The Films of Karyn Kusama: Jennifer's Body

 

            

              The third film in my retrospective on the films of Karyn Kusama is the late blooming horror classic Jennifer’s Body. Misunderstood, underrepresented and overlooked, this 2009 film was ahead of its time, and the culture at large. The film presents gender and sexuality in a way that we’ve barely touched on, outside of vague indie dramas, in the near 15 years since its release. Even fewer, are the films that are marketed to mass audiences and open wide as this film did. This paper is an exploration of the historical revulsion of the film upon its release, and its reconsideration a decade later, as well as an analysis of the film’s broadly stroked gendered and sexual themes that become more intricately detailed upon further and closer examination.

 

PLOT

            High School friends Anita and Jennifer have been inseparable since childhood. Jennifer, the outgoing aggressive bombshell, is the gravitational force in their relationship, while the diminutive Anita, who goes by the descriptive, albeit narratively deceptive, “Needy”[1], sits comfortably in her orbit. But when Jennifer gets lured away after a bar fire and improperly sacrificed to Satan for an Emo Glam Rock Band’s desire for fame and fortune, Anita “Needs” to take care of what remains, a demon succubus, inside her best friend.  

 

 

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

            Production

            Jennifer’s Body marked the sophomore film for writer/producer Diablo Cody and their second collaboration with Producer Jason Reitman after their smash hit, Juno. Cody wanted to both pay homage to, and subvert, a lot of the Horror tropes of the era by centering the narrative around girls and their friendships, ultimately turning the genre into a double entendre.

While not confirmed, Cody seemed to draw inspiration for Jennifer’s sacrifice from the real-life murder of Elyse Pahler who in 1996 was lured from her home in California and killed as a part of a Satanic ritual; all for the Metal Band Hatred to be granted “The Craziness and Go Professional”. Once captured, the three members of the band pleaded “no contest” and are each serving life sentences in three separate penitentiaries across California. One of these men was denied Parole in 2021 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the other two have upcoming parole hirings in 2023 and 2024 respectively. Feeling a lack of Justice, The Pahler Family lashed out at the band Slayer, believing that their music and lyrics promoted murder and violence, which in their mind, led to the death of their daughter. All civil court cases were dismissed.      

The script for Jennifer’s Body was written in 2006 at the same time as Juno, but because of the latter’s success, the second script by Diablo Cody was quickly put on the list of the “most anticipated” unmade scripts of that year. Reitman was initially set to direct, given his history with Cody, but realizing his vision wasn’t the right fit, began shopping for directors. Kusama came on in the early months of 2008, drawn to the project by the script and its overall themes, “a fairytale gone psycho”, and was present during the additional drafts of the script that zeroed in and highlighted its feminist messaging. Both Cody and Kusama were adamant in wanting the story to remain about female friendships and write these horror roles that [ so rarely] service women.  While Cody’s popularity assured that this script would be produced, the reactionary nature of the Hollywood industry, ultimately guaranteed that the studio, in this case 20^th Century Fox, would not understand it.   

             The studio ignorance of this film festered. Only seeing through the white male gaze of standard Hollywood pictures, Producers believed this film to be a riff on the typical sex comedy in the vein of (what would eventually become) National Lampoon’s trademark in the early 2000’s, a sort of American Pie with a Succubus. Therefore, they hired an all-male marketing team who focused their attention on capturing young white men, by using their promotional budget to sexualize Megan Fox at the center of its advertising. Billboards, posters, one sheets, and trailer editors all leaned in on the hyper sexualized image of Megan Fox cultivated by the Studio in order to get men into the theater with the promise of her naked body. According to Kusama, this crack marketing team even had the deplorable idea that Fox should do live chats for the film on Amateur Porn sites. This failure at the marketing ultimately poisoned the public well of goodwill for the film. Thus, audiences and critics at the time did not know exactly what the film was, nor what it was trying to say; their expectations crashing upon the rocky shores of the film’s actual messages. This incongruity left many (typically male) audience members and critics feeling duped, leading to them unfairly criticizing the film, because of its marketing tactics.

            Reception

            The initial reviews of the film which were mixed but leaning towards terrible, typically cited the script and direction as being at fault rather than the performances. Yet, due to the mismanaged marketing, praise for the performances rarely went beyond the physical, with one review stating: “Forget Jennifer’s Body. This is all about Megan’s Body”. Several other reviews lambasted the film for its “lack of fun” or stated that it was a film that was “pretty to look at” but “without substance.” or calling the directing amateurish and the writing a “disappointment from an Oscar winner” (meaning Cody). Many critics felt that Cody was “trying too hard” to match her success with Juno while others thought the film was too sexual, or conversely, not sexual enough (which might have been code for not enough nudity, meaning they didn’t get to see Megan Fox naked). While others just saw the finished product as trashy B movie schlock.  

It is difficult to truss out whether these first negative reviews, were conceivably led a stray by the piss poor marketing team, or if it’s a representation of the cultural subtext of the patriarchy. Many of these negative reviews (typically, but not all from men) read like the masculine gatekeeping of a genre. The keyboard warriors and early internet trolls that believe that a female led and directed film, is by its very creation, subpar. They are then inclined, nay, self-empowered, emboldened, even entitled, to have their voice be heard and to “put these women in their place.” These outbursts being tantamount to these men throwing a toddler’s tantrum for the film not being what they wanted or expected. These negative reviews shaped a generation’s opinion on this film. For a decade, anytime anyone would suggest watching it, the inevitable refrain would be: “Oh I heard its bad, isn’t it bad?” Fortunately, vindication and the valorization of Jennifer’s Body eventually came with the shifting of gender politics in the US.

 

The Emancipation of one Jennifer Check    

            Since the film’s release in 2009, US audiences have seen the embolization of a white supremacist misogyny, ever present in our history and culture, congeal, and metastasize into the living tumor that is Donald Trump. His successful run for the presidency against Hillary Clinton set off a wave of anti-immigrant, misogynistic and racist behavior and its resistance. Many people were speaking up to this tyranny that wouldn’t before; whether that be because they have finally had enough or because Trump forced them to be introspective[2] is irrelevant.  Regardless, people were beginning to have conversations about structural forms of systemic racism and sexism that were outside of academia. Yet, these conversations needed a catalytic spark to create change. History would provide two events; the response to which would further a new anti-sexism movement called #MeToo.

 The phrase “MeToo” was coined in 2005 by Tarana Burke, to illustrate the frequency and cultural ubiquity of sexual assault and violence against women. Burke defined the tactic that would eventually become the movement’s mission statement:

 “to empower sexually assaulted people (especially young and vulnerable women of color) through empathy, solidarity, and strength in numbers, by visibly demonstrating how many have experienced sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace.”

