On the “Real Women Have Curves” Meme

Jezebel.com nails it once again. Writer “Lingerie Lesbian” wrote a blog post about, well, lingerie, and touches  (among other things) upon a subject that’s been on my mind a lot:

The “Real Women Have Curves” meme is problematic not only in its suggestion that certain types of bodies are better than others in their size and shape, but also in their suggestion that “real women” should want curves. It goes without saying that curves do not make a woman, but it does need saying that these curves that are so associated with “real” womanhood (and in this situation, an explicitly feminine version of womanhood) can bring an unwanted femininity especially because they are associated with this idea of the classically beautiful (read: classically feminine) woman. I hate when we act like beauty and femininity and curvy bodies are somehow synonymous.

THIS. The writer posts a meme:

I’ve seen this before multiple times, reposted by various Facebook friends, I’ve seen several more pictures like it, and it annoys me every time.

Of course I don’t have anything against women being curvy. I’ll level with you,  I’m not a curvy woman myself. It’s not that I don’t have any curves at all, I do, but I don’t think anyone would describe me as curvy. When I’m not wearing a shirt, or if I’m wearing a tight-fitting top, you can count all my ribs. In the seventh grade I found a document authored by the boys of my class listing the girls of our class according to boob size, and I came in last, and I don’t think my position would have improved much if those same boys were to track down all us girls again today and do a qualified estimate (actually I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t, as I happen to know that the one contender for my final place is currently breastfeeding. So.). My scrawny stature is not brought on because of dieting or because I’m obsessively trying to look like a supermodel (which I don’t, by the way, not at all.). I just happen to have the genes for a small, non-curvy stature. Sometimes that’s annoying, sometimes it’s ok, but at no time does it mean that I’m not womanly, and I resent that idea.

Look, I was as thrilled as anybody when the Christina Hendricks thing started happening a few years back, and curviness came back in style. I grew up with the whole “skinny is pretty” thing and disliked it as much as the next person. What I don’t see, however, is how it suddenly became ok to just go ahead and say the exact opposite, namely that curvy is the only way to go, and that skinny women are not hot or, even, not real women. It offends me that when it comes to the issue of women’s appearance we’re obviously so reluctant to learn from the mistakes of the past. That it is obviously so difficult for us to just accept women for what they are. That there always have to be a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘real’ and ‘false’ when it comes to our looks.

I also don’t think ads like these are as funny as people make them out to be:

I mean, I see how they’re thoughtprovoking in the sense that women are always trying to lose weight these days. But mostly I just think they’re kind of a depressing reminder that things have been this way for a really friggin’ long time, that for as long as anyone can remember, the world has had an attitude towards what kind of body type women should have in order to qualify as attractive. As Lingerie Lesbian puts it, it’s “woman vs. woman imagery”, and it’s ridiculous. And I do not even see what it’s supposed to mean. Skinny women and curvy women and in-between women have co-existed at all times, and, at least among my friends and acquaintances, I see no proof that curvy women have a harder time finding romantic partners than skinny ones, or vice versa. We’re ok. And we’re all women.

I’m not saying that people are not allowed to have preferences. If you’re a woman and your curves/skinniness makes you feel sexy, well, good for you. Also, if you’re a man and you happen to be into curvy ladies, that’s nice. But please, please let’s abandon the whole “real women” rhetorics. As well as the idea of a certain body style being “in”. Thanks.

Minus Days

Yesterday Jezebel.com’s Dodal Stewart posted the brilliant article “Fuck You, Menstruation“ as part of their brand new annual “Fuck You Week”. I cannot recommend this article strongly enough. Not only is it hilarious in the funny-because-it’s-true way, it is also long overdue. Because I so agree with this message:

We need to be allowed to talk about periods. Menstruation, like sneezing or sweating or erections, is a natural bodily function. But honestly? Sometimes women suffer in silence. Because for some ladies, to complain about your period is to participate in demeaning sexist clichés about being on the rag. She’s annoyed? Must be that time of the month. She’s crying? Probably surfing the crimson wave. As though menstruation, like an emotional tsunami, washes over the body and wipes out the real you. Maybe it does! For a couple of days! Or maybe it doesn’t! But we want to seem strong and capable, so we grit our teeth and pretend it doesn’t feel like a tiny rabid chihuahua is gnawing on the inside of our uterus. Fine. But fuck that. Fuck having your period.

And this one:

Women spend a shitload of time and energy trying to plug a hole in a dam that’s designed to burst. An unstoppable stream of vivid red, and we’re supposed to do gymnastics and party in a bikini like a tampon commercial? OMFG. Fucking bullshit.

Also, this:

The point is this: Yeah, it happens, yeah, it sucks, no, it doesn’t mean women can’t run shit, but FOR FUCK’S SAKE, CAN’T WE EXPRESS OUR DISPLEASURE WITHOUT BEING BELITTLED OR PATRONIZED OR THE OBJECTS OF BIAS?

And this is just beautiful:

And can we talk about how we jokingly call it Aunt Flo? As if it’s normal for a relative to wake you up in the middle of the night so you can find yourself lying in a pool of your own blood. As though permanently staining your underwear, sheets and mattress is something only your mother’s sister would do. FUCK THAT.

Where I come from, “minus days” is a recognized euphemism for menstruation. For that reason alone you ought to go read that article. Menstruation is not minus, it’s not nothing, it just sucks. But this article actually made me laugh about it, and that’s no small feat.

My 16-year-old self: Here to tell you all about the gender roles in Rosemary’s Baby

I was going through some stuff in my flat the other day, and I found a folder of assignments from my high school English class. One of them was an essay that we had been assigned to do on the novel Rosemary’s Baby which we had read in class. We were free to pick our own angle on the novel, and I had decided to go with the subject of the gender roles displayed in the novel. 

Pop culture, gender roles and all, it reads sort of like a blog entry from a time when I had no idea what a blog was and had only just discovered the internet (which I mainly used to surf fan sites about David Duchovny. They were almost exclusively set in Times New Roman or Comic Sans and they had lots of clip art and pixelled animation and glitter. Oh, the nineties!).  So I thought it would be fun to publish it here on the blog for you guys to see.

I should warn you, however, that it is in no way a groundbreaking, let alone good, piece of writing. It’s a perfectly average high school essay. English is not my first language and was even less so at the time, and I use the word “very” about 1.003 times, being the eloquent, versatile, sexy 16-year-old that I was.

