(no subject)

[mstakenidentity]

This rant by Joss Whedon was linked to on a community I'm in. I don't quite agree with his theory (one of the other women in the comm refered to it as the MIGHTY WOMB WARRIOR theory) but I thought it was a good read. I like that his rants can run into each other.

Comments

Re: I think I agree with you, but want to hear your thoughts.

[damien6.livejournal.com]

I agree with pretty much everything you're saying.
It is immensely disrespectful to equate the death of an actual person with a movie, and the article is kinda simplistic in other ways (womb envy?).

I suppose that the concept 'the torture of women is entertaining' persists in both his culture and the culture he is discussing is worthy of comment, even if that concept is expressed in very different ways. If for no other reason than so his readers won’t be able to comfortably distance themselves from what is going on.


And I don't think that entertainment and real life can be entirely divorced from each other.
A man believing that women deserve to be tortured, or that the torture of women is erotic does not necessarily equate with that man actually torturing women, but there’s a connection there.

Movies like Captivity validate men who believe that torturing women is erotic. They desensitise people in general to the idea.
And they do harm women. Having those trailers and posters around, having a movie like that exist is a giant ‘fuck you’ to all women. If those images don’t resonate with something that happened to them in real life (similar in intent if not in intensity), it will no doubt resonate with a million cautionary tales.

That material is remarkably similar to political propaganda under dictatorships.
This is what you should believe. This is what you should be afraid of. Don’t you dare walk the streets at night. Don’t you dare be successful or sexy or deny some man sex. This is what we think of you.

And I don’t buy the whole capitalist argument for the existence of these movies/tv shows/ whatever. Not when there are massive untapped markets for the kinds of stories people would want to watch. For the kinds of people who would want to watch them. Everything else is influence by political agendas, why do people claim pure as driven snow capitalism when it comes to misogynist cultural products? (Not that you do, but it happens often.)