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#gamergate all about the menz antifeminism irony alert men who should not ever be with women ever misogyny oppressed men pedophiles oh sorry ephebophiles post contains sarcasm

"Why did it the main character have to be a girl?" and other tough questions about modern cinema

ScarJo as Lucy: Apparently, if you're really really smart, you can grow another hand
ScarJo as Lucy: Apparently, if you’re really really smart, you can grow another hand

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:

 I don't like how a woman can take out so many guys so easily.. image for user Comment-Here by Comment-Here » 2 days ago (Fri Feb 27 2015 07:42:13) Flag ▼ | Reply | IMDb member since September 2012 This never happens in real life, so why is it in so many movies? I find it hard to believe that an average size girl can beat up an average sized male.. ive never seen it happen.. why is that trope so popular?

 Why did it the main character have to be a girl? image for user Comment-Here by Comment-Here » 2 days ago (Fri Feb 27 2015 07:37:31) Flag ▼ | Reply | IMDb member since September 2012 I am tired of the movie industry trying to shove girl power down our throats.. most women dont even watch action movies.. it would be like making a chick flick that caters to only men.. wth?

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

 Re: Why did it the main character have to be a girl? image for user Comment-Here by Comment-Here » 1 day ago (Fri Feb 27 2015 19:04:15) Flag ▼ | Reply | IMDb member since September 2012 Post Edited: Fri Feb 27 2015 19:04:45 Omg.. I make a good point and you just sweep it under the rug.. you are the one with issues if you ask me  you probably let a woman take charge of your body, coward Re: Why did it the main character have to be a girl? image for user harveythepooka by harveythepooka » 1 day ago (Fri Feb 27 2015 19:27:37) Flag ▼ | Reply | IMDb member since July 2006 You are so overtly sexist there is no point in talking to you. If you don't want to watch a movie with a female protagonist that is your own issue, not the issue of the movie industry.  And why is the main character a woman? Why not? It doesn't matter either way who played the role just from the script and Lucy did nothing that a man or woman wouldn't have done in the same situation. Re: Why did it the main character have to be a girl? image for user Comment-Here by Comment-Here » 1 day ago (Fri Feb 27 2015 23:16:01) Flag ▼ | Reply | IMDb member since September 2012 Well like I said before, men are the ones who mostly watch this.. you can't really get into it if it is a girl... It seems so backwards to me.. are they trying to get more women to watch action movies (to make more money)? I hear it worked for making women play more video games

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:

 If Men can't sex Girls.. Then neither should Boys, end of discussion! image for user Comment-Here by Comment-Here » Thu Feb 5 2015 19:27:21 Flag ▼ | Reply | IMDb member since September 2012 It is illegal for underagers to send each other nude pics  Why is sex any different? It should be illegal for underagers to have sex with each others..  If I can't have sex with underaged girls then neither should boys, end of discussion!

Evidently the Men’s Rights movement is leaking. .

 

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samantha
samantha
9 years ago

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…

radiofish
radiofish
9 years ago

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.

Spindrift
Spindrift
9 years ago

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.

GrumpyOldMangina
9 years ago

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.

deniseeliza
deniseeliza
9 years ago

I also remember reading tons and tons of complaints about the existence of female characters fighting in Dragon Age: Inquisition. There was an article on The Escapist on how it’s actually not implausible that a girl could wield a longsword.

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.

proxieme
proxieme
9 years ago

^ Wasn’t one of the reasons that crossbows were such a huge thing because battlefield archers took years and years to condition and train?

sunnysombrera
9 years ago

@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.

ej
ej
9 years ago

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

suffrajitsu
suffrajitsu
9 years ago

@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.

suffrajitsu
suffrajitsu
9 years ago

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.

williamlongfellow
williamlongfellow
9 years ago

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

Jenora Feuer
Jenora Feuer
9 years ago

Wasn’t one of the reasons that crossbows were such a huge thing because battlefield archers took years and years to condition and train?

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.

alaisvex
alaisvex
9 years ago

@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.

GrumpyOldMangina
9 years ago

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.

Corinn
9 years ago

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.

Sarah
Sarah
9 years ago

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.

contrapangloss
contrapangloss
9 years ago

@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.

Jenora Feuer
Jenora Feuer
9 years ago

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.

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.)

GrumpyOldMangina
9 years ago

@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.

ParadoxicalIntention
9 years ago

LBT | March 2, 2015 at 2:10 pm

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!

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.

ParadoxicalIntention
9 years ago

Speaking of Dangan Ronpa makes me think the MRAs would flip their shit over Chihiro as well. : /

Tessa
Tessa
9 years ago

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…

Falconer
9 years ago

@katz:

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.

Sounds like someone took the wrong lesson from Disney.

http://youtu.be/VuJTqmpBnI0

@LBT:

(Also seriously katz, Colon Man’s tag line could be, “YOU’LL SHIT BRICKS.”)

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!)

Dawn Incognito
Dawn Incognito
9 years ago

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.

Tessa
Tessa
9 years ago

Dvärghundspossen:

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.)

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).