I recently saw Billy Bob Thornton’s portrayal of a drunken, misogynist football coach in the remake of Bad News Bears. It was hard for me not to think of his personal life while watching and how he had recently ended his marriage to Angelina Jolie-Pitt when he made this movie. He comments on teenage girls’ asses to the consternation of those around him and yet his character does not hurt for lack of snatch – lack of a real relationship on screen and in real life – but apparently not sex. It seemed that this movie was chosen by Thornton as a monument explaining his fears and insecurities about being a father and dedicated to his posthumous marriage. It’s too late, Billy Bob; women don’t take kindly to being abandoned while new to motherhood whether the baby is yours or not, and proving that you worship women in retrospect won’t get you anywhere either. There was a scene where Thornton’s character was talking to the teenage girl with the nice ass mentioned previously and one of his baseball player protégées interrupted him and was severely reprimanded. It was here that the uninformed kid got what I imagine is a universal lesson in a young boy’s life – the anti-cockblocking speech. I have been meditating on this idea of cockblocking and its anthropological repercussions ever since, some mystical key to the Universe seeming to be contained within the act. Cockblocking: a woman walks by while the man hustles to get a word in, any interruption and the moment/piece of ass is lost. I used to see this as yet another sign of man’s constant attempted manipulation of woman as well as his opinion that she is stupid. But suddenly I see it form a different side and the woman becomes a feminine creature that seems to float by on the air while the lowly human man victoriously struggles to overcome his fear and insecurity and touch the magic that woman contains.
As my feminist-educated mind reels from the implication that everything might be exactly opposite of how I have always thought it, I ponder other such supposed erroneous ideas that I have held. Is the man working and running the world a sign of woman’s ignorance and inability? Or is it a sign of her power to have the tedious done for her? I gotta say ladies – a career is one thing – something that you care about and can be your stamp on the world – but working for a living sucks. Is it too late to go back and unchange the world? It’s too late for Billy Bob, that’s for sure.
Tags: Angelina Jolie-Pitts, Bad News Bears remake, Billy Bob Thornton, cockblocking, fatherhood, feminism, football, marriage, misogyny, motherhood, post-feminism, sex