While the movement started in 2005 it was not until 12 years later that it would gain both traction and a voice. The first event that initiated the Me-Too movement was the New York Times expose on the sex crimes of Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein, receiving over 100 different accusations including many from the Hollywood elite. The #MeToo began trending on social media, giving many who were unaware (mostly men) their first glimpse at the enormity of the problem of sexual assault and sexual violence; ultimately contributing to Weinstein’s unlikely arrest and surprising conviction.  

The second event that solidified the movement was the appointment of an anthropomorphized can of Papts Blue Ribbon to the Supreme Court through Brett Kavanaugh; regardless of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about being allegedly assaulted by Kavanaugh while in college. Veterans of the fight against sexism and the newly “woke” watched as the systemic patriarchy rallied around Kavanaugh and protected him and his reputation with all of the power at their disposal.   

            According to Constance Grady (2018) it is among the backdrop of the #MeToo Movement that Jennifer’s Body gets its reconsideration and recompence.

 “In a post-#MeToo world, the implications of this storyline look uncomfortably familiar. It’s the story of a group of powerful men sacrificing a girl’s body on the altar of their own professional advancement — and it’s also the story of them using her torment as a bonding activity.”

            Several feminist and gender scholars have discussed at length the way that the violation of women by men is used as a mechanism for male group cohesion (Sanday 1984, Kimmel 2008). The members of Low Shoulder, quip, joke and sing just before murdering Jennifer. Not only is this a way to decompress the situation from its immensity, allowing them to either kill her or be complacent to it, but their laughter illustrates more broadly the way that a lot of men in their friendship circles hide from dangerous or uncomfortable situations. They believe that if they can laugh about a situation then the gravity of what they have done is dissipated (Orenstein 2020).  

In the Me-Too era, Jennifer’s Body can also be framed as a rape revenge fantasy, a reclamation of a woman’s body after an assault. Living in the Rape Culture which defines sexuality as violent and minimizes sexual assault by gaslighting women into silence, how many assault stories end like Jennifer’s: bloodied, near catatonic, and looking for comfort in the presence and safety of a best friend? What the public has learned is that the story of what happens to Jennifer’s body, could have happened to anybody. To that end, the only criticism I have of how this film handles the assault is that it reinforces the tired trope that violence (typically sexual violence) is the catalyst for Jennifer becoming powerful. Regardless of what she eventually does with that power, it still has its origin in male violence against her, which she then turns on others.

In 2023, Jennifer’s story, or at least the beginnings of it, are all too familiar. This reframing transforms the film from the marketed sex fantasy for men, to a revenge fantasy for women and the importance, and complexity of female friendships. The broader (male) society can now look at the film and rather than be distracted by the “male gazey hotness of Megan Fox” put forth by the marketing, they can recognize the allegorical gender messages the film always portended but was obfuscated by the patriarchal and misogynistic industry standards of Hollywood. Many terribly sexist films have been tacitly accepted through the socio-cultural hand waving of “it was a product of the times.” The speech being used as a shield against any intricate investigation through a more modern/less forgiving lens. Yet, films like Jennifer’s Body become richer within the present context. While the cynically glib part of me wants to flippantly exclaim that “the world had to get bad enough in order to appreciate the film” But part of the point of the #MeToo Movement is that it was always like this, we’ve now decided to see it…for a while.    

        

“You’re Killing people.” “No, I’m killing Boys.”

SOCIAL ANALYSIS

The social analysis of Cody and Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body developed in part along the same timeline as the film’s reclamation. While there have always been supporters, the film surviving on its cult status, the revivification of the love story between Anita and Jennifer in the public discourse began with a Feminist theoretical reading of the film. Through this lens, Jennifer’s Body becomes a subversive and Feminist treatise on female social expectations, anger, and friendships, while providing a space for the exploration of bisexuality, something that is still radical today.

Upending The Patriarchal Power of men

Part of the amenable power of Jennifer’s Body is in its ability to shine a lens on the gendered expectations and the fragile nature of masculinity within the patriarchy. To say masculinity is fragile means that the veneer of manhood is easily broken because the acceptable criterion for masculinity is so narrow and specific, often surrounding violence, being tough, numerous sexual conquests, as well as protection, provision, and alcohol consumption, that a person’s masculine presentation can be obliterated with a simple question or a small behavioral slip. Say the “wrong” thing, order the “wrong” drink, where the “wrong” clothes and you leave yourself open to ridicule. Because the tenuous nature of masculinity is known, masculinity needs to be reaffirmed/solidified in (nearly) every social situation. Jennifer’s Body highlights the fact that boys and men are not the only ones that learn these masculine rules, girls do too and use them to glean power (In Jennifer’s case, their lifeforce) from them. Yet, because she is working within the confines of already established gender norms, exploiting them, rather than breaking them, she goes undetected.

  In the film, although Jennifer is always the last person to be seen with the victims, she is never suspected. The tacit implication being that it is unthinkable that a girl/woman could be the killer, especially given the horrifically gory cannibalistic nature of the crimes. This gendered invisibility allows her to hunt without interruption. Part of Jennifer’s stalking process is playing on the socially constructed gender norms that police both men and women’s bodies. These boys willfully go with Jennifer, or are lured by her, to secluded locations so that she can feed. They do not fear her, even when the context of the situation screams danger, because she is a girl. And still, they persist into danger because of the promise of sex, because of the promise of “Jennifer’s Body.”

    The scene that clearly articulates this exploitation of fragile Masculinity is when Colin (Kyle Gallner) is driving to a supposed “date” with Jennifer. As he is driving, he notices that the streets get less populated, homes get darker, and eventually everything looks abandoned. As he approaches the house where he is supposed to meet Jennifer, he knows that at the very least, this seems like a prank (and at worse he is in danger). Yet, he continues into the house because of the allure of uncertainty, the possibility of Jennifer, and the masculine gender police of his fellow men, that will mercilessly ridicule him for leaving.  Jennifer weaponizes fragile masculinity and she wields it with perfect precision.    

The filmmaking intention of scenes like the one above is to upend the trope of women dying in horror movies. While the film is successful, to that end, it also goes further and makes all the male characters utterly faceless and disposable, only identified by their particular aesthetic (jackets, piercings, hairstyles etc.) much like female gendered tropes in traditional horror movies.  The subversive thing about Jennifer’s Body is that the boys and men in this film are one-dimensional mechanisms by which the relationship between Jennifer and “Needy” play out; they are a function by which the relational dynamics of the principal characters are explored.