 I actually got an A, though, if anyone’s interested. I also remember that my teacher also told me to read it aloud to the rest of the class, which I willingly, proudly did. Unrelated: I had very few dates in high school. This was a cause of much distress to me at the time, although it did leave me with much more time to go through David Duchovny fan sites online.

My English teacher was really awesome though, and in addition to my essay I will include a note she wrote in comment to some very naïve statements I made in the essay about the equalization of the sexes, setting me straight.

Here we go:

Rosemary’s Baby

by Marie [Mylastname], grade 2.c

As I read Rosemary’s Baby, I found that apart from being a horror story about Satanism and witchcraft, Rosemary’s Baby deals with gender roles and the liberation of women. This aspect of the story is very important, I think. It creates an image of the time in which it was written and takes place. It is of course up to the individual reader how much he [or she, gender-aware Marie of 1999! OR SHE!] wants to focuse [SIC] on this, but I do think that the gender roles play a crucial part in the story.

The gender roles in Rosemary’s Baby are terribly traditional. Rosemary is the sweet and sensitive hausfrau while Guy is the strong, rational man who goes to work in order to provide for his wife and family. Rosemary is also a very emotional person in comparison to the more cynical Guy. This is made clear by the fact that Rosemary – in her heart – is a Catholic and that Guy is an agnostic. But the traditional gender roles also have their effect on Guy and Rosemary’s every-day life. An example of this is the scene in which Rosemary and Guy are introduced to the Bramford:

‘It’s a marvelous apartment!’ Rosemary said back in the living-room. She spun about with opened arms as if to embrace it. ‘I love it!’
‘What’s she’s trying to do,’ Guy said ‘is to get you to lower the rent’.

Apart from acting in this little girl like manner, Rosemary also lives up to the old-fashioned ideal of a woman by being remarkably dependent on Guy, both financially, because she needs Guy’s income,  and emotionally. She does get angry with Guy, but she never really stands up to him and tells him what she wants. During Guy’s preoccupied phases, Rosemary has to wait for Guy to apologize. Even when Guy claims to have taken advantage of Rosemary’s unconscious body, she does not manage to tell him how she feels about it.

Rosemary tends to use her vulnerability and femininity when wanting to get her way. This is very obvious as Guy declines the Castevets’ dinner invitation:

‘You don’t have to sulk about it, he said.
‘I’m not sulking’, Rosemary said. ‘I see exactly what you mean. (…).’
‘Oh hell.’ Guy said. ‘We’ll go.’
‘No, no, what for? We don’t have to. I shopped for dinner before she came so *that*’s no problem.’
‘We’ll go.’ Guy said.

If these traditional gender roles had continued all through the story, I would have been on the verge of stating that Levin was simply an old-fashioned sexist, but when reading the last chapters of the book I found that the roles changed. Rosemary appears to be strong and independent while Guy is weak and insecure. Actuallay the last chapters make you understand that Guy was never the strong one in the relationship. Guy is willing to sell his own wife for a good acting career, and after having done this, he is not even able to stand up for himself. This is particularly clear as Rosemary enters the Castevets’ apartment in search of her baby:

He stood looking down at her, his hands rubbing his sides. ‘They promised me you wouldn’t be hurt’, he said. ‘And you haven’t been, really. I mean, suppose you’d had a baby and lost it, wouldn’t it be the same? And we’re getting so much in return, Ro.’
She put her handkerchief on the table and looked at him. As hard as she could she spat at him. He flushed and turned away, wiping at the front of his jacket.”

I think that it is very important for us to consider this apparent change, because I believe that this indicates that Levin has an idea with letting the gender roles of his character appear to be as traditional as they do.

The fact that Rosemary develops during the story supports this theory  Rosemary seems from the beginning and right up to the point where she figures out that Guy is somehow involved with the Satantists’ cult to be very much in love with Guy. It is actually her love for an loyalty to her husband which leads to the disaster – the fact that she is impregnated with Satan’s child. The one time we sense that Rosemary actually wants to be come an individual person is when she is by herself in Hutch’s cabin. Here she seems to allow herself to get a little angry with Guy:

On the third day she thought about him. He was vain, self-centered, shallow, and deceitful. He had married her to have an audience, not a mate. (Little Miss Just-out-of-Omaha, what a *goop* she had been!)

Shortly after, however, she gives up all thoughts of rebellion and elides to go home to Guy. By going home to go on as if nothing has happened, she accepts Guy’s alleged abuse of her body and by this, one might argue, she resigns to Guy and gives up her independence. As a result of such a resignation something awful is bound to happen.

The fact that something awful does happen, and how awful it actually is, is another side of the story, which I will not try to define nor explain here. However, it is remarkable that Rosemary, as soon as she learns that Guy is involved in the conspiracy, leaves him. At this point in the story, one experiences for the first time, that Rosemary is a strong person. She realizes that she needs to take care of herself in order to save herself and her baby. Eventually, however, Rosemary is forced to acknowledge the fact that she is too late – she is trapped, because she cannot leave her own son in the lurch.

I think that the liberation of women is one of Levin’s points with Rosemary’s Baby. That it is a main point is arguable, but I do believe that Levin has meant to discuss the old-fashioned woman’s situation with this story. How dependent should she allow herself to become in her marriage? What might the consequences be? These questions were indeed relevant in the sixties when this story was written and takes place, because the liberation of women was just about to begin at the time (1). Is it still relevant, one might ask, today, when the equalization of the sexes is almost total (2). I think it is. The gender roles in Rosemary’s Baby are probably a little too antiquated for us to identity with, but I do think that we an still learn from this  thriller story. I think that as long as we live in a society with even the slightest possibility of discrimination, we need to be reminded of the consequences of resignation, however bizarre they may be.”

TEACHER’S NOTE:
(1) The struggle of the sexes and the process had been going on for a hundred years then – but the sixties saw the birth of the feminist movement.

(2) I wish you were right [about the equalization of the sexes being almost total] – but I’m afraid there is still a long way to go – I remember a heated discussion in a Scottish youth hostel with my best friend in 1962: She said that men and women were equal now, I said they were not. She learned her lesson later!

Feminist Frequency, the 2012 Oscars, and The Bechdel Test

Just in time for the Oscars, here’s Feminist Frequency‘s excellent video putting  the 2011 Oscar “Best Picture” nominees to the Bechdel Test.

Thought-provoking stuff and a must-see for anyone with an interest in modern cinema. I think it’s a problem for all of us – feminists or non-femininsts – that 50% of the population is still so badly represented in our cinematography. And I really like the FemFreq’s added 60-second appendum to the original test.

