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| image of movie poster is from here |
Plot summary paragraph added on 8 May 2011.
There's a lengthy rant before the review.
If you want to cut to the chase, go down about ten paragraphs. This note was added on 21 Sept. 2012.
***Added 12 Oct. 2012: Even easier--scroll down to the row of red asterisks!***
This post concerns misogyny, whiteness, darkness, and movie-making. I'm unsure of how it is that misogyny about white women is so revered and celebrated by men as a form of entertainment. I only know that it is, as is misogyny against any woman--it's just that Hollywood knows that if it makes movies about white people, more white people will go see the movie, in theatres or by renting the DVD. In a racist society in which there are white people--a majority population or not--where the economic system is racist too, whites will rule both socially and economically.
In the West, white men will possess more money than any other group and will hoard it using any and all means necessary, including military, legal, and police force. This is the current news story of the U.S. economic crisis--not mentioned this way exactly. Nowhere are rich white men calling for and end to the racism or the classism, coded into financial and cultural currency, that keeps them rich, and richer, and richer. These white boys just did a calculated sell-off of oil futures. They knew that the U.S. people wouldn't tolerate gas prices above 4 bucks a gallon, and voila, as soon as that became the national average, they make their profits and now will wait to see how much more money they can make in the next quarter of the year. What is it that oil is sometimes called? Ah yes: Black Gold.
It takes a lot of men to make so many movies featuring misogyny. It also takes the support of a lot of women too. Jodie Foster is now promoting her film made with racist-misogynist Mel Gibson. As I understand it, he revealed the latest depths of his racist-misogynist raging and ranting, and abusiveness and terrorism, only after shooting of the film was completed--this is according to Jodie, who appeared on David Letterman's show and only quickly noted that Mel's behavior cannot be excused--but she said nothing else about him and has only publicly defended him as a good person.
She's quite willfully maintained a professional relationship with him long enough to determine that he's a racist misogynist--if you consider what he's said in public and done in private to be racist and misogynistic, that is--without making excuses for him.
To blame Mel's attitudes about and treatment of women across race, and of people of color across gender, and of Jews, as only a consequence of his drinking, which Roger Ebert does EXPLICITLY
*here*, is to make it seem like alcohol possesses the ability to determine our attitudes about specific groups of people, which it does not. Shame on Roger Ebert for avoiding the truth of Mel Gibson's life, and to pretend his career and his abuses of women are not intimately linked. See this snippet of his review:
[H]ere is another of Mel Gibson's fine performances, a reminder that he is after all a superb actor. His personal life is in ruins because of the disease of alcoholism, which he is still struggling with. Though he's responsible for his outrageous acts and statements, I think this is not the good man I have met many times. From what I know about alcoholism, I believe he goes through personality changes, that he is content on some days and consumed by rage and madness on others, and that such changes are symptoms of the disease. Make your own diagnosis.
It took some courage on the part of Jodie Foster to direct this film. I believes she knows Gibson's good side and respects his talent. He was certainly the right choice for this material. All of his troubles through recent years are summed up by her opening shot, of an exhausted man floating on a raft in a swimming pool, his arms wide like the crucified Christ. A voice (later revealed to be the Beaver's) informs us this is Walter Black, a man so deep in depression, he has alienated his family and nearly destroyed his business.
We meet his much-suffering wife Meredith (Jodie Foster), his resentful son Porter (Anton Yelchin) and his disbelieving colleagues. Meredith finally throws him out, not without love. He buys a bottle, checks into a motel, tries to kill himself and is interrupted by the hand puppet.
And we get to feel so sorry for another privileged white het male abuser of women and his child, and of many other people too. Got it. Spare me the violins.