 

“Do You have a Tampon? I thought you might be plugging.”

           

“Needy” and Jennifer: Best Frenemies Forever  

 At first glance, and in the opening scene, Jennifer and “Needy” are supposed to embody a gaggle of female friendship tropes. Jennifer is “the hot girl” and Anita is “the nerdy best friend”; each identified with specific hairstyles, clothing, and make-up. The filmmakers even go so far as to resurrect the 90’s trope of making an attractive girl seem ugly by putting Amanda Seyfried behind a pair of glasses and tying her hair back. This is even called out early in the film after Jennifer tells “Needy” to “Wear something cute.” “Needy” understands exactly what that means. Her proceeding explanation is so razor thin specific that she only needs to try on a few outfits/ combinations that fit the criteria.

Woven into the character tropes of “Needy” and Jennifer is an exploration of female relational aggression (Simmons 2002). Because direct aggression is often coded as masculine, women have been socialized to express their anger in subtle indirect ways. This keeps them from seeming overtly hostile, and maintaining a “good girl” image, and therefore not sanctioned. This anger manifests through the weaponizing of relationships and using the practices of group exclusion, rumor spreading, and name calling (Simmons 2002).  A lot of the aggression that “Needy” and Jennifer feel for each other is expressed through their interactions with other people. Jennifer expertly pits “Needy” against others (mostly Chip) in order to make “Needy” choose Jennifer; effectively sabotaging her other relationships so that they only belong to each other.   

      

            Jennifer and “Needy’s” Bisexual Journey

            Jennifer and Anita’s love story begins in a sandbox when they were children (Sandbox love never dies). Throughout the film, that bond is tweaked and stretched the way a lot of young love develops, through flirtation and experimentation. Jennifer and “Needy” are shown engaging in playful, semi aggressive shoving early in the film which can often be a precursor to a sexual encounter. Moreover, when Jennifer shows up in “Needy’s” bed in a t-shirt, underwear, and leggings, Jennifer mentions that “[She] found her way back to [Needy]” and passively mentions that they used to play “boyfriend and girlfriend”. In these moments, their love, desire, and passion for each other is palpable; especially for “Needy”. For Jennifer, because she is always sexually confident, it is in her quiet caring, and unwillingness to harm “Needy”, that shows her tenderness and love.  While these ideas were originally assumed by critics to be solely for and about the heterosexual male audience, creating titillation for the male gaze, what Jennifer and “Needy” display here is a clear presentation of Adrianne Rich’s “Lesbian Existence”    

In a previous essay I provided an articulation of Rich’s main point and context that is valid in Understanding the Sexual Politics of Jennifer’s Body

 

“Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women. But it is more than these, although we may first begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act of resistance. It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy penalties; and lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a continuity, a social underpinning. The destruction of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain”

As the term "lesbian" has been held to limiting, clinical associations in its patriarchal definition, female friendship and comradeship have been set apart from the erotic, thus limiting the erotic itself. But as we deepen and broaden the range of what we define as lesbian existence, as we delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself, as an energy not only diffuse but, as Audre Lorde has described it, omnipresent in "the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic," and in the sharing of work; as the empowering joy which "makes us less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial[7]

 

Rich identifies in this stitched together passage, (as in the article as a whole) that in a patriarchal system women are taught to see other women as a source of contention and competition for male attention (Thus making heterosexuality compulsory through socialized behaviors, reinforced by rewards from social structural institutions (Marriage, family, Military economy etc.)), and denying the reality of the power women have among and with each other by placing undue emphasis on the type and nature of a relationship rather than what that relationship provides for the individuals involved. Thus, women are socially trained through compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchal oppression that the most important relationships that they have are with men, and that all other relationships are secondary within this structure.

            We see this play out in Jennifer’s Body in the way that “Needy” only engages in sexual contact with her boyfriend, Chip, because she feels threatened by Jennifer (contention and competition for male attention) “Needy” never initiates romantic or sexual contact with him that isn’t motivated by Jennifer’s presence or her mentioning. Consistent to that point, Jennifer’s pursuit of Chip is in service of affecting her relationship with “Needy”

Additionally, Amanda Seyfried and Johnny Simmons (“Needy” and Chip respectively) have nonexistent on-screen chemistry. When Chip is first introduced in “Needy’s” room, in the context of the scene, the audience could just as easily infer that Chip is her brother rather than her boyfriend. This is solidified when you juxtapose “Needy’s” participation in her sexual interactions with both Chip and Jennifer. With Chip, “Needy” is in the passive receiving missionary position with little to no eye contact with her partner (to which Chip makes no notice or care for).  Instead, it is clear in the context of the scene that she is thinking about/linked with Jennifer. Conversely, later in the film, after Jennifer initiates their kiss, it is “Needy” that becomes desirably aggressive towards Jennifer, overcome with a passionate hunger neither she, nor the audience, have seen from her before.

In the end, the confluence of Jennifer and “Needy’s” relationship is a near perfect distillation of Rich’s argument for the power of “The Lesbian existence”. They do not define themselves by the patriarchal definition of lesbian, but instead define the erotic in feminine terms, thereby allowing for the creation of a “lesbian continuum” which includes their Bisexuality. Carmen Maria Machado (2022) reinforces this in the way that they deconstruct the final confrontation between Jennifer and “Needy”:

When Needy eventually kills Jennifer, she does it facing her, straddling her; this is how Jennifer’s mother finds them, compromised in Jennifer’s canopy bed.

The scene is shot less like a death scene and more like teens being caught in a romantic entanglement. The culmination of the fight has the subtext of mild sex play, and when the final blow is struck, it plays out like a sexual climax rather than a death. This seems intentional considering that orgasms have been historically referred to as “the little death” and acts as a satisfying narrative metaphor for the pinnacle of their relationship. To further this point, the reaction of Jennifer’s mother is first one of surprise in seeing “Needy” intimately atop her daughter, and her reaction to Jennifer’s (dead) body is one of sorrowful disappointment rather than anger which is also consistent in many “coming out” stories.

