The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

Eat, Pray, Love: “Travel Porn for Women”

May 29th, 2008

I haven’t read Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, because, frankly, everything I’ve read about it disgusts me. One day I may have to grit my teeth and plow through a library copy, though, so that when I mock, I can mock knowingly. For now, I’m entertained by travel writer Rolf Potts’ reimagining of the book with the characters’ genders reversed. He suggests that, with a male protagonist, readers would “react with hostility at such a self-absorbed, culturally oblivious and vaguely sexist narrative.”

Potts makes a few too many assumptions that Gilbert’s readers are women (which, statistically, is probably true, but he uses “women readers” in many cases where just plain “readers” would suffice), but his points are interesting, especially in relation to my recent reflections on gender in the Indiana Jones movies.

Comparing a past genre to Eat, Pray, Love, Potts describes the kind of books that (in movie form) were in fact a large part of the inspiration for the first three Indiana Jones movies:

“Around the middle of the 20th century, pulpy American men’s magazines published what has come to be known as ‘adventure porn’—breathlessly told tales that involved hairy-chested men fighting crocodiles, exploring rivers and surviving diseases in far-off lands. Women characters didn’t figure much in these stories, unless they were helpless victims, hot-blooded savage-vixens or hookers. Though this era of men’s travel writing has been ridiculed, these stories no doubt lent a sense of escape to the working stiffs who read them—men who weren’t likely to ever leave the country, but enjoyed the vicarious problem-solving that came with the pulpy adventure.”

How does this relate to Elizabeth Gilbert? Potts continues:

“The legacy of ‘adventure porn,’ I think, is not the kind of adventure writing you see in Outside magazine, but books like Eat, Pray, Love. Instead of wrestling crocodiles in distant lands, our protagonist wrestles despair; instead of exploring rivers, she explores emotions; instead of surviving disease, she survives heartbreak. Men occasionally appear in this survivor’s tale, but they are as one-dimensional as adventure-porn wenches, and mainly serve as a sounding board for the protagonist’s feelings. When these men are giving our heroine love and help, she gushes with admiration; when they can’t intuit her emotional needs, she reacts with despair (and vague contempt). Rarely does she ponder what—besides emotional availability to her—might motivate these men in day-to-day life.”

Unfortunately, Eat, Pray, Love is going to be made into a film—reportedly starring Julia Roberts. I suspect I’d rather see Indy 5.

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