I understand Jodie wanting to make money off of her film. I can only hope it is her last professional collaboration with Mel Gibson. I recommend boycotting
The Beaver. (And
pleeease with the title--and the ridiculous story. It's not funny. It's not cute. The movie sucks. It's yet another "oh, the poor, poor very privileged MAN" movies. There have been entirely too many of those. We need far more murder-suicides where the murder isn't of a woman and the suicide is of a man who takes his own life before,
not after, ruining the lives of others.) One last note on
"The Beaver". (And we're not talking about
*this* Beaver either, although it too celebrates the colonisation and domestication of white women.) How does one decide to name a movie after a misogynist insult to women? Jodie explained, semi-facetiously, that the title might help it sell well on DVD, because there will be het men wanting pornography who will order it. What a great idea for the selling of a serious film! (Not.) She also told us about how almost entirely wonderful her two sons are, how much better it is to have sons than daughters, and how wretchedly insulting to her Jodie's overbearing mother has been, except to her sons as a grandmother. It appears we cannot escape these themes of man-adoring and woman-hating.
I'm not sure who has more social clout: Roger Ebert or Jodie Foster. He reviews movies. She makes them. He's male and heterosexual. She's not. I've witnessed for a long time how if a woman is marginalised in some ways in Hollywood, by appearance, by sexuality, by age, or by race, she is expected to publicly support MEN, by those who pay her, more than it is expected of other women who are less marginalised. Even and especially, it appears, the most misogynistic among the menfolk are expected to be supported. What if we all stopped supporting misogynist and racist men? And stopped featuring them in movies and TV series and other programming (for example: Charlie Sheen). But there is non-gay boy-bonding of course, and it does preclude any man from speaking out against abuses that are primarily perpetrated by men against women.
Another theme in society is that when men are entranced by boys or men, they will betray women and girls utterly. This goes alongside the theme that when men are entranced by girls and women, they will betray women and girls utterly.
I guess it's men being entranced that's the problem. For when in such as state, men routinely conclude they are not in power, they are not in control, even while they take possession of and kill all who they are entranced by. That's a curious bit of
logical phallusy, now isn't it? When women have been accused of taking possession of boys--such as in custody conflicts with abusive men, or of men's penises in the night, as in some of the witch trials, that never works out well for the women. If they don't burn her, they tie a stone to her ankle and toss her into the river: if she sinks, she was not a witch; if she floats, she is a witch and must be burned. Clever men: they get to destroy women either way.
***********************************************************
But on with the featured show.
This cinematic psychological thriller is called "Black Swan". The title comes from the ballet. The ballet comes from some of the cultures of Russia and Germany but was written by Pyotr Tchaikovsky and was later modified by his brother Modes. Almost immediately, I waged a bet with myself, not knowing much about the film's creators. I bet myself that the writers and director were all male. I bet that no woman was involved in constructing this story, as it appeared, in every respect, to be nothing other than a tangle of men's misogynist fantasies about pretty pale young females, as men define pretty, pale, young, and female, put on film. Indeed, we are led to believe that Winona Ryder, who plays the "aging" dancer, is so far over the hill that she might as well be dead. Oh, that's practically a spoiler alert. To the extent that she is alive, one has to ask: why is she alive and for whom? Surely not herself.
Here's the main plot: a young, thin, white woman who is pretty according to conventional Hollywood and Madison Avenue standards, is grossly and abusively manipulated in body and mind by a prestigious white het male choreographer of a revival of the ballet, Swan Lake. She hopes he will cast her in the role of Swan Queen which would allow her to perform (dance) as both the White Swan and the Black Swan. She lives with her mother; she is attracted to another woman dancer. And she is battling with various forms of psychosis as she is brought close to a complete mental breakdown well-choreographed by the instructor/choreographer.
The story braids together these themes: white heterosexualised female beauty being overpowering to presumably straight white men; men's need to control, manipulate, and dominate women sadistically, socially, and sexually; people changing from birds to humans; goodness and purity of love represented by whiteness and lightness; evil and seduction by blackness and darkness; and the on-going question men seem to have about women's sanity. The sexist and racist themes are well represented--more symbolically with the racism, more interpersonally with the sexism. (Where HAVE I heard this before??? Oh, I've written about it
*here*.)
Added to those are "problems" of lesbianism and how closely it relates, to the filmmakers, to a woman's insanity. Crazy = dark = female. Crazy = dark female. Dark = crazy female. Female = dark and crazy. Remember that. When a woman is darkest, she is at her most insane, according to white het men's myths.
