tweets on magic mike
September 5, 2013 § Leave a comment
I watched Magic Mike early this year and was troubled by it, and in a fit of earnestness composed some grumpy tweets about what I thought, and posted none of it up except, I think, the link to the Joshua Clover article. Recently someone was talking to me about movies and this person had seen Magic Mike, and “as a feminist” was thrilled about how it centered “female desire”, which is something that a lot of people have said about the movie, I think? Or at least that’s how a lot of discussion on it was framed. And I’d have to agree with Clover that this film is not at all interested in women, or “female desire”, whatever that means — I’ve used that phrase before, too, but now it makes no sense to me, and so it made me newly irritated with the film.
- Yes: “In the sex work movie, men get happy endings.” Joshua Clover on Magic Mike (& Step Up Revolution) http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/dance-dance-revolution-20130204
- Wonder if Magic Mike is entertaining because it doesn’t take sex work seriously when done by men. Think it wants to take precarity seriously
- but this is undermined by inability to show how precarity structures lives when focus is on hot white male leads who seem to be having “fun”.
- It’s a weird movie & completely unsexy since it is about sex work. So the comments about how this is the sexiest movie ever? Perplexing.
- How to unpack the layers of wrong in commentaries that celebrate this film for catering to “female desire” without acknowledging the work that produces it
- Talking about male sex work in a not-Soderbergh situation, in a dehumanising capitalist system, female desire comes at what expense?
- Not to mention what happens when it’s First World women and Third World men. But here the main leads are conveniently white.
- Is this what liberal feminism means when it talks about “equality”
- “despite its stylized hetero-swinger proclivities, the film is interested in men”–yes, which is why this is strange: http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=956
- Her comments on Heti are astute but MM doesn’t “play with female fantasies of submission” so much as affirm men’s fantasies of dominance…
- Which I suppose is contrasted with how their material lives are out of their control/in capitalism’s hands — thus, not about female fantasies.
- Because yeah Alex Pettyfer is unemployed but at the end of his first performance he gets a blowjob and an actual job out of it.
- Meaning, it you’re an attractive heterosexual man and you’re lucky enough to be a sex worker in a film
- with an attractive heterosexual female audience — jackpot!
- Heterosexual relations between thin, attractive white people. Rinse and repeat.
- How do they know which woman to pluck out of the crowd, who would enjoy being on stage with a strange man’s groin in her face? Important q
- I mean, just because you show up to see men gyrate does not mean you want to be gyrated on. Or do you? What is “consent” in this case?
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