By David Futrelle
In my travels through the manosphere, I regularly discover new ways in which men are oppressed by the evil gynocracy. They are mostly extremely dumb, but the one I found today is somehow even dumber than that.
Poking around in the Men’s Rants subreddit — a smaller and somewhat angrier offshoot of the Men’s Rights subreddit — I ran across a dude who’s mad that there aren’t enough scary female clowns in pop culture to balance out all the male ones. This lack of “scary female clowns in media,” toddfan420 sniffs, is “a massive layer of anti-male culture affecting us subconciously” by, presumably, making us think that all men are scary clowns, or something.
“It’s so trendy to be ‘scared of clowns,'” he continues,
But if there are no female scary clowns in media, than we cant rule out that this may be creating anti-male fear.
If a woman dressed as a clown and sat at a playground, people would bring their kids up to her. But imagine a huge dude clown just sitting at a playground…
I don’t doubt you, but that might have less to do with the scariness of Pennywise the Clown than with the fact that 95 percent of child abductions by strangers are carried out by men?
Tell me a huge part of scary clowns is not their maleness.
Well, some of it clearly is — and as I mentioned before it’s likely this is the result of the fact that men are, statistically speaking, more dangerous, more violent, more scary than women, and far, far more likely to commit violent crimes. I mean, it’s a lot more complicated than that, and I’m sure someone could write a dissertation or two on toxic masculinity and the rise of the scary male clown, but I don’t think the discrimination going on here is against men.
Nah, it’s against women, who generally don’t get the plum roles as villians in horror movies or in any other genre. Most heroes in movies are male; most villains are male. Still, there are some tremendous female villains in film history, and at least one of them is a clown. I believe her name is Harley Quinn.
If you google ‘scary woman clown,’ It’s all just Harley Quinn stuff. Women get to be sexy, while men have to be objects of fear.
Women “get” to be sexy? Female characters are expected to be sexy, even when they’re also supposed to be scary. And it isn’t feminists insisting that Harley Quinn has to be a sex object. Indeed, when Margot Robbie demanded that producers of Harley Quin: Birds of Prey ratchet down her character’s sexiness and ratchet up her scariness, male nerds lost their shit and boycotted the film, cursing feminists for intruding on “their” pop culture bailiwick. Because that’s the kind of clowns they are.
So in conclusion,
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I find the phrasing of this part to be unintentionally revealing. Like he knows how ridiculous it sounds to say it is anti-male bias, so he tones it down to say he “can’t rule it out.” And I can’t rule out that unicorns live in my basement. /s
Yet if the women weren’t sexy, the MRAs would all be having tantrums. And if the men were sexy, they’d probably also have tantrums just because. I’d love to see more female characters that are less sexualized (villains and heroines), but that’s something MRAs would throw a fit over.
Okay, but I think a majority of the scary ghosts in pop culture are women or girls.
And scary demonically possessed people are typically women or girls
@ Naglfar;
Therefore, aliens built the pyramids….
When my niece was in high school, she did a report on fear of clowns… which, as I then discovered, has a NMH
Google is inside our brains and everything, so this experiment is inexact, but that’s kinda the point. I googled “scary woman clown” and, because it’s my default, ecosia’d it as well. I got a lot of cheap Halloween costumes, many of them lazily “sexy” because that is how Halloween costumes designed for women over the age of thirteen are, and a lot of elaborate costume makeup of the sort that takes a lot of skill. That ranged from the cartoony to the clever to the genuinely horrifying. Not a Harley Quinn to be seen, literally or even in Spirit Halloween “Misfit Sidekick” form. So we are forced to draw some conclusions about what this guy’s been googling.
@WWTH
Which also is evidence of misogyny, since it seems the reason for this is an idea that women are weaker or more easily corrupted.
@fiercebadrabbit
He probably didn’t google anything, he just searched his rectum to find his ideas.
Also witches. Wizards (male) are AFAICT more often than not portrayed as wise and kindly leaders, whereas witches (female) are more often than not portrayed as malevolent and scary. Yes, the modern fantasy genre has shaken up those stereotypes considerably, but the traditional image of the wizard is far less negative than that of the witch.
Also, according to Google Ngrams the phrase “scared of clowns” doesn’t appear at all before about 1982. The idea that clowns are frightening is a relatively recent pop-culture take.
@Kimstu
It seems the idea of scary clowns really took off with Stephen King’s novel It, which was published in 1986. In more recent years it has been boosted by film adaptations, similar stories, and a spike in 2016 related to a number of instances of children reporting clowns attempting to lure them into forests.
I just think of the nurses from silent hill. They have a mess up face but they are sexualized so much that it’s hard to tell gje porn pictures of them from the actual characters so yes even scary monster women are expected to be something the male audience can jack off to
Just a reminder that Pennywise is actually female. Her real form is that of something close to a spider but she adopts Pennywise’s form because kids think clowns are scary.
Oh, ye uncultured MRAs. Have you not heard of Cha-u-kao? She’s a downright historic female clown. She’s not really scary, though, unless you’re afraid of ground-breaking lesbians painted by Toulouse-Lautrec.
