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. .
OK. last (I hope) post by me on this. Will someone explain to me how age of consent laws are violating children’s right to have sex with adults??????
Seriously…these guys are claiming that…that little kids WANT sex with grown men. After all, you only have to look at how the kiddies play.
I am shaking right now. I need to go take a hot shower…
Scarlett Johansson can grow an extra hand, turn into a computer, blah blah blah, but the second she wins a fight with a man all the MRA’s are like WOAH THERE, THIS IS WAY OUTSIDE THE REALM OF POSSIBILITY HOW DARE YOU INSINUATE SUCH A WICKED THING.
Besides, any statement that starts with “If I can’t have sex with underaged girls” is already fucked. As an underaged girl myself, I can personally say that no, high schoolers do not lust after YOU and ONLY YOU, Mr. Anonymous Commenter. Take yourself down a peg.
No matter how low you make the age of consent, there’s always going to be some creep angry that it’s not even lower. And then they’ll want incest laws gone too, cause strangers won’t let their kids get anywhere near another adult in a society with an age of consent of 5.
So squicky and disturbing.
I was never sure how much NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association) was a real thing — I mean I know it existed, but I was never sure whether it was more than a few fringe people. But every time gay rights came up, the homophobes would bring up NAMBLA to argue that all gay men were actually child molesters that wanted to be accepted by society so they could get sexual access to boys. I always though NAMBLA was made into a much bigger thing than it really was to serve the purposes of the anti-gay-rights folks.
This guy who is into historical fighting made a really interesting video about the stereotype that swordfighting requires a lot of physical strength, whereas archery doesn’t.
^ Wasn’t one of the reasons that crossbows were such a huge thing because battlefield archers took years and years to condition and train?
@deniseeliza Archery requires a TRUCKLOAD of arm strength. Seriously. I used to do it and the bows that most sports clubs use, you know for the general public, are smaller and lighter than the kind of bows that would have been used for fighting. The “real” bows? Big, and hard to draw the arrow all the way to the tip. I couldn’t do it. And those bows were made of fibreglass too, not heavy wood.
Sorry to throw things off topic, but guess who did an interview with a university radio station? That’s right…our friend Mike Buchanan! I literally choked during the interview. When asked if he was in denial about the existence of the pay gap, his response was, “I’m not in denial. It just doesn’t exist.”
Also, men who identify as feminists are traitors.
Here’s the link if anyone wants to listen. David, this might make a good post.
http://urn1350.net/blog/pulse/2015/03/interview-mike-buchanan-leader-justice-men-and-boys-party
@GrumpyOldMan: from what I understand, NAMBLA is very much a real organization, but you’re right in that it was used as a political football by homophobes to portray all gay men as pedophiles. It’s like how MRAs bring up the very real problem of male rape victims to shut down any discussion of male-on-female rape.
Of course that’s not a perfect analogy because male rape victims are a much larger problem than NAMBLA was a large group, but I meant, same co-opting by assholes for asshole reasons.
Why do these MRA types always bring up sex with underage girls like some sort of discursive hostage? “If I can’t have sex with underage girls…” stop right there dude. You can’t. No “if”. No negotiation. It’s so goddamn creepy ugh
My understanding is that there was also an element of classism in it. Highly-trained bowmen, especially the longbowmen, were often commoners; and knights really didn’t like the idea of being less important in the battle than an elite force made up of commoners.
@williamlongfellow,
They bring it up as an example to show how feminists are policing male sexuality. (According to them, telling men that they can’t commit rape, sexual assault, or sexual harassment is a way of policing male sexuality because it limits the amount of ways that men can have sex.)
But it also makes me wonder how the portion of the MRM that wants to protect male victims of statutory rape from female perpetrators gets along with the portion that wants to lower the age of consent so that they can have sex with underaged girls. It definitely struck me that Typhon Blue was addressing male rape victims, including underaged boys victimized by adult women, while the Humbert Humbert apologist was arguing to lower the age of consent to twelve because he really wanted to fuck young teenaged girls and not go to jail for it or be called a rapist for it. Do they want different standards for teenaged girls and teenaged boys? I’ve often suspected that that’s the case, especially when they argue that girls mature faster than boys, but I’m wondering if a single member of the MRM has ever argued for both the lowering of the age of consent so that they can rape teenaged girls with impunity AND further protection of boys from their female teachers.
I’m inclined to think that their blather about women raping boys isn’t really serious — they are well aware that it isn’t that big a problem relative to men raping girls, but they seem to be arguing that women are having sex with boys so they are being hypocritical when they complain about men having sex with girls. They want to have sex with young teen girls and are scrounging for any possible justification.
Basically, it’s entirely natural for men to be attracted to young girls. However, society has decided for good reason, that girls under 16 are too young to fully understand the issues of a sexual relationship and therefore need to be protected from older, more sophisticated men.
My older daughter moved from her grandparents’ home to live with my wife and me when she was ten. When she when back to visit her grandparents she would also visit her childhood best friend. When they were 13, she was horrified to find that her friend was dating on the sly a 24-year-old man who was divorced with a couple of children that he didn’t have much contact with. The friend told her, Oh, he’s so misunderstood — his ex-wife was a meanie pie, and [he tells me that] I am the love of his life. (Yeah, right.) The friend was, of course, totally head over heels over this guy. This is precisely the reason that we make this sort of relationship illegal — that a 13-year-old is so vulnerable to the manipulation of an older person.
