‘No Hard Feelings’ & The Cinematic, Double Standard for Female Predators
Image: Captured on Netflix
The coming-of-age comedy No Hard Feelings is a strange film. Its premise borders on the problematic, as a much older Jennifer Lawrence plays a woman named Maddie secretly hired by the helicopter parents of the character Percy (a recently graduated high school senior, I must emphasize) to have sex with him. The reasons for this charade are contrived (and that's okay), but throughout the film, I was very uncomfortable about this much older woman trying to "seduce" a nineteen-year-old (don't worry, he's technically legal, I guess).
The plot of this film thankfully moves us away from this angle, as Maddie and Percy fail to have sex and eventually just become friends, and the parent's behavior is depicted as wrong. Yet I was left wondering that if the gender of Jennifer Lawrence was swapped for a man, would we still find this movie funny? I don't think a lot of people would.
No Hard Feelings seems to tie into a double standard with how we treat female predation, and although I think the film's heart was in the right place, we still walk away with a comedy that trivializes male victimhood.
A Brief History of Pop Culture Downplaying Male Sexual Assault
There seems to be a double standard in film (and society at large) where sexual harassment and assault toward men are depicted as a joke. For a long time, whenever the concept of perpetrators grooming or raping men was brought up, a lot of people would make fun of it. "I roofied you on [two dates]," the alien character Roger from American Dad says to the high school boy Steve Smith, in a longstanding bit about how the character rapes any and everything, but mostly men.
One of the most pervasive myths is that men simply can't be raped because they all want to have sex. In an old episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, he referred to male victims of sexual assaults as experiencing "Lucky Bastard Syndrome." The movie Wedding Crashers had an entire bit where Vince Vaughn's character Jeremy Grey was tied to the bed against his will as another character tried to rape him — it was played for laughs (see also Get Him To the Greek, Get Hard, etc.).
And this dismissiveness is not only in media: legal systems all over the world have denied the existence of male rape, especially in the case of female perpetrators or perpetrators perceived as queer. Much hay was made in 2018, for example, about how England and Wales still had a legal definition of rape that was gendered, only recognizing victims of rape as those who are penetrated by a penis, either vaginally, anally, or orally. (see also Switzerland, Finland, etc.).
This willful ignorance of male sexual assault sadly even applies to young boys and teenagers from authority figures such as teachers and the like. There is an entire South Park episode aired in 2006 that parodies this grim reality (see Miss Teacher Bangs A Boy). A young boy is engaged in a sexual relationship with a female teacher, and when someone comes forward about it, the police are pretty dismissive, saying it's "nice."
There is also the contradictory belief that those who rape men are "sexual deviants," particularly queer people, who are often erroneously portrayed as the primary (and sometimes sole) initiators of sexual assault. In the words of Dr. Aliraza Javaid from the paper Male Rape, Masculinities, and Sexualities: Understanding, Policing, and Overcoming Male Sexual Victimisation:
“…the male rape myth that ‘male rape is a homosexual issue’ is highlighted in more recent research. Demirkan-Martin (2009) perpetuates male rape as solely a homosexual issue and believes that male rape is either incited by sexual deviance, sexualised aggression, or sexual lust/desire, instead of male rape being totally desexualised. This suggests that male rape does not affect heterosexual men and is essentially a sexual act, whereby the offender is unable to control his aggressive and sexual impulses.”
This myth is again untrue (queer people are more likely to be sexually assaulted and often not well studied when it comes to sexual predation), but it is pervasive nonetheless. We started this section with the alien character Roger, a "depraved" bisexual trope whose gender and romantic fluidity are intertwined with his predatory nature. This type of paring is common in media, especially in comedies, where a depraved bisexual is pushing the limits of his more timid and "stereotypical" heterosexual cast mates, many times nonconsensually. Other media characters that might fit this mold are Dr. Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror, Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Logan Delos in Westworld, and many more.
We can likewise see this outlook of deviancy leading to assault with male prison rape jokes, which are ubiquitous in pop culture. Whenever the threat of prison comes up, it's common in media for a character to jokingly bring up the threat of rape as an unavoidable aspect of this “deviant” environment. As Tony Stark implied to the character Ivan in Iron Man 2: "Where will you be watching the world consume me from? That's right. A prison cell. I'll send you a bar of soap," he laughs, referring to the widespread myth of men in prison bending over to get a bar of soap only to be raped as a result. "I am going to slather you up in Gunavian jelly and go to town," a prisoner says to Peter Quill, in a line we are meant to find funny in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie (see the "Don't drop the soap" meme more broadly).
These jokes are almost always directed at men, and the whole punch line revolves around trivializing male rape. As stated in the video Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs: "Men's vulnerability is an endless source of mockery in mainstream comedy and vulnerability that results from sexual violence is no exception…The idea behind the joke here is as obvious as it is toxic: that men who aren't tough or manly enough to avoid being victimized are pathetic and therefore deserving of ridicule or worse."
