Photo by Flickr user NorthbyNorthEast. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Soooo….

Following up one last time (for today, anyway) on this post and this one about the detectible outcomes of the dominant paradigm assigning women the role of judge/referee/trophy/yardstick of men’s accomplishment at the expense of their own sexuality.

Skeptical?

Meghan O’Rourke of Slate.com says

...it came as only a small surprise that sunny Katherine Heigl recently told Vanity Fair that Knocked Up is “a little sexist. It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys. ... I had a hard time with it, on some days. I’m playing such a bitch; why is she being such a killjoy?”

O’Rourke’s whole article is pretty thoughtful. Find it here.

Why was her part written as such a killjoy bitch? Well gee, people around the world have lots of things to say about referees, but, um, rarely is one of those things “gee didn’t you love how they keep blowing those whistles?”

Referees exist to be killjoys, to make sure that the actual players can concentrate on the game without too much attention on all those twiddly little rules and, in particular, when two players disagree to judge which one is being playful and which is being naughty.

O’Rourke tries to be fair herself, giving the male author, Judd Apatow, credit for sensitivity to “how romantic expectations ultimately make some women unhappy in marriage. The film deftly shows how squabbling over the distribution of power in a relationship can make love fade as quickly as the new linens.” But, she adds,

If Apatow tries, in Knocked Up, to suggest that guys need to grow up a bit to meet women’s high expectations, he, like his own characters, doesn’t seem to get that maybe there’s a lot more to women than these expectations. You might say his critique is muddied by its own joyful enactment of male high jinks, and the corresponding absence of anything similar on the part of the women. So when Debbie tells Pete that she, too, might want time to watch movies by herself, it seems utterly unconvincing: She seems too focused on the mechanics of family life to do anything that … pointless and solitary.

This disparity is on display in a whole series of recent comedies, from School of Rock to High Fidelity. It’s also powerfully familiar to anyone who follows the so-called Mommy Wars. In that proliferating literature of family friction, women’s lives seem to shrink to a series of pragmatic decisions about achieving balance, while men are concerned with domestic stuff only to the degree that they choose to be. In this regard, Knocked Up is in keeping with the zeitgeist: If, as Heigl delicately put it, the movie is a “little sexist,” that is because it is the natural product of a culture evidently sold on the notion that women are so focused on domestic mechanics that they simply don’t know how to allow themselves the playful inner lives men do, whether they’re free-associating brilliantly with their friends, or lazily absorbed in video games. (The trope cuts both ways, of course: It allows men to be comedic geniuses, but it also means that husbands get portrayed right and left as childish dopes.) Just glance at a book like The Bitch in the House, where female essayists portray their male partners as slouches who don’t get the job done until they’re given a to-do list.

In other words, even in Apatow’s world, women are still refs, judging, and thus earning the resentment, of the men who recruit them… sometimes drag them… into the role!

Once again can we just say how silly this is? How degrading not just to women but to men? How… if men really wanted all the sex we say we do… we’d pick someone else besides you to judge us, to jury us, to measure us to find us worthy or find us (but never you) wanting?

Seriously? What does the word “misogyny” and the phrase “kill the umpire” have in common? Just askin’