I would also like to add that Melancholia would have passed the test. If it had been nominated for best picture. Which it isn’t. Which is a travesty. Melancholia was, hands down, the most amazing, devastating, brilliant film I saw all year.

La commedia è finita! – on the Cuckold as a Comical Figure

I recently saw my first Pagliacci ever, and I was blown away. What a powerful, tight, intense piece. Although I did not know the story in advance, I knew enough about operas to know where it was going, but I still got goosebumps at the ending with Canio’s rash act and his wonderfully meta declaration that “the comedy is over”.

And then I also really feel that Pagliacci marks a pivotal point in the history of male characters in theatre, namely the point of intersection between the cuckold as a comical and a tragic figure.

Certainly the comical cuckold is the more prominent one of the two. In the history of theatre, the figure can be traced back as far as to mimes and pantomimes in the 1st century B.C. The few surviving descriptions of the aliterary mime shows make it clear that infidelity was a recurring theme within the genre, and representations of the mime in various reliefs show tableaux of beautiful ladies, their charming lovers, and their stupid, cuckold husbands. As Marianne Grandjean notes in her article on the mime of late antiquity, the cuckold is often depicted as a bald man, perhaps to indicate that he is older than the woman and her lover, and it seems clear that these cuckolds are comical figures: The charming young lovers point at them with ridiculing attitudes, and the audience are supposed to laugh at these men. It is of course difficult to say exactly how these men became the butt of the joke, but as oscenity and sex jokes played an important part in the mime shows, it seems pretty safe to me to say that it was the cuckold’s unsatisfied sexual appetite that made him as a character: He wanted some, and he wasn’t gettin’ any.

No link has ever been identified between late-antiquity mime and the commedia dell’arte tradition of the 16th century, but the cuckold of the commedia dell’arte, Pantalone, has a lot in common with the cuckold of late-antiquity mime shows. Often known as Pantalone il Bisognosi (Pantalone the Needy), his trademark was, to put it bluntly, that he wanted to have a lot of sex, especially with his beautiful young wife, the female lead, who didn’t care for his advances and who would cheat on him with a younger, more handsome lover, while the audience laughed at the silly, cockblocked old man.

Pantalone. Even in the 16th century, footsie pajamas apparently did not do it for the ladies.

The Pagliacci characters are a typical travelling commedia dell’arte troupe. There’s no Pantalone in Pagliacci, but the character of Pagliaccio seems to be based partially on Pantalone, partially on the more recent commedia dell’arte character of clownish Pierrot. However, Pagliacci came about in the time of the Italian verismo in the 19th century rather than in the heyday of Pantalone and his fellow commedia dell’arte characters, and I think this shows when it comes to the motif of the cuckold. As late as in the 18th century the ridiculous cuckold could still be found on stage in plays by the likes of Molière or Beaumarchais, but by the end of the 19th century, the tragic cuckolds started appearing: Most prominently, I suppose, in plays by Strindberg and Ibsen. In Ibsen’s The Wild Duck the revelation that Hedvig may not be Hjalmar Ekdal’s daughter marks the crux of the tragedy, and of course in Strindberg’s The Father the entire plot revolves around the notion that Laura has made a cuckold out of The Captain. And there is certainly no humour in the Swedish realist’s take on the theme. Not only does The Captain genuinely grieve for the loss of the love that once was between himself and his wife:

CAPTAIN. (…) I feel your shawl against my mouth; it is as warm and soft as your arm, and it smells of vanilla, like your hair when you were young! Laura, when you were young, and we walked in the birch woods, with the primroses and the thrushes–glorious, glorious! Think how beautiful life was, and what it is now. You didn’t want to have it like this, nor did I, and yet it happened. Who then rules over life?

The idea of his wife’s possible unfaithfulness (and, thus, the fact that Bertha may not actually be The Captain’s child) also disrupts his entire perception of his own existence:

CAPTAIN. (…) I do not believe in a hereafter; the child was my future life. That was my conception of immortality, and perhaps the only one that has any analogy in reality. If you take that away from me, you cut off my life.

I haven’t done enough research to determine whether or not it is plausible that Pagliacci composer and librettist Leoncavallo had read or attended the cuckold tragedies of Ibsen and Strindberg, but the verismo opera composer clearly shares their interest in exploring the psychology of the cuckold. What is so exceptionally fascinating in Pagliacci is, however, that Leoncavallo examines the tragic aspects of the cuckold man all the while acknowledging the comic potential of the motif. The central aria of the opera revolves around the idea of laughing at the cuckold buffoon (“Ridi, Pagliaccio!”), and in the frantic play-within-the-play ending the opera, the ambiguity of the cuckold as a comical/tragic figure is constantly at play. The audience-within-the-play wants nothing more than to laugh at the buffoon, but cuckold Canio’s very real despair is constantly creeping into the caricatured pantomime grief of the cuckold Pagliaccio.

Significantly, Canio’s unfaithful wife Nedda is not dealt the demonic tendencies of Strindberg’s Laura. Rather, she becomes a painful inbodiment of the conflict between the comical and the tragic cuckold: We can’t help rooting for the poor woman who loves her Silvio so dearly, and it’s for her sake that we want to regard Canio as the fool. As several researchers have noted, the theme of the cuckold in late-antiquity mime shows as well as in the commedia dell’arte did not come out of nowhere. The motif became popular in the male dominated patriarchies of late antiquity and 16th century Italy in which women would often be at the mercy of their controlling husbands and have very limited means of personal or sexual emancipation. Tellingly, both the mime shows and the commedia dell’arte marked themselves by allowing women to rise to fame and fortune on stage at a time when women were generally not allowed to star in theatre productions. In late anitquity there are even instances of women becoming managers of mime troupes and it is easy to imagine that these women would have been a driving force in the furthering of the ridiculous male authoritative figure in the mime shows. Pagliacci was written at a time when women’s liberation was slowly building and the need for ridicule of partriarchy was less acute, but the beauty of it, to me, is that the cuckold story of Pagliacci doesn’t claim to hold any simple solutions to the infidelity issue. Canio may declare that the comedy is over, but the tragedy that lingers instead pertains to both sexes. And the commedia dell’arte tradition with its clownish cuckold lives on within the verismo tragedy whenever Pagliacci is staged.

