The problem with feminism is basically that it cannot decide if it is interested in affirming gender or destroying it. I recently read one of Dr. Laura's books, Ten Stupid Things That Men Do to Mess Up Their Lives or something like that. We'll have to take a little sidebar here, as I sort of feel that I have to justify my reading of Dr. Laura. Her condemnation of homosexuality is quite unfortunate. To her credit, I have never seen much of it in the text or in her radio show. It's a misconception to equivocate her with Fred Phelps or something. But I'm sure she believes it's wrong and wouldn't hesitate to tell you so if you asked. She has little precedent in her religiosity, of which her system of ethics apparently stems from. Many a time, she'll claim or imply that her system of ethics comes simply from pure rationalism. Something like, it's God's law 'cause it works. As somebody who had had premarital sex for a year and half or so, monogamous but premarital all the same, and had been able to do so disease- and baby-free, I have good reason to doubt her deterministic views on those sort of actions.

All the same, I like Dr. Laura's stuff. I had bought the book long before I got married, but I didn't read until afterwards. And for somebody like myself, inexperienced in relationships in general much less marriage, but largely determined to make it work, it's a valuable resource. If I succeed at absolutely nothing else, I want to say that I have succeeded in this. In fact, I've decided that I want to succeed in this more than I want to succeed in anything else. Dr. Laura's success probably comes less from the fact that America has a leaning towards "conservative values" than because there is a unsatisfied need towards some resource for family therapy and she has simply gone unchallenged. We have lots of sex therapists, but not a lot of family therapists.

I also want to add, Dr. Laura is interesting in that, although she would never admit it in this phrase perhaps because it would cause some theological problems and dissent among her fanbase, she believes in evolution, not creationism. While people are essentially animals, it's an ability to have a personal relationship with God that lets us evolve beyond that. The anti-Rousseau-ian viewpoint that purity is not awarded from birth but must be striven for through adulthood and childhood probably stems necessarily from her training in physiology and family therapy. Indeed, doesn't creationism sort of imply that you should let your kids run amok? That God created you exactly how he wanted you? I suppose that original sin, which always implied to me that free will was a failing and not a gift (as it would be under the evolutionary theology), might get you out of that problem. Sins of Adam corrupt your kids towards animal behavior. But it doesn't seem to do as good a job, does it? The problem of course is that this seems to limit the omnipotence of God. The omnipotence question is a difficult question for the good doctor.

Well, anyway, back to the critique of feminism. Dr. Laura argues against feminism, saying that it has destroyed the positive aspects of male gender, making all men out to be rapists and child molesters. And she hates the idea of independent women getting intentionally pregnant without having a relationship with a man. They want to be mothers and don't want to deal with the fathers. While these complaints seem to stem from crude and possibly ignorant generalizations of what a feminist is, the truth is that it's impossible to have anything less than a crude and possibly ignorant generalization of what a feminist is because feminism has become so generalized and meaningless that it cannot obtain any one meaning. Assuming that there exist feminists who want to have children without having a relationship with the father, why would they want children in the first place? What does a child mean to them? What does motherhood mean to them? Does motherhood itself mean anything to them, or is it just the idea of parenthood that means something to them? If we are good feminists, should we reduce the idea of motherhood to the point where it is meaningless, as it would trap women into a specific gender role? I explained a bit of this to a feminist and he told me that feminism simply means having the ability to meet your potential. That certainly shut me up for a while, but now I realize that that was a totally bullshit answer!! One's potential to become what? A rapist? A stripper? A housewife? If a feminist would answer no to any of the above, well then why? How does one realize what they are to become?

Feminism is unable to provide an adequate definition of what a woman is. They don't know. They aren't comfortable with any one definition. And so they have no way to explain what a woman is not. I remember seeing a poster of an overweight Barbie saying that this is how most women really look. Of course a lot of women do NOT look much like that. Heavier women are misrepresented, I know, but heaviness can hardly be argued to be a prerequisite for womanhood. And even if it did, wouldn't that replace a thin ideal with a fat one? And if so, we wouldn't that mean that we would have overeating instead of anorexia?

