{"id":67593,"date":"2015-08-03T08:28:52","date_gmt":"2015-08-03T13:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=67593"},"modified":"2015-08-02T15:22:28","modified_gmt":"2015-08-02T20:22:28","slug":"trainwreck-and-taboo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/08\/03\/trainwreck-and-taboo\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Trainwreck&#8221; and taboo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I saw \u201cTrainwreck\u201d last night. The 7:00 p.m. showing at the 68th Street AMC was full. Maybe people had come just to get out of the apartment and yet avoid the beastly heat, but they enjoyed the movie.\u00a0 Sometimes the laughter lasted long enough to cover up the next joke.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cTrainwreck\u201d story is standard rom-com: Amy Schumer plays a young woman who rejects the idea of commitment and love. Circumstances put her together with a man she seems to have nothing in common with. You can guess the rest.<\/p>\n<p>But this is Amy Schumer\u2019s movie, so there\u2019s an important twist \u2013 the conventional sex roles are reversed. It\u2019s the man who is sweet and naive and who wants a real relationship; the woman has a lot of sex with a lot of different guys, drinks a lot, smokes weed, and resists love until at the end, she decides to become the woman he wants her to be.<\/p>\n<p>Here is the R-rated version of the trailer:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/-JfJQJI2Epo\" width=\"480\" height=\"270\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>What interested me was not the movie itself, but the reaction in some conservative quarters. For Armond White at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/421328\/trainwreck-amy-schumer-irrational-man-woody-allen\">National Review<\/a>, the movie triggered something like what Jonathan Haidt calls \u201cdisgust\u201d \u2013 a reaction to the violation of strong taboos that surround things like food, sex, blood and other bodily matters, and death. These taboos are often arbitrary, not rational. Pork is an \u201cabomination,\u201d for example, because&#8230; well, because it is, and because pigs are \u201cunclean.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTrainwreck\u201d has no pork, but it does have what some find unclean.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Schumer\u2019s tampon jokes and gay jokes, female versions of locker-room humor, literally drag pop culture to the toilet. A girl-talk scene set in adjoining restroom stalls \u2014 one revealing dropped panties, the other panty-less (obviously Amy) \u2014 is just Apatow using women to show off his indecency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>As a comedian and now as a filmmaker, Schumer talks about women-things: body functions and body parts. These jokes seem to elicit two different kinds of laughter. Back when researchers studying small group interaction were trying to code and categorize behavior, laughter posed a problem (see this <a href=\"http:\/\/montclairsoci.blogspot.com\/2014\/08\/lol.html\">earlier post<\/a>). It could be coded as \u201cShows Tension,\u201d but it might also be \u201cShows Tension Release.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>With Amy Schumer jokes, the male laughter is mostly a nervous, full of tension about a taboo subject. But the female laughter seems much less inhibited \u2013 tension release, maybe even a relief, as if to say, \u201cSomeone is finally talking publicly and frankly about things we could only whisper about,\u201d since most of the time they have had to pretend to share the male taboo.<\/p>\n<p>Indecency indeed. But something is indecent only to members of groups that deem it indecent. Some groups are not at all disgusted by pork.\u00a0 And for some audiences, tampon jokes and toilet-stall conversations about Johnny Depp movies are not indecent; they\u2019re just funny. What audiences might those be? Women.<\/p>\n<p>Take the tampon joke that the National Reviewer finds indecent. It would seem obvious that used tampons look different depending on where you are in your period \u2013 less bloody on the final day, more so a few days earlier. But at the mere mention of this fact in \u201cTrainwreck,\u201d hilarity ensues, especially among women in the audience.<\/p>\n<p>The thing about taboos \u2013 ideas about what is indecent or disgusting \u2013 is that entire social structures get built around them. To violate the taboo is to threaten the entire edifice. Powerful taboos on women-things often go with male domination. So for the National Review, the \u201cTrainwreck\u201dreversal of rom-com gender roles makes the movie dangerous and subversive.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some excerpts from the review just to give the flavor of this\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Purity_and_Danger\"><i>Purity-and-Danger-like<\/i><\/a>\u00a0conflating of taboo, female sexuality, and social\/political threat to the established order (emphasis mine):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Schumer turns <b>female sexual prerogative<\/b> into <b>shamelessness<\/b><\/p>\n<p>the <b>degradation<\/b> of sex \u2014 and women<\/p>\n<p>uses sex to promote <b>feminist permissiveness<\/b>.<\/p>\n<p>She enjoys a <b>sexual license <\/b><\/p>\n<p>Amy <b>brazenly<\/b> practices <b>the same sexual habits as men<\/b><br \/>\n<b><br \/>\nLacking<\/b> . . . old-fashioned sense of <b>shame<\/b>,<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s merely <b>brazen<\/b>, like Lena Dunham\u2019s HBO series, Girls (also about a <b>promiscuous female<\/b> writer<\/p>\n<p>Schumer\u2019s film can be seen to <b>distort human relations into smut.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>This is not just <b>disrespectful<\/b>, it confirms Schumer\u2019s project of\u00a0<b>cultural takeover<\/b>,<\/p>\n<p>she aims to <b>acquire cultural power<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Schumer disguises a <b>noxious cultural agenda<\/b> as personal fiat. She\u2019s a comedy<b> demagogue<\/b> who okays modern<b> misbehavior<\/b> yet\u00a0<b>blatantly revels<\/b> in PC notions about feminism, abortion, and other hot-button topics<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Wow.<\/p>\n<p>I should add that not all conservative publications felt so threatened. Joe Morganstern at the <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em> gave the movie a warm review. Breitbart saw the movie\u2019s essential conservatism (\u201cThe anti-slut message is a healthy one\u201d) and praised Schumer as a comic actor.\u00a0 Still, the <em>National Review<\/em> piece seems emblematic of something broader in the cultural conservative camp: a taboo-like reaction to female sexuality.<\/p>\n<p><em>Originally posted at <a href=\"http:\/\/montclairsoci.blogspot.com\/2015\/07\/trainwreck-and-taboo.html\" target=\"_blank\">Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<span class=\"ft_signature\"> Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/profilepages\/view_profile.php?username=livingstonj\">Montclair State University<\/a>.  You can follow him at <a href=\"http:\/\/montclairsoci.blogspot.com\/\">Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/JayLivingston\">Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I saw \u201cTrainwreck\u201d last night. The 7:00 p.m. showing at the 68th Street AMC was full. Maybe people had come just to get out of the apartment and yet avoid the beastly heat, but they enjoyed the movie.\u00a0 Sometimes the laughter lasted long enough to cover up the next joke. The \u201cTrainwreck\u201d story is standard [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":67597,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,15,403,329,55,2103,2095,23679,129,343,120],"class_list":["post-67593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-culture","tag-deviance","tag-emotion","tag-gender","tag-gender-bodies","tag-gender-feminismactivism","tag-gender-subordination","tag-media","tag-tvmovies","tag-sex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/08\/13.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67593","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\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67593"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67602,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67593\/revisions\/67602"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}