CinÉireann Issue 8 | Page 34

within the Star Trek franchise; she was afforded her first on-screen romance during the fifth season and more than one hundred episodes into the run of Star Trek: Voyager, because the production team were afraid of diminishing or undermining her. In contrast, the male leads of the franchise all got at least one romance plot within the first two seasons of their tenure. On The X-Files, Mulder got a flirty ex-girlfriend in the first season and hooked up with a sexy vampire in the second; when Scully spent the night at a date's apartment in the fourth season, he pointedly slept on the couch. Actor Gillian Anderson and writer Glen Morgan called out the double standard as applied to Scully.

Teen comedies have traditionally treated male sexuality as something to be celebrated and encouraged, whereas female sexuality is something deeply uncomfortable. This not just a genre trapping, but a cultural reality. The double standard finds expression in a number of different and often insidious ways, from the manner in which promiscuous men are lauded as "studs" or "players" while promiscuous women are dismissed as "whores" or "sluts." Within sex comedies, male characters are often attempting to lose their virginity, while female characters are often presented as trying to preserve their purity.

However, recent juvenile comedies have demonstrated a willingness to interrogate this idea in interesting and thought-provoking manners. Bad Neighbours 2 is a film largely based around the incongruity of a gender-swap of the original film's presence. Instead of a fraternity moving in next door to the lead characters, a sorority moves in. These young women engage in precisely the sort of grossout debauchery in which young male characters typically engage over these sorts of films, often pausing to articulate the double standard that exists within how the characters (and possibly the audience) react to these stunts and displays.

At one point, in a moment that is very much intended to make the point, the female characters throw bloody tampons at the lead characters. Teddy, the fratboy troublemaker who served as the antagonist in the first film and is consulting with the rebellious sorority in the second, is horrified by the bodily-function-related prank. "That was over the line," he protests. Shelby, the head of the sorority responds, "You would've been like 'it's so funny' if it was a bag of dicks: 'look, it's a bag of dicks on the window!'" Teddy concedes, "Yeah, you got me. That's funny. A bag of dicks."

Of course, Bad Neighbours 2 is not condoning some lost art of bloody tampon throwing; it's reckless, gross, and potentially unhealthy as with any bodily-function related humour. It is, however, pointing out the double-standard of comedy that is somehow less repulsed at the equally disgusting use of male bodily fluids for broad grossout comedy; the iconic "sperm as hair gel" joke in There's Something About Mary comes to mind.

Maude Lebowski was correct in The Big Lebowski when she pointed out the double standard that applies to the presentation and discussion of male and female sexuality in popular culture. "My art has been commended as being strongly vaginal, which bothers some men," she informs the lead character. "The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina." She elaborates, "They don't like hearing it and find it difficult to say whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his dick or his rod or his johnson." In some ways, Bad Neighbours 2 plays as an extended meditation upon this idea. If these sorts of comedies can rely upon penis-adjacent humour, why can't they also tell vaginal-related jokes?

Producers Seth Rogen and Even Goldberg have become unlikely champions of this sort of equal-opportunity crass comedy. Rogen is something of a champion of this sort of juvenile humour, to the point that his Netflix comedy special Hilarity for Charity could perhaps be described as wither an extended dick joke or an interlocking sequence of dick jokes. When they were working on Bad Neighbours 2 and decided to include a strong female perspective within the narrative, they brought on Kay Cannon to work with the team of writers. Fleshing out and developing the feminist themes, and providing the movie's female characters with a sense of agency, Cannon impressed Rogen and Goldberg so much that they sought to give her a vehicle to develop her approach to the raunchy teen comedy.

34 CinÉireann / June 2018