What then of the cuckold character today? More than a decade has passed since Pagliacci, along with a sexual revolution, so surely we must have reached some new level of awareness when it comes to the issue of infidelity?

Well, I guess maybe we haven’t. When it comes to the tragic cuckold at least, many of the perceptions of biological paternity found in Strindberg are very much alive today. I have noticed it, for example, in Per Olov Enquist’s excellent novel The Visit of the Royal Physician (2000) about King Christian VII of Denmark and Doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee. In Enquist’s take on the highly dramatic story of the German royal physician’s rise to power as de facto king of Denmark, enlightenment-inspired Struensee is portrayed as the hero in a horribly backwards, medieval Denmark, and his wrongful execution is depicted as a terrible loss. However, Enquist allows Struensee some vindication in the epilogue in which he notes that the child that Struensee fathered during his affair with Christian VII’s queen, Caroline Mathilde, lived on and granted him a kind of immortality. “The little daughter Louise Augusta grew up in Denmark (…)” writes Enquist, and goes on to describe the beauty and fertility of the princess:

“She is described as very beautiful, with a ‘disturbing’ vitality. (…) She married the Duke Frederik Christian of Augustenborg who was hardly her equal in any way. She did, however, have three children with him (…) today there is not one European monarchy that cannot trace its heritage back to Johann Friedriech Struensse, his English princess, and their little girl.”

The juxtaposition of sexual potency and immortality is striking to me in this paragraph in which the Danish monarchy seems to play the part of the cuckold husband whose DNA is not carried on or at least only carried on to a limited degree, opposite Struensee as the handsome lover who fathered a beautiful, vivacious daughter.

"I'm bringin' sexy back/Them Danish boys don't know how to act/I think it's special what's behind thy back/So turn around and I'll pick up the slack."

I also find it telling that the theme of the cuckold as a figure is still something that is predominantly associated with a male character. The betrayed woman has always been, and continues to be, a tragic figure, doesn’t she? Even today we love to revel in the not-at-all-funny pain of historical betrayed woman characters struggling to make it in a partriarchal society, such as Betty Draper or Saul Dibb’s Duchess of Devonshire. It’s still hard to imagine a hilarious comedy about a younger, handsome man cheating on an older woman who is laughed at for her inability to maintain her young husband’s sexual interest. I can’t even imagine a movie like Forgetting Sarah Marshall with the tables turned so that it’s the betrayed woman we’re laughing at, rather than Jason Segel’s naked, unattractive, blue-balled, cuckold boyfriend character. The idea that a woman might be a ridiculous sex-crazed authority rather than a vulnerable victim with hurt feelings still seems alien in our contemporary narratives. The only character vaguely of this sort that I am able to think would be Jennifer Aniston’s sexually harassing boss in Horrible Bosses.

I guess you could say that the development of the cuckold motif in the history of drama and comedy is a good indicator that we still have a long way to go towards equality. Still, I think I prefer to see it as a testiment to the genius of Leoncavallo, rather than to the backwards nature of today’s cultural perception of gender, that his tragic comedy Pagliacci still feels so intensely relevant today.

“Every little thing I do” – In Defence of Boy Bands

Out of nowhere I got to thinking about boy bands the other day and about how there aren’t a lot of boy bands around these days. And as I sat down to reminisce with an ‘N Sync video on youtube, I realised that I think that this is sort of a shame.

This is a really weird thing for me to be saying, because I hated boy bands back in the day. I’d like to say that this was only because I didn’t like the actual songs, and while it’s true the songs were not to my liking and that I and much preferred, say, nerding over The Magic Flute in my teens, a big part of my dislike of boy bands was due to my being a bit of a douche as a youth. I’ve mentioned before that I detested anything popular back then, and oh boy were boy bands ever popular in the 1990s. When I was very young it was Take That, then came Backstreet Boys, and Five, and ‘N Sync, and there was also some Boyzone and New Kids on the Block  in there somewhere, and I hated all of it. But then I watched that video the other day, with an open mind and well past most of my youthful doucheness, and you know what? I think I get it now. I get what boy bands are about.  And I approve.

It’s not that I like the song, because the song is every bit as generic as I remembered. It’s not just my crush on Justin Timberlake talking either, although Lord knows I have a thing for Justin Timberlake. No, it’s the dancing. To be more specific, it’s the dancing combined with the singing. Dancing in perfect sync is difficult, doing so while singing is even harder and certainly a lot more complicated than just looking cute while singing a song by yourself in a romantic setting. Being able to pull off perfect in sync dancing and singing is quite a feat and will always be somewhat spectacular and impressive to watch, especially when done by attractive, well-groomed young men. What the boy bands did with their elaborate dancing routines was to send off the signal of a serious effort being made in order to please a female audience. With their performances they created a piece of irresistible fiction about young men teaming up and going out of their way to satisfy a woman, and I suppose ‘N Sync were the ones who were most keenly aware of this. Not only was the band named after their charming synchronic dancing abilities, their videos also tended to revolve around the theme of male subordination – the above video was not the only ‘N Sync video to make use of the imagery of the band being a set of dolls or puppets in the hands of a young woman:

(This video makes no sense, by the way. The beginning is ok, with the puppets on strings, but why do the puppets then proceed to fall on to a moving train when their strings are cut? And where does the blue, zero-gravity room fit into the narrative? Oh, well.)

And you know what, as far as female fantasies go, I don’t think this is a half bad one. Why not indulge in a fantasy for once in which the girl is not trying to get the attention of a distant, aloof, and troubled man? In my day that guy was called Dylan McKay and I suppose his name is Edward Cullen today, and really they’re both bullshit with their furrowed brows, brooding, preoccupied personalities, and tendencies towards substance abuse. Most girls will have their fair share of real-life heartbreak, so why not lean back and be pampered by the fictitious attentions of a perfectly dancing set of good-looking young men? At their best (i.e.: Justin Timberlake) boy bands gave off a care-free, tongue-in-cheek, roguish charm, communicated through a painstakingly prepared choreography and pitch perfect vocals. This had clearly taken endless hours of training and had nothing to do with the amateurism and quick fame of today’s numerous television talent shows. It presented young girls with the idea that they were worth wooing, and that wooing should take the shape of real effort.  I miss that fantasy. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but here goes: I think we need to bring back the boy bands.

