Continuing on my tirade about whores whores and more whores, I’ve decided that the only acceptable script for an interesting woman in which said woman survives happily is The Taming of the Shrew. All scripts written before 1988 (and most since) punish a woman for her freedom, especially her sexual freedom, as well as her willingness to compete with men.
(In the old days, women were punished for unmarried sex. Unmarried sex=slut. In recent years, sexual freedom is not simply unmarried sex. A woman can have unmarried sex without necessarily being a slut, but only if it’s fundamentally pre-married, not un-married. Uncommitted sex is still Teh Slut; women who fall in love and fuck are not punished, but women who fuck for fun are.)
Punishment is herewith defined as death (Looking for Mr. Goodbar), prison (High Sierra), drunken misery (the aforementioned The Long Riders), or just plain ol’ humiliation/ostracism/misery (Dangerous Liaisons).
Anyway, cheer up girls. There’s a way out. The Taming of the Shrew (a.k.a. Annie Get Your Gun, a.k.a. Pillow Talk, a.k.a. Spellbound). Any woman who admits her wrongdoing and gets in touch with her inner wifeliness and desire to be dominated by manly manly macho men is off the hook.
Phew.
(Cross-posted for your reading pleasure.)
Sounds good to me. I’ll happily put my foot on her hand. 😉
Um. Okay.
Of course these movies were made by the same dingbats who said Thelma and Louise was too violent.
Good point, and potentially a whole new blog; is violence committed by women treated differently than violence committed by men? I wonder if This Film Is Not Yet Rated deals with that…
I just watched a good deal of T&L the other night… I’d forgotten just how good it was.
I had a co-worker at the time it was in theaters (Bridget, Deb, whose mom worked in the art store in Bergenfield and eventually died of cancer) who walked out because she couldn’t handle the rape scene.
But yeah, it’s a good next topic. It was hardly violent, we just don’t like our angry women out of control.
I remember Bridget.
Yeah, T&L was one of the first movies to depict rape as rape, not as an eroticized fantasy; Geena Davis (who played either T or L…) was raped from the female point of view; the film was from her experience; most movie rapes are from the eyes of the perp; the movie camera stalks, disrobes, and violates the victim.