No, this is a stupid defense, and I'm tired of people always pulling it out whenever this subject is broached.
It's not a defense, it's a comeback to some guy's lame-ass claim that "in movies, violence against men is the norm." Not "in action movies" - "in movies." Read his post again.
Did you even read the rest of my post? Where I talked about how many movies have their plot driven by the death of a woman? That's not just horror movies. Where I pointed out that you can find articles gloating over the sexiness of female victims in movies? I can't find articles like that where the subject is male victims.
How about just simply the body count issue I mentioned? Forget genre: just start making lists of how many times you see a man killing a woman, and how many times you see a woman killing a man.
I presume that the all-time winner would be "men killing men" but a big reason for that is simply that there are a lot more male characters in movies than there are female characters.
Yes, I've seen a lot of horror movies lately. And IN those horror movies, a woman is nearly always the hero. She gets smacked around quite a lot at first - as do the rest of the victims - and comes very close to being killed a number of times, but by the end, always roars back and finds enough strength the defeat the killer.
This is true. In horror movies, there is often (though not always, and only since the late '70s when this trope was established) a female hero who gets to kill the villain. But along the way, most of the rest of the female cast will be carved up and killed. So how does this change the fact that there are more female than male victims?
Stephen King himself once said this. He said that if you ever go to see a horror film expecting to see a weak, vulnerable female, then you're doomed to disappointment.
If he put it like that, Stephen King himself is mistaken (not an uncommon occurrence). Horror movies have no shortage of weak, vulnerable females. Let's take as an example Alien, one of the movies which established the trope known as the "final girl" because of the character of Ripley.
There are only two female characters in Alien. One is Ripley, who is cool, calm and efficient. She's a great character and is often held up as a female role model, with good reason. The other female character is Lambert, played by Veronica Cartwright. Lambert spends most of the movie behaving as a stereotypical weak, vulnerable female.
You can pretty much take this character and multiply her across most modern horror movies, 'cause there are a lot more weak, vulnerable female victims than there are Final Girls.
Yet violence against men has been so normalised that you can stick it in any action movie and not only is it acceptable, it's condoned and made humourous. If it were the other way round, people would be in an uproar.
The question of movie violence being played for laughs is a seperate issue. I can point you to a lot of scenes in movies where a woman being killed is played for laughs - for example I watched Death Wish 3 the other day, and there's a pretty hilarious scene in that where a major female character is offed for the audience's amusement. James Bond has offed a number of "bad girls" (usually after sleeping with them) in scenes that are often played for laugh.
There are, in general, more male characters in movies than female characters. This by itself would lead to more male characters being killed than female characters.
Action movies are marketed overhwelmingly towards men. They feature men kicking the crap out of other men because they are usually made by men, for men, about men. Stereotypically it's a macho genre, and the movies which break this stereotype are in the minority.
Rightly or not, women are usually thought of as being physically weaker than men. Many action movies feature scenes of the hero fighting his way through hordes of enemies. If he was fighting women, forget misogyny - many audiences would simply see him as fighting people who are weaker than him, and therefore less macho.
And there's also the chivalric "I wouldn't hit a woman" thing to take into account (in times past, he wasn't supposed to hit a guy with glasses either). Men who hit women are usually regarded as terrible people in real life.
And yet, despite all of this, there are STILL more women killed by men in movies than men killed by women. We'd probably have more movies in which women are killed by women, except for the fact that there are less women than men in movies in general.
And this isn't even getting into the whole "most female characters in movies only exist in terms of their relationship with the male characters" thing.
I can think of only ONE movie over the past decade or so where the women were villains and defeated by a bloke (The Wicker Man) and what happened? Everybody called it sexist and misogynistic!
They also called it stupid, which it was. And incidentally, The Wicker Man didn't exist in a vacuum - it was written & directed by Neil LaBute, who has been frequently accused of misogyny since his early days as a playwright and has openly courted this controversy. The accusations of sexism and misogyny were often made in this context.
