Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Warning: quick feminist rant ahead!

It's been a few days since I posted, and though I will most likely post a more in-depth entry tomorrow, I'm sitting here reading my new issue of BITCH magazine and I had to comment on something.

A few months ago, my boyfriend and I went to the movie theatre to see the opening night of the movie 300 by director Zack Snyder. Before seeing the film, I was excited - I thought it would be a more comic bookie version of Gladiator. Little did I know that I would be spending two-plus hours of my life suffering through crappy dialogue, even crappier acting, screaming oily men wearing very authentic Spartan black spandex shorts, and, even worse, a very anti-feminist message. Okay, you're probably saying that I took the film too seriously, and that I probably should've known what I was getting myself into; after all, it is a war movie, so it has to be testosterone-crazy, right?

For the longest time I had trouble explaining to the masses what it was about the film that absolutely drove me up the wall. Was the film pretty? Yes, the visuals were pretty awesome. But all in all, I walked out of the theatre feeling offended. Well, in the current issue of BITCH, columnist Nichali M. Ciaccio puts it SO perfectly that I had to quote her:

"The queen's moment of sacrifice (for her king) comes when she 'allows' herself to be sexually brutalized by a politician. Young women everywhere can no show their gratitude to Snyder, a director with the courage to give females a positive role model".

The queen in the film is intended to give women someone in the film to identify with, and yet we as the female audience are force-fed the idea that to offer our bodies up to sexual sacrifice is somehow heroic. I remember feeling so disgusted watching the film that it made me crabby for days afterwards.

Okay, enough of my ranting. Back to reading.....

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