking about seriously.

As much as Hey Baby is ostensibly a shoot ’em up gorefest, there’s way more to it than that. It’s art, activism, and social commentary operating under the novel guise of a recreational pastime, and despite its in-your-face presentation, its underlying message is meant to be discussed seriously—and it should be.

I hope that this game does create a dialogue, that would be a magnificent result. I fear it is just going to lead to more misrepresentation of feminism as some sort of violent man-hating cult. I also do not like the idea of combating violence with more violence, even if it is virtual violence. I want to have a public dialogue about how catcalling a woman can make her feel terrified, objectified and/or violated. We should talk about how men who harass seem to pleasure in the sense of powerlessness that catcalling can instill in a woman, if only for a moment. And we really need to talk about how power is distributed in society as a whole to understand why certain people are harassers while others are harassed. It is no coincidence that women (or feminine people of all genders) are usually the victims of this harassment. This is all about power.

I have not played this video game, but I have a feeling power is not discussed in that particular way. It leaves a lot of things ambiguous. What is the gender of the shooter? Does it matter? Why is the harassment sexual? What are the implications of class and racial identity when it comes to street harassment? And, perhaps most important, why do some men publicly harass women on the street at all?

I sincerely hope that this game does create a public discussion about these topics. If it does not, than it is just another violent video game.

Boy Toys/Girl Toys

About two weeks ago I wrote about the highest and lowest paying college degrees and noted that the degrees with the greatest financial value are in fields dominated by men. Today I found this amusing comic that offers an, albeit oversimplified, explanation. Gender socialization plays such a massive role in the stratification of our society it is hard to imagine why anyone would argue that nature is responsible for these differences. Here is a series of very clear examples of nurture clearly overpowering nature.

I Hope They Serve Karma in Hell

I have been meaning to blog about Tucker Max and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell for quite awhile but every time I try to put pen to paper I am too overwhelmed and horrified to continue. What can I say about someone whose hatred of women and disabled people is so acute and obvious? All I can do is shake my head and mutter about how this proves the need for feminist activism.

After contemplating some quasi-legal anti-IHTSBIH actions, I decided to start a Facebook page with lots of links and information for people who are unfamiliar with the film. I hope we can educate without having to ever pay money to see this film or encouraging anyone else to do so. This film should come with a serious trigger warning. Since it does not, I offer my own for all of the links and videos on my Facebook page and here.

The Facebook page is currently by invite only so feel free to request an invitation if you would like to be a part of this small feminist action.

Here is a link to the trailer from Shakesville.
Here is the Gawker movie review.
There has been some controversy about the I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell ads on CTA buses with slogans like "Deaf girls can't hear you coming" and "Blind girls can't see you coming."
And here is a little culture jamming because we are not without agency here.


So you don't have to subject yourself to the book, blog or movie, here are some of the most telling quotes from Max
On women:
- “She may be a vacuous slut with no taste, but at least she’s not a stripper.”
- “I’d rather mainline Drano than listen to another minute of your whore prattle.”
- “Your gender is hardwired for whoredom.”
- “I don’t like her because she’s a negative fucking bitch, not because she has tits.”
- “Fat girls aren’t real people.”
- “Cum dumpsters.”

On fun:
- “Ready to get shit-faced and grab some titty!?”
- “We can’t all go after the girl with low self-esteem.”

On what women are good for, beyond fucking:
- “I will gut you and grind you into pig fodder.”
- “Get away from me or I’m going to carve a fuck hole in your torso.”
- “I want to shoot every one of these bitches.”
- “The only way I can cut you deep is with a battle axe and a running start.”
- “Rape’s not funny, but murder can be.”

Pee-wee's Playhouse as a Queer Text

I used to watch Pee-wee's Playhouse all the time as a child but I was recently re-introduced to it as an adult and I am totally loving it. Why aren't there more queer, or at least ambiguous, children's television shows available? As a child I never read Pee-wee as anything other than a childlike man in an imaginary world with kooky characters. As an adult I see the queer subtext all over. Whether it be the overdone caricature of femininity that Miss Yvonne performed or the almost maternal male femininity performed by Pee-wee, both provided a critique of hegemonic gender by presenting a parody of it. I know a lot of readers of this blog are children of the 1980s and wonder what you all think?

Also, has anyone heard that Pee-wee's Playhouse is going to be made into a movie to come out in 2011?

