Bloodsport

"There are no victories

In all our histories

Without love"

 

Sting - Mad About You

_________________________________

"Only a few days ago Carlos Suomi's plans for his future would definitely have included Athena. But that was before he had seen her so avidly viewing men killing each other."

Fred Saberhagen - Berserker's Planet
_________________________________

 

"And die young"

Kill Hannah - Kennedy

_________________________________

"this sexual excitement, this love story, is just a part of growing up and we grow out of it. So far literature and art and sentiment and all our emotional forms have been almost altogether adolescent, plays and stories, delights and hopes, they have all turned on that marvellous discovery of the love interest, but life lengthens out now and the mind of adult humanity detaches itself. Poets who used to die at thirty live now to eighty-five. You, too, Kahn! There are endless years yet for you—and all full of learning.... We carry an excessive burden of sex and sexual tradition still, and we have to free ourselves from it. We do free ourselves from it. We have learnt in a thousand different ways to hold back death, and this sex, which in the old barbaric days was just sufficient to balance our dying, is now like a hammer that has lost its anvil, it plunges through human life."

[...]

"Up to within a few years of us the chief interest and motive of an ordinary man was to keep and rule a woman and her children and the chief concern of a woman was to get a man to do that. That was the drama, that was life. And the jealousy of these demands was the master motive in the world."

H.G. Wells - The World Set Free

_________________________________

 

 

As one of my quirks, much as I love the symbolism of lycanthropy I consume little to no werewolf-themed entertainment. Most often wolfmen are treated as muscleheaded speed bumps for the hero on his way to the mad scientist boss fight, and if the main alternative's those idiotic romance novels with brutishly virile werewolf lovers, count me out. I shall remain a myth of one. Terrible acting aside, I do tolerate some of the older werewolf flicks which played up the shock and awe of the transformation itself (instead of the sheer bulk of the finished product) even though most of their special effects were hardly up to the task. Let's (pun intended) face it: Lon Chaney Jr. looked more like an overgrown gerbil than a canid.

The 2010 remake of The Wolfman kept the flat-faced "Jojo the dog-faced boy" look out of apt deference to the classic. Sadly, it also not only kept the romance subplot filler but ramped it up to disturbingly Freudian levels. It is occasionally joked that the new Larry Talbot apparently has a sexist streak, since during his dozens-strong rampage he never attacks a single woman - even as he gorily dismembers man after man after man. However, nobody mentions the plot rewrite's Oedipal undertones, overtones and all too obvious tones.

- the first werewolf is now his father instead of a random gypsy

- the father now killed the hero's mother, who was not even mentioned in the original

- the love interest is his brother's widow instead of some chick from town engaged to an extra

- instead of killing off the first werewolf and then focusing on Lawrence's tribulations, it's now reserved for a boss fight

- instead of being killed by his father, the protagonist is now killed by the love interest

Which all yields the effect of killing your father while mackin' on your sister in law, all so you can placidly submit to her executing you for being bad, insistently witnessed by images of the hero's sainted, martyred mother. Why not have Benicio del Toro gouge his own eyes out just to drive it all home?

 

On a completely unrelated topic, I found myself wondering: whatever happened to softcore cable porn? You remember (assuming you're over thirty) those cheesy late night movies or series with B-grade acting and D-grade scripts you'd sit through for a chance of seeing a few minutes' worth of nipple. Sure, the internet largely obsoleted them, but I found it hard to believe they'd dissappeared altogether. So I looked for a few and got my answer: they've been repurposed for female audiences.

First off, men are always wrong and in the wrong and wrongheaded and doing it wrong, this being an absolute requirement of "romance" that all-pervasive female paraphilia.

Second, more abs and shoulders than nipples.

Third, the new breed of softcore porn always involves a lord's mansion, a luxuriously appointed condominium with a hundred-kilo chandelier, a penthouse with an infinity pool, high-powered boardroom meetings and exclusive clubs, and most importantly conflict, conflict, conflict! If guys aren't stabbing and shooting and punching and firing each other for your entertainment, how else are you supposed to jill off?!? With a handful of diamonds, obviously.

Compare that to the deliberately and explicitly mundane male sexual fantasies: cheerleaders, nurses or the soccer mom across the street doing yoga by her window. The girl next door routine sells great. The guy next door is not even a routine. He barely even exists from the female point of view, except as a punching bag for Prince Charming.

