So I have an e-date with a certain girl I like in London. We need to buckle down and actually book our little trip to Amsterdam. London is 8 hours away from Portland, which means I'm supposed to stay up and she's supposed to get up early just so we can sync times so we're not stuck emailing while one or the other of us is at work.
Of course it also means tired me and bleary her (or vice versa).
I was dumb enough to decide to watch Kissing Jessica Stein tonight.
I hate that movie. I always hate it.
But I keep forgetting why I so loath it. I mean deeply. It gets beneath my skin.
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
It's a movie about a 28-year-old writer who falls in love with another woman. Same usual coming out drama story.
Except in this movie she ends up being told she's straight and poof that's magically7 it. What's the fucking point of the movie?
I realized tonight it's more than that.
I don't fucking believe she's straight. I mean the whole movie they're focusing on her romance with the other girl, and there's this dude in the background who's supposed to be her one true love, but as the audience you're watching the girls fall for each other and who cares about that dude? Honestly. If I wanted to watch a movie where a girl slowly ends up with a guy after foibles and shenanigans? I'd watch a chick flick.
Moreover the whole girls' breakup bit is thrown in at the very end, and then there's about 5 minutes of epilogue being like "oh but it's all okay, we found her a man....and look? Those girls are still friends! No one hurt." There's no actual respect given to the process of the breakup. If the point of the movie is that they weather a breakup and become friends, show that as a process. Make that the plot, not their romance.
I think the thing that really kills me though is that she's supposedly straight because she isn't having enough sex, and spends too much time pursuing her own interests (painting and reading), which were always well established as central to her identity.
That shit pisses the fuck out of me. She's supposed to give up on things that have always important to her to prove her sexual identity? Whether she's with a man or a woman, I would hope she is true to her self and her interests.
Speaking someone who is not particularly libidinous, I really hate the idea that sexual identity is born of a measure of sexual output. That concept brings with it creepy ideas of sex quotas and honestly reinforces that sort of rape-culture conceptualization of marriage and relationships wherein a woman owes her partner a certain volume of sex, regardless of her own will and interests.
So I'm realizing tonight that hat pizzes me off about this movie is not simply that it's a heterosexist storyline pretending to be a lesbian movie.
But that it's a movie whose lead character is pretty much a reflection of me (28 year-old artist and writer with a low libido and a romantic soul), who chooses to pursue a relationship with a woman, and is told she's not fucking gay enough. And she accepts that. That's fucked up.
Worse yet? That incredibly fucked up twist is treated as a happy ending.
It makes me feel like I'm personally under attack, and like I'm being taught that I can't be myself, pursue my own interests and have a healthy enough relationship with myself to acknowledge that sometimes I don't feel like putting out. And that if I am true to myself, that I'm doomed to always be alone.
Fuuuuck.
So basically I'm waiting now to meet Ms. London and plan our trip, but I'm grumpy and I feel like crying. I'll probably snap at her.
All because I watched some dumb movie that I've seen before, thinking I could be charmed by the cute parts and ignore the awful ending. Dumb.
As far as sex goes - in general I think that it should be about quality over quantity, and finding a middle ground that both partners are comfortable with. People who measure it by numbers and emphasizing quantity really are shortchanging themselves by pooling together a whole bunch of low quality stuff and pretending that it's decent just because there is so much of it.
I hope you have a great time in Amsterdam when you go, it's a beautiful city and has this incredible light. Maybe it's the way all the water reflects in the windows or something, but I've never been anywhere with that kind of light before.
Oh and that seems like exactly the kind of movie I would get annoyed with after watching maybe two minutes..