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The new Ghostbusters Movie looks like a lot of fun. What is not so much fun, the overwhelming negative reaction to the trailer mostly by man-babies who have to get their winge on because an all female cast of a rebooted franchise is ruining their lives. But hey, take a look at the trailer and form your own (slightly framed by me) opinion on the upcoming reboot.
There. Now that wasn’t so bad now was it? To my informed readership there could be issues with the dialogue, what is considered funny, how much can one really glean for a trailer – the usual suspects when it comes to evaluating a possible film to watch.
Then there is this dude. Welcome to Ground Zero of glibly earnest misogyny. Feel free to stop the vid at any time. It doesn’t get any better.
The pattern laid out by the douche-nozzle above can be found replicated in the comment section of the movie. But before we get to that, the we should examine the numbers of the situation.
At the time of this screen capture, 877k of negative votes for this movie. Similar trends for other movies?
Evidently not, especially note the Adam Sandler, a movie crafted with all the care and attention a drunkard has while taking his mid bender shit of the day. For this toadstool of a movie, 13k people have rated it negatively. Yet, how did Ghostbusters earn so many down-votes? Could it be the threat of male-centric media dominance ever so slightly slipping way? The plaintive wails from thousands of fragile male egos, given an anonymous forum, showing how threatened they are?
Quite possibly.
I shan’t talk about the Green Lantern – its better and more humane that way.
A small sampling of the comment section:
Now before I go on my spiel, I managed to find a comment hidden in this thread that is golden as it encapsulates the phenomena at hand.
Well there you have it. Problem named. Male entitlement and the reaction to the threat of not being centre of the media universe, for just one movie. The amount of push-back over the new Ghostbusters movie is quite staggering, as it is in fact, just one summer movie and unlikely to change the dominant mode of production in Hollywood.
If we put on our sociological glasses and get our hypothesizing boots out we can appreciate the fertile ground the discussion of this movie brings about. Can we perhaps extrapolate to other venues in society that have been traditional bastions of male power and the backlash that must have been experienced by women trying to change the status quo?
Consider the amount of misogyny present, even in the small sampling presented here (you can go see much much more in actual thread if you’d like) and what does that say about about our society? I would say that despite all the hurley-burley about social justice warriors and their ilk ruining *everything* that one of the dominant themes in our constructed social existence is the hatred of women.
This hatred of women is a learned generational feature – the commenters on this trailer are of the new ‘enlightened’ generation. This is scary frakking shite we have here, because without direct attention to the processes that form this toxic hate, nothing will change. Deprogramming the patriarchal misogyny that cripples men and destroys women must be moved up the priority list (stat!). We have wasted too many generations on a system that is destroying us.
“Women feel more guilt than men, not because of some weird chromosomal issue but because they have a history of being blamed for other people’s behaviour. You get hit, you must have annoyed someone; you get raped, you must have excited someone; your kid is a junkie, you must have brought him up wrong”
— Germaine Greer, Guilt Poisons Women
Did you need your daily LoLsob, well check out the headless women of hollywood tumblr and bathe in the cool waters of women decapitated, anatomized and passively portrayed for the male gaze. Misogyny, fresh from the pop cultural centre of the universe, to you, faithful readership. Whoo-haa….:/
And dudes, do note the link regarding the inevitable WATM outcry. Please follow and read it; save us both some time. :)
“The point is (of course) not that every poster we see objectifies and fragments female bodies. The point is that many do and that cutting up female bodies into consumable, sexualized parts is such an accepted and standard marketing practice across the board – people tend not to even notice.
It is something that is not done to men in the same way, but that is not dismissing problems that face men. It is merely focusing on a specific problem that affects women. (See: http://headlesswomenofhollywood.com/post/143241005563/headlesswomenofhollywood-what-about-the)
Even for movies that already objectify women as their main purpose (which maybe one day won’t be an entire genre??????) by cutting off the head of the woman on the poster, the dehumanization of her body is taken a step further. And her pleasure and consent are taken completely out of the equation.”
