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Perception is a funny thing. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. You gets no part of my weed but you can have my bitch Heather. Sorry, got lost in an ign’ant tangent. There seems to be a new genre of movie that looks like a guy’s movie, feels like a guy’s movie, even makes me laugh like a guy’s movie, but rears it’s ugly head at the end to really be kind of a chick flick (Simmons brought this up in an earlier column with his dubbed “spork” flicks, but I’m not limiting myself, baby.). Some examples:

• The 40 Year Old Virgin

• Knocked Up

• Wedding Crashers

What do these movies have in common? They’re all pretty funny (at least in the beginning), they have male protagonists, and chicks seem to like them. (That’s strange, most girls don’t like watching Caddyshack, Clerks, Animal House or Dirty Work with me…) Also, Judd Apatow made the first two, the guy who brought us Talladega Nights (meeeehhhh, alright) and Anchorman (fuck yes).

But these three movies are not truly guy movies. Yes, guys are the main characters. They do guy stuff and make dick and fart jokes, just like real guys. But the message gets tainted at the end. What do these three movies have in common? In order to truly attain happiness the guy must totally change who he is so that a woman will love him and, therefore, make him truly happy. Behold, the examples:

40 Year-Old Virgin: Guy leads a decent, if nookie free, life. Has a steady job, his own place, and all of the video games and action figures he could ever want. Sounds pretty sweet, right? Shoot, we’ve all had droughts when all we dated was our right hand (or for a little exotic twist, our left hand after sitting on it for 10 minutes) for a somewhat extended period of time, and things went pretty well, right? So his boys try to get him to get some ass, and he seems down with it. Good friends, good idea. Lots of mishaps abound, and he turns up the sure-fire freak who would love a thumb in her butt and being called mommy mid-coitus for the older broad he has feelings for and he still waits until he’s married. Motherfucker bought the cow when he could’ve gotten the sweet freaky sex for free. He even freaks out when he’s losing his identity before realizing that’s what he really wants… Say it with me now, awwwww….

Knocked Up: (Spoiler alert, retard) Dude that hangs out with his buddies and gets stoned all the time (sound familiar, fellas? Did your ladies say “they’re just like you and your friends” to you? Thought so.) meets a truly bangin chick, plants the seed, and has to totally give up everything he likes to make this girl happy and be her full time love interest and baby daddy, totally ditching his friends in the process.

Wedding Crashers: Two best friends live the swinging life by crashing weddings and wielding meat with copious amounts of girls. A cad’s lifestyle? Sure, but what else do they have going on? Wedding season is summer, and all that’s on is baseball. Who doesn’t like free food and booze and anonymous sex? Funny how I don’t see any hands raised… So he finally finds the girl that he wants to change his life for and that’s when the fun STOPS. Seriously, is there any movie that hit the emergency brakes on the fun train faster than Wedding Crashers? How does it end? He changes his life and gets the girl, only after turning damn near suicidal over a girl he knew for approximately 48 hours. Get a grip, douchebag.

Now don’t get me wrong, I like all three of these movies. They were all very funny. I guess even Knocked Up didn’t totally piss me off at the end because he was doing it for the kid, which is respectable. But the main theme for all three of these movies is guy has fun, does his own thing; guy meets girl who totally makes him change; guy pisses on everyone and everything he loves for this girl, he is now happy.

****Before I go any further, Courtney, I know you’re reading this. This in NO WAY reflects how I feel about myself, but how I feel about the movies I’m talking about, and the general theme they seem to reflect. I’m just talking about movies. I can still do anything I want and you’re an AMAZING woman and I love you with all of my heart. You’ve never insisted that I change anything and you’ve only helped me grow as a person. Don’t hit me. Thank you.****

And maybe that’s what they’re getting at, that these guys were incomplete and they grew and became better/more complete people thanks to these women brought into their lives. I can respect that, but ho in 40 Year-Old Virgin makes dude get rid of ALL of his action figures. What the fuck? That’s a lifetime of collecting! Girl in Knocked Up monopolizes his time and more or less makes him choose between his friends and her. Hey, if you want him to give up the tree, that’s fine. He’s unemployed and living off of an insurance settlement. But dang, let him hang out and look for nipples in movies with his boys! That should make you happy, too! The more time he spends looking for other nipples the less time he’s tugging and feeling on yours (scientifically proven). And in Wedding Crashers? Yeah, maybe the womanizing could get old. Maybe. Gosh, I don’t know. But this dude was fucking MO-ROSE after the girl got pissed at him and told him to fuck off. Well you lied to try to get in her pants. Deal with it.

This train of thought echoes what I’ve heard many folks say (like the G.I.P., for instance). But there’s something else that made me write about this. I was reading this chat transcript from the Washington Post that talked about Knocked Up. Allow me to quote:

Silver Spring, Md.: Hi, Ann, love a woman chatter! I say this because there are so many what I call “male fantasy movies” that men in particular seem to love.

