So the other night I watched Lucy, a highly entertaining movie with an incredibly silly premise: Scarlett Johansson develops superpowers after a drug enables her to use more than the standard 10% of her brain. (Yes, I know, and the film’s director knows, that the idea we use only 10% of our brains is a myth. And that being super smart wouldn’t give you power over the laws of physics.)
Anyway, after watching the film I took a peek at the IMDb message boards to see if anyone had a way to explain one particularly baffling plot point. Someone did. But I also encountered this charming fellow, who started two separate topics in order to express his extreme displeasure that the main character was … a woman:
Bear in mind that this is a science fiction film. In it, Lucy does many things that would be impossible for any human being to do, regardless of gender: she [SPOILER ALERT] causes a dozen men to collapse on the ground with a wave of her hand; she learns a language by overhearing three conversations on the street; she travels through time and meets the original prehistoric Lucy; she grows an extra hand just for the hell of it; and, oh yeah, she turns herself into a tiny computer with a USB plug.
Movie heroes and superheroes, most of them male, do impossible things in action movies all of the time. But somehow I never see any of these guys complaining that Superman can fly or lift cars off the ground or turn an entire lake into ice with his breath.
Even those movie heroes who don’t have superpowers regularly do things that would be impossible for any real human being to do. I mean, have you seen the Crank movies? Or, I dunno, Rambo? Or any of the other gazillion action movies out there with male stars?
Somehow Mr. Comment-Here — and all the other guys who put forward this complaint — have no trouble suspending their disbelief when it comes to male characters doing impossible things. But the idea that a mere “girl” could win a fight with a guy — something that isn’t impossible in real life — breaks their brains.
When another commenter responded to Mr. Comment-Here with a snarky putdown, he offered this odd retort
Looking back through Comment-Here’s previous contributions to the IMDb message boards, I discovered another, er, injustice he seems to care about a lot. In the forum devoted to the 1997 version of Lolita, he wrote:
Evidently the Men’s Rights movement is leaking. .
That’s where I recognized Katee Sackhoff from in the Power/Rangers short!
http://youtu.be/vw5vcUPyL90
I just laugh at the idea that women don’t watch action movies. Women like to look at hot men and the one thing action movies have in them is hot men.
Like when Hollywood was all kerfluffle because women were flocking to see 300. They tried to say it was because of the strong female character in that movie.
WRONG!
That movie had a bunch of hot, buff men running around in speedos, hacking each other with swords. It’s the same reason women watch Spartacus and Supernatural and Arrow.
Beautiful men plus action scenes is our idea of mindless entertainment.
When women are in action movies, it’s just as mindless fun, but then for us it’s power fantasies. Women find something to like, no matter what the gender of the protagonist.
The nitwit above just has an especially diminutive imagination.
Ghost Robot: I did watch the original BSG when I was a child but when I think of Starbuck, I think of Katie. I don’t even remember what the original Starbuck looked like.
Buttercup Q. Skullpants, proxieme and Kootiepatra,
Perfect summations.
Here’s another manosphere contradiction:
Women are too weak to ever do a “mans” job and naturally more docile and submissive than naturally volatile, strong men. Also, women are just as dangerous to men as men are to women. Women are dangerous domestic abusers and they make up their own abuse.
Die Hard is a Christmas tradition in my house.
“Drugs will give you superpowers” is an old trope; I imagine many male characters must have benefited from it over the years; and if I didn’t have the brain ache I’d think of a few. Now I must drink my morning tea. Ta.
Welcome, ARedFox! Welcome package by clicking on the candle on the right.
Somebody needs to point them to Tomoe Gozen, a storied female samurai from twelfth century Japan who later likely became a nun. (The stories are from before 1330, old enough to be almost impossible to verify, unfortunately.)
@Flying Mouse:
Oh heck, what was that guy’s name? I remember him, I think. He said the majority of guys could do pull-ups and that made them stronger than the majority of women, and Pecunium chewed him out over his pull-up technique.
