celebrity gossip, academic style

I can’t get away from the postfeminist dystopia. I’ve written about it here, here, and here; I just gave a presentation on its application to Girls; I just submitted a conference panel proposal in which three other very smart scholars and I apply it to Girls, Us Weekly, the star image of Katherine Heigl, and Spring Breakers. It’s all over; it makes more and more sense. But I also think it’s not operating in a vacuum: it affects men, too, even if not as directly as women. But men have their own dystopia with which to grapple: borne of the ubiquity of digital, streaming porn.

With the rise of New Media, porn has become ubiquitous, free, and amazingly accessible — and that ubiquity has come to structure both sexual and gender relations. In this era of ubiquitous porn, men deal with an equally contradictory ideologies of masculinity that call for them to be sexually aggressive, dominating, and muscular….while also abandoning physical labor (because it’s not longer a feasible lifelong income) and not being misogynist assholes. You shouldn’t beat your wife, but rape jokes, those are chill. You should be romantic with the lights on, but when they go off, you should behave like a porn star, because that, at least as far as you’ve seen, is what women want. Objectifying women is Bad, but seemingly every media text, including those directed at women, openly invites you to do so.

The overarching contradiction: how do you live life as a feminist — espousing the straightforward ethical belief that women are equal to men — when the world that surrounds you pummels you with encouragement, both implicit and explicit, to act and think otherwise?

Which is why I love Don Jon. I get the critiques: it’s somewhat hamfisted in its use of repetition to emphasize points; I agree with those who say that the “guido-face” of the performances compromise its power. But it’s the first text I’ve seen that both honestly and extensively interrogates the realities of both living in the post-digital porn world….and trying to forge relationships with women living within the postfeminist dystopia.

Let’s look at the life of our main character, Jon:

As he says in the trailer (and the beginning of the movie), “there’s on a few things I care about in life: my body, my pad, my ride, my family, my church, my boys, my girls, and my porn.”

My Body: American culture — and not just ‘guido’ culture — dictates that the dominant understanding of “hot” = “jacked.” Now, “jacked” is an exaggerated physicality that’s actually a fetishization of the working class body: a body that looks like it labors. But since most of those jobs of disappeared, most men, working class or otherwise, go to the gym and lift heavy things in order to approximate the bodies that their jobs would’ve created for them. Jon is a working class guy, but he works, in his words, in “service” — he bartends. But in order to obtain a desirable body, he has to spend his off hours doing pull-ups.

My Pad/My Ride: Consumption isn’t somehow a new part of masculinity. It’s a holdover compunction — what you own, and how it’s kept, says something about what kind of man you are. But you have to consume in a very particular way: consume too much, look like you care too much, and you’re feminized. There’s a brilliant scene between Jon and Barbara (Scarlett Johansson) at a Pier-1 type store, shopping for curtain rods. After helping Barbara in her own consumer fantasy, Jon excuses himself — not to go sit in the car because he’s bored, but to go get some Swiffer pads. He maintains his apartment diligently — how else is he going to make his one-bedroom pre-fab apartment look good? — but Barbara is absolutely aghast that he do something as unmasculine as clean his own floor. The real sin, in fact, is buying the Swiffer pads in the first place, committing the ultimate sin of emasculating yourself in public. But it’s a double-bind: consume, but look like you don’t.

My Family: Jon’s mother lives in a fairytale. Some people have complained about the facile characterization of the parents, but I think it serves a pretty compelling purpose: clear distillations of the first wave of postfeminism. It’s doubtful that Jon’s mother ever “gave up” on feminism (we only see her cooking dinner; we have no indication that she works outside the home) but her life seems to rotate entirely around her son’s ability to fulfill a fairytale. To come home, in her words, and tell her “I’ve found her.” A beautiful girl, a beautiful wedding, beautiful babies. She’s already had her supposed fairytale — which resulted in a home where her husband yells incessantly and watches football instead of engaging with others — so she remaps the scenario on her son. He brings home the “perfect girl” (read: the type of girl her father finds attractive and her mother finds appropriately feminine), but the problem is that that girl is nothing but a set of attributes that add up to “perfection.” As Jon’s sister points out in her one line in the film, “she doesn’t actually know a thing about you.” She’s too busy being a princess, and cultivating the “perfect relationship,” to pay attention to anyone else, even her counterpart. But more on that later.

Last crucial point: Jon has clearly adopted his fetishizing tendencies from his father, who mirrors him in both looks, wardrobe, and temper. As we learn from the story of Jon’s parents’ “meet cute,” his dad saw his mom and said “that’s mine.” His attitude towards women is thus one of fetishization and possession, of dominance and control. He may not be watching as much internet porn as Jon, or any at all (he doesn’t know what a TiVo is), but the porn attitude is a natural extension of his gender politics. But he’s also not happy — and neither is Jon.

My Church: The film is not unsubtle with this point: Jon is a hypocrite. Every week, he drives to church screaming obscenities, punching in windows with rage. We never hear the sermon because Jon never really hears the sermon — church is all ritual and symbolism. We see the stained-glass windows; we seem him making the sign of the cross and kneeling. He goes to confession, but treats it as a game to be won or lost, visibly pumping his fist when he receives five fewer Hail Marys and Our Fathers than the week before. Church tells him he is a good person simply for attending, not for actually acting out the principles of Christianity. Appearance, not acts.

