My name is Michelle Mercer, and I am a feminist. Coincidentally, I'm also a nerd. While much of the time the two labels fit well together, there's always a few problematic subcategories of "nerd". When you find yourself forced to represent half the world to a group of people that often act like they've never seen a woman before, you start to wonder--why are things the way they are? Why is it everyone assumes I couldn't possibly be a Wes Craven fan, or love Isaac Asimov, or own every issue of The Amazing Spider-Man?
The truth is simple--because I am a woman.
Almost since the horror genre was invented, women have been systematically placed in the role of victim, particularly hyper-sexualized objectified victims. They prance around helpless and naked, damsels in distress waiting for their buffed-up brute of a hero to come to their rescue wielding grenades and chainsaws and whatever phallic weapons happen to be in their extensive and readily available arsenal. We may be entertained, scream, or laugh it off, but really that is exactly what such images are – extensive and readily available. They've been around so long and have saturated so much of our pop-culture and media that it's difficult to see the wrong in them anymore. Every Halloween yields more slasher flicks, alien abduction flicks, and scary-sexy costumes, and every year they are consumed by droves of high schoolers and teenagers – whether they actively participate in this culture or not. Nowadays it is nearly impossible to find a horror or science fiction genre film or novel that doesn't make use of the sex appeal of women, along with many stereotypes thereof.
However, this objectification and victimization (literally) isn't always so easy to spot, isn't even always present. In fact, countless popular horror and science fiction films and novels place a woman at the center as the leading protagonist and heroine, who must use her resourcefulness and cunning to defeat the evil that befalls her, often through no direct fault of her own. At its surface, this would seem to be a position of empowerment for women – and sometimes it is – but the social backdrop for these authorial decisions does not stem from nothing, especially when they are made by women.
Women are powerful in horror, science fiction, and Gothic genre film, literature, and other media because of their difficulty to occupy a position of power in any other context other than the unreal, and so this specific type of media is used as a vehicle to portray feminist agendas of empowerment and garner sympathy with an audience. We as women admire characters like Jane Eyre and Ellen Ripley of the Alien saga because they are strong independent women that seem to overcome anything and everything in their way, even mad women in attics and 13-foot monsters from outer space. But could they really overcome the much more complicated, much less physical hurdle of social stratification that defines the current and historical position of women in our society? Are these films and novels successful in their feminist endeavors?
This is what I hope to find out.
This is what I hope to find out.
I understand this very well but I think you miss a huge point. I would love if films would be reversed and guys could be the victims and women could be saving them. I think you wouldn't just get opposition from men with this you would get opposition from women. I think because some women still hold onto this idea that men should save them. I mean guys have to Jacob Black or something like that and even Jacob wasn't good enough...I think until both men and women change their views nothing will change. Women have to realize that they can't wish to be empowered but at the same time be treated with old chivalrous courtesy. ((For example don't be surprised if I don't hold the door open for you because you wanted to be treated equal.))
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