dudes, bros and the women they hate to love

-written in joint disdain by Bhakti & Laxmi

The Story with the Stats

I recently watched I Don't Know How She Does It, a movie where a frazzled Sarah Jessica Parker juggles career, kids, marriage and friendship. The film was about the current state of affairs that the modern mother has found herself in. Though light in its tone, I was surprised by the careful and critical depiction of the genre of books known as mommy lit. The commentaries by Christian Hendricks resonated with me; they were tough, sarcastic and undeniably feminist. While it espoused a cliche, white heteronormativity, it was refreshing because it was not about landing some guy but about doing well in career and with your kids. When I looked for reviews on rottentomatoes.com, it only rated at 17% from critics. It was not the first time I had come home from a women-centric film and found that it rated atrociously, with critics saying the harshest possible things. When it comes to dude movies, however, its a completely different story. Take a look at these revealing stats:

Knocked Up 90% - A story about a set of greasy, unfortunate looking young men who smoke pot all day and the grimiest of them all ends up with a hot babe with an amazing tv career. 

I Love You Man 83% - A story about a vulnerable (read pathetic) guy with no friends who friends out with a greasy, sleazy guy who waxes eloquent about farts.

Hangover 78% - A story about some attractive and some greasy, potbellied guys who take roofies in Vegas and do things like pull out their own teeth and trash their hotel room. Some of them still get hot babes, especially the tooth guy.

And then here are stats for the equally annoying chick films...please note that these are not romantic comedies but female-bonding films even though critics constantly rate them based on romance criteria. 

Baby Mama 63% - A hilarious, hip movie about a woman trying to have a baby and the comedy of surrogacy that ensues. Starring attractive, profilic, insanely talented women like Tina Fey and Amy Poehler

Sex and the City 1 - 49% and Sex and the City 2 - 15% - An occassionaly funny, mainly sappy movie with fabulous fashion and talented actresses propounding (though poorly) some feminist ideals. 

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 77% An extremely charming coming-of-age film about teenage friendship that shockingly rates less than Hangover!

Lets forget about the pot-bellied, pot-smoking, trash-talking dudes for a moment and see how their six-packed, ball-dunking, trash-talking bro counterparts rate: Best Man 71% or The Brothers 63%. While the bros do poorly compared to the dudes in our pathetic society that lacks the most basic critical tools to understand African-American context or culture, they still rate higher than sisterhood movies. For example, the less recent How Stella Got Her Groove Back 48% or Phat Girlz 23%. 

To understand the exceptional case of Bridesmaids, read here. 

Machismo to Mess-ismo 
What is the malady at hand? Well, the most obvious issue is the unadulterated worship of male chauvinism. While the trend towards chauvinist narratives is hardly new, it is the particular form that it has taken which poses a big problem for us women who have to deal with the outrageous trends that arise in real life thanks to the fictive lives in these movies. Once upon a time, masculine ideals were perpetrated through dashing action heroes who were sauve and skilled. They beat a villain to pulp, sipped a martini and swirled breathless girls to tango music, all in a days work! What kind of role models do these overweight, jobless, broke, vulgar, messy and crass guys espouse? It seems that socially we have taken a turn for the worse - from the raw machismo of the previous times, we are now applauding farting, unkempt hair, lack of focus or ambition and a porn collection. 

Trash Talking
The direct outcome of these films is that men feel it is now okay to take trash-talking about women to the next level. Characters of women in most of these films have gone from adorable bimbo or nurturing angel to that of brittle bitch who stands in the way of anything the man may enjoy such as bachelor parties, porn, guys nights, pot parties and other shallow and vulgar pastimes. Attractive women that these men have miraculously snagged interrupt every possible moment of male camaraderie. The first topic among the male friends focus on how to "get" women, that is, how to get laid without getting the woman in question to fall madly in love with the greasy guy. The second focus is on pure women-bashing. All these women are desperate to get married, have kids, they are constantly in the pursuit of plotting home-making, plotting monogamy and mainly snooping and stalking even though not a single one of these characters seems remotely eligible for so much attention to be heaped on them. Though the men in dude movies are clearly losers, thus vulnerable and thus lovable, it is the bro movies which astound a little more. These hunky African-American males are all ivy-league educated, moneyed guys with all kinds of worldly experience, success and an erudite vocabulary, yet they spend their male bonding time mindlessly dissecting women in a manner that seems to hark back to the middle ages. Women-bashing is rampant here too but almost worse because the characters are supposedly so classy. 


