In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

53 The body guys do not offer their gold-medal sex style to just any women in the films of the genre. These women are not only beautiful but intelligent. The Harvard-educated Samuel (Henry Thomas) says of his fiancée Susannah (Julia Ormond) in Legends of the Fall (1994), “She’s got me spinning. She’s got these ideas and theories, and she’s . . . she’s sorta passionate.” Samuel confesses to his earthy brother, Tristan (Brad Pitt), that he’s afraid he won’t meet Susannah’s sexual expectations. When Tristan asks if they’re going to “fuck before marriage ,” Samuel haughtily replies, “I’m planning to be with her,” to which Tristan playfully snaps, “I recommend fucking.” Samuel dies in World War I before “being with” Susannah, but we see that she later enjoys “fucking” Tristan, represented in the conventional all-night, multiple positions montage. In Enemy at the Gates (2001), when the man of the earth, a sharp-shooting shepherd (Jude Law), first sees the woman of his dreams, Tanya (Rachel Weisz), she is reading a book. The people of Stalingrad are eating boiled rats during the prolonged siege of their city in World War II, but Tanya has a library of books neatly organized on shelves in a basement where she lives with filthy, ragged families. The mind guy (Joseph Fiennes), a political officer in the Soviet army, also desires Tanya. In his bid to win her affection, he compliments her intelligence and appeals to their common heritage as learned Jews and good students of Marx. Instead of the intellectual, however, Tanya chooses the barely literate shepherd and begins their relationship by seducing him as he lies in a chilly cavern among filthy snoring soldiers who may awaken at any moment from the sound of cannon fire in the distance. Yet the shepherd performs so admirably that he must stifle her orgasmic screams. The film emphasizes Tanya’s braininess, but ultimately implies that smart women know in an instant that the best men and lovers are body guys. One line from American Gangster (2007) says it all: as a brainy woman rides the film’s protagonist, a police officer working on a law degree, she screams, “Richie, fuck me like a cop, “Fuck Me like a Cop, Not a Lawyer” chapter 3 h Ch003.qxd 6/10/10 6:45 PM Page 53 not a lawyer.” In mainstream cinema, men associated more “purely” with the mind than the body just can’t do it right. What does it mean to address contemporary intelligent, college-educated, professional career women with these narratives? Why construct their sexual desire on a masculinity defined by lack of formal education, outward attractiveness , bodily strength and coordination, and athletic sexual performance with a good-sized penis? The genre engenders the core body/mind dichotomy as a penis/brain opposition and is a reaction to a significant change in women’s self-identity that began in the 1960s and continued into the 1970s and 1980s. Second-wave feminism valued women for their brains instead of their bodies. Affirmative action laws facilitated this vision by opening formerly all-male elite universities and academic programs to women, enabling them to flood male-dominated fields and careers. Indeed, it is now common knowledge that throughout the 1970s and 1980s, women’s influx into the workforce steadily increased, especially in professional careers. This major historical event in America dispelled long-standing gender stereotypes: women are too emotional, illogical, moody, indecisive, weak, or just plain too nice to perform “men’s work.” Clearly not so. Even the last bastion of masculine privilege was infiltrated. In the early 1990s—precisely when the body guy emerged in films—forty thousand American military women served in key combat-support positions in the Gulf War. Women were—and are—doing virtually everything a man can do, in the military and elsewhere. The Body Guy’s Gift Never before in American history did women have so many opportunities to define what fulfills them in life—in theory anyway. It is at this moment that a model of pleasure and satisfaction for women is devised and circulated, centered on a highly physical sexuality, a well-toned male body, and the one thing males can say they have that women don’t: a penis. Ironically, from this perspective , the proliferation of body-guy films includes a key woman director linked to feminist sensibilities. Two Moon...

Share