Anyone else's TV pleasure ruined by feminism?

[QuentinWinters]

I was trying to watch "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix yesterday.
It wasjust full of self congratulatory men, either really amazed that their big brains had come up with a difficult ethical question, or really proud they had monetised Facebook, or namedropping the ceo of twitter.
I got so bored of men wanging on I had to turn it off.
I don't know if it was just a really bad programme or if feminism has ruined me!

I found this with computer games, although I do enjoy some that have a bad reputation like GTA, which although I have some issues with is mainly played for comedy, there are others which really bother me. Especially in a game called Heavy Rain, the female protagonist is terrible. Goes through sexualised violence totally not needed for the story and seems to be there mainly as a prize for the male in the story.

@ErrolTheDragon

Though quite a few men in Austen have to marry for money as well. Trying to remember... do any of the men actually have to marry for money to avoid destitution, or is that just easier than getting a job, which at least wasn't impossible for them?

I guess it depends on how you think about it - I suppose most or all could have worked and made enough to get by in some sense. In the military or a profession if they could qualify. But not, say, worked and made enough to fulfil their family obligations, particularly around property maintenance. But it's not like that was really considered an optional thing they could choose not to buy into in any case.

The worst age gap couple I saw was Liam Neeson and January Jones playing a married couple in some generic thriller. I mean, she's January Jones FFS. Even if she married an older man he wouldn't look like Liam Neeson.

This thread has been a huge lightbulb moment for me. For the past few years, I have found that I no longer have any real interest in most films or TV. Genres that I would previously have enjoyed just don't entertain me any more. And this is probably why.

My tv pleasure wasn't ruined by feminism, but some movies and tv shows definitely have.

I really wonder for example, what my thoughts would be on the character of Daenerys in Game of Thrones have I seen the show when I was younger and more unaware of the strong female character trope.

I spent the my viewing time not being able to stand her because her entire characterization was "badass queen!" and being pissed that people are actually praising her as some sort of feminist hero when actually the writers character a one dimensional character and got praised for it because they slapped a feminist label on her.

My biggest pet peeve is when movies/shows do this. I would rather watch something that contains violence towards women if it makes sense in the story and has well written female characters.

@nevermorelenore

The worst age gap couple I saw was Liam Neeson and January Jones playing a married couple in some generic thriller. I mean, she's January Jones FFS. Even if she married an older man he wouldn't look like Liam Neeson.

I think a lot of women find Liam Neeson very attractive.

[quote EmpressSuiko]@GiveMyHeadPeaceffs Game of Thrones has a lot of misogyny because it’s based off of history, it reflects how woman were treated and even still get treated in some parts of the world.

The books are worth reading though, the TV show obliterated some really strong female characters and made them utterly useless and just pretty to look at which caused a lot of upset in the fandom.[/quote]
People always say this about GoT; that the rape and misogyny are there for historical accuracy.

Then why so many straight, white teeth and smooth hairless bodies? And dragons?

I've returned to the 90s and am watching West Wing, there are subtle and obvious challenges to the patriarchy and feminism I find fascinating. There was even a bit on hate crime which lead to a big discussion with DH (who rarely engages) afterwards.

I tried watching Sex in the City again which I used to love but it's too awful for words. I guess I'm all grown up now.

Great thread OP, really interesting to see how feminism tinted spectacles change even our viewing habits!

THIS. In so many programmes/ films the blokes meet up at a strip club. They don't go themselves to see the women (though many get handed a woman at some point), it's just a meeting place with t and a as background. So easy to just use a bar instead but clearly men cannot be trusted to keep watching unless they have some dehumanised eye candy. Any objections can be plausibly denied..."it's what the characters would do".

This device is often used in crime dramas where there is partnership between a male and female investigator. Eg, Bones, X-Files, where the woman is portrayed as a bit uptight. The interaction between the laid back, open minded male investigator and the happy stripper is used to make the female investigator appear even more uptight, jealous, frigid or whatever pejorative term the writers and directors want to use for a professional woman who is not sexually available at the drop of a hat.

People always say this about GoT; that the rape and misogyny are there for historical accuracy.

Then why so many straight, white teeth and smooth hairless bodies? And dragons?

Yeah. That bit where Osha seduces Theon and she drops her robe to reveal a completely hairless fanny. She's supposed to be a wildling! Back when GoT was being broadcast, I spent quite a long time arguing with a smug man on the Guardian episode blog about why there was so much rape and female nudity, and he pulled the "historical accuracy" argument on me too. Women were treated like chattels in medieval times, blah blah blah. I pointed out that a show set in an alternate world that features dragons, ice zombies, and fire-retardant princesses didn't have to cling to the societal norms of real-life medieval Europe, and he accused me of demanding unrealistic fairytales, like all women do when they try to ruin a fandom for the menz...

