Wiping Off the Whipped Cream: Unveiling the sexual power dynamics of Cazwell's "Ice Cream Truck"

The artist Cazwell is clearly forty years old but he's performing with a bunch of super sexualized twenty year olds, trying to pass himself off as such.  He also talks about the 'school yard' as though he were still in high school (or even younger?) when he is obviously far too old.  Cazwell indicates that he is available on the sidewalk "May to July", the months during which school is out, again implying that he is still a school boy.

The images of a child's xylophone, 'rainbow sprinkles', the iconic ice cream truck are also all part of the process of self-juvenilization.  The performers do not consume ice cream that is more typically considered for adults, but rather, those associated with ice cream trucks and children: red popsicles, ice cream pies, Drumsticks, watermelon Icees.  I am surprised there was not a red rocket popsicle.  There is a transparent veil of innocence over the abundant sexuality, from the obvious metaphors to the sexualization of the simple act of consuming ice cream.

Meanwhile, the song has an extended metaphor of ice cream = sex, using phallic popsicle imagery.  Cazwell persistently offers to buy the object of his affection 'ice cream', implying an imbalance within this sexual relationship.  Although he engages the object ("you") with a semblance of equal standing, in reality, he is the one in charge.  He insists, "Meet me at the ice cream truck [emphasis mine]."  He tells "you" to finish the ice cream before "it melts on the floor."  But in another verse, he talks about the object of his affections as a third party.  "You", 'he", it is all ultimately interchangeable as anonymous sexual objects.

The exploitative aspect of this pursuit is made more apparent through the examination of racialized dynamics.  Cazwell is a white man while many of the young men around him appear to be Latino, perhaps implying sex tourism where the image of the school yard is a metaphor for a sexual wonderland of young, nubile, tan flesh such as some ambiguous Latin American stop for the moneyed white man.  Cazwell's insistence on using his limited Spanish ("Uno, dos, tres, cuatro") indicates his shallow appreciation of the Latino sexual object.  And all the dancers are light-skinned, reflecting that, even as the Latino lover is fetishized, fair-skinned beauty is what is valorized among gay male culture.

The final image is whipped cream being wiped off a brown chest to reveal Cazwell's name tattooed over a nipple.  But examination of the video reveals that this tattoo does not appear on the artist's own chest, but rather, the flesh at the end is one of the brown dancers.  He has branded this silent dancer for himself.

This music video demonstrates the gay male pursuit of youth (conflated with perfection and desirability) through the commodified trading of sex.  If the aging gay man can obtain sex from a beautiful young man, he is essentially obtaining youth from the man, through validation of his own desirability.  And far from an equal exchange in this sexual relationship, the aging gay man predates on the object like a vampire, exerting dominance through his masked but undeniable age, his comparative wealth, his white privilege.

You have nice abs, but I don't love you.

That's Gay is super cis gay male-centric and has problems, but I thought this video, which is only seven million months late, illustrates my feelings about the recent trend of masculinity as portrayed in advertising.  And I know everyone is past this bullshit, but watching this yesterday just made me think about its reception again and how everything annoyed me.  So I am going to whine about it now.

I understand that these Old Spice commercials are supposed to be less misogynistic than, say, Axe ads where hypermasculinity goes hand in hand with driving women into a sexual frenzy through your olfactory presence unlike the insufficiently masculine you before applying the potent essence of a thousand middle school guy locker rooms.   By which I mean 'sexually potent', of course.

I mean, the original ad with Isaiah Moustafa actually addresses women, who all want manly men like Isaiah Moustafa, because he's black and well-built and has a deep voice and we all know black men are smooth, hypermasculine sexual dynamites who are never gay and have God-like voices.  They also probably dance really well, unlike white people who dance the Charleston.

Wait, what do you mean, this is a stereotype common to ads and also everything?   He's funny!   That can't be racist!