Apparently I can not have my screename link to my writeathon without tossing me in spam again. *sigh* Well, I’m doing a writeathon on the theme of the self! Feel free to join me!
RE: Flying Mouse
A looong time ago, when I first started lurking on here, there was a troll who used a lot of the same “gggrrrrforcefedgirlpowerargh” language as the guy in the OP.
NWOslave?
to the troll’s credit I don’t remember him showing any interest in bothering young girls (or the Jeremy Irons/Dominique Swain version of Lolita).
Oh, DEFINITELY not NWO then.
RE: katz
I’m tired of the 10% of your brain thing. I want a movie where it turns out that people only use 10% of their skin.
10% of their kidneys!
RE: estraven
Apparently linen stores are strictly female and gay male territory. Who knew?
What, seriously? WEIRD. I mean, it’s freakin’ cloth. Who cares?
RE: lkeke35
Women like to look at hot men and the one thing action movies have in them is hot men.
We watched The Phantom last night, and between my sister going, “Ooooh, Billy Zane!” and my hubby going, “Ooooh, Catherine Zeta-Jones!” you’d think we were watching softcore porn.
Oh, hey, I might have been here for that too.. was it pull ups or push ups? Both? I swear I remember Pecunium chewing someone out over push ups. Maybe it was a separate thing.
I remember it, just not the troll. IIRC, he was a keyboard badass, claiming he was truly the baddest of asses? Or something?
I’m not sure whether to be sorry I don’t remember more, or glad that my brain kindly tossed most of the memory out.
I do have a problem with super thin women doing action stunts that in real life requires lots of physical strength (hey, Selina Kyle from the Dark Knight Rises, I’m looking at you!), but the reason we see this so often is not because of feminism, it’s because of patriarchy. Thin is considered sexy, and women must be sexy above all else, therefore even physically strong women must be thin with no muscle.
(Btw, I loved that Starbuck in the new BSG actually looked as physically strong as she was supposed to be.)
The thing is, many men argue that it’s so unrealistic when a thin little woman hurts a man even when it’s not done through brute strength, as if “no woman can hurt a man” is a law of physics or something. I’ve heard people complain that it’s so unrealistic that Mallory kills that policeman in the beginning of Natural Born Killers, because she’s thin and a woman and he’s a man. But what she does is firstly kick him in the balls when he doesn’t expect it at all, making him kneel over, and then she proceeds to kick him in the head and stomp at him and jump up and down at his unconscious body – he never even gets the chance to fight back. It’s not unrealistic that a person dies from that treatment – on the contrary, it’s unusually realistic for an action flick.
I’ve seen that complaint a lot regarding Hitgirl in the first Kickass movie. And sure, Hitgirl does some unrealistic things, like the way she reloads her guns, and some of her super-acrobatic moves. But the very fact that she kills grown-up men isn’t unrealistic, FFS, because she shoots them. Seriously, a child killing an adult by shooting him is perfectly realistic (not the least since Hitgirl has been practicing shooting and fighting since she was about three years old, so her being faster than the adult mob men she shoots down makes sense). It really says something about the level of misogyny someone displays when he finds it unrealistic that a man dies from being shot in the head or the chest by a girl.
Have you guys seen the article on Pandagon about the new Thor comic making fun of anti-feminists? There’s a whole bunch of MRAs being hilariously whiny in the comments. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/02/new-female-thor-panels-show-how-much-online-anti-feminists-destroy-their-own-cause/
I’ve heard the pull-up argument from more than one would-be physiologist. I think that it’s a pretty standard, go-to argument for those who want to “prove” that women are weak. It’s funny because even the dudebros over at the bodybuilding forums agree that pull-ups are not necessarily the best measure of upper body strength for a number of reasons, including the incredibly obvious: no single exercise is going to be a great indicator of your overall body strength.
