Dude, where's my gender? Contemporary teen comedies and new forms of American masculinity.

Gleefully vulgar celebrations of the sexual antics of youth and other raucous rites of puberty, contemporary American teen comedies--such as American Pie (1999), Dude, Where's My Car? (2000), Loser (2000), American Pie 2 (2001), and Saving Silverman (2001)--usually fall below the radar of middlebrow moviegoing tastes and are rarely subjected to critical analysis. While they perpetutate the critically disreputable nature of the genre, established by earlier entries such as Porky's (1981), Screwballs (1983), and Revenge of the Nerds (1984), a closer look reveals that there's a lot more going on in these films than we might think.

Indeed, this latest wave of teen comedies offers a fascinating record of the fluctuations and new currents in the shaping of masculine identity in post-Clinton America. In surprising ways--often reflecting the impact of the feminist and gay-rights movements--they portray new visions of gender, mapping emergent sexualities, reshaping conventional notions of manhood, and helping to redefine gender identity as such.

This is not to suggest that these commercial entertainments are consciously making progressive statements, or that, in seismically monitoring changes in conventional sexual and gender codes, they are part of the feminist and gay movements' efforts to challenge the dominant culture. They are neither completely progressive nor devoid of political implications. While they might occasionally engage in a conscious, if humorously-motivated, socio-cultural critique, they also often display a troubling, reactionary dimension. Some of the representations of gender and sexuality in these comedies, which reveal the effect of radical changes in our culture, simultaneously evince a deep hostility to these changes. In fact, the comedies can be seen as an attack on the very forces they reflect. Yet what's interesting is that they don't merely counterattack perceived threats to stable gender and sexual stereotypes. The new teen comedies offer both reaction and representation, and thereby sometimes even sympathy for sexual t ransgression.

Male teenagers are a distinct field of cultural inquiry--neither men nor boys, both childlike beings and adult men, blurring the boundaries of both categories. In his 1993 study American Manhood, E. Anthony Rotundo discusses the "free nation" of nineteenth-century American boy culture as "a distinct cultural world, with its own rituals and its own symbols and values. As a social sphere, it was separate both from the domestic world of women, girls, and small children, and from the public world of men and commerce. In this privileged space of their own, boys were able to play outside the rules of the home and the marketplace." Teen boys in a world of their own, playing outside the rules.

The new teen comedies exploit this special zone of identity, amounting to veritable pageants of boys in men's drag, donning and discarding codes of manhood that have dominated our culture for so long that they seem 'natural.' In this sense, the films remain thoroughly conventional in suggesting that boyhood--sustained pubescence--remains a period of romantic idealization in American culture: the perpetual antics of I-luck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

Do teen comedies merely forestall the inevitable social definition of boys to men, acting as last-chance respites against complete male socialization, or can they be considered as serious challenges to dominant male codes? And how do girls and women figure in this special, distinct world of 'boys'? In terms of film history, how do the contemporary teen comedies' occasional gender-bending characterizations relate to teen comedies from the Eighties such as Porky's, Risky Business, Losin' It, Revenge of the Nerds, and others that foreground male sexuality?

The new teen comedies treat male friendship as a primary social model underpinned by the demands of two key compulsory aspects of American manhood: the successful pursuit of marriage, a metonym for heterosexual relations, home, family, and work; and the successful formation of same-sex ties in the homosocial sphere. The term 'homosocial,' popularly used in academia since the Eighties, succinctly describes the sphere and realms of same-sex relations--the relationships and spaces in which both male power and intimacy are concentrated. Homosocial relations may include homosexual ones, but, in our homophobic culture, they are not meant to. Teen comedies depict intense same-sex intimacies that are always informed--i.e., curtailed--by the threat of homosexual ardor or eroticism. The realms of the homosocial--public places where members of the same sex share intimacies--are just as important as the intimacies they facilitate. In the comedies, these locations include pizza parlors, dorm rooms, parent-free houses, lux ury summer resorts. The reinforced suggestion is that even the more overtly public realms truly are private, special, enclosed--the teen boys are both cut off from the world of adults and deliberately sequestered in a zone of intimacy in which they are safe to be themselves.

