It’s Sethghazi! The internets is teeming with horrified reports! No, not that Zero Dark Thirty is a joint Hollywood-CIA production that is more domestic PSYOPS than entertainment. No, NOT the rallying around the movie musical Chicago –from ten years ago, that no one cares about, no one is talking about – because it was produced by the guys producing the Oscars. No, it was the host that somehow went beyond the usual awkward imbalance of celebrating and embarrassing a self-indulgent industry in the same show.
Breaking news: White Feminist Female Misses Point, Offended! The Deadline Hollywood lady lorded over a live Oscar night evisceration, sounding like an old man in the balcony that really needed to pee. Nikki Fink, you are a lost cause – you can’t go back and repeat 6th grade at your age without being bullied, so how’s it go, waking up every morning, clutching your pearls, struggling to remain relevant despite being constantly wrong? If Brett Easton Ellis smoking you out of the secret location of your proto-Dalek installation weren’t so entertaining, everything about you would just be sad. When you’ve been physically grafted onto a computer of some kind so as to fulfill your destiny of exterminating what tiny sliver of civility might still exist in Hollywood and make a real-life Hunger Games– and our eventual wholesale demise as both a culture and a species– perhaps then you’ll get your comeuppance for riding powerful people’s dicks like Seth’s into notoriety. Also, please quit your day job.
Imagine having to play court jester for 4 hours of self-congratulatory liberal propaganda, for a bunch of people who are – thanks to their looks and luck – living in a bubble of adoration. Imagine playing satirical personae spouting ironic truisms coming out with a boobs song and filling in the blanks of the super earnest, self-righteous Gatsby style bacchanalia, and rather than folks saying – yes! Yes! Leading ladies *have* to whip their tits out to get the plum roles! Thanks for having the balls to say that out loud in front of a a billion people, you are eviscerated as a misogynistic frat boy, a steaming pile of awful thoughts from the most warped, regressive assholish mind in American history! A spiraling toilet of ironic sexism for fun and profit! Misogyny personified, boiling over into a level of woman-hating that had been till now undiscovered by Science, the Higgs Boson of misogyny! The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Sarah Palin’s lady parts, the crucifixion and, sure, Hitler! And worse, imagine being held personally responsible for future DEATHS OF WOMENZ! Because you *gasp*, made JOKES… about WOMEN! And that’s unacceptable, why won’t someone do some thing against him? Why did they allow him to spread his filth, oh the humanity!
There was a dig at George Clooney via 9-year old Quvenzhané Wallis. Translation: Simple math indicates that Clooney doesn’t date women older than 25. I guess adding 9 + 16 – math is hard! Oh no! I just insulted women by insinuating they can’t do basic maths! The Fake Outrage Machine (FOM) will make this comment go viral ! ARE WE NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE FUN OF GEORGE CLOONEY NOW?
It’s interesting how many of these “Seth Macfarlane is a misogynist” complaints emit the actual context of that “boobs” song. If this song is an example of misogyny, then why the need to leave out or misrepresent so much context to try and make that point? I believe it was presented as a joke about fat Captain Kirk coming from the future to warn Seth against doing something dumb and terrible that had gotten him exactly the kind of bad press that he’s ironically getting now….right? Isn’t the whole idea of the song that it’s puerile and stupid – exactly the kind of thing the hand wringers were worried he’d do? Instead of acknowledging the existence of satire and parody, critics way of describing the joke is as if she went to see “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” and came out declaring that the Pythons are all staunch anti-abortion Catholics who truly believe “every sperm is sacred” because there’s an outrageous song with that title in the film.
There’s a really, really complicated idea there, of a joke being on the perpetrator, not the victim, putting a vulgar ironic twist on everyday situations without actually condoning the action. Does the scolding tone of indignant, unevolved ’90s feminism really say boobs are off limits? Is it the “comfort” of paternalistic protection or the roughness and freedom of equality? No, really. What about missing the entire point? That’s the joke. The intended point is that the joke is squarely on Seth MacFarlane himself, purposefully focussing on actresses’ cleavage at his own expense in intentionally the wrong situation. Awesome feigning such offense from an industry built on the exploitation of women and minorities. But the FOM must keep moving. Doesn’t matter the context, the FOM is a full time job nowadays. Here we are again. Some old FOM’s reactionary, mainstream not thought out opinions.
Furthermore, surely women who demand big bucks for taking their tops off, profiting from their jugs, are letting down the feminist cause? Merely making a self-effacingly puerile but utterly harmless joke about boobs – it’s just breasts – the humor of which lies in Hollywood’s thinly veiled justification of nudity in the name of ‘art’? What if it had been a song about male actors getting their dicks out there – would that be more or less immature or inappropriate? The boob song was a perfect example of highlighting how Hollywood exploits women in movies by having them nude just to pander to the lower echelon of society. Remember, behind every exposed big screen boob is a little man clutching his little gold man who didn’t insist that the tits get put away.
Sweet Jesus, people, I can think of a dozen media outlets off the top of my head that make a living out of degrading female celebrities by discussing their weight, clothing, cleavage etc… I’ve heard far far more misogynist hateful things on episodes of that loathsome Two and a Half Men. And that’s the number one show for god fearing middle America by a landslide. But, The “Academy” holds itself to a very high standard. The Oscars, last I checked, were watched by something like a billion people worldwide. The planet sure loves American movies!