"Men's Rights" on The Dr. Phil Show

I don't want to go too much into this episode of The Dr. Phil Show because it certainly is complicated. A thirty seven year old alcoholic, drug addicted, man had 'sex' with a nineteen year old young woman. A pregnancy ensued. The man proceeded to stalk the young woman until she simply told him she had had an abortion so that he would leave her alone. After the baby was born the young woman placed her for adoption. When the father discovered this he decided that he wanted custody and began a lengthy legal battle for his rights despite a rather odd law that requires fathers to register with the state prior to birth if they wish to have any rights to the child after birth.

I will not suggest that this man doesn't have some rights. My problem with this episode is that the "expert" opinion that Dr. Phil solicited was that of Mel Feit, patriarchy-denier extraordinaire. Feit identifies himself as a Men's Rights Activist. Having recently studied at some length MRA movements I have to concur with one of my favorite feminist scholars, blogger Twisty Faster.

Quoth Twisty:

“Massively [W]rong Assholes, or ‘men’s rights activists’ are patriarchy-deniers. The ideologies of this violent and knobbish subset of the Male Dominion spring from male fear of women’s personal sovereignty, and manifest in practice as active misogyny. Men suffer, O how they suffer, at the hands of subhuman conniving bitches who seek world domination through insane women-are-human propaganda and the misguided attempt to claim their own internal organs as private property. The MRA imagines that women’s interests control and abuse him in an ever more feminized world; he erroneously sees himself as a battered victim of women’s agency, rather than what he actually is: a moron.”

Kurt Cobain's Interrogation of Hegemonic Masculinity

I am taking a course about construction of celebrity in America this quarter and one of the things we were assigned to read was Kurt Cobain's Journals. I had never really thought about Kurt in an academic way but I felt as though I had an intimate relationship with his music in high school. Reading his writing and listening to his music in the context of this course really made me think about the way that he did gender or rather the way that he queered gender and pop music. It is a topic I didn't even realize I was interested in until this course. I wrote a paper about these things and my professor suggested that I think about this as a topic for my thesis especially considering there is so little work to this effect out there. It would be very cutting edge. Or something. Anyway, I thought I'd put the ideas out there and see what others think. Here is a chunk of the paper:

“Yeah, all Isms (sic) feed off one another but at the top of the food chain is still the white, corporate, macho, strong ox male. Not redeemable as far as I’m concerned. I mean, classism is determined by sexism because the male decides whether all other isms still exists (sic). Its up to men. I’m just saying that people can’t deny any ism or think that some are more or less subordinate except for sexism… I still think that in order to expand on all other isms, sexism has to be blown wide open…but there are thousands of green minds, young gullable (sic) 15 year old boys out there just starting to fall into the grain of what they’ve been told of what a man is supposed to be and there are plenty of tools to use. The most effective tool is entertainment” (Cobain, 117).


I am not sure if I started listening to Nirvana when I was a freshman or sophomore in high school but it was somewhere in there. 1999 and 2000 proved to be formative years for me as I had just entered the public school system from a very sheltered home and tiny Catholic school. My body was changing, my friends were changing, I discovered feminism and my relationship with my parents transformed. It seemed that overnight I had gone from their overachieving perfect daughter to an angsty and rebellious teenager. Kurt Cobain’s angst-filled voice, nihilistic lyrics, and grungy guitar appealed to me immediately. To make it even better his appearance and lyrics made my parents and teachers writhe. When I listened to Nirvana in high school it was a purely pleasurable experience. I would drive around my small town with my friends with Nevermind cranked all the way up on the stereo. I had posters of Cobain all over my locker and my bedroom. I thought he was so dreamy…

When I saw that we were studying Nirvana for class this week, I pulled out all of my old albums and listened to them all again. I even found my old posters! Reading Nirvana in a critical academic environment felt like a kind of violation. Listening to this music has been so intensely personal and intimately tied to my budding high school sexuality. Experiencing that music again after so long brought out many of those emotions. I feel that it is important to foreground my own personal experience with Nirvana before attempting an analysis of their work. I am a particular person with a particular experience in a particular time and space.

One thing I certainly never noticed as a teenager that I noticed immediately as a graduate student in Women’s and Gender Studies is that Kurt Cobain had a knack for challenging notions of hegemonic gender. His performance of gender is at least non-normative but I would argue that it is also queer. Cobain’s body was small and not hegemonicly masculine. His ripped up old clothes and occasional ironic cross-dressing posed a challenge to the authoritative heteropatriarchy that rules American culture.