Although there is a strong female presence in American Pie--with Natasha Lyonne's frizzy-haired, seen-it-all Jessica, and Alyson Hannigan's flighty, geeky, but sexually rapacious band-camper Michelle, among others--the film focuses on male experiences. The four friends are a mixture of stalwart male types that suggest the motley fraternal crews of wartime movies such as Howard Hawks's Air Force: Jim (Jason Biggs), a sexual novice and smart goof; Oz (Chris Klein), a big jock with a sensitive side; Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) a fussy, vaguely effete intellectual-poseur; and affable, smooth Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas). Other players include Stifler (Seann William Scott), a Wild Man-monster whose lubricity and penchant for uproarious insensitivity knows no bounds, and Sherman (Chris Owen), the "Shermanator," who parodistically describes himself as a Terminator of heterosexual prowess, and whose intense undesirability is parodied throughout the film.

Jim's nebbishy dad (Eugene Levy) offers his son, much to Jim's discomfort, relentlessly 'supportive' insights on sexual matters. Jim's overbearing dad confirms the film's relegation of adult men to the Other World of life experiences and sexuality--as much of an alien threat as he is a (sympathetic) boob, Jim's dad wanders in periodically to remind the audience of the distracting strangeness of adult life, and to provide the anticipatory terror of becoming an adult male. Made to look as unattractive as possible, Levy's dad provides a stark, hirsute counterbalance to the smooth, virginal sleekness of the boys, collectively on the verge of a manhood contingent upon achieving mastery over the mysteries of sex. Thus does sex become both a rapaciously sought goal and a terrible anxiety to be delayed, stalled, avoided--lest the sleek boys become, and start to look like, their fathers.

American Pie 2 is much more squarely, in every way, a guy's movie. Even the Shermanator 'scores' in this one. The vital female presences from the first film are muted. The film affirms that male friendship provides an invaluable social base for teen males as they prosper experientially, financially, and sexually. Though now in college, the American Pie pals still consider themselves a tightly bound unit--no new college buddies intrude on their special world, which remains hermetically sealed, though the sequel folds Stifler more prominently into the mix. Rising above the pizza parlor where they congregated in American Pie, the boys of American Pie 2 rent a plush summer beach house for the staging of their shenanigans. This lavish house but-tresses their closed-world bonds in a luxuriousness that suggests a perpetually upward social and sexual mobility. As they refine their sexual prowess, the boys will always have each other, in increasingly prosperous surroundings.

In his classic study Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler argues that American men want to escape "the gentle tyranny of home and woman, and thus pursue male friendship as an escape from the domestic sphere.

But American Pie (which features lavish house parties) and its sequel (with its summer-house pleasure dome) suggest that men want homes all their own--the visible consolidation of male power and intimacy. An interesting complement to the American Pie films' use of the homosocial is Saving Silverman, which makes it clear that the homosocial has its own demands and needs. This time, Jason Biggs's male friends take revenge against the sphere of heterosexual love: they kidnap his snooty shrink fiancee because she isn't, they claim, good enough for him-- they want him all to themselves. Saving Silverman explicitly defines the homosocial's interest in saving one of its own from the adulthood-conferring rigors of heterosexuality. The kidnapping of the hero's girlfriend is staged not as an act of malevolence but as the bound girlfriend's systematic humiliation of her captors. The movie never invites any sympathy for the captured woman--so confidently derisive and dismissive is she that we're invited to pity her capto rs as we castigate her. The film ensures, as well, that her wild beastliness will be tamed, since she ends up a nice, loving woman who marries one of her kidnappers.

But Saving Silverman muddies the waters of class that are so languidly still in American Pie. Biggs's goofy, shaggy Neil Diamond-worshipping friends, living together in a big but messy house, are the burnout freaks the suburban boys of American Pie shun. Loser, another Biggs film (he has become the male Muse of the teen comedy), inverts Saving Silverman's class and homosocial schemas: Biggs plays a Midwestern rube in the Big Apple exploited by his dormmates, who are depicted as unremittingly cruel rich kids out to thwart the innocent yokel. Yet the theme of preventing sexual consummation endures--their efforts to stall his romantic bliss with Mena Suvari's daffy ingenue amounts, however inadvertently, to another homosocial 'save.'

The racially mixed cast of Scary Movie reminds us of how homogeneously white the casts of almost all of the teen comedies are. White male friendship becomes a self-contained realm, ruthlessly policing the intrusion of any foreign element, racial or sexual. Dude, Where's My Car? literalizes the foreign quality of hetero sex--its two best male friends repeatedly run into a horde of alien women who promise them hot sex that is never consummated. The domain of male friendship, color-coordinated and organized by coherent heterosexual desire (however problematic to male unity), buttresses the boys from all outside threat.