There is no goal to feminism. No future. As simply a perspective in psychology, sociology or media criticism, it's quite invaluable and I support it. But its critical weakness is when it stems into political activism and by implication ethics (which are always assumed and never reduced to bare basics); when it says what should happen instead of illustrating what does happen. Feminist perspectives on psychosexual development of children, in reaction to Freud, is certainly invaluable in establishing femininity to be something to be valued. But the establishment of femininity as any one thing or another is certain to drive some feminists nutty. I suppose that I support the feminist perspective of femininity being alien to masculinity, but in itself a very valuable thing. But see, when we enter the arena of political equality and ethics, the situation gets badly confused.

In some weird way, Dr. Laura seems to have a handle on this. Aggression is masculine, she says. It's a good thing. And being a Dad, actually playing with your kids, taking care of them, staying home while the wife works even, is a good thing too. Possibly even masculine. Dr. Laura argues against the devaluation of the masculine identity in favor of a feminine one, which seems to be the complaint that most men have about femininity. Masculine values and traits are socially essential, as are feminine ones. But then again, as I have been saying, several feminists are reluctant to define feminine and masculine traits. I can at least understand what Dr. Laura is saying. She doesn't get bogged down by the ambiguity of the feminist culture.

Good lord, I've been wanting to get that off my back for a long long time. I thought that I would actually have to see and review The Hours before I could enter that sort of rant. And anyway, the ambiguity of what feminism is has a lot to do with Mother's Day.

The film is about three professional women who get together every year to go on a "mystery trip." In this particular year, they are kidnapped by two rednecks and are raped and tortured for the amusement of the rednecks' mother. Their mother has, of course, trained them to behave this way not only for her apparent sexual gratification but also so they can protect her from their feral aunt Queenie, who is said to be wandering around in the woods or something. Two of the three women survive and they decide to get revenge on the brothers, leading to a third act that is certainly far more stomach-churning than anything that had preceded it. Like I Spit on Your Grave, of which those who loathe both freely group it with, Mother’s Day is a feminist slasher film. (In this sense, I suppose I am meaning the word "feminist" as being nothing more than reactionary towards traditional gender perspectives, which I'll remind you is a weak foundation to begin with.)

My opinion towards I Spit on Your Grave went up from slightly negative to negative positive once I began to seriously consider the implications of those last two words: "Suck it." The words "suck it" were said to the raped Camille Keaton, and upon obtaining her revenge on the perpetrator, through death by boat propeller, she says them herself. It's a revenge fantasy in the strictest sense of the word. She has gone from the status of passive female rape victim to the perpetrator of violence. In a separate instance earlier in the film, she's a perpetrator of sexual violence. She castrates a man in midst of giving him a handjob. Castration is sort of her way of "raping" this man back. It's a humiliating affront to his dignity as a man. The first real act of vengeance against the rapists in Mother's Day is a castration, albeit one that is direct as opposed to being a trick. She just sinks an ax to his soft spot. But perhaps that's the better, more masculine method of committing a sexually violent act. She isn't using any feminine guile, she's approaching the attacker purely as a fellow warrior.

Think of this content as sort of a Freudian penis envy for women, only where the penis is seen as a violent tool of oppression and violence. Do you see what I mean? Masculinity is devalued in Mother's Day in one sense -- the men are animalistic and violent -- but it's that very animalism and violence that the women in the film strive for. The same man who is castrated also has a needle shoved through his neck. You know from my reviews of the Friday the 13th films that the use of a penetrating weapon is representative of a violent sexual act. That's how you explain the extreme squeamishness of it. Just the idea of this tool being pushed through the flesh. I had titled these killings "rapes by steel" and the fact that, in this outing, it is a woman who commits this rape by steel cements the "phallic weapon envy" I've been talking about.

In the final scene, one of the heroines executes the mother character with a pair of inflatable breasts. While she does so, we hear cries from her real mother on the soundtrack. The heroine goes on and on about how she had been forced to take care of this miserable old bitch, and we make the connection that she is killing her own mother. Why do the filmmakers have her kill her mother? Symbolically anyway? The implication here is that she is rejecting the feminine role as caretaker in favor of masculine one as a ruthless killer. She sees her mother in the way that a man may: as a usurper of her power and autonomy.

