Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies. Hadley Freeman

      Movies lie – damn it, woman, they lie!

      It took me a long time and a lot of inappropriately overdramatic dialogue before I realised that real life is not how it is depicted in the movies, and, to be fair to movies, they never claimed otherwise. To be fair to me, they just insinuated it.

      In retrospect, I should perhaps have realised that, already by the age of twelve, I took movies too seriously when I woke up the morning after being voted prom queen of my summer camp (George W. Bush is not the only American to have attained power through possibly dodgy vote counting) and felt … disappointed. It didn’t make any sense: how could I – not a popular girl ever, and certainly not at summer camp where popularity could only be bought by the double and, to me, foreign currencies of athletic prowess and sluttiness – be anything other than ecstatic after, against all odds, beating the far sportier and sluttier Tiffany Feiglestein? Even better, winning meant that I got to dance to a cassette of the Dirty Dancing soundtrack in front of the WHOLE CAMP (attention – ha!) with dreamy fourteen-year-old (older man!) Alex Zimmerman (call me!). But that was precisely the problem: that moment – me looking into Alex’s eyes as the speakers blared that we were having the time of our lives, him looking over my shoulder for Tiffany Feiglestein with whom he would spend the rest of the night making out under the gym steps while I chatted with my arts and crafts counsellor about my planned future career in papier-mâché – was the perfect climax, the point when the end credits should have rolled and a power ballad should have struck up, sung by Jennifer Warnes, Peter Cetera and Christopher Cross, three singers whose presence on a soundtrack guarantees a quality film.

      It’s not that I consciously wished for death after the prom (I am more Molly Ringwald than Sissy Spacek); rather, on some level, I just didn’t realise that the slog of life still continued after the triumph, especially after an achievement that is so frequently touted as the end goal in movies. Personally, I’m surprised more divorces don’t happen the day after the wedding. Wait, you mean there’s still more to this story? And it involves me having to go to the supermarket and pay taxes and wait for the bus? But I thought everything was supposed to be sorted and perfect now! Mother FUCK!

      There is a soul-crushing number of differences between reality and the cinematic version thereof. I’m not even talking about the sad lack of musical montages in one’s life; nor the rarity of someone (a kooky new friend, a romantic interest, a mystical old person, a wise child who will tell you where you have been going wrong all along) turning up in your life at the exact moment when you need them; nor the fact that you are probably separated by many more than six degrees from Kevin Bacon. But rather, the certain tropes movies lazily rely on that have, through overuse, become such clichés that they are part of popular culture and become a given so that they become the prism through which you see your life and, in doing so, ruin it. Let’s un-ruin your life!

       1. All men are constantly desperate for sex and women are the reluctant objects of their energetic pursuits

      As is the case with pretty much any gender stereotype, this one is spectacularly unfair on both sexes. There are so many movies – and books, and TV shows and magazine articles – that operate under this premise that to list them all would render this book a size that would give the whole of the nineteenth century’s literary world put together an inferiority complex. It is always the men and boys in movies who are desperate to lose their virginity (American Pie, Meatballs, The Virginity Hit) because for women, of course, not only is virginity not an embarrassment but a commodity, and women, such movies infer, aren’t actually that keen on sex anyway and only do it to please the men. I like to think that Stephen Fry’s infamous claim that ‘The only reason women will have sex with [men] is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man,’¹⁴ came from watching American Pie too many times, doubtless in between his heavy schedule these days of tweeting and writing puff pieces about Apple products. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how this generation’s Oscar Wilde spends his time.

      Leaving Stephen Fry to the side, this trope about men’s desire for sex and women’s reluctance to have it has nothing to do with reflecting whatever differences may or may not exist between men and women’s sex drives (and some of us would argue that differences between sex drives are more individually based than gender based, but particulars are so much more finicky than sweeping generalisations). It might well have more to do with the fact that most filmmakers are men who need to justify their lack of sexual success by portraying women as terrifyingly frigid as opposed to, just maybe, resistant to getting naked with a self-obsessed filmmaker.

      What it mainly has to do with is laziness when it comes to thinking up new narratives. This trope is a barely updated version on the premise of centuries-old fairy tales: a princess lies imprisoned in a tower, helplessly, virginally, and the prince vigorously pursues her, thwacking away through her thicket of celibacy (they didn’t have bikini waxes in Once-Upon-a-Time). This in itself comes from the ancient and reassuring (to some men) idea that men are the pursuers and women are the pursued because women do not enjoy sex. That is the male preserve. Therefore, women won’t ever be sexually unfaithful and the man can rest assured that, yes, all his wife’s children must be his. Pizzas for everyone!

      Now, clearly, American Pie et al. were not attempting to make some comment on paternity insecurities, but it is a shame that they unthinkingly made do with a cliché that comes from a misogynistic fear and is worn down to a nub through overuse.

      Presumably, for men, one consolation for being portrayed as hopeless, hapless, desperate hound dogs is that it explains away all female rejection as merely the downside to them being delicate princesses (making any eventual scoring with them even more of an achievement). Nonetheless, it is pretty insulting to them.

      For women, this trope, while seemingly, sort of, complimentary, can only be hurtful. First, there is the insinuation that a guy will sleep with anyone so, you know, your prince may have come but, to be honest, he would come with anyone. Then there’s the very overt suggestion that frigidity is, ironically, sexually attractive and, of course, feminine. But most of all, if you are a woman, it makes sexual rejection even more humiliating than it already is.

      I mean, Christ, how ugly must you be if he turned you down? A guy would probably have sex with a bagel. And the hole in a bagel is just nothing. Your vagina is less than nothing. You are disgusting.

      Well, here’s an amazing little secret: almost all women have been sexually rejected at some point, and the only ones who haven’t are nuns although, thinking about it, seeing as they’re the brides of Christ in what is, presumably, an unconsummated union, then they must have been rejected too. So there it is: at some point in every woman’s life, a guy – possibly even Jesus – declined the invitation to the party in her pudenda.

      It even – yes, even! – happens to women in relationships. Movies often depict women in relationships as being especially resistant to putting out to their poor desperate husbands or boyfriends. After all, the only reason women enter relationships is to steal men’s sperm and make sure they don’t die alone. So once you locked the guy down, phew, you don’t have to bother with THAT any more! This in turn explains why the only roles open to women in comedies are the shrewish wife/fiancée who spoils all the fun or the hot single girl (who presumably will release her inner shrew once she gets that ring on her finger – The Hangover, Knocked Up). Any woman in movies who does have a high sex drive is usually depicted as laughable, desperate and possibly crazy.

      However, back on Planet