The title isn't really a joke; more and more, with the sheer number of willfully ignorant and hateful people infesting this nation, I think a zombie apocalypse or another giant asteroid might actually make things better.
So what has me pissed off today? I'm glad you asked, disembodied source of inquiry! There are two things that are really making me angry as of this moment. The first is the NRA and the second is the marriage equality debate, and both have to do with equal rights under the Constitution.
First off, the marriage equality debate should not be a debate. At all. The Constitution is pretty clear on this in the 14th Amendment, providing equal rights and protection under the law for all US citizens. Ever since Loving v. State of Virginia, marriage and all the laws/protections provided thereby are counted as rights for anyone willing to make use of them. This isn't quantum physics or an attempt to prove Toni Morrison isn't a repetitive and formulaic writer; things are pretty damn straightforward.
I will illuminate: According to US law, no citizen can be denied equal rights and protections under law. Also according to US law, marriage is a right that provides more than 1,500 protections. Therefore, since even criminals are still permitted to marry, there is quite simply nothing legally preventing homosexuals from getting married and any preventions thereof are demonstrably unConstitutional.
The only things in opposition to the very real legal imperative to permit marriage equality are the religious and right-wing lobbies. For some reason lawmakers are so scared shitless of these groups that they are willing to ignore unConstitutional laws being written into existence and to permit the obliteration of every principle upon which this country was founded.
The nation of the United States of America was founded on the principle of religious freedom. No religion could impose its rule onto the people of the nation. Should "Christian" laws get ratified by the Supreme Court, this nation will have obliterated one of its oldest tenets.
The only thing preventing our Supreme Court from doing the right thing is a combination of personal bias and fear of retaliation. If we had given in to petty squabbles and fear of a violent presence instead of standing as one, this nation would never have been founded. Every moment of hesitation on the part of the Supreme Court is another moment spent shitting on each and every person who died defending this country or who dedicated their lives to ensuring the survival and correct course of our nation.
Now, since I don't really have a segue, let's just take a moment and shift gears. From the legally-ensured right to the Pursuit of Happiness, let's move to the right to Life. Hey, that was a segue after all!
So the NRA have started sending robocalls into Newtown, just three months after the Sandy Hook massacre. Well of course they are; after all, how long do you have to take to get over your children's deaths? They're just noisy little bastards who aren't good for anything. You can't even get 'em to work since those silly child-labor laws got passed. Like any other possession, it should only take a month or two for you to get over it and focus on what's really important, like guns!
The Second Amendment is one of the least-contested of the Constitutional Amendments and for the life of me I can't see why. The entire point of the Second Amendment, as written into the Bill of Rights, was to ensure that the states could protect themselves should another nation invade or a civil war between states stir up. That was the reason for the first phrase in the Amendment: "A well-regulated militia." Well, now we have a well-regulated militia. It's called the National Guard. State militias have been outlawed, since heavily-armed groups with questionable sanity and morals are a threat to everyone else, so there's really no need for all these firearms.
Of course, the Supreme Court spat in the eyes of our Founding Fathers on that one, ruling that the well-regulated militia part of the Second Amendment was outdated and everybody had a right to guns whether they intended to defend their nation from invasion or just planned to kill their governors.
Gun violence in this country should have reached its saturation point last year with the sheer number of mass shootings, but sadly it seems that no number of dead children and loved ones can sway gun-lovers' hearts. Apparently a chunk of metal designed for murder is more important than the life of your spouse or parent or child.
The illegal firearms trade is inextricably linked to the war on drugs. By turning drug possession into a multi-billion-dollar black market, we've made it a requirement for all drug peddlers - from cartel lords to street pushers - to carry guns so they can murder one another and take territory. Basically we established an underground repeat of early-Renaissance mercantilism, and we all know how fucking well that turned out.
Honestly, I foresee that if the underground drug trade were killed through legalization, taxation, recuperation programs and the decriminalization of those users inadvertently hooked, the illegal firearms trade would all but dry up. There just isn't any other major money-earner for gangs that can be hidden and shipped so effectively, so gangs wouldn't have the income to continue buying guns and their rackets would be easier to shatter.
And then, when the illegal gun trade is practically dead, perhaps people's eyes will be opened to the wanton slaughter perpetrated by psychotic alpha-types when they feel their authority is threatened, or by self-styled victims who decide to lash out.
We've created this mess, true, but we can still undo the horrors we've helped to bring into existence. We need to follow the moral compass provided by human empathy and common sense. It's not that hard; it's just inconvenient sometimes, and some people would rather a million innocents die than they be inconvenienced for a minute.
