Supposedly, people are getting all up in arms about the movie Kick-Ass — because Hit-Girl swears like a sailor, gores her way through upwards of 50 people over the course of the film with all sorts of weaponry, is unrepentant to boot, and worst of all: she’s 11 years old.
I really enjoy how sexism immediately comes into obvious, irrefutable play despite all supposed to-do about the age:
Why exactly is it perverse? To see a child engaged in violence? Or is it because it’s a female child engaging in violence that’s the problem?
I really suspect it’s the latter and not the former. After all, it’s not as if foul-mouthed, violent male characters are lacking in the market and yet there isn’t a huge brouhaha about that.
It gets funnier:
Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology weighs in with: “This promotes the idea that infantilising adulthood is ok and that we are no longer expected to draw lines between us and kids.”
Oh. Give me a break. Infantilising adulthood? So what do we call the current trend of putting prepubescent teens in stripper outfits and those high heels for babies?
On a related tangent, here’s a clip of 7 year old girls performing dance moves that look as if they’ve come straight out of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” MV:
Or, if you don’t like videos, here’s some pictures:
Granted, there’s somewhat of a firestorm going on because of these girls, but this isn’t the first or only instance of things like this happening.
Girls have been increasingly sexualized at younger and younger ages for years now and yet that sort of behaviour is alright and yet violence isn’t?
I love how there’s the comments that range from claiming that because it’s dance and therefore an art form, it’s not dirty or inappropriate to those who claim that sexualization is only in the eyes of the beholder and whoever sees this as being problematic should really get their mind out of the gutter.
Deanna:
I completely agree with you. These girls are talented little dancers and have skills! They are doing real choreography! There is a difference between getting dirty on the dance floor and body isolations! and do people not understand the difficult turn sequences in this piece.
Ken:
Unless you are one of these girls’ mothers, shouldn’t you keep your ridiculous ultra-conservative opinions to yourself? Anyone who sees sexuality in an outfit on a 7-yr old needs serious professional help. If your mind wasn’t thinking that way, you wouldn’t have this opinion. Period. Look yourself in the mirror and ask why you would see a costume on a 7-yr old as sexual.
Beammer:
The outfits look like swimsuits.
Peters (executive vp of The Hozman Group):
“It has been taken out of context.” and “There was NOTHING provocative about what they were doing.”
Presch (parent of one of the kids):
“The costumes are designed for movement, unrestricted movement and to show body lines.” Also, this is because “the judges need to be able to see the girl’s movement and technical skills.”
Um. Right. I see we’re going from justifying to rationalizing to flat out bullshit in very short order. I wonder if Presch thinks the rest of us are all idiots who haven’t seen ballet performed before. I’m sure that leotards would show body lines and allow for full range of body movement.
I’m gratified that there’s still people who still think that this sort of dance routine and costuming choice is wildly inappropriate for 7 year old girls, but the fact that we have managed to let public morality slide to the point where this sort of performance is considered de rigeur in this sort of venue is frankly appalling. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if a 17 year old I knew was doing this, I’d still be somewhat taken aback. You know it’s bad when Beyonce was wearing much less skin in a much less provocative manner in the original video.
Back to Hit-Girl. I appreciate how Chloe Moretz, the actress who plays Hit-Girl seems to be taking this way more in stride than some of the people blowing their tops off.
“Hit-Girl isn’t very adult at all. She may say this stuff, but she doesn’t know any better. That’s how she was born and raised. She watches John Woo movies — what do you get from John Woo movies? You get violence and cussing. And that’s all she knows. She doesn’t know how to speak kind words to people. Her Dad tried to raise her like that, she really doesn’t know any better.”
and
It’s a movie for a reason. It’s not meant to be taken as real life.
She also doesn’t suggest that kids watch it nor does she think that Hit-Girl should be a role model. She does see it as female empowerment insofar as it’s a female character who is kicking ass instead of being the damsel in distress.
What I really enjoy is the dichotomy. When it comes to violence, cursing, and such non-feminine pursuits, where are all the comments about it being art, about perversity only being in the eye of the beholder, about taking a chill pill because obviously to pull this off takes talent and that therefore excuses all?