Overall, it is so sad that these ineligible males view themselves as prized candidates whom women are waiting to entrap. They are chronically contriving to keep these women off and are perennially playing these women to keep them in check. These are such unlikely scenarios but the tragedy is that they have started to pass off as truth. Men romanticize these mindsets and  it is changing the fabric of relationships and courtships for the worse today. Some months ago, the New Yorker article on Anna Faris made a big splash by exposing sexism in Hollywood. The moguls of dude comedies claimed to follow some basic rules for date nights. I quote: "1) Men Rule: Men decide which movie a couple will see on any given weekend, and any hint that a film involves fashion, pedicures, or female troubles is "man-poison" --- 2) Men are simple. Don't confuse them: Men just don't understand the nuances of female dynamics...Male movie-goes care chiefly about the male star and his buddies --- 3) If a woman is the star, it better be a romantic comedy." Hollywood may swear by these rules but it is upto women to take date night into their own hands. Real women have never been more different than their on-screen avatars. They are stronger, more successful and less likely to settle than ever before. There is an embedded subjugating tactic within these films that I would urge women to not respond to. As for the men, I only have a simple question: Do you really want to be like these guys? I sincerely hope not. 

love and other demons

I was recently asked if any piece of art or writing I consumed particularly resonated with my state of being at the time. The first thing that came to mind was Orhan Pamuk’s exquisite love story, The Museum of Innocence. Through the protagonist, Kamal Bey’s eyes, Pamuk journeys the entire gamut of emotions that loving fosters with a writing that is both real and magical at the same time. I don’t admire this book only because I am a silly romantic but because it managed to restore my faith in love and passion. The novel has anything but a fairy tale end leaving all its characters exhumed by the passions that drive them. But when I took it up, I was beginning to feel weary by the pragmatic notions of time and tracks, things that had no particular significance to me by themselves, but the discourse of which I could not escape. It was tiring to have to constantly justify a stance which in my mind seemed the most natural or logical, that one must always pursue love for its sake and not as a conduit to things that follow in its wake. If the former happens to bring about the latter it is one thing, but to pursue it in a pragmatic manner would kill my soul I often argued. I would like to share the following two excerpts from the book. The first speaks of passion (even though the protagonist had not fallen in love yet, or didn’t think he had) but manages to be exalting, sophisticated and intensely romantic. The second one is an uplifting passage and something that always calms my sense of disappointment and impatience with any given situation. I don’t think I can ever stop believing in love even if I never actually find it and no matter all the disappointments I have been dealt. And I will always be grateful to Pamuk for the kinship he offered me through his beautiful novel. 