            Machado (2022) goes on to identify the Bisexual diversity through “Needy” and Jennifer’s characters, believing that if Jennifer were not to be invaded by Satan, that she would have turned out to be a bisexual that is primarily lesbian in practice and “Needy” as a bisexual that also consistently dates men. While I believe there is just as much evidence for the opposite given “Needy’s” desert of chemistry with her Gaslighting jackass of a boyfriend; it’s important to understand that stories of sexuality, actual, non-romanticized versions are complicated and messy especially around the subject of sexual Identity…and “such little grace is given to the perfect messiness of desire.” (Machado 2022:3)

            Thus, the bisexual queerness of Jennifer and “Needy’s” love story is complex and multifaceted; set in direct opposition to the common bisexual stories we are subjected to in our “post-modern” culture. The bisexual identity is less accepted and vilified on both sides of the sexuality binary, with many people (on both sides) believing that the bisexuality identity is a layover rather than a destination. This is further complicated by the way the heteronormative structure allows for “spaces of experimentation” usually college, where fluid sexual identities are more accepted. Granted, many of these spaces were created still under the male gaze and women in sexual congress with other women has been commodified by heterosexual men for their own pleasure. But regardless of intention and motivation, women are allowed to sexually experiment more openly in these spaces and that has the potential to allow for greater sexual diversity beyond the binary. Therefore, we need more complex messy stories like Jennifer and Needy’s because not everything is blissfully explicit and wonderfully clean.  

Machado (2022) sums this up nicely in a recent interview:

 People want queer representation to be perfect, and it doesn’t have to be perfect — and also, people have different ideas about what makes something perfect. And there is a deliciousness in subtext and uncertainty… But also, the standards are so high. Subtext is really fun! I feel like a lot of younger people are like, “If it’s not explicit, it’s not worth it.” And I’m like, “Eat your vegetables!”

 

CONCLUSION

Jennifer’s Body is a wonderfully schlocky B movie horror feminist cult classic. It was undercut by the marketing team and sold to the group that would hate it the most; under the guise that the objectification of Megan Fox would continue in the service of the white male gaze. Instead, what many of these men received was a understanding of their minimal importance in the lives of girls and women when compared to the complexity of female friendships. Upset, they decided to lash out at the film for making them face this realization rather than be introspective about their relationships and how they treat women. In a recent court ruling, the US courts have determined that individuals can sue production companies over the validity of their movie trailers. Meaning that if something that is presented as significant in the trailers does not make it into the final film, that could be grounds for a lawsuit. If this was precedence in 2009, how quickly does anyone think these butthurt, dude-bros. would sue the studio for not being this films target audience, feeling a sense of entitlement to ogle at Megan Fox’s fully nude body. One of the key aspects of denial is deflection. These men do not want to recognize that the power of “Jennifer’s Body” has nothing to do with them, and that irrelevance is the harshest weapon against the misogynistic patriarchy.

 

REFERENCES

   Grady, Constance (2018)  “How Jennifer’s Body went from a flop in 2009 to a feminist cult classic today The critical reevaluation of Jennifer’s Body, explained” Retrieved at https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/10/31/18037996/jennifers-body-flop-cult-classic-feminist-horror Retrieved on 12/30/2022

 

  Kimmel, Micheal (2008) Guyland: The perilous world where boys become men New York: Harper Collins

 

Machado, Carmen Maria (2022) “ Both Ways” In It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror Retrieved at https://www.autostraddle.com/in-queer-horror-anthology-it-came-from-the-closet-carmen-maria-machado-considers-jennifers-body/ Retrieved on 12/30/2022

 

Orenstein, Peggy (2020) Boys and Sex: Young men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity New York: Harper Collins

 

 Rich, Adrianne (1980) “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence” In Women, Sexand Sexuality 5(4) Chicago University Press Retrieved at https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173834 retrieved on 12/22/22.

 

  Sanday, Peggy Reeves (1984). Fraternity Gang Rape New York: New York University Press.

 

Simmons, Rachel K. (2002) Odd Girl Out: The hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls New York: Harcourt   

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[1] After my rewatch of this film, I am convinced that the nickname of “Needy” was something that Jennifer came up with (a constant subtle jab) and Anita accepted it to maintain a relationship with Jennifer

[2] It is important to keep in mind that during this many White men who openly and vocally came out against Donald Trump did so under the guise of using Trump’s openly inflammatory and blatantly discriminatory statements to distance themselves from their own levels of racism and sexism. Because compared to Trump, their level of Misogyny seems quaint. May people justifying their actions by saying “At least I am not that bad”

When Gender Socialization...Met The Romantic Comedy...

 

The process of socialization is polymorphic. From observations, school lessons, and shared experiences, to on-the-job training and parental “teachable” moments, all can be a part of general social learning. Socialization is primarily used systemically as a mechanism of social control, giving individuals investment in a societies social order by manipulating them (beginning at birth) to follow rules, regulations, and cultural norms, with the hope that those norms get internalized into a drive and determination to benefit society. In essence, socialization seeks to create a law abiding productive acceptable member of a society within an established order. The more rigid the order, the more acute its socialized messaging. This paper is an examination of the impact the Romantic Comedy film genre has on the creation, maintenance, and reinforcement of problematic gendered messaging in the process of socialization through its narrative arcs, marketing, and characters; all while normalizing emotional terrorism against women, coercing girls and women into the Patriarchal bargain, and viewing all women through the lens of the rich white straight “Karen”.

 

A BRIEF THORETICAL INTERLUDE

 

            Gender Socialization is the process by which individuals learn what it means to be male, female, masculine, feminine, trans, and non-binary along the gender spectrum.  While these definitions, concepts and identities are fluid at their core, the process of gender socialization has the same goal [as socialization] of fitting someone into an established social order. So, even though this process is a social construction, able to become anything as open and free as one’s heart desires, it often is restricted by a power system of institutions and organizations that harness and cultivate an exclusionary understanding of gender, sexuality, race, and disability that is exceedingly recalcitrant. This power system reinforces a genitally focused, biologically deterministic binary understanding of identity, creating arbitrarily irrational differences between and among the categories of gender it has validated (through various societal rewards and opportunities) as being acceptable. What results is a genderist, sexist, racist, ableist latticed institutional apparatus; what bell hooks (2000) called “the white supremacist capitalist [Heterosexist, Able-bodied] patriarchy”.    