In terms of consummating heterosexual desire, the movies suggest that, in canine fashion, boys just want each other--females represent an alien mystery that threatens to disrupt the boys' bonds. Yet this strain in the films is too dangerous to be allowed to flourish unchecked; the films self-reflexively ensure that sexual relations surpass the ardent homosocial ties. The homosocial in these films militates against, yet also relentlessly strives towards, the procurement of boy-girl sex. If these films privilege male friendship (even Loser does--though the male group opposes Biggs's solitary loser-character, it functions as a cohesive whole) and depict the ways the boys cleave to their own collective companionship, the drive to seek out and achieve heterosexual intercourse looms as their primary quest-objective. In fact, male friendship seems to be the dugout where the boys catch their breath during the game of heterosexual conquest.

In this regard, the character of Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) in American Pie and American Pie 2 is, in many ways, the most interesting. Desperate to consummate his romance with his blonde, nervously virginal girlfriend, Vicky (Tara Reid), he is shown to be even more desperately obsessed with getting his fraternal crew to lose their virginities along with--although not alongside--him. Kevin makes them all take a pact with him that, by prom night, they will each have lost their virginity. In our omnisexual era, the quest to lose one's virginity wouldn't seem to be as mythically arduous as American Pie depicts it, but it comprises the entire film. Kevin's bland, smooth affability transforms into an almost sinister coldness by the end of the film: his insistence that all of the guys get laid by prom night becomes rabid, unyielding. It's little surprise when Jason Biggs's Jim snaps at him during the prom, when all their sexual prospects begin to look dim, "I haven't even had sex yet and I hate it!" All of the othe r guys walk off at this point, leaving Kevin to contemplate his junior-league-Ahab manias. When Kevin and Vicky do consummate their relationship, the film goes to considerable length to depict it as an uncomfortable, joyless experience, focusing especially on the complete lack of fun in it for Vicky.

Kevin insists on implementing and maintaining a compulsory manhood within the group. Sex before marriage isn't marriage, but in white, middle-class suburbia it's the signpost up ahead on the route to the Marriage Zone--or so these films claim. Kevin brilliantly fuses the two bonds of male gender--marriage and male friendship--by insisting that the friendship the guys share be solidified by and organized around shared heterosexual experiences. Kevin's edicts confirm the biological and social imperatives toward heterosexual couplings, which the new teen comedies endorse, even though they also carnivalize them. Kevin's obsessive interest in the guys productive, efficient, 'normal' sex drives makes him a heterosexual slave driver, insisting on the compulsory performance of male virility--what evidently makes boys men.

If in American Pie Kevin is interestingly depicted as an oppressor of the other boys, and the disappointingly hollow sex he has with Vicky comes to seem a moralistic punishment, the film nevertheless allies itself to his campaign. After they shun him at the prom, the boys seek out Kevin, whom they find alone, brooding over his now publicly exposed manias. They comfort him, their unity is reaffirmed, and the film proceeds to make sure each of the boys finds sexual fulfillment. (Chris Klein's bland, dream-hunk Oz and his good-girl girlfriend cuddle under the stars, which, instead of seeming like a respite against the push towards heterosexual productivity, appears to confer a prepubescent, nonphallic sexuality on him for being such a nice guy.) Kevin may get a diegetic comeuppance, but the movie strives to realize his vision.

The efforts of Eugene Levy's dad to help his son be sexually successful--met with groans and exasperatedly raised eyes by Jim--remind us that a great deal rides on Jim's ability to be an effective, efficient lover. The movie, Carrie-style, turns sexual anxieties into hugely public displays of humiliation: Jim's disastrous efforts to get sexy, foreign-exchange student Nadia (Shannon Elizabeth) in bed--broadcast via hidden Webcam to the entire school-- climax, so to speak, in his premature orgasm. He then prematurely ejaculates again, as the entire school watches this spectacle of male performance-failures. This scene becomes a treatise on male performance anxiety. The huge pressures put on the American male to be successfully virile are no excuse for this shambles of a sex act, the movie implies. American Pie also suggests that male heterosexual performance is no less rigidly compulsory for guys than it is for girls.

If Jim's male-performance anxiety suggests that the problem of achieving adult sexual potency is central to the teen comedy, Dude, Where's My Car? ingeniously solves the problem by depicting two male best friends whose sexuality is so hidden beneath their childlike goofiness that such problematic questions never arise. Starring Seann William Scott and That 70s Show's Ashton Kutcher, Dude gives us a kinder, gentler, dreamier Stifler, and, in Kutcher, who's like a boy Marilyn--the American male as polymorphous--perverse infant--an appropriate accomplice. Both Scott and Kutcher play men here who are amazingly childlike, almost to the point of not seeming capable of sexual expression (truer in Kutcher's case, since Scott's manic energy retains its feral edge.) In this manner, Dude allows homosocial ardor to flourish while reinforcing the sheer wonder and constant appeal of heterosexuality. The nonphallic innocence of the boys plays like arrested sexual development, while their wide-eyed reactions to the recurrin g promises of heterosexual intercourse make sure we understand its potent allure and necessity.