Through his angst-filled, corporeal and occasionally disgusting lyrics and non-normative attire he queered gender and popular music. In his Journals and lyrics, Cobain seems to have an obsession with the physical body and with the disgusting, the unpleasant and the painful. Particularly he writes about gastrointestinal functions and dysfunctions. I remember being very troubled by the lyrics to “Heart Shaped Box.”

“Meat-eating orchids forgive no-one just yet
cut myself on angel hair and babies breath
broken hymen of your highness I’m left black
throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back.”

Meat, being a representation of a dead body is juxtaposed with the very genteel and feminine images of orchids, angel’s and babies breath (being both a flower and symbol of femininity and a representation of innocence and beginnings of life). Cobain weaves high culture, transcendental religious spirits (as opposed to bodies) traditional beauty and femininity with the so-called low brow culture, the profane, the guttural, the corporeal. In connecting these seemingly opposite things he poses a challenge to Victorian social order that values masculinity, rationality, objectivity and denial of the body over femininity and being present in one’s body with all of its grossness and potential for failure.

I Am Angry About Grand Theft Auto IV

I am angry.

I am angry about a 'game' called Grand Theft Auto IV. I am angry because this 'game' romanticizes, decontextualizes and glorifies male violence against women and against other men. It portrays women as the sex class (willing and available) and men as autonomous agents with full subjectivity (as long as they are hegemonicly masculine). I am angry because this is the result of living in a patriarchal, ethnocentric, xenophobic, homophobic and, yes I'll say it, woman hating culture. I cannot understand this 'game' as anything other than that.

I am scared to live in a culture where this is considered a viable form of entertainment. The protagonist of Grand Theft Auto IV, Niko Bellic, fucks women, seemingly all prostituted women, and then brutally murders them immediately afterward if he so desires. Bear in mind, of course, that 'he' is controlled by the player. Young men all over the country (and beyond) will learn that the value of women is their capacity to provide male orgasm. That is all.

I am angry that abuses of women are not taken seriously; are not seen as major social problems. In this culture of domination the murder of a prostituted/raped woman cannot be taken too seriously. Yet in video game culture it is not seen as a problem. Stamp an "M for Mature" rating on it and move on.

It seems worth examining the otherness of Bellic here as well. Admittedly, I am no expert in gaming or gaming culture, I have only played a few in my life and have never been amused by their seeming androcentrism, exclusivity and extraordinary violence. Bellic is a Bosnian immigrant in search of "The American Dream." I think it is relevant that in a game produced and developed by plenty of white men, Bellic is depicted as 'foreign' and/or not white. It enables white American men to play the game and distance themselves from the extraordinary violence that they are enacting upon women and other men. "Oh American men do not murder, rape or pay for sex!"

In a time when immigration is such a heated issue, Grand Theft Auto IV must be placed within its proper cultural context. It is not an accident that Bellic is a violent, over sexed, thuggish immigrant.

Dr. Phil Duo

I need to get another job. This can be evidenced by the fact that I have been watching too much Dr. Phil. What is so fascinating about this is that I watched episodes on Thursday and Friday which were just so strikingly sexist, particularly in relationship to one another, that I almost couldn't believe it.

On Thursday Robin McGraw, Dr. Phil's wife, had the opportunity to tell women what we need to do to look ten years younger during an oh-so-tired makeover show. Apparently all it takes to be a happier menopausal woman is microderm abrasion, teeth whitening, cellulite reduction cream, velashaping (?), eyebrow sculpting, 'natural' hormone therapy, not eating, a gym membership, working out in the proper (name brand) gear, an iPod, sunglasses, perfume, high heels, bubble baths, a cocktail dress, a crap-load of make up and a haircut. (Seriously, all of these things were mentioned!)

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The show featured five 40-50 year old women who were unhappy with their appearance.
"I've become a frumpy mom... I'm not feeling pretty anymore!"
Dr. Phil's only apparent reason for even being in this episode seemed to be to illustrate the contrast between men and women. Every time Robin named off some inane new beauty treatment he would shake his head in that condescending "oh you silly women" way. He joked many times about how women just like to be pretty and thin, blah, blah, blah. He lectured the women about going to the gym (one of them moaned about weighing 130 lbs!) AND he consistently referred to them as 'girls!' Remember, they were all between 40 and 50!!

