Life is unfair
Kill yourself, or get over it
- Black Box Recorder, Child Psychology
(Girls!) To do the dishes, (Girls!) to clean up my room
(Girls!) To do the laundry, (Girls!) and in the bathroom
(Girls!) That's all I really want is girls
- Beastie Boys, Girls
Women, encouraged to manipulate their appearance and sublimate assertive impulses behind a mask of feminine behaviour, are necessarily involved in everyday duplicitous practices. The emotional, sexual, and social machinations of the dating and marriage market, the self-objectification that presents an appealing facade: these are achieved by employing the trickster tactics of deception, impersonation, disguise, duplicity, and subversion. Because the social practice of femininity is a form of trickery, tricksters in cultural texts resonate with and expose a fundamental tenet of the social relations of the sexes in American culture: the only way for women to survive, given their subordinate position and limited opportunities for exercising overt power, is to use the covert power of female trickery.
- Lori Landay, Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture
*
There have been two major interests in my film watching habits recently - Generation X's angst and baffling, noxious masculinity. I fell down a rabbit hole earlier this year, watching a lot of films directed by Neil Labute, a provocative playwright with nebulous politics and edgelord tendencies, whose work often tries to expose the innate cruelty of people, but especially men. Jason Patric and Aaron Eckhart in Your Friends and Neighbors (1998) and In The Company of Men (1997) respectively exemplify this, and are two of the most upsetting performances I've seen in a while. Not necessarily because I was shocked by the content of their characters or that they seemed to get away with consistent cruelty, but Labute's glee with which he writes and films these men. They learn nothing, go through no emotional arcs and are not meant to seem human, but rather a distillation of what realities men are allowed to evade when they're never confronted with their supposed naturalised chauvinism. There was a palpable feeling, particularly during the late 1990s, that gender relations had regressed, and instead of revelling in the restored supremacy of maleness, American films around this period exhibited a detectable anxiety around the role of men, their sexual prowess, and how they were going to wrangle reluctant women into believing their bullshit once more.
Like all generation wars, there is a compulsion to poke, prod and analyse the youngest generation's deficiencies. (Where were you when millennials killed napkins?) This is pointedly a way to atomise communities and deny class solidarity, but my own theory on top of these is that this preoccupation is an existential one. Young people represent the future, one that is so often being written by politicians and CEOs, and yet its authoring is foisted upon people with the least amount of political and economic power. It is presented as a righteous critique because people aged 18 - 24 presumably have the most energy to combat emerging problems and the highest tolerance for petty cultural detritus. And so, the people in front of us become symbols of change and ire, mashed together in a heinous sludge, ideologically incoherent and therefore, difficult to fight against.
American Generation X, born between the mid 1960s and early 1980s, were perceived as floating, politically savvy, economically down-trodden, and ultimately disengaged because of all of these factors. They allegedly stalled 'essential' life steps like marriage and family because they had grown up with parents who got divorced. They came of age when Reagan was shelving and ignoring major issues like AIDS and economic recession, all whilst pushing rigid gender essentialism to combat the fluidity of the Free Love movement. They resented social mobility and were raised on television. The world seemed to cause them social paralysis. Slacking off was essential and anxiety was a given. As Kim Phillips-Fein argues, there was an implicit 'quiet radicalism' in the ironic distance Gen X kept from the world and a belief that this detached mode, in contrast to the go-getter norm of their current moment, would 'blossom into an open challenge' to authority.
The sex comedy as a genre has existed as a mound of flesh hanging from the romantic comedy, not sordid enough to be considered pornography, and not mature enough to challenge ideas about sex and relationships with precision. The lack of precision with these kinds of films is often their appeal, floating through riotous vignettes, glued together by a meagre plot, all to explore pleasures both relatable and otherwise. The goal is never to truly upend sexual hierarchy but to jab at it and see if it explodes. Covered in a variety of fluids, the protagonists often learn something about life, friendship, themselves, and this exploration never diverts too hard from leering at hot babes and getting your dick wet. With the rise in popularity of home video, it's no surprise that Gen X in particular had a glut of these to devour.
In his book, Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture, Joseph Boskin presents American humour as a simultaneous takedown and argument in favour of normative values and the American Dream, with a 'tone of ironic razzing' allowing for a plausible deniability if the jokes in question ever appealed to an audience's prejudices, especially regarding gender. Despite a spike in feminist humour as a pushback against misogyny in the 1970s, Boskin details that the 1990s in particular saw a revival of sexism in comedy to combat the alleged humourlessness of women in general, but particularly feminists.