Anyway, the original ad addresses women who can now turn their men into ridiculously sexy black men too by buying products!  That is way better than being horny maenads!  Your new Old Spice Man can also ride gleaming horse-motorcycles and do you beneficent favors like get you tickets to that thing you love (who gives a fuck what it is) and I guess defend your honor.  Chivalry is totally pro-woman.

But what does this mean for lesbian women?  Do they want Isaiah Moustafa as well?  Possibly, considering woman-woman action in advertising always has an invisible '-man' appended to the end.

Also, women shouldn't use Old Spice because it'll make them grow mustaches and stuff.  lol, gross, women with muscles!

And people should be taken seriously because they're men.

Wait, weren't we talking about The Man Your Man Could Be being less sexist than Axe?

The defense of the Old Spice commercials is that it becomes ridiculous and thus parodies or satires advertisements that play on Real Men Buy This Product!  Why?  Because Old Spice Guy claims to boil pasta by sticking his head in the oven.   LOL WHO DOES THAT.  Hypermasculine men do.  How is this more ridiculous than shooting Snicker bars at fast walkers in yellow short-shorts?  Or killing helicopters?   Or split atoms with roundhouse kicks?   These are not parodies of hypermasculinity.  They are celebrations and the implicit wish that lesser men could perform mythical acts of manliness like Gilgamesh who is one-third god as manliness triumphs even more mathematically sensical hereditary lineages.

And who are these lesser men?  Sissies who wear skirts to bars who deserve to have giant beer cans dropped on them!  Worse of all, they're mocked by women.  That is some fear of Medusa's grin psychosexual bullshit right there.

So, what is ultimately the message?  It's not just Buy Old Spice Because We're Funny, it's Buy Old Spice Because We're Manly to the Point of Ridiculously Mythic Standards.  Manliness becomes gender-conforming heterosexual maleness, which is under attack for some reason.  Because of 'metrosexuality', because of modern day constraints of PC sensitivity, because of women, because of fags.

But putting on deodorant and drinking light beer (lol) will save the day and also your manhood, because when you put on a dress, it falls off.  It literally falls off and the closest woman will swoop in like a harpy to devour it before it even hits the ground and then you too shall be a gay.

So, products are sold by exploiting this feeling of threatened masculinity.  This masculinity which must be protected from the women and the queer men and the trans folk and you know what? other straight men who aren't enough or themselves who aren't enough, through beating and removal from our communities (either by violent force or the attrition of discrimination) and repression and murder.

The feelings are made all the more explicit in the South Park episode, "South Park is Gay!", which concludes that the Queer Eye guys are lobsters who want to render the Earth defenseless by making all the men fags.  I mean, 'men who have appropriated gay...ness'.  And who will protect us from the lobsters when all we have left are women and gay men (and also the millions upon millions of brown people who cannot afford highlights and totally sweet shoes.)

For people who want to defend South Park as satire that's better than Family Guy—talk about low standards—well, 'satire' is not a general term that can be applied to something and suddenly its message is whichever is the best, most progressive, and most incisive one.  You know.  FYI.  It's a satire on 'metrosexuality' and the point is how it's bad for straight men and also the world.

How can something be satire when it hits all the right notes in our societal song?   "A Modest Proposal" would not be ironic if the English were already considering trying Irish baby stew.  The point is, when I'm not mansplaining feminism, I too find the original ad amusing.  But it's not any different from all the other insulting, homophobic, misogynistic ads, and I don't know why anybody seems to think it could be.

I also think If you really want humor where the punchline is machismo, I suggest looking elsewhere.

It's almost like it's possible for people who aren't straight male advertising executives to skewer hypermasculinity without reitering all its points, feeding this Viking fantasy.  Somehow, we are to believe that we live in a world where being this misogynistic, homophobic fool is somehow functional.  And the sad thing is, we kinda do.

I plan on blogspotting regularly now.

I made cookies today just so I could make a cookie ice cream sundae.  Success!

I'm amazing.

