Hoping to score a few publicity points in what seems to be the worst magazine market in human history, the Neanderthal rag Maxim is teaming up with bimbo-bible Cosmopolitan to declare the war of the sexes over.
The truce was Maxim’s idea, and no wonder — after all, the caricatured men to which they pander are regularly getting their asses kicked all over the culture, from Janet Jackson videos to art-house films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Business of Strangers. Online, it’s easy to see the enduring affection for Valerie Solanas, shooter of Andy Warhol and author of the SCUM Manifesto, which declared, "To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.... The male is, by his very nature, a leech, an emotional parasite and, therefore, not ethically entitled to live, as no one has the right to live at someone else’s expense." The Manifesto is reproduced on a dozen Web sites in several languages by adorers who agree with the San Francisco Bay Guardian columnist who wrote last year, "I may not follow in her footsteps, but I definitely light a candle for her on occasion, as do many women. She may be a wacky, somewhat addled saint, but she’s a bit of a saint to me."
Clearly, a rapprochement about toilet-seat positions won’t go far toward dampening such anger. Before any gender truce is possible, we need to figure out why so many women are so enraged, and why the image of a frenzied female attacking a callow guy has become such a media staple.
It all STARTED innocently enough, with cute, courageous post-feminist icons like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Powerpuff Girls, Tomb Raider’s Laura Croft, and Charlie’s Angels. These are girls on the side of good, able to get along with the nice guys who came their way but unafraid to take on villains of either gender. Buffy never uses her awesome strength against men who were merely caddish — she saves it for homicidal monsters.
Of course, for many women who know the sharp, desolate fear of walking home on empty streets late at night, it’s viscerally satisfying to watch Buffy demolish the (usually) male demons lurking in dark alleys. Yet creator Joss Whedon never casts the fights as explicit sex wars. In one episode last year, Buffy gets her heart trampled by a campus player, but viewers hoping that she would give him a kung-fu comeuppance faced disappointment. Instead, later in the season, she saves his life.
Lately, though, girl power has gone awry. Now, men are being punished not for violence, but for betraying promises they may never have made. Take the recent Janet Jackson "Son of a Gun" video, where, backed by a posse of stone-faced glamazons, Miss Jackson uses telekinetic powers to lay waste to a hapless guy while a sample from Carly Simon’s "You’re So Vain" loops ominously.
Then there’s Pink’s 2001 video "You Make Me Sick," in which the scarlet-haired singer rams her motorcycle through the plate-glass wall of an apartment belonging to the man who did her wrong.
In mainstream movies, there’s Vanilla Sky’s Cameron Diaz trying to kill both herself and Tom Cruise because he dissed her after their sexual relationship. On the indie circuit there’s Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles assaulting and degrading a corporate headhunter for his supposed sexual offenses — or just his potential to commit them — in The Business of Strangers.
This new wave of violence against men is no longer about empowered heroines protecting the world from metaphorical rapists and pillagers. This is about raw, crazy, Fatal Attraction–style vengeance. But in this era of the swinging single girl, of hook-ups and friendly fucks and Sex and the City, what exactly are women getting revenge for?
