Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Why Do We Think We Can't Like Women Characters Unless They're Doofusses? Is That How Doofusses Is Spelled?

I've long groaned about our portraying women as "real" by demanding they be depicted as awkward messes who can't walk from A to B without tripping all over themselves or getting caught with their faces in a quart of Hagen-Daaz, however the fuck you spell it:
What’s with Jessica Alba sprinting from talk show to talk show to desperately sell us on how clumsy she is? What the fuck…apparently she spends 2 hours in the new steaming pile of movie she’s in bumping into things and tripping. And she sprains her lips hurriedly trying to tell us that that’s how she is in real life, so pleased with herself. Why does she think this is so endearing?...Wow, hot girl tripping. My sides are splitting. Does she think she’s SO hot she has to now counterbalance this with goofiness? Like Charlize Theron, who cannot seem to do a movie anymore unless she’s required to cover her face in moles and wear a dead mouse for an eyepatch.
Also in that post I give a shout-out to Hitch about women not having to be funny. Don't h8!

ANYhoo, that's what this writer thinks about the writers of Girls, which I can't seem to stop posting about even though I haven't seen a minute of it:
But for right now, we have "Girls," and it arrives on the heels of what feels like a 10-year wave in what we might call “Lady Humiliation Comedy.” This is the surprisingly pervasive technique in which girl characters are made “funny” exclusively by being written as people who fall down a lot, or get food on their faces constantly, or put up with the antics of their sexist dirt-bag boyfriends, or get their skirts hooked under their underwear in public. (Along the same lines, Mindy Kaling has outlined the specimens of women in rom-coms who don't exist in real life, including The Klutz, The Ethereal Weirdo and The Sassy Best Friend.) There is nothing inherently wrong with a female character embarrassing herself now and again — and I want nothing less than I want a female character that never makes a mistake — but the device becomes worrisome when it stands in entirely for character development and a genuine sense of humor. Are we most comfortable with women in comedy when the funny is being done to them rather than coming from them?

I don't know any women like this in real life. I'd like to meet some, since they are all apparently 1) hot  2) desperate to bang anyone who will have them - ie, my dream demographic.

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