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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.
Tatsuya Ishida creates the internet comic Sinfest. Sometimes his insight hits the proverbial nail on the head.
“Suppose, for instance, that men were only represented in literature as the lovers of women, and were never the friends of men, soldiers, thinkers, dreamers; how few parts in the plays of Shakespeare could be allotted to them; how literature would suffer! We might perhaps have most of Othello; and a good deal of Antony; but no Caesar, no Brutus, no Hamlet, no Lear, no Jaques –literature would be incredibly impoverished, as indeed literature is impoverished beyond our counting by the doors that have been shut upon women.”
— Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own)
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.
It takes dedicated effort to remove these sorts of fiery speeches from the history of women. Oratory like this somehow doesn’t make it into the classrooms, or history lectures. So the lessons need to be discovered, theorized, and fought for in each generation of women making progress glacially slow. Yet we have helpful mnemonics for the British Monarchy, US presidents and Canadian PM’s that we teach to children. Yet nothing for the bold female speakers of the 60’s and 70’s who set their minds to one of the most important projects facing humankind – the dismantling of patriarchy.
Unless you seek information like this out, you won’t be told about it by your choice of news station, you most likely won’t hear it on the radio and I’m almost certain you wont get this in secondary school. The exclusion of feminist history in the mainstream is not an accidental omission, but a tactical choice.
– [Source:Notes from the Third Year]
-“We harbor an ideological bias against the feminine voice, rooted in positive primal associations with masculinity.”
Some highlights from the JSTOR article On Men and Women’s Public Speech.
“Gunn uses speeches delivered by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in their 2008 contest for the Democratic nomination to illustrate how gendered norms about speech create a double bind for women.
Gunn argues that the field of public address is an important symbolic arena where we harbor an “[ideological] bias against the feminine voice,” a bias, he contends, that is rooted in positive primal associations with masculinity (and the corresponding devaluation of femininity, the voice that constrains and nags—the mother, the droning Charlie Brown schoolteacher, the wife).
Both Gunn and Campbell contend that masculine speech is the cultural standard. It’s what we value and respect. The low pitch and assertive demeanor that characterize the adult male voice signify reason, control, and authority, suitable for the public domain. Women’s voices are higher pitched, like those of immature boys, and their characteristic speech patterns have a distinctive cadence that exhibits a wider range of emotional expression. In Western cultures, contends Gunn, this is bad because it comes across as uncontrolled. We associate uncontrolled speech (what Gunn calls “the cry, the grunt, the scream, and the yawp”) with bodily functions and sexuality—things that happen in the private, domestic spheres (both coded as feminine). Men are expected to repress passionate, emotional speech, Gunn explains, precisely because it threatens norms of masculine control and order.
The notion of control also relates to the cultural ideal of eloquence. Eloquence is not just a Western value but is rewarded in many cultures around the world.”
[…]
““Eloquence” is, essentially, code for values associated with masculinity.”
Ouch. Yet another patriarchal societal barrier that needs to be brought to light and rectified with all due haste.
John Stuart Mill wrote an essay in 1861 (published 1869) called the Subjection of Women. From this brief quote we can see the evidence that even in the 19th century there were people who understood how socialization effects people and how they behave. I’m constantly amazed that here and now in the 21st century I run across people who don’t get basic shit like this. It isn’t rocket science and doesn’t take a keen sociological mind to identify the concepts and start to make the relations and come to the conclusions that Mill was making 150 years ago.
“When we put together three things – first, the natural attraction between the opposite sexes; secondly, the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, every
privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character. And, this great means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual attractiveness.
Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till now if the same means had existed, and had been so sedulously used, to bow their minds to it?”
The tl;dr of what is being said – women are raised in a society that glorifies the toxic notion of femininity and the constellation of man pleasing behaviours that femininity entails (patriarchy anyone?). Surprisingly enough(?), this state of affairs is bad for women.
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