“I would like to say a few things about kisses, though I have some anxieties about steering clear of trivialities and coarseness. I want to tell my story in a way that does justice to its serious points regarding sex and desire: Fusun’s mouth tasted of powdered sugar, owing, I think, to the Zambo chiclets she so liked. Kissing Fusun was no longer a provocation devised to test and to express our attraction to each other, it was something we did for the pleasure of it, and as we made love we were both amazed to discover love’s true essence. It was not just our wet mouths and our tongues that were entwined but our respective memories. So whenever we kissed, I would kiss her first as she stood before me, then as she existed in my recollection. Afterward, I would open my eyes momentarily to kiss the image of her a moment ago and then one of more distant memory, until thoughts of other girls resembling her would commingle with both those memories, and I would kiss them, too, feeling all the more virile for having so many girls at once; from here it was a simple thing to kiss her next as if I was someone else, as the pleasure I took from her childish mouth, wide lips and playful tongue stirred my confusion and fed ideas heretofore not considered, and the pleasure grew to encompass all the various personae I adopted as I kissed her, and all the remembered Fusuns that were evoked when she kissed me. It was in these first long kisses, in our lovemaking’s slow accumulation of particularity and ritual, that I had the first intimations of another way of knowing, another kind of happiness that opened a gate ever so slightly, suggesting a paradise few will ever know in this life. Our kisses delivered us beyond the pleasures of flesh and sexual bliss for what we sensed beyond the moment of the springtime afternoon was as great and wide as time itself. Could I be in love with her? The profound happiness I felt made me anxious. I was confused, my soul teetering between the danger of taking this joy too seriously and the crassness of taking it too lightly.” 

“Thus, did we enter what I have called the happiest moment of my life. In fact no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it. It may well be that, in a moment of joy, one might sincerely believe that they are living that golden instant “now”, even after living such a moment before, but whatever they say, in one part of their hearts they still believe in the certainty of a happy moment to come. Because how could anyone, and particularly anyone who is still young, carry on with the belief that everything could get worse. If a person is happy enough to think he has reached the happier moment of his life, he will be hopeful enough to believe his future will be just as beautiful, more so.

But when we reach a point when our lives take on their final meaning shape, as in a novel, we can identify our happiest moment, selecting it in retrospect as I am doing now. To explain why we have chosen this moment is to acknowledge that it far in the past, that it will never return, and that awareness, therefore, of that very moment is painful. We can bear the pain only by possessing something that belongs to that instant. These mementoes preserve the colors, textures, images, and delights as they were more faithfully, in fact, than can those who accompanies us through those moments.”

poems for palestine

by Pedram Harby

Palestine made its bid for statehood at the United Nations today. While Abbas' tight half-smile reflected his years of fatigue with the situation, the standing ovations and the rapturous applauses to Abbas' speech affirmed that an international community stand behind him even though our now officially Israeli President Obama makes an aggressive move to veto Palestine's right to recognition. On an emotional day, lets reflect on some poems from, about and for Palestine....

We fear for a dream by Mahmoud Darwish
We fear for a dream: don't believe our butterflies.
Believe our sacrifices if you like, believe the compass of a horse, our need for the north.
We have raised the beaks of our souls to you. Give us a grain of wheat, our dream. Give it, give it to us.
We have offered you the shores since the coming to the earth born of an idea or of the adultery of two waves on a rock in the sand.
Nothing. Nothing. We float on a foot of air. The air breaks up within ourselves.
We know you have abandoned us, built for us prisons and called them the paradise of oranges.
We go on dreaming. Oh, desired dream. We steal our days from those extolled by our myths.
We fear for you, we're afraid of you. We are exposed together, you shouldn't believe our wives' patience.
They will weave two dresses, then sell the bones of the loved ones to buy a glass of milk for our children.
We fear for a dream, from him, from ourselves. We go on dreaming, oh dream of ours. Don't believe our butterflies.

movies to avoid in the next few months

1. Machine Gun Preacher

Racism Alert!

Some white guy tries to save "Africa." Again! The trailer is totally insidious showing a towering man in safari suit bending over masses of young black kids as a disheveled red-head aid-worker type looks at him adoringly. Then there are the trucks blowing up, red-eyed "African" militants running amok, giant wooden crosses being mounted, a miscast Gerard Butler foolishly banging on desks asking to save children and random yet consensual "African" men looking on at him in admiration. Need I say more? Even though it is directed by the nuanced Marc Forster and even if the trailer may be misrepresenting the actual film, the whole premise is starkly racist and imperialist. Not to mention, utterly cliche.

2. Ides of March

Intellectual Hogwash Alert!

