Apparently there’s a movie in theaters now by the name of The Hunger Games – it’s sort of obscure, so you may not have heard of it. Despite the title, it does not have anything to do with food. No, apparently it has something to do with young people fighting to the death on TV, or something.
Over on the Fox News website, Dr. Keith Ablow – described as “a psychiatrist and member of the Fox News Medical A-Team” – is shocked to discover that this film contains:
1) Attractive young people
2) Violence
This deadly combination alarms Dr. Ablow, who warns:
The Hunger Games … adds to the toxic psychological forces it identifies, rather than reducing them. …
It is an entertainment product of complete fiction and great potency, given its intense level of fantasy and violence. As such, it only conveys young people closer to “expressing” in a virtual format their powerful and primitive instincts (potentially kindling their desire to truly express such instincts) while conveying them further from their daily realities and a little further still from their real selves.
And apparently the film fails utterly in inculcating hostility towards the Kardashian family.
Almost no one will emerge from a theater swearing off shows like the Keeping Up With the Kardashians, or Jersey Shore because they are produced by adults happy enough to make a buck off of stupefying teenagers.
As I am sure you are all aware, inculcating hostility towards the Kardashians is the aim of all great art, as Aristotle explained so many centuries ago:
A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious, and also, as having magnitude, complete in … with incidents arousing pity and terror, with which to accomplish its purgation of these emotions. Those Kardashian girls are such stuck up bitches — “ooh i got a big ass, everybody look at me!” And don’t even get me started on Snooki.
Hey, can I get a goddamn gyro here?
That quote is, of course, from Aristotle’s famous treatise “Ho-etics.”
In addition to not inculcating hatred towards the Kardashians, Dr. Ablow warns us, The Hunger Games will make its viewers
more likely to come out of theaters having shed some measure of the healthy psychological defenses (which are, luckily, partly reinforced by socialization) that keep them at a distance from their violent impulses. …
Other than entertaining millions and millions of teenagers and making millions and millions of dollars, the net result of The Hunger Games is likely to be:
1) Females will be further distanced from their traditional feminine characteristics that … suggested they were not being real “girls” if they were extremely physically violent.
2) Young teens and many pre-teens will be awakened to the fact that they are capable of extreme violence, given the right set of circumstances.
3) A few psychologically vulnerable teens—who would have come to no good anyhow—may be inspired to replicate the film’s violence.
So I’m guessing that’s a big “thumbs down” from Dr. Ablow.
Given that the mainstream media is but a tool in the hand of our gynocentric matriarchal overlordsladies, I’m not quite sure how this article slipped through. But we’re lucky it did.
Over on What Men Are Saying About Women, where I found big chunks of Ablow’s essay quoted without any explanation of where they were from, our good friend Christian J. explains that:
This movie is straight out of the slut-feminists’ arsenal of the “You Go Grrrllll” mantras. They have promoted violent women and will continue to do so (think Valerie Solanas). Slut-feminists justify this action under their delusional and blatantly false claim that women should be able to protect themselves as they are constantly attacked and physically abused on a daily basis, everywhere they go..
Where they get that from is ofcourse by generating their own falsified and doctored statistics which they have done for too long to remember.
If anyone suggests you go see The Hunger Games, they are probably a slut feminist. You should run far away from them in case they decide to punch you.
Go watch old episodes of The A-Team instead, a show which is totally not violent in any way.
MRA’s hate movies that show women kicking ass, calling them “you go, grrrl” fantasies. Then they complain that women don’t fight enough in wars, fight criminals to protect their male relatives, or even give random women bloody noses to undo the great misandry that is Title IX (reference: Big book o’ learning). What do they want? Are women supposed to be fighters or not?
My slut-shaming MRA-lite cousin gave this movie a big thumbs-up. I’m glad that more reputable sources endorse it!
“A few psychologically vulnerable teens—who would have come to no good anyhow”
Wow, such concern for troubled young people.
Stop hoarding all the crossbows dude.
Also, who are the women having to protect themselves from-other women or….other men?
HA! I called it a day or so ago. Lemme find it but, yeah, totally called it.
People are already capable of violence, this is nothing new. Just how dumb does Ablow think everyone is? Never mind, he’s on Fox “News.”
My slut-feminist self is going to seen THG very soon.
Is this anything like when all the kids were reading Harry Potter and then they all started doing satanic witchcraft? I hope not, because that was scary.
I’m absolutely sick of being told how to be a woman. Fuck your traditional feminine characteristics. I can damn well wear a frilly skirt one day and fatigues the next and I’m still a woman. And a man can do the same and still be a man.
Fox News has nothing but morons on their payroll, so I’m not surprised in the least they’d have a doctor who spouts this nonsense. And yet what about all those movies for the teenage boys that shows violence? Though I will say there are some idiots out there who complain about that too. And it grinds my gears as well.
I’m pretty sure this is the same guy who wrote the piece on how allowing 5-year-old boys to wear toenail polish if they want will destroy them for life. Clutching his pearls over kids not being trained into exactly the gender roles he wants is kind of his schtick.