The Daughters of Copenhagen

I’m terrible at keeping up with the contemporary music scene, but I came across this song yesterday and really liked it:

The song is “København” (which is the Danish name for Copenhagen) by rock band Ulige numre (“Uneven Numbers”), and it’s basically an ode to Copenhagen. The song and video go perfectly together, I think. The video shows historic and recent footage from Copenhagen, and the song has a certain nostalgic sound to it, especially in the guitar riff, that makes it reminiscent of old protest songs from the 1960s and 1970s, like Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock“  or this 1971 Danish protest song. Thus “København”  becomes a sort of hymn not just to Copenhagen, but to the side of Copenhagen that I’ve always loved the best about the city: The open-minded, progressive side that blossomed in the time of the hippie movement, but which has its root back in the labour movements in the city about a decade earlier, and which still flourished in my childhood years in the 1980s, when my parents took me to the city, and I would be gaping at the punks with their brightly coloured hair, hanging around outside the old buildings of the city, and somehow fitting in perfect with the once-progressive Jugendstil architecture. And which is still there today, I suppose, although it’s always so difficult to detect the shock of the new when you’re in the middle of it.

The song lyrics of “København” go:

You have danced with me
for twenty years
And you have taught me the steps that I know
but don’t understand
Copenhagen, you are nothing but all I have
When your thousand eyes close
And darkness colours you infinite
And your daughters
they have no good intentions with me
And your eyes
light the way home for me when I’ve had enough

I have a minor problem
that I can’t find
Before you’ve shown me where
you’ve hidden her
Copenhagen, I am your last son
When your thousand eyes close
And darkness colours you infinite
And your daughters
they have no good intentions
And your eyes
light the way home for me when I’ve had enough

The darkness wants more
the days grow shorter
And I’ve spent my last kroner
painting mine black
And your eyes, there are more and more of them
And your daughters
Tell them that I won’t be waiting any longer.

The song reached me about the same time as the much less flattering description of Copenhagen and its daughters by Roosh: Danish Women Are the Most Masculine in the World. The article is hardly accurate (as everyone knows I myself am a perfect example of absolutely charming femininity), and in some parts it’s vulgar and downright offensive, but then again I’m sure it’s meant to be vulgar and offensive, and I have to admit that this:

A big problem is that just about everything offends a Danish girl, especially if you make casual observations about her culture, whether positive or negative. She doesn’t believe in stereotypes or generalizations at all. She has the belief that everyone is a completely unique snowflake and any attempt to generalize is wrong and offensive. The irony of this is that Danish people are so incredibly homogenous and alike due to Denmark being a strong conformist culture that they’re the easiest people to generalize about.
(…) or example, it was common for a Danish girl to joke that Americans like cheeseburgers and French fries. She’s indirectly saying that Americans are fat. I get it, and I don’t care, because Americans are fat and I personally love cheeseburgers and French fries. I would counter her observation with one of my own by saying, “We love hamburgers, but you guys like the kebabs. Those places are everywhere.” Pretty innocuous comment, right? Wrong. The Danish girl gets offended and counters with, “No, Danish food culture is quite varied. You’re not looking hard enough to find other places.” Really, bitch? There would be no less than four kebab shacks within a stone’s throw.

This hit a nerve. Oh, yes. I do see myself in this. And several of my girl friends, though I love them dearly.  We do this, with the adamant, sometimes hypocritical non-generalisation, and I can see how we might be obnoxious about it at times.

So there you are, Roosh, you are right about us in some aspects, and I’m owning up to it. I’m taking it like a man, you might say. You may shake my big, man-like hand. I’m not going to sleep with you, though.

Reviewing MTV’s Plain Jane

MTV’s Plain Jane is one of several tv shows that I’ve become addicted to by  accident, while spinning in front of the tv screens at my gym. Here’s a review.

I’m usually not that into reality shows, but makeover shows tend to reel me right in. What appeals to me about them is, I’m sure, the same thing that appeals to anyone who ever got hooked on a makeover show: The illusion that a quick, easy, and positive, yet radical personal transformation is possible and that you can become a better person practically over night. I call it an illusion because that’s what it is of course – change is difficult and demands hard work. But it’s a nice illusion. Especially when you’re on the spinning bike and the display lets you know just how painfully slowly you’re burning off those calories. So I rate makeover shows based on how good a job they do at selling me this illusion.

Louise Roe - hostess of MTV's Plain Jane

In MTV’s Plain Jane the hostess is English fashion expert Louise Roe. Roe receives video applications from young women, one per episode, who tend to have a plain appearance, and during a short period Roe sets about administering their transformation into hot, well-dressed, stiletto-sporting ladies.  She does this not only by taking them to high-profile stylists and hairdressers and expensive clothes shops, but also by putting them up to several challenges which typically include flirting with random guys in public and forcing the women to confront and overcome some random phobia of theirs, like touching snails or being alone in the dark.

Two days
Does the show do a decent job in selling the illusion that these acts really do transform the young women’s characters? Of course it does, a little. I wouldn’t have watched the entire first season if it weren’t the case. However, I do think there are some aggravating problems with the format of the show. The first and most obvious one is the fact that the entire transformation allegedly takes place during the course of just two days. I get that it must be sensible in regard to the budget of the show’s production to limit the shooting to a few days, but couldn’t they at least pretend that the makeover is spread over a longer period? Like a week or so? A span of two days simply doesn’t seem convincing in terms of personal transformation, not even of the most superficial kind. And especially not of the in-depth kind. Which brings me to the next problem with the show:

The Alleged In-Depth Transformation
The show’s primary object is to change the apperance of the girls – it’s right there in the title. The show is not called “MTVs Fear of Commitment Susan” or “MTV’s Problem with Intimacy Paula”. It’s “Plain Jane”. Which is why I really think the show ought to just focus on getting the girls to look and dress better instead of insisting on taking a faux-deep spin on it all by having the girls conquer their various fears and phobias, as mentioned above.

Especially considering the fact that, once again, the show only has two days to accomplish all this, which is hardly enough time even for a physical transformation. The result is that Louise Roe often ends up doing a half-assed sort of job on the girls. Like with Carrie in the episode “Conservative Jane”. Roe and the crew spend a lot of time conquering Carrie’s deepest fear (I believe it was a fear of the dark, but I’m not sure) instead of spending some time teaching Carrie how to walk in the super tall platform stilettos that they put her in in the last scene of the show. It hardly helps Carrie that she’s faced her phobia and is wearing expensive clothes and make-up when she is walking around with the apologetic and unsure slouch of a kid trying out stilts for the first time. And I’m not even beign catty here: Walking in high heels is difficult – we’ve all been there, with the stilt-walking – and it’s not Carrie’s fault that nobody on the show bothered teaching her.