I can just imagine the casting meeting for this movie - "just find every intellectually smug actor in town, put him in a suit and have him parade around with a creased brow." There's a lot of high-stakes dialogue about election campaigns, the wrong man, the mistake, the leaked story but its still impossible to figure out what this movie is about. It seems entirely premised on the illusion that when Clooney, Gosling and Seymour Hoffman get together, something important is going to take place. Why then bother with a plot, a script or even a comprehensible premise. Sadly, this one may haunt us till the Oscars.

3. 50/50

Sexism Alert!

Here comes another dude movie glorifying oversmart, overweight characters that have overtaken Hollywood. This time their endless male-bonding is interrupted not by women, but by cancer. Nothing could be more unbearable than the fast-talking, fake vulnerability of Seth Rogen and the expressionless, cutesy, hipster histrionics of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Apart from the usual jokes about pubic hair trimmers and marijuana, these guys will try to pick up chicks using the cancer card. Plain ugh.

4. Abduction

Brain Drain Alert!

Lets call this what it is - an excuse to see Taylor Lautner flaunt his body! From what starts off as a promising psychological thriller about stolen identity, a whole patchwork of thriller and mystery plots suddenly appear and some talk of a wanted asset. Main mystery though is how John Singleton went from Boyz in the Hood to directing our favorite werewolf running around town destroying stuff. Everyone is constantly mouthing something very grave and technical but I can promise you this is going to be dumb and dumber.

5. The Double

Cold War Nostalgia Alert!

It begins with a telling shot of a flag flying over the Capitol building and soon enough, its about the return of Soviet assassins called "Cassius 7." I almost fell asleep as I typed that line. Richard Gere is terribly serious as he hunts down the killers with all kinds of gratuitous violence thrown in. Patriotism, nationalist propaganda and blatant stereotyping aside, when will Hollywood actually get the memo about the Cold War? It really is over.

storm in a tomato soup can!

After spending much time rooting for fasting impresario Anna Hazare, urban Indians have found another food related event to controvert. A Valencian festival called La Tomatina is being hosted in Bangalore where tomato pelting will synchronize with hot DJ spins. This has enraged some conscientious Indian youth who are busy signing petitions and calling for boycotts against this fairly silly event, as they refuse to "ape the West." Not only do I find this to be a laughable lament for an urban Indian, I want to add that the inspiration for this event is the recently celebrated Bollywood flick that is largely the Indian yuppie's homage to foreign holidaying, in that case, in Spain. I am not in any way supporting the idea that one must be anything but repulsed by hip, food-wasting events in poor India. But what about all those Hindu rituals of pouring milk over deities, or throwing rice at weddings or other celebrations. I somehow don't think one can exempt those occurrences from the same argument. It also makes me fairly irritable that people are quick to denounce the Western corruption of the Indian goodness. Lets not waste food, I agree. But let's protest that with some self-awareness please!

9/11 must reads

There has been a lot written lately about books that appropriately represent 9/11 and the decade that followed. I have found some of these lists short-sighted and a little tone-deaf. It is definitely time for a counter list! The depiction of the day of 9/11 itself is of lesser concern to me and it is more important to find books that are tools to understand the world better whether geopolitically, culturally or emotionally in light of such an event. The travesties of something like 9/11 is that it immediately shifts the way history is discussed and in this particular case, it has allowed for the western world to obscure a lot of its past by hiding behind the tragedy. My list fills that gap by offering a context to understand why 9/11 happened and in what way it reflects relations between the west and the rest. 

