by Lindy West
Eugene Levy tries to have a postmortem talk with Biggs about the pie incident: “I want to talk about masturbation.”
The purpose of this conversation, Levy explains, is that he wants to make sure that Biggs wants a sex partner and isn’t just content with masturbation for the rest of his life. Is that a real problem? Teenage boys not wanting to fuck enough? Anyway, who cares, it brought us this dialogue:
“I did a fair bit of masturbating when I was younger. I used to call it stroking the salami. You know your uncle Mort? He pets the one-eyed snake five, six times a day.” SAVE IT FOR THE PODCAST, EUGENE.
Back at school, the rumors about Finch are getting sexier than ever. “He’s the guy with the tattoo, right? You know, the eagle and the blazing fire, and all that stuff? Well, if you see him later, will you tell him Courtney says hi?”
Nadia, the exchange student Biggs is darkly obsessed with, asks him if he will help her study. “I have ballet practice; perhaps I could come to your house afterwards, I could change clothes at your place?” A woman changing clothes in the same building as you while you don’t watch? In some cultures (orc, badger, Mar-a-Lago) that makes her your wife! Might as well do whatever the fuck you want to her!
“There’s gonna be an Eastern European chick naked in your house and you’re not going to do anything about that?”
“What am I gonna do, broadcast it over the internet?”
“Yeah!”
“You can do that?”
NO, YOU CAN’T!!!! YOU ABSOLUTELY CAN’T!
This is one of the most fucked-up things to happen in any movie. It is so so so so so so so so so so so fucked up. Porky’s is bad, but at least peeping through a hole is purely analog sexual exploitation. Jason Motherfucking Biggs nonconsensually livestreams Nadia’s naked body to everyone he knows, AND he “addressed the e-mail wrong” so it went out to “every mailbox in the East High directory” INCLUDING BLINK-182 AND A MONKEY.
THE NAME FOR THIS IS CRIME.
Biggs sets up his webcam, and Nadia comes over. Biggs shows Nadia to his bedroom so she can change. Nadia takes off her clothes. She does a little dance. Then she starts going through Biggs’s stuff. She finds his sex magazines. She lies down on his bed to read the sex magazines. She starts masturbating on his bed to the sex magazines! WHO WOULD DO THIS IN SOMEONE ELSE’S HOUSE!? It’s almost as though this character is not remotely a person!
The guys urge Biggs to go back in there and “seduce her.”
“If you ever had a chance with Nadia, this is it.”
“Go over there and ask her if she needs an extra hand.”
He barges into the room and instead of, I don’t know, screaming and crying and apologizing for nudely masturbating in the bedroom of an acquaintance??? What would be a normal response to this absolutely alien situation that has literally never happened without the presence of methamphetamine? Instead of anything like that, Nadia is just naughtily titillated and tells Biggs, “You have seen me, now it’s my turn to see you,” and makes him do a striptease. Yeah, okay. “More, more, you bad boy!” YEAH, OKAY.
Then Biggs jizzes in his pants and the monkey cannot believe it. Blink-182 cannot believe it. Nadia cannot believe it the most. She thought she was going to get some of that lil 9-volt coppertop! Biggs begs for a second chance (reminder: everyone he has ever known is watching this and masturbating) and Nadia is like, “Well, I do like your dirty magazines.” Then she says the word shaved, so he jizzes in his pants again.
THEN NADIA GETS SENT BACK TO THE CZECH REPUBLIC BECAUSE HER HOST FAMILY WATCHED HER NONCONSENSUAL WEBCAM PORNO AND WOMEN MUST ALWAYS BE PUNISHED FOR THEIR OWN EXPLOITATION.3
Biggs is moping around because the whole community, including Mark Hoppus, saw his Mark Hoppus (and let’s just say it wasn’t a Tom DeLonge), when he stumbles upon the one person in school who seems unaware of his no-hands jizz video. It’s Michelle, a flute geek who everyone hates because she is always talking about things that happened at band camp. It’s annoying when people have interests and feel joy! Biggs asks her to the prom.