Loser would also appear to employ Dude's solution. In making Biggs's character so aw-shucks nice in comparison to the mean homosocial order that excludes him, so attentive to the heroine (almost like the gay best friend stock character), and surrounding him with sick animals to nurture, Loser appears to be dispensing with both homosocial allegiances and the fulfillment of mature heterosexual love--not having to grapple, then, with the problem of the teen boy's potency. Yet Loser ultimately confirms Biggs's virility, having him knock out one of his rivals and get the girl. Loser shortcuts its way to the goal of manhood--it dispenses with male friendship, butches up its hero, and insures his union with the girl.

Given that the teen comedy both foregrounds male sexual-performance anxieties and resolves them through a final realization of 'manly' sexual prowess; and given that this genre also affirms homosocial ardor while suggesting that it must ultimately be renounced, repudiated, and transcended in order for teen boys to achieve coherent, properly heterosexual manhood, the relationships these films and their boy protagonists establish with girls, women, femaleness, and femininity becomes especially interesting. The new teen comedies are all distinguished by an interest in women who wield sexual power and who, like the queen heroine of H. Rider Haggard's She; tower over the men they enslave.

For such deeply male-oriented entertainments, the American Pie films feature remarkably distinct and memorable female characters. The women--save for tense Vicky--are sexual dynamos with breezy airs of confidence, an avid appetite for sex, and no compunctions about discussing or satisfying their sexual needs. Hannigan's Michelle reveals herself to be a brazen proponent of wild sex. When Jim feels particularly hopeless about his sexual chances at the end of the film, Michelle, as the conclusion to one of her incessant, innocuous stories, says, "And then I stuck a flute in my pussy!" It's the sheer unselfconsciousness with which Michelle announces her adventure--in sharp juxtaposition to the inefficacy of Jim's sexual performance--that produces shocked laughter in the audience. The shock becomes sheer wonderment when Michelle says, with now characteristic blitheness, "So, are we going to fuck anytime soon?"

The shock of this scene comes from the surprise that this seemingly dizzy, clueless girl has steel-trap control over the entire sexual proceedings. Far from being a hopeless sexual prospect for Jim, Michelle controls the entire situation; it is she who impatiently awaits Jim's sexual performance. In both films, she routinely calls him her "bitch." Neither clueless nor frigid, Michelle is a sexual sorceress who controls all aspects of the sexual performance. But merely presenting strong female characters does not automatically constitute a challenge to dominant male culture. Reinforcing the cultural myth that women alone decide when sex happens, movies like American Pie continue to defer all the possession of the secrets of (hetero) sexual fulfillment to the women. Even tense Vicky, so plaintively uncomfortable, maintains tight control over the time and place she and Kevin will have sex. Even if sexualized and presented as the stuff wet dreams are made of, the teen girls of American Pie are miniature Dark Con tinents, to use Freud's rather infamous metaphor for female sexuality, or, in Dudespeak, they are from another planet.

Lyonne's Jessica, figured as a cross between wise-woman village crone and matchmaking yenta, is a sexual double agent--she gives advice to women on how to make men crazy; she tells men how to make women their sexual slaves. Again, like Michelle, she confirms the movie's gendered schema--it is the women who control and create the realm of sex. And Elizabeth's tall, sexy Nadia--who manages to be thin and voluptuous at once, Amazonian in the way she towers over Jim--attests to the sexual confidence of the women here. Left alone in Jim's room while she changes--Jim means only to film her undressing, not his subsequent failed sexual performance-- Nadia rifles through his drawers and finds the sex magazines that Jim's dad has given him. She begins to masturbate, moaning audibly, remarkably relaxed about satiating her own desires. When Jim walks in on her, she seductively requests that he enhance her onanistic mission. The juxtaposition between her sexual fearlessness and Jim's pathetic premature orgasms provides t he fiendish humor of the scene.