I would argue that the Gen X sex comedy has its roots in the American screwball comedy, where gender difference is centre stage and comically dissected. Wes D. Gehring argues in his book, Romantic Vs. Screwball Comedy: Charting the Difference, that the 1930s screwball often involved 'ritualistic humiliation' as a way to 'spoof the romantic process'. As I've stated in the past, there is a masochism innate to the sex comedy, one that is both cathartic and conservative, with ironic sex negativity on display never really cancelling out the neurotic obsession with sex. It's a genre that needs the sticky, embarrassing process to be tied back to something safe and familiar: romantic love and gender rigidity.
Casual Sex? (1988) is the single directorial credit for Geneviève Robert as well as the lone film writing credits for Wendy Goldman and Judy Toll. The film seemed to run antithetical to the sex comedies of the 70s and 80s, many of which excluded women from having a perspective on the sexual exploits they were a part of, with a chunk of them happening without their knowledge or consent. More than this, in what could be interpreted as the greater affront here, these movies often excluded women from being funny at all. Initially based on a series of sketches performed by Goldman and Toll, Robert preserves the spontaneity of live performance with fourth wall breaks and cutaway jokes, whilst retaining the familiar stage and plot beats of the genre, that being escaping a normal, boring life, and going to a health resort to try and get laid.
Best friends, Stacy and Melissa, initially seem like polar opposites, representing the two kinds of woman you can be: horny to the point of debilitating anxiety and repressed to the point of debilitating anxiety. Yet by bonding over disappointing experiences with men and their desire for a fulfilling, enduring sexual connection in a time where AIDS anxiety was peaking, the film creates more porous categories of womanhood, often arguing that attraction can change at the drop of a hat. Casual Sex? is by far one of the most compassionate sex comedies from around this period, going to great lengths to argue in favour of putting the intimacy back into intimate relations, and that this doesn't need to be a humourless, painful affair, even if it does require some inconvenient self-reflection.
Joan Micklin Silver's work has had a fairly recent reappraisal, with her films being described as 'uncompromising, unapologetic, and utterly charming', especially with how she was able to translate genre elements in a way that retained humanity but didn't shy away from cynicism. Her iteration of the sex comedy, Loverboy (1989), employs a bawdy and chaotic inversion that manages to move past the novelty of its premise in fairly interesting ways. Patrick Dempsey plays Randy, a young man forced to come home from university after failing his classes and disappointing his frustrated girlfriend. His shitty pizza delivery job and emasculating circumstances put him in a position where he needs money fast and considers the possibility of sleeping with the older women in his community for cash.
Where we might see a woman in this same situation and have it framed as an afterschool special, Micklin Silver uses the genre itself to highlight how gendered this subject is, with humour being used to alleviate the audience's anxiety around the subject of sex work. There is a tension in the ease with which we are able to laugh at this kind of strife when it is happening to a man, with the genre itself seeking to flatten and elide the wretched class politics at play, and yet this tension is pacified by the framing of sex work as a means of fleshing out a world that Randy had previously disregarded as the background noise of his adolescence. He is invited to, along with the audience, view middle aged women with an infectious curiosity that never veers into cloying or patronising. This is aided by a fabulous performance by Dempsey, who is at once impish, charming, naive and eager to please. The slapstick is often dialled up to eleven, unresting the scare quotes around both 'sex' and 'work', and once again, this is only possible because Dempsey's Randy is both lithe and collapsible, literally falling over himself to please a myriad of repressed women. There is joy and whimsy brought to the sex work tale, with Micklin Silver's direction often at odds with the prescribed cruelty of the sex comedy.
As I've detailed above, the 90s saw a sharp swing in the opposite direction, and there may be no better evidence of this than Christopher Kublan's Giving It Up (1999), one of the most sexually anxious films I've seen in my life. It places the young urban professional under a magnifying glass, in the hopes that he will catch fire within the 90 minutes we are invited to know him. Ralph is a man who has too much sex and not enough spiritual enrichment, cursed with getting everything single thing capitalist patriarchy promised him, and still being desperately lonely. The film observes that using sexuality to sell perfume or alcohol or even condoms has not eased the negative reputation sex seems to have in relation to emotional fulfilment. In fact, the film argues that the gap has never been wider. Kublan presents the neuroses that the masculinising of the world has only led to hypersexuality and more advertising, that a holistic sexual revolution never really came for Gen X. Instead, sex was pathologised, sold back as therapy, addiction support and self-help, pressed into a normative mould, with the fear of HIV and AIDS surely being one of the most influencing factor, with general conservatism not far behind. The job market stole your insides and, as a result, the sex comedy was more inhibited than ever.