Most recent version of this, “Knocked Up.” Very funny, but super sharp woman ends up with a jerk who turns out to have a somewhat sweet side but is nowhere near her equal in terms of brains, education, earning potential. Enough already!

I think some of these have been spawned by country songs, which routinely contain lyrics such as how amazing that you, a PhD, could love an automobile mechanic and high school drop-out. I’m sure there are some of these marriages, and some of them may be happy, but not nearly as many of these good ole boys would like to have us believe.

Ann Hornaday: Love it! I must admit, I had the same reaction to “Knocked Up” — he never quite transcended that arrested adolescent vibe to make me root for him. I can’t quote her here, but Gloria Steinem recently coined a very funny phrase for guy-centric movies, a slightly profane pun on “chick flick.” … I’d say that generally, yes, since most of the filmmakers and green-lighters in Hollywood are (still) guys, there’s probably a bias toward male fantasy fulfillment in the narratives they create. And as readers/viewers/listeners/consumers, we’re all conditioned to accept the white male perspective as the universal, objective norm.

Go fuck yourself, Silver Spring. And don’t call the male EMT when you get a zucchini stuck up in there, you man hating bitch.

Oh, ha ha ha…. A dick flick. I get it. You know what a dick flick is? Fucking 300 (in all it’s thinly veiled homoerotic glory). The leading male (Leonidas) is empowered. He tells a huge army to suck his Spartan cock (paraphrase). He has a bangin wife, who is also an empowered chick and LOVES that he’s empowered, too. She encourages him to be himself. And he encourages her to take disdick. Then some war happens. Guys get stuck with spears and warhammers and clubbed with shit. The end. That’s a dick flick, Ms. Steinem.

In what ways do any of these three movies exhibit male fantasy fulfillment, besides the beginning of Wedding Crashers (getting mad play) and Knocked Up (Katherine Heigl on your weiner)? It may start off as male fantasy fulfillment. Any average guy knows a chick that hot wouldn’t sleep with him, no matter how funny he is, unless he pulled up to the club in a gold plated Bentley and drug his dick behind him on the way in. But homeboy does it, raw dog at that. End of fantasy. She wakes up and sees he’s a regular dude (thanks, booze!), has an awkward breakfast and proceeds to blow him off until she finds out he hath spawned in her fertile field and needs a baby daddy. Guy goes back to his regular life doing his thing, then gets to knock it out a couple of more times while she gets greater with child. Make no mistake, the fantasy ends at “I’m pregnant.” Game fucking over, Ben.

So we go from male fantasy fulfillment (average guy bangs hot girl… Seriously, is that the depth of the male fantasy?) to the endings, chock full of female fantasy fulfillment. “This guy was a total schlub and loser and I fixed him! I fucking rock! Now, let’s have some Cosmos! Girl power!” This is what happens in all three of these movies (in one way or another), and every other reverse chick flick that’s ever been made.

Who were the ad wizards that came up with these? I think Oprah has developed a lab to make the ultimate subversive chick flicks, the reverse chick flick. Lure us in with the funny. You put Apatow’s name on it “fuck yeah, I love Anchorman… I’m in.” Lull us into a false sense of comfort, then WHAM! They cut our virtual movie dicks off! The secret Hollywood gynocracy (tm, me) is trying to emasculate huMANity! They know there are guys like me who put our feet down and say “hell no, no chick flicks, no way.” So you ladies find your girlfriends, sisters, mothers, etc… and go see Hugh Grant piss away male existence opposite whomever with a real tender soundtrack. But the girls want to see movies with us, too. That’s how these movies came about.

As I said, I like every movie I mentioned above. Even the end of Wedding Crashers didn’t totally sully the movie for me, even though Owen Wilson is wearing WAY too much makeup in it. Yikes… But they all made me feel a little weird at the end. I’m having a good time laughing about dick and fart jokes and “You know how I know you’re gay?” and all that good stuff, then I felt the old tug and snip at my crotch. Motherfucker. I got duped.

It’s funny how the ladies in the chat above (and maybe even the couple of you that read this blog) felt that Knocked Up embodied the ultimate male fantasy. I know that none of my friends that have seen it (or the other two) would say that. We just thought we were watching a funny movie that ended up getting us stuck in another having babies conversation (not me, but men in general). The guy sold out and the woman got her way. How does this fulfill my fantasies?

You want to make a movie that would appeal to my male fantasies? First of all, get the MPAA to come up with a rating well beyond NC-17. The movie starts with Chuck Norris and Bear Grylls as cybernetic commandos being dropped into the major metropolis of your choice. It has been overrun with hot, big-tittied, nympho aliens (I’m thinking Jessica Biel and Scarlett Johannson could be the bi-sexual alien queens). Chuck and Bear fuck them all out of existence with their cybernetic machine-gun dicks. Then they fly back and punch their boss in the face, go fishing, and have some peace and fucking quiet. That is a male fantasy movie.