shoesonwrong

Me: We’re going to see Brothers tonight, okay?

Ryan: Which one is that?

Me: The one with the two brothers and the wife? Tobey Maguire? Jake Gyllenhaal? Natalie Portman?

Ryan: How do I not know those names?

Me: Spiderman, The Prince Of Persia, and Queen Amidala.

Ryan: Ok. That sounds like a cool video game.

Me: Movie.

Ryan: Whatever.

Ryan

I wish I could hear this song without inevitably picturing Dirk Diggler’s dangling participle.

Three of the biggest box office hits in recent years that have been heavily and exclusively marketed to women are:

• Sex and the City: The Movie
• Twilight
• New Moon

I wrote a rant about Sex and the City here, but it boils down to a few main complaints:

• People of color are don’t matter and are more than happy to do things like be a whiny white woman’s personal assistant despite having a degree in computer science.
• Finding and ensnaring a man is the best thing a woman can do.
• Women who value themselves are destined to die alone because they’re too selfish to shut up and be a good wife or girlfriend.
• A slight weight gain is the end of the world, and yes, all your friends have noticed.
• Infertility can be cured by “relaxing” and “letting it happen”.
• Buying things is the appropriate answer to all of life’s ups and downs.

I left that movie theater actually feeling offended, while women around me (mostly black, I might add) were shedding tears of happiness or crowing about what a good movie it was. Black women, represented in the movie by only one sassy character who exists solely to make a white woman feel better, were grateful for this movie because it was finally something targeted to them, as women, if not at them as black women.

The Twilight series is something I feel more conflicted about. It’s aimed at teenagers rather than adults, so I feel like I’m more willing to make allowances regarding it’s absurdity. Teenagers are extreme, absurd, and extremely absurd by nature. That’s what’s fun about being a teenager (and what’s horrible about being a teenager). What bothers me about Twilight is that it goes beyond the normal absurd teenage love where you feel like you’re going to die if your boyfriend breaks up with you. At it’s core is a story about domestic abuse. More than the blunt message of abstinence, more than the heroine’s complete lack of personality, what bothers me is that it presents domestic abuse in a romanticized way — as something to yearn for rather than escape from.

The National Domestic Violence Hotline lists over thirty warning signs of an abusive relationship and states you only need to fulfill one before you should seriously reevaluate your relationship. The relationship between Edward and Bella fulfills, by my count, at least twelve of these warning signs. One of the biggest box office hits in history, and that’s what it’s teaching it’s core audience of teenage girls: love is abuse.

Abusive relationships, marginalized ethnicities, and the ever present belief that woman is not complete without a man, plus a myriad of other hurtful, petty, and degrading things. This is what Hollywood thinks women want, this is what Hollywood thinks we deserve to see. Screw Hollywood.

*(“Stupid Lamb” is what the Twilight heroine, Bella, identifies herself as. It is, of course, in relation to her One True Love — Edward, The Lion.)

A teen movie about domestic abuse and velociraptors? It’s practically the new Sixteen Candles.

[hellamike: via]

Hey, women: it’s so awesome that we came out in force and showed that just because a movie is targeted at us doesn’t mean it will flop.

But hey, women: maybe next time we could pick something that doesn’t, well, debase our entire gender?

I’m at the movie theater and I get a small popcorn, which I have to butter and salt myself because paying five dollars for it wasn’t enough. There are four “butter sauce” dispensing machines, two to either side of the cash registers. I’m standing at one that is apparently not a faux-butter dispenser but instead some sort of horrible grease geyser that sprays the side of my tiny popcorn container, my hand, and my pants without actually touching a single kernel of popcorn. It’s astounding, really — if I weren’t all greased up in a movie theater, I would probably see the marvel of engineering that it took to create this exact scenario. So I’m attempting to towel myself and the outside of my food off using paper napkins, when I notice a woman standing uncomfortably close to my side. I figure she’s probably just using the other machine, since she’s not saying anything to me, and then go back to trying to mop up grease with dignity and grace.

Suddenly, some bitch behinds me says, in a voice shrill enough to make my non-existent testicles pull into my body, “It’s as if she doesn’t even KNOW the other machine is EMPTY and we’re all waiting.” I sort of ignore her because, well, I’m moping up fucking butter-flavored motor oil from both myself and the surface in front of me. There’s like, three other machines in the place and it’s not that busy. After she repeats herself and nudges me a bit, I look up and turn bright red when I realize that a crowd of flannel-clad Midwesterners have gathered around me to sigh impatiently that they cannot get extra calories on their popcorn THIS VERY INSTANT. Apparently, the machine beside me ran out just after I started using the machine from hell. I glance frantically over at the other two dispensers on the other side of the cash registers. EMPTY. They’re completely empty, but no one wants to take ten seconds and walk fifteen goddamn feet.

I am doing the best I can, here. I just want to get my popcorn with some “butter” and go watch Men Who Stare At Goats without sliding out of my seat. I’m clearly flustered and just trying to do my best. Had ONE person said something even close to, “Hey, this machine’s empty, can I use that one?” I would have gladly moved aside. The reason I am still standing here is because I thought, hey there are three other machines and I should clean up around this one because it’s all greasy and I’m all greasy and I still need butter anyway.

But no. I get boxed in by a very large man, a pissy teen, and some giant bitch who just mumbles passive aggressive things. I whirl around and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, do you need this?” The woman, who was so vocal a moment ago just glares at me and sighs.

I’m not the bigger person, though. I’m a teeny tiny person because I say, “Well, I’m still using it. Too bad nobody asked for it.”

Two minutes later when I’m done, she’s still waiting, still glaring, and hadn’t bothered to haul her ass over to the other dispensers.

Michigan Avenue, with some random building turned into the police station for the Red Dawn remake. A bit later a bunch of tanks and army vehicles showed up and I was going to make a joke about it being a war zone but not really anything new, then I was all, “Bad taste, Annie.” And I shamed myself for speaking ill of Detroit when it’s done nothing to me.

They’re shooting a Red Dawn remake a block from my house. Yeah. I have SUPER high hopes for that one. But Jeffery Dean Morgan is rumored to be in it, so I may try to find him and hump his leg.

You Don’t Know Jack, a TV movie about Jack Kevorkian starring Al Pacino (no, really) is also filming concurrently. I hope the gunfire isn’t part of this movie. This might not suck.

AND an as of now unnamed HBO movie starring I don’t know who about I don’t know what is also filming. My bets are on this one being the best. You know, because there’s no commies or Kevorkians in it that I know of.

cleversimon:

This is why I grind my teeth whenever someone tells me that Joss Whedon is, like, so respectful of women, because when his female characters aren’t crying over their relationships or getting stuffed into a refrigerators they get to kick people in the head. “Strong female characters” like Kara Thrace aren’t female characters at all. They’re men with tits.

We don’t need more strong female characters. We need strong feminine characters. The problem is that to most Hollywood writers these days, that sounds like an oxymoron.

(via cleversimon)

I think Hollywood does have a dearth of strong characters who are what we think of as traditionally feminine, but I don’t think that’s a reason to shit all over characters like Starbuck or Buffy just because they get to kick people in the head, aren’t stereotypically feminine with their emotions, and generally act like assholes. To limit the definition of what a strong woman looks like is another form of sexism — a woman isn’t really a woman if she acts in a stereotypical masculine manner?

I completely agree that we need more strong women on screen, but from ALL points on the femininity spectrum.