By the way, I'm a woman.
Good for you! I'm a horror movie fan.
So what did you think of the comment by the guy I was responding to about "harpy feminists"?
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marauder256
11 years ago
Are we still trying to take Wicker Man seriously? Isn't that where we all agreed that Nicolas Cage had lost it?
And haven't we forgotten another character from Alien?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VasquezAlwaysDies
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sexy_dancer
11 years ago
Vasquez isn't in Alien. She is in Aliens. And this trope is another point in the "women are always getting killed in movies" corner.
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marauder256
11 years ago
...because she finally got her wish of being a man. Of course this also meant she was expendable, but Vazquez forgot about that and paid the price for it.
Didn't Ripley and that other girl you hate survive in Aliens?
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nikki-folwell
11 years ago
It's not a defense, it's a comeback to some guy's lame-ass claim that "in movies, violence against men is the norm."
Buddy, what's the intrinsic difference between a defense and a comeback? Isn't a comeback just a defense in a terser structure? And his claim is not lame at all, it's completely on the money. It IS the norm. The fact that people such as yourself are so quick to dismiss it as "lame" and "laughable" just confirms not only the extent of indifference that men are shown these days (at least by comparison), but how normalised it's become. Any time a woman gets killed or beaten up in a film, it's nearly always accompanied by some manner of complaint from the public. Guys, on the other hand, can get killed and beaten up in films like it's going out of fashion, and the few men who make the mistake of complaining about it are only putting themselves at risk of being banged over the head with irrelevant arguments such as the one that you just yanked out.
Did you even read the rest of my post? Where I talked about how many movies have their plot driven by the death of a woman? That's not just horror movies. Where I pointed out that you can find articles gloating over the sexiness of female victims in movies? I can't find articles like that where the subject is male victims.
Yeah I read the rest of your post. Why do people always ask you that whenever you talk to them on Imdb? Is this another one of your comebacks? I wouldn't be responding to your two cents if I hadn't read the whole thing. I wasn't saying that it's just horror films where it happens. Yes, women DO get killed in films, both actions and horror pickings alike. And no it doesn't stop there - dramas, thrillers, festivals, choose your weapon. The difference, however, is that it's generally MORE common for violence against men in movies to be written off as funny. There HAVE been movies where this has happened with women, but nowhere near as much. Because it's just not PC. Hence Haywire. Why put a woman in a film beating the granny out of a whole lot of men? Because you can. Because...it's FUNNY! Look at those guys getting their asses kicked by a woman! Oh my sides! And it doesn't just happen in actions and horrors either. Quite often it even goes so far as spilling over into comedies. Let's see...off the top of my head, how 'bout Fool's Gold? This features a scene in which Kate Hudson belts Matthew McConaughey full-on in the face with a GOLF CLUB - something which could be potentially fatal in real life, given how heavy golf clubs are - but hey, that's OK, because he did something to p**s her off, so deserves it accordingly. Later on in the film, they're (spoiler alert) happily reunited, the attempted bludgeoning completely forgotten. Suppose the shoe was on the other foot in that situation? Of course, it wouldn't be because that would be sacrilegious. Do it to a man however - AND IT'S FUNNY! That's what I mean when I say how normalised violence towards men has become. People just turn a blind eye to it. It's not the only comedy to have done that. I could rattle off at least a dozen more, but I shouldn't have to. It should be blatantly obvious. Between that and being voted one of the sexiest victims in horror, it should be no contest.
How about just simply the body count issue that I mentioned? Forget genre: just start making lists of how many times you see a man killing a woman, and how many times you see a woman killing a man.
