So on the cool pop-media analysis blog Overthinking It, a blogger named Stokes pulls some cool insights into a reboot of the schlocky 80's movie Teen Werewolf and its 2011 reboot as an MTV series. First insight was that werewolf stories are metaphors for the myriad disruptions of male puberty, from crazy hormone-driven emotional fluxes to disturbingly rapid growth to unwelcome physical reactions to, well, hair growing all over your face. The second was that while the original Teen Wolf saw transformation more as a metaphor for boys' uncontrollable awkwardness, the reboot has a much darker view of emergence into manhood.

In the original movie, this would have been fodder for the comedy of humiliation.  Oh no!  SHE’S GOING TO REALIZE THAT I HAVE AN ERECTION!  Must… fight… embarrassment!  And the important lesson, of course, is that eventually you have to realize that these sexual drives are part of who you are, and if the girl likes you enough she’s not going to mind even a little.  But in the darker and edgier Teen Wolf reboot, the threat is not that she’s going to notice — rather, it’s that he’s going to lose control and tear her limb from limb.  Taking its (deeply sexist and problematic) cue from the Twilight series, Teen Wolf: The Next Generation suggests that teenaged boys are seething cauldrons of hormonal lust that are always a whisker away from exploding into a whirlwind of passionate, bodice-ripping… well, rape.  There’s not a nice or polite way to put it; that’s what the subtext is about.  And it’s meant to be sexy, which is kind of gross.

Source: Overthinking It

It's a very cool insight. First, because of the possibility that werewolf stories could be used to help young men through the transition into getting a handle on their new assets and liabilities. As Stokes puts it,

The old Teen Wolf movie is fundamentally about being unhappy with the very bodily nature of one’s own developing body.  It’s not body horror in the classic sense, where what you are becoming is abominable and terrifying to look on.  Rather, the monstrous body is funny looking. Not terrifying but mortifying, embarrassing.  Teen Wolf is also about getting past that – realizing that along with funny odors and hair-every-which-where, puberty also maybe gives you some enhanced basketball skills.  And maybe members of the opposite sex aren’t as weirded out by your new body as you are yourself. And eventually once you’ve grown up completely, you start shaving and wearing deodorant, and your testosterone-crazed fight-or-flight reflexes calm down a little, and you make out with your childhood friend rather than the unattainable cheerleader type, opting for love and companionate marriage rather than a more juvenile romance based on lust and status.

The second insight, the one that ties in with the Twilight series, is that instead of providing boys with proxies that can help them resolve their own issues the new series serves the purpose of teaching girls to process their feelings about boys in decidedly anti-feminist ways.  Because that whole "ZOMG, if he didn't control himself literally every second Edward could totally rip her throat out... because that's what love is" is... sort of the worst possible gender expectations-setting you can imagine.

Because, seriously, it sounds like the 80s version had it exactly right.  The self-control most boys are struggling with is the intense desire not to humiliate themselves with testosterone's... um... byproducts.  If the message girls are getting instead is that boys are struggling not to (romantically!) massacre them it's...

It's going to create some disconnects that just aren't going to serve either boys or girls once they do leave puberty.

Oh, and extra credit in the "wrong message" department?  In the new version not only does becoming a werewolf fail to make the victim even more of a confused loner than he was before...

I find most of the “good side” of the protagonist’s wolfification pretty ugly to begin with — there’s nothing wrong with enhanced senses or physical speed in and of themselves, but he quickly and cheerfully uses his gifts to turn himself into a fratty douche.  The character’s name is Scott, but I kept wanting to call him Chad, or possibly just “Broseph.”   Who knows, maybe over the course of the series he’ll learn a valuable lesson about not being a hyper-competitive Type-A jagoff all the damn time.

In other words it turns you into a privileged asshole who... will rip his girlfriend's throat out any time he actually loses control.

Charming!

While we’re on the subject of sex-related vocabulary, Holly of The Pervocracy reminds me of a tic that annoys me to no end.

I hate it when people call women “females.” I have one friend who does it because she was in the military and it was standard practice there, and occasionally I’ll say it when I specifically mean biological females rather than women, but 98% of the time it’s douchebaggery. Rule of thumb: if you say “females and males” it’s okay, but if you say “females and guys/men,” you’re probably a douchebag.

She said it here.