One of the messages of the film as written is that attraction to men is sometimes destructive, but attraction among women is only destructive and all attraction among women amounts to incest in one form or another. You know women: they can't tell one from the other! Mom sees herself in her daughter; daughter sees herself in her female dance competitor. (
Sarcasm alert: Thank goodness it isn't
men who mistake different women for one another! Ask any consumer of
Playboy: he'll be able to tell you what distinguishes about Miss April from Miss August. But it won't be the depth or breadth of the women's humanity, I assure you.) To the extent that such attraction among white thin females is sexualised in the film, it must be presented to het men publicly for their own private enjoyment. Again and again and again. We are allowed--or is it forced?--to gaze upon Portman's breasts, covered only in a very thin white leotard. It, like her own skin, will not keep any man out.
One of many misogynist sub-plots in
Black Swan might just as be described thusly: "See how male filmmakers write and direct a story requiring Natalie Portman to fake masturbation and orgasm as often as possible." Her character can try to keep her mother out of her "private" sexual life in the fantasy sequences in the film, using a wood pole, curiously. In the reality scenes, she cannot keep men out, publicly or otherwise: there aren't enough wood poles around when she needs them to beat the predatory man over the head, or to use to stab men in the crotch or the eyes. Men wouldn't write such scenes anyway. Sighted men don't stay aroused by seeing men hit in the crotch or the eyes by a woman. They "feel" such assaults viscerally, in the groin or they eyes not as pleasure. Most men want their erections and their vision too, and use both to penetrate women's bodies which, in men's stories, are everything but private.
All the disgusting invasive assaults against Portman's character--and there are so many I lost count--are meant to evoke pleasurable responses from men, or a kind of revulsion-titillation response, typical of how men view women they lust for and simultaneously hate. This movie is a het male serial rapist and fatherly incest perpetrator's delight. Just check the demographic of who is renting it. I predict it will be (or already is) mostly white het men. Like over 90%.
"Art"--using the term loosely, sometimes, is
pornography: the graphic depiction of woman-as-wh*res. Women are depicted and referenced as "wh*res" throughout this film--whether or not they are "frigid" or "hot", they are wh*res and must be sexually available to men when men want them to be. Portman's character has the scratches on her back to prove it. Roger Ebert only alludes to this; he doesn't use the word "misogyny" at all, which I find shocking as I know he is conscious of it both as a term and a social reality.
*Here's his review*. But true to form, the female lead only ever wants or admires the man who possesses and destroys her--even while she resists him; she only resents the woman who possesses and seeks to protect her, and also resists her. Portman's character attempts to tear down her mother's image, which fantastically mocks and shames her. But the male lead who tears at her and breaks her down can only be either secretly desired or submitted to. Alas, in misogynist cinema and other stories, is there any difference between the two?
This was one of the more disturbing films I've ever seen--unrelentingly disturbing, in fact. It wasn't just that it was gross--and it was gross--repulsive--a lot. What was repulsive was how the writers and director subjects the audience to scenes that seem only to exist to make the viewer recoil or retch. There seriously ought to be a trigger warning on this movie for anyone with an eating disorder that involves self-starvation or throwing up. It's not a safe movie; not only for that reason.
In addition to Portman's body being scratched, it is also bloodied in many other ways--indeed, menstruation is the only blood-event not mentioned. This was clue number 5000 that it was written by a man or by men. She peels back her own skin, off of her finger; she examines her cracked and bloody toenail; she gazes at lesions by her fingernails; she presses her fingers into abrasions; she sticks things into her flesh; she tears at herself. This is the most perversely self-touching movie of a young woman I've ever seen. But then again, I haven't seen much pornography in the last 25 or more years.
This fictional woman who is spawned from the utterly infertile minds of men (Russian, German, and U.S. American) has a boundary called "skin" that betrays her; or she betrays it. But underneath all the peeling, picking, pinching, poking, and bleeding, if you're paying attention, is a story of how men ruin women's lives. You just have to endure all the very graphic female self-injury along the way. It was like watching a movie of a bird systematically and painfully plucking out its own feathers. Oh, she does some of that too.
