A rake at the gates of Hell

Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cabbages and Queens...
I was gonna post this over in

lord_darkseid's journal in response to his post here, but, in my typical fashion, it became too long and rambling to clutter someone else's comments with. In the post, Darius is commenting on this post by Joss Whedon, relating the recent "Honor killing" of Dua Khalil.

"Honor" killings happen all the time in countries that live under Shiara (sp?) law. We only see them on the news and via the web now, because we're over there. There are these groups who call themselves "morality police" who are kind of self-appointed or church-organized vigilantes with the implicit but not the explicit help of the police. That way, when they go out and beat some woman to death for hanging out with the wrong group, the police don't interfere and it kinda ends there. The Government says "wasn't us" and the church claims it was a "social uprising" against the woman's immorality. (I remember reading about how a female US soldier in Iraq was driving a refueling tanker on the airport tarmac and stopped to hook up one of the jets, when one of these "morality police" assholes ran out and knocked her down with a club because "women aren't morally allowed to drive." Fortunately, being a US soldier, she then stood up and beat the everliving shit outta him.)

Joss is perfectly right to try and call more attention to these groups. And he's welcome to whatever philosophical pontificating he likes concerning the ramifications of gender differences around the world. (However ridiculous the tired, trite, inverse-Freudian "womb envy" theory may be.) On the issues of entertainment, however, I coincidentally ran across this post in connection with that famous bingo game that's making the rounds. I have issues with the "bingo game" itself and the motivation behind it, but that's not relevant to what I wanted to say here. What is relevant is the writer's feminist perspective on some of Joss's work:

Buffy Summers - how I loathe what was done to this character - ended up forcing oral sex on a male character over his repeated verbal objections. To a musical sting. The writers, I am fairly certain, did not actually realise they had written a rape, particularly as this same character later attempted to rape Buffy, which was not treated as at all amusing.

See also: Men forcing demonic power into the First Slayer = metaphysical rape and utterly despicable. Buffy using Willow to force demonic power into possibly thousands of young women = empowering!

Women are entirely capable of stupid or evil decisions. But those decisions should be treated as such by the text, not lauded as a turning of the sexism tables.

This is an issue because Joss spends a good deal of time in a "holier than thou" approach, grinding after this new "Captivity" movie, and, for all I know, he may have a solid point. I haven't seen the ad campaign but... well, let's break it down.

1a) Traditionally, in movies, the horror genre has been excoriated as universally misogynistic because of its preferrential obsession with women as victims. (Even setting aside the borderline porn obsession that's becoming universal across all genres.) However, this overlooks the "final girl" factor in which a designated woman turns, self-empowers, and takes out the slasher/monster that's effortlessly killed everyone else. The trend is noticeably absent in many foreign genres (giallo), but is nearly universal in stateside films, the particular industry that Joss seems to be concentrating his scorn on. (See: every damn "slasher" ever.)

1b) The new trend of "torture horror" (which I, personally, dislike intensely) however, seems to be stepping things up significantly in the trauma department, concentrating on increasingly creative and shocking ways of gouging, cutting, piercing, or otherwise killing its targets, and using that as its principle advertising hook. For someone concerned with the the societal effect of entertainment trends, it's obvious that these new trends warrant examination.

1c) Yet, even within these new films, the old trends remain. The "Saw" movies in total could be seen as the story arc of the new twisted "hero"... Jigsaw's apprentice stepping up to replace her ailing mentor, and "Hostel" 's violence was primarily man-on-man. I think (heard, didn't see) that even "Turistas" follows the "final girl" trend.

2) Whether the "final girl" or the twisted new versions of it counteract the apparent misogyny that preceeds it is an issue that's been batted around academia for years, and frequently open to debate on a case-by-case fashion. I think there'd be little debate that "Ripley" from the Alien movies or Sarah Conner from the first "Terminator" are empowered female figures, nor that "House of 1000 Corpses" is, at its least, violently misogynistic. (The latter could be argued as just straight misanthropic, but that's a bigger argument.)

My point is, as much as I may enjoy many of Mr. Whedon's stories, if he's going to speak from the mount to us on the nature of gender relations in the modern world, specifically on the topics he's objecting to in "Captivity, then he really needs to take a close look at his own work. He's used the "rape trick" in Buffy more than a couple times. 1) Woman force sex on men = empowering/funny, man force sex on woman = deplorable. 2) Rape attempt used to denigrate & weaken main female character (look again at Spike's attempted rape of Buffy) 3) Rape attempt used to demonstrate evilness of main baddie (in the "three geeks" storyline).

And that's not even detailing the pieces specifically germain here. Do I even have to list the number of times that Buffy gets tied up, chained down, or caged in the course of the series? (The occasion when Ethan Rain tied her down to carve symbols into her skin leaps immediately to mind.) Or how about objectification with the "Buffy bot"? Yes, Buffy always escapes, empowers, and beats the crap out of the baddie, but so do the other "final girls" in the horror genre. Why does he get a pass, and "Captivity" not? Is it due to the severity of the situations in "Captivity"? I know nothing of the story or the advertising campaign, but After Dark's quote that it's "...also about female empowerment" tells me we're dealing with another "final girl" story, just one within the "torture horror" genre.

In short, Joss has a good point about the way in which the world in general has ignored things like "honor killings" in the name of tolerating inherently sexist cultures. Further, Joss's concern with parallels between the honor killings and modern entertainment may be a truly important issue. That in mind, however, he really needs to re-think his own attitude of blamelessness about his own contributions before speaking down to the rest of the world. Things he's done in his own stories would seem, by his own standards to be beyond the pale.

Ohhh... I'm gonna get mail on this one...

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