General messages

              Each social system dictates the social learning process and the overall messages individuals will receive. The more egalitarian the system, the more benevolent, open, and accepting messages they will receive. The more exclusive messages, the more discriminatory, closed, and alienating the response will be.  In “the white supremacist capitalist [Heterosexist, Able-bodied] patriarchy”, the limits are heavily compounded. In such as system, those socially labeled at birth (by presumed visible genitalia) to be “girls,” are consistently given the message that their chief value resides in their body; either as a sex object for someone else (usually Cisgendered heterosexual men) or as a vessel for the next generation (that they are supposed to want and bear children), and be in a constant state of potential pregnancy. Because of this objectifying valorizing, girls start to form a self-identity based around their relationship to other people. Their value is not in themselves, their value is in what they are and worth, to boys and men.  This system rewards girls and women for accepting, promoting, and securing their place among men, while sanctioning, resisting, or restricting any behavior outside of those relationships, especially complete independence. Additionally, since these messages are not exclusive to one gender, girls also learn the messages for boys and men[1] so that they too can participate in masculine policing through various sanctions. Like all sanctions, these restrictions can be overt (blatant, visible) covert (subtle, invisible) individual or institutional. However, when policing gender, for the sanctions to retain their hold, a system needs to be implemented to assure compliance. 

Gender Feedback Loop

According to Crawley, Foley and Shehan (2008) The Gender Feedback Loop is a mechanism of surveillance, social control, disciplining behaviors, and ideas of the self.  The general messages that girls and women receive is then internalized in themselves through the cultivation of a gender self-identity. Then, the expression of that identity is carried out on their bodies which then become messages for others.

 Messages     to Selves       to Bodies : 

 

This general process is common regardless of the level of restriction a system imposes. However, in a restrictive gendered system like we have in the US, the messages, selves, and bodies require daily affirmations and confirmations at each stage. Each of the “messages” require conformation that they are being properly given, the “selves” require confirmation that they have been properly received, and the “bodies” are policed to maintain “correct” expression based upon the system its reinforcing.

 This is a panoptical surveillance that sees this body expression as passive; docile gender bodies (Foucault 1990). The Foucauldian “bio power” envelops this loop defining the ways that the body is considered “normal” by the way it expresses gender. The surveillance of womanhood begins at birth and includes every woman’s behavior (Crawley et al 2008: 93). Girls and women are called upon to cut, pluck, pull, wax, fast, and kill themselves into a “perfect” body. To accept the creation of masculine social bonds through their objectification and violation, girls and women promote masculine power for economic, social, and political stability. Women are required through this surveillance to actively practice femininity through what they do, how people respond to them, and how they respond back. They cannot just be “not men”, they are required by the system to “become their own jailers.” (Crawley et al 2008).  Girls get acquainted with this Prison and self-sanctioning at a very young age.

The Media as an Agent of Gender Socialization

According to Kilbourne (1999) the media as an agent of socialization, acts twofold:

  The media gives us knowledge without experience.  This means that the media we consume (through smart phones, tablets, laptops, TV, film etc.) provides us with passive information about the world. Passive information is any type of information that is easily captured.

2.      The media does not just show entertainment nor does commercial advertisements just sell products; they sell images of class, race, gender, sex, ability, disability, beauty, honor, adulthood, relationships, morality etc. Defining for us what we consider normalcy.

For the gender socialization of girls, this begins with the media consumption of “The Princess Culture”.

From Princess Culture to the Rom Com

The Princess Culture can be defined as the commercialization of the fantasy princess narrative identifying the feminized ideas of beauty standards, physical perfection, and passivity, as a source of young girl empowerment (Orenstein 2011).  It is through this princess culture, especially the one that has been dominated for nearly one hundred years by a single company (Disney), that girls learn that they can wait for their literal “Prince Charming” to come and rescue them: from death, sleep, or poverty and abuse. Then, [in the more recent Disney Princess Films][2] believing he is worth altering your body to be with him or staying in an emotionally abusive relationship because you believe you’ll be able to change him.

The Princess Culture is not only validating the aforementioned passivity but supports the establishment of the Patriarchal bargain for girls at a young age.  The Patriarchal bargain, coined by Denzi Kandiyoti (1989) to explain the way different forms of patriarchy present women and girls with distinct "rules of the game"; calls for different strategies to maximize security and optimize life options with varying potential for active or passive resistance in the face of their oppression. Basically, through this bargain, girls and women support and promote the patriarchal system with its misogynistically violent behavioral rhetoric, and in exchange, are granted access to male power through the relationships they cultivate with them. The unfortunate irony being that the patriarchal bargain isn’t an active choice. Instead, girls and women are just playing out the passive scripts and validations that they have already been given. They are accessing power through relationships with men, rather than cultivating power in and of themselves.  

Additionally, the Princess accouterment has also been co-opted by the Purity movement, which, in another shitty Patriarchal “deal”, girls and women are convinced to relinquish their sexual agency and give the power of their body autonomy to their fathers; who become “chastity cops” of their daughter’s virginity. “The fathers plucked silver tiaras from a basket and “crowned their daughters” (Orenstein 2016:91). This again, reinforces the image of Princess purity that begins with the (Typically Disney) Princess culture, and then is retooled and repackaged for First Communions, Quinceaneras, Bat Mitzvahs, Homecoming, Proms, and the White Wedding (Ingraham 2008). “The Princess” then at this point, is beyond its basic royal title. Through the constant bombardment of imagery, and the cultural “practice runs” in preparation for virginal heterosexual white marriage, the princess is the pacifier that it has become the foundation for Cishet white femininity on which The Romantic Comedy stands. Along the way, marketed as lighthearted relational entertainment, the romantic comedy since its inception, has followed in the tradition of the princess culture in form, and messaging.

 

THE ROMANTIC COMEDY

The sub-genre titled the Romantic Comedy, or “Rom Com” has existed in various forms for over 100 years in the United States. In that time, a lot  has been written about this very popular subgenre, that always seems to be “on the back foot”. While there have been subtle shifts in the organization of Protagonists, updated cultural references, and change in narrative storytelling devices, these are still genre pictures that follow set guidelines to obtain/retain the “Rom Com” classification. The typical Romantic Comedy is often identified as a comedy sub-genre of films that add romantic subplots to [typically] slice of life stories in which two, usually well-liked characters are united and or reconciled by the end of the film.

While not exclusive, many of these stories tend to involve:

·         Younger protagonists

·         Seemingly meant for each other but kept apart due to circumstances and plot contrivances

·         The Surmounting of all odds (class differences, concurrent partnerships, unaccepting family, geographic difference, or a volcano) they reunite by the end of the films in a typical fairy tale style happy ending

·         A wedding, or they get married soon after reconnecting.

·         A marketing strategy where the trailers and posters of the films are indistinguishable from each other.

 

When looking at the Romantic comedy as an extension of the Princess Culture to be used as another mechanism of gender socialization for girls and women, the similarities of the fairy tale are often present. Firstly, the Princess imagery recreated in the Rom Com through its common white wedding ending. In these endings, Ingraham’s (2008) retooling of “the princess culture” for women is on full display. From the dress, the setting and staging of the wedding and, because it is typically the final shot/scene of the film, there is an invocation of the Fairy Tale end phrase “And they lived happily ever after…”. This maintains the myth, power, and importance of love and relationships to the learning of and participating in feminine gender performances; through the lens of “the Princess” without any real strategies for building and cultivating legitimate relationships.