This and boy-war movies like
Platoon rank up there in "movies I plan never to see again". Watching movies about how men graphically and violently destroy other men and how men pornographically destroy women isn't my idea of a good cinematic time. But men do love their violence and violations, don't they? And it's only when feminists notice this theme that men take umbrage and deny it altogether.
Men can do whatever they want to women--men have demonstrated this enough times for it to be received as an unquestionable statement of truth. Men can and do possess women and girls. Men can and do rape women and girls. Men can and do dictate the terms by which many women live their lives, and thrust, assert, and insinuate themselves into women's and girls' lives in such ways that women's freedom with men is not possible, and the only freedom women have from invasion is to live without men. Men arrange societies so that the only way to accomplish that is by not living at all. Suicide-as-liberation, I'd argue, is not a pro-feminist idea. Liberation by murdering the male invaders, the male abusers, the male violators: that to me is pro-feminist because it removes from men the complete lack of accountability that men currently enjoy and exploit in too many ways to imagine or contemplate. Instead, it seems we all want to think of men as "good" at least some of the time. That men choose to waver dangerously between something called "goodness" to something called "evil" only shows us how easily men project their own moral and sexual struggles onto women, making women the source of all that is good or bad in men--as if men weren't in charge at all.
It is a primary conceit of contemporary corporate pornography--and all mass produced material that is about "pornos" graphically, that because women's sexual power is greater than nuclear, wind, hydraulic, and solar power combined, it must be tamed, controlled, and punished by men. So too must animals. So too must the Earth, sea, and sky. There is nothing that white men, in particular, can keep their grubby hands off of. And there is nothing they touch that is not ruined, made to feel or be utterly without value or worth. It's like
The Golden Touch in reverse, a curse from which there appears to be no remedy or relief.
Black Swan (from IMDb):
Directed by
Darren Aronofsky
Darth Paul | 6 October, 2010 at 3:57 pm 
Julian 10:18 am on April 19, 2010 | # |
First, if you’re not among the ten to eleven million who have seen this, I welcome you to see this:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U (or just Google “Dove Evolution video”)
No matter how thin, no woman wakes up in the morning computer-digitally altered.
I’ll add that these ads perpetuate the most vile forms of contempt for certain “other” women. AS IF women are all extremely pale, thin, young, and very tall. This particular body type, where it does occur “in nature” occurs in Europe among a very few Caucasians. Not commonly in Asia–and Asia goes from China to Indonesia, and from the “Middle East” to Japan! Not so much in Indigenous populations in Asia and the Americas. Not in any part of Africa, unless among a few whites descendants of colonists. And, in case no one has noticed, the Americas, the UK, and Australia, and other places where Elle magazine and Vogue magazine are sold and distributed, such as most cities, mostly people who are none of those attributes live there, including NYC, London, and Perth.
Yes, Laura. I totally agree. Why don’t we men organise and not just speak up when it seems “the women are ignoring our pain”? Why don’t men speak out against what pornographers do to men, what pimps do to males of various ages, and advertising execs get rich doing to mostly white people that negatively impacts all people?
“The fairer” sex also means whiter/lighter, as in “mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all”. (Answer: Snow White… get the racism?) Fair skinned is allegedly “better” than dark skinned. So racism against women runs all through these images. And that is horrendously marginalising and alienating to women of color, to non-superthin women, to older women, and one other category as well… can you guess which category?
The “type” of woman that rarely gets discussed when discussing ads about women, and is never seen in media at all, unless to denigrate her terribly, is butch women, non-femme women. These magazines won’t go near any woman who isn’t ultra-femme to the point of having to be painted from head to toe, because NO women look like the women above, ever. (See that famous “Dove Ad” on YouTube to know what I mean, linked to above in this comment.)
So that one man, as mentioned, could be gay, but the women only exist for/draped on the men to do with as they please. They are Barbie dolls. Is he HER accessory, or is she HIS? (Hmmmm: is there a “gay” inference: do naked white-but-tanned men play with Barbie dolls?)