In the gendered world of horror villains, men are hulking faceless killers, psychotic clowns, mad scientists, religious zealots/cultists, demons and zombies. Women, on their side, are obsessed stabby-style girlfriends, vengeful ghosts, witches, possessed victims, abusive mothers and femme fatale. Werewolves are usually men and, while vampires see a lot of women representation, female vampires most often serve as sexy-acessories for a male vampire villain.
All in all, male horror movie villains are a direct threat. They use violence and brute force more often than not. They are also perceived as relentless and almost impossible to kill. When they are not, they are usually piloting from afar direct threats to the heroes who must survive the minions and outwit the evil mastermind.
Female horro movie villains are most often manipulators who use guile, mystic abilities, seduction and deception to represent a threat. They are perceived as being difficult to actually identify as the real threat and viciously cunning. When they pause a more direct threat it’s often through the use of mystical powers or because they manoeuvred themselves in a position of strength.
Famously, women are more often heroins of horror movies than men. Many believe that this is due to the fact that the audience, to be scared, needs to feed of the fear displayed by the protagonist and that a masculine hero showing abject fear would be unrelatable and break the suspension of disbelief.
John Wayne Gacy (1942-1994) likely is the original Killer Clown who made clowns scary ever after. Stephen King has never explicitly said that Gacy was an inspiration for his novel It, but the timing would make it difficult for him to deny. Gacy was arrested for his crimes in 1978, and sentenced to death in 1980, the precise time period that King began writing It.
I tried many, many combinations of words on google, yahoo, and shutterstock to see if there’s anything which would give no non-male clowns except for Harley Quinn. And I eventually found one: “clown villain”. To be fair it took so long to come up with the duh-obvious one because I was mostly playing up the creepy/scary angle like other people here. It resulted in just male clowns, mostly comic/cartoon/movie characters, plus a few pics of Harley.
Anything else I tried, with or without terms implying woman/female/etc. didn’t work. Even “female clown villain” showed mostly pictures of Women dressed as Joker or Pennywise.
I tried imagining an evil sexy male clown. I ended up imagining David Bowie in a skintight harlequin suit and facepaint. Were he still alive, I would absolutely not object to that… Great, I think I’m all hot and bothered now.
I googled scary woman clown and got plenty of not Harley quinn pictures:
BTW what are everyone’s scariest female villains?
off the top of my head:
Jadis from the Narnia books. They’ve got issues with female characters but the White Which scared the hell out of me as a kid.
Azula from Avatar. Nice exception to the norm of female villains not being physical threats, she mopped the floor with the heroes in practically every episode she was in.
Amanda Waller from JLU. More of an anti-villain but still the last person on the show I’d ever fuck with.
Ayt Madashi from Jade City. Jade City is a newish book series that’s basically The Godfather if it happened in the world of Avatar/legend of Korra. Ayt is the leader of the enemy yakuza clan and dominates the city of Janloon. She doesn’t get a lot of screen time but she’s still one of my favorite literary villains.
@Snowberry:
He have a hint of something in that in popular cultures, females are much less often willingly evil, and much more often redeemable and/or redeemed. I can’t easily find a (fictional) female equivalent to Star war’s Palpatine, FF6’s Kafka, or Thanos in the avengers.
(I am aware of female versions, like Vayl in Warmachine/Hordes, but it’s much harder to find, and often more obscure)
Now, for that to count as oppression … Let’s just say that it’s a man-enforced trope. Who inherently serve to reinforce gender stereotypes who are overwhelmingly favorable to males.
@Nequam: Not exactly what I was picturing, but yeah, Bowie-clown’s still hot. I’ll be in my bunk.
@ Kimstu
‘Scared of clowns’ may have been around long before it hit the literature. As a pre – teen in the early 1970’s I remember clowns would scare the s**t out of me close up. Looking back, I think it may have been an ‘uncanny valley’ sort of thing.
Okay, I’m a lurker posting for the first time, but in the world of LGBT panic defenses, that is a startlingly tone deaf thing for that guy to say.
…wait. No, that’s par for the course for MRAs.
I don’t know if it’s my incipient senility at work or that I just can’t keep up with the hip lingo all the kids are using these days, but I need a translator for some of these posts. :/
What is this “NMH” that clowns apparently have?
What does “I…ecosia’d it” entail?
What the heck is “gje porn”?
Even if these are typos, I can’t tell that they are, so I still need translations. 🙁
@epronovost
I don’t watch a lot of horror films but IMO the most common role of women on those films is to be victims who die to advance the story. This is rather misogynistic for obvious reasons.
@Prith kDar
I don’t know what NMH means, but ecosia is a search engine and I think “gje” is a typo of “the.”
Ok, thanks. I think by the time I reached “gje” my brain had shut down from all the previous things I couldn’t interpret. 🙂
I do agree we have a lack of scary lady clowns in pop culture. It is a very male dominated space.
I imagine any initiative to diversify the scary clown niche will be met by hostility from male scary clowns who feel that men are just naturally better at it or something.
@Naglfar: Unless they are virgins, in which case they get the coveted ‘Final Girl’ title. There have been plenty of horror films that have challenged that kind of bs, but like with all genres, there’s a lot of formulaic garbage out there. Cabin in the Woods did a pretty decent job showing and mocking formulaic horror archetypes.