Ok, the other day I had a chance to watch TV for the first time in a month so I didn’t care what was on. Screw all that Tyler Durden “After a month I didn’t miss TV” bullshit. Sure, most people spend too much of their fat assed lives sitting in front of a backlit screen that fucks up their eyes and mindlessly repeats idiotic episodes of crap like “Friends.” But the fact is, sometimes it is acceptable to just tune in and vege out for a little while. My mental capacity is not so highly developed that I can follow a film like “Aguirre: The Wrath of God” when I’m already exhausted from my other constant endeavors and challenges--like attempting to do all of my interpersonal communication in a language other than my native English, or fending off the various tropical infections and diseases I seem to keep getting plagued with.
So anyway, what came to pass was that I found myself a nice comfy sofa and a rather modern looking color TV. I was excited about the fact that the shows would be in English, I didn’t give a shit what was on. I ended up watching “The American President” with Michael Douglas and Annette Benning. Keep in mind that this is the only possible scenario in which watching this kind of trash was even possible. Keep in mind also that the prospect of George W. Bush in office is the only way I would ever find myself comforted by the thought of President Michael Douglas.
So the planets aligned and I watched this film drifting in and out of some spotted yellowish fever that the locals keep telling me the name for but which I can’t pronounce. Anyway, I found that even though I had never seen this movie before, I was familiar with about 90% of it. It was like eating one of those star shaped cookies with sugar frosting you get at Christmas, except that this cookie had Michael Douglas sprinkles over a white house back drop.
In effect, the movie had nothing to do with the trials of the white house, international leadership, leadership of any kind for that matter. Here was the plot:
Boy meets girl.
This is the kind of romantic crap that your girlfriends always drag you to and act like it is uninsulting. But the truth is that movies like this, which comprise about two thirds of all movies, are just indoctrinating, brain-washing, anti-male propaganda. Let me break down the elements to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about.
Boy meets Girl--Translation:
Sappy, pseudo-romantic encounter that makes guys sick to watch and makes girls coo with pleasure. You know, this kind of crap is really insulting. What is it about all this flirty eye garbage that makes women go all gooey? Or to be more precise, why is it that women seem to think it is “nice” and “romantic” to see a man go to extreme and unreasonable lengths, inflicting who knows what emotional damage on himself and becoming an embarrassment in the process, just to meet up with a girl who could have easily recognized his “signals of communication” from a hundred miles away and saved him all the trouble. I mean, Christ, HELLO! Whenever some women or some TV or radio show or whatever off-handedly mentions how women are the “more communicative” sex, I guffaw. That’s guffaw, not snort, not laugh. To say that women are more-communicative is absolutely bullshit, unless you are talking about issues that apply only to them.
“Women speak in subtle signs that they want the men to read”
Duh, men do that too, all the fucking time! It’s just that men don’t sit around and pout when these signs are ignored because WE’RE USED TO IT! WE’VE GIVEN UP THE BATTLE. We’ve accepted the mental position that our emotional well-being is completely unimportant to our potential spouses, so we don’t battle for it. The implications of that stretch to every level of society, but nobody gives a fuck.
Boy Wins Girl--Translation
This is the part in the movie where, after completely resisting every advance by the man for the first 30 minutes or so, the woman finally gives in and starts allowing for the fact that...oh, maybe this guy isn’t a demon from hell like all other men (a stereotype that the first half of the movie has been strong-fistedly endorsing since the opening credits). For the most part, this 30 minute segment will develop the sub-plot of some serious issue that has Earth shattering consequences that he’s been working on but is, for some reason, unable to share with his girlfriend. The issue of why the female character is completely unaware of her partner’s stress despite the fact that she is supposed to be the “communicative” and “emotionally oriented” one, is completely ignored. At the end of the segment, the man will get the only piece of tail that he his going to see for the whole movie. This scene is depicted as though it is a moment of pure pleasure for him and him alone and some major sacrifice for her.
Boy Loses Girl--Translation
This is the scene where the guy has to do something that is totally reasonable but which the women will interpret as a personal attack and as an assault on her womanhood, her individuality, blah, blah, blah, and definitive proof that the man really was a demon the whole time and just tricked her for sex.
