June review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2013: Suck It, Wonder Woman!: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek by Olivia Munn (with Mac Montandon), 2010. [Memoir category]
(Fuck you, Olivia Munn, you do NOT have thick thighs.)
Okay, now that I got that out of the way. I can attempt to talk about this book in a civilized manner. Sort of. Apologies if this review becomes somewhat more of a tangential examination than a straight book review. I have a lot of feelings. Also if it folds back and forth on itself--I'm really just trying to figure out said feelings about the book.Overall, I had middling feelings toward it, but the things that made me angry are pretty big eyesores in my opinion and I wanted to give them their due, push against the things that made me uncomfortable coming from a woman I so admired. Here we go.
The gist of Olivia Munn's 2010 memoir-slash-funny-stories-about-her-life-collection Suck It, Wonder Woman!: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek seems to be a brash declaration of Munn's status as a Geek Sex Symbol, mostly stemming from her run as a host on G4's Attack Of The Show. When I first picked up the book at Motor City Comic Con a few months ago, drawn by the intriguing title and funny cover posing, I was excited. I like Olivia Munn, especially on HBO's summer blockbuster The Newsroom (returning for its second season in a few days!!!). I admire her disregard for stereotypes and her brazen ownership of a traditionally under-the-rug epithet. I was looking forward to loving every word of her sardonic take on the ridiculously sex-crazed society that has become our Mount Olympus of sorts, excited to take it almost as a gospel for a geek girl like myself, but I felt myself getting a little more angry, a little more annoyed, as the book went on. the sex-positive geek girl is a concept that seems to come under much contention lately. As another reviewer on GoodReads said, I decided at the end that I still like Olivia Munn, but I did not like this book.
It makes me unspeakably sad to not like a book by someone who seems to be trying in earnest to cast a positive image for women in comedy and film, and this was no exception. I didn't enjoy reading Suck It, Wonder Woman! as much as I thought I was going to: Munn contradicts herself (as I have been doing for days trying to write this review and figure out how I feel about it), she uses the same jokes over and over again, her candor is illuminating at times but abrasive most of of the time--the flickers of actual personality sprinkled throughout the book are what kept me holding on. I mentioned before that the book seems to be proclaiming Olivia's Geek status although there exist within the text few substantial examples of such. I really want to believe that she is the geek she says she is, and not trying to capitalize on the sexy geek girl facade, to which she is dangerously close. She seems to have some connection to geeky stuff and mentions a lot of videogames that she played as an army brat outcast growing up being bounced from school to school, but there doesn't seem to be anything substantive to the claim other than running Attack Of The Show! Now, I'm not saying that Geekdom is a club for which you need to have references and a resume and a look-what-I've-done-to-prove-myself compendium, but I was disheartened by her continual use of pejorative language and suggestions for guys to "Totally Help You Score!" (title of chapter 17), adding the qualifier that geeky girls are somehow special and take certain XP to get with, maybe? Her language is almost intentionally abrasive--the opening anecdote about her first boyfriend ends with a revelation that he had Tourette's, and her response was that it was some kind of shitty karma, an almost "why me?" feeling. Not cool. Plus, incorrect use of the concept of “karma,” as I was informed by my Buddhist coworker. Double not cool.
While some of those suggestions were good and thought-provoking (like WHAT), many of them still seemed to fall under the typical "pretend to listen to girls because thats how you get what you want" heading. And I was angry. It appeared to me like Olivia was trying to be funny and appealing to all, but in a sort of angry way. Almost condescending?. She tells countless grotesque stories about other people in the industry--only one of whom actually has a name, almost like she's hiding behind her hilarity to ignore the fact that she's still relatively small-time and maybe isn’t Hollywood enough to be saying these steamy tell-all tales she’s telling. The one nameless story I actually enjoyed was chapter 9, "My Dinner with Harvard's Finest" (p76). It is one of the only times Olivia comes out as actively almost-feminist (though at one point in the books she denies the title), staring down a Hollywood bigwig's date and asking her why she lets him talk to her like that, calling her a whore and asking the others if they thought she was a whore. Although, at the end of the chapter, Munn does jump to conclusions and judge the girl as she pulls away with a community college bumper sticker on her car. Less than stellar.
On that note, I'd like to examine the sexuality and body-image aspects of the text. In the bottom corner of the book there is a teensy flip-book of Olivia in a long shirt/short dress type outfit waving and doing sexy things. Inside the cover is a poster of her in a frilly bikini and sailor hat kissing up at the camera. A whole chapter is devoted to her in revealing costumes of "Great Women" who inspired her--without any such meditations as to why or how they can inspire other girls. (Granted, they are each famous for certain things and no doubt those famous things contribute to their inspiration, but still.) While talking about her Playboy cover shoot--which she specifically got contracted to do sans nudity, which is impressive--she perpetuates the image of obsessive dieting and nigh-on-unhealthy eating habits that girls are force-fed every day. EVEN THOUGH later she says "I think it's great for young women to see a real woman, with real breasts and thick thighs considered sexy. I hope that changes the insanely narrow definition of sexy we generally see in the press and on television. Young girls should be proud of their imperfections and curves" (216). These two parts of her image were the most upsetting to me as a less-fit-than-most-twenty-something-girl who has lived with those pressures. I found myself being sucked into the stories, being like “yeah okay I can see why she wouldn’t want to eat if she has to pose--wait WHAT AM I SAYING.”
I found myself pondering the difference between her and say, Felicia Day. Do I respect Felicia a lot more? Why? Felicia still has sexy poses and a healthy knowledge of her body, but most of her time on Twitter is spent geeking out about the new Borderlands 2 patches and who’s going to stay up for the Persona release. Is it because Olivia seems to be selling some sort of sexualized version of the geek girl and because I don't look like her I automatically become angry and distanced from her? That isn’t a feeling I want to internalize. Both of these ladies are funny in their own way, and while both are skinnier than me (which I’m totally ok with, most of the time) I admire their devotion to being real, even if sometimes one or the other falls short. I guess the question I most asked myself is if there’s a world where two such geek girl personalities can exist without completely erasing each other's merits? How do we get there?
Ok, I know i’ve spent a lot of time arguing, against myself and this book and society. But like I said in the first paragraph, I do still like Olivia Munn. Actual glimpses of her personality shone through, and those moments were the ones that tried to hook their not-quite fully-formed fingers into the Memoir category while the rest of the book goes off on a stream-of-consciousness jaunt of its own with little regard for intent, and those moments were the quietest for me, the ones where I really felt connected to this woman, rather than sort of appalled (masturbating with shrimp in one hand story, anyone?). All in all, I admire Olivia for her attempt. This book came out in 2010, before she did Newsroom or her stint on New Girl, two characters that I really felt helped cement her into someone I’d like to get to know. I wonder what she’d have to say now.
Things I actually really enjoyed:
ooooops! I left a "WHAT" where there should've been an example...
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