I’m a fan of horror movies. I watch a lot of them. And I watch them for the scares, for the humour, for the concepts and very rarely I watch them for the gore. Unfortunately, that’s what you usually get, because horror’s mistaken for blood. [I don’t mind the gore, but it’s not my sole motivation to watch a movie.] Sometimes, I’m surprised, usually not.
Anyway, this is not supposed to be a post about horror movies in general, but about one specific one: Teeth. You probably haven’t heard about it, it’s a rather small film, although it was shown at the Sundance Film Festival.
[HERE BE SPOILERS!]
Teeth is about a young girl, Dawn, who lives with her mum, stepdad and stepbrother in a house, more or less in the backyard of an nuclear power plant. Dawn is spokesperson for an abstinence only group and therefore not really liked at school (except for her abstinence only friends). Her stepbrother, Brad, is the complete opposite – he does drugs, lives at home, seemingly only to be able to abuse his sick stepmum and his dad, has a kind of girlfriend he only fucks in the ass and is generally subversive.
Well, a new guy comes to town, one who’s part of the abstinence only programme. He (Tobey) and Dawn start to date. They need several tries, because their not able to combine their belief in abstinence and their through-dating-newly-found sexuality. In the end, they decide to date anyway. They go swimming together and Tobey gets carried away – he hurts Dawn and ends up raping her. In the middle of the rape, though, it turns out that Dawn has a vagina dentata, which promptly bites off Tobey’s dick. He falls into the water and is not seen anymore. After a while, Dawn gathers her things and goes home.
The next days are awful for Dawn – she constantly worries about Tobey, and has a bad conscience. She starts to research stuff on the internet and finds the myth of the vagina dentata. She resolves to see a gynacologist, who loses his fingers, when he’s not too gentle while examining her. She runs away, while the doctor keeps on screaming “vagina dentata”.
Tobey is found dead in the lake and Dawn has a breakdown. She goes to see a guy from school she’s spoken to a couple of times. The guy, Ryan, takes care of her and finally seduces her, telling her that he’s conquering her vagina, and that she shouldn’t worry. He’s gentle and actually brings her to orgasm, and that’s enough to let her vagina keep its teeth in. Dawn spends the night at his place and the next morning they’re fucking again, when his phone rings. Ryan picks up and immediately brags to his friend, “You won’t guess, who I’m fucking right now!” Dawn gets angry and Ryan gets castrated. Far from having a crisis this time, Dawn goes home.
At home, she finds her mum lying on the floor, unconscious. While Dawn calls the hospital and her dad, her brother can be seen in the background, fucking his girlfriend. They go to the hospital and are later joined by the brother’s girlfriend (Brad can’t be seen), who tells them how sorry she is, the mother was screaming but Brad told her that she usually does this and that it doesn’t matter.
The stepdad goes home and confronts Brad, telling him that he has to move out. They get into a fight, involving Brad’s Rottweiler and finally Brad tells his dad that he resents him so much, because he made the love of his life his sister.
In the meantime, the mother dies. Dawn, intent on revenge, goes home and starts to fuck Brad, consciously using her vagina to castrate him. Then she leaves. She hitches a ride with some old guy, who expects payment in kind. The last shot is of Dawn, who can’t convince the guy that she doesn’t want to fuck him, starting to smile.
The movie isn’t bad. Especially Jess Weixler (Dawn) gave a horrific performance. There’s humour, although I never found it laugh out loud funny.
It has it’s weak spots, especially Brad’s character. And the ending.
But by and large, it’s a solid genre movie.
There were several questions it raised, and that’s the actual reason I’m writing this post.
- It’s hinted at several times that having a vagina dentata is an evolutionary advantage. Somehow, I doubt that. Evolution cares about reproduction. That a female enjoys sex is – at best – secondary for reproductive purposes. So, actually, a woman who has a vagina dentata hurts evolution by lessening a) the number of males able to have children and b) the number of times she will get pregnant.
This is of course, from a purely reproduction point of view. Not a moral statement. [I think, you know that rape is awful and that having some kind of weapon that makes rape practically impossible would be great.] - I’m not comfortable with the idea of sex as a weapon. I mean, that’s one of the most critisised things, when men do it with women (abuse, sexual harrassment, rape etc.). When women use sex as a weapon on men, suddenly it’s empowering? I don’t think so.
I’m all for a healthy sexuality and that women should be aware of their sexuality and their beauty and yay! great! But sex is not a weapon and it shouldn’t be treated as such. - Probably my biggest question: Is this movie actually a feminist movie?
Acid for Blood blogs (about the video game Cunt):
Cunt could be seen as an iteration of the vagina dentata myth in folklore, wherein men had an underlying dread of women and of sexual intercourse due to fears of castration, impotence, and weakness, and they expressed these fears through cautionary tales, warning against sex with strange women. The tales portray female sexuality as dangerous, predatory, alien, and all-consuming.
Can a movie based on such a misogynist myth actually be an empowering movie for women?
Honestly, I don’t know. On the one hand, I feel that that’s what they were trying to get at and Dawn’s journey through the awkwardness of the awakening of her sexuality towards being comfortable with herself is wonderful, it’s very well done and it works.
On the other hand, I don’t think it’s empowering women, it’s “dispowering” men.
While I’m all for equal treatment of men and women, I’d rather see women getting the same privileges as the men, instead of the men taken privileges away until they’re on the same stage like women.
An example of what I mean by that: I want men and women to get euqal payment for the same job. But I want to achieve this by raising the women’s compensation, not by lowering the men’s. Result is the same – they both earn the same thing – but the means through which we got there differ.
Well, as I see it, Teeth features more the second way. The woman only gets stronger by mutilating the man. And that’s really not the empowerment I want to see.
Any thoughts on that?
kalafudra's Stuff 
Okay…this is one demented storyline.
From what I read here, that woman isn’t empowered by her murderous vagina. She’s still a victim, albeit a victim with a seriously disturbing coping mechanism, if that makes sense.
The vagina remains that strange and frightening thing ‘down there’ that will cause horrible things to happen if you ever use it.
Does that woman ever get any sexual enjoyment out of it? Probably not. And why would she. That’s not what a vagina (and all those other ‘lady bits’) are for, after all.
And it also doesn’t seem as if that vagina is hers in any way. She hardly ever seems to control what happens with/in it.
In short, if this is supposed to be feminism, then it was probably written by a person whose feminist credentials consist of making jokes about Dworkin-quotes they don’t understand.
The thing is that she goes from being a victim to being an attacker. She consciously choses to sleep with her stepbrother to castrate him for neglecting the mother.
She controls (in the end), who she wants to castrate, but hardly ever who she wants to sleep with in the first place.
Sexual enjoyment: Yes, when she sleeps with Ryan, she enjoys it (the first time round). It’s also the only time she actually says, “I want to sleep with you”.
But you’re right, mostly the vagina is “the thing down there”…
ok, well i thought this movie was simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. but as far as feminism goes, i didn’t really think of it in that light. it did remind me of “vagina dentata” – the context i learned about that was my mythology class when we were studying medusa. i tend to interpret it as some sort of defense mechanism, albeit it bitterly so. it did seem like the vagina had a life of its own, and that she went from being a victim to an attacker because it was empowering to hold over men in a world where that is rarely an option. it’s sort of like vigilante justice. not an advance for feminism, but i can see where women would feel empowered from it.
still, very interesting movie…
-Harlequin
I wouldn’t have thought about it as a particularly feminist movie, either, if it wasn’t painfully obvious that it was meant to be one…
But vigilante justice hits the nail on the head.