It also featured Idris Elba pausing a lot, a genially likeable turn by the lead Chris Hemsworth, the sort of actor whom it is impossible to gauge if they're any good at acting because they're too charismatic, and, for a summer blockbuster about a muscle-bound space Viking hitting giant robots with a hammer, plenty of feminism, if you're looking for it.
And then it had Tom Hiddleston, of course, who has become a surprise sex symbol amongst those denizens of the internet for whom nothing is sexier than five frames of someone's head jerking upwards on an infinite loop. Which, as it happens, seems to be an awful lot of people. Look at the number of Tom Hiddleston-based tumblrs and you'll see what I mean. Now, I probably have cause to thank Mr. Hiddleston for his lady-success - he went to my university, trod the same boards as me and is similarly poshly educated, and if he keeps the skinny posh Englishman look fashionable I can't complain. But I do find him and his tumblr heartthrob companions like Messers Cumberbatch, Hardy, Smith, Gosling et al irritating for a very specific reason. As a straight guy, I'm really jealous of being able to fancy them.
You see, the recent boom in "thinking woman's pin-up" so exemplified by the Double-First in Classics, threepiece-wearing, rug-cutting, Shakespearean Hiddleston has made me wonder why there has been no equivalent for straight guys. Why the hell aren't there gushing, testosterone-drenched tumblrs devoted to, I don't know, Ruth Wilson? Naomie Harris? Felicity Jones? Natalia Tena? Can you even get posters of these people? Why can't guys get their act together and learn how to drool properly over talented, attractive women in the way that women have come to drool over talented, attractive men (Who mainly keep their clothes on)?
The answer, as usual, is patriarchy. But that's a boring answer, so let's look at it a little further. The accepted position, cemented by every cliché of a teenage boy's bedroom, is that we are interested in pictures of bikini-or-less clad women of a very specific physical type. And that has never really been challenged, even after we grow out of adolescence. Because the teenage guy's bedroom wall of nude calendars and cars is the way we learn about ogling girls, we have come to associate all lust with immaturity once we're fully grown. You will never have conversations, as a straight male with your straight male friends, about how much you fancy a popstar or moviestar, because we haven't been taught how. We've been left with what amounts to "Phwoar! Eh? Eh?" or "look at the x on that", which is a. boring and b. past the age of seventeen, obviously puerile.
Men, it seems, don't really have much of an outlet for fancying women. Oh, they have porn, of course, but it's not really the same thing. And don't dare come up with the "Ah, but Fred, men and women just fancy each other in different ways. Women fantasise about the type of man they will meet, and getting saved by him" bullshit. For one thing, it reduces all men into slavering animals. We aren't, and we do find things like talent and wit and charm and mystery attractive. We just haven't found a way to talk about it yet, and I really wish we did. Because you know what? I quite like the idea of ogling women. Legitimately ogling, in the way that women and gay men could legitimately ogle Thor or James Bond in their gratuitous topless scenes. It definitely has its place - I think it's a nice steam-valve for sexual desire and it's fun to share that moment with friends. But in those films, because the rippling abs were attached to interesting or dangerous characters who drove the plot, not to mention give name to the franchise, it's difficult to claim too much objectification.
Whereas you can't man-squee over Megan Fox, reduced to the level of a plaything, bending over in Transformers. Because it's embarrassing to any thinking person. And that's the problem. Patriarchy is embarrassing. It's even embarrassing, deep down, to non-feminists. It's embarrassing to be reduced to a gurning eleven-year-old by the producers every time an object of desire comes onscreen, and everyone knows it.
What we need are, firstly, more female characters with bite and edge and wit and agency to them. (Also, can half of them be played by Natalia Tena, please?) Secondly, we need to find a way to talk amongst ourselves, men, about why we fancy these characters. Something along the lines of "PHWOAR. I'd like to have an engaged conversation with her about US policy towards Iran before the implicit sexual tension became too much and we eventually fell on each other in a fit of passion. EH? EH?"
This sounds stupid. It shouldn't.
Let's face it, if there were such thing as
fanboy tumblrs, she'd have about 3,000
No comments:
Post a Comment