Another thing is that the crew doesn’t seem prepared to deal with it when they actually manage to accomplish something with their in-depth “face your fears” challenges. In one episode, “Wallflower Jane”, 24-year-old Loreli is made to take a kind of boxing lesson, the emotional impact of which makes the young woman burst into tears. Louise Roe, being a fashion reporter and stylist, understandably has no idea how to handle the situation and as a result she just stands around awkwardly while the poor girl is sobbing her eyes out on international television. I get that the entire point of departure of reality TV is to explore people’s emotions (which is of course also problematic in and of itself, but that’s another discussion entirely), but on a show like “Plain Jane” where the premise is sleek surfaces and the illusion of painless metamorphoses, it’s just incredibly out-of-place and uncomfortable to watch.

Every Plain Jane has a Secret Crush
I’m also not sold on the show’s statement (repeated in the intro of every episode) that “every Plain Jane has a secret crush” the affection of which is pointed out explicitly as the goal of the entire makeover. It simply bothers the feminist in me that the makeover needs to be done for the sake of gaining a man’s approval when it could just as easily have been a question of simply making the young women feel better about themselves and their appearance. I actually think the show works the best when it takes a brief pause from focusing on what the guy in question will like. Like in the episode “Do Over Jane”. Here we meet a young woman, Clare, who has allowed herself to become stuck in a job a s barrista and lost sight of her dream of becoming a professional writer. In a few very nice scenes, Roe helps Clare pick out outfits that will make her look like a business woman, like someone who would be taken seriously if she walked into a publishing house with a manuscript. There was much more dignity in these scenes than in the final scene in which Clare was reuinted with some random failed blind date from her past, sharing an awkward on-camera kiss with him.

The “learn-how-to-flirt-with-guys” challenges that the Plain Janes are put up to are a little less offensive to me, since these could easily be seen as a way of learning how to get the young women to have fun and let loose a little, and these exercises don’t have the approval of one specific guy as their focus. The actual scenes, however, suffer a great deal from being so obviously staged: The allegedly random guys are clearly hired actors, and if I were one of the Plain Janes the idea that the show had to hire people to flirt with me would not exactly make me feel more self confident.

Also, I would like to add that the vast majority of the guys I’ve been involved with in my life haven’t really been that into fancy clothes and expensive make-up. They appreaciate the effort, so they have told me, but several of them have told me flat out that they think it’s sexier when women have their hair tousled and are looking casual and a little dirty. And, preferably, not wearing any clothes at all, fancy or not. Of course the preferences of men change from person to person, but still. I’ve seen little evidence that pretty clothes = endless romantic success.

Long sleeves and broken mirrors
Again: I’m not saying all this simply because I want to expose the show as being stupid and superficial. Of course it’s superficial, that’s what I like about it. It’s all about selling that superficial illusion. And there are a few things that I think the show does really well in this resepct. The best part about it, I think, is Roe’s repeated message to several of the young women that they have to embrace the woman in themselves and stop thinking of themselves as little girls. Women get things done while little girls sit around in schoolrooms and wait to be told what to do, and as all the partitioners on “Plain Jane” are on the wrong side of their school years, I love that Roe makes it her mission to get them to act their age. In one episode, Roe tells a Plain Jane to stop letting her sleaves fall down over her hands, because it looks childish. And in episode “No Risk Jane” Roe walks into Plain Jane Joanah’s bedroom and scolds Joanah for totally neglecting the interior decoration. Joanah is a hoarder, and her bedroom looks like the room of a messy 12-year-old,  packed with defect Chinese-style fans, ugly furniture, stuffed animals, and even a broken mirror. “Do you know what that means?!” Roe says, pointing furiously at said mirror. “Seven years of bad luck?” Joanah replies timidly, to which Roe retorted “Seven years of bad sex!” I thought that was one of the genuinely funny and cute moments of the show, and the interior decoraters that Roe released in Joanah’s bedroom actually did a wonderful job with it.

More of this, and less of the awkward boxing lessons and you’ve got me hooked for another season, MTV. Catch you at the gym.

C’est la guerre – Waterloo Bridge (1940)

I’ve been in bed for three days with a cold. After two days I badly needed something to pass the time. I called my father who recommended the 1940 movie Waterloo Bridge starring Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh.

Despite being, so I like to think, at least somewhat well-versed within the movie classics, I’d never even heard of this movie before, which really got me thinking about how arbitrary it is that some movies continue to be thought of as classics, while others sink into oblivion. Waterloo Bridge certainly deserves status as a classic as much as, say, Casablanca does, if you ask me. I expected an old-fashioned romantic movie, but I got a lot more than that.

Air-raid romance
Not that the romantic story of the movie isn’t fulfilling in and of itself – it is. It’s the story of Captain Roy Cronin (Robert Taylor) and ballerina Myra (Vivian Leigh), a young couple who have a chance encounter on Waterloo Bridge around the time of the on-set of World War I during an air-raid. After having spent some time together seeking shelter in the underground for the duration of the raid, the two are sad to part, and Roy goes to see Myra in her ballet company’s production of Swan Lake, taking her out afterwards. The two fall in love and Roy, destined to leave for France two days later, proposes the next day that they marry right away. Myra accepts, but before the two can be wed, Roy is given order to leave a day earlier than expected.

Courtship in wartime: Myra and Roy during the air raid

Taylor is dashing and Leigh displays a wonderfully sweet mien that will surprise anyone who associates her chiefly with the proud and capricious Scarlett O’Hara, and the two have great chemistry. Director Mervyn LeRoy has wisely chosen to let their quick attraction towards one another be shown through clever dialogue, which always seems more convincing and less forced to me than the lingering gazes movie directors sometimes resort to when depicting love at first sight. You really believe that these two people feel singularly comfortable with each other right away. The dialogue allows us to get to know the two main characters and the two characters to get to know each other:

Myra: What was it that you started to tell me in the restaurant that you didn’t understand about me?

Roy: No use getting into it now…

Myra: No, but tell me, please, I’d like to know.

Roy: Well, it struck me as curious ever since I met you… that you’re so young and so lovely and so… defeatist, you know? You don’t seem to expect much from life.

Myra: Well, aren’t I right? For instance, I met you. I liked you. And now so soon we have to part – perhaps we’ll never see each other again.

