Lolita's Fist

To all the people who know that Blade Runner is my favourite movie of all time. I was 19 when I saw this movie, and I was mindbound (like footbinding, see Mary Daly). The patriarchal narrative enveloped/s me. Even after 30 years of my own feminism. The patriarchy is insidious and systemic, and I have to work daily to find the nooks and crannies it lurks in. I was so in love with Harrison Ford. He was an embodiment of the men in the Mills & Boon I was reading. Craggy, bad-tempered, masculine. Ooh. And scifi was new to me. New on film to everyone. It was shiny, it was intellectual, it was engaging, it was Mills & Boon antidote. From when I was five (or that’s when I remember), I have been protesting the advances of men. I still did not see Sean Young protest. When I started to feel horny when I was young, I saw that women were NEVER allowed to want sex, NEVER ask for fingers in your vagina, NEVER ask for hands to touch your breasts, NEVER ask for a kiss, NEVER...

#Feminism #Racism  Fridging ~ female or black characters who are injured, raped, killed, or disempowered sometimes to stimulate protective traits among men or whites. The fridging is a plot device intended to move a male or white character's story arc forward. (From a comic book story where a female character is killed and stuffed in a fridge.)

#Movies ~ The Highwaymen  (2019). I looked at the movie header. Two men. Seriously? OK but it's Kevin Costner. Love him. Skipped watching it a few times. Eventually, this morning I started. You know how they ALWAYS  have to have that scene where the man is going to go out and change the world, big VDay speech, big dragon slaying, big moon landing. There's the woman, "Errh, my dinner's getting cold. Errh, but you said you would be home more, you promised. Errh, I have pilates on Tuesday and who will pick up the children."  *eyeroll*.  In this movie, she said a list of things she WOULDN'T say and then said, "But I'm not going to say any of those things, I knew who you were when I married you." Then she goes off to serve the party punch. Woohoo! Headway! Small shift, but let's get out the champagne!   Ironically the movie has Bonnie and Clyde in it, and back in the day, Faye Dunaway played Bonnie. In those the days, the Highwaymen had wom...

Loving the man-feminist  Pop Culture Detective  who shows us feminists here, that Abduction is framed as Romance in the movies. And while Kidnapping is a federal crime, the kidnapper-in-movies is dressed with hearts, empathy and flowers to overcome the sticky issue of #EnthusiasticConsent so that we women are not clear about what Red Flags really look like.  Not to mention the lack of clarity on what's not acceptable that is demonstrated to men. The blurry Red Flag makes men who can’t just ‘be nice’ and get women, instead they be awful and dream daily of just being able to abduct and rape.

Teenage movies back in the day were about how we felt different to our peers, we were each unusual and didn't fit. The movies were about how we tried.   The films were highly inappropriate, but we were so normalized to inappropriate that we didn't notice. Rapey, racist, sexist, were normal.   Grease (1978) was chock-a-block full of sex talk - I didn't notice - children ignore what they don't understand and fit what they do into a world that normalized what they did understand.  Girls tossed aside if they didn't put out and accepted if they look like sluts was normal. Normal. But to grown men our ignorance of what we were looking at looks like consent, acquiescence, flirting. "Young girls come on to me." Olivia's pants were fashion. Slut pants were fashion. Even now I am deeply uncomfortable with using the term 'slut'. And does my discomfort systemically play right into the patriarchal agendas depic...

I've had enough of Homeland. The lead woman is portrayed as a madwoman in the attic, a sadwoman on the heath, a badwoman on the bed. And the men all around are calm and focused and collected. Her behaviour would never be tolerated in real life. Never. She would be relegated to some desk job. She's a loose cannon who can't follow orders, popping Lithium. At least John McClane and Dirty Harry weren't popping Lithium.  I wonder what Hollywood could be wanting to imply about the emotionality of women in the workplace? Does anyone want to give me insight into what happened with her pregnancy - did they let her have the baby or did she dutifully abort it, or it self-aborted, or she carried it to term and became a housewife in the woods?

Meryl Streep as 'god'. I have total faith in her. I believe the world would be better as-constructed. Utopia manifested. The patriarchs don't have a clue what they are doing. Their manifested Utopias fail. Soylent Green, Logan's Run, Handmaid's Tale, The Island, Minority Report... whatever. Why do we always advocate for a return to The Outside that represents The Same as Now. That's stupid. Streep has the right idea despite being shrouded with the eye-rollingly insidious trope of being The Woman Who Holds the Man Back from Duty and Greatness. Snore. They can never see that we are always right and shouldn't have to be painted the Baddy when we are saving them from their Culture of Violent Masculinity. The very war that traumatizes Jeff Bridges. But No! They are obsessed. Not Sweet Death, but trophy-hunting, limb-shredding, sex-worker-dismembering War. Snore. IMDB The Giver (2014) Actors: Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep Director: Phillip Noyce

Snore... woman pleading with men not to go and do what they need to do. All women are are hindrances. There's also the mourning woman, the abandoned mother, the sacrificial woman... they're speeding through the tropes. IMDB American Sniper (2014) Actors: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller Director: Clint Eastwood