My understanding of feminist alternative anti-Freudian theory of psychosexual development is that knowledge of the penis in the young male initiates his distancing from his mother into an autonomous figure. That is basically what happens here. The heroine, having experienced the very masculine pleasures of vengeance and rape which have empowered her (the attractive aspect of killing somebody is the knowledge that they are dead but you are alive and therefore you have achieved a state of supremacy over them), she has learned to overcome the limits of passivity defined by femininity. The mother character has that same sense of "phallic weapon envy." That's what she gets from watching her sons torture and rape women; it's a voyeuristic activity. But in mothering boys she has in effect denied herself the opportunity to really become the hypermasculine monster that the heroines do.

If there is a flaw to my reading of the film it may be that a feeling of sisterhood helped to initiate the attack on the redneck rapists. This seems to place the film in the arena of "touchy-feely" feminism, and something not as frankly disturbing as I have just described. Especially since there is a scene of extraordinary intimacy where one of the girls kisses the corpse of her deceased friend right on the mouth. Oh, but there is something about the type of sisterhood in the movie. The idea of sisterhood feels more like a childish comfort for these women instead of this transcendent feminine ideal.

Their relationship reminds me a lot of the recent Dreamcatcher, where a bunch of men get together for the weekend to drink beer and share stories of their childhood. There aren't a lot of things that the girls do in this movie that I couldn't imagine the guys in Dreamcatcher doing, that one kiss withstanding. No, I don't think that this theme of sisterhood is anything particularly gender-specific. The girl who dies had been horribly mistreated by men, and the battle against the rapist is in her name and the name of all women who had lost power from men. The ideal of this godly untouchable "evil serial killer" is one that all the women in the film strive for.

While I have spent much of this review reading Mother's Day through a sort of feminist perspective, I actually think that the film has a much broader aim. When the heroines are introduced to us, we sense that they are grossly dissatisfied with their surroundings. Much like the heroes of Dreamcatcher, adulthood seems to have failed them and so they resort to this infantilism.

In New York, one of the girls walks away from her lazy bum "sensitive artist" lover to begin her trip. (The boyfriend talks, with little conviction, about how guilty he feels in failing in his role as a male provider, and how he hates being sensitive. Notice again how the "feminine" traits of sensitivity and artistic talent are mocked as being ineffectual and meaningless. If he were a "real man," he would get a job and help out. This is a tip off about how feminism in this film is defined as women gaining the ability to adopt and succeed with masculine traits. The attitude is vehemently anti-touchy-feely, reminding of the bitchy conservatism of strong "anti-feminist" women like Ann Coulter and, of course, Dr. Laura. See, I told you that this "feminist" stuff is weird.)

When she leaves the building, she tells the black doorman to enjoy his weekend. He angrily replies that he will never get to enjoy his weekend as long as he is a black man in America. Soon afterwards a homeless man yells about how Rockefeller makes a million dollars a day. It is typical of the film that these images of an unjust unequal world are brought up, but never properly addressed. The world that they inhabit is indeed quite horrible, but later in the film we see that they take a position of "can't beat 'em, join 'em."

The film's rednecks, of course, give us images of Appalachian hillbilly stereotypes which provide the women with something to feel superior towards. While it is difficult to actually defend the rapists, in a way one may find himself (or herself) more in sympathy with them than the women who appear downright smarmy. If you hate women, Mother's Day may very well make you hate them more. They possess the most power in the film, which comes by the way of sexual experience, intelligence and maybe even ruthlessness. I think, again, the point is that the women in the film want to evolve beyond our sympathy and compassion, which feminizes them into victims. The women in the film are not insecure exactly (again, you can't really sympathize with them), but they can possibly relate to and wish to ape the sort of mindset you see in male child molesters and serial killers who were abused as children. Instead of being identified as the victim, they wish to be identified as the perpetrator, as with that status comes the greater degree of power.