Like American Pie and its sequel, Dude fetishizes the sorceresslike power of women over men, a notion that is just as much a part of dominant male culture as the image of the virginal 'good girl.' The Dudes are in constant terror over displeasing their glowering girlfriends. The girlfriends wield all of the sexual power in the film, deciding when they will allow the Dudes to have sex with them. Almost as if fantasizing about entry into some sexual Heaven, the Dudes wonder aloud, with zonked faces, if the girlfriends are summoning them over for sex. Solidifying the movie's thematic assignment of all sexual power to women, that cadre of black-on-black, female alien hotties periodically appear. Obviously inspired by The Matrix, these chic dommatrix types are cold, deadly, demanding, and implacable in their relentless campaign to turn the Dudes into slaves. They're like Fembots, the mechanical killer women from the Seventies' TV shows, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, only scarier, funnier, and mo re explicitly sexually charged. They manifest the theme of women's sexual power over men by embodying a militaristic image of that ideal.

Sexual sorceresses also wield power in Scary Movie, made the same year as Dude. Directed by Keenan Ivory Wayans, Scary Movie, a parody of parodistic teen horror films such as Scream (and hence a copy of a copy), is a shockingly violent and unappealingly cruel movie. As if in response to the female sexual authority of other teen comedies, not to mention the 'Final Girl' character--so brilliantly analyzed by Carol Glover in her book Men, Women, and Chainsaws--of the horror movies it spoofs, Scary Movie features feisty women who receive brutal punishments for their feistiness. A young, loud, obnoxious black woman finds herself beaten, stabbed, slashed, and slaughtered by hordes of angry white patrons. Shannon Elizabeth, American Pie's Nadia, in a real comedown role, plays an indestructible woman whom the joking killer annihilates--or tries to. He hacks at bits of her, but she continues to taunt him with derisive comments meant to signal her awareness of her role as female victim. "Oooh, is this the part where I break my leg?," she shrieks, and then does so, graphically. We watch as tendons tear, sinews split, and blood gushes forth. Finally, the killer decapitates her and stuffs her still babbling, jeering head into the garbage.

These murdered-women scenes are particularly nasty modern movie sequences. The sexually powerful woman of the contemporary teen comedy pays quite a price for her gendered hubris. Hacked at but resisting destruction, she continues to spew vile sexual taunts and threats even as the film disposes of her. Seeing a crowd of white moviegoers annihilate a black woman would be shocking to watch in any film--much more so in one made by black filmmakers. Scary Movie is deeply reactionary.

Still, Scary Movie only makes especially apparent the deep ambivalence with which the new teen comedy beholds the girl and womanhood. The lively women of American Pie become much more muted, more drably peripheral, in the sequel. Even Lyonne's acerbic Jessica lacks bite here. Hannigan's band-campy Michelle gradually loses her eccentric edge and daffy conversational rhythms as she gains a moony romantic ardor for Jim. (This process happens all too often in Hollywood movies, which force women to give up their distinctiveness in order to realize romantic love.) Vicky, not an especially compelling character in American Pie, is revealed to be much more sexually confident in the sequel, but barely figures in it at all. Her contributions here consist mainly of glaring at Kevin--reduced to the status of blank worrywart--while he fumbles his way toward man-woman friendship with her. Nadia, such a tempting tigress in American Pie, in the sequel becomes neurotic and uncertain, duped, and dumped by Jim, who now realizes that he loves Michelle. And while her interest in coaxing Oz into phone-sex is intriguing, Mena Suvari's good-girl Heather, relegated to a year abroad in Europe, barely registers as a presence in the sequel.

Though a big hit (its source material, Austen's Emma, adding to its cachet), Clueless (1995), a teen comedy that focuses on girls, has not been widely emulated, even if its sardonic rhythms continue to circulate in pop-culture products like the WB's girl-ensemble shows and the Reese Witherspoon surprise smash, Legally Blonde (2001). Most teen comedies privilege male experience, this year even having the 'girls' played by Sorority Boys. The kind of romantic friendship shared by Jodie Foster and Scott Jacoby in the 1976 B-movie classic, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, is quite rare in the new teen comedy, where boys collectively converge around iconic female statuary.

Herein lies the female bind of these films--they depict strong, confident females yet keep them at a chilly remove. The girls in these movies, largely free of the anxieties with which the boys are riddled, are in the paralytic position of being simultaneously powerful and unreal. Allocated all the sexual knowledge of the films, they wield power over boys yet remain largely outside the narrative. In this fashion, the girls become remote goddesses who exert a smug influence over the proceedings, while the boys get to have complex, problematic life experiences, and their characters show growth in narrative arcs. Assigning all the sexual power to the women and girls, then, becomes a means of containing and entrapping female experience--their confidence in these films serves as consolation prizes, concessions to the rising social prominence of women that yet manage to keep femaleness Out of the narrative trajectory of individual life. In other words, these films allow us to watch boys turn into men, but girls have no access to such bildungsromans.

