Life on the Fourth Floor


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House Bunny is Ruining Girl Geeks for Everybody

Posted 14:27 (GMT) 23rd August 2008 by David J. Bishop

I'm trying to be less angry these days. There's nothing wrong with being a bitter husk wallowing in cynicism and despair but there's such a thing with being too bitter. But maybe it's time I shelved the positive outlook and found something to get angry about, since the alternative is me eating and describing sandwiches.

So, House Bunny. Anna Faris. Forgive me for explaining something which for some of you will be old news but over here films usually get released about two months after they're shown in the states so many of you Floorians won't know what the hell I'm talking about. They're all like, House... Bunny? Is this a furry adaptation of a successful medical drama? No, no it is not.

The plot, as I gathered from the trailer, concerns a Playboy Bunny called Shelley who gets kicked out of the Playboy Mansion and somehow becomes a 'House Mother' (I originally typed that as 'Mouse Hother', illegal in 47 states) of a sorority house. No, I didn't know there were such things as House Mothers either - it doesn't help that the premise and title all assume a fairly detailed knowledge of the American college fraternity and sorority system. We don't have that over here and I don't understand why these organisations exist or what purpose they serve. All I know is they all have names made out of letters in the Greek alphabet and you can be kicked out for not being pretty enough. Jeez, why do I have to know the ins and outs of a system utterly alien to me just to figure out what the title of a film means? It's interesting how you can't say "torch" in an English film because American audiences don't know it means "flashlight" but American releases can be as insular and confusing as they like.

Anyway, Shelley becomes the 'house bunny' of Zeta House, populated by very intelligent but 'unattractive' girls. They are all top of their class but none of them can get any boys. In steps the bunny to help! A make-over montage later (and this is the part of the trailer where 'U + Ur Hand' by Pink blares somewhat ironically over the footage) and the girls discover their inner 'ho-bags! Yay!

What am I saying, 'somewhat ironically'? There are at least three levels of irony in that choice of song. The line "I'm not here for your entertainment" playing over footage of a Playboy Bunny? The implication that doing a girl's hair and dressing her up like a stripper somehow constitutes female empowerment? How about the phrase 'you and your hand' itself, what it refers to, and how you know there will be some guy doing that whilst watching this film? It's like a perfect storm.

Now, I'm not going to deny that I'm a pretty geeky guy. The combination of 'cartoonist' and 'runs his own website' practically says all there is to say about how nebbish I am. But my nerd levels are not over nine thousand. I don't keep pens in my shirt pocket, I don't choreograph my own lightsabre duels and I don't cosplay. But I'm geeky enough that I find the girls in the House Bunny trailer really attractive pre-makeover. I think girl geeks are sexy, just as wrench monkeys find girls who are into cars sexy or gun nuts find girls with semi-automatics sexy. Shit, if I met a girl who could quote Firefly I would marry her. I would propose on the spot.

What I'm saying is that whoever you are there is someone out there who thinks what you do is hot. There is even someone out there who will think this way about you who you will also find attractive too. If you make yourself over to become someone you're not you're denying yourself and this hypothetical dream partner the chance at true happiness. You've heard that confidence is the sexiest thing you can possess? Well have the confidence to just be yourself. Those that conform, those that care about being popular or who change their behaviour to match everyone else in the room, are the boring ones. Those same geeky girls in the House Bunny trailer after their make-over just look uninteresting. Sort of plain and homogenised, like extras in a film. Not ugly by any means but unremarkable, lacking in personality, generic. I'm pretty sure that's what House Bunny is trying to turn every girl in the Western world into. Pussycat Dolls.

The second half of the trailer has a HIL-ARIOUS subversion of this tired make-over trope, when Shelley meets a guy and tries to seduce him using her air-head Playboy charms but discovers he's attracted to intelligent girls! Or, as it's worded in the trailer, "What if Oliver doesn't mind a smart girl?" Doesn't mind? What the fuck is this, 1532? Are people still worried about education melting women's brains? That's the most appalling sentence I've heard uttered all week, and I watched an Anne Coulter interview the other day. Yeah, so when Shelley realises that Oliver doesn't mind smart girls, we see her hefting books around comically and wearing huge glasses made out of the bottoms of coke bottles and wearing frumpy clothing, all in attempt to look smart. Ha. ha. ha.