Goodnight, and stay safe.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Monday, March 4, 2013
Gender Confusion
Last night I re-watched one of my all-time favorite action movies, The Long Kiss Goodnight. For anyone who hasn't seen it, I'll give a brief rundown while keeping as spoiler-free as I can: Geena Davis plays Samantha Cane, a woman with amnesia looking for her past while caring for her daughter. She's accompanied by Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson), a rather sleazy but kindhearted PI. They discover that Samantha - or rather, Charlene - is much more than she thought she was; Charly Baltimore was one of the US government's best assassins before she was presumed KIA.
The movie has some of the most heartfelt moments, some of the most genuine and natural humor, and some of the greatest action scenes ever shot. Both heroes and villains stay within the realm of believability while still being almost impossibly badass.
This and Davis' other mid-90s adventure movie, Cutthroat Island, should have spawned a wave of female action stars by sheer virtue of their awesomeness alone. And yet, they didn't.
...Well, why the fuck not!?
"That's Discrimination!"
Let's face it, for as liberal as Hollywood's actors and writers tend to be, those with the real power - CEOs, marketers, accounts managers - tend to be horribly bigoted even today. Despite more and more evidence to the contrary, many bigwigs still seem convinced that a movie won't sell because it stars a woman in an unconventional role, or because it stars any manner of minority. So they set it up as a self-fulfilling prophecy by investing next to nothing into advertisement campaigns so that when the movie doesn't sell well they can say 'I told you so.'
But is this genuinely a conspiracy? Or just the result of generations of fiscal cowardice? We all know that most of the über-rich would eat their firstborn rather than part with a single penny of their money, so the fear that something might not sell has to turn them into economic hermit crabs. This wasn't like when Sidney Poitier got top billing on In the Heat of the Night. Race relations were improving, wounds were slowly beginning to heal, and the nation could take steps toward acceptance.
The 90s were a time of discovery, social upheaval and an attempt to forge a new status quo. The most enduring fear ever to breathe down America's neck, the USSR, had just given its death rattle. We were no longer told by our government to look over our shoulder with every step. It was the perfect time for new beginnings.
And yet nothing came of it. Shit, we had more female action stars per capita in the 80s with the likes of Cynthia Rothrock. And yes, while in real life Rothrock does kick all kinds of major ass, her movies were kind of...shit. Is it really that executives can't comprehend a woman being in such a strong role?
"I Love a Woman who can Kick my Ass"
Beyond Good and Evil. Tales of Symphonia. Metroid. Surprisingly enough, video games - the genre that's often decried as being a haven for male power fantasies - have far more and far better female protagonists than Hollywood can credit to its own action franchises. Let's just list the badass ladies from these games alone:
Beyond Good and Evil:
Jade, journalist and martial artist working to uncover the truth of a dark web of conspiracies invading every aspect of a nightmarish war between human and alien. All she has is a camera and a bo staff, yet she's determined to expose the lies even if it kills her.
Tales of Symphonia:
Colette, the one Chosen to save the world. She suffers silently, shouldering the burden of her own inevitable death in order to spare her friends from panic. She hides her pain behind a curtain of happy-go-luckiness and inextinguishable optimism, yet anyone who's played the game properly knows better than to just classify her as a 'genki girl' or a brainless blonde. In her vulnerable moments it's clear that Colette knows exactly what is expected of her and is grimly resigned to her fate. She doesn't take pride in her sacrifice; the only thing keeping her sane is knowing that her death will protect those she loves.
Sheena, the assassin sent to exterminate Colette before she can sacrifice herself. Her self-confidence and almost vicious nature in initial meetings belies her deep fears and insecurities. She has failed before and it has cost the lives of her loved ones. Failure again means that everyone dies. Her suffering as more and more family and friends die around her is palpable, but so is her resolve to stop the endless cycle of murder.
Metroid:
I'm pretty sure that everyone's heard of Metroid and its titular character, the master bounty hunter Samus Aran. It was a surprise to everyone back in the 80s when the badass planet-killer turned out to be a woman. Through the years she has consistently been one of the icons of female power, able to stand fast against seemingly impossible odds and yet retain her beauty and almost delicate nature outside of her armor. Of course, 'delicate' is a relative term when she's 6'4" and can bench 250 lbs.
"In Conclusion..."
So why haven't we seen more genuinely good and well-marketed female action heroes in movies, or even more in video games? Certainly the marketers and executives shoulder a good deal of the blame, but just like in early feminism I think one of the worst enemies in this case is women themselves, or rather, in their response to such media.
Davis' Cutthroat Island has been torn apart by many 'feminists' who insist that her character isn't strong enough, or that she should be more independent and able to move freely like any man. *patpat* That's right, sweetums, let's just rewrite all of history for you. It's not like ever since Aristotle made his completely bigoted and false assumption about women simply being the incubation pods for babies - that is, not contributing anything more than space for a full child to be implanted by a man - that women have been discriminated against in the Western world. The Abrahamic religions certainly didn't make things any better, and brutal tribes such as the Mongols and the Vandals pretty much covered the rest of the known world for anti-woman stances.
