Why do I bother writing when they do it better?

[trinityvixen]

I think if I made my opinions on this post three times as long, I'd never express myself half so well as this post on Hit Girl at Jezebel. Just...wow.

One of many very important parts of her incredibly well thought out analysis:
But I do like [Shit Blows Up And A Lot Of People Die] movies as a rule, and so do about a gazillion other people, so it's probably safe to assume that liking them does not actually make you a bad person who struggles to be compassionate and non-violent in real life. It just means you can suspend your better nature for a short time in order to watch a lot of intense, terrifying shit happen to (and because of) a fictional character, provided you know that character has the intellectual, financial and physical resources to wind up safe and triumphant, and that the fictional people who get slaughtered along the way are all A) evil and B) trying to kill the hero first. Hit Girl is clearly shown to be such a character, fighting such characters. So if you can't stomach this well-established formula with her at the center of it, the obvious question is, are you usually willing to suspend empathy because of the character's resources and the good/evil thing and the knowledge that it is fiction, or because the hero usually has a dick and a deep voice?

And this, definitely this:
I like that I walked out of there with a gut reaction of "That was awesome!" immediately followed by an intellectual reaction of, "Damn, it's fucked up that I thought that was awesome." That tells me I just saw something new, if nothing else. And on further reflection, the new thing for me was not a violent, remorseless, brutalized, potty-mouthed child but a female action hero with all the agency and skill of a man, whom the audience is not supposed to want to fuck. That is a pretty awesome thing, even if it is also frankly pretty fucked up that I thought that movie was awesome.

Comments

[xannoside.livejournal.com]

This may be an odd thing to say, but I thought the film actually walked a suitably subtle (considering the subject matter, obviously) line in regards to Hit Girl in that she was able to retain her gender as a character without it being used as a weapon against her while still being able to take hits like a true super-hero.

Does anyone want to count the number of times Wonder Woman has been "restrained" by captors in the comics? Or the number of times rape is threatened or implied when a super-heroine is in trouble?

Not saying that can't be done right (but it pretty much never is), but for whatever reason it's something that was completely avoided with Hit Girl without compromising the character, and I think that's notable.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

What you're noticing is a lack of sexualization of the character, something the author of the Jezebel post outlines very well. Part of what makes Hit Girl so shocking is that she isn't sexualized. There's even a joke about her behaving like a sexualized girl when she tells Big Daddy she wants a Bratz doll--those dolls are extremely sexual dolls, more so than Barbie. But, of course, Hit Girl doesn't really want them.

This lack of pointing out that she's a girl, and therefore an up-for-grabs sexualized object, is only really possible because she's underage. We sexualize EVERYTHING these days. They make high-heeled baby booties. The only way for a woman NOT to be sexual is to not be physically developed enough to be considered sexual. So, sadly, the only way to escape being ogled or threatened with rape is to have no breasts, to be barely sexually identifiable as female. Our society might not like that Hit Girl is being regarded as awesome, but our society makes it impossible to regard grown women as awesome because, as the post points out, the second a woman has breasts, the film will exploit this breast-having condition. It's really sad.