Youth and why I'm so tired of the male gaze

I guess i'm a bit late to this party, precisely 7 years late, but well: I have opinions too.

Youth (2015) written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino is yet another movie about old white dudes reminiscing on their younger lives, feeling sorry for themselves and "appreciating" beauty (?).

I mean, sure, getting old must be scary as hell + a director can only put their feeling into a motion picture, and I get that artistic freedom of expression is something we should protect at all costs, but sometimes, only some times, I wish male white privilege would feel a bit more self conscious, more insecure about itself and just shut the f**k up.

Not to be rude but this isn't a great film at all, it wasn't essential to put out, or to write or for anyone to watch. Nothing new is being said or done, it's really a stylistic exercise, a way to showcase how masterfully every detail of a Sorrentino movies can be calculated and how talented he still is. And sure, he's a great director and he definitely knows its audience - which I'm evidently not a part of - but jeez... he really thinks he's so relevant that even when he has nothing to say we should listen?!

The whole film is a meditation on age, on relevancy, on time passing and on the fear of oblivion. But honestly, I can't take this seriously for a second. This man is literally one of the most important voices in Italian (if not internationally) cinema today, he has made 13 movies in his career plus a tonne of short films, documentaries, tv content... I mean, he has it all, so tell me : why should we feel sorry for him? There are much more talented people who will never get a chance to even try holding a camera, so check your privilege dude! It's obnoxiously self indulgent and so very ego centered, I'm literally embarrassed.

I will say, very few moments of this movie felt quite aesthetically mesmerising : Cane literally playing the cows, the Karl Marx tattoo reveal (or even the tennis bit), the climbing scene at the gym. But most of it was bland, inappropriate if not offensive and quite frankly unnecessary.

You see ? The patriarchy taught men like Sorrentino that whatever their opinions are they're absolutely valuable and important, and that they should take up all the space they want to tell them. Instead, it told women that our opinions are irrelevant, that we should keep them to ourselves and only listen to our "husbands, fathers, sons" and so on. That we should worry about their fragiles egos.

Well, I'm tired of this, I'm tired of movies where male directors put women's naked bodies on display, perpetrating an image of the "female form" that is simply not reality. Was it necessary for Miss Universe to be completely naked in the pool? Was it necessary for the two old men to look at her like she was there for their enjoyment? Why didn't they show an older woman, or a curvier, shorter, more "universal" type of nudity? F**k this.

I’m so over this male gaze only showing "perfect" (to them) women's bodies to satisfy men's desire to objectify, to own, to use and take advantage of whenever and however they want to. It's because of men like Sorrentino that women hate their bodies, that we become anorexic, bulimic, that we're constantly trying new diets and killing ourselves in a gym to achieve a form that would please a man, to become an object they would want to buy. This isn't their world anymore, we have a voice too and we aren't afraid of using it.

So dear Sorrentino, fuck you and all the men who feel entitled to their opinions, we don't care about what you think, we've heard it times and times again and the story always ends with a woman dead, raped, beaten. Your world doesn't work, and we're here to burn it to the ground!

I'm out.