If feminism has made it more difficult to represent women in films as weak, irrelevant creatures, the teen comedies have found an ingenious compromise between earlier cinematic modes of femininity and current views--their depiction of strong women concedes the legitimacy of the advances of feminism, while their relegation of these strong women to the sidelines allows men to maintain preeminent control. Analogously, the comedies' expressions of gay awareness allow--even if in occluded ways--gay sensibility to lend its voice to the depiction of conventional manhood, while always reaffirming the normality (i.e., the heterosexuality) of the boys' sexual aims.

In Saving Silverman, one of the kidnapped psychiatrist's ploys is to diagnose one of her kidnappers as a repressed homosexual--thereby (mysteriously) bending him to her will. This seems a key move in the teen comedy. Homosexuality--and the threat of its manifestation--underlies the teen comedy, especially in terms of its fixation on straight male friendship, and thematically relates to its depiction of women as both symbolically powerful and narratively powerless.

American Pie registers not only an awareness of the gay sensibility that has reshaped mainstream culture but also the anxieties that attend that awareness, a simultaneous fascination and repulsion. In one striking scene, Stifler, the gonzo horny Wild Man, drinks another man's semen--surely a first in Hollywood movies. Indebted to the gross-out esthetic popularized by the Farrelly Brothers, this scene remarkably encapsulates the capacity for disgust still thoroughly in place within the relationship heterosexual culture has to homosexuality. As Stifler retches copiously, Kevin jabs at him--"Hey, how'd you like that pale ale!"--generating wild crowd laughter.

In her essay on the calumniation of the maternal in horror films, "The Monstrous-Feminine," Barbara Greed discusses the centrality of establishing borders to the genre. It is the very crossing of those borders--human/monster, outside the body/inside the body, normal gender identity/abnormal gendered identity--that constitutes horror. Increasingly, the genre that, in the Farrelly Brothers era, most transgressively crosses these crucial borders is the (teen) comedy. Even today, with new treatments against AIDS available, the exchange of bodily fluids between men can only be the stuff of horror (alien contagion, vampirism) or gross-out comedy. The threat to the heterosexual male of contagion from the sexual energy of other men--in other words, the threat of being forced into homoerotic situations--is explicitly addressed in this moment. That it becomes a public spectacle of humiliation suggests the fear of the Secret being let out--sexual contact with other men, even if rendered in so baroque a fashion, could o nly cause excruciating embarrassment to those involved.

Unlike Eighties comedies such as Revenge of the Nerds (1984), neither American Pie nor its sequel has any explicitly queer characters--but they don't need them, in a sense, because a recognition of a pervasive gay threat to conventional masculinity permeates both films. Stifler becomes the battleground for the films' warring impulses between interest in homoeroticism and revulsion from it. Stifler has a much more expanded role in American Pie 2. It is important to contextualize Stifler's increased visibility within the film's much bolder interest in the graphic suggestion of the boys as purveyors and objects of sexual desire. American Pie 2 takes all of the big setpieces from the original--the sex-object Jim's public humiliation, the homo-threat 'pale ale' scene--and reimagines them in grander terms, upping the sexual ante. So, Jim's parents walk in on him in flagrante delicto with a woman; Stifler is luxuriantly urinated upon by a guy at a party; Jim performs his sex dance in front of a large public crowd ( at Michelle's mythic band camp); Jim Krazy Glues himself when, while masturbating, he mistakes the adhesive agent for lubricant; sensitive-jock Oz fondles his organ during a comically interrupted phone sex scene; and so on.

Stifler's sexuality becomes one of the major motifs of American Pie 2. Though depicted as a kind of heterosexual satyr in American Pie, violently cheerful in his sexual pursuits, in the sequel he comes to seem a polysexual Pan. Stifler, savagely heterosexual in appetite but always suggestive of rampant sexual appetites inclusive of the homosexual, is like a character in a Saturday Night Live sketch about a homophobe who's actually just closeted: he blithely repels Oz's rebukes with the line, "I'm going to give you a spoon to eat my ass!" The film's use of Stifler--what a perfect name!--culminates in the movie's loony piece de resistance, involving two 'lesbians.' Once they see that Jim, Finch, and Stifler want them to 'prove' that they're real lesbians through depictions of sapphic sex, the women decide to put one over on the guys, whom they've caught hiding out in their room. (Ladder-clenching Oz and Kevin voyeuristically observe from outside.) For every fake lesbian kiss, they request a complementary gay k iss from the guys. Stifler is shown to be the most animatedly willing to endure these trials in order to experience vicarious lesbian sex. Stifler even allows the men to bring him to climactic fruition--a last-straw prospect from which Jim and Finch flee, shrieking.