My bugbear is the "empowered sexy stripper/prostitute" trope. Deadpool, Sin City, The Hangover, Knocked Up - they all feature either a sassy, wisecracking sex worker character who does what she does because she loves sex and men sooo much (usually in contrast to the shrewish, uptight wife or girlfriend character) or a horrible strip club scene that makes you think less of the male characters who go there. It will be a long time before I can look at Paul Rudd without imagining him flubbering his face into a stripper's buttocks.

I'm not against an age gap per se, as I'm partial to an older man myself BUT we recently watched Entrapment and not only was it an absolutely god-awful film, the two main characters are Catherine Zeta Jones (aged 29 on release) and Sean Connery (aged 69 on release) and there was absolutely NO chemistry between them whatsoever. Zero. It was terrible.

Argh yes, the age gap in Entrapment - never mind jumping the shark, it jumped a humpback whale!

One thing I particularly hate is the whole thing of "we must make this character relatable to our female audience, by making sure that no matter how professionally or politically or artistically successful she is, she has a ditzy vulnerable side, because our viewers want to feel like she's just like them at heart (and of course our viewers are ditzy and vulnerable and let's face it, a little bit dim, ammirite?...)."

See for example Ally McBeal (only managed episode 1 of that, for that reason), and (this may be a minority opinion) Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett.

Then of course there's the annoying tendency among critics to assume that one single character who is ditzy by design (Bridget Jones - a choice on Helen Fielding's part, and only one character among many female characters she could have chosen to write about) - that that character is therefore "every woman" and speaks for a whole generation, and that's what we're all like.

@BlueCatRedCat

THIS. In so many programmes/ films the blokes meet up at a strip club. They don't go themselves to see the women (though many get handed a woman at some point), it's just a meeting place with t and a as background. So easy to just use a bar instead but clearly men cannot be trusted to keep watching unless they have some dehumanised eye candy. Any objections can be plausibly denied..."it's what the characters would do".

This device is often used in crime dramas where there is partnership between a male and female investigator. Eg, Bones, X-Files, where the woman is portrayed as a bit uptight. The interaction between the laid back, open minded male investigator and the happy stripper is used to make the female investigator appear even more uptight, jealous, frigid or whatever pejorative term the writers and directors want to use for a professional woman who is not sexually available at the drop of a hat.

Said uptight, career driven woman inevitably ends up getting her kit off in later seasons. Whether she gets drunk and wild or shags the lead character.

I was rewatching House during lockdown, and what really pissed me off was how they treated Cuddy who was a very smart woman at the top of her field. She's always dressed in ridiculously tight and low cut office clothes, and there's even a scene in House's imagination where she's dressed as a sexy schoolgirl and dancing around a pole. Yuck.

Yes! And even the Bechdel Test is a pretty low bar. Lots of people rave about Mike Bartlett - he of Dr Foster and the new Life on the Beeb. I can not get on with how he writes women's parts. The actors themselves always wang on about him writing strong women characters. This is not what I see.

Agreed on Mike Bartlett, I don’t know why he is so rated.

Recently I’ve noticed when a woman has been a similar age to her husband, it’s been because it’s based on a true story and therefore they’ve stuck with the ages of the real people.

The other danger is they go woke. There was this terrible drama about Silicon Valley types but in Britain and they were so woke and trying to be right-on about women, but the female characters were still just small parts and accessories to the men.

It’ll be interesting to see what they do with Black Widow in her own film because she’s been written abominably in the Marvel films. Not to mention killed off to save fucking Hawkeye! On the one hand she’s an amazing kick-ass woman who doesn’t need alien or superpowers to be a very effective fighter and spy, but if I have to see her besting an opponent by wrapping her legs round his head and shoving her groin in his face one more time I might scream! And don’t get me started on all that ‘I’m a monster because I was sterilised as a child’ shit!

I think a lot of women find Liam Neeson very attractive

I think a lot of other women think he looks like a wet leather handbag.

Great thread. Yeah, I can barely watch anything anymore, and I think it's getting worse. LOVED The West Wing and ER in the 90s, and I think they had great female characters.
My DP watches a lot of action movies and I'm like "Oh look there's Tom Cruise, and a control room full of plain 50 something men, and one 28 year old woman who is there to be rescued and shag Tom at some point."
Oh, I'm fun to be with

People always say this about GoT; that the rape and misogyny are there for historical accuracy.
Then why so many straight, white teeth and smooth hairless bodies? And dragons?

