Vital gender under-class lessons from a sabretoothed squirrel

Just like I enjoyed Twilight while noticing its perturbing elements, I can appreciate the fun animation in Ice Age while REALLY hating the sexist cultural referents its humor depends on. Here's what I'm talking about:

Here, we have a host of assumptions underlying the narrative of the guy squirrel and the girl squirrel. Which we know is a girl squirrel because it's wearing blue eyeshadow and acts sexually manipulative. (Hint! Little girls! That's all you need to become a Woman! Start practicing today!)

The guy squirrel possesses the fruits of his labor, which he has rightly earned and which he needs to survive. The girl squirrel uses a combination of sexual manipulation and faked distress to trick the guy into entering an implied contract to share resources based on love and sex. This would not make sense unless we understood and accepted that the girl is unable to get an acorn through her own labor. The girl then screws the guy out of his earnings. He has been a fool! (Little boys, take note! Don't let this happen to you! It's just how girls are!) The end.

Let me unpack it a little bit more for you. Women's efforts and labor doesn't actually count. If they do anything, or work at anything, or achieve anything, that can be instantly invalidated by saying they stole that tangible success through sex, ie through a transaction with a man trading the only thing women have of value, which is their sexual availability to men. Or, in this case, to goddamned sabre-toothed cartoon man-squirrels. That's either just the way girl squirrels are because of their essential nature which results in wry romantic comedy hijinks, OR they're that way because society has denied them the ability to make a living or if they (barely) have it, the actual credit for making that living is denied them and it must have been due to some man in the background who they're blowing on the casting couch (or the VC board room, or whatever). Therefore, it makes sense to believe, and to base humor that "we all can understand" on the "fact", the weird, powerful, and false idea, that there is a huge category of women with no legitimate personal interest in any particular subject who are just looking for some powerful man to fuck in order to access (and steal) his power (though how are they stealing it if they are actually exchanging something of value, ie, sex?) These women are looking to sleep with you, the powerful (!?) man to get a tangible benefit because they can't (legitimately by your standards) benefit from their own labor. Given the slightest opportunity they will turn on you (the man who has earned everything justly, even if it has been by exploiting others' labor). Unfortunately there is NO woman so powerful and accomplished that this misogynist patriarchal myth cannot discredit. Go ahead and think of one and let me know if you come up with any answers.

Comments

[Pretty Lady]

Yes, it's a toxic bind, isn't it.

Aside from the fact that a person who cannot obtain power directly will obtain it indirectly, this scenario has another angle. It's possible that a lot of the reason for misogyny stems from the resentment of less-powerful men, who get their asses kicked by the Alpha, competing to impress the Most Desirable Female. (My significant other has often complained that in really violent neighborhoods, an attractive woman can endanger the lives of beta males all around her, simply by walking down the street.) Thus, the sociocultural dynamics are entirely determined by the most-violent male, with everybody else struggling to survive whatever way they can.

In other words, patriarchy on its most fundamental level is as destructive to men as it is to women, perhaps even more so.

Oh! Wait, I thought of one--Margaret Thatcher.

[Danny]

Yeah, I thought of Thatcher to begin with, but then I remembered. One of the long-running complaints about Thatcher in the UK was that she got her money to pursue her political career by marrying Denis Thatcher, who was always portrayed as a hen-pecked sot in the press. Also that she manipulated the Tory bigwigs by (incomprehensibly, but that must have been how she did it, right, lads) by flirting at them. Cue articles about how leading conservative figures in the party actually fancied Thatcher, etc.