Waterloo Bridge as a “womance”
Myra is late for a ballet performance as she has to rush to the station to say goodbye to her war-bound fiancé, and for this misdemeanor she is excluded from the company by the strict manager Madame Kirowa. Myra’s best friend Kitty (Virginia Field) steps into character here as she stands up to Madame Kirowa trying to explain the urgent nature of Myra’s errand that night – and is thrown out along with Myra. This marks the beginning of the second half of the movie which is what really makes the movie stand out to me.

Because apart from being a romantic drama about boy meets girl, the movie is actually also a bit of a womance – the story of loving friendship between women. Kitty and Myra seem to be depicted deliberately as opposites: Brunette Myra is demure and meek, while blonde Kitty has a fiesty, outspoken temperament. Yet the two remain close and loyal  friends to each other, and after Roy has left to fight in the war, they move in together in a humble flat trying to make a living as dancers. The war leaves very few job opportunities for two young women ballet dancers, and as Myra is led mistakingly by a note in the newspaper that Roy has been killed, she sinks into depression and illness, leaving Kitty to desperately trying to support the both of them.

Sisterhood: Kitty and Myra

Kitty lies and tells Myra that she has got a job in a dance theatre production, but Myra catches her in the deception and confronts her. This leads to the most tremendously moving scene of the film:

Myra: Where is the money coming from? Where are you getting it?

Kitty: Where do you think I’ve been getting it?! …I tried to keep it from you, but… Well, you know now.

Myra: (sits down shakily) You did it for me.

Kitty: No, I didn’t! I’d have done it anyhow! C’est la guerre: No jobs. No boys who want to marry you. Only men who want to kill a few hours because they know it may be their last…

Myra: Kitty, you did it for me, to buy me food and medicine. I’d sooner have died…

Kitty: No no, you wouldn’t. You think you would, but you wouldn’t! I thought of that. But I wasn’t brave enough. I wanted to go on living. Heaven knows why, but I did, and so would you. We’re young, and it’s good to live! Even the life *I*’m leading, though God knows, it’s… I’ve heard them call it ‘the easiest way’. I wonder whoever came up with that little phrase. I know one thing: It couldn’t have been a woman. I suppose you think I’m dirt…

Myra: Oh, Kitty. (embracing her)

My quoting the scene doesn’t really do justice to it. The direction is absolutely ingenious here. The dialogue balances just on the verge of becoming an argument, and you think it will, but then it doesn’t, and it ends in an embrace. The feeling of solidarity between women that you sense in this scene is all the more important because of the subject matter, and it is also echoed significantly in Myra’s interaction with her mother-in-law Lady Margaret (a superb Lucile Watson) as the two share a scene of great compassion towards the ending of the movie when Myra is in a desperate state.

“If I were only casting the white swan…”
And the movie goes even further with that solidarity. Rather than letting Kitty play the part of the whore opposite Myra’s virtuous Madonna (like Kim and Amanda in the 2008 flick Taken which I recently reviewed), Myra, too, descends into prostitution in the aftermath of this scene. Kitty is right: Myra really does want to live, and there’s only one way to do that in their situation and it’s not the Madonna way. Surely it’s significant that Roy sees Myra dancing Swan Lake of all ballets. More than half a century before Black Swan, this movie explores the interesting duality that lies implicitly in the title character of the Tchaikovsky ballet – the white and the black swan embodied by one dancer.

In this movie, produced during the trying times of World War II, the theme is not, as in the Aronofsky movie, the destructive fulfilment of true art, but the hardships of women left behind as their men go off to the trenches. The reference, though kept very subtle, is most apparent in the heartbreaking scene,  beautifully played by Leigh, when Roy returns as a war hero and is overjoyed to find an astonished Myra there to receive him at the train station. He remains oblivious to the tragically ironic fact that she was really there to pick up customers . Once a white-clad ballerina, Myra is now wearing dark dress and a pitch-black hat. “It is you, isn’t it? It’s really you” Roy says, embracing her – as the swan theme from the Tchaikovsky ballet is struck up mournfully by the  orchestra in the soundtrack.

Metamorphosis. Left: Myra at the beginning of the story clad in white tutu as a bashful ballerina. Right: Myra as a prostitute in dark dress on the train station as Roy returns

Roy’s question goes unanswered by Myra who simply bursts into tears. This puzzles Roy – “This is a happy ending!”, he insists. In Mervin LeRoy’s directing, the returning war hero is optimistic and triumphant. But for the ones who have been left behind there is little triumph, the movie seems to say, and they have good reason to be, well, defeatist. For Myra and Kitty the war has been a humiliating defeat to the black-feathered side to them that has had to take over in order for them to go on living, and the home-coming of Roy assigns to Myra the impossible task of having to be the lily-white maiden that her war hero expects to find waiting for him.

Oh, ye’ll take the high road, and I’ll take the low road
The ending of the movie is concerned with the question of whether Myra will tell Roy what’s happened to her and whether Roy will be willing to accept and love Myra for what she is now. This makes for a satisfying ending to the romantic storyline, but it isn’t an urgent question. We have already been led to accept Myra and love her. I really like that, and I’m impressed that a movie from this era of partriachy, and directed by a man at that, got such a message through. I’m sure that the movie was marketed in part as an exploitation film because of its scandalous subject matter, but the prostitution storyline hardly gets an exploitation-like vulgar feel to it at any point in the actual movie.

Finally, the film has a very good soundtrack. Apart from introducing a fetching original love theme and, as mentioned above, remnants of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, the orchestral score includes fragments of Scottish sentimental ballads such as “For Auld Lang Syne“, and “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond”, thus emphasizing discretely and effectively the themes of Myra’s metamorphosis, scottish-born Roy’s somewhat nostalgic approach to the world, as well as the moving story of affection and loss between two lovers.

“They are going to take you” – Reviewing Taken (2008)

So! Last weekend I did a lot of cleaning up around the house. I wanted a movie to watch while I was doing this, and decided on the 2008 action flick Taken starring Liam Neeson. This turned out to be a poor choice.

I guess you could say that I should have been able to predict the fact that Taken was not going to be a masterpiece. The poster is pretty generic looking as far as mindless action flicks go:

Still, Liam Neeson was in it! Whom I associate with clever films like Husbands and Wives. And the script was written by Luc “Leon” Besson.

