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!

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.

Yes, I think that's largely true. She gives a lot more moral leeway to the circumstance of the women in needing to look for security. It's pretty clear throughout the novels I think that she sees money as being potentially corrupting for both men and women, and she suggests that indolence is also corrupting. Many of the male and female characters who are rich enough to be indolent are morally corrupted.

But her answer is also ambiguous in other ways - it's arguably adds a lot to Mr Darcey's charm that he is both not such a prick after all, and also is the owner of pretty nice digs. And my sense is that she's not unsympathetic to the need for a man to marry well in some cases as well. Willoughby wasn't portrayed as evil in the same way Wickham was, for example, and his crime was really courting where he wasn't going to be able to follow through, despite the pain it caused others. He was weak rather than evil.

I’ve found my people! Agree so much and wish I could turn my feminism filter off sometimes. It ruins practically all popular culture. Seriously, I kind of wish I was still unaware

Completely. I am so tired of every TV series beginning the first episode with gratuitous, totally unnecessary female nudity just to pander to male audiences. Working Moms, Mrs. Maisel, the list goes on and on. I hate it.

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

Also, for all its purported "historical accuracy", I've read a hilarious take-down of it by a military historian pointing out that GRR Martin has no understanding of Medieval warfare, no grasp on tactics, strategy or logistics, and just teleports armies around the (unrealistically huge) map as the plot requires.

So if he can do this with whole fucking armies, he could come up with a better plot device than rape. If he wanted to. The key being that he doesn't want to.

(Though actually my biggest bugbear about GRR Martin is just that his prose is so unbelievably turgid that it's utterly unreadable... Still, de gustibus non est disputandum and all that.)

Agree so much and wish I could turn my feminism filter off sometimes. It ruins practically all popular culture. Seriously, I kind of wish I was still unaware

I wish this too, but for parenting. I find raising my children so much stressful and worrisome the more I realise how misogynistic and just utterly fucked up the world is. I'm not so bothered for me, I'm a grown woman. I just wish I could protect my children forever.

Oh well, at least I can 'helpfully' point out misogyny in TV shows for them and my DH

This has been brewing for me too for some time. I really (used to) love a crime drama or police procedural. But the number of shows I've switched off in the first 5 minutes because it is yet another example of graphic male violence against women. I decided to give Des a shot and lo and behold - no graphic scenes of violence, a body being respectfully taken out of a house in a coffin, not laying naked on a slab in a morgue. I couldn't help thinking it was because they were male victims.

@JulieBindelAteMyHamster

And the old stuff. My favourite film used to be Dangerous Liaisons, but when I tried to watch it again recently, I had to give up because dear god it's rapey

I watched this again recently having loved it as a teenager. I nearly started a thread myself. When the John Malkivich

BBC has had quite a few female led comedies recently, written by women too.

Oh well, at least I can 'helpfully' point out misogyny in TV shows for them and my DH wink

Oh god, my poor DS got treated to a full-on rant over an episode of "The Next Step" on CBBC. Plot line - "nice guy (TM)" puts girl on spot by asking her out in one of those horrendously over the top, horrendously public ways. She knocks him back because she doesn't fancy him. Everyone else on the dance team ostracises her because he's such a nice guy, and his over the top public humiliation of her demand that she date him was soooo romantic, how dare she not be kind and date him.

Suffice it to say, DS was left in no doubt as to what I thought of him, the rest of the dance troupe and the screenwriters! but at the same time.

GRR Martin has no understanding of Medieval warfare, no grasp on tactics, strategy or logistics, and just teleports armies around the (unrealistically huge) map as the plot requires.
I think that's just the TV show. Certainly in the book there are lots of very long trips between different places.
The TV show was definitely more sexist than the book. The episode where Little finger has a tedious soliloquy, so they spice it up by having two prostitutes having lesbian sex in the background
Actually in the end I think GoT was all about the women. Especially Sansa - her treatment by men turned her into a very cruel woman.

@CaraDuneRedux

Oh well, at least I can 'helpfully' point out misogyny in TV shows for them and my DH wink

Oh god, my poor DS got treated to a full-on rant over an episode of "The Next Step" on CBBC. Plot line - "nice guy (TM)" puts girl on spot by asking her out in one of those horrendously over the top, horrendously public ways. She knocks him back because she doesn't fancy him. Everyone else on the dance team ostracises her because he's such a nice guy, and his over the top public humiliation of her demand that she date him was soooo romantic, how dare she not be kind and date him.

Suffice it to say, DS was left in no doubt as to what I thought of him, the rest of the dance troupe and the screenwriters! but at the same time.

Fantastic thread!

