Britters.

Kit Kittredge, a film I have never seen, nor a dolly I’ve ever played with, recently arrived in theatres and it blew away the competition.  According to the the New York Times, this little juggernaut of a chick flick was screened in only five theatres across the country.  Last weekend, the film earned more than $220,000, or nearly $45,000 per screen. (No other movie in the Top 50 last weekend made their studio daddies more than $10,000 per screen.)

That’s pretty hardcore for a girl movie.  Far hardercore than Angelina all scribbled in tats whipping around her assassin’s phallus.  Kit’s box office bank is man’s money.  So, ok, I guess we’ve established that pimpin out girls and women can bring in the dills. Like the Sex and the City movie, this is proof that women can win at the box office without a strap-on glock.

In Sunday’s Times, film critic AO Scott wrote a squinky little piece about how confuthed he is, how ambivalent he feels about these gosh-darned mickthed messages girls are receiving these days.

More like getting fucked by.  Well, perhaps not so dire… but for me a larger, more ominous sign that something is rotten in the state of girlhood is evident right from Scott’s lede: ”TO paraphrase Henry James: It’s a complex fate, being an American girl.” 

My word, you don’t say!  Thanks so much for bringing this to my attention, you being a man and all, so clever and incisive with your logic.  And with such a breadth of learning, book-learning too!  Those James texts are SO heavy, filled with achingly lengthy sentences, my head begins to hurt. 

Okay.  I can cut him some slack, and maybe James too.  But still, I think we need to address the fact that dudes are telling women — specifically little girls — about their own psychic life.  By talking about women and not owning a vadge themselves, they reveal their own inner desires and fears far more than shed light on the difficulties facing those avec le double X.

Quite a lot of hand-wringing is done over girls’ fantasy life.  Scott’s American Girl conundrum for example — it’s not genuine, it’s too commercialized, too sentimental, not sentimental or sanitized enough.  But male fantasies do not receive nearly the same amount of scrutiny.  Our twenty-first century Apatovian man-boy’s inner life is filled with FUN!  Video games, weed, comics (oh! cough! ‘scuse me), graphic novels.  All Fun, with a capital F, entertainment.

Fun male literature receives vaunted treatment, evolves from a dimestore buy into the plummy intellectual’s “novel.”  Even the Metropolitan Museum of Art can attest to this phenomenon, since the Costume Institute has curated a show of sartorial Superheros that shows us, the American public, through our cartoon ideals.  Comics have gone from a fully marketable franchise (action figures, costumes, plastic weaponry, the thin sheaves of paper themselves) into an exalted vision of humanity – a singular glimpse into our (male mostly) fantasy life.  It is regarded as important.  Whereas the American Girl world is demeaned into being a venal, nasty “franchise,” a place that yearns for a place that never existed and gives wittle girls wrong-headed ideas. 

After watching Iron Man, I reflected on how difficult it was for Tony Stark to extricate himself from his super-hero suit.  One of the film’s deficiencies (pointed out by not a few critics) is that viewers must watch the suit’s construction twice, which is less than riveting and more like soldering.  HA!  Just a little welding humor to brighten things up in here!

Anyway, you have to see Tone heaving away on his Iron Man outfit once in an Afghan cave, which is presumably just a stone’s throw from Osama’s.  Then, once he’s safely returned to Malibu, you see him construct a second, more elaborate Iron Man suit, this time in his home’s batcave-like basement.  Presumably his home is just a stone’s throw from Pamela Anderson’s dwelling who would be as eager, if not more so, than Osama to harness the power of Stark’s Iron Man technology. 

So, he zips around and demolishes danger, saves the day, etc etc, and then returns home, only to struggle getting the handmade suit of steel off.

Fighting terrorism single-handedly would drum up quite a thirst, right?  And Tony seems like the sort who would slake his fierce desire for hydration immediately upon returning to homebase, so would he not need to utilize the little Iron boy’s room?  But if he can’t get the outfit off, what would he do?  A superhero would never wet his little Iron pants.  Stumped, I queried a wise friend who apparently had more expansive knowledge of this issue.  He instantly came back to me with a response.

“Well, he’s a genius, right?  He’s sure to have outfitted his suit with a Stadium Pal.”