The complexities of this scene are rich. Once again, women are in sexual control, devising ways in which men can perform sexually for their delectation. The men are forced into homoerotic contact by women who want to beat them at their own game. And Stifler is so overcome by the promise of male-fantasy lesbian titillation that he even becomes excited at the prospect of group gay sex. Textually, it is impossible to determine whether or not the prankster women here are razzing the boys for their own homophobia or trapping the boys into homo-hi-jinks in order to humiliate them. Finch and Jim's terrified escape from the revelation of Stifler's willingness to engage in gay sex (albeit in the service of watching lesbian sex) would also seem to suggest the movie's hurried determination to reestablish the essentially disgusting nature of gay sex. Still, the sheer length of the scene implies an interest in pushing past the borders of straight male sexual taste.

Dude makes male sexuality and gender identity elastic and pliable categories. In one scene, the Dudes are driving around and come to a red light, as does a car with Fabio, the cartoon hunk, and a lady companion. To compete with Fabio, the Dudes end up passionately making out. It's hard to know exactly what's going on in this scene, where the radicalism ends and the homophobia begins, or whether either figures into it at all. Nevertheless, this scene suggests a new willingness in American males to adopt an increased tolerance--if not an all-out embrace--of homosexual identity, which, of course, they can discard at any moment. It suggests a comfort with homosexuality in mainstream culture that is in itself radical--the movie pushes a corner of the sexual envelope that still hasn't quite been pried open in social life. By assigning the obligatory gross-out to Fabio's vacuous lady friend, but not to either of the Dudes, the movie also suggests that homophobic reaction belongs to the enemy. Yet the film's depicti on of the Dudes as nearly prepubescent in their innocence divests any homoeroticism between them of the threat of mature gay male sexuality. The homoeroticism becomes simply another aspect of their infantile manhood.

Dude also has a running gag involving a pre-op transsexual with a womanly body, a male-organ bulge revealed in close-up, and an alarmingly deep, monster voice. Like the alien dominatrices, she hounds the Dudes all though the movie. Having cornered them, she displays her lover, who appears to be a mustachioed woman, whom the transsexual woman kisses passionately. "Should we be grossed out by this?," one of the Dudes asks the other. The innocent way in which the question is posed lightly masks the obvious revulsion the movie feels towards the transsexual villainness. Without doubt, the film's depiction of the transsexual is offensive. Yet there's something else going on here, too--a kind of genuinely puzzled ambivalence over the rise of new forms of gendered identity. While it would be wrong to call this ambivalence a progressive statement, it would also be wrong to call it purely reactionary. In its own clumsy, dumb way, Dude labors on behalf of the youth culture it reflects and services, asking, 'Dudes, shou ld we be grossed out by this?' The movie leaves the Dudes and the teen audience in a ambiguous position--exposed to queer sexuality with no clear indication of how to respond.

Like Dude, Scary Movie represents queer concerns--including monstrous transsexuals and the fear of homosexuality--but only in service to an overall design of cruelty and phobia. Managing to be misogynistic, homophobic, racist, and unimaginative all at once may be a feat of some kind, but not one I wish to celebrate. Scary Movie threatens, at times, to be an interesting satire of the codes of white-teen privilege that provide the logic of teen horror films and most teen comedies, but its brutal mass slaughter of the black woman cancels out the possibility of such pointed satire.

The themes of homoeroticism that permeate the American Pie films and Dude achieve a grotesque realization here. In one scene, the character everyone believes is secretly gay goes into the restroom and finds a 'glory hole,' from which an extremely lifelike member pokes through. Intrigued, the closet case bends down to examine it, and the penis bursts through one ear and out the other. (He appears, however, to suffer only a mild earache.) The killers are revealed as queer, though the closet case violently denies it. It is of interest that the killer who denies being queer--Shawn Wayans's Ray--is African-American, while the one who affirms his queerness (only to have that affirmation mocked by Ray), Jon Abrahams's Bobby, is white. This uneasy moment in a film that is queasily full of them seems to suggest that homosexuality is a white boys' disease; it reaffirms conventional pop fantasies about the virility of black manhood by locating 'actual' homosexuality in white rather than black men.