       “…we have grown up in a culture that told us that no matter what we experience in our childhoods, no matter the pain, sorrow, alienation, emptiness, no matter the extent of our dehumanization, romantic love will be ours…we believe “someday our Prince may come.”

                                                                                                                   (bell hooks 2001: 170)

Here hooks (2001) is putting love in context, while displaying how we often take love out of it. One of the typical narrative arcs is the “love will conquer all” thematic, where, as stated above, love develops regardless of class status, geography, Political affiliation, racism, or ableism in the family. The implication being that love is something cosmic, beyond the socially constructed institutional limiters we simple humans place on the world to have it make sense. Yet, it is also something that is framed as beyond our control, seen as something that we do not choose…. we “fall” in love after all (hooks 2001). This implies that we do not have any control when it comes to the subject of love[3], we are not active in its process, and we like to believe that it just happens. Girls and women have been conditioned through gender socialization, to internalize this myth of love to the point that they relinquish their agency and body autonomy for a boost of oxytocin.

Hooks (2001) also points out an additional allure to the mythologizing of love is a diffusion of responsibility. Love is often referred to as a drug; that the individuals who are “in its thrall” or “under its spell” act irrationally, reckless, and out of character.  Although, with that also comes a sense of boundless freedom and experimentation, many of those actions and behaviors would not be as readily accepted outside the context of “being in love”.   Because of this, any rational evaluation of a partner from a foundation of care, knowledge and respect is often portrayed in the Rom Com as distant, cold, and coercive. Instead, in the Rom Com genre, a woman without a partner, (regardless of how occupationally successful she is) is somehow unfulfilled. 

The Rom Com as a Product

In a capitalist system, profit is motivation for action, response, creativity and creation. To that end, we’ve monetized the gender social learning process to the point that we have gendered everything to double the revenue. Therefore, it cannot be overlooked that the success and proliferation of the Romantic Comedy for a century is due to the intersection of gender socialization and Capitalism. The Romantic Comedy is a product, and due to the aggressively predatory nature of capitalism, that product needs to make a profit.

On the very rudimentary level, as a product of an industry, the film needs to make money (financial capital)[4] beyond its budget. In this regard, the livelihood and trajectory of the romantic comedy has been volatile to the point that nearly every single decade, someone writes a think piece about how “ the rom com” is dead or is dying, or something saved it from dying. And even though the public taste for the Rom Com waxes and wanes[5], it will never truly die because of the cultural social and symbolic capital of the genre (Bourdieu 1987).

The value of the Rom Com as a mechanism of gender socialization is in its ability to maintain the acceptable vision and gendered messages our society deems acceptable. In this context, the Rom Com is successful when it either establishes or reinforces these messages, doing its part to turn them into norms.  This is the function of the rom com’s cultural and social capital. According to Bourdieu (1987), cultural capital is the value of knowledge skills and experiences, whereas social capital is the value of social relationships. Thus, the Rom Com genre’s Cultural capital can be determined by its impact on how we think, and importance we place on romantic relationships and value them in our lives. A Rom Com genre’s social capital is determined in the way that it impacts the relationships we have. Hefner and Wilson (2013) found that the greater exposure to romantic comedies resulted in a stronger endorsement of romantic ideals. Also, Johnson and Homes (2009) state that:

“ Films appeared to depict relationships as progressing quickly into something emotionally meaningful and significant, but there was little shown to explain how or why this was the case. Adolescents using these films as a model on which to base their own behaviors, expecting that in doing so their relationships will progress in kind, are likely to be left disappointed” (p368)

  Moreover, According to Heriot Watt University's Family and Personal Relationships Laboratory, misconceptions of love and romance depicted in romantic comedies are common struggles relationship councilors face with their clients. It is this inaccurate representation of how relationships work through the Rom Com, that hinder our ability to create healthy relationships.  Whether that is by confusing erotic attraction, or basic human compassion with love, to the lack of active and purposeful communication, relationships suffer because of the cultural and social value of the Rom Com itself (hooks 2001, Walker 2020). Yet, it is through the symbolic value where the Rom Com becomes truly dangerous.

The Rom Com is “the Karen” of the Film industry

According to Bourdieu (1998) Symbolic capital is the value of demographics that when used, creates various forms of privilege and barriers. This is employed so often that it can create “symbolic violence” instituted through the adherence that the dominated cannot fail to grant to the dominant (Bourdieu 1998:35). To that end, the symbolic capital of The Rom Com is in its promotion of a white supremist heterosexist, able bodied capitalistic patriarchy, which not only legitimizes the symbolic violence people experience, but may result in symbolic annihilation and the omission, trivialization, and condemnation of any group or person outside of this system (Tuchman 1978).

 The Rom Com as a genre is incredibly white. The films featuring Black Indigenous People of color (BIPOC) are infinitesimally fewer, with smaller budgets. Until the recent resurgence under Netflix, the majority of the Rom Com Catalog for the last 100 years has been all white. With that amount of volume, whenever anyone makes a “best of “ Rom Com” list, it will inevitably feature 95% of white actors in both roles. This not only normalizes whiteness as having ubiquitous complexity, but it forces people of color to, once again, find some kinship and comparison with white protagonists while not seeing themselves or their story on screen.

Like The Princess culture, the Rom Com also exclusively traffics in Cisgendered Heteronormativity.  Most Romantic comedies only include cisgendered females seeking social and emotional refuge from their life (regardless of how occupationally successful they are) in the arms of a cisgendered man. Many of the traditional cisgender norms are played out, reinforcing gendered stereotypes about emotion, self-fulfillment, and success, that reinforce the gender binary convincing girls and women into the trap of “have it all” sexism.

As I explain in a previous essay from 2013:

"Have it all" Sexism is a term that refers to a new type of sexist female representation in the media that requires female characters that are shown to have careers (with varying degrees of power, agency and autonomy), or who are being portrayed as physically strong (or strong willed), must also identify (or in some cases learn to identify) with traditional female gender norms and scripts.  The message is that it is OK for girls to have agency and social power in our society as long as they don't forget that they also have to be wives and mothers (i.e. sex objects and reproductive vessels.) This maintains the value of women to be in their body, and their representation as full and complete human beings is a distant second.”

