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Oct. 20th, 2012
(no subject)
Oct. 20th, 2012 09:25 pmOn the one hand, the new lj-cut style is nifty and sometimes useful. On the other hand, it's frickin' weird (if only in that I can't simply hit Back to get out of a cut, I must now scroll to the top of the page. A major pain in the butt when dealing w/particularly long posts).
This post below the cut (b/c my post is turning out to be fairly long), apparently, speaks to a bone of contention I've been having with my feminist sisters lately (not all the sisters, but you know what I mean): The feeling that violence and degradation isn't often the baseline position that women find themselves in when society goes to pot. If when, not too long ago, this country and others in the Western world were doing well and still not giving women equal pay and recognition, what do you think happens to women when society goes down the toilet? I'm not saying it's right, because God knows it's not. I'm not saying it should be better, because God knows that it should be. But when it's all sliding downhill, it's often women and children who are pushed down the hill first. Why? Because at our hearts, people as a whole are wicked. I'm not talking disasters on a small scale (one town, one state, one nation) but what we saw with the global meltdown.
You're probably wondering what my trigger for this was. I was reading a glowing review of Looper (which really is good), whose author felt that the movie's only misstep was its misrepresentation of women. Not one woman, it points out, is in a real position of power. We have women in service (waitresses, cooks, doorkeepers, etc.), whores, moms, and other not-so-great traditional roles. But there are no female Loopers, no female bodyguards, no women with any obvious power. And none of them seem to be trying to get power either.
What the author failed to take into consideration, is that (a) the movie takes place in a city that makes Detroit at its worst look like Paris' Golden age, and (b) our main character's a criminal. In other words, society's gone to pot and the people that we're focusing on in that society are at the charred bottom of that pot. In which case it makes sense that all the women our main character interacts with are waitresses, whores and the occasional mom. Actually, the mom's kind of a surprise!
Should society at any state be like this? No, heck no. Is it? Yes. We (you, me, my feminist sisters with whom I am annoyed) need to take that into account and go forward from there. Pretending that it's not doesn't help anyone. You can't cover an issue this big--that women at the low end of society get the worst of it--with disbelief and expect to fix it.
Okay, now I'm rambling/ranting a bit pointlessly.
In counterpoint to all this, because she has a very good point:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jaguarx13: eh, I'm not sure I agree. The writers could have chosen to make women's roles stronger. We were only seeing one possibility
jaguarx13: if no one branches out beyond the status quo, things will never change
( Please see below. And watch out for those trigger warnings. )
You're probably wondering what my trigger for this was. I was reading a glowing review of Looper (which really is good), whose author felt that the movie's only misstep was its misrepresentation of women. Not one woman, it points out, is in a real position of power. We have women in service (waitresses, cooks, doorkeepers, etc.), whores, moms, and other not-so-great traditional roles. But there are no female Loopers, no female bodyguards, no women with any obvious power. And none of them seem to be trying to get power either.
What the author failed to take into consideration, is that (a) the movie takes place in a city that makes Detroit at its worst look like Paris' Golden age, and (b) our main character's a criminal. In other words, society's gone to pot and the people that we're focusing on in that society are at the charred bottom of that pot. In which case it makes sense that all the women our main character interacts with are waitresses, whores and the occasional mom. Actually, the mom's kind of a surprise!
Should society at any state be like this? No, heck no. Is it? Yes. We (you, me, my feminist sisters with whom I am annoyed) need to take that into account and go forward from there. Pretending that it's not doesn't help anyone. You can't cover an issue this big--that women at the low end of society get the worst of it--with disbelief and expect to fix it.
Okay, now I'm rambling/ranting a bit pointlessly.
In counterpoint to all this, because she has a very good point:
jaguarx13: eh, I'm not sure I agree. The writers could have chosen to make women's roles stronger. We were only seeing one possibilityjaguarx13: if no one branches out beyond the status quo, things will never change( Please see below. And watch out for those trigger warnings. )