The site Jezebel rails against Seth’s misogynistic boobs song on the very same page that sports the above header.
The fact that anyone can get a hardon over a “saw your boobs” song is confusing, to say the least, considering how often the cameras zeroed in on cleavage, and all the links about “breast dressed” and the Anne Hathaway nipplegate on the red carpet. I know people who ONLY watch the Oscar’s for the sideboob and cleavage shots. The awards has a massive obsession with tits. Tits or GTFO. They don’t care if you’re a dude, they want to see boobies. They’ll happily just pretend you’re a waifish Malaysian hooker. I would almost confuse this confusing behavior with the repressed, scolding Conservatives, but Hollywood knows that “right-leaning audiences” avoid movies in favor of teevee (unless the movies involve car chases, cars exploding, car sex, cars that talk, car driving moonshiners, car gun battles or cars with pets tied to the top).
The Huffington Post, upholding the time-honored traditions of journalism by raising the level of civic discourse, devotes an entire vertical (web-dork-speak for “section”) to SIDEBOOB, a homage to Peter Griffin’s public access TV show: “The Sideboob Hour”. A Family Guy joke became the buzzworthy addition to a Pulitzer Prize winning site, and the heavens opened up raining Fonzis on motorcycles and shark tanks. I mean … seriously. They have an entire sideboob section. Not a feature, but a entire SECTION, bringing you all the important albeit aggregated sideboob news; more in-depth features, the sideboob longreads, targeted at the coveted 13-year-old-virgin-boy demographic. The next time Huffington rails against sexism and misogyny, will someone please take away that Pulitzer the site received? Puleeeze??Hey, to everyone who gets all excited looking at sideboob pics: there is actual porn on the internet, for free even. And even if you wanted to obsess on celebrity, there are topless stills and clips of all of the above-mentioned women easily found on the internet. To the ladies: internet “side cock” discussions seem to be centered around guns (what else?).
It’s great to be aware of your own sexism/racism, but to apply monikers to someone to whom you know next to nothing about on the back of one off-form evening is incredibly vulgar. It aint easy being a Hollywood Outsider on the Big Stage. It’s clear that the Hollywood Elite – Brangelinas and Sir Clooneys – do not consider Seth MacFarlane one of THEM and that, for all Hollywoods talk about individual achievement and self-made Makers, they have a serious boner for the licking the bootstraps of an inherited Hollywood aristocracy. Then there’s the neat indie set who loves Louis CK and Sarah Silverman but hates Seth. The same borderline sexism/racism is hilarious when they do it – “edgy” and “pulls no punches” – but predictable and tawdry when Seth MacFarlane does it, no, actually it makes him the antichrist. They simply cannot comprehend an anti-hipster who makes them uncomfortable by routinely mocking the modern Williamsburg/Echo Park-centric pop culture Whatever Generation. They cannot wrap their heads around the idea of an unapologetic nerd who dismissed Rock n Roll in favor of showtunes, who was putting on musicals in high school while they were posing as punk rockers. Someone doesn’t couch his comedy in an inaccessible style, must suck, right? Ricky Gervais was given immunity for his cruel picking-on off actors at the Golden Globes, and Tina and Amy do can a song about how actors have to whip it out in films. Really, folks, how are Seth’s jokes about purposely getting the flu to don a gown any different than Amy Poehler’s joke at the Golden Globes about starving herself for six weeks to fit into her dress?
Young viewers the Oscar were targeting would rather watch paint dry than suffer through Brangelinas leg bone and Billy Crystal, quipping through a stretched and polished and grinning skull, like an overexcitable Grim Reaper, like watching Leno, which is like watching an endless loop. the soft twee drivel that makes the culture scene flat and grey and the ratings plummet year after year after year. 40 million people watched the Oscars, up 11% in the young dudes demo. Now let’s see if the same folks who ranted about Seth take the time to thank him for holding onto the viewers/fans that are propping up their declining theatrical business. It’s hilarious that the interwebs is teaming with complaints that the show seemed to have been put together by a bunch of seventh grade boys – precisely the demographic that ABC was longing to snare. I assume Seth was hired precisely to invoke disapproving frowns on Hollywood elite’s faces, to bait feminists and political activists, and provoke all of us to surge onto twitter – and like moths to the flame they went! Like lemmings to the sea. Folks, you were used as living breathing adverts for the Academy Awards, from your first tweet to your last article telling you breast joke, from that the guy who brought you ‘Family Guy’, is ammunition for the case that misogyny is everywhere. The only result from you and every other enraged tweeter/blogger furiously venting your rage into increasingly meaningless hashtags is that the Oscars will be talked about for six weeks longer than they would otherwise. Meanwhile, the rest of us get on with life.
Aaaannnnd it’s all just another example of why American media (like American political satire, apparently) will end up in garage sales and evolutionary cul-de-sacs of humor. This is what it takes to be a liberal elite today. My follow up posts will be: “Feeling Uncomfortable: Who Needs it?” followed by “Big Ideas: Why I hate them.” Next up: “Newfangled Technology: Not As Good As Everything Back in My Day” and for the grand finale “Young People: You Call That Music”.
We saw their boobs. We all did. Big whoop. Now, get off my lawn.
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