     Additionally, regarding Heterosexism,  LGBTQ romantic comedies are fewer and far between, many of them only beginning to be released in the last 25-30 years.[6] Also, many of these stories fail in their representation because they tend to hire straight actors to play gay characters and Cisgendered actors to play Transgender characters; many of them garnering Oscar recognition.  Thankfully, in 2022, 110 years since the start of the Rom Com as a genre, we are getting our first romantic comedy with a Transwoman in the lead.

Disability is rarely provided a positive portrayal in film. Too often, we are villains, “techno marvels”, saintly sages, or regarding our sexual abilities, either considered asexual or “damaged goods” (Norden 1994, Blackburn 2000). Because of this we are often not the protagonists of romantic films and are even rarer in Romantic Comedies. When we are in these films, the portrayal often activates the gag reflex of any Disability activist or Ally; because the disabled protagonist often ends up dead.  This lack of representation, like the other groups mentioned above, reinforces the “otherness” of disability, as not being worthy of love, being too much of a burden, and therefore only regulated to being “Inspiration porn” for able bodied people.  Additionally, many of these stories are about the disability. Rarely do we see a story about disability in film that does not feature the disability as a major plot point or character motivation. If we are to take the RomCom structure of a “slice of life” focus, then the disability would be as essential to the plot as someone just moving from one room of their house to the other. Thankfully, as with the other marginalized groups discussed above, we are seeing some small steps forward in not only showing the full Disabled personhood of an individual, but their enriching inter abled relationships that they have cultivated.

While these positive strides to bring visibility to more marginalized groups in the RomCom genre, the continued presence of binary focused gender stereotypes, and normalized white able-bodied heterosexism, the Rom Com becomes exclusively marketed to cisgendered affluent white women. And as we all get sucked into its orbit through wide and continued distribution, we can never fully escape the “Karen” of the film industry.      

    

The Rom Com, and The Rape Culture

Aside from the exclusionary and harboring the unfortunate vestige of “The Karen”, romantic comedies in its reproduction of the white supremacist heterosexist capitalist able-bodied patriarchy, also reproduces, supports, and expands the rape culture.

The Rape Culture can be explained as “a complex set of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy, and sexuality is violent. In a Rape culture, women perceive and experience a wide continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to rape itself. A Rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women and presents it as the norm.” (Buchwald Fletcher and Roth 2005: xi) This is both continuous and compounding overtime, leading to Psychological Trauma, and is a part of the overall “Female Tax” women emotionally pay for existing in such a society.

 Much of the gendered messages learned through the Princess culture are the tools that are used as weapons against girls and women in The Rape Culture. Passivity: “Why didn’t you fight back?” Wealth and Status: “Emasculation by proxy”, “You should have known better, ” Empathy and Compassion: “Why didn’t you leave [him]?” The draw and crave for public attention through the beauty and body norms, fed by the princess culture, is transformed into a false sense of public ownership over a woman’s body, men feeling entitled to a woman’s body in public.  This is just one of the social conditions that create the domestic terrorism of everyday violence that women and other marginalized groups experience.

According to Kolysh (2021):

“Everyday Violence includes commonplace behaviors many people consider acceptable and normal. It is violence not only because each act is violent, even if not in the traditional sense, also because the cumulative effects of these interactions keep women and LGBTQ folks in a near constant state of self-surveillance, being at the ready, and prevent their full participation in public life and feed into violence across society (p17)

    

One of the significant (but far from only) Catch-22’s that is created from a binary constructed genitally focused gender socialization, is the perception that “the world” is a dangerous place for women. Part of the gender socialization process to a rape culture for girls and women, is learning this danger…and then being blamed for it.

 xTx (2018) discusses the “lessons” girls are taught to be a girl:

1.      Sometimes you will be forced into things that you don’t want to do.

2.      If boys want something, they can take it. What girls want is irrelevant

3.      If you do nothing, its your fault

4.      You are a thing a boy can use to make himself ejaculate

5.      It’s fucked up that this happens, and you just deal with it. Move on.

                                                                                                                               (p118-127)

Because “the dangerous world” model is taken as fact and not what it is, another mechanism to control women’s bodies, women are forced to develop various defensive and protective strategies to simply exist within that world. Many of these strategies include classics like: not putting your drink down at a party, or going to the bathroom in groups, to more “advanced methods” through Surveillance apps to “walk home safely at night”  or the multitude of articles discussing the safety and security of female travelers, women are encouraged to read before they depart for literally anywhere. Of course, in our Predatory Capitalist structure many of these strategies are also commodified and monetized, adding to the overall Female Tax[7] women experience. This is like buying bandages for a gaping festering wound, and that still seems more plausible than realizing the truth.

  Feminist scholars have tried to tell us the truth. The problem, is men. Toxic forms of Hegemonic Masculinity that is initiated through the gender socialization process of men and boys to be precise. The general valuing of men and masculinity along with the promotion of alcohol consumption, violence, and sexual conquest as behaviors to regain/establish their masculinity to the public when it is threatened, or even questioned (Connell 2005). Regardless of whether or not boys and men fully, partially adopt or reject these ideals and behaviors, they will still be judged by them, and sanctioned accordingly. Even though many men may not directly engage in these Toxic forms of masculinity, they still contribute to the overall patriarchal system of oppression by existing in its embrace.  Once such response is the Incel movement.

As I wrote in a previous piece in (2018)

 “Incel”s (short for involuntary celibate) are a relatively new form of misogyny. They are a subsect of “beta” male sexism that is adopted by men who do not fit the masculine beauty or body standards. Their ideology sees women’s bodies as a product that they pay for with dinners, vacations, clothing etc. So, from this perspective, if these men provide material goods for women, then they should be given access to their bodies.  They believe that if they are nice to women and are “supreme gentlemen”, then they have claim to them. Often, “Incel” men frequent predominantly online spaces like 4chan and reddit from which this isolated subculture has developed this new warped sense of toxic masculinity that is both fragile (able to be deconstructed with the slightest slip up) and preyed upon by our veracious capitalism. The result of which is a group of emboldened misogynists who’s lack of “sexual conquest” of women they believe is due to feminism.  In their mind, feminism is a movement that hates men; and that any feminist progress is one that hurts men’s sexual access to women.  Thus, when their masculinity is shattered by women being able to have free and equal choice, these men have lashed out violently due to the imagined slights by women that they have falsely perceived.

Because film is a cultural product, The Romantic Comedy is another space in which this gendered oppression plays out in a variety of ways.

