\n<\/p>\n
You know the setup: one boy, the underdog, is forced to face off with a boy with more social clout \u2014 and, likely, more muscles. They\u2019re in the gym, the hallway, or the schoolyard, and by the time the last punch is thrown, the underdog, our hero, has taken his first steps into manhood.<\/p>\n
For decades the school scrap was a prevailing coming-of-age trope in movies and TV. The \u201980s produced some of the most memorable scenes, whether it was Clifford versus Moody<\/a> in \u201cMy Bodyguard\u201d or Ralphie versus Scut<\/a> in \u201cA Christmas Story.\u201d Then in 1993, Richard Linklater gave us the memorable freshmen versus the paddle-swinging Fred O\u2019Bannion<\/a> and his cohort of sadistic seniors in \u201cDazed and Confused\u201d; and in 2002, Sam Raimi offered Peter Parker decking Flash Thomspon<\/a> in high school. Even SpongeBob has found himself caught in a boating school scuffle<\/a> with a classmate.<\/p>\n But teen brawling onscreen has since evolved to becoming more than just a metaphor for boys at the cusp of adulthood learning to assert their masculinity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the queer sex comedy \u201cBottoms<\/a>,\u201d which de-genders and subverts the boorish maleness of the school tussle as a male developmental milestone, ultimately making it about young women asserting their identities and pushing back against convention.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n PJ and Josie are best friends who start a female fight club at their high school, with the goal of losing their virginity to two popular cheerleaders. The entire premise of this delightfully absurd offbeat comedy is predicated on two young women using a narrative often tied to masculinity to their advantage. PJ specifically models the concept of the extracurricular on \u201cFight Club<\/a>,\u201d which also works as a meta-commentary: The girls in \u201cBottoms\u201d are flipping gender in the same way \u201cBottoms\u201d itself is reworking the testosterone-pumped, fist-bumping, male-targeted genre of fight movies like that much-worshipped film. (\u201cI love <\/em>David Fincher,\u201d one of the girls gushes about the \u201cFight Club\u201d director in passing as she walks into the first club meeting<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Whereas that Brad Pitt vehicle rewards the savagery of its virile men with sex, violence and destruction, their aggression brimming with homoerotic undertones, \u201cBottoms\u201d offers its girls the same gratification, but with more comedy and explicit queerness.<\/p>\n PJ and Josie take male posturing to the extreme, capitalizing on a rumor about their being hardened juvenile delinquents. Even when it seems they\u2019ll be called on their bluff, they double down, as when, early in their charade, PJ goads Josie into punching her<\/a> in front of the group of their peers and Josie ends up on the floor smiling, blood streaking down her chin. The girls\u2019 popularity soars. So does their self-confidence. Somehow, these girls aimlessly bruise and bloody one another into a sense of camaraderie, even newfound strength.<\/p>\n The movie\u2019s wry gender subversions extend to its ridiculous depiction of PJ and Josie\u2019s male peers, specifically the jocks, who spend the entire movie in their football uniforms. Despite these guys wearing the armor of masculine dude-bros \u2014 literally, protective shoulder pads included \u2014 \u201cBottoms\u201d often makes them effeminate. They fit more squarely into a misogynist\u2019s stereotype of women: They\u2019re petty, sensitive, underhanded and, ultimately, the ones who need saving by the end of the movie. (The one notable exception is an example of the opposite extreme, masculinity gone wild in the form of a feral male student who spends his school days locked in a cage.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n