And then I also got interested in the movie because I’d heard that it dealt with trafficking. Which it did, although in a slightly backhanded way: Liam Neeson is Bryan, a former CIA agent and divorced father of a 17-year-old girl. He very reluctantly lets the daughter, Kim, go to Europe with her 19-year-old friend Amanda as her sole companion, urged on by the ex-wife who thinks that Bryan is being overprotective of the girl. Shortly after arriving in Paris, however, the two young women fall prey to a group of criminals who are in the habit of kidnapping attractive girls and selling them off as sex slaves. Bryan is informed by his CIA sources that in cases such as this one, one usually has about four days to track down the victims before they will be gone forever, forced into a (presumably short) hellish existence of drugging and prostitution. With this grim statistic in mind, the father sets out on a gun-toting, action-packed quest to retrieve his daughter.

“The next part is very important… They are going to take you”
I do think there’s a lot of potential in a story like this. There’s strong motivation for the main character to get involved in the plot, there’s the possibility of a moving depiction of the love between a father and his child, and there’s even a chance of raising awareness about the conditions of victims of trafficking.

And the movie actually starts out promising. Liam Neeson does a great job in the expositional part of the movie, playing the part of a somewhat defeated man, estranged from his wife and struggling to be a good dad to his only child after having been absent during most of Kim’s childhood because of his job at the CIA.

This also builds efficiently up to the peripeteia of the movie – the scene in which Kim and Amanda are kidnapped from their Paris apartment – which is equally well crafted and actually one of the most chilling scenes I’ve seen in any action movie. Kim happens to be on the phone with her father when she witnesses a terrified Amanda getting attacked and dragged off, and Bryan can only listen helplessly as Kim tells him that the kidnappers are coming for her as well. Drawing on his CIA experience, Bryan records the call, then instructs her to win some time by hiding under a bed in the nearest bedroom. But as he informs her, wincing with terror and sorrow:

Now, the next part is very important … they are going to take you. Kim, stay focused, baby, this is key. You have five, maybe ten very important seconds. Leave the phone on the floor, concentrate. Shout out everything you see about them: Hair colour, (…), scars, anything you see. You understand?”

The monologue effectively sets up Bryan as a competent crime fighter, but it’s also absolutely chillingly set up. You don’t have to be a parent in order to be able to imagine how horrible it must be to listen to your child’s kidnapping, and to have to tell her that you have no way of preventing it. And it’s just as easy to identify with Kim’s horror as she realizes that nobody can stop the strangers from hauling her off to an unknown fate.

Then one of the kidnappers picks up Kim’s abandoned phone, which gives Bryan the chance to deliver the line that became the movie’s tagline:

I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don’t have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

The line is totally over the top and campy, of course, but as an action movie line it works and is kind of charming.

“…Good luck.”
The criminal on the other end of the line, Marko, of the line pauses dramatically before replying with an evil “Good luck”.

And this can be pinpointed as the exact moment when the movie starts sucking hard and loses every hint of believability.

I get that trafficking criminals are evil and ruthless, but I don’t really see them as supervillains who revel so much in their own evilness that they would actually take the time to wish a victim’s father a vicious “Good luck”, mid-kidnapping. In fact, I would think that traffickers are probably mostly in it for the money, and that they would want to get the hell out of the crime scene if they had just successfully kidnapped too teenage girls, one of whom had already alerted somebody over the phone.

But that’s a kind of finesse there’s obviously not room for in Taken. The villains have little resemblance with the malnourished, downtrodden thugs of the real world of crime, and as Bryan starts chasing them across Paris, they skillfully and athletically jump off highway bridges and on to moving trucks, dodge bullets, aim perfectly, taunting Bryan all the while. As if they’re quite used to their victim’s middle-aged dads coming after them 007 style and in fact take pleasure in his distress.

The Hollywood hero and the justification of torture
I can’t help but feel that this bears witness a view of the world that I find extremely dangerous, namely one in which fixed concepts of enemies thrive and are even encouraged. Kim’s kidnappers are Albanian mobsters, Kim is later manhandled by a lustful Arab sheikh, and the entire movie just reeks of a very unhealthy kind of post-millennium xenophobia mixed with a portion of post 9/11 paranoia. In such a world view there are no grey areas, no subleties, no nuances. The villains are villains and they are foreign and certainly not western, and they will rape your daughter and laugh in your face while doing so. And so anything goes for our western hero who is automatically in the right.

Pictured: ARAB!!1!!

This is most glaring in the scene in which Bryan has managed to capture Marko. I was absolutely appalled as I watched the hero of the movie tie his opponent to a chair and then continue to subject him to torture by giving him severe electric shocks through nails hammered into his thighs. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but it still shakes me to my very core to find that we’re living in a society in which we can still have a mainstream movie protagonist torture another human being.

The valuable virgin and the worthless whore
I’d be able to forgive at least parts of the above flaws in this movie if at least the issue of trafficking was dealt with tastefully. Not so, however. Since the traffickers seem to be in the business solely in order to torment Bryan, I suppose it makes sense that Kim would have to be the only victim that matters in the story. Still, it’s galling to see Bryan largely ignore every other victim of trafficking he encoutners. He makes contact with one other girl, whom he rescues – but only because he suspects that she has information about his daughter.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, there’s a truly icky tendency in the movie towards a stigmatization of sexually active women. Kim is ultimately saved because she is a virgin and thus too valuable to be put into immediate prostitution. Meanwhile, Kim’s friend Amanda is a sexually aggressive young woman – we learn as much from a piece of dialogue between the two girls upon their arrival in Paris:

“Amanda: I’m gonna sleep with [Peter].
Kim: You just met him!
Amanda: I hear French guys are amazing. Maybe he has a friend, huh?
Kim: No, no.
Amanda: Oh, come on! You gotta lose it some time. Might as well be in Paris.”

‘How dare Amanda want to sleep with a cute French guy?’ gasps Hollywood and clutches its pearls indignantly. And sure enough, when Bryan finds Amanda, she is sprawled on her prostitute bed, dead from an overdoze.

He doesn’t even make an attempt to bring her body to safety, for fear lest, I suppose, he will catch syphilis from this dirty whore of a teenage girl. Virgins may be more valuable than non-virgins to the evil, evil Arab sheikhs in the movie, but our hero seems to make pretty much the same misogynic distinction. I wish the film would have included a scene in which Bryan is confronted by Amanda’s grieving parents whom he has robbed of the chance to bid a final farewell to their daughter. But of course then there wouldn’t have been time for the very relevant and deifying ending in which Bryan takes his virginal daughter to be given singing lessons by a famous American pop star.

No, I’m not kidding. That’s the actual ending of this action thriller about trafficking.