Unthinking Eurocentrism by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam 

This is the most comprehensive and extremely analytical guide to understanding the sway of Europe upon our world today and of course, the United States which is a bastion of neo-European ideology. Through the use of film, popular culture and other media, Shohat and Stam unearth the truly astounding modes of Eurocentrism literally from "Plato-to-NATO." This book is pivotal for moving beyond mainstream rhetoric and to have clarity about why the so-called Third World is pissed off at the monolithic West. More importantly, this book addresses the failed phenomenon known as Multiculturalism. This is key since the witch hunt for terrorists continues in our own multi-culti American backyard. buy here

Epic Encounters by Melanie Mcallister

This is yet another heavyweight taking on the most controversial, contentious and impossible topic of them all - United States and its very unique relationship with the Middle East. Its disguises itself as a book about US popular culture and the way it shapes the discussion about the Middle East. But in truth, it is a tome about American foreign policy and the how that has boomeranged back into creating what we call an American culture. From the Bible to Black Power to Vietnam War to Israel to the politics of Oil, Mcallister connects all the dots fearlessly and with immense rigor. buy here

Patriot Acts, Narratives of 9/11 Injustice by Alia Malek 

The most recent contribution to the discourse of 9/11, Malek's book charts the discrimination faced by men and woman of Middle Eastern, South Asian, Arab or Muslim heritage. It is an unprecedented collection of oral histories told by a diverse set of people about the damage inflicted upon their daily lives with the coming of new security apparatuses, increased surveillance, legitimized racism and legally sanctioned rendition and abuse. Its a moving homage to the innocent victims of the War on Terror. buy here

Baghdad Blues by Sinaan Antoon

Poetry often offers the only way to authentically represent and simultaneously deconstruct places, spaces, history, events and emotions. From the very core of Baghdad comes this soulful, strong, stern and utterly tragic rendering of a completely shattered place - Iraq. A brilliant translator of Arabic poetry, an accomplished novelist and a poet of great intensity, Antoon's work is also important because it is well-timed and comes like a bullet to rip through lopsided narratives about the Arab world. buy here

Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Ahmed

A deceptively simple but lyrical book, this is a first person account of a young Princeton graduate from Pakistan whose love affair with America leaves him heartbroken and alienated. With the events of 9/11, his environment is transformed as he experiences overt racism and anti-Islamic sentiment everywhere. Though not necessarily substantial or deep, it resonates, in particular, with bourgeois westernized immigrants who are suddenly forced to be on the wrong side of privilege, prejudice and acceptance. buy here

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

A stoic, controlled account of the actual events of the day, it is the only work so far that recreates with accuracy the smell, sound and taste of a catastrophic moment. It is a truly humane American narrative and does not resort to cheap patriotism. DeLillo remains undefeated as the most exacting creator of a choral protagonist, which is the only way to depict an event of such monumental meaning. buy here

9/11 and aftermaths: mishra tells it like it is

I will let Pankaj Mishra do all the talking through this truly excellent piece on 9/11 and its violent aftermaths. It comes under the guise of a review of Jason Burke's book, "The 9/11 Wars." If you don't have time to read the entire article, below are some quotations that will give you plenty of food for thought:

"The sense of mad overkill, intellectual as well as military, grows more oppressive when you realise that, though al-Qaida murdered many people on 9/11 and undermined American self-esteem, the capacity of a few homicidal fanatics to seriously harm a large and powerful country such as the US was always limited. There is nothing surprising about their spectacular lack of success in rousing Muslim masses anywhere (as distinct from inciting a few no-hopers into suicidal terrorism). Their fantasy of a universal caliphate was always more likely to provoke fierce Muslim resistance than the globalising project of the west. Over-reaction to al-Qaida was by far the bigger danger to the west throughout the last decade; and, as it happened, groups of rootless conspirators, initially cultishly small and marginal, quickly proliferated around the world as a direct result of western military and ideological excesses after 9/11."

Pankaj Mishra

"The wars for which a small group of people in the west, essentially members of the military and their families, bore a disproportionate sacrifice were largely invisible to the rest. Unlike in the 1960s, the anti-war movement failed to animate political life; and there wasn't even a significant countervailing "support-the-troops" attempt at civic patriotism. "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths?" Barbara Bush, mother of George W, exasperatedly asked. "Why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" Why indeed? The wars were kept invisible by such willed ignorance as well as governments eager not to advertise their high costs."