This post really captures the horror I feel every time I see an orchestrated marriage proposal. I think it was Adele's Glastonbury set a few years ago, when this bloke was invited on stage with his girlfriend and propose to her in front of millions on live TV.

I died inside. Talk about coersion. How the hell could she do anything but say "yes"? Maybe she wanted to say yes, but she was given no choice.

I'd have dumped him as soon as we got home.

Oh yes. I hate public proposals too. Very coercive.
Love Actually gives me the creeps as well. Its just stalkers. And twilight. It is not romantic for someone to creep into your room and watch you sleep. It's disturbing.

I'm even noticing it in music. My niece loved a song by the Script, I think, called something like The man who can't be moved.

Dumped bloke sings of sitting for the rest of his life on the corner where he and the object of his affections met, waiting for her to realise the error of her ways and come find him.

A 13 year old thought it was romantic. I just heard "I'm a creepy stalker". I guess at least he wasn't sitting outside his love object's home.

There's a proposal clip on Youtube where some guy proposes during a big televised US basketball game using the big scoreboard, but also going down on one knee in the middle of the court and the woman just rushes off, and the camera cuts to the cuddly mascot putting his paws over his eyes. We're clearly supposed to go 'Oh, cringe!' but surely that woman's is a perfectly normal reaction to realising that a man you're in a relationship with is an idiot who thinks this is 'romantic' rather than coercive?

Also, for all its purported "historical accuracy", I've read a hilarious take-down of it by a military historian pointing out that GRR Martin has no understanding of Medieval warfare, no grasp on tactics, strategy or logistics, and just teleports armies around the (unrealistically huge) map as the plot requires.

Also, Jon Snow is a completely shit tactician. He never managed to win any sort of battle without third party intervention, and not before he'd managed to get a load of his mates killed. I don't know why everyone was so desperate to follow him.

Goosefoot the post you quoted originally was challenging the idea that GoT had to have lots of rape and nudity because it made it more "historically accurate", by pointing out that there were lots of things about the show that were definitely not historically accurate. It always seemed to be a very selective defence adopted by people who didn't really want to think very hard about what they were watching and why. The fact that it was a fantasy surely gave it scope to take a more creative approach than just "woman's character is developed in response to her brutalisation" or "prostitution was totally normal in ye olden days so here is a man having a bath with two jolly hookers". You said yourself:

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.

It's a case of not being able to have it both ways. Either you're making a gritty, brutal sort of a show with narratively justifiable nudity and sexual violence (which would involve all sorts of body shapes and states of deformity, since it wasn't only beautiful, hairless women who get raped), or you're spicing it up with titillating crotch shots. Fair enough if it's the latter, but people could at least own it and not try to make intellectual claims for why it was done that way.

PS my use of "object" was deliberate, as that's how I felt she was represented. Like a nice juicy steak he was drooling over.

i am generally finding most films are either about the relationship between groups of men and their achievements or where women are basically victims of rape or murder

This^^ x 1000!

I quite liked the boobs at the start of Working Moms. I don't think it was for men, it was feeding boobs not sexy boobs.
Let's face it, no men are ever going to be watching Working Moms!
I fucking HATE Love Actually though. Every single male character is shagging, or trying to shag, a woman who could be his daughter. Or granddaughter.
Except Liam Neason. He's teaching his son how to stalk girls. Yuk yuk yuk!

I read Backlash by Susan Faludi in my twenties. I read the chapter on movies, which included a scathing analysis of Die Hard, with the same kind of horror as if someone had wandered into my living room and set the Christmas tree alight.

@JimmyJabs

Also, for all its purported "historical accuracy", I've read a hilarious take-down of it by a military historian pointing out that GRR Martin has no understanding of Medieval warfare, no grasp on tactics, strategy or logistics, and just teleports armies around the (unrealistically huge) map as the plot requires.

Also, Jon Snow is a completely shit tactician. He never managed to win any sort of battle without third party intervention, and not before he'd managed to get a load of his mates killed. I don't know why everyone was so desperate to follow him.

Goosefoot the post you quoted originally was challenging the idea that GoT had to have lots of rape and nudity because it made it more "historically accurate", by pointing out that there were lots of things about the show that were definitely not historically accurate. It always seemed to be a very selective defence adopted by people who didn't really want to think very hard about what they were watching and why. The fact that it was a fantasy surely gave it scope to take a more creative approach than just "woman's character is developed in response to her brutalisation" or "prostitution was totally normal in ye olden days so here is a man having a bath with two jolly hookers". You said yourself:

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.

It's a case of not being able to have it both ways. Either you're making a gritty, brutal sort of a show with narratively justifiable nudity and sexual violence (which would involve all sorts of body shapes and states of deformity, since it wasn't only beautiful, hairless women who get raped), or you're spicing it up with titillating crotch shots. Fair enough if it's the latter, but people could at least own it and not try to make intellectual claims for why it was done that way.