Now, I know there's going to be a nice moral at the end about being yourself, that the girl-geek-in-slap who says "Now we can be the best versions of ourselves" in the trailer is going to be proven wrong, that the whole conformity and beautification process is going to spiral into self-destructive bitchiness, that everyone's going to learn how to give a care and that Oliver is going to tell Shelley that he doesn't mind that she is a superficial idiot. But that's not going to negate the effect of the rest of the film, the core message of which can be summarised thus:

1. Smart women are ugly geeks.

2. If you want to look smart, dress up like an ugly geek.

Why are all the brainiacs in house Zeta also geeks? There is such a thing as a smart glamorous person and such a thing as a stupid geek - I myself am living proof. In fact, I get by mostly by pretending to be smart, by people assuming I'm smarter than I am just because I'm a total dork. But that's hurting my case for being yourself so enough about my pseudointellectualism.

Look, even after we get the nice moral ending about being yourself those girl geeks aren't going to go back to exactly how they looked at the start of the trailer - there's going to be some sort of compromise in which the girls find their own semi-'ho style and the house bunny accidentally picks up some quantum physics or some stupid bullshit. How do I know this? Because in a Hollywood film everything can't just go back to how it was at the start - all the characters will have changed by end, albeit in terribly shallow ways.

So the film won't get around this reinforcement of the bespectacled smart girl stereotype - reinforcing the belief that education and intelligence turns girls into cardigan-wearing socially-stunted losers who cannot get boys (that all-important goal). Not only is it not true, it's encouraging girls to be less smart or to pretend to be stupid - and not college girls, because college girls aren't the target audience for this film about girls in college. It works like this - girls in college want to watch films about women living in New York, girls in high school want to watch the films about college and small children want to watch films about high school - hence High School Musical and (shudder) Bratz. So the target audience for House Bunny is actually younger and more impressionable ladies, ones who I fear will be more affected by its message. And, as a single guy who is genuinely looking for intelligent women with big sexy brains, that can only be a bad thing. Let's put it this way, I'm doing a course in English Literature at a University with one of the largest research libraries in the UK in a class with a roughly 2/3 female population and even I am struggling to find women who read.

Conclusion: House Bunny is sexist shit, ruining it for everybody. But then what else can we expect from Anna Faris who, outside of her work in the Scary Movie franchise (I could just stop typing now), was last seen setting women's lib back by a good ten years in My Super Ex-Girlfriend, the message of which was "power and self-confidence makes women scary and unattractive, and their insecure boyfriends feel threatened by that". Well, now intelligence makes women unattractive too! Hooray! Next up: boobs make women unattractive. Anna Faris plays a flat-chested girl who helps a load of women get breast reductions. High fives all round.

In other news you may have noticed I used the word 'thus' back there. Yeah, thus. Not 'thusly'. Thus. Most adverbs end in '-ly' - most. But some do not. 'Thus' is one of those. Please don't stick a '-ly' on the end just for the sake of it. You're destroying the English language. 'Thusly' isn't a word, so stop it. Just stop. If you can't figure out how to use 'thus' correctly just don't use it at all, just say "like so".

Finally I want to give a big shout out to Anne in Spain, who posted a link to my strip in her Spanish language blog. As far as webcomics are concerned, for Anne it's just Fourth Floor and Wapsi Square, which is most flattering. I assume Anne speaks English because she's not going to get a lot out of this site if she does not but just out of politeness I'm going to draw upon the only Spanish I can remember from high school. Muchísimas gracias, Anne. Tengo un perrito caliente, me llamo David. No lo se. Se puede. Hacías. Como estas. There, that's all I got. Alcohol, you have a way of emptying one's mental recycling bin of all unnecessary files. Peace out.

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