Quick notes from Monday

[jlh]

Don't you love it when Colbert screws with Wikipedia?

What I find most interesting about these Equus promotional photos is that despite all the blah blah blah about the play being quite serious in how nudity is used (all true) the producers have clearly decided to sell it as "see Dan Radcliffe in his debut as teenage heartthrob, naked with a horse and a girl." I find it sort of funny in a way to see all the yadda yadda on my flist about the bad place and all of that. I mean, these images have been created specifically in order to make one say, "oh my," so feeling that one should actively resist based on the age of the subject is sort of, well, whatever. I don't have a problem with some 50 year old guy saying, "wow, those pictures of Britney from Rolling Stone when she was 16 were really sexy" because they were, and they were supposed to be. So to assign "appropriateness" to reactions based on the viewer's age, as if only those younger than 20 are allowed to drool over sexy pictures doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't have much to do with seeing him in person, without makeup/lighting/hairstyling/poses/horses/etc. As I think mahoni infamously said, if he showed up in the middle of my living room looking like that I'd probably say, "Aren't you cold?" But maybe it has to do with the difference between women looking at men and men looking at women, that we have to do some hokey-pokey to distance ourselves from being the equivalent of dirty old men, when the boys are pretty unapologetic about thinking that teenage girls are hot. We should know as well as they do that there's a big difference between finding an intentionally sexy picture of someone underage, well, sexy, and trolling the high schools for dates.

I think any hope of Studio 60 being good in any way depends on how this two-parter ends. I'm irritated that Jordan thought that Danny felt sorry for her, and that's why she was embarrassed by his attentions, because it continues Sorkin's whole "women don't know what they want until the right man tells them" thing. I'm irritated with Matt's immature obsessiveness, though I would be much more so if he weren't played by the adorable Perry. I'm hopeful that Harriet will finally tell Matt to fuck off because enough already, and also because I'm not really sure that he loves her as much as he wants to sort of control her and feed her "talent" which isn't the same thing at all. (Never mind that it's close enough to Sorkin's actual relationship with Kristin Chenoweth that it has the feel of him making her say what he wants her to say, which, ew.) I'm irritated that Tom was stupid enough to take advice from Matt on dating (like he's an authority) and fucked things up with Lucy.

I'm irritated with the whole Zheng's crazy daughter storyline, especially with the entirely ridiculous "censorship" plot in the background, even if it does give more airtime for Jack sans Jordan, and I love Jack. (In the real world once a time delay on the news got out, which would be immediately because NBS's own journalists would be pissed off and leak it, there would be a firestorm of criticism and bad publicity that would completely overwhelm anything else that NBS was doing and the board wouldn't be happy about that, either, so I find the entire thing pretty goddamned ridiculous.) And don't even get me started on the whole snake thing.

As for Simon, well, I get that he's pissy, and I'm mostly with him, but he really needs to find a less aggressive way to put forth his POV. Also, Sorkin needs to find him something to do other than being black. That said, I wish that they had said "small house of Uncle Thomas" which what Tuptim called it in The King and I; I can't imagine that "little house of Uncle Thomas" was an unintentional botch since it's a famous reference, so is Sorkin saying that he doubts that Simon knows his Rodgers & Hammerstein or was it a reference to the Laura Ingalls Wilder or what the hell was that?

Comments

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much of it has to do with the taboo against women perving on men in general, and how much of it has to do with the maternal incest taboo being stronger than the paternal one, and how much of it has to do with seeing all women as already potentially maternal. I see all these women doing the math to say, he is young enough to be my son, but I never see men doing that. And it's all ironic since when we think "sexual predator" we think older man, young girls, and maybe that's because that border is so fucked up, we're so aware of how sexualized young girls are, how our sexual ideal is really pretty much a 15-year-old girl.

But the marked difference for boys growing up is valid, esp in their faces. I'm trying to think of male child stars who weren't baby faced adults and all I'm getting is Seth Green, maybe River Phoenix. Though Leo seems to be growing out of it now.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

In Dan's case the anxiety in fandom seems to focus specifically on his age, though -- fandom is awfully good at overcoming any general taboo against women perving on men. :)

Interesting about the incest taboos -- I suspect they work differently in the two cases. I suppose a father's protectiveness of his daughters is based on an acute awareness of their sexual potential -- he's hypervigilant because he thinks it's "natural" in some sense for other men to want them sexually and to exploit them in a way that would be harmful to them. I wonder if the maternal taboo works the same way, because the vibe I get from some of the Dan comments seems based on a rejection or discomfort with his sexuality itself, a preference to continue seeing him as a child. Otherwise, of course, there's traditionally less of a sense that early sexual experience is harmful to a boy, compared to a girl (unless it's homosexual experience, which supposedly would skew his normative long-term sexual development.)

So the women who feel really squicked by seeing Dan sexualized (I'm not talking about the ones who simply don't find him sexy) don't seem to be protecting Dan, it seems to be about something else, maybe. And I don't really feel sure about what that "something else" could be. I'd trust your intuitions much more than mine, here. Could there be an uneasy mix of desire/transgression about being a mature and psycholgically dominant woman who captures and "tames" a boy's sexuality before it can develop into something more independent and threatening? Is there some secret shame about the "Mrs. Robinson" role, so that falling into it would feel like an emotional failure or a form of immaturity? Do people just feel freaked out about how the boy/man transition reflects the passage of time, reminds them of everyone's inevitable aging? I'm out of my depth here, I just don't know.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I was going to say the same thing. It seems like women either do or know they're expected to relate to little boys in a different way, and that makes a difference. Men are happy ignoring little girls unless they are their daughters, and then once they hit puberty they're acceptable sex objects.

Women more generally value the child, which is why they can squee over these boys no matter what age they are. They can think Dan's adorable and then think he's adorable in a different way. (My mother called me today to ask if I'd seen Extras and was all about "When did he get so big?") It's almost easier if you don't care or notice until it's a sex object. For the women first they're maternal and then they're like quasi-maternal with all the figuring out of how much older they are and all that.

And it's true it's ironic that BD talked about lust being threatening, but it depends on who it's threatening to. If women are weirded out by it they seem to be threatened about their own lust if they're not sure about the object being appropriate. But the male lust for young girls is probably a lot more threatening in reality.