Twentynine Palms and 29 Reasons to Be Aware of this Stuff!

When I was in college and considering joining a sorority, I learned that frat houses – where the boys live – are allowed to have alcohol on the premises and are allowed overnight guests, but that at the sorority houses neither is allowed. Just on that principle alone, I made the decision to stay out of the Greek system altogether.

As the years went by since that time, I’ve learned a lot of things.  For instance, college-age males are way more likely to engage in power binge drinking to excess than women are.  Not that women don’t get drunk or even binge drink also (usually in the company of their male peers), but it is way more problematic among males.

Many mature adult men develop into alcoholics, and much of the time those roots have their origin in college-age male binge drinking. My father was a frat boy, and that’s his story exactly. And he’s not alone.

Males are also far more likely than women to get violent when they drink, or get belligerent, or do malicious mischief, vandalism and destruction.  So, could someone please remind me why it is that boys get to drink in their frat houses and the girls aren’t even allowed a drop of alcohol in their houses?  If anyone is more responsible drinkers at that age, it is women.

This same argument holds for sex in film/video.  Men are the rapists of the world. Men are the cheaters (by and large, though not exclusively).  Men are the peeping toms, the ones who jack off in the bathrooms at work, and the ones who seek out porn.  And women are the ones who have to live in this world with these guys.

Yet, male nudity is all but illegal.  The term “soft core” porn means lots of naked women showing full-frontal nudity and often showing very explicit adult sex.  There is nothing equivalent shown of men.  There are no “acceptable” porn shows on my TV set that show “just hot full-frontal male sex.”  And again, if anyone is more responsible about sex, about being able to enjoy the erotica without taking it to the next level (compulsion, rape, obsession, cheating, etc), it’s women.  And again, it’s women who “aren’t allowed” to have it in entertainment shows, and men get it anytime and anywhere they want.

There are few windowless nightclubs where women can go on any given day or night to watch fully nude men dance erotically, or where a woman can pay to grind herself to orgasm on a nearly naked twenty–something year old stripper-guy who is built like a stallion. Yet little girls grow up driving by those establishments in the back seats of their parents cars, knowing that men go to those places. Little boys are surely aware of them too, and everyone knows by age seven that it’s only the ladies who take it off.

So why is this?  Why does every generation of girls growing up, hitting their twenties, have to deal with the fact that yes, their boyfriend or fiancé or young husband IS going to see these things. The young men are going to see naked women in films, and lots of them. Men are going to see strippers at some point or another.  Men are going to see soft core porn on their TV channels or in their hotel rooms on business trips.  And they will probably see some serious triple-X porn from time to time as well, perhaps often, depending on the guy.

No one ever seems to question the big why. Why do women have to put up with this in the world they live in?  Men don’t have to sit silently next to their girlfriends in the movie theater or at home watching horrific scenes of male sexuality being done to men, made by sick women filmmakers for lusty women viewers' enjoyment, but women are expected to accept that this it is just “natural” that guys like to watch female sexuality and that they get plenty of available material to watch.

This little rant was brought on today because I saw the film 29 Palms.  It was on Showtime and it caught my attention because at the start of the movie, when it says it’s rated R for this, that and the other thing (language, violence, sexual situations, the usual) it also had a rating of RP, which I had never seen listed before.  And the RP stood for rape.

I thought that was interesting that they noted it at the start of the film, and thought it was a good idea. Since 2 out of 5 women are raped at some point in their life, there are probably a lot of women who would prefer to not watch a film that shows graphic rape, so I thought it was cool they mentioned it in advance.

It’s part of my research to pay attention to these things, and I was in a mood where I figured I could handle the film (plus I could leave the room if the rape scene was too much, or change the channel), so I watched the film.

I was surprised, though, because there really wasn’t a graphic rape scene in the film. There was an attempted rape in a car, but the camera only showed the car, and the rape never actually occurred anyway because it was interrupted by some other car showing up on the scene.  So that got me wondering why the film was rated with an RP for rape. Seemed a little off-base to me.

I got on the Internet and started doing some research on the film. For one thing, I was curious how much the film cost to make. It was obviously an independent, low budget film, but done in a very professional way, so I was intrigued, as a wanna-be film maker. It was during my research on that film that I found out there is another film called Twentynine Palms, which is not the same movie at all.