This is a crazy idea of how fiction works. "Historical accuracy" is probably not quite the right language in a fiction story, but the point is that it is depicting a world that is certainly in line with what we know to be true about how people behave, how people express the will to power, how evil manifests, etc.

Lots of people don't like stories with any violence which is fair enough. Even personally disliking one kind of violence in stories is fair. It's quite different to say a story that includes all kinds of examples of human violence, that is very much about the will to power in all its forms and how it affects people and society, and somehow draw a ring around one expression of that and say it's untouchable. You can have political oppression, war, torture, illegitimate use of authority, scientific experimentation, disappearing enemies - but not rape or forced marriages or anything like that? Why? It's not plausible.

The whole story begins in a scenario with soldiers being brutally killed by monsters, in large part through the stupidity of a member of the aristocracy, and the one poor bugger who manages to escape being publicly executed by another member of the aristocracy in front of his young son. It's really ok for that to drive narrative action, but not violence against women? Aside from being pointless, that is not going to be a coherent or believable world where violence touches everyone but sexual violence somehow doesn't happen for no apparent reason.

And as far as non-attractive women being the subjects of violence, that certainly happens in the story and even occasionally in the tv show.

As to the sexposition - as I said in my original comment - that is a valid criticism of the show, but it comes from a completely different place than the actual plot of the story. That's basically HBO saying "ooo, we have a show with gritty material and a brothel, we can show a lot of naked women in compromising positions." It's not really related to the story in any way, which is the heart of the problem with it, aside from being exploitative it undermines the narrative. Which is why you can't conflate the use of violence in the story with what is essentially a type of television fan service - which in other forms almost destroyed the narrative integrity of the tory in the end.

And as far as actors not looking quite like real historical people - the important thing there is the viewer should believe they do without noticing their appearance too much. So like all theatre, it involves a sort of compromise. If you let them have their terrible teeth and goitres, its actually a distraction. If you make them too shiny and clean, that's noticeable and unbelievable. You have to give the impression of them being realistic. "Not enough goitres" doesn't translate to not being historically accurate from that POV.

I’ve given myself permission to turn off any “entertainment“ involving violence against women. I guess by permission I mean I don’t judge myself as uptight/reactionary/close minded for it.

This includes walking out of the cinema, which I don’t hesitate to do (the teenage me would’ve cringed with embarrassment)

I know all that, Goosefoot, I actually write fantasy! But it's a question of (a) in world plausibility (which I don't think GRR Martin is actually as good at as he's cracked up to be - too many of his readers seem to conflate "lots of violence" with "gritty historical realism") and (b) needs of the story (which, in fairness, Martin is good at, HBO on the other hand is gratuitous).

Take the treatment of rape within fiction. Even if you have a rape which is (a) plausible within world (sadly, that would be most fictional worlds barring a few feminist utopias) and (b) an integral part of the story telling (rather than... "hey, we need a crime for our detective to solve... how about a rape - that way we get a juicy plot line and an excuse for a bit of rapey sexposition and gratuitous naked female flesh, win win"), even then there's still a huge choice as to how you portray it (and I think you and I are both making the same point here).

For example, I mentioned Harlots upthread, where rape is very much integral to the plot (and it would be a failure in portraying the situation not to include rape, because the whole point is these women are trafficked into prostitution, their virginities "sold to the highest bidder" and it's fucking horrible, and the scars stay with them, driving inter-generational feuds, murder, revenge, killings in self defence which a male judicial system also treats as murder). But the female show-runners have taken a decision not to show the rapes on screen, barring perhaps a close-up of the woman's face. They show events leading up to it, they show the emotional (and in some cases, physical) aftermath, but not the rape itself.

The way I always frame the question to myself is: have I written something some sick fucker could wank to? I wish more male TV show-runners would ask themselves this question.

And it's not just rape - what works best in showing the horror of war, for instance? Spielberg opening Saving Private Ryan with a huge, long extended take on the Normandy beaches, with top notch special effects showing every last entrail hanging out, every last limb hanging off by a thread of flesh. Or Zanuck, in 12 O'Clock High, having one of the bomber crew saying as he climbs out of the plane "I can't... I wouldn't believe it if I wasn't looking at it. You can see his brain." (Brain not shown on screen, for the avoidance of doubt). Your mileage may vary, but for me, that very brief line carries every bit as much visceral punch.

I can't watch Hollywood movies any more.

So much sexism , misogyny, sexualisation of women and girls, dominating men, simpering women. It's just shit.

Even futuristic films where 3trillion years in the future women are still prostitutes and men violent gun toting wankers.

I despair