Extreme images of violence against women. "Moral and edgy" or vile misogynist cliche?

I don't like shows which inevitably involve a random visit to a lapdancing club, inevitably a young attractive female victim, and shots of dead naked women covered in blood rendered so lovingly.

I am going to stop watching CSI I think. It's isn't the same since Grissom left with his insects

MIL is a big fan of Midsomer Murders and such like - can't imagine she watches this. I wonder if the traditional female preference for crime drama still holds with the hyper-violent stuff.

agree about the disingenuousness.

Oooh I like columbo.

And midsummer murders, miss marple, rosemary and thyme

I am obviously one of those middle-aged women

I heard a radio report some time ago that said that most readers of crime fiction are middle-aged women. However, I suspect that includes reading books by Agatha Christie and the like, which of course are not in the same league as the many recent misogynistic offerings. As far as I can remember, I think women also make up the bulk of the TV crime drama viewers. I think that when TV and film companies say "misogynistic stuff is what sells/what the audience wants", that is disingenuous. On the contrary, TV and film often offer what they (the creators) want, for social engineering reasons as much as for profit - you can have any type of film you like, as long as it's misogynistic.

'His argument is that the serial killer narrative has a lot to say about all the old contemporary capitalist cliches: emptiness, isolation, the attempt to set rational masculinity against embodied femininity, etc.' - I can follow this, but I suppose my response is: if the consequence of the relentless use of this trope is fear and disgust among watching women and the normalisation of sadistic violence against women, what sort of insular, morally vacant blowhard would you have to be to bang away at it? It's not like male disaffection is an underexamined topic.

Boo that is exactly what i think. Usually right before turning them off.

It is everwhere

I genuinely fear fo what my sons will see as 'normal' and mainstream when they are older. I mean how more graphic and shocking can the writers get.

Excuse this rant from an English Lit/Gender Studies PhD but this is one of the subjects I'm really interested in.

There is some very interesting literary criticism on the 'diseased' mind of the literary serial killer who defines himself by the number of 'meat' bodies he can pile up. Mark Seltzer's 'Serial Killers' describes it a lot better than I can, but in effect he describes what a lot of you are talking about- the glamorisation of the psychopath who tries to reduce others around him, particularly women (and sometimes children) to mere bodies. His argument is that the serial killer narrative has a lot to say about all the old contemporary capitalist cliches: emptiness, isolation, the attempt to set rational masculinity against embodied femininity, etc. I actually think that writers like Bret Easton Ellis deal with the phenomenon really well when they portray the killer as an overblown cartoon demon like Patrick Bateman- a male=model killer who describes himself as 'not existing'. I suspect though that there are many on this thread who would class him as an exploitative writer- each to their own.

ISNT- the first thing that came into my head upon reading OP was CSI.

i have to say whenever i see programmes or films with graphic scenes like the ones described in OP, i think it is nothing more than the sick fantasy of the person who wrote it. and it feeds the sick fantasies of people who would be inclined to act on such thoughts. if someone was found to have stories such as this on their homw computer or in a diary, eyebrows would be raised but because it is under the guise of drama or 'entertainment' (how that could ever be entertainment is beyond me)it is deemed totally acceptable.

i do worry about the minds of the people who come up with the stuff.

I do agree that this 'actually it's moral' is a load of tripe.
If all the film makers who made these films were constantly to be found campaigning and fundraising against violence against women I might believe they were concerned about it, but you never hear them making that connection.
I think Elephants puts it very well with '
I don't know what we're supposed to learn by seeing this kind of shocking violence anyway' and 'why not a documentary?'

I would love to know if this kind of stuff is watched more by women or men.

Hello ISNT. Yes, exactly, I was thinking the same thing earlier on too. Why exactly is it so terrifically culturally important to render sexual violence in forensic detail, again and again, when far more common violent crimes are rarely depicted so lovingly?

Realistically, it's either because the auteur/writer/whatever thinks that sexual violence is somehow more profound than other violence, or because s/he is too cliche-ridden to do something the fuck else, or because s/he gets off on it. What other explanation can there be?