Dude, there may be LESS examples of women killing men in films than the other way around, but that doesn't change the fact that whenever it happens, it's not treated with the same level of animosity. It's not really a question of numbers. While there are films - again, of any genre - where men kill women, remember what I said in my last post? It's rarely glorified or condoned. Examples of that DO exist, I'm sure, but it's an exception rather than the rule. Most of the time, a man is only allowed to kill or hurt a woman whenever he's the villain. He can't usually do it and remain the hero. Whenever a good guy is beating up bad guys in films, it's generally required that he sticks with other men. In action movies for instance, you see good guys killing bad guys, and good girls killing bad guys. You almost never see a good guy killing bad girls, and on the odd times when you do, it's kept strangely brief; censored almost. There's almost never a big elaborate fight scene where he kicks the living man-s**t out of her. Because this is simply not allowed. He's permitted to either shoot her or, to a lesser extent, throw her one punch, which usually knocks her out instantly. They can't prolong it. But a prolonged, nasty fight scene in which a man gets the s**t kicked out of him by a woman is always welcome. At the risk of repeating myself, hence Haywire.
This is true. In horror movies, there is often (though not always, and only since the late '70s when this trope was established) a female hero who gets to kill the villain. But along the way, most of the rest of the female cast will be carved up and killed. So how does this change the fact that there are more female than male victims?
You didn't seem to read my post properly either. I already said that myself, man. But I ALSO said that this happens to make you hate the killer even more, and cheer for the heroine twice as much when she eventually gets the upper hand. As previously stated, nearly everything that happens up to then is utilised as a plot device to make you wish an even nastier death upon the killer. Hell, maybe THAT'S why there's a lot more female victims in horror movies than male. The killer will be loathed even more when he's taken a couple of girls with him, given that the death of a woman is always considered more tragic than that of a man, sometimes for no truly discernable reason (given that the death of anybody should be considered as tragic as the next). And then, he gets his comeuppance in the end when he in turn is ironically killed by a girl. And until then, yes some weaker females have been killed, but that's to keep it realistic. It's not like they could have every victim in the film a natural-born warrior; it'd stretch plausibility and also make it a pretty short movie. So again, big difference. Stupid thing to compare this to.
If he put it like that, Stephen King himself is mistaken (not an uncommon occurrence). Horror movies have no shortage of weak, vulnerable females.
He didn't say that! He never said that horror movies have a SHORTAGE, that WOULD be a dumb thing to say. What he said was, if you're expecting horror movies to be an all-around exercise in weak females, then YOU'RE mistaken.
If he was fighting women, forget misogyny - many audiences would simply it as him fighting people who were weaker than him, and therefore less macho.
Maybe so, but they'd still consider it misogynistic. You said it yourself, "men who hit women are usually regarded as terrible people in real life." Which means that in movies, the hero can't do it even when it's necessary (again, with exceptions. I really am trying to be objective about this). And oh yes, the "I wouldn't hit a woman" thing. I haven't forgotten that. As if I could. While that engrained regulation has its perks, I personally think that it does more harm than good, because many women take advantage of it. I'm talking about real life, not movies. It's been responsible for the plights of a lot of innocent men in the past. And marauder256, I WASN'T taking the Wicker Man seriously. I only mentioned it because when I said that you almost never see a man beating up women in films, I figured that somebody would want me to offer an example of at least one rarity. So that's why I brought it up. Only for that reason. That aside, I agree, it was a dumb movie.
Good for you! I'm a horror movie fan.
Oh come on dude! I only said that because I'm tired of being mistaken for a guy online! I mean come on, TELL me that you didn't think that I was, up until I stated otherwise! And as for your parting passage, "Despite all of this, there are STILL more women getting killed by men in movies than vice versa" - for the final time, it's NOT about the numbers! It's about the fact that people always have a more fevered reaction to women getting killed, despite the fact that men are killed by EVERYBODY in films, both women and OTHER men! Yeesh.
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LLink2411
11 years ago
After reading your posts, I think I love you.
No, not in that way, don't worry. I "love" you as one would "love" anyone who did anything awesome. You know what I mean.
“My movies are funded with NAZI gold.” – Uwe Boll
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