tweets on magic mike

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.

1. 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
2. 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
3. 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”.
4. 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.
5. 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
6. Talking about male sex work in a not-Soderbergh situation, in a dehumanising capitalist system, female desire comes at what expense?
7. Not to mention what happens when it’s First World women and Third World men. But here the main leads are conveniently white.
8. Is this what liberal feminism means when it talks about “equality”
9. “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
10. 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…
11. Which I suppose is contrasted with how their material lives are out of their control/in capitalism’s hands — thus, not about female fantasies.
12. 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.
13. Meaning, it you’re an attractive heterosexual man and you’re lucky enough to be a sex worker in a film
14. with an attractive heterosexual female audience — jackpot!
15. Heterosexual relations between thin, attractive white people. Rinse and repeat.
16. 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
17. 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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