Mother's Day seems to have been despised by a fair portion of mainstream critics. Roger Ebert gave it his dreaded and fairly rare "zero stars" rating as he did with I Spit On Your Grave, although he hasn't published his review of it in his collection of hated movies or in any of his later compilations. Most seem to explain that this is a film where two boys rape and torture women for the voyeuristic pleasure of their mother as explanation enough for why it's an atrocity. Perhaps they are right, although, if I may be so bold, I think we've seen here a much better explanation of why it gets under the skin so deeply.

Mother's Day was produced by Lloyd Kaufman and directed by his brother Charles Kaufman. They would later, of course, go on to create Troma studios, which are sort of their own little genre. Like The Toxic Avenger which was made a few years later and remains their most popular film, Mother's Day uses Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange as sort of a touchstone. They may even react to it. One of the problems that people had with A Clockwork Orange was that it was so studied. People make this complaint about Kubrick's films all the time, but with A Clockwork Orange it gained a special significance. The other problem that they have with it is that it turns violence into fun. Mother's Day takes on this idea of violence being fun, or the topic of some sort of comic ballet as it sometimes was in Kubrick's film. Like the droogs, the rapists' home is covered with scrawlings and sexual graffiti and art. They are saturated in this environment of sex and violence. And with their mother watching all the things that they do, why, she really isn't any different than any of us, is she?

Mother's Day has a moral sense in that the rapes are taken very seriously (they aren't kidded in Clockwork Orange as much as gleefully glossed over). It's telling that there is only one real rape in the whole film. The rest are just attempted. The threat of rape certainly feels to be enough to provoke outrage and disgust, however. Mother's Day is similar to I Spit on Your Grave in that it provides you with exactly what you come for. Want to see a film where a woman is raped and she gets revenge on her captors? Well, here you go. The approach seems to imply that films are about content more than style. If you are offended, you can't much argue that the film should have been made in a different way, just that it shouldn't have been made at all. That perspective has a truth to it, but it strikes me as maybe being a little too exclusive.Mother's Day's attacks on media violence are overlapped by all the feminist stuff, however. Cowboys and Indians, wrestling and the like are instrumental to the male identity here, and the bread and butter of feminist theory is of course in media criticism. The idea that "the media is violent" is part of what Mother's Day is about, but is not, thankfully, the end product.

Mother's Day is a very good film, but not quite a great one in my eyes. The biggest problem simply comes from the fact that it is frankly sloppily made. In the first killing in the film, we see the splatter on a hippy girl before her boyfriend's head is chopped off. Some of the inserts sort of feel like afterthoughts. In a scene where one of the girls steps in some doggie doo, we feel like the shot of the doggie doo was filmed and added after principal production. I also don't much care for the forced cheesiness that you often get from a Troma film. The film gives us a hell of a lot of false alarms, to the point that it calls attention to itself. When you watch something like Jaws for a convenient example, or even Friday the 13th Part 2 or 3, you know that they are being fairly sincere. It's pointless to try and make us think that the hippy chick and her boyfriend are going to assault the mother character (before we officially find out that she is the killer). Kaufman is just doing it to rub our noses in the cheesiness. Same can be said with the exaggerated violence, especially in a scene involving very severe rope burns. Not to mention the awful twist ending. I guess that they are trying to remind us that we are seeing a movie and remove our suspension of disbelief. The effect is awfully primitive though.

For a slasher film, condescension can often spell out the death of the effect. To the degree that Mother's Day succeeds, it may very well be in spite of itself. I Spit on Your Grave is not as good a film as this, but it's probably easier to out-and-out respect. The Troma films sort of take their status as low art a little too much to heart, which I think may be a problem with the slasher films and the reason why we have so few genuinely great ones. (Well, Psycho is great, of course. And there are moments in Children of the Corn that clearly transcend its ear-bleedingly awful dialogue and raise up to the level of something genuinely profound.)

All the same, I find that I have a deep affection for Mother's Day though, and who knows, there may be a day where I instantly forgive all its flaws and realize that I don't want to live without it. It happened fairly recently with the laughably awful King Kong vs. Godzilla. However, I'm afraid that today isn't quite that day.