The horror, the horror. If you believe many of this year's movies, tabloids and blogs, one of the most terrifying sights is an adult female body that is (gasp) slightly imperfect. If you really want to scare the 15-year-olds to whom pop culture caters, forget chainsaws and torture devices - just zoom in on wrinkles, sags or cellulite.
In last August's hit comedy Superbad, a blind-drunk hottie in short-shorts dirty dances with one of the film's heroes, chubby Seth (Jonah Hill). He's delighted, until he realizes she's left a stain on his pant leg. "Period blood!" he screams in disgust, while other partygoers reel. Okay, having that accident is unpleasant, but Seth is as repulsed as if the girl - hot no longer - had presented him with a severed head. Box office: more than $120-million.
In Knocked Up, which came out in June, hero Ben (Seth Rogen -- also chubby, which I point out because it's not an issue for the men) impregnates a babe (Katherine Heigl). But when she's delivering the baby, there's an extreme close-up of her distended vagina, with horror-movie sound effects. The friend who glimpsed it rocks back and forth on the waiting-room sofa, traumatized. "I shouldn't have gone in there, I shouldn't have gone in there," he chants. Box office: nearly $150-million.
In the remake of The Heartbreak Kid directed by the Farrelly brothers, which came out in October, Eddie (Ben Stiller) hastily marries the lovely Lila (Malin Ackerman), only to be repulsed by her sexual wantonness -- and the thatch of unkempt hair on her crotch. When she pulls off her jeans, the camera swoops in for yet another close-up as her flattened pubic hair springs back to menacing fullness. Stiller recoils as if from a werewolf. Box office: $37-million.
"I didn't see those movies, but I heard about those scenes," said Tracy Clark-Flory, who writes for Salon.com's Broadsheet, a blog that focuses on feminist issues. "They're the ones people walk away talking about."
"Women's bodies have always been fodder for jokes, but the envelope keeps getting pushed," said Jessica Valenti, whose book Full Frontal Feminism came out in March. "Young moviegoers expect more and more outrageous humour, so the movies get more risqué."
Offscreen, recent tabloids, TV shows and Internet sites raked Tyra Banks and Britney Spears over the coals for gaining weight. Endless unflattering photos of their non-washboard midriffs were displayed and discussed. The fact that Banks was at most a size 12, and that Spears has had two children, didn't matter: These women didn't maintain their veneer of perfection. They had failed.
A few weeks ago, the nitpickers hit a new low: They targeted Jennifer Love Hewitt, zeroing in on bumps on her bikini-clad bottom and blaring, "We know what you ate last summer."
Now, I try to have a sense of humour about this stuff. But Jennifer Love Hewitt is a freaking Polly Pocket, and obviously fit. Seeing her scorned - for I don't even know what, having hips? - I can't help but feel that the volume and ubiquity of this kind of criticism is tipping from humour into something uglier.
"Women's inferiority - in fact, their malevolence - is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they're sporting burkas," wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon on a website recently. "I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards... Women are weak, manipulative, somehow morally unfinished. The logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are expendable... There is a staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted."
The reasons are as old as time. Men are visual creatures who fear female power. Women are self-loathing. Each sex mistrusts the "otherness" of the other. Humans have a natural inclination to raise up heroes, then tear them down. Plastic surgery has created a super-race, and the Internet keeps their images in our face 24/7. The baby boomers who are running Hollywood are alarmed by their own aging. And on and on. I'm more interested in the results.