According to Dr. Ablow, women are naturally meek and passive.
According to Christian J, women are naturally violent and aggressive.
Here’s a wacky idea I want to throw out. Some women are very violent, some women are very meek, and many women are somewhere in between those two extremes. It’s almost like each woman is an individual person rather than a representative of her entire gender.
Yup. http://manboobz.com/2012/03/27/mens-rights-redditors-take-on-racism-by-which-they-mean-a-white-dude-admitting-that-white-dudes-arent-actually-oppressed/comment-page-1/#comment-139325
My 72 year old traditionalist dad has asked me to take him to see Hunger Games because he’s a sucker for the dystopian future trope. Does that make him a slut feminist?
Ablow’s a twit, but now I AM curious to see if the Hunger Games spawn underground Fight-Club-style arenas.
I wanted to leave a comment on the linked article, but alas, apparently Fox News doesn’t accept comments. Anyway, I had two messages for the Fox News morons and their conservative fans:
First, go make your complaints to your uber-conservative friends in the MPAA. Ask them why they think highly realistic images of severed heads are more acceptable than a scene in which a woman is shown enjoying sex. Ask why it’s preferable to have teenagers see someone’s head blown off than to show them (gasp) a nipple. Because they apparently think there is no problem with extremely violent entertainment. Oh, wait, neither do you, as long as women are on the receiving end of that violence, and their role is limited to that of plot devices for male protagonists.
Second, we are not idiots, and teenagers are not idiots. We all KNOW what the traditional feminine role is — lying passively on one’s back with a detached expression, being a helpless victim, dying in childbirth and tearfully pleading with men to stop all that carnage (to no avail, of course, because who the fuck listens to a woman?). We know this is the role — it’s just that the overwhelming majority of us don’t like it. Even those of us who are more than willing to foist that role on other women.
Gonna go catch it tonight
/is excited
I wonder how dude survived both volumes of Kill Bill to make it here
The Fox dude’s main argument seems to be that upon viewing this movie, young girls will abruptly realize that violence exists.
…As so often, I kinda wish that I lived in their universe.
I’ll take a well reasoned and possible panning of the film from feminist frequency, but not from this sexist dude. What a tool.
Still not as dumb as the people whining that Rue is played by a black kid.
Well, I’ve never read The Hunger Games (it looks interesting, but I already have approx three months’ worth of books to read minus course books… and I read fast!), but I would say that the most ‘traditonally’ feminine things about me… I like My Little Pony, chocolate, and funky socks. So, I don’t think The Hunger Games will magically make feminine girls into tomboys.
I’m not violent though, apart from at printers…
Now, an enterprising tool would combine the outrage and suggest that The Hunger Games was promoting racial violence. But then he’d have to pretend to be opposed to racial violence.
The whole thing is garbage of course, but I’m really wondering what his logic/facts is/are here. Is this based on interviews of teens coming out of the theater after a showing? Research? What? I’d bet dollars to donuts that it’s mostly just his own bogus theory, but it really makes no sense. I know a lot of people who’ve started to acquire a disdainful taste for reality tv after reading the books, and not all of them are slutfems like me who hate shows like The Bachelor on principle. I feel like it’s pretty hard to read those books and then not turn around and question a lot of reality TV, TV in general and possibly the culture we have in which some of our absurd shows thrive.
Part of me wonders if kids questioning shit is what really grinds this guy’s gears.
Hm… Hunger Games is about being strong and fighting against an oppressive government. And then there’s Twilight which encourages abusive relationships….
“Still not as dumb as the people whining that Rue is played by a black kid.”
I know right? She was described has being black in the book ffs!
“Hm… Hunger Games is about being strong and fighting against an oppressive government. And then there’s Twilight which encourages abusive relationships….”
That.
Also (*spoilers*), this isn’t apparent so much in the first book or in the movie, but one of the things I like best about the Hunger Games is how hard it is for Katniss to cope with all of the violence she witnessed and participated in after the fact. IMO, this is a much more realistic portrayal of how people–men and women–deal with violence and war than what most mainstream entertainment offers. After the Hunger Games, Katniss is in psychologically rough shape – not so much the “goooo gurrrrl powerrr!” you see in other movies with women in leading action-y roles. And the same is true for the other past victors we meet in the second and third books, male or female. There is a very clear message in that the Capitol first forcing these kids to fight and then forcing them to mentor future kids who are most likely going in to fight to the death, year after year, is abusive and hurts people. The Hunger Games actually glorifies violence less then the majority of action movies Hollywood produces.
Which is all sort of beyond the point, because as Holly mentioned, I’m pretty sure girls aren’t going to discover violence from the Hunger Games. Also, god forbid they are encouraged to be less traditionally feminine.
Remember when Japanese girls became violent and unfeminine due to Battle Royale? Yeah, me neither.
Wow, way to miss every singe point in the movie and books. That level of point-missage is frankly quite impressive.