herman said:
I'm trying to understand where you're coming from on this, SI, so correct me if I'm wrong here. You believe Wonder Woman is equivalent to Tomb Raider because it is a female lead crafted for men, by men, to placate women and fulfill the male gaze fantasy? And therefore is problematic, anti-feminist, etc.?
My problem is that you can't serve something up as ground breaking if it isn't really ground breaking. It doesn't move the needle forward as far as the perception of women. Diana is still a princess. She's a princess with powers. Same as Frozen. Or look, princessses, but one has powers. Tangled, princess, but her hair is powerful. All of these princesses are now solving their own problems. No need to wait for a prince anymore.
The standard should be higher. We've got to actually look at things and call a spade a spade if we want to advance things. Saying we are making advances, when we might actually not be making advances will cause us to stall.
herman said:
Your description of the film doesn't really jive with how I remember it, so perhaps I'll watch it again, particularly where men use Diana for their own gains. I remember them trying to, and I remember her just doing her own thing anyway and working with the ones that chose to fight alongside her. They literally destroyed the film's most phallic symbol that was touted to be the McGuffin that will solve all the problems.
Which in and of itself is great. A woman saved the day. How is that ground breaking. In Tomb Raider, Laura Croft saves the day too, fighting off a whole bunch of evil men to boot. What about the above story line is ground breaking?
herman said:
I mean, I agree with you that we can do
a lot better. What I don't understand is why you're so interested in the male response to gauge whether or not the film is feminist. I provided several examples of women responding
very positively to the message of the movie and you probably saw it demonstrated at Halloween in kids' costume choices and comic conventions with more people opting for WW's bracer pose, than Leia's RotJ slave-kini. Yes, it is shallow to say that a strong feminist needs to look a certain way. The implication there is that strong women need to look like men.
The way males perceive women is part of the problem. We view them as sexual objects. Part of what needs to happen is that men need to start viewing women as human beings, with hopes, dreams, and feelings. Placing a good looking women in front of a male crowd and then saying look she's also strong doesn't do anything. I get the angle your coming from. Hey guys she's good looking, just ignore that, and focus on her accomplishments. We've already done that in several films in Hollywood. How does continuing to do that break new ground? Why not come at it from the other angle? Hey guys here's this women that has accomplished a lot in field X. You should accept her because she knows what she is doing. Don't allow looks to come in to the equation.
I don't see what the problem is with saying that the bar should be higher if we are going to break new ground for the representation of women in mainstream media?
herman said:
What I also don't understand is why the standard it sounds like you're holding to the feminist ideals of this film outstrip its context in reality. Women already have so many extra rungs to climb to be taken seriously, and Cameron's comments are saying this didn't climb enough.
We shouldn't be calling something ground breaking if it doesn't move the needle towards the end goal. If we don't move the needle, but we all act like we did, then we aren't really making progress. We are just spinning our tires in the same spot doing the same thing over again.
As Nik mentioned this movie does help because of it's financial success, so it has given Gal Godot the power to dictate some of what is going to happen with the next film, which is great. That's a positive to be taken from that. But that has more to do with the financial success of the movie than it does with the overall message that the movie is trying to portray.
Taking the movie content as it is and offers up and then saying "Yes now Women have someone they can look up to. It's a super model princess who is a demi-god." and saying that this is a ground breaking moment in cinametic history for women seems like an overstatement of what has happened. It's kind of like calling a hockey player generational because you want everybody to know just how good he is. It may be that he isn't actually generational but he still is pretty good.
herman said:
The Bechdel Test is not a scale that rates movies' greatness, by the way. It's merely a check to see if the movie or show fulfills the following criteria:
1. It has to have at least two [named] women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something besides a man
If you scroll through the list, something as simple as two women interacting for their own sake is astonishingly rare.
[/quote]
I knew what the scale was. I had heard about it during Iron Man 3. The article that I read about it in was about how comic book movies are good for women because they pass the checks. Again, if that is the scale that we are using to measure how well a movie represents women, Wonder Woman didn't really break any ground there, because Iron Man 3 passed those check in 2013, 3 years prior to the release of Wonder Woman. The big difference being that main characters genders switched places (Steve Trevor <--> Pepper Potts, Tony Stark <--> Princess Diana).
herman said:
Men got the writing credits for
Wonder Woman as a function of how
screenwriting credits work, and how WB wanted the DCEU to come together under Snyder's vision, but it is quite clear women were behind a good number of the
story, costume, and directorial choices (which they, naturally/ironically, barely got recognition for).
Well hooray for those women. They did the work and got very little credit. Sounds fair.