Let's Get Nerdy: Or, Why Jon Law would make amazing films you would pay full price and sneak in cheap snacks from the Chinese supermarket to see

So, they're making a Warcraft film.  The first thing is that they told Uwe Boll that he wasn't making it, which is kinda amazing.  I do not know why people allow him to touch their video game franchises; it's like looking at that kid who just finished wiping his hands on his feces-fouled shirt and thinking, "Hey, I can trust him to hold onto my sandwich."

You cannot.

The other thing about this film is that they are setting it between WarCraft III and World of Warcraft and they are telling it from the Alliance's point of view.  The former makes sense because WoW's story is already being told in the game and has been well-traveled by the game's nations' worth of players and I don't feel like it needs to be transposed to the screen.  It's a rich world and other stories can be told!  The latter irks me because I have a strong urge to cheer on the underdogs, the Horde, and would like a fantasy film that really tells the story from the side of the monstrous folk that are easily marginalized by the self-righteous Alliance.  (Not that portraying the Alliance as the stereotypical straw racists would be preferable either.)  But it makes sense because telling the story from the Alliance's side allows them to use mainly human characters, i.e., not spend as much time and money on heavy makeup and CGI.

To get to my main point: This Warcraft film is telling a previously untold story that takes place on Azeroth featuring new characters.  The characters are completely open.  The story itself is relatively open.  So what does this mean?  We are probably going to get another film about white dudes with beards and swords spouting clichés in English accents and maybe there will be a dwarf with a Scottish accent.  Women will be significant in relation to the main characters and expose a lot of skin.  I will probably go to see it and I will probably come back to complain a lot.

So, instead, here is the Warcraft film I want to see: I only played WoW on and off for about a year, but play it I did and my first main character is Fariath, a black woman paladin.  So, I don't want her specifically in the film, seeing as I don't roleplay so she has no personality.  But imagine a film where the protagonist was a black woman who kicked ass.

I'm imagining Gina Torres plays her.

In platemail, wielding a giant warhammer.

There is a method beneath all this besides thinking Gina Torres is hot and amazing as all get out and she needs to be cast in more things now.

The Bechdel Test posits a very simple standard for films: It portrays 1. two women who 2. have a conversation with each other 3. about something besides men.

Seems simple and obvious: I am sure any woman reading this can give an example of how she had one—just one!—conversation with another woman and talked about something besides men.  But if you think about it, so few films and television shows pass this test.  Because women appear in media almost exclusively for the male gaze, meaning they exist for the purposes of straight men, meaning they are sexualized in ways male characters are not and they have no real interests outside of men.

Which is why so many women characters in romantic comedies could have their job be replaced by any other job and the film would not be impacted much at all.  Because a woman's life outside of her romantic relationships is no more significant than the choice of frame for the picture on her desk.

I suspect that this is why so many women in romantic comedies are writers (seriously, think about it), because being a "writer" in the collective imagination of audiences is such a nebulous occupation that it presents almost no pressure and represents no force in a woman's life, freeing up all her time to pursue her lead, or rather, the lead man.  At best, a woman's career that actually means something is also an obstacle to the woman's love life and she needs to discover love.

(One reason why The Devil Wears Prada is amazing is that Anne Hathaway SPOILERS chooses to leave her job not for love but because she realized she wasn't who she wanted to be or where she wanted to be anymore.  When she meets up with her ex-boyfriend, she does not expect or demand him back.  She changed (back) for herself and her ex recognizing that and loving her is a side bonus.)

So, Gina Torres' character would have a woman best friend who was also a Knight of the Silver Hand.  Maybe the best friend would be focused on the healing arts in contrast to the combat-focused Gina Torres (holy paladin versus ret/prot paladin for WoW players).  And most importantly, they never talk about men.  They don't have to dish about the men in their life.  They can talk about slaying the Undead Scourge and debate the founding of Orgrimmar.

They will fight in boots with no height to the heel, at all.

I just really want a fantasy film that does not involve white dudes who get more realistic armor and women only get to cast spells or fire arrows in midriff-baring armor.  I want a film where women can be something not auxiliary to men.

The problem is that it is not just that nobody is writing stories that pass the Bechdel Test; it's that the film industry does not want to pass the Bechdel Test.  And it does not even make sense because action and speculative fiction films that star strong woman characters that are not there for men do well.