It's a fantasy series, dragons aren't really a very sensible criticism. And it's meant to be on the dark and earthy side, all round. Anyone who doesn't like that obviously isn't going to like the show but the story has narrative coherence, including all the violence.

As far as a lot of the sexposition, that's a valid criticism though I think the non-violent sex scenes were a heck of a lot more problematic. It's shoehorned in to appeal a certain type of viewer, which was pretty standard HBO bs for all their shows. They actually toned down a lot of narratively important sexual stuff from the books to avoid upsetting people and to make certain characters more likeable - in some cases it was probably necessary given the change in medium but it didn't always work as effectively in terms of storytelling.

The relative hairlessness was always rather silly , but it is usual for actors on shows to be more cleaned up than people in historical settings really would have been. No one really wants to look at the pimples, boils, goitres, and bad teeth of the past.

While it is stupid to lump all woman-driven comedy together, and while the tone and content of Miranda and Fleabag are different, I think there is a similarity in that they both have central characters who have an intimacy with their audience. They are not trying to play power with us (either Miranda or Fleabag); they are communicating with us. Similar male stuff that plays with the POV conventions like Peep Show doesn't have intimacy with the viewer; rather it is an insight into a terribly lonely, solipsistic POV in which part of the humour is in the knowledge that the character would hate to be so terribly exposed; lives so terribly privately and enclosedly partly for fear of the vulnerabilities; lives constantly in thrall to continual private analyses of power dynamics.

I too find it in incredibly hard to watch most mainstream = male TV and film. Before I reached full clarity about this, I had lots of arguments in the 90s with boys / men who were telling me that Film was Serious and if I thought it wasn't up to much in one way or another it was because I Didn't Understand

I walked out of a comedy night on a rare childfree night out with my ex once because the "joke" involved the man randomly repeatedly saying "vagina" and the mostly male audience finding this funnier every time. "Why is this funny?" I asked my ex. "It just is! "Vagina"!" he said and gave me his usual "oh you are so stupid" look. I can't believe men get away with convincing themselves they have any brains, let alone anyone else.

“I got the same undertones from The Social Network. Men were bizniz men, talking tech** and stress, with women were there but in minor cameos and often more emotional/theoretical discussion topics.”

Yes. Also
I enjoyed it, but I had that feeling that even though what’s his name was being portrayed as an arsehole, a lot of blokes could watch it and see him as some kind of straight talking hero.

It's a fantasy series, dragons aren't really a very sensible criticism. And it's meant to be on the dark and earthy side, all round. Anyone who doesn't like that obviously isn't going to like the show but the story has narrative coherence, including all the violence.

I think you've made the point for the OP you quoted here. It's a fantasy series - therefore it isn't a very sensible defence to say that all the sexual violence and lingering shots of smooth, naked female bodies are there for the purposes of historical accuracy. There are ways of conveying "dark and earthy" without having to have naked peasant women with perfectly waxed pudenda on display every other minute.

In regards to men marrying for money in the old days, Austen often has the men preying on women due to have large inheritances, like Wickham and Willoughby. But noticeably they're the Bad Guys.

@Packingsoapandwater I had exactly the same reaction! I remember it was Tan France to a gay guy who was sad about not having children and I was horrified at how glibly he said "oh don't worry about that! Just get a surrogate!" Also Jonathan Van Ness is NB now so yeah I'm kinda over Queer Eye.
Feminism "ruined" a bunch of 70s/80s movies for me, like Grease, St Elmos Fire, etc. Emilio Estevez's character in the latter one is just a stalker, that's it, and it's framed as if it's really romantic.

Romantic comedy movies in general tend towards being really creepy. Almost invariably there will be a man pursuing a woman and not taking no for an answer. In real life it would be somewhere between annoying and terrifying to be the female character in most romantic comedies.

And it's never the same story in reverse, because a woman pursuing a man would naturally be viewed as needy and pathetic and trying to trap the man into marriage.

@JimmyJabs

It's a fantasy series, dragons aren't really a very sensible criticism. And it's meant to be on the dark and earthy side, all round. Anyone who doesn't like that obviously isn't going to like the show but the story has narrative coherence, including all the violence.

I think you've made the point for the OP you quoted here. It's a fantasy series - therefore it isn't a very sensible defence to say that all the sexual violence and lingering shots of smooth, naked female bodies are there for the purposes of historical accuracy. There are ways of conveying "dark and earthy" without having to have naked peasant women with perfectly waxed pudenda on display every other minute.

Did you actually bother to read what I wrote?

IN any case "It's fantasy, you can just remove sexual violence (which has little to do with nudity) is about as sensible as saying, "just take out the war/battles/politics/torture/bad people/human sacrifice. You could but it wouldn't be the same story. A bunch of nice people in a land where nice things happen.