Mena Suvari visits Chris Klein at his job, and she discovers that not only is he a jazz god, he’s also a working-class hot dog boy. But then Klein realizes that he has a big lacrosse game on the same night as the vocal jazz state championships! An angel torn between two worlds! Suvari says it’s okay, but you know that IT IS NOT OKAY.
Stifler’s prom date cancels on him because she thinks Finch might ask her instead and let her touch his tattooed XL johnson, so for revenge Stifler slips “a little something in his mochaccino.” It’s poop juice! Finch is gonna shit like crazy!!!!!
Stifler steers Finch into the girls’ bathroom, and he’s just about to release his bowels when a bunch of girls come in giggling about how Finch is a bad boy that they just HAVE to lick. Oh no! This is his demo! They won’t want to munch his boy meat anymore once they learn that he is an organism that metabolizes food into energy and waste! Unfortunately, he cannot hold it in anymore and diarrhea just starts rocketing out of his asshole while he screams and screams. The girls shriek and run out of the bathroom, and then when Finch comes out, the whole school is gathered to laugh at him. Now he will never have sex! Girls only fuck guys who hold all their shit inside!
Klein’s heart is just not in the lacrosse game, so he bails and gets to the vocal jazz competition just in time. Mena Suvari can’t believe her eyes!
“You’re missing the game for us?”
“No, I’m missing the game for you.”
(The first one would have been better, but okay.)
Then the choir director gives Chris Klein his solo back, which is absolutely not fair to Albert,4 who’s been working really hard on this solo and actually showed up.
FINALLY, IT’S PROM NIGHT. There’s a prom.
They go to Stifler’s lake house for the after-party. Mena Suvari and Chris Klein sensually undress each other in a gazebo. Michelle loves Biggs’s nasty story about Stifler drinking the jizz, and he starts to wonder if she is in fact nasty. Kevin(?) asks Tara Reid if she wants to do the missionary position, and she says only if he says, “I love you,” so he does, and so they do. Finch is feeling nihilistic so he goes through a door that says “Please Keep Out,” and finds Stifler’s mom in there, bein’ horny.
Stifler’s Mom: I’ve got some scotch?
Finch: Single malt?
Stifler’s Mom: Aged eighteen years, the way I like it.
Out of nowhere, Michelle is like, “Oh, and this one time at band camp, I stuck a flute in my pussy,” and then, “Are we gonna screw soon? Because I’m getting kinda antsy.” It turns out, Michelle is the horniest and nastiest girl of them all! She tells Biggs to wear two condoms so he doesn’t jizz too early (don’t tell kids to wear two condoms!) because it turns out she DID see the webcam video after all, but she LIKED IT.
While they’re having sex, she starts screaming in Biggs’s face: “What’s my name? SAY MY NAME, BITCH!” This would be my ringtone if those existed anymore.
After all that, Tara Reid dumps Kevin(?) because she doesn’t want a long-distance boyfriend in college. Kevin says he wasn’t lying when he said, “I love you,” during missionary, and she’s like, “I know.” OH MY GOD, WHO CARES ABOUT THIS?
Biggs wakes up and Michelle is gone because she is a free, libidinous woman who takes what she wants.
Stifler catches Finch fucking his mom and dies.
Biggs goes home and strips on the webcam for Nadia, who is not mad AT ALL about him broadcasting her tits to the entire school and getting her kicked out of her exchange program. She knows it was all worth it because there is nothing on earth, LITERALLY NOTHING, more important than some mediocre boner.
RATING: 1/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Footnotes
1 I confess it! I also like Chris Klein!
2 Hey, when will “mochaccino” die as a joke? Like, I get it, your high school shop teacher needs a way to be vaguely homophobic on Facebook, and drinking anything but the shittiest
black coffee in existence is extremely homosexual and Marxist, but for FUCK’S SAKE, coffee snobs are not ordering “half-caf extra-hot no foam triple-pump rooty tooty fresh ’n’ fruity crème brûlée for a day fudgy white extra whip coconut mochaccinos” at Starbucks!!! Are you nuts? I actually live in an effete liberal urban center, and we dicks are drinking single-origin pourover from coffee shops that don’t even believe in milk. If you want a really good “mochaccino,” you gotta go outside the city limits to Red State Real America because they’re using heavy whipping cream, they’re giving you 128 ounces of it, and they’re sticking Almond Joys and Oreos and whole cherry pies and other smaller mochaccinos on top, hail Satan. “Mochaccino” is a self-own, please stop.