I get this kind of shit from beta readers occasionally. “Why do you have so many lesbian characters? It’s not realistic!”
Nobody ever complains about having too many straight characters.
Damn, I had thought NAMBLA was fiction from South Park…
Wrt the fighting and physical strength. Men have in average more muscle mass than women (both due to biology and culture), but as many have said, physical strength alone doesn’t win fights. A male friend of mine is into judo, and he’s fascinated by this female teenager judoka that goes unbeaten in their mixed group, because some martial arts are all about using your opponent’s strength against them.
@Grumpyoldmangina,
Please forgive me while I go dry heave over a toilet. Just…
…please, please, please tell me you were able to get enough information to report the bastard to the authorities.
Please.
I’ve not done judo, but I’ve trained in aiki-jujutsu, which is a closely related art. (How closely depends on which version of school history you believe.) One of the basic five techniques is the same hip throw that is common in judo: it involves leaning over and essentially rolling the person coming at you across your hips to toss them to the other side.
And yes, the best person in my class at that move was this short little Chinese woman who could easily toss people who were well over twice her mass. Because fundamentally, the advantage in that hip throw goes to whoever has the lowest center of mass. If your center of mass is higher than your target’s, you actually have to lift them up to throw them; if your center of mass is lower, you just have to redirect them over you.
(I never got too deep into the martial arts; I tend to overthink things too much. But having some actual training has helped with choreographing fight scenes in stories I’ve written.)
@Contrapangloss: My daughter didn’t tell me until several years later — we were talking about the problem (well, actually I was sermonizing about the problem) of teen girls dating older men, and she explained that that was the reason she had not kept in touch with her friend. Every so often I think about the situation and wonder if there was anything I could have done at that point. I couldn’t have gone to the police — my daughter didn’t know the guy’s name, and it’s hard enough to get the police to pay attention to this sort of thing even when you have all the gory details. The only thing I could think of was telling her mother, which I would have done if I had known at the time, but I couldn’t see myself walking up to a woman I had never known and telling her, “Do you know that several years ago, when she was 13, your daughter was seeing a 24-year-old guy on the sly?” I wasn’t sure that would do any good, and it might just lead to a major blowup between mother and daughter. As I’m sure you’ve observed on this blog, I can be fairly clumsy in dealing with sensitive issues and I am well aware of it. Still, it is one of those things that I look back and say, “Is there something I should have done?”
On the other hand, if I found out that my daughter was dating a 24-year-old guy when she was 13, I would consider that I had seriously failed as a parent. But in this case it is my understanding that the girl’s parents were divorced and the father had very little involvement in her life, and that may have been part of the problem — she wasn’t getting the love and attention she should have gotten from her father, so she got it from this guy by (probably) bartering sex.
LBT | March 2, 2015 at 2:10 pm
SAKUUURRRAAAA!
http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/37500000/Sakura-Oogami-dangan-ronpa-girls-37539800-500-500.jpg
OMG she’s my absolute favorite in Dangan Ronpa! I cried over her death too. ; n ; She was the most noble, amazing, and fantastic character for me.
Speaking of Dangan Ronpa makes me think the MRAs would flip their shit over Chihiro as well. : /
The part that really bothers me (ok all of it bothers me but still) about the guy complaining about the movie, is that the audience split was actually 50 percent women. So the idea that women don’t go to these movies is ridiculously stupid. And even Hercules that opened the same week had an audience of 42 percent women (Lucy still did better). So yeah…
@katz:
Sounds like someone took the wrong lesson from Disney.
http://youtu.be/VuJTqmpBnI0
@LBT:
Dammit, guys, you made me nearly wake up my little boy.
Also, you talked about watching The Phantom, and my brain immediately sang “He’s there, The Phantom!” and I spent a long time waiting for it to croon “of the Opera!” but it just hummed a bit until it got to the warbling. Too many Phantoms.
(Oh, and Fantomah is now in the public domain!)
re: women winning fights with men.
I haven’t read the entire thread, so pardon if I repeat anyone.
I took karate for several years, and from what I learned, fighting is rarely about raw strength. So much is about leverage or balance. I loved learning weapons takeaways because you’re not ripping the weapon away with brute force. You just twist your weapon like so, and then step like so, and bang you’re now holding two weapons!
Some throws and takedowns were the same way. I threw some very fit men who were larger and stronger than I was, but you can’t fight the laws of physics!
Speed, training, coolness under pressure (pause for song riff), height/reach, endurance, weapons, all mean a lot in combat.
Oh, and re: NAMBLA: I thought it was an invention of South Park too! Imagine my disgust/horror when I realized that it was a real group of actual men who thought it was their right to have sex with children. Gah.
Dvärghundspossen:
That’s one cool thing about the show Arrow. Katie Cassidy (Laurel LanceBlack Canary) works out to get the appearance of a street vigilante (even if the character isn’t all that skilled yet).
http://i.imgur.com/qRv1BGp.jpg
Same with Caity Lotz (Sara LanceBlack Canary). There’s even a cool scene of her doing the salmon ladder (not a stunt double).