We can see examples that attempt to play with the idea of sexual freedom and can only really grasp at pathetic insecurity. The Sex Monster (1999) is the culmination of heterosexual men being terrified and aroused by women's sexuality, and the general (and specific) anxiety that the presence of queer women has on heteronormative spaces. After essentially pressuring his wife into a threesome, Marty is mortified when she is actually attracted to and wants to repeatedly have sex with women. The threesome fantasy here is first positioned as something women must endure to placate the desire of their husbands, whose appetite is assumed to be too large to be satiated by just one woman. The novelty, then, is the subversion when it is Laura, the wife, who is both insatiable and aberrant to heterosexuality. The power Marty may have had when he was making his wife perform for him is now gone, and all that's left is the revelation that a woman's appetite for sex is not only larger than any straight man can conceive of, but the freedom to pursue it has fundamentally changed the initial dynamic. In this structure, there is one fucker and one who gets fucked. The queer woman upends that and chaos reigns forever.
I've now brought us to the turn of the century, and the entire reason I decided to write this essay in the first place. Whipped (2000) is a sex comedy that blew me away with its bare-faced disdain for men and their attitude towards romantic love, and ultimately became the culmination of what I have been detailing so far. Peter M. Cohen's Y2K release, crudely named after the embarrassing process of a heterosexual man becoming emasculated through his attraction towards women, specifically to the degree that he abandons the attention of his boys, is a mash-up of the adult romantic dramedy popular throughout the 90s and a consolidation of the heightened masochism any fan of this genre will come to recognise. It follows three men who all become infatuated with the same woman, Mia, and their sad hanger-on married friend who despises their obsession with proving their masculinity through their relationship to her, as he is the Ghost of Christmas-Yet-To-Come, the face of married life and all its libido-killing attributes. (There is a very little irony here, I'm afraid).
It speaks to a heightened sexual anxiety, a fear of and stringent adherence to post-feminism, and the death of this kind of movie in general. According to Whipped, there are four types of man you can be: the yuppie, the sensitive poet who keeps getting robbed during threesomes, the proto-incel who watches too much porn, and married. None of these men are happy in their own right, their identities only really being validating by their relation to one another. As their bonds dissolve through petty grievances and insecurity, their complete lack of emotional and psychological development only comes to signify the end of an era. Goodbye, conservatism. Hello, conservatism 2.0, this time with even more gender anxiety.
There is no friendship at the centre of this male friendship movie. Cohen is bleak and blatant - the four men provided each other with the safe space to be as objectifying and revolting as possible. As the world closed in around their dying ways, they were a sanctuary. This puts them in a miserable bind though, codependent and starving. The male friendship group is not conducive to emotional vulnerability. The romantic relationship therefore becomes the only outlet for forbidden emotions, which is why there is so much at stake. It is not simply sexual competition. It is the last gasp of interiority that can only be unlocked through the proximity to womanhood. Their romantic development actually punctures everything, where actualisation is a detriment to the sex comedy. If the men are capable of getting their feelings hurt, of having their hearts broken, what use are they to the audience? We came here to see them get into humiliating sexual situations, not stomp their feet on the playground over who gets to play with the new dolly. The audience is positioned as the married friend, using cinema as a way to live out sexual freedom not afforded to us in our everyday life. Cohen denies us this, and braces for a girlboss future.
The woman pulling the strings of this movie, Mia, was not in fact the perfect, beautiful woman who was able to match all three of her new boyfriends' personalities. She was a liar, just trying to get off. The audience was duped. Indulging in its chauvinism whilst simultaneously being terrified of it, I am not treated to a feminist inversion of gendered domination. You unwrap the Y2K woman smoking a cigar and eating men for breakfast, and you just get more patriarchy. The woman who miraculously loves all the same things you do (poetry, group sex, exhibitionism) is a fiction, something Cohen presents starkly and cruelly.
In this context, the empowered woman in the eyes of a male writer was just a woman who was going to swallow you whole, and not even choke on your bones. There's a shape to be filled in the absence of real people, a realisation that the raunchy romantic comedy was a display of gendered types, skin without the flesh. If the malleable woman doesn't exist, if all of romantic love is a grift, then the end point of the 'men versus women' film would be underlining the grift at the centre of it all. Women's sexuality has historically been used to benefit men and if women were no longer just extensions of men, the process of exploiting one's sexuality to get what you want was now in the hands of women. This was their terrifying future. This was genre, mulched.
*
Further Reading:
A Sexist Jerk Ruined One of My Favourite Movies | Maggie Mae Fish
Singles (1992, directed by Cameron Crowe)
S.F.W. (1994, directed by Jefery Levy)
SLC Punk (1998, directed by James Merendino)
Live Nude Girls (1995, directed by Julianna Lavin)