Elisabeth Rappe puts it beautifully when she says that it’s because the violence isn’t sexual in nature.
Charlie’s Angels where they seduce men and then beat them? Perfectly alright.
Death via sex? That’s alright too.
But having a girl get all bloody and spill gore? Oh wait, that’s not ok at all, because a woman is supposed to either be the whore or the Madonna. The Madonna nurtures, teaches by loving pacifistic example, and “lends civilization to a brutal world”. Irony quotes. The whore kills with sex, poisons, and is essentially a back-stabbing bad girl who you do not want anywhere near your mother.
When it’s a girl doing all the bloodspilling, it’s no longer “just a movie” or “just entertainment”, it’s something infinitely more subversive, perverse, and problematic.
Hypocrisy, people. Hypocrisy. You’re so bad at this game.
A friend emailed me an article from the Economist.
He asked me my thoughts on the article, and one thing really stood out to me: the author says that “most obviously, China should scrap the one-child policy”.
I think that’s just rank stupidity talking.
The authors says in the article that other countries without the one-child policy also suffer from a skewed sex ratio. This, to me, says that the one-child policy may be a significant cause in causing the numbers to be as ludicrous as 200 boys to 1 female, but it’s not fixing anything to scrap that policy.
There’s a couple of problems with the entire situation:
For those couples who can afford multiple children, they’ll simply keep having children until they get their desired boy. If there is enough affluence, then this would just cause a population surge at worst and at best there would be more girls brought into this world to live in a world of passive abuse and neglect with names like “bringing brother” and “summoning brother” or “might as well keep feeding”. Yes, that last was actually a common name.
For those who cannot afford to feed, clothe and school multiple children, then abortion is still the answer. As standards of living rise in China, more and more couples are realizing the immense amounts of money, time, and energy required to raise a child to be successful. With this in thought, it is more than likely that under those circumstances those people who would prefer sons would abort girls anyways to keep the best for their sons.
In rural areas, I can all but see rag-tag armies of girls doing the chores, working in the fields, toiling whilst their brothers go to school. For a family who has to scrimp and save for tuition, the only person in the family who will go to school is, of course, the son.
As a Chinese female, I would rather die than live in the above scenarios. It would be kinder to strangle me at birth or even much more humane to kill me in the womb. To live and be denied education, to be seen as lesser simply because of my gender, and to be seen as a breeder on legs? No thanks.
Of course, others may not share my view. Others will probably think that life as a slave is better than death. That’s alright. We’re all entitled to our own opinions.
Speaking as a Chinese woman living in today’s times seeing the gender inequality and the crimes that rise from it: bride-napping, sharing stolen wives between brothers, gang rape by villages of men who just want to breed their next generation of rapist sons — at this point I’m not even particularly keen on living in China. Sounds like a rather dangerous proposition to me, actually.
It speaks rather eloquently to me that when the demand for women rises, violence against them also rises in proportion to said demand instead of more respect. Instead of having more choices, our lives are put in more danger.
Nothing is going to change, not the sex ratio, not women’s rights, not anything unless some fundamental views are changed. Before that, perhaps scientists can comfort themselves that at least the numbers aren’t looking quite so horrible at the expense of having more people on the face of this earth — but nothing is fixed.
Thene told me that when I say feminazis, not only am I not being politically correct, but I’m not really communicating what I really mean to say.
That troubles me — the latter more than the former. Much, actually.
So, to be clear, when I say feminazis, I don’t mean all the feminists in the world.
I mean, specifically, those women who de-value women’s work. They are opposed to women living subordinate to men in the roles of housewives and SAHMs. They consider women who are not desirous of climbing the corporate ladder with the best of them as “throwbacks” and a waste of the “foremothers” who suffered for the cause.
I mean those women who seem to all but hate men. The patriarchy and by extension, all men, is the root of all evil. The world would be much more peaceful if only women were in charge. Society as a whole would make more sense if only women led the way. Men are nothing but hulking brutes who are all capable/willing/desirous of raping women, in thought if not in deed. Those women who get terribly offended when a man opens a door for them or waves them onto the train first. God forbid that a man give up his seat or something equally archaic.
I mean those women who have issues with women with long hair, who wear skirts, or who actually might want to have children.