In “The American President,” the act is that Michael Douglas has to kill the bill Annette Benning has been working on so that he can pass another bill that is sure to help his rapidly declining political popularity (rapidly declining because of her I might add).
OK, I’m going to go into some detail here because this one pisses me off.
The deal that we’re supposed to accept is that men and women are equal right? Ok, I’m hip to that, I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. But tell me, why is it that whenever a women feels even remotely slighted by a man in a movie, she is allowed to just go storming out of the room before she has all the facts? And don’t go and tell me that it doesn’t matter because it is just the movies, where do you think people obtain their patterns for behavior these days? And believe me, people act like this.
In “The American President,” you have a woman who is dating the President of the US. What the fuck does she expect? That every decision he is going to make is going to be in her interests rather than those of the country? Even if the decision he made was wrong, what’s with this storming out of the room crap? That’s not equality. A reasonable, equal, mature, and respectable person would have assessed the situation and stuck by the side of the person she was “supporting” while trying to convince him of the error of his ways with dignity but in private. A united front to the public, discussions behind closed doors, that’s the way it’s done.
But Hollywood and all the people who go to movies apparently think it is OK for a women to just go storming out of the relationship at the first perceived hint of trouble. God does that piss me off. Just once I’d like to see this situation reversed. You could have some movie about some big-breasted gold digger who is trying to win the confidence of some aging millionare, and just when he starts to believe her, she goes off with three guys that “she’s just friends with” for a skiing and jacuzzi vacation in Aspen. When she gets back and looks at her future mate with a “what I did was completely innocent” look, he just leaves the fucking room and doesn’t have anything to do with her until she performs some act of utter purity to regain his trust.
Why would it be so bad to have a women even apologize to a man in a movie? Has that ever happened? Men are always crawling over glass to get to women, but I think it is an unwritten rule of the cinema that women never have to apologize. Bullshit.
Boy Regains Girl--Translation
The guy goes through some unreasonable contortions to prove to his women that he’s not the slimy demon that she jumped to the conclusion of believing he was. He has to do things like:
1. Stand outside girl’s house all night with a radio playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.”
2. Not train for his fight with heavyweight champion Apollo Creed, instead sitting by his girlfriend’s side reading while she is in a coma.
3. Leave the championship football game for which he is the star player so he can come and join his girlfriend in some stupid song and dance duet.
4. Rescue his girlfriend from pirates, snakes, starvation, etc., before she will even consent to sharing body warmth on the below freezing nights.
5. Be Tom Hanks.
Meanwhile all the time while you’re sitting there watching this in the theatre, your girlfriend is cooing away at the antics of the dejected hero and wondering why you don’t express your sensitivity in the same way?
These damn romantic movies are a load of crap. You should be offended if you’re girlfriend asks you to go to one of them. It’s just a lot of junk about how men should do shit for their women, it isn’t presented with an even hand.
Has a woman ever made a sacrifice in a movie to make up for the fact that she said or did something that had a one in fifty million chance of being interpreted as a personal assault? Give me one example.
Going to an action movie is not an even trade with going to a romantic flick. Even action flicks have a lot of pro-women propaganda. The only trade off would be a good hard-core porn where all the women do exactly what the men want. But that’s not acceptable socially. God, what totalitarian times we live in.
But the big irony is what the real message of these movies is. Nobody brings it up because they are too afraid to say it and they like the status-quo, but the reality is that modern cinema doesn’t have female roles that endorse true emotional support for men because Hollywood thinks women are inferior.
That’s right: inferior!
And until movies start providing the example for women in which women are held accountable for doing shitty things, or at least, don’t flip their lids when they erroneously believe their boyfriends are doing something shitty, women will have an inferior behavior and value system to follow.
Don’t blame me, I’m just putting it out there. But I’ll tell you this much, strong women don’t go running from a room in a pout when a situation they have the power to change doesn’t go their way.
And don’t let your women guilt trip you into seeing the latest Amy Tan offering or whatever. There is nothing innocent about girl movies. They’re bad for you. If you want an equal partner, you shouldn’t even allow your women to watch them on her own.
The End
Boy wins girl.
Boy loses girl.
Boy regains girl.
fin