Thinking about this earlier

On threads about women/men/violence, when people talk about violence against women, there are always people who come on to say that statistically men are more likely to be the victims of violent crime than women

And yet when we have this television thing (reading the comments in reponse to one of the links), it seems that on television and in films, violence against women is depiceted so frequently as most violence is inflicted by men on women.

I suspect that the people making the first argument are likely to be the same people as make the second argument.

But this is clearly totally contrdictory. If dramas are to mirror real life, then surely we need to see a lot more people being the victims of violent crime at chucking out time, and the victims should be men. Strangely, dramas usually choose to portray sexual violence against women.

Hmmmm.

That Alison Graham article puts it very well. Especially the bit about emphasising how women shouldn't ever feel safe, anywhere, not even in their own homes with their children playing at their feet. This is one of the consequences of this repetitive broadcasting of sadistic violence against women - it has the effect of making us all feel, at some level, unsafe.

All you have to do is watch CSI and see the camera lovingly linger on the naked breasts of teh dead young woman on the mortuary slab, to see that there is a problem with all of this.

Violence against women = mainstream
Sexual violence against women = mainstream

It wasn't this way 20 years ago. Many films now seem to feel the need to include a rape scene in the story, often randomly, as its just what you do now.

Good point Proles. Wasn't a massive fan of the film as a whole, but the ending was extremely powerful and made you really feel what had happened, rather than just know about it.

I don't know what we're supposed to learn by seeing this kind of shocking violence anyway. If directors concentrated less on the violence and more on the characters it is visited upon (beforehand) and the reactions of the relatives/friends etc (afterwards) the emotional response would be far greater. If we're supposed to be learning a lesson about the terrible things that men do to women, in visceral detail, then why is it dramatised? Why not a documentary? It's not like it's a fictional circumstance is it.

The only message to be got from a story like this (true or false) is that violence against women is totally unacceptable, and that victims need to be given every opportunity and help to escape from the danger they are living with.

Repeatedly showing women enjoying - even finding a turn on - the violence inflicted on them, is a staple of extreme porn - that should tell you something about who this film is made for, and at whose expense.

Did anyone else read Rachel Cooke's interview with MW in the observer: here

Alison Graham did a great article about violene against women on TV here too which is well worth reading. She reviews this crap for a living and is fed up with it.

Good point re it all being centred around the male character, policywonk. I'm not sure if I would necessarily want to see a film centred around the woman's tragedy of being raped / murdered either on the other hand - even if there was clearly-depicted agency / interior life on her part, say in coping with the aftermath - but it would be more unusual and possibly more uplifting. (perhaps it would be rather more like the Jodie Foster film referred to above - I might still not want to watch it, but it might be a film I was happier to see exist, IYSWIM.)

Yes. Which leads back to your point about Stephen Griffiths - we'll all hear a lot more about him than we ever will about the women he murdered. It's a fast route to celebrity for every woman-hating loser out there (and let's face it there are a frighteningly large number of those).

Agree that the Kermode/Mayo prog (which I love anyway) is refeshingly pro-woman on the whole. And I did feel pathetically grateful to Mayo for obviously having had such a viscerally hostile response to the Winterbottom film.

Winterbottom's argument seems to be that anyone who routinely consumes images of violence towards women - which he accepts are prevalent in popular TV/films - has no right to complain about the scenes in his film. So, for those of us who go out of our way not to consume those images, is it OK for us to say that his film is a stinking pile of old cock, even if we haven't seen it and never will? Somehow I doubt he'd accept that line of argument either.

One thing that really angers me about Winterbottom's arguments is that they're all centred on the central male character, his motivation, blah blah. How it's a tragedy really because he's driven to destroy the women who love him (ie not a tragedy because he's murdering people). This absolutely routine insistence on seeing everything through the eyes of the male aggressor, while the women are just collections of body parts with no interior life, just hanging around waiting to be raped and murdered.