My Boys: Don actually seems to have pretty healthy male friendships, all things considered. Sure, all they talk about are women, and spend most of their time rating those women based entirely on their physical attributes. But you don’t see much of the traditional tension in films like these (and life): how to still be a “guy’s guy” when you’re devoting your life to your girlfriend. Jon’s friends build up his masculinity — he’s better at “smashing girls” than both of them; he’s taller and better looking — but they also ratify his life choices. When Barbara breaks up with him for watching porn, his friend supports him in his belief that that’s ridiculous. Chances are, if these movies would’ve shifted focus, these men are dealing with the same impossible contradictions that affect Jon.

My Girls: These are postfeminist girls. We only really get to know Barbara, but she’s the part that stands in for the whole: reared on rom-coms that suggest that consumption and self-objectification, with the ultimate end goal of a fairytale wedding, is the path to happiness and fulfillment. She’s a virgin and a whore, a ball-buster and a princess; she gets what she wants….only what she wants is not only self-serving, but hollow. Granted, we don’t see figuring out that that life is hollow. But our only grown woman is Jon’s mom — a woman who clearly sees Barbara as a kindred spirit — and who, as emphasized above, now fulfills herself with the fantasies of the next generation. When Jon points out that Barbara spends just as many hours engrossed in her own implausible, destructive fantasies (read: the rom-com), he’s not wrong.

My Porn: Jon has never known a world without porn. When Esther (Julianne Moore) asks him if he’s ever masturbated without porn, he honestly cannot think of a time. His sexuality was entirely shaped by porn and the dynamics it celebrates. But he can’t find pleasure with actual women — probably because he’s acting out the scenarios he’s seen in his videos, scenarios that look fulfilling but, in practice, are just the opposite.

But it’s not entirely Jon’s fault. Postfeminist women have been equally affected by the ubiquity of porn: teens are now reporting that they’re expected to engage in “porny” behaviors (I’ll let you fill in the blanks yourself) very early on, in large part because their partners have been immersed in media that depicts and normalizes those behaviors (or at least makes them standard). A woman thinks that men want a porn star, so a woman behaves like a porn star. Her pleasure is faked; his pleasure is never what he wants it to be. Lose, lose.

Jon tries to quit porn, but soon discovers that porn surrounds him: the objectified, fetishized female body has become so normalized that even women’s magazines, exercise videos, and fast-food restaurants use it to sell products. Again, this isn’t anything new, but it’s amplified with each passing year. How can Jon give up porn and the sexual dynamics it promotes when seemingly every piece of media invites him to continue the practice? The anti-porn feminists used to say that “porn is the theory; rape is the practice.” That’s powerful rhetoric, and I’m not sure I entirely agree. But I do think that the idea of “porn as theory” is incredibly compelling, especially given its current ubiquity. It becomes the de facto guide for how you should treat a woman in the bedroom,which consciously and unconsciously dictates how you’ll treat women outside of the bedroom.

I realize I’m treating porn as a monolithic being. There’s a fair amount of porn that’s not aggressively masculine, focused on male pleasure, or reifying the dynamics described above. But most porn — the dominant form of porn — is just that.

But that’s not even the real problem. The real problem is that porn, and the mainstream “children” of porn, tell you to behave one way — and another strand of media tells you to behave another. It’s like the virgin/whore complex, only for men: let’s call it the prince/dick dichotomy. A guy must both be what women want him to be (kind, respectful, willing to be a stay-at-home Dad, generous in the bedroom, takes up half of the household chores, a feminist) and what dominant, porn-influenced says he should be (aggressive, disarticulated from the domestic, selfish in the bedroom).

To be clear, women contribute to this dichotomy. Think of Marnie in Girls, speaking about her ostensibly perfect boyfriend: “It’s like he’s too busy respecting me that he looks right past me and everything that I need from him.” What she “needs” from him, at least at this point, is for him to act like a dick. When an dickish guy comes on to her (“The first time I fuck you, I might scare you a little, because I’m a man, and I know how to do things) she’s so turned on that she flees to the bathroom to masturbate. But the dick turns out to be much to much of a dick — he doesn’t satisfy her in bed, as much as she really wants that scenario to bare out, and he ignores her outside of it.

The digital porn guy wants a fantasy that doesn’t exist, but the postfeminist girl wants one as well. Usually, movies don’t deal with this impossibility, but that’s precisely where Don Jon excels: it shows just how unfeasible the ideology has become. The montage of Don Jon undergoing a furious, seemingly weeks-long masturbation marathon isn’t hot; it’s dystopic.

In my recent presentation on the postfeminist dystopia, I divided my analysis between texts that know they’re dystopic and those that do not. Girls knows it’s highlighting the contradictions; Revenge does not. Jersey Shore doesn’t know it’s highlighting the contradictions of digital porn masculinity, but that Don Jon clearly does. That’s why it so clearly interrogates porn, which usually goes unnamed in depictions of contradictory contemporary masculinity. Instead of shying from it because it’s dirty or unacceptable, it faces it head on. In that way, it’s a spectacularly honest film, which is part of the reason I can forgive it its various faults.

But Don Jon also offers a sort of solution. It isn’t giving up porn, exactly, so much as embracing an understanding of sex and love outside of the ideologies of porn masculinity. Society is the way that it is; there is no outside of ideology. But you can choice to negotiate your own way within those existing ideologies, and the more texts like this highlight the dystopia, the more these dominant understandings of “proper” behavior, sexual and otherwise, are compromised. Don Jon doesn’t advocate for a life without porn, per se. But it does suggest that a life immersed within it is no fantasy — for men and women alike.