Indeed. All the posts from women here (Kelley, Jane, Maggie, & me) and honorary girl & my favorite male feminist Michael Hoover focused more on the contexts (the production of images of women + collective male consumption of them + how existing modes of consumption of female images serve sexist male bonding) than anything else. The locker-room ambience of the SI thread is what we are criticizing first and foremost. And that is why I retitled the thread 'Giggly Guys.'
>>And I was merely giving voice to a general (but not really casual)
>>impression I got after some time in my native Netherlands, where sex,
>>sexuality and feminism seemed to me to align and interact in very different
>>ways than I was used to here.
Apparently Rob hasn't seen Marleen Gorris's _De Stilte rond Christine M. [A Question of Silence]_ (1983). The most famous feminist film from the Netherlands, as far as I know. Here's a very brief commentary on Gorris's works (and male reception of her works):
Files, Gemma. "AND YOU THOUGHT ANTONIA'S LINE MADE MEN LOOK STUPID."
***** Right up to the moment before writer/director Marleen Gorris' Antonia's Line won the Best Foreign Film Oscar this year, you could still kind of hear the whining: A chorus of guys coast to coast complaining that this otherwise heart-warming little generational drama from the Netherlands portrays them as either potential rapists, unperceptive doofi or passive dupes of the strong, fecund, infinitely resilient female characters around them.
As we near the end of a decade during which feminism has become the real "f-word", Gorris' cinematic championship of her own gender (and her not-so-subtext, which implies that women could happily choose to live their whole lives without male support or companionship) obviously strikes some people in the audience -- especially those with penises -- as infinitely threatening.
Well, gentleman, the good folks down at Cinematheque have taken Gorris' new Oscar-winning status as an excuse to launch a retrospective of her earlier works. And if you think Antonia's Line seems "anti-male," then you ain't seen nothin' yet.
It all began in 1982, with A Question Of Silence (June 7, 8:45 p.m.), a story about three women (a harried housewife, a divorced waitress, an "old maid" secretary) who suddenly unite one day to kick, stab and genitally mutilate an annoying male shopkeeper to death in a Bacchic frenzy. A female psychiatrist visits them in prison, bent on assessing their mental fitness to stand trial. After much deliberation, she pronounces them sane -- just fed up with a world in which the male few feel free to run roughshod over the female many. And none of the male lawyers and male cops involved, the male judge or her own husband, seem even vaguely able to understand why.
Legitimate and reasonably objective case study, or puerile feminist revenge fantasy? Gorris plays both ends against the middle, refusing to let anyone involved off the hook, a pattern that continues in her next two films, Broken Mirrors (June 8, 8:45 p.m.) from 1983/84 and 1989's The Last Island (June 12, 8:45 p.m.), which also pit female practicality against men's incapacity to enjoy anything without wanting to possess it.
In The Last Island, a group of plane-crash survivors stranded on a desert island slowly realize they may well be the last people left on earth. The male members of the group immediately begin to pressure the sole fertile female, a Canadian lawyer, to breed and perpetuate the human race. "You said you wanted life on this island," she cries, despairingly, as she watches them squabble and destroy each other. "So why couldn't you just live? Is that so hard?"
Whether Gorris actually thinks men are superfluous is debatable. But she's certainly concerned enough with the sexes' apparent inability to maintain any sort of happy medium to keep on turning out movies which examine the problem with style, grace and appealing surfeit of warm, wry, self-deprecating humor. ***** (http://www.eye.net/Arts/Movies/Features/FF/1996/ff0606a.htm)
I don't see 'self-deprecating' humor in Gorris's work, but the above is a good enough summary of her films and how they are perceived and even positively hated by many men. Judging by her work, Gorris is not likely to agree with Rob that "relations between men and women were much less strained, socially scripted, and hierarchical [in the Netherlands] than here [Australia?]."
One important thing that the reviewer misses is that in _A Question of Silence_, the shopkeeper that three women murder is a _boutique owner_, thus symbolizing how capital profits from the power of sexist relations and ideology to shape appropriate images of women and even our bodies themselves.
Yoshie