That’s the sort of person I mean when I say feminazi. For the sake of being politically correct, and much more importantly, to be clearer in speech — I shall just refer to them as those women in the future.
Thene mentioned the use of “second-wavers”, but I’m fairly sure that there has to be some second-wavers who don’t hate men and who wouldn’t mind wearing skirts.
Radical and extreme has been ruled out — because as Caesura pointed out, there’s more than one way of interpreting them.
So, my aunt and my mother and I had a little conversation the other day.
We came to the conclusion that it pretty much sucks to be a woman.
So, when a man has money, he has plenty of opportunity to cheat. Even if he doesn’t necessarily seek it out, there are plenty of women who will come sticking onto him like flies onto honey.
On the other hand, if a woman who has money wants to cheat — it’s comparatively harder. For one thing, men appear to be somewhat less enamored of being a kept man — at least I’ve never heard of men claiming that they wanted a sugar mommy whereas it’s pretty common to hear women talk about such things.
Further on that road, it seems that it’s more or less accepted if not lauded for a man to marry or date a much younger woman. However, if a woman tries the same, even if the man is a negligible five years younger to the twenty or so that is common amongst men who practice december-may matches — that’s somehow indecent.
In that vein — ugly and fat old rich men can find a nice, warm, willing cunt if he so wishes whereas a fat, old, wrinkled rich woman might find it comparatively harder.
Did you know that there’s actually entire detective agencies in Taiwan who center their entire business around finding the concubines of Taiwanese businessmen based in China?
Further more, did you know that supposedly there’s laws in China to protect the rights of said concubines? Purportedly there were so many women and children abandoned by their “husbands” that the government had to step in. Isn’t it telling that the Chinese government chose to semi-legalize adultery instead of telling the men and women that adultery is wrong wrongwrong?
And you know what takes the cake?
When there’s a dearth of men — we women have to work our asses off to get married. Consider the competitiveness women have towards each other. See the many ploys women employ.
Then see how when there’s a shortage of women — such as in inner China — men simply kidnap women from the coastal areas where they are more plentiful, because there’s more foreigners there, to sell to inner China to be wives to men who can’t otherwise find someone to bear their sons. Sometimes wives to multiple men who simply want sons. The concept of women getting more power because there’s less men as in “A brother’s price” ? Not really — not in China at least.
Fuck.
No wonder there’s some saying somewhere in Buddhism that states that you must’ve done something pretty bad in a past life to be born as a woman.
I’m just going to state here, once and for all: All of you who can’t understand that you can be a stay at home wife and be a feminist at the same time are currently engaged in disempowering women.
You got that?
When you’re lobbying for women’s choices, that involves respecting the decisions that they make; whether you agree with them or not.
If I state that I find it more fulfilling to stay at home, you are disrespecting my intelligence and insulting me to tell me that I am lazy and/or misguided. You are further disempowering me if you state that I’m a waste of the effort my foremothers expended to give me the choice to choose to stay at home.
Personally, if no one is hurt by my choices and it actually benefits myself and the person supporting me, the rest of you dissenters need to shut up.
I do not see the point of working a entry-level job that makes me miserable, involves 2 hours of travel a day, requires a expensive professional wardrobe, and which results in a worse standard of life.
When I was working fulltime, Caesura and I would end up eating less healthily because we would be too tired and unhappy to cook. Or clean. Or do laundry. Or do any sort of thing that results in a better quality of life.
Unless circumstances require a second income to keep up afloat, we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a better deal for me to stay at home and make sure we’re not eating from the freezer every single night.
I’m currently still on-call for temp agencies, for the record. At this point, a second income would be preferable if not outright necessary.
As for those people who find fulfillment in having a job — good for you. I’m not one of you. It doesn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to know that I’m just one more cog in the system. Nor does it fulfill any of my needs to be climbing the corporate ladder. Further, I’ve never had any sort of ambition towards monetizing myself. Y’all need to stop judging my life based on your perceptions of what is right, proper, and preferable.
So really, I appreciate your worries that I’m wasting my life or that I’ll feel bored eventually and then where would I be with a gap in my resume, but you really need to just STOW IT.
