Sex Games: The Hangover (2009) // The Duke of Burgundy (2014) // The Phantom Thread (2017)
Here we go: The first issue of my new horror comic, Be Not Afraid #1, is out on stands today. You can go pick it up (or get a copy on Comixology, where Be Not Afraid is apparently the "#1 New Release in Religious Graphic Novels") then place your pre-order for Be Not Afraid #2 – the final order cut-off for that is Monday, June 9.
While you're at the comic shop, today is also the release day for DC Pride 2025. I love what I did, and I love that I got to do it – so, whether you want to read about humanoid abominations with mommy issues or baby trans in eight-foot-tall mecha suits, you're covered.
Normally I would try to put together a thematically appropriate essay, but these are wildly disparate projects – it's hard to find a common thread. So... here's "The Hangover," I guess?
The first time I watched The Hangover, I was looking to get angry. I ran a feminist blog in 2009, and back then, this was one of the single most important things you could do for Gender Equality: Watch a notoriously sexist movie, so that you could see how sexist it was, and list all the ways it was sexist for your followers, who were already planning to skip the movie because of its sexism.
I have gotten tired of watching movies this way — the whole Internet has, but as someone who did a lot of it, I reserve the right to be especially burned out — and so, when I watched The Hangover again for a podcast, I wanted to take a gentler tack. Maybe, I thought, I would wind up feeling nostalgic for The Hangover. Maybe I would be wistful for the time when cultural misogyny had not yet escalated to apocalyptic, pussy-grabbing, Andrew-Tate-idolizing levels of awfulness, when the worst thing we had to worry about was hack jokes.
No such luck. The Hangover is still really, really sexist — more so, now that its particular bro-y late-2000s misogyny is less normalized — and I still don’t like it. But I know that I’m a dude, now, which I didn’t know when I first watched The Hangover. And what I wound up thinking, as a dude watching this movie, was: These guys just seem fucking miserable.
I mean: Every wife or girlfriend in this movie is written as being deeply, viscerally unhappy with her partner — they’re sleeping with other guys, they’re always frowning or angry — for reasons the male characters can neither comprehend nor fix. The men hate the women they’re with, viscerally, without being able to imagine an alternative. Married men talk about how being married is life a knife in their gut, a soul death, a Hell without ceasing, but they never leave. Gender hangs so thick in the air that even the love between parents and children is voided by it — at one point, a father cheerfully encourages his son-in-law go cheat on his daughter in Vegas. She might be the tiny, perfect little baby that he nurtured into a whole person who will change the universe just by existing, but she is also (ugh) a girl.
These guys are profoundly lonely, and profoundly alone, no matter how many people they have around them, because they lack the basic capacity to relate to others. In the place of human connection or intimacy, what they have is Manhood, a list of things Men Do even though Women (those fiends) always try to stop them. Yet their idea of Real Manly Manhood hangs over their heads precisely because they can never measure up to it. No-one can measure up to it. Here is a partial list of things that are “gay,” according to The Hangover:
- Texting
- Having a shoulder bag
- Having a girlfriend, who is a woman
- Changing clothes
These guys spend more time thinking about being gay than most gay men. They’re all perpetually tormented by the knowledge that other men’s butts exist, and that they might accidentally catch a glimpse of one. They are denied any scrap of human vulnerability, and if they get hurt, it’s shameful — Ed Helms is supposedly being beaten by his girlfriend, which is not sad, but funny, because it proves he is “the woman” in his relationship. (Women are supposed to get beaten! Ha.) At one point, Bradley Cooper learns that he may have been raped while he was unconscious. His eyes widen in terror, while the audience, I guess, laughs.
All Real Men can do — literally all they can do, the thing the movie is about — is get blackout drunk and try to approximate some version of connection with other straight men, who are also bugfuck wasted throughout the encounter. They have to be too drunk to remember it, and they can’t forge an actual friendship, because caring about other men is gay.
When I watched The Hangover in 2009, poring over it for signs of Patriarchy or Rape Culture that I could decry to my followers, I got a thin high of outrage. But The Hangover isn’t outrageous. The Hangover is just fucking sad. I want to stress that these guys are not victims – they're experiencing the self-imposed loneliness of the victimizer. No-one can get close to them, because no-one is safe. But this is the story straight men tell about themselves, a massive hit movie about how awesome and fun and funny being a man is, and this is the prize at the top of the mountain: Isolation and self-harm, interspersed with occasional bouts of yelling “woo," like, really loud. What a waste.
There’s a book I recommend often, at this time of year, called The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. It’s about how heterosexual gender and relationship norms are fundamentally self-defeating — designed to produce the worst and most dysfunctional version of a relationship, even if you excel at meeting them. Now, if you are averse to theory, I have a new recommendation: Just watch The Hangover. It will teach you the exact same thing.
I’m trying to write my way into The Duke of Burgundy, or possibly Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Phantom Thread. Both are movies about a romance, featuring one cold, controlling person who constantly berates their quiet, self-abnegating partner on her failure to measure up to their excruciatingly high standards. The difference is that one of them is about a bad straight relationship and the other is about two lesbians who are into BDSM.