            Because a lot of Romantic Comedies have a “slice of life” narrative, the men of this genre consistently participate in Everyday Violence (Kolysh 2021). The men of these Romantic Comedies are: gaslighting, coercively duplicitous,  incel adjacent, man babies that are looking more for a mother whom they can fuck, rather than an actual competent, self-possessed and independent partner. Women in these stories learn, and therefore teach their female audience to look past flaws, and personality defects because being with someone is better than being alone. Given that women are happier and healthier when they are childless and single, whereas men’s life expectancy rises when they are married (mom they can fuck) with children (secure their legacy).  This anti- single, “warm body is good enough (sometimes)” messaging girls and women receive through the RomCom, is more about maintaining the health, wellbeing, and stability of the patriarchy. Once again, even stories about and marketed to women, are really about men.   

This mechanism has become so integrated it is difficult to see a way out. What we need is a culture shift; to Redo Gender. Instead of the strict binary, we need to begin at a more open and fluid starting place. This is because the limited nature of the binary system inevitably will lead to feelings of discomfort and gender dysphoria for those who do not see a place within it (Darwin 2022). Instead, it is far more economical and inclusive to start from a space of broader understanding and acceptance. We need to start in the liminality of the nonbinary space and cultivate allyship that will lead to a greater acceptance of authentic identities wherever in the spectrum they might lie.    

 

 

CONCLUSION

The Romantic Comedy genre, through its structure, narrative arcs marketing and characters reinforces and retains the white supremacist, capitalist heterosexist able-bodied Patriarchy acting as a gendered trap to supply men with compliant sexually desirable motherly servants. This process begins with the basic messages through gender socialization and continues to build and sustain the Rape Culture. While we can take some solace in the examples of current romantic comedies that break out of this mold, and are more inclusive, thereby increasing representation; the retrogressive messages of the Rom Com have unfortunately continued due to their popularity regardless of the messages being flawed.[8]It seems we will have to wait until the more progressive Rom Coms become equally quotable and a part of film culture for there to be a necessary seismic shift. Love is love, and all our films should reflect that openness.

 

 

REFERENCES

Blackburn, Maddie 2002. Disability and Sexuality 4^th eds  New York: Butterworth-Heinemann

 

Bourdieu, Pierre 1987. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. New York: Harvard University Press

 

_____________ 1998 Masculine Domination California: Standford University Press

 

Buchwald, Emilie, Pamela R. Fletcher and Martha Roth (eds.) 2005. “Preamble” and “Introduction” in Transforming a Rape Culture pXI-XVIII

 

Connell, R. W. (2005). Masculinities (2nd ed.). Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

 

Crawley, Sara L. Lara J. Foley and Constance l. Shehan 2008. Gendering Bodies  New York Rowman and Littlefield

 

Darwin, Helana 2022. Redoing Gender: How Nonbinary Gender Contributes toward Social Change  New York: Palgrave MacMillan

 

Foucault, Michel 1978. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction New York: Vintage Books

Hefner, Veronica and Barbara Wilson 2013. “From Love at First Sight to Soul Mate: The Influence of Romantic Ideals in Popular Films on Young People's Beliefs about Relationships” In Communication Monographs Vol 80 (2) p 1-26. Retrieved at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263521659_From_Love_at_First_Sight_to_Soul_Mate_The_Influence_of_Romantic_Ideals_in_Popular_Films_on_Young_People's_Beliefs_about_Relationships Retrieved on 7/3/2021

 

 hooks bell 2000. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center 2nd edition  Massachusetts: South End Press 

 

_________ 2001. All About Love: New Visions New York: Harper Collins

 

Ingraham, Chrys 2008. White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture 2nd Eds New York: Routledge

Johnson, Kimberly R. and Bejarne Holmes 2009. “Contradictory Messages: A Content Analysis of Hollywood-Produced Romantic Comedy Feature Films” In Communications Quarterly p 352-373 retrieved at https://doi.org/10.1080/01463370903113632 Retrieved on 7/3/2022

 

Kandiyoti, Deniz. 1988. “Bargaining with Patriarchy.” In Gender and Society 2, no. 3 pp 274–90. Retrieved on 1/3/22 Retrieved at http://www.jstor.org/stable/190357  

 

Killbourne, Jean 1999. “Socialization and the Power of Advertising.” From Jeankilbourne.com

  Retrieved at https://www.jeankilbourne.com/lectures/  Retrieved on 7/2/2022

 

Kolysh, Simone 2021. Everyday Violence: The Public Harassment of Women and LGBTQ People New Jersey: Rutgers University Press

 

Norden, Martin 1993. The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

 

Orenstein, Peggy 2011. Cinderella ate my Daughter: Dispatches From the Front lines of the new Girlie girl Culture New York: Harper

 

_____________ 2016. Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape New York: Harper

Tuchman G 1978. “The symbolic annihilation of women by the mass media” In Tuchman G, Daniels AK, & Benet J (Eds.), Hearth and home: Images of women in the mass media (pp. 3–38). New York: Oxford University Press.

 

Walker, Alicia 2020. Chasing Masculinity: Men Validation and Infidelity New York: Palgrave Macmillan

 

xTx 2018. “The Ways We are Taught to be a Girl.” In Roxane Gay (eds) Not That Bad: Dispatches from The Rape Culture p 115-128. New York: Harper

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[1] The general message for boys, their message is that they are valued by virtue of being men. Meaning, it doesn’t matter what men do, it’s that they do it. If they don’t do anything that is considered feminine; those behaviors are heavily policed.

Boys also get socialized to a specific form of masculinity. While there are many forms of masculinity that exist, the type of masculinity that gets reinforced is “Toxic” to both men and women. It is this type of masculinity (that is reinforced among men) that glorifies alcohol consumption, violence and the objectification of women.

[2] I understand several of these things have started to change, and we are getting better representation. But that seems to be a function of the acquisition of more boy-related IP by Disney and then trying to “reclaim the label of Disney Princess” to apply to other more diverse representations  (Princess Leia)

[3] How commonly is love defined as irrational, reckless, making people wacky etc.?          

[4] Many of the top grossers making between 152-241 million dollars

[5] The height of the modern Rom com being in 199 with 11% of the film market share at the time.

[6] Granted this might be due to the fact that Federal protections of Gay Marriage are only 7 years old. And now look like they could also be threatened  

[7] Sometimes referred to as “The pink tax” that women are generally quoted and have to pay more for consumer products. “The Female Tax” can also refer to the more money women have to spend out of pocket just to live. This includes the cost of menstrual products, safety and security, and maintaining beauty and body norms   

[8] Geography matters, be yourself online, men and women can absolutely be friends and DO NOT jump into a Volcano