Its more debatey than cafe society so I threw it here
There is quite the FB kerfluffle going on that seems to be stirring up a ton of grief.
There are billboards featuring the Apocalypse character holding Mystique up by the neck in a choke hold.
People seem to have strong feelings about this billboard and I have already lost a few FB friends for disagreeing with their interpretation.
Having seen the movie, the moment that this situation pictured happened was probably one of the most “heroic” moments we ever see from Mystique. Shes not famous for playing the hero.
I get where it could be misinterpreted, but the flame wars directed at folks like myself is that I am misunderstanding or embracing some underlying misogynistic abuse fantasy and that this ad is all about hating women.
My take is these are fantasy superpeople who make a habit out of breaking reinforced concrete tossing each other around and generally doing “bad things” to each other. The “no hitting girls” rule seems to be pretty much off the table considering how many times we have seen various villains and heroes killing each other in this franchise. If anything I would tend to think that if marvel has been trying to teach us anything its that underestimating a woman can come with unfortunate consequences (see Angel Dust v. Collosus : “Deadpool”)
So is this whole thing a giant crybullying episode or I am I being an insensitive Dbag that is failing to check my straight white cisgender male imperialist priveledge and exposing my hatred for women.
I am prepared to be wrong, but I think its a way over the top response in the context of the genre.
Your link does read a bit like offensiveness word soup to me. And it’s not “a woman”, it’s Mystique. Hasn’t she kind of earned the right to get her ass kicked by a man at this point?
But then I tried to imagine that picture with Wolverine in Mystique’s place. And that’s a picture I’m having a hard time seeing on a poster. It would look pretty silly with him in that pose. So maybe there is something going on there.
I don’t have my panties in a twist yet, though. Or, well, I do. But that’s just how I dress.
I can see where the specified image might be taken as a “damsel in distress” portrayal, with whatever positive or negative implications that might suggest. To see it as endorsement or approval of hating women, and of physically abusing actual human women, requires an agenda so large that the Hulk could not lift it and a jump (to an errant conclusion) beyond the leaping capabilities of Spiderman, Superman, and the Beast combined.
I think the important point was at the very beginning of Rose McGowan’s post: “there is no context in the ad, just a woman getting strangled.” She isn’t complaining about the movie, she’s pointing out that this particular ad, stripped of all context, shows simply a woman being choked. And that image is a powerful one whose first implication isn’t “this woman kicks ass,” or even “a villain fights a superhero.”
Take Raiders of the Lost Ark as an example. Indy’s whip is his signature weapon. I don’t remember it scene by scene, but he probably fought a black man with it in one of the movies, and it didn’t have any racist connotations within the movie. But would anyone think it was a good idea to use an image of a white man whipping a black man on a billboard? Without context, it suggests something completely different than what was intended.
The fact that many people don’t see a man choking a woman in the same way, despite a long history of violence against women, is why McGowan calls it “casual violence.” It’s so common that it’s easy to miss. Not seeing that connotation doesn’t mean you’re an imperialist who hates men. But it’s worth considering if that’s the best image they could choose to market the move.
I don’t see anyone in that linked article suggesting it is an endorsement or approval of hating women.
Some people are afraid of dogs. Anything which faintly reminds them of dogs will flip a switch in their brain and they’ll project all the thoughts and emotions they associate with dogs unto that faint reminder. Reasoning them out of it has a low probability of success even with skill.
If I were an ad man looking to promote a movie and knew that, that poster would do a good job of getting a reaction then a counter-reaction, throwing up lots of noise which serves as free publicity.
Perhaps that’s not what happened. In any case, it serves its legitimate purpose in announcing what kind of movie one can expect it to be.
This. In a different context (or, as noted, with some context at all), the image becomes less problematic. Use it to talk about marketing the movie when the gossip has been that she won’t sign a new contract for more X Men movies, so will Mystique survive or not; use it in an article about how Mystique doesn’t expect any quarter because she’s a woman, and Apocalypse doesn’t give it. Those give context to it that make it more than just ‘woman getting strangled’.
And I dunno, I think the context is pretty well supplied by the fact that she’s blue skinned, and he’s some sort of grey skinned clown robot make it pretty obvious that this is a movie about physics-defying super people punching each other through buildings.
That could be any blue woman getting choked by an… alien… pharaoh?
Even if you don’t know who Mystique is or have context, there’s still obviously something more going on here than just “Some dude is choking a woman”. Speaking of, from the article:
Only in Hollywood are nine year olds saying “committing violence against a woman” instead of “hurting her” or “choking her” or “grabbing her” or any other normal way to describe what’s going on. Anyway, the obvious answer to this deep philosophical question is “Well, because he IS a monster man and a bad guy and the X-Men are going to try to stop him from hurting anyone else.”
Ok, those people, they need something useful to spend their time on and they have liberated you to do likewise.
OTOH not everyone around knows who or what is Mystique so the image **by itself **does hit the “female in trouble” note and maybe, just maybe, the scene set-up for the promo should have taken that into consideration.
I have to admit that I’m having a problem un-seeing the unfortunate implications in the poster now. It’s like one of those 3D picture optical illusion things. Or that time I painted a fish, and someone pointed out the obvious giant schlong. It didn’t really occur to me at first to strip it of context. Stuff usually comes with context. But, OK, I get it, when you point it out.
I dunno. Should we remove all the posters? Yeah, I guess I probably would. If it was me, I could probably live without the shitstorm. Lynch the guys at Fox? Oh, give them a break. I’m perfectly willing to believe that it was by accident.
In a Pit thread recently, someone denounced C.S. Lewis’ “A Horse and His Boy” as racist, because the bad guys have dark skin. (A little more to it than that, but not much more.)
Does this mean that no science-fiction writer dare ever create a fictional dark skinned race of bad guys? They wouldn’t be humans at all; “race” as we know it would be totally irrelevant. But the charges of racism would (likely) be made.
Also, if the figures on the billboard were reversed, and some group of Men’s Rights Activists complained…who’d take them seriously? There is an asymmetry here, and it warrants discussion.
(If anyone in the Marvel Universe deserves a good smack-down, Mystique is a damn fine choice for it!)
well, these cartoons are extremely sexist from the get-go. The female characters all wear practically nothing but body-damaging high heels and appear to have all opted for some serious plastic surgery.
Why, out of all of the possible images they could have chosen to promote this movie, did they select a female-appearing character being choked? Some kind of unconscious thought process is my best guess. I don’t think it was a conscious decision, but it does kind of reveal the thinking/biases of the people who make these kinds of movies. Or possibly it was a conscious decision to appeal to the misogyny of the typical fan.