3 Kinda seems like Shannon Elizabeth was ALSO sent back to the Czech Republic just for playing this role! Has anyone seen her?????
4 Eric Lively, brother of Blake Lively and, more important, ROBIN LIVELY.
Acknowledgments
My dear Ahamefule watched every single one of these movies with me, even when he was stressed, even when he would rather be watching Naked and Afraid, even the ones he knew he would hate. Some of the best jokes in the book are his, but I will never say which ones. I love you, Aham. None of my books would exist without my literary agent Gary Morris, who has been encouraging and advising me for over 10 years now, who waited SO LONG for me to write Shrill, and who I don’t think I’ve ever properly thanked. Thank you, Gary! I’d be lost without you! Thanks to my family, especially my mom, Ingrid, who always knows what to do. Thanks to Hachette, as always, particularly Krishan Trotman, Michelle Aielli, and Mary Ann Naples. Thanks to Mauro DiPreta for buying this book in the first place. Thanks to Rafil Kroll-Zaidi for reading it and telling me it was funny (and which parts were not funny)! And thanks to the movies for being goofy as hell! I love you so much! And NO THANKS AT ALL FOR DEVLIN-MACGREGOR. BYE.
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Praise for
THE WITCHES ARE COMING
by Lindy West
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF FALL 2019
Amazon • Book Riot • Bustle • E! News • Esquire • Mashable • Refinery29 • USA TODAY
“Searingly smart…[with an] overarching tone of swashbuckling courage: West knows what she wants to say, and she really doesn’t care what you think…a stirring manifesto for honesty…and an exhortation to give a damn.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A fiery book from an admirable author.”
—Morgan Jerkins, New York Times Book Review
“With her signature wit, brio, and laser-like clarity of vision, one of our foremost thinkers on gender unveils her unifying theory of America: that our steady diet of pop culture created by and for embittered, entitled white men has stoked our sociopolitical moment. Adam Sandler, South Park, and Pepe the Frog all come under West’s withering scrutiny in this funny, hyper-literate analysis of the link between meme culture and male mediocrity.”
—Esquire
“West is back and funny as ever in…The Witches Are Coming, a cultural critique of American culture, the #MeToo movement and what it means to not be a mediocre white man—in a society that so often protects and promotes him.”
—NBC News
“As a girl, Lindy West obsessed about pop culture. As a critic and columnist, she analyzed it. Now she’s creating it…In her wise, witty new collection of essays, The Witches Are Coming…West blasts the misogyny lurking in the media we love.”
—Star Tribune
“A thoughtful and funny examination of rape culture in media.”
—Bustle
“The Witches are Coming is simultaneously whip smart, infuriating, a call to action and, of course, laugh-out-loud funny.”
—Huffington Post
“The book made me simultaneously laugh out loud and want to pull my hair out. West’s snappy writing is funny but full of anger, and I felt myself instantly sucked in.”
—Steph Coelho, Book Riot
“[A] hilarious, astute essay collection chock-full of her signature wit and personal anecdotes.”
—BUST Magazine
“Equal parts hilarious and sobering, West’s words will help fellow witches articulate why they are so fired up (YES!).”
—Booklist
“From Facebook to Goop, cancel culture to climate change, the essays here add West’s discerning and quick-witted voice to the conversation about what social and environmental justice looks like, and what it can look like in the future. So if you need a little magic in your Halloween reading, pick this one up.”
—LitHub
“[This book] highlights one of West’s greatest gifts, beyond her voice and humor—her ability to shine clarifying light on the dark, knotted bits of culture without divesting herself of that culture completely.”
