Dick in a Box?: The Dubious Feminism of Jennifer’s Body

by SABINA FRIEDMAN-SEITZ

Octo­ber 2009

“My dick is big­ger than his,” quips demon-infused Jen­nifer in Dia­blo Cody’s new horror/comedy flick Jennifer’s Body.

Jennifer’s one-liner reveals the real point of this attempted fem­i­nist re-write of the hor­ror movie script: that, in order for a girl to “take back the knife,” she has to grow a dick—one big­ger than those of her oppo­nents. As with Cody’s Juno, an attempt to send a fem­i­nist mes­sage to teenage girls actu­ally vio­lates fem­i­nist val­ues; the female pro­tag­o­nist of that movie, Cody’s first, lives out the happy alter­na­tive to abor­tion, car­ry­ing a fetus dur­ing high school for no explained reason.

The vil­lain of scary movies is usu­ally male, and the scenes of vio­lence are usu­ally played out on the bod­ies of female vic­tims.  Vir­gins tend to sur­vive, while promis­cu­ous girls pay in blood for their slut­ti­ness (see: Hal­loween, Scream, House of Wax et al.).

Jennifer’s Body tries to reverse the trend. Here, the slutty girl is the one who does the killing.  Jen­nifer, played by Megan Fox, is the hot girl at school.  She becomes inhab­ited by a demon when an indie band, mis­tak­ing her for a vir­gin, sac­ri­fices her to Satan to assure their fame and suc­cess.  Because Jen­nifer isn’t “even a back-door vir­gin,” the sac­ri­fice doesn’t kill her. Instead, a demon pos­sesses her body and turns her into an all-powerful suc­cubus.  This should be the begin­ning of the rever­sal of trope; instead of sav­ing the vir­gin and killing the slut, the boys are try­ing to kill the vir­gin, and Jen­nifer ends up becom­ing (quasi-) saved because she is a slut.  But this is where the film’s fem­i­nism goes awry. Jen­nifer can­not become a socio­pathic man-eating killer on her own.  The musi­cians make the first fatal stabs in the story, and it is their pen­e­trat­ing knife strokes that trans­fer their male energy into her body.

[Jen­nifer] embod­ies the prover­bial “man-eater”: the over­sexed woman who stomps over blame­less men, but relies on them for her power.

Although Jen­nifer retains the tits and ass of Megan Fox (which have been splat­tered across Maxim and the inter­net for the past year), she wields her power like a penis.  What’s more: in order to keep her skin beau­ti­ful and her sex­ual mag­net­ism alive, Jen­nifer relies on the flesh of the boys on whom she preys. She embod­ies the prover­bial “man-eater”: the over­sexed woman who stomps over blame­less men, but relies on them for her power. It seems at one point that she may switch over to girls, when she threat­ens her friend Needy. But it turns out that this plot point is just an excuse for Jen­nifer to say she “goes both ways,” thus remind­ing us of the gra­tu­itous girl-on-girl action in the scene before. That piece of les­bian exhi­bi­tion­ism is a per­fect exam­ple of how this film need­lessly sex­u­al­izes everything.

Jennifer’s last vic­tim is Needy’s boyfriend, and the two girls bat­tle it out after that. Before she can stab Jen­nifer, how­ever, Needy has to be mas­culin­ized: Jen­nifer looks at the blade in Needy’s hand and scoffs, “Do you buy all your weapons at Home Depot? God you’re butch.” Jen­nifer, in turn, must be fem­i­nized before she can be the vic­tim; Needy accom­plishes this by assert­ing that the weapon is for “cut­ting boxes.”  It’s a fit­ting end. In the phallo-centric world of this film, Jen­nifer is a dick when she kills and a box when she is killed.

Sabina Friedman-Seitz is a junior at Wes­leyan University.