It really isn’t exclusive to misogynists: for instance the otherwise perfectly accessible bell hooks has the same completely annoying tic going the other way, and as Holly says they do the same thing to both genders in the military and, to a lesser extent, in police organizations.*

In the military or police it makes a little sense to put that layer of abstraction — it’s way easier to see or say (or, yikes, do!) when you can say something like “minor female down” rather than “a little girl is badly injured.” But whereas that sort of psychological separation might make it easier for soldiers, police, firefighters, or EMTs remain dispassionate in emotionally-charged situations, that kind of distancing is problematic in the extreme when you humanize one sex but “animalize” or objectify another.

At the very least it sounds alienated. At worst it sounds ominously creepy.

* While walking through a shopping mall I once overheard a mall cop pretentiously instructing a janitor that there had been some sort of disturbance “in the females’ restroom.”

fMhLisa of Feminist Mormon Housewives stands up for feminism and men (I’ve mildly reformatted her post)

So there’s this one debate, you may be familiar with it . . .

One side of this debate says stuff like:

• Feminists hate men.
• Feminists attack men.

• Feminists want to weaken men.

And I hear many of these same people saying:

• Men only think (or care) about one thing.
• Men  don’t have a strong moral compass and need women to (gently) guide them to do the right thing.
• A man’s pride controls him, so don’t bruise it by being bossy.  It’s okay to get your way, just so long as he thinks it’s his idea and feels strong and manly about it.
• Men are visual, they can’t help it, so cover up because he can’t control himself.
• Men are simple creatures who need food, sex, sports, money, and fast cars.  Don’t expect him to have (or express!) a complicated inner life with emotions and crap.
• Men are naturally less righteous than women, so they need this here God-powered crutch gift to raise them up (nearly) to our level.
• Men have to think they’re in charge, or they quit trying. So we’ll just tell’em they preside (even if we really are equal partners), and let’em assign someone to say the prayer.
• You also gotta let men have all the leadership positions, cause otherwise they’ll stay home and watch football.

• If we don’t let men have the priesthood (and make the money, and protect us from spiders ‘n rapists), then women wouldn’t really need men. (Since other than that all they’re good for is sperm donors?)

So wait . . .

Who is it that attacks, weakens, and hates men?

I nicked her whole post from here.

An even better question? Who created the stereotype of men that feminists are supposed to hate so much? Anti-feminists hate, fear, and are strongly disgusted by men. Feminists? Exasperated sometimes, when we men mistake anti-feminist stereotypes for compliments maybe. But hate? Not so much. Certainly not the way anti-feminists hate us.

Following up on my previous post about problems with blaming the victim: You might have noticed that throughout the post it looked like I was assuming all rape and sexual assaults are committed by men.

Actually, no, I’m not making that assumption at all — if for no other reason then because when I was roughly pre-school age I was physically sexually assaulted by a roughly middle-school aged girl. (And, of course, there are plenty of other reasons.) I also wasn’t making that assumption even the vast preponderance of sexual assaults really actually happen to be perpetrated by men. I wasn’t even making an assumption because narratives about male predation are even more prevalent than actual male predation.

Nope. I made the calculated decision to speak about men in the context of “she asked for it” victim blaming because…

you ready?...

When a woman sexually assaults or rapes someone — a man, another woman, a child, whatever, you know what they don’t say?

They don’t say “well, the victim was asking for it.”

They don’t say “well, she just couldn’t help herself.”

You know, the way they do when a man sexually assaults or rapes someone.

What do they say instead when a woman does it? That she’s mentally ill? That she’s traumatized from her own abuse (as, incidentally, I strongly suspect was the case with the girl who assaulted me.) That, in other words, she was broken, damaged, crazy, or otherwise not an otherwise perfectly normal person who’s hormones just got away from her in the face of irresistable provocation.

In other words when a woman does it there’s never any question about who’s at fault. No question that she deliberated, made a decision, and then acted on that decision. No question that it’s the assailant’s fault and not her victim.

Yes, yes, if you thought about that for very long you notice the bitter irony that whether as victim or assailant rape is always held that the woman is at fault. Believe me that hasn’t escaped me but while it’s not a small issue it’s one that’s heavily dependent on the main point of this post:

Notice how the characterizations of women perpetrators do not mitigate the assumptions about men’s inherent weakness and sub-human dependability and responsibility inherent in the standard “blame the victim” scripts mentioned in the preceding post: in one important regard women are held responsible for their victimization because men aren’t expected to be responsible in the first place.

And, once again, they say feminists hate men!