We can see how, historically, sexual violence toward men has often been downplayed. While some media and academics are starting to challenge these misconceptions, for the most part, it's not uncommon for our society to reinforce the idea that sexual violence toward men is funny, nonexistent, or, paradoxically, both — and that is where the film No Hard Feelings comes into play.
How 'No Hard Feelings' fits this trend
The movie No Hard Feelings takes a very similar stance, trivializing male sexual assault for laughs. Maddie initially abducts Percy. She goes to his place of work and pressures him into her vehicle. Percy nervously glances at the back of the van he's in and sees a machete and other equipment that could kill him. He starts messaging 911, and Maddie takes his phone. In any other context, this would be horrifying.
However, the way this scene is framed shows us that while Percy thinks he's getting abducted (which he is), the film doesn't want us to think about it too much. We hear not horror music but The Stroke playing in the background. When they get out of the car, Percy maces Maddie, and it's played as a comedy of errors. He tells her that she tried to abduct him, and she denies it, saying, "I can't kidnap you. You’re 19. Grow up." This statement, along with several other assurances, is enough to convince Percy, and he rushes to get Maddie a hose, which he, of course, fails to administer. Maddie's actions aren't depicted as creepy as much as funny and ineffectual.
I want you to imagine now that a man in his early to late thirties shows up unannounced at a 19-year-old woman's place of work. He tries to sleep with her in her office, and when that fails, he pressures her into his van so aggressively that the teen fears for her life. He offers to drive her home, a lie, instead bringing her back to his place, and then when the 19-year-old finally has the courage to mace her would-be assaulter, he responds: "I can't abduct you. You're 19."
Is that funny? More to the point, would that be believable (note this is your public service announcement that adults too can be abducted)? I am not the only one who has asked this question. As Claire Cohen writes in Vogue:
“It’s just all a bit tone deaf, isn’t it? And while I do think a predatory older man and a young girl has different connotations when it comes to the power dynamic and threat of physical violence, frankly I’m not sure a film about a young person of any gender being pressured into having sex after their parents decide that they’re “ready” is a feel-good “coming-of-age sex comedy,” as No Hard Feelings is billed.
And indeed, this movie does not feel very lighthearted. Maddie is very unstable. She has her reasons (i.e., being abandoned by her father and almost losing her house), but that doesn't change the fact that she actively puts people in danger. There is one "funny" scene where she doesn't let Percy into her car after the two have lost their clothes, and he jumps on her car's hood, begging to be let in, and she starts driving with him on it. It's, again, framed as a laugh-riot, and while Percy eventually gets to do the same to Maddie, the power dynamics of this initial interaction make me very uncomfortable.
It also bears mentioning that while Percy may be legal to bang (gross), he's emotionally stunted. The whole reason his parents hired Maddie is because they somehow thought that having sex would allow him to mature (parents of the year, right here). And so, emotionally, he's like fourteen. He doesn't navigate the world very well, and so his parents hiring this very mature woman to pressure him into having sex is just abusive — there's no other way to say it, really.
While their helicopter parenting is depicted as wrong in the end (although childishly so), that's not the primary issue here. I am not angry that they are tracking his phone and other such over-functioning — like I am a little peeved by it — but mostly, they arranged for their son to get sexually assaulted. That's what I dislike about them.
The film eventually pulls away from this premise, and Maddie and Percy become friends (in the last ten minutes), but again, most of the film is just Jennifer Lawrence's character very aggressively going after an immature 19-year-old.
A hard conclusion
The most disappointing aspect of this whole thing is that the film was trying to say something meaningful. A significant tension is that Maddie, a townie, is resentful (rightfully so, in my opinion) of the wealthy vacationers gentrifying her town. Her only significant friend is another working-class white woman who can no longer afford to live in that community and is considering moving to Florida.
There is even an intelligent lampshade where Maddie is complaining about this gentrification to a Native American, only to realize that yes, maybe other people do understand how she is feeling — a nod to the fact that although gentrification is hurting poor white people, as an attractive white person in a settler-colonial state built for white people, she still has many privileges. There is a better comedy movie trapped in here that talks more succinctly about the intersections of class, gender, and whiteness that I would have loved to see.
Yet, instead, we go ham on this very outdated gag about a cougar hitting on a late teen and there being no power dynamic because men love to f@ck. This film felt very anachronistic. We are in the 2020s, not the 80s. Can we accept that men, too, can also be victims of sexual assault and stop with this patriarchal nonsense about men being so "horny" that any harassment directed toward them doesn't matter?
As Claire Cohen continues in that Vogue article: "The truth is that it's this tired old storyline that has come of age — and should rapidly be put out to pasture."