“You can’t give orders to your employees. It’s not allowed,” he says. Actually, says Knop, managing prostitutes is completely legal. The problem is making sure you don’t cross the line between “managing” them and “exploiting” them.
Helmut Sporer, Detective Chief Superintendent of the Crimes Squad in Augsburg, Bavaria, is one of many German policemen frustrated by the law’s greyness in this area. In October, he talked at a seminar in Brussels about a “flat rate” brothel in Augsburg. “Flat rate” places pay the prostitutes for a shift, making their money from the bar and the punters’ entry fees. The women working here were given strict rules: they had to be completely naked at all times and, according to Sporer, were sometimes obliged to offer unprotected sex. If they broke a rule, they had to pay a fine to the brothel. “The court declared all this to be legal,” said Sporer, because the brothel owners had “right of direction” over the women – as they would over any other employee.”
Go read the rest of the article to reconfirm your correct notion that prostitution (in whatever form) is not good for women.
-Allan Johnson on compulsory femininity
(the systematic expectations and goals of female socialization)
Women under patriarchy often are told that the choices they make will differentiate themselves from those “other” women. That the choices they make as an individual will empower them to overcome the obstacles they face. Granted, in some individual cases this can happen, but for the vast majority of women the choices they make individually in society does not alter society’s or men’s impressions and evaluations of them. Hence, the resultant series of catch 22’s that define the female experience – Virgin/Whore, Push-Over/B*tch, Motherly/Control Freak et cetera.
The common factor that is missing from much of liberal feminist analysis is the idea that misogyny is the backdrop (canvas, background radiation, insert meaningful metaphor here)to the stage of how society operates. Men will hate women in whichever role they choose, thus negating much if not all of the progress claimed by individual women.
Let us thank tumblr user Sazquatch (original post unavailable) as she provides perspective into the finer points of how misogyny works in society.
It’s not really as simple as saying “Men treat you badly when you do x, therefore men hate x, and so you doing x is empowering yourself and standing up to them!!” because men treat us badly no matter what we do, even if what we are doing materially benefits them. That’s what misogyny is – the hatred of women.
Men treat women who engage in sex with them badly, talking about how they’re worthless sluts if they send nudes etc., and you’re not gonna convince me that men’s goal in life is to ensure no woman ever has sex with them. Men want you to engage in sex with them, but they treat you badly afterwards because they hate women.
It’s like how men want women to be subservient house-servants who cook and clean without complaint, and then they turn around and slam those same women for being dependent, boring, or doormats. It doesn’t mean they want us to stop performing domestic labour for them, it just means they hate us.
Nothing we are doing in relation to men is standing up and doing things they hate to empower ourselves, unless we’re actively avoiding them and not centring them in our lives.”
Still not convinced? But wait there’s more! Did you want to see how quickly the shift happens in dudely behaviour from ‘possible happy sex times’ to let’s see how fast we can pile on the misogynistic insults. The bullshit dudes pull really turns a dime. Don’t believe me? Go see for yourself.
This is just a small sliver background of misogyny that we exist in and yes Dudebro’s it applies to you, because you let it go on around you. Your part in the equation is to stop the misogyny when your friends start in on, if you don’t then welcome to being part of the problem.
“People say, “Oh, well, pornography—that’s for masturbation, nobody can get hurt that way.” But orgasm is a very serious reward, isn’t it? Think of Pavlov’s little dogs, right? They don’t just think about salivating; they salivate. They do it because they learned it. Period. Now think about pornography. The dehumanization is a basic part of the content of all pornography without exception. Pornography in this country in the last ten years has become increasingly violent by every measure, including Playboy, including all the stuff you take for granted; and every single orgasm is a reward for believing that material, absorbing that material, responding to that value system: having a sexual response to stuff that makes women inferior, subhuman.”
– Andrea Dworkin, Feminism: An Agenda, 1983
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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