OF. COURSE.

Just yesterday, I was skimming through a notebook I kept last year for jottings — yes, private jottings, not this exhibitionist shizz I post up here for the attention of, what, the two people I know.  (One being my roommate who hears these gems in real time.  The other, hum… my mom?  Hi, Mommy!)  No, I keep a journal for when I want to mentally masturbate over my own genius.

Ok.  I digress.  One journal entry in particular made me pause.  I’d written down a blog post from Obeastiality.com, Jakob Lodwick’s old blog.  Yes, the Fameball himself, had produced something worthy enough to be translated from pixel into pen and inscribed onto actual, physical A4.

Working in PR, I used to spend an inordinate time on Gawker, etc., reading those goofballs rag on the self-consciously crude Lodwick, who always seemed like pottery that a kindergartener had made — lop-sided, struggled-over, yet kind of precious.  Periodically, I’d scroll through the brilliance Lodwick slung up on Obeastiality, averting my eyes when one of his hood-eyed, semi-nude self-portraits came on the screen.  Jake!  That’s just not nice.

Anyway, I noticed this quotation I pulled from his site:

“A year ago, I would not have believed I’d be posting ten blog posts per day.

Thank you, Tumblr.”

But, really?  Really.  Ten blog posts a day?  Sheesh, ‘ats nuthin.  Your girl Jules got you beat by miles.  Everyday, she’s got ten, minute-to-minute posts of her oh-so-sleepy self in the back of a towncar.  Most certainly in a V-neck.  Always the V-neck, Jake.  Maybe that’s why I find your nude self-portraiture so offensive — you’re not wearing a V-neck.

Not sure really why this post devolved into being about two boring people who document the minutae of their lives when really I wanted to express my frustration with this reblogging bidness.  I mean do we all need to ricochet that photo of the drunken driver plowing through a cycling road-race in Mexico just to feel a collective, tumbled hug?  

But, darned if I don’t love the Obama’s fist pound pic… you likey, too?  Let’s Friend!

As the tidal wave of Sex and the City’s maniacal media coverage has repeatedly over-washed me (billboards, pullcards, TGI Friday’s themed cocktail — what? can’t a woman wash down a blooming onion with a Charlotte Side Car without cackling sneers?), I have developed extremely raisin-like fingers from all the bailing I’ve had to do to prevent from capsizing in this morass of consumerist mindfuck.

I’ve seen the show — I don’t think it’s possible to avoid it. However, I will be avoiding the movie theatre, but not out of a sense superiority. The corrals of overly-dressed women at the cinemaplex should do precisely what pleases them. But, here, let me introduce you to the fly in the lo-cal dip.

The whole Sex and the City concept — the footloose and fancy-free ladies about town, dressed in fashions so backward they’re forward, etc. etc — these women are men in drag. When the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane spews contempt on the film’s vacuous buy buy buy undertoe, seemingly as glaring as a be-chino’ed cameltoe, he doesn’t accurately position his teeny poison pen. His dart attacks women and their hollow little spendthrift hearts that beat for one thing only: labels. But who wrote this film? An openly gay man. A very successful man who has written award-winning work for Will and Grace and Murphy Brown. But he is gay. And one must mention that. Not in a disparaging, back-of-the-hand, bish plz kind of way, but more to rework your take on this rather obese piece of cultural ephemera.

Attacking the film for heavy-handed product placement is obvious and easy. Skewering it because it holds up base female corruption for what it truly is — she only loves you for the customized closet — is blindly moronic. The lives of these women are not the fantasies of millions of double-X-chrom holders. Some of the elements (beautiful shoes, successful careers, multiple orgasms) ring true. But they resonate with everyone. I know plenty of men who collect sneakers like China is going to suddenly start passing child-labor laws and their beloved Nike Lo-top XJazz designed by BAPE won’t be cobbled together by tiny hands any longer. And those are straight guys!

But truly, for so many women, this film doesn’t begin to describe female experience because it only presents a reasonable facsimile of women’s exterior without filling in the juicy parts beneath. It teeters around on skyscraper heels with giant blown-out hair wrapped in couture, but gets the heart of the matter all wrong.