Near the end of the show all of the women came out to show their new make overs. The audience applauded vigorously when Robin announced that one of the women was now a size 4. Now all of these viewers have learned that being a size 4 is how women are valued in mass media, this is the only reason that this woman made it onto broadcast television. This revelation sequence was my very favorite part because the first thing Dr. Phil did was ask the women's husbands how they thought that their wives looked. He didn't ask the women how they felt or what they thought. No, he was much more concerned with whether their torturous beauty rituals had succeeded in making their fat, balding husbands' dicks hard. Job well done! And of course, all of this was presented as being some great treat for all of these women.

Another portion of the show was spent at the mall. Robin showed viewers how to shop so that you can look years younger! She did this with her token gay man and her vacuous Barbie-doll-looking daughter-in-law.

Heternormativity, misogyny and class privilege all smashed into one hour long show. Well done!

~

The show on Friday was seemingly very different in its focus. However, if you pay attention to the subtext the connection becomes very clear.

The first part of the show was about Adam who is $200,000 in debt. Adam's family thinks that he is too concerned with material things. He claimed (and no one really disagreed) that "it's all about image." I am assuming he meant life.

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He would buy himself new vehicles at an alarming rate and he went to the tanning salon and got his hair done before being on the show. These things apparently demonstrate his obsession with his image. Dr. Phil's advice for him?

"Why do you care so much about what people think?
"Why do you need that Hummer to perceive yourself as okay?"
"Don't be that shallow, don't define yourself by that stuff."

Now remember that just one day earlier he and his wife were encouraging women to do those very things!! To absorb themselves in their image, to allow their possessions to define them, to be extremely concerned with their outward appearance. Now when a man is perceived as doing those very same things, he is told that that is unacceptable. He should not be so concerned with material things or with his appearance. No, that is the burden that only women must bear.

"Which Animal is Most Like Having Sex With a Woman?"

My nephew's mother alerted me to the show Manswers on the oh-so-problematic Spike TV. Because I do not have cable I have not had the privilege of actually watching this horrendous show but I have been able to watch some of the clips on their website.

Spike TV is television designed especially for young men. To which I say a resounding HA!! As if ALL television were not designed by and for men. It reminds me of the argument that if there is a BET there should be a WET. Spike TV and its Manswers are just another of many anti-feminist, woman-hating, backlashy shows meant to help hetero white guys get it up.

A few of the clips that I had the pleasure of viewing include: "Are women with fake boobs hornier?" "How to make your pick up a hot lady tub," "Hooker or cop," "Which animal is most like having sex with a woman?" and the oh-so-flattering "Make a stripper your lady?"

A few gems from the show:

"Any time a girl is around another girl there's always a little bit of competition."
"If she gets bigger knockers you get more sex because chicks with fake boobs are hornier."

Shows like this are the reason that we still desperately need feminism. Enough said.

The Holidays: A Time for Antiquated Gender Roles

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The holidays are always a good time to take pause and think about family. I have been thinking a lot about my family because I understand that in order to enact radical change one often has to start with one's self. My family is no feminist haven, in fact, I take the most flak about my beliefs from members of my own family.

A typical Thanksgiving in my family involves my aunt(s), mother, grandmother and myself in the kitchen preparing our feast while my father, brother and uncle sit in the living room watching football. I am told that this is not at all uncommon in other families. As the women served up the dinner that they had spent the entire morning, nay WEEK, preparing for, my uncle and father could not even pry themselves away from the television for long enough to eat with the family. No, instead we all had to watch the game while we ate and tried to converse with on another over the clamor of glorified male violence.

After dinner, the men retired back to the living room to continue the game-watching. At this point I abandoned my post in the kitchen and went out to talk to my uncle. My uncle fancies himself a liberal minded yuppy, but still has a very difficult time understanding my disdain for marriage (he says this to me as he is reclining with a beer watching football being served desert by his wife). He tells me that he has an egalitarian marriage (his wife is the primary caretaker of their twin three year olds despite the fact that she too works full time) and cannot understand why I don't think I could have the same.