@Matt: almost no white men have hairless upper bodies AND hairy lower bodies. Possibly some “Aryan”/Nordic men. So you do, and another .001 percent of the population. But “nature” doesn’t work that way for most of us, and men’s chests are now moving back towards being hairy on television, which means those actors won’t have to have that hair ripped or shaved off.
If you sense agitation in my posts, it’s because I hear from the people who are profoundly negatively impacted by this and other media. The women and men who believe women are “undesirable” and “ugly” and “ought to stay inside” if they don’t have stick-legs, are not “pretty” as defined by pimps and cosmetics companies, and “fairest of them all”. The lesbian women who never see their desire, their aesthetics, depicted anywhere. Even depictions of “lesbianism” in dominant media is “for heterosexual men” to “enjoy”. Ugh.
These women, above, and men, only exist in relation to one another. For each other. Lesbians and gay men exist too, and we don’t all look like the people in the images above. And NO Black man looks like that polished ebony form above. (Not even him.) If you don’t see the harm, just breathe in the pain and suffering caused by these and all the other images shoved at us 24/7. Feel that pain. Of raw throats from vomiting several times a day. Of not having a clear mind and strong body due to self-starvation for one to twenty years. Of all the girls who don’t have, as Toni Morrison wrote, “The Bluest Eye”.
Andre 8:07 am on May 30, 2010 | # |
I don’t see anyone turned into objects here. I think this concept is misguided if people think being sexy is somehow “bad/wrong”Julian 9:11 am on May 30, 2010 | # |
@Andre,The point isn’t that being turned into objects is bad/wrong. The point is to note how capitalist white male supremacist media market the flesh of white women, white men, women of color, and men of color, while noting as well what it has to say bout heterosexuality and lesbianism and gayness. The issues are discrimination, harm, oppression, and dehumanisation, not being “bad/wrong”.
You can decide for yourself if racism is bad or wrong. But this blog exists to document misogyny, racism, and heterosexism, among other realities, that do injure people physically and emotionally. You can care or not care about matters of gross exploitation, the promulgation of harmful ideas of “beauty”, and social and sexual subordination. That’s entirely up to you.
fox 6:07 pm on June 3, 2010 | # |
I notice that the same thing often critisized in this blog is present in this post: first there are naked and sexy “men”, followed by a “black man” being objectified. So the first ones are just men, not “white men” – and the last one isn’t just a man, but a black one.Alexei Soares 11:26 am on September 2, 2010 | # |
How can it be that intelligent authors fail to understand the pervasive and unrecognised nature of the sexual objectification of men in Western culture? It is everywhere, it is blatant, and it is most assuredly NOT exemplified by these pictures. These pictures are a myopic view of the sexual objectification of men as seen through the reality of women.A mean [sic] objectifies a woman when he evaluates her worth based mostly on her fitness as a reproductive partner. He bases his decision on proxy-fertility characteristics such as youth, body shape, firmness of behind, and breast shape and size.
A woman objectifies a man when she evaluates his worth based mostly on his fitness as a reproductive partner. She bases her decision on proxy-genetic characteristics such as dominance, power, intelligence, financial success, and a larger than life presence.
The best way to understand the objectification of women is the way women who do NOT posses the needed “object-characteristics” are treated as worthLESS. Fat, old, and ugly women are almost completely absent from cultural representation. I flew jetBlue last night, and the free movie was “Prince of Persia.” There was not a single old, fat, or ugly woman in the movie.
The best way to understand the objectification of men is the way men who do NOT possess the needed “object-characteristics” are treated as worthLESS. Weak, powerless, and commonplace men are culturally represented in HUGE numbers, seen only for an instant (with no face) before being quickly killed off in a humour scene, as thought the death of an “inconsequential” man is worth no more than a laugh. The “Prince of Persia” is filled with funny scenes involving the killing of huge numbers of “weak” common soldiers, often “good guys” killed by the leading “dominant” male by mistake.