And men in the industry persist in dismissing the truth, labeling solid films that profit with strong women as "exceptions" and continue to produce shit films with more of the same actors that look like the people with the most money and power in the industry (i.e., white and male).  All to deny that flat-out sexism (and racism) that motivates the decision-making process here.

Silent Hill, which has mixed and mostly poor reviews, is a horror film based on a video game, which was surprisingly well done in my opinion.  It captures the spirit of the games and, interestingly, passes the Bechdel Test.  Because the main characters are two women and a girl, and both of these women are badass.  The father-husband character was even only included because of corporate pressure to include a male character.

When I showed my casting choices (including Ruth Negga, the Ethiopian-Irish woman actor in Breakfast on Pluto, and Zhang Ziyi, a Chinese actress probably best known in the US for Memoirs of a Geisha, and Vin Diesel because what is a WoW film without the man) for this Warcraft film to someone online, they answered that this would not be a WoW film anymore.  Which is sad and true.  What is WoW without its night elf women in bikini armor?  Without its extremely exaggerated musculature for male characters?  What is a WoW film without the male gaze, basically?

In my mind, something amazing.

But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.

"Well, I don't know what will happen now.  We've got some difficult days ahead.  But it doesn't matter with me now.  Because I've been to the mountaintop.  And I don't mind."

Martin Luther King, Jr. said these words the day before he was assassinated.  I had read his last speech for the first time a couple weeks ago, and this quote continues to haunt me to this night.  It feels like a sturdy hand on a shoulder, a last smile before a fade to white, a last promise to us, a last request we must keep.

Sometimes, it feels like all great people become prescient of their deaths a little.  Maybe it is simply mundane movements that, through hindsight, transforms into strange prophecies.

I think these simple sentences, with simple meaning but also depth of meaning.  It's Neruda's "Eso es todo," or Danticat's "Dye mon, gen mon."  It is final and sad and beautiful and sorta hurtful, in a kind way.

I read a heartbreaking poem not long after I read that speech, John Updike's "Dog's Death.  I suggest never reading it because you will die and I do not need that drama, but take my word when I say that the words "Good dog" are the saddest things you will ever read.

I think these are my favorite works, and it is why I prefer vignettes, short stories, poems to novels.  There is an intimacy.  There is something weirdly honest and true.  Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is a, perhaps surprisingly, amazing film.  In a shallow glance, it is a period romantic comedy, but there is depth in this simple film.  Right outside of a party of the London's youth, on the edge of the Second World War, an older man tells an older woman, "I don't think I can bear it again."

One of my favorite scenes in The History Boys is a quiet one: Hector, the English teacher of "General Studies", and Posner, the student who remembered all the songs, sit and talk about Thomas Hardy's "Drummer Hodge".  Hector explains to Posner,

The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.

For me, I think it is something different.  There is that moment, in those unadorned words, these characters, these personae, these voices flare up in fierce softness and they are more alive than me.

Think of it as personality dialysis!

So, while I was reading Kristin Chenoweth's response to Ramin Setoodeh's idiotic piece, I was completely imagining that Kristin Chenoweth was complaining to me, personally, as I nod along and snap at the appropriate moments.

"Mm-hm, Kristin Chenoweth, that is so spot-on.  Come, let this heterosexist news magazine filth clutter our minds no more.  While we wait for our delicious fruit pies to finish cooling, we shall ride our bikes to the park while singing!"

And at the park, there would be birds and frogs and boys, and I don't even care because I'll be hanging out and singing with my BFF.

And yes, the entire time, I call Kristin Chenoweth by Kristin Chenoweth's full name.

For the Horde!: The Various Ineptitudes of Allies

Yes, it's a stupid WoW joke, shut up.

Months ago, I was standing in a kitchen and watching as one friend, R., was surprised by another, H., declaring that she was not a feminist and hated feminists.  R. and H. continued talking about it, and A., standing next to me, turned to me and grinned, "Well, we're not feminists, are we, Jonathan?"

