http://urbanhonking.com/isawthat Mon, 10 Feb 2014 17:36:23 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://urbanhonking.com/isawthat/2011/08/01/who-knew-ao-scott-was-such-a-feminist/ http://urbanhonking.com/isawthat/2011/08/01/who-knew-ao-scott-was-such-a-feminist/#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2011 05:23:42 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/isawthat/?p=303 Continue reading →]]> AO Scott gets his feminist bona fides on in the NYT:
Oddly, being a father, which is, technically, the result of heterosexual you-know-what and therefore, symbolically, proof of manhood, is looked at in movies as a state of emasculation. Becoming a husband and father turns a man into a baby or a woman, removed from the company of men by diaper duty and other antisexual domestic chores. Unless or until mommy takes off, either to a (usually off-screen) new man or the grave. Single dads seem to outnumber single moms in the movies (the reverse of real life), and widowers in particular are potent sources of pathos and sex appeal. A man rearing children in partnership with a woman is barely a man at all, but a man raising kids by himself is perfect.
I forget sometimes that as much as all the bro cinema is annoying, as a feminist, as a woman, though I have enjoyed some Apatow in my time (though not without some WTF-ing reservations), it is surely annoying to be a man and suffer through it. The argument with cinema seriously, though, is similar to one people make with music–“it’s only music”–it’s only entertainment, meaning we shouldn’t expect anything beyond 90 mins of stupidifying, lobotomizing, ‘splosions and single entendres. But you can’t divorce a culture’s entertainment from the same symptoms and mores of the culture itself. AO Scott, here, raging for some liberation for the Iron Johns who want some reasonable modeling of men on film, not superheroic, magical boys or clad in Madea-fat-suits.

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