JPLee 8:30 pm on January 6, 2011 | # |
Your comment is ridiculous.It is NOT “sexual objectification” to evaluate a man’s worth based on his intelligence and financial success…
What makes someone more valuable as a human being: a perfect body, or a brilliant mind? I don’t know about you, but I appreciate the artists, musicians, philosophers, and scientists of this world much more than I appreciate top models and pinups.
When you objectify someone, you reduce them to a physicality, like a vase or a bottle of beer. Objects do not have thoughts, and so their purpose is to be USED by others to pleasure and satisfy.
Of course there is unfair societal pressure on men to be intelligent, strong, or to conceal their feelings, but IT IS NOT THE SAME! You cannot objectify a mind the way you can a body!!
Both sexes can be shallow when it comes to choosing a mate/judging the opposite sex, but women do not judge men on the same objectifying, intimate terms that have such limited shelf life as men do women.
Women have it worse…..not pretty, but it’s true.
Lawrence 7:37 pm on February 7, 2011 | # |
I agree. women constantly whine about objectification and then insult us and call us immature if we point out their double standard. You cant watch a TV show or movie without all these athletic cut 20 something guys losing their shirts and many times even more. We have had a push of show showing male genitalia and they have been rated down to R. Show a woman’s pubic hair and you automatically get a NC-17, and you haven’t even shown her genitals. And then we get all these experts saying, “a flacid male organ is not erotic”. So, its still indecent and should garner the same treatment as female genitals. The beefcake in ads has gone way over the top and they know it. Women just want to have their beefcake and eat it too.JPLee 12:28 am on February 8, 2011 | # |
Yes, we all have to contend with exceptionally hot (and touched up) people on TV. But at the same time…..now you know how we feel!Women are still objectified far more often than men (just going by the ads I see everyday). And only recently has the number of scantily dressed people in the media started to even out among the two genders…….I have to wonder why you are so pissed, when it is really just an eye for an eye.
You really have to consider the long history of women being objectified before you can complain about things not being fair.
PS. Who the hell are these experts telling us what to find erotic? I think we can figure these things out for ourselves.
Julian Real 1:26 am on February 8, 2011 | # |
@Lawrence – You seem not to grasp a very basic truth: that the men objectified are still valued for being powerful; the women objectified are valued for being weak. Why? Because however much men are objectified–including the objectification of white rich men as “wealth objects”, wealth, power, control, and force still remains in the hands of white men in the US. There’s no level playing field onto which such images fall. The field is mined against women of all colors in ways it never has been for men. It is mined against all people of color in ways it never has been for whites.If you want to narrow the gaze myopically to this issue of how people are presented in some print ads, that’s your myopic choice. In the real world, however, those images are part of a larger pattern of very threatening and horrific realities which, I would imagine–correct me if I’m wrong–you’ve not had the displeasure to be terrorised by, such as men following you as you walk to a bus station or train stop, or to your car; men pulling their cars over asking you to get inside; men harassing you on the street or at work; men feeling entitled to rape you at home, or to batter your face until bones are broken, or to batter your belly if it carries a fetus; grown men sexually abusing, trafficking, and enslaving thin girls–by the millions. I’ll wager you don’t register these horrors and terrors as “real” at all. And so you can pretend we are only discussing “a few images in some magazines”. You are quite privileged to be able to not make any more connections than that. This is to say, your privilege is showing.
Guest 3:46 pm on March 5, 2011 | # |
The next thing you know male models in ads display themselves while women display clothes.Dave 5:24 pm on April 19, 2011 | # |
How can eople complain of what happened historically when they are now all dead!! It’s today’s children we should be thinking of and objectification of men is far more rife than that of women. It’s just that women moan about it more when an advert shows a bit of female leg or a film shows a female bum. And yet men are supposed to shrug their shoulders and take it like a man when bombarded with adverts showing shirtless hunks all the time or films and dramas showing detailed shots of genitals.It’s a double standard and it stinks. Women are all smug about it at the moment but the middle-aged white male is the last minority group yet to be protected from societies onslaught of male-bashing and male objectification. Give it another 10 years and the young males of today’s generation will put a stop to this because enough is enough!!