—Seattle Met
“When I have a hard time making sense of and finding the words to describe the complexities of women’s issues, I turn to Lindy West. There’s something about her sharp, steady, and ferociously funny writing that re-centers and refocuses my mind on what’s in front of me and why it matters. West has a gift for packaging the truth into easily digestible sentences. And her latest collection of essays, The Witches Are Coming is no different…The next time you’re feeling lost or can’t find the words to describe why you’re angry about a particular topic, pick up The Witches Are Coming. Lindy will lead the way.”
—Hello Giggles
“In this time of great frustration, this collection is a clearing in the woods to meet, to reflect, to dance, and to cackle around the fire.”
—Abbi Jacobson, creator of Broad City and New York Times bestselling author of I Might Regret This
“Lindy continues to be one of the funniest, smartest writers around.”
—Jessica Valenti, New York Times bestselling author of Full Frontal Feminism and Sex Object
“GET ME A BROOM.”
—Samantha Irby, New York Times bestselling author of We’re Never Meeting in Real Life and Wow, No Thank You
Praise for SHRILL by Lindy West
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
NPR • Esquire • Newsweek • Los Angeles Times
“Read West’s ferociously funny book and you’ll be shouting her praises.”
—People
“Stitch-inducing and searingly honest.…West takes readers through her journey from a self-effacing child working to keep her body and voice small to an unapologetic, fat-positive feminist, skewering the status quo one keyboard stroke at a time.”
—USA Today
“Lindy West is the troll-fighting feminist warrior you’ve been waiting for.…Shrill treats feminism, fatness, and social change with rigorous attention without losing any of West’s signature humor.”
—Los Angeles Times
“[West is] one of the most distinctive voices advancing feminist politics through humor.…With patience, humor, and a wildly generous attitude toward her audience [West] meets readers at their point of prejudice so that she may, with little visible effort, shepherd them toward a more humane point of view.”
—New York Times Book Review
“[B]eautiful, joyful writing.…West defies clichés both by being persistently hilarious and deeply loving.”
—Washington Post
“Hilarious, biting, and wise.”
—Huffington Post
“Lindy West’s memoir is a witty and cathartic take on toxic misogyny and fat shaming. She comes to accept her body just as Internet trolls congregate en masse to try to rip this new confidence from her, but she’s rearing to fight back.…In Shrill, West is our fat, ferocious, and funny avenging angel.”
—NPR, Best Books of 2016
“Reading West’s book is like taking a master class in inclusivity and cultural criticism, as taug
ht by one of the funniest feminists alive today.”
—Refinery29
“An emotional roller coaster. One moment you’re snorting from laughter, trying to avoid all the weird looks you’re getting on the train. The next you’re silently absorbing a larger truth neatly packaged into the perfect sentence you didn’t expect to read.”
—Mother Jones
“With her clear-eyed insights into modern culture and her confidence in her own intelligence and personal worth, West appeals to the humanity of even the most parents’ basement-dwelling, misogynistic, and casually hateful of trolls.”
—Esquire
“[West’s] writing is sharp, smart, hilarious, relatable, insightful, and memorable. She tackles serious and personal subjects—like being fat, getting an abortion, feeling lonely, or dealing with harassment online—and is just as capable of eliciting tears as laughter…I dare you to pick up a copy.”
—Newsweek
“Poignant, hilarious, and contemplative.”
—Cosmopolitan
“One of the most impressive aspects of this book is the level of nuance, self-reflection, and humanity that West displays in her analysis of her own writing and her relationships with others.…It’s the best kind of memoir, and it shows that Lindy West still has a lot more to say—and that we should all keep listening.”
—Bitch Media
“West is utterly candid and totally hilarious…as funny as she is incisive.”
—Vogue
“With Shrill, West cements her reputation as a woman unafraid to comfort (and confound) her critics.…[Shrill] illustrates just how deeply sexism pervades our society while laughing at the absurdities that sexism somehow normalizes.”
—Elle
“Lindy West can take almost any topic and write about it in a way that is smart, funny, warm, and unique.”
—Bustle
“West is candid and funny, unafraid to criticize rape jokes or explain how airlines discriminate against fat people, and her fearlessness has made her one of the most notable voices on the Internet.”