The film Twentynine Palms is about a marine who goes on some kind of crazed binge or something and ends up raping and killing two women.  So I started researching that film. I found a two minute trailer that gave me an idea of what the film looks like, and I read some things people said about it. The most common comments were “not for everyday film goers” and “this film is essentially soft porn.”

And yet, any young man on earth would probably watch it if he was over at his buddy’s house and it was on.  This is just life, for a guy.  From a guy’s point of view, yeah, there’s tits, so what? Yeah, there’s really sick, graphic rape scenes (several of them, from what I gather); there’s a fully naked young woman beaten and nearly dead (ash grey color with bruises everywhere) in the back seat of car. No doubt she’s one of the women who eventually ends up dead. Gawd knows what they show being done to her before then.  But guys like all kinds of graphic, sick or stupid stuff, and since all that sexual violence and nudity is being done to female bodies, it doesn’t really impact them the way it does women seeing those same images.

And women are just supposed to accept that this is life.  Men like to drink, so drinking is allowed in frat houses. Men like to look at naked women dancing, so there are strip clubs everywhere.  Men like to watch girl-on-girl sex, so there is soft core porn with fully naked women.  Men are capable of raping women, therefore rape is also allowed to be shown in film.  All this stuff is just life – for guys.  Yet for women, it’s completely ridiculous that we have to sit there and tolerate this aspect of society, when there is nothing even close to comparable with how men are portrayed in film, or on the stage, in everyday life.

The fact is, children can’t be shown being raped and violated in legal films.  But women can.  Women actually have fewer rights than children.  The argument always comes down to “freedom of expression” and “women are consenting adults when they are in those films, and they are paid” so therefore it’s OK.  No one is being “taken advantage” of, like children might be. Except for all the millions of women that have to live their entire lives accepting it, putting up with it and dealing with the "sickos" out there who take inspiration from the demoralizing, graphic media portrayals of women in media.

I have a 25 year old sister now and I wonder how she feels knowing that her Marine husband has probably seen the film Twentynine Palms.  What if she was in the room when all their friends turn on the TV and decide to watch it?  I know when I was twenty-five, I would have been upset beyond belief to have my friends in the other room watching women being nude, raped, violated, beaten and killed – all in the name of entertainment and “freedom of expression.”  Especially since men are never shown that way.  And then what happens the next day, after the film is over and you are in bed with your boyfriend/husband etc.  You think those images he saw in that film just disappear from his mind once the film is over?

I have read a lot of books on feminism and also books on why men look at porn.  But the one thing no one ever even mentions is the fact that women have to live in this world and deal with this stuff going on and men don’t.  Men get to engage with it and enjoy it if they want to. Women have to put up with it and can leave the room if they don’t like it. There’s a big difference in those two scenarios.  This stuff impacts women’s lives in very serious ways (self-esteem, mental health, jealousy issues, fear of how men feel looking at these images) whereas men can laugh their heads off and have another swig of beer while watching the film and it doesn’t impact their lives what so ever, other than possibly leading to a compulsion or addiction to porn.

There is no equivalent of easily accessed male erotic entertainment that women can indulge in and that men have to just accept and tolerate.  We can’t sit around and watch mainstream films on TV and in movie theaters that just routinely show scenes of male sexuality in every way possible – sometimes arty, sometimes violent, sometimes horribly controversial.  It is ONLY women who have to sit there and take it, or leave the room, all the while knowing that all men access it at one time or another, perhaps often, and there’s not a damn thing women can do about it. And women pay just as much for movie tickets as men, but the sexual voyeurism added to films for titillation and controversy are always one-sided, with male fantasies and viewing in mind.

Additionally, women don’t seem to crave that sick crap the way men do. We don’t want to see naked men brutalized, humiliated and shown as fully-frontal nude, grey corpses. We don’t want to see heinous acts of graphic sexual violence done to men. This is not typically what women find entertaining. So matched-play is a strategy not likely to happen.

But just like when it comes to binge drinking, malicious violence and vandalism – women are simply better-behaved than many young men.  Yet it’s the guys that gain access to all these things – liquor in frat houses, movies that depict women in sexual (and often naked and brutalized) ways, and plenty of strip clubs and prostitutes available if they want them.

And generation after generation after generation of women are just supposed to take it. It affects the quality of our lives. It affects our relationships with the men we love.  It affects our mental health and our happiness. Women deserve better.