{"id":49232,"date":"2012-07-05T11:00:59","date_gmt":"2012-07-05T16:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=49232"},"modified":"2013-07-06T14:28:21","modified_gmt":"2013-07-06T19:28:21","slug":"magic-mike-old-sexism-in-a-new-package","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/07\/05\/magic-mike-old-sexism-in-a-new-package\/","title":{"rendered":"Magic Mike: Old Sexism in a New Package"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog.<\/em>\"\"<\/a>Magic Mike<\/a><\/em>\u00a0is “wildly overperforming<\/a>” at the box office because\u00a0women<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0gay men<\/a>\u00a0are going to see it in droves.\u00a0 Thank you Hollywood executives for finally noticing that there’s plenty of money to be made off of heterosexual\u00a0female and gay male\u00a0sexuality.\u00a0 Magic Mike<\/em>\u00a0purports to be a movie that caters to het women, and while it\u00a0does provide a highly unusual public space for women to objectify men, the movie in fact prioritizes male sexual pleasure in tired, sexist ways.<\/p>\n

Watching Magic Mike<\/em> was an experience.\u00a0 Many of the female theater-goers around me were hollering demands (e.g., “take it all off, baby!”) and grunting approvingly during dance scenes.\u00a0 The camera unabashedly\u00a0focused tight on the dancer’s abs and\u00a0buttocks,\u00a0requiring\u00a0viewers to objectify the male actors.\u00a0 I’ve written elsewhere that living in a culture that objectifies girls\/women is\u00a0highly damaging<\/a>,\u00a0and\u00a0emerging male objectification<\/a>\u00a0is a corporate wet dream to sell products by creating new body dissatisfactions\/markets.<\/p>\n

Make no bones about it, this movie is all about reinforcing the notion that men are in control and men’s sexuality matters more.\u00a0 It baffles me\u00a0that the filmmakers were so effective in\u00a0conveying these themes in a movie about male strippers that a mostly female audience is eating up.\u00a0 Have we learned to devalue our own sexual pleasure so\u00a0thoroughly that the scraps of het female sexual pleasure provided by Magic Mike<\/em> feel like a full meal?<\/p>\n

Aside from the questionably-empowering viewer interaction with the film, the content of Magic Mike<\/em> is old-school sexism wrapped in a new package.\u00a0 It reinforces prevailing notions of masculinity where white men are in control, both economically and sexually, and women are secondary characters to be exploited for money and passed around for male sexual pleasure.<\/p>\n

Most of the women in the film are audience members portrayed as\u00a0easily manipulated cash cows to be exploited for money.\u00a0 In one scene, the club boss, Dallas (Matthew McConaughey) gets his dancers\u00a0pumped up\u00a0before a show by asking them, “Who’s got the cock?\u00a0 You do.\u00a0 They don’t.”\u00a0\u00a0Dallas has a running commentary that\u00a0forcefully\u00a0rejects\u00a0the idea that female audience members are sexual subjects in the exchange.<\/p>\n

Beyond the foundational theme of male control, many (but not all) of the simulated sex acts the dancers perform in their interactions with female audience members\u00a0service the male stripper’s pleasure, not hers.\u00a0 Dancers shove women’s faces into their crotch to simulate fellatio,\u00a0hump women’s faces<\/a>, perform faux sex from behind without a nod to clitoral stimulation, etc.\u00a0 As a culture, we have\u00a0deprioritized female sexual pleasure<\/a>\u00a0to such a great extent that these acts seem normal in a setting where they don’t make sense.\"\"<\/a>While the\u00a0men in Magic Mike<\/em> strut their sexual stuff with a plot line that constantly reaffirms their sexual subjectivity, the few supporting female roles show women in surprisingly pornified, objectifying ways.\u00a0\u00a0Magic Mike<\/em> is pretty tame when it comes to male bodies.\u00a0 Lots of floor and face humping, but no penis or even close-up penis tease shots through banana hammocks.\u00a0 In fact, viewers aren’t exposed to any male body part that they wouldn’t see at Venice Beach.\u00a0 The same cannot be said for women.<\/p>\n