 

When I was growing up, feminists couldn't stop wailing about violence in porn - all the throwing her onto the bed and insulting her and pulling her hair and slapping her. Clear evidence of patriarchal terror, right? Point one: it was the '90s, alright? Every genre, every field, every medium was dark, grim, angry and dramatic. Hell, comedy was George Carlin. So you might think, obviously feminist pressure must've worked to make porn less violent, right? But was it violent before? After all, porn's always been around, and you can look at the rather prolific '70s for example, or go all the way back to pre-electric days, and overwhelmingly the story's always pretty much what it is now. The hot girl next door (or the maid, or the saucy flapper, or the soiled dove) is open for a fuck. So she fucks. Done. No karate required.

 

So what actually happened in the '80s, '90s and into the early 2000s? Well, it was decreed that porn had to be made for women, because it was unfair for anything to be made for men, regardless of the fact that women's porn (i.e. romance) had been its own highly profitable field since before modern entertainment industries were invented, and never criminalized like blue movies or skin mags. So by decree (and porn company hopes of breaking into the new female market) suddenly porn no longer required sex but drama, and conflict, and huge muscular men with waist-long hair, and opportunities for those men to display manliness. As has so often been the case, feminism created the problem it later used as justification in attacking men. They only abandoned the issue when the market for "porn for women" failed to grow beyond an initial blip, when it turned out women don't get aroused nearly so much by sex on screen as by seeing men tear each other to bloody shreds in thrillers.

 

How many Fifty Shades of Gray do you need to admit that the conflation of sex with power and violence is not primarily a male but a female instinct?

 

How many series like Taken center on portraying a superior male going on a rampage against other men in the interest of a woman? How many ogres must Prince Charming / Daddy Warbucks slaughter before he is acknowledged as a worthy provider and protector for the females of his tribe?

I might note Ayn Rand had her hero more or less rape the heroine in every version of the one single plot she wrote, and you'll reply wait, hold on, that chick was just nuts all around, you can't give her as example. But then I'll point you to the murderous denouement of The Wolfman where the romantic predator looms over the damsel's prostrate form in a scene so thickly suggesting rape you might find yourself exclaiming "cut the foreplay and stick it in already!"

 

When I was about seven years old, during a new year's party, one of the girls asked: who're you gonna marry? While most of us were either stumped or stammered out random answers so as not to look stumped, another girl immediately blurted out: Jesus! And she didn't mean in the habitual sense. Attagirl, A., shoot right for the top. (Sorry though, I hear he's married to his job.)

As I don't indulge in slashfic, I was amused at this tidbit from TVTropes about the inarguably female-dominated slashfic field and female-marketed boy-boy erotic stories:

"In many (but not all) communities, the ordering of the names is used to indicate a power relationship, and who exactly is the dominant member."

Females codify power games like males codify which hole's gettin' porked.

 

Here I'd like to remind you of Christopher Lee's astute assessment of his long-running role as Dracula:

"Certainly a bloodthirsty character, without a doubt. I also told you that the character is romantic — so he is, as far as women are concerned, and erotic."

Those Hammer Horror themed romance novels I mentioned at the start? They don't consider the supernatural element nearly enough by itself. It can't be just any werewolf ravishing the audience surrogate damsel. It has to be the ALPHA werewolf, a corporate CEO werewolf or the motherfuckin' prince! of! werewolves! Presumably he's gotta rip out a few throats (paternal or not) to win her before boning down. Seriously, if you've never tried, search Amazon for "alpha romance" or somesuch phrase

Aptly noted by Terrible Writing Advice in #45 "Alpha Heroes"

You might laugh at the first page of identical covers until noticing it's just the start of "over 60,000 results" (it's over 9000!) at which point, even assuming a hefty number of false and duplicate hits, it just gets depressing.

 

Neither is this anything new. While the original Wolfman movie wasn't quite the Oedipal head-trip its remake was, it still required the fair damsel to be courted by the lord of the manor. After his death in the end she still gets to keep her plan B utility male and the moral high ground to boot.

 

Do you wonder why humanity has not outgrown its sexual psychoses? It's because you've always scapegoated men while deliberately ignoring the market demand for combo sex/power/violence so glaringly pervading every bookshelf and marquee around you, the driving force behind the drama that is life: female mate choice.