Scary Movie's ultimate allocation of homosexuality squarely to white males is suggestive. In terms of the homoerotic themes that circulate in them, the new teen comedies reflect the incoherence of the current state of that most controversial of social identities, white manhood. The films seem to be saying that--under pressure from feminism, racial tensions, emergent sexualities, and revisions in conventional codes of gender--white manhood is in a state of profound flux. The special world of boys depicted in these films then becomes a perfect arena in which these myriad tensions can battle--after all, the transitional state of teen manhood means nothing ever has to 'stick.'

To return to American Pie, the scene in which Nadia orders Jim to do a striptease for her bespeaks the incoherent state of white movie manhood. Jim's striptease--exuberant if gangly--signifies a new moment in American masculinity. Yes, Tom Cruise did dance in his underwear in Risky Business (1983), but Cruise gyrates in auto-erotic isolation. In contrast, Jim gyrates for an audience--for Nadia and, unbeknownst to him, for the entire high school. The comedic edge of Biggs's dancing whittles down the sexually threatening nature of the scene. But the sheer energy and gusto of the striptease--at Nadia's behest--confirms his willing participation in the movie's construction of him as the object of Nadia's--and our--gaze. He has to strut his stuff and turn us on. No longer does Man wait to be turned on by what he gazes upon. Jim's striptease is a willing, and enthusiastic, recognition of men as the new sexual objects of our culture.

Jim's dancing for Nadia and the high-school audience (males and females) reflects the influence of a certain gay sensibility that has become more familiar since the politicized late Eighties and Nineties. The awareness that men can be perceived as objects of erotic contemplation--displayed by Jim's manic public display of his own sex-object status--is a gay idea that white, heterosexual, mainstream culture has now assimilated to some degree. Books, magazines, academic studies, and mass media are scrambling now to make up for the lack of a historical beauty culture for men.

Likewise, movies such as There's Something About Mary (1998) foregrounds male sexuality through its ample discussions of messy orgasms and spewed semen (which Cameron Diaz mistakes for and uses as hair gel), or a scene in which crowds gather to watch Ben Stiller squirm in discomfort when his genitals are ensnared in his zipper. While such moments are not exactly paeans to homosexuality, they have facilitated a new openness about sexuality, the male body, and gender, which gay culture has traditionally expressed in its own folklore.

Yet straight male sexuality and bodies, despite their cinematic absorption of the new tensions and threats that surround them, remain, for all of these excesses, sacrosanct, hygienically cut off from the growing interest in their graphic representation. Two notable art-house films from last year--Intimacy and Fat Girl--not only featured nude men but also revealed their erect penises. Yet such displays are unimaginable in American cinema. Even an American film that obsessively privileges the white male body--last year's Memento, which fetishistically roams the expanse of Guy Pearce's extensively tattooed body--would never show full frontal male nudity.

This point is important as evidence that adult, white, heterosexual men remain--for all of the developments in male beauty culture, straight borrowings from gay culture, feminism, and so forth--cut off from the multifarious gazes of culture. Although Laura Mulvey's classic theory about the primacy of the 'male gaze' may have to undergo some revision in the face of Jim's striptease, it remains relevant for the general, heterosexually oriented depiction of men in the cinema and on network TV. Herein lies the essential, inescapable conservatism of the teen comedies. Crammed with disorienting, occasionally bracing and shocking forays into socially perverse sexual and gendered territories, they nevertheless squarely situate these forays in the primeval forest of teendom, from which boys emerge as men. Kevin's strained attempts in American Pie 2 to develop a mature friendship with Vicky, firmly entrenched in her cultural role as the aloof Woman, evinces not so much sensitivity and respect for women as it does an im plicit acceptance of the inevitability of heterosexual consummation--Kevin had better learn to treat women right if he's going to master them. The older, less boylike males of American Pie 2 no longer need Kevin's vigilant prodding to seek out the successfully achieved adult heterosexuality that will confirm them as men.

The contemporary teen comedies have come to represent an infantile stage in American manhood--thus the preoccupation with bodily functions endemic to the current wave of gross-out humor. The boys in the teen comedies are really boys, not even proto-men, and are therefore allowed to grapple with the massive forces of cultural change that threaten conventional notions of white manhood without succumbing to them. The new American teen comedies, then, serve as consolatory catharses for white manhood. They suggest that exposure to homosexuality and the disabling power of strong women belong to the white male past--to that arrested but bygone period in which everything was up for grabs and the world had not yet been mastered. The teen comedies, therefore, incorporate as much sexual perversity and transgression as possible in order to make their ultimate evacuation of these perversities and transgressions total. For all of the impudence of the new American teen comedies, they amount to little more than a collective yearning for a discarded, amorphous age in the development of white manhood.

David Greven teaches American literature and film at Simmons College, Boston