Ice and Indigo, thanks for the link to the NYT article. Wow, so if pedophiles surround themselves with people telling them that their impulses and desires are perfectly normal and healthy, they start believing it. Ick. Full disclosure, I was active in a gay youth group back in the late 1970s, and a couple of realio trulio NAMBLA members approached our table at a Pride Day event. They seemed puzzled and dismayed that we treated them so curtly.
By the way, is your screen name a reference to the Wendigo poem by Ogden Nash?
One of my favorite female characters is Sakura Oogami. She looks like this. Her goal is to be the strongest person in the world.
Not only is she a badass, she also likes tea, is kinda reserved and polite in a way that makes her seem cold, and she adores her best friend.
I kinda wish I saw more female fighter characters built more like her. I liked her so much, I commissioned an artist friend of mine to draw her for me!
Robert,
That story made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
A lot of bodybuilding bro-types are actually crap at pull-ups because they’ve put on so much mass that they can’t lift their own weight.
Or else they’ve put on so much mass that they can’t scratch their backs without hurting their shoulder. Happened to a bodybuilding bro that I knew.
Aaahahaha! Thanks for the link. It inspired me to pre-order the compilation volume being released in May, using my Amazon Smile account that donates to Planned Parenthood. Ya know, for extra misandering.
Well, comparing men and women, men in general are quite a lot stronger than women in general. It sucks, but it’s the truth. Doesn’t matter if you look at pull-ups or deadlifts or bench press or squats or what-have-you; men are, on average, quite a lot stronger. Still, doesn’t mean that every single man is stronger than every single woman, doesn’t mean that there’s anything strange or surprising about a woman who does a lot of strength training being stronger than a man who doesn’t, and most of all, it doesn’t mean that women can’t beat up or even kill men in ways that don’t rely on brute strength.
Re: 10%ers
…wherein the protagonist produces such concentrated urine that it can eat through metal, enabling them to escape any contraption so long as they remembered to eat and drink the day before.
Or, 10% of their liver! Wherin the protagonist takes over the world by challenging every political figure to a drinking contest, but is able to metabolize toxins so quickly that they never have ill effects!
Also, they have a ridiculously slow metabolism, because the liver is also just too good at doing the whole glycogen thing. So they’d also look a little chunky. Unless they also had a 10% of the pancreas thing going on at the same time, and then super insulin!
They could donate some of their blood so scientists could extract their super insulin and cure all the type 1 and type 2 diabetics!
…these could be really awesome movies, come to think of it. Or just really, really bad ones.
Some Asian martial arts movies hire skinny women because they want professional dancers–Zhang Ziyi, who’s not much bigger than Audrey Hepburn, and Michelle Yeoh were cast in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon because of their training in dance. It actually makes sense for those types of wuxia movies because the focus is on spectacle and acrobatics and moves that are almost like in a ballet instead of street fight-style punches. I actually thought the Anne Hathaway Catwoman was one of the better “sexy women in spandex” characters, because she does turn out to be important to the plot (and she kills the bad guy!) as opposed to Faux Action Girls, but she’s still a definite example of how most of the time ass-kicking women in movies are there for horny heterosexual guys as much as for female representation.
At the gyms I’ve been to, you usually see the really big guys doing pull-ups with extra weights chained to their waists… Makes me envious, since I can only do a few reps with my hands turned towards me without extra weight, and only nearly a single one with my hands turned away from me!
But one day… one day I’ll be hanging there with weights chained to my waist as well, and a back wide as a barn door. 🙂
I can’t remember where, it was recently, maybe here… someone posted an analysis of research into human strength that concluded that physical strength is only strongly correlated with muscle mass. More muscle mass = more strength. Sex, gender, gender identity, size, weight, height, all only weakly correlate, and only so much as one would expect them to correlate to muscle mass. Taller people tend to have more muscle mass, heavier people tend to have more muscle mass, but not always, and the same is true for sex/gender.
Gah, now I need to dig that up. Was it on Pharyngula?