Thursday, May 10, 2018

Importance...

Hey, kids!

I'm still with you and I hope you're enjoying the podcast! Sorry I haven't written a lot lately. Tons of irons in the fire, as it were. I just had a moment with someone on Facebook and I thought I'd share.

A person wrote in a horror forum I belong to that "everything is misogynistic these days" in response to the original post about someone's lesbian co-worker saying that he shouldn't enjoy horror movies because they're all misogynistic.

 Now, first off, people have been saying this since the Women's Rights movement began (and, really, way before then, because it's true that horror movies tend toward the sexist due to their primary demographic being young men) but things are changing, particularly since the advent of the Final Girl trope, but when I pointed this out to him, his response was "Makes my point no less valid."

 My response at that point went as follows:

 "I mean, saying that something is misogynistic isn't automatically false, either. There's a LOT of anti-feminist material in horror movies even to this day and we do have to recognize that women, even though they make up the larger half of the population, are still mistreated.

Is EVERYTHING about horror misogynistic? Absolutely not. Should we recognize and call out misogynistic cinema and work to change it? 100% yes. If we can call out homophobic, transphobic, or racist material, we should be doing the same for women.

For example, the gay-themed slasher Hellbent. Hellbent contains a scene in which a character is beheaded ON A CROWDED DANCE FLOOR AND NO ONE REACTS TO IT, which displays gay people as shallow, narcissistic, puppets that don't pay attention to the world around them. I don't want that kind of representation, do you?

 I'm not saying "Write me Mary Sue Horror" at all, just make things believable. Write in misogynistic characters but write women strong enough to see those characters either quake in their boots or learn how NOT to be misogynistic. Write in misogynistic situations but then let women side-step or confront those situations in a positive way. Write LGBTQIA characters as actual people and not caricatures of themselves and, for fuck's sake, stop giving me AIDS-era tragedy porn.

We can make better and more positive cinema happen. We just have to make sure that problematic subject matter is written well and handled appropriately."

ANYWAY, kids! Reach out to us! Let us know what you like and what you don't like about the podcast and continue to like, subscribe, rate and review the podcast so that we can TAKE OVER THE WORLD AND INSTITUTE CTHULHU-CULT-LIKE MADNESS!

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