Well for starters even women who are determined to step out of their prescribed gender roles seem to fall right back into them after marriage. (At least that appears to be the case of my aunt). The words 'egalitarian' and 'marriage' seem mutually exclusive to me. How can women ever be equal or even safe in an institution that was designed to enslave them? Anyway, my point is that his own enormous level of privilege is completely invisible to my uncle and I find that devastating.

I am saddened by the knowledge that I cannot change even my own family. How on earth do I expect to change the world? If I suggested that the men and women switch roles for a holiday, I am sure I'd be cast right out of my family.

Feminists and the Men who Love Them

I don't know if men can be feminists but I sure do know that they can support feminist ideas and goals. A friend and classmate sent me this link to her partner's blog. I read about this study on feministing and it makes me very happy. But it makes me even happier to hear men proudly proclaim that they love feminists (or one in particular) without fear or shame.

Upon reading the post at faithfully liberal I decided to investigate my own relationship and discovered that some men do indeed love dating feminist women. Here is what my partner said when I linked him to the study:

"I believe it. And I tell my friends that too. No mind games. You tell me what you want."

Yay!

It is more than a little bit pathetic that we need a study to tell us that feminism makes for happier relationships. It should be obvious. But since it isn't, I am glad for this study and even more glad for men like Aaron who love feminists.

Parenting and Masculinity on Cable TV

Tonight I had the pleasure of catching an episode of Showbiz Tonight on CNN. I had no idea what to expect of an entertainment news show on cable. The ones I get to see on broadcast TV at home are just wicked and I supposed I shouldn't have expected much more of CNN.

Anyway, one of their feature stories was about the actors in the new film American Gangster which I have not heard much about but I am sure it is another pornographic display of romanticized male violence (perhaps I will write more on that film later). Showbiz Tonight interviewed Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Well, mostly it was Denzel lecturing Russell (and anyone else watching) on how to be a father.

Now I should warn readers that I recently finished reading bell hooks' The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love and it has influenced me. A lot.

Denzel Washington talked about a few key things in child-rearing. He said that "Sports...is the best thing I did." Suggesting that engaging in hyperviolent organized and professional sports is the best thing for children upsets me. Violence is a disease and institutions like professional sports (and I am talking about the football, hockey type sports here) are huge perpetuators of violent behavior.

hooks talks a lot about how men are damaged by patriarchy. She suggests that boys and men are told to turn off their emotions and turn inward at a very young age. Masculinizing institutions like professional sports encourage and reward that type of behavior.

This is only the beginning of Washington's terrifying, patriarchal advice. He also said that he put his son on an inner-city football team and his son hated it. He got a call from the coach saying "Your son is crying." To which Washington said "Be ten times harder on him, if I hear about another tear another whimper I’ll be back down there and put a foot in his behind in front of the team.”

Because when a male child has the audacity to show emotion, to express himself, to dislike absorbing physical violence without a wince, the best thing to do is to kick his ass. I was horrified. That child now knows that men are violent and that he is not a man unless he is violent and if he strays from that hegemonic masculine ideal that he will be harshly punished. I cannot think of worse advice. That is not tough love as Showbiz Tonight so graciously called it, that is abuse.

hooks mission is to teach men and women that their sons need and want love and that when they don't get it they learn a very painful type of masculinity. And it is this blogger's opinion that masculinity is destroying men.

See the video here.

Victim-Blaming on The Dr. Phil Show

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I have already mentioned that I love to watch the Dr. Phil Show. I love it precisely because he so completely embodies the enemy that I am dedicating my life to eradicating.

Anyway, last week I caught an episode about O.J. Simpson’s new book If I Did It. Now, I was only ten years old when most of the murder trial and media storm took place. So, naturally, I didn’t have much of an opinion on the situation when it occurred. However, as a grown-up feminist, I can see, quite plainly that this man was violent and abusive and because of his hyper-masculine, hyper-violent personality, he decided to teach his wife a lesson in male dominance.

And as if beating her throughout their marriage, murdering her and her friend, and facing no consequences were not bad enough, he has now decided to publish a hypothetical book about what he would have done if he had committed the murders. To which I, and probably anyone who witnessed that trial, say a loud and resounding “Ha!”

Of course he did it. That is really a moot point now because he cannot be tried again. However, the ghostwriter of the book, Pablo Fenjves, had some very interesting things to say to Dr. Phil. Fenjves maintains his belief that Simpson is guilty because of the attitude that he displayed when discussing Nicole Brown.