I still do not know what that means or how to respond.  My instinct, beyond feeling awkward and not saying anything, is to say, "Actually, yes, I am."  If I felt like A. was making that assertion on the basis that he felt that he, as a man, could not be a feminist because he had no capacity to understand what sexism fully means and thus felt that he should not represent himself in a way that would co-opt the movement(s) from women's experiences.  If I felt like this was the angle he was coming from, I would have had no problem agreeing and then entering a discussing with A. about the topic.

But no, it was pretty clear that, somehow, feminism was laughable or at least male participation in feminism.  I have, customarily, identified as a "feminist" to indicate my dedication to anti-sexism efforts.  Less so recently, due to reading about the issue mentioned above, and I am fine if some people hold that I cannot be a feminist as a male-identified, male-assigned person.  I am not invested in wearing the term "feminist" like a badge; it is a shortcut for me to say that I believe that there is a patriarchy, that there is continuous and varied sexism in the world that acts to oppress women, that I am willing to and have participated in anti-sexism activism, but it is not not a vital identification.  I do not need to be able to call myself a "feminist" to believe or do those things, and it is never my prerogative to preempt someone else's definition of feminism and what a feminist is.

But I feel like if I simply replied, "Maybe not, but I am against sexism," it would be meaningless.  Not many people would say they are for sexism and most would say that they are against it, but there is an unspoken second part of that sentence.  I could be saying, "I am against sexism, which is something that persists to this day that we all participate in and, as men, benefit from in any number of ways," while he agrees, "Yeah, I am against sexism too, and good thing it doesn't exist anymore."

It is the same in any other conversation.  "I am against racism, which is a persistent and complex system in our world that continues to affect and effect everything we do and say and all the outcomes of various processes, regardless of intention," versus "I am against racism, which was totally eliminated by white people working with Santa Luther, who knew his place and how to be nice and appeasing and non-confrontational enough."

It is possible for one to just straight-out say the former, but not everybody (read: me) has that in-person articulation.  It is easier for me to just say, "Yes, I am a feminist," but does that ease in a passing conversation override the problematic aspects of me making that statement?

In a related topic, I had also been reading about the problematic aspect of the word "ally".  Like the idea of "male feminists", as I understand it, there are two issues:

1. People who take on these labels use them as shields to defend and excuse their privilege.*
2. People who take on these labels use them as permission to co-opt the movement from actual women/POC/queer people/etc.

Honestly, I am not ready to personally disavow the term "ally", like I am not ready to personally reject "feminism" as inadequate due to its history of transphobia, of racism, of classism.  (Though I would also feel appropriative taking to womanism or anything like that, as I have never and can never find that feminism does not represent or fight for me as a woman.  Because I'm not a woman.  For me, I find it better to understand people in those two categories as Doing It Wrong.  I can recognize that the idea of "allies" can build coalitions and empower persons who may feel it would be otherwise appropriative for them to participate in anti-oppression causes due to their privilege, while remaining aware of the possibility of and critical of unexamined privilege.

As before, I am not going to assert that people have to accept my understanding or to accept my identification as an "ally" if I were to ever adopt it.

I'm not sure what I am trying to say here.  I think I am just trying to put together how I feel about something I've been reading and thinking about.  I think I am more optimistic because I feel like I have seen that there are anti-racist queer activists and Marxist feminist activists and queer disability rights activists and people able to navigate all these issues.  I know people who could easily be the stereotypically clueless feminists but instead are constantly willing to read and listen and learn.  I have seen my own transformations, slowly absorbing anti-oppression works around me and learning to be aware enough to see all this around me.  I have friends who listened to me stumble my way through explaining what I feel are problematic aspects of things and they were able to appreciate my attempts without demanding I kowtow to their own sense of pride and progressivism.

I just feel good about it, even when I am pissed about it.  Maybe I'm just still young.

*This is an article focused on the first in feminism, but I dislike how it attempts to negate someone's sexual identity, even if that person is a complete ass.