The movie features gratuitous breast\u00a0scenes\u00a0galore (yes, the breasts\u00a0are<\/em>\u00a0the scene) and full body (side and back) female nudity. One of the male stripper’s wives is reduced to a pair of breasts that are passed around when her husband encourages another\u00a0male stripper to\u00a0fondle them because “she loves it.”\u00a0 The few recurring\u00a0female roles\u00a0in the cast are flat with no character development, including the romantic interest, while\u00a0the white men in the film\u00a0enjoy extensive character development.<\/p>\n

Other disturbing\u00a0moments are peppered throughout the movie.\u00a0 Magic Mike (Channing Tatum) makes a thinly veiled rape innuendo when he’s “teaching” a younger guy how to approach a woman at\u00a0a club: \u201cLook what she\u2019s wearing. She\u2019s asking to be bothered.\u201d\u00a0 The movie also asks viewers to\u00a0laugh at\u00a0a larger woman who hurts a dancer’s back when he picks her up (see photo and trailer below).\u00a0 And one of the main characters has a homophobic reaction when he’s grossed out that his sister thinks he’s gay.\u00a0 Also, this is a story about white men where both women and men of color exist at the margins.\u00a0 The Latino DJ is a drug dealer (how original), and the two Latino dancers barely talk.\"\"<\/a>I was heartened and humored by grandmas and teenage girls asserting their sexual subjectivity in the theater by yelling at the screen.\u00a0 It is wonderful\u00a0to see so many women spending money\u00a0for an experience that purports to\u00a0cater to our sexual desires.\u00a0 We want to feel powerful when it comes to our sexuality because we’re constantly robbed of sexual subjectivity through popular culture, pornography, the male gaze, and in the bedroom.\u00a0 One Sexual Revolution later, men are still\u00a0twice as likely<\/a>\u00a0to achieve orgasm than women\u00a0during sex.<\/p>\n

If Magic Mike<\/em>\u00a0is our sexual outlet, we\u00a0deserve something better.\u00a0 When women turn around and engage in the same objectification that harms us, is\u00a0that empowering?\u00a0 When the men we’re objectifying on the screen are degrading women and prioritizing their own sexual pleasure, and we eroticize this behavior, is that empowering?\u00a0 And when women eroticize sexual acts that don’t involve the clitoris\/orgasm, is that empowering?\u00a0 I don’t have definitive answers to these questions, but I do know that Magic Mike<\/em>\u00a0would have been a radically different film had it truly been about female sexual pleasure.\u00a0 It’s high time more women were calling the shots in Hollywood and making mainstream movies that feature female sexual pleasure.<\/p>\n

Magic Mike trailer.\u00a0 To see the sexual double standard, note how the trailer frames male stripping as a “fantasy” life, and imagine this term being applied to female strippers in a Hollywood trailer.<\/em><\/p>\n

[youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=eMU7s6cwxEM]<\/p>\nCaroline Heldman is a professor of politics at Occidental College<\/a>. You can follow her at her blog<\/a> and on Twitter<\/a> and Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog.Magic Mike\u00a0is “wildly overperforming” at the box office because\u00a0women\u00a0and\u00a0gay men\u00a0are going to see it in droves.\u00a0 Thank you Hollywood executives for finally noticing that there’s plenty of money to be made off of heterosexual\u00a0female and gay male\u00a0sexuality.\u00a0 Magic Mike\u00a0purports to be a movie that caters to het women, and while it\u00a0does […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,244,279,16039,55,2103,2093,2098,343,283,120],"class_list":["post-49232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-fat","tag-objectification","tag-dance","tag-gender","tag-gender-bodies","tag-gender-objectification","tag-gender-prejudicediscrimination","tag-tvmovies","tag-prejudicediscrimination","tag-sex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49232"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49238,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49232\/revisions\/49238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}