Lets Get Some Period Blood in 'Jackass,' Please!
Feminism means that women can destroy their bodies, too
I finally saw Jackass Forever last night. I loved it! I had so many questions afterward that I stayed up late Googling: Why does Johnny Knoxville have three different hair colors at different points of the movies? (Ultimately it doesn’t matter.) Where was Bam Margera? (Actually, that’s too dark to spend another second on for the purposes of this blog post). But most important, will future women jackasses ever achieve parity if men with penises are designing the most epic stunts?
To catch you up, Johnny Knoxville, Steve O, and the boys added a few new loons to the crew, including an unctuous, steaming hot himbo named Poopies, some guy’s dad (he’s very afraid of spiders), a guy with one tooth and an “I love fat cock” lower back tat, Machine Gun Kelly, some other guy, and a real life GIRL. That’s right, YouTuber Rachel Wolfson joined the crew. Sort of. She licks an electric lollipop in a mime challenge, and later gets underwhelming Botox from a scorpion. But really, it’s more apt to say she got scorpion lip filler — a minor oversight, but one that nonetheless proved to me that women in STEM are not designing the Jackass challenges.
When Wolfson asks for the scorpion to be removed from her chest after the lip filler, Chris Pontius, dressed as a doctor, tells her that she needs to consent before he’s allowed to touch her. “Consent!!!” she screams, scorpion scaling her body back up to her face. “Consent!!” That’s 2021 for you, Pontius says, permission granted for him to touch her clothed boob.
I laughed A LOT at this exchange while choking on $12 tater tots, but probably not as hard as I did when a colony of bees stung Steve-O’s dick or when a few of the guys flattened their penises like pancakes under plates of glass and used them as ping pong paddles, for example. Wolfson can’t do any of that, and not just for reasons of consent but because of the facts of her anatomy.
I loved Jackass as a 14-year-old girl, and even more so I loved what it spawned in Viva La Bam and Rob & Big. I never wished I could do what they were doing at the time, but Wolfson’s somewhat meek introduction into the boys club got me thinking. I am obviously not suggesting here that Johnny Knoxville design stunts where women’s genitalia are stung by bees or pounded into chicken cutlets (because of cultural trauma surrounding women’s reproductive organs and also my suspicion that it would not play well on screen). I’m not even saying we need women swathed in raw salmon alone in rooms with bears like the guys for the sake of gender parity. What I’m calling for is more women behind the scenes, designing boob- or ass- or menstruation-centric stunts.
Wolfson herself contributed stunt concepts to the movie, but as far as I can tell, only one out of 17 people in the writer’s room was a woman (SNL’s Sarah Sherman). That’s a great start, but we need a few more. My body is often as disgusting as Poopies’s and the boys’, and I have plenty of ideas on how to destroy it for feminism.