Julian Real 9:06 pm on April 19, 2011 | # |
Hello Dave,I welcome you to open your eyes to what’s going on globally, and in the West specifically, to women and girls before you jump to erroneous conclusions about how much more objectified men are than women.
You know, I hope, that father-daughter rape is the most common form of child sexual abuse in the U.S.
The average age of girls–yes, girl children–entering prostitution and pornography is thirteen, due to male pimps lying to the runaways from incest-perpetrating and otherwise patriarchally abusive homes.
There are many hundreds of thousands of girls and women being trafficked internationally, primarily for the “pleasure” and profit of men.
And that men get away with battery and rape most of the time, and most cases of men beating the crap out of women and raping them are not reported at all.
When men are asked to describe what they do, in day to day life, to avoid being raped, they generally scratch their heads. When women are asked, the list is long and men respond to it by saying “I had no idea!”
When a segregated group of young men were once asked what they feared most from women, the answer was “being laughed at”. When a group of young women were asked what they most feared from men, the answer was “being killed”. So please stop putting out this nonsense about how things are so, so bad for the doods. Whatever objectification men get, it’s not tied into a gendered political system in which women let that initial interpersonal or industrial objectification be the doorway to terroristically harassing and sexually and physically assaulting men and boys.
If we understand ‘objectification’ to be part of women’s subordination–as part of the economic discrimination and aggressively abusive activities men enjoy unleashing on and against women and girls systematically and usually with impunity, your argument sinks like lead and stinks worse than the apparently unrecognised privilege in your comment. That would be the privilege to be oblivious and insensitive to what women and girls are enduring the world over that you, Dave, are not.
Dave 5:16 pm on April 20, 2011 | # |
Oh for goodness sake, get a grip! Mothers kill their children far more than fathers do. Fact – look it up. I think rape is awful BUT there are other sides to the story that often go unheard. Girls get away with false rape claims all too often and men aren’t protected from this despite the fact that it can ruin innocent lives. Men get raped too, but that’s not as bad, is it!There is no support from Governments regarding domestic violence against men either, despit the fact that, arguably, that just as many, if not more, women commit violent acts against their partners – look it up. Quite simply it goes unnoticed because men don’t tend to complain, probably due to their protective instincts. Nobody cares about men. http://www.youtube.com/watch[blahblahblah].
Life these days is all about women isn’t it. It’s all about how we should protect women, often at the expense of men. Look at the Titanic as a classic example of how men’s lives are treated as second class, expendable etc. Nobody cares about mens feelings. There is less spent on male health. Education these days supports girls (and the results go hand in hand with the trend). Fathers don’t have the same custody rights over their children. White males are victims of positive discrimination in the workplace. They are the victims of male bashing in modern advertising. It’s funny when they get kicked in the groin in a film. You can say anything you like about a man. You can make programmes that strip them of their dignity and make them look foolish because they are a man. The list goes on and on and on…
Nobody cares about men, not even men. But I’m telling you now, give it 5 to 10 years and the young males in society are going to realise what a stupid, uncilvilised nd unfair society it is that they are part of and, trust me, there will be a massive backlash. THey will not put up with this crap for much longer.
It makes me laugh how stupid people are and how indoctrinated they have become what with all the feminist brain-washing that has taken place over the last few decades. Look how people complain when a music video shows a woman dancing showing a bit of flesh. See how they are so quick to place it in the sexist objectification catagory. THey say how bad this is for young girls and boys, firstly because it puts pressure on the girls to look good and secondly because the boys are supposedly not allowed to look. YET, those very same complainers are completely and utterly oblivious to the half-naked male hunks flexing their muscles for the benefit of the female audience, despite the fact that this, too, makes many young lads feel shit about their body. But who cares about them, eh! The girls are allowed to see hunky bare-chested men everywhere. Double-standard.
I could go on but I really can’t be bothered because I happen to know that I’m about 20 years ahead of my time and people like you are 20 years behind. You’ll see, just watch, it’s the next big thing!