Fenjves told Dr. Phil that O.J.’s attitude was “If I did it, she had it coming.”

To this Dr. Phil said, O.J. is obviously guilty because he was trying to justify murdering Nicole. He then said what a tragedy it was that an innocent man had to die.

Because she was not innocent? Her friend was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but she was a bad wife so she deserved it? That was the attitude of Dr. Phil throughout the show. Now I am not sure if he was just pandering to the family of the deceased man (the one’s who actually had the book published) or if this is actually what he believes. Because of his record on women’s issues in the past, I am inclined to believe the latter.

Almost 15 years after her death and she is still being blamed. Sheesh.

Can men be feminists?

I feel the need to discuss something that has been weighing heavily on my mind. It is not directly related to popular culture but it is certainly related to feminism. In my sociology of masculinities course last night we discussed the role of men in feminist movements. This is something that I am personally very conflicted about. I concede that we (feminists) need to unite with men in order to produce radical change. Separatism will solve nothing and will most likely alienate a whole lot of people, women and men alike.

That being said, hearing a man call himself a feminist makes me cringe like nothing else. Allowing men into feminism is dangerous territory because we risk losing hard won power. In class someone suggested that we wouldn't want to have white folks at the forefront of anti-racist movements. Theory written by the oppressor is just further imperialism. Yet wealthy, white and male folks who traditionally have had all of the power have a very hard time forfeiting that power to those they have traditionally subordinated.

My point is, how do we know that letting men call themselves feminists will not result in them taking the reins and writing the canon? How do we know that they will not further silence women's voices?

These are things for which I have no answer. I do like to hear men call themselves pro-feminist or feminist advocates. In fact, in class last night I mentioned how I have never met a man who actively called himself a feminist. After class a young man approached me and said "Hi. My name is Randy. I am a feminist." I laughed at him and had a very difficult time believing that he was not patronizing me. After several minutes of conversation it became clear: this young man was sincere. Or as sincere as a member of the privileged class can be.

I guess I will let Randy show me his feminism before I castigate him too severely...

Sexism on the CTA (part 1 of 1,000,000,000)

Image via Flickr. Ignore the random dude.

These advertisements are all over Chicago. Specifically, all over the CTA. I am posting it here because I think that it is the perfect marriage (excuse the pun) of patriarchy, heterosexism and capitalism. This ad plays off of insecure masculinity. How do you make wedding rings macho? Why, you equate them with testicles of course.

This ad campaign assumes that all women want engagement rings, that only men can (should?) purchase engagement rings, and that only real men get engaged.

The CTA is FULL of sexist advertisements. The first one I saw was for the movie Captivity. There have been several more since then but I couldn't find them online. I am sure there will be more to come.

Why I Do Not Go to Movies

I recently wrote a review of the movie Knocked Up. You can read the review here. What I was unable to say in the review was that the movie itself was not nearly as upsetting as the trailers that preceded it. I really think that they deserve as much, if not more, analysis than the film.

Apparently there is a new Die Hard movie with Bruce Willis. The trailer for this film was an orgy of male violence and of course, the token helpless female who must be saved by the machine-like homicidal manic/hero. Score 1 for the patriarchy.

The next trailer was for some movie about a dude who has the magical ability to help women find their soul mates... by fucking them. So women just throw themselves at him in the hopes that their true loves will propose. Does that not just reek of male fantasy? Desperate, hot women seeking one night stands with some douche-bag so that they can become the sexual maidservants of some other man for the rest of their lives. Score 2 for the patriarchy.

The next trailer was for Ben Stiller's new gem The Heartbreak Kid. This fella is a commitment-phobe who finally takes the plunge with a hot blonde environmentalist, only to find his true love, a hot brunette, on their honeymoon. Beyond the totally ridiculous plot this film just adds to the miasma of male cultural domination.

All of the films advertised were presented from the male perspective, with women as the incidental characters they happen to act upon. The women in all of these films are creations of male fantasy. They are either totally helpless and virginal (ala Bruce Willis's daughter) or they are desperate whores who are willing to do anything for a good fuck so long as they end up being Mrs. maidservants for the rest of their lives. Hollywood is really one of America's most sexist institutions. Broadcast television has made leaps and bounds toward better gender representation compared to the patriarchal wasteland that is Hollywood.

Twisty Faster in her infinite wisdom refers to Hollywood as the patriarchy's communications department. One night at the movies proves it.