Criticizing a period piece for having women forced to be subservient is like criticizing a mammal for having to defecate.
Some of the most common complaints are that the women are too much like men, or they aren't enough like men. It seems like you can never win. Someone's always quick to start a riot about sexism whenever boobs larger than an A-cup appear on a video game character, yet as the blog Busty Girl Problems (http://bustygirlcomics.com) will attest, real-life women with such figures are never so defended.
Fuck, Metroid: Other M was decried as demeaning and sexist for showing post-traumatic stress disorder coupled with the return of a father figure. Don't believe me about the PTSD? Just google Metroid and PTSD and see what articles pop up. Real soldiers complimented the game on how realistically it portrayed their suffering, yet armchair crusaders managed to shift popular opinion and shit all over a very real and well-handled issue.
So what's the real reason that more female-centric action movies and games haven't been made? There is none. There's just a bunch of prejudice and imagined issues that come together and keep legitimately good storytelling out of the spotlight.
So the next time you're watching a Jet Li movie, just think: 'In another world that could have been Angela Mao.'
Goodnight, and stay safe.
The movie has some of the most heartfelt moments, some of the most genuine and natural humor, and some of the greatest action scenes ever shot. Both heroes and villains stay within the realm of believability while still being almost impossibly badass.
This and Davis' other mid-90s adventure movie, Cutthroat Island, should have spawned a wave of female action stars by sheer virtue of their awesomeness alone. And yet, they didn't.
...Well, why the fuck not!?
"That's Discrimination!"
Let's face it, for as liberal as Hollywood's actors and writers tend to be, those with the real power - CEOs, marketers, accounts managers - tend to be horribly bigoted even today. Despite more and more evidence to the contrary, many bigwigs still seem convinced that a movie won't sell because it stars a woman in an unconventional role, or because it stars any manner of minority. So they set it up as a self-fulfilling prophecy by investing next to nothing into advertisement campaigns so that when the movie doesn't sell well they can say 'I told you so.'
But is this genuinely a conspiracy? Or just the result of generations of fiscal cowardice? We all know that most of the über-rich would eat their firstborn rather than part with a single penny of their money, so the fear that something might not sell has to turn them into economic hermit crabs. This wasn't like when Sidney Poitier got top billing on In the Heat of the Night. Race relations were improving, wounds were slowly beginning to heal, and the nation could take steps toward acceptance.
The 90s were a time of discovery, social upheaval and an attempt to forge a new status quo. The most enduring fear ever to breathe down America's neck, the USSR, had just given its death rattle. We were no longer told by our government to look over our shoulder with every step. It was the perfect time for new beginnings.
And yet nothing came of it. Shit, we had more female action stars per capita in the 80s with the likes of Cynthia Rothrock. And yes, while in real life Rothrock does kick all kinds of major ass, her movies were kind of...shit. Is it really that executives can't comprehend a woman being in such a strong role?
"I Love a Woman who can Kick my Ass"
Beyond Good and Evil. Tales of Symphonia. Metroid. Surprisingly enough, video games - the genre that's often decried as being a haven for male power fantasies - have far more and far better female protagonists than Hollywood can credit to its own action franchises. Let's just list the badass ladies from these games alone:
Beyond Good and Evil:
Jade, journalist and martial artist working to uncover the truth of a dark web of conspiracies invading every aspect of a nightmarish war between human and alien. All she has is a camera and a bo staff, yet she's determined to expose the lies even if it kills her.
Tales of Symphonia:
Colette, the one Chosen to save the world. She suffers silently, shouldering the burden of her own inevitable death in order to spare her friends from panic. She hides her pain behind a curtain of happy-go-luckiness and inextinguishable optimism, yet anyone who's played the game properly knows better than to just classify her as a 'genki girl' or a brainless blonde. In her vulnerable moments it's clear that Colette knows exactly what is expected of her and is grimly resigned to her fate. She doesn't take pride in her sacrifice; the only thing keeping her sane is knowing that her death will protect those she loves.
Sheena, the assassin sent to exterminate Colette before she can sacrifice herself. Her self-confidence and almost vicious nature in initial meetings belies her deep fears and insecurities. She has failed before and it has cost the lives of her loved ones. Failure again means that everyone dies. Her suffering as more and more family and friends die around her is palpable, but so is her resolve to stop the endless cycle of murder.
Metroid:
I'm pretty sure that everyone's heard of Metroid and its titular character, the master bounty hunter Samus Aran. It was a surprise to everyone back in the 80s when the badass planet-killer turned out to be a woman. Through the years she has consistently been one of the icons of female power, able to stand fast against seemingly impossible odds and yet retain her beauty and almost delicate nature outside of her armor. Of course, 'delicate' is a relative term when she's 6'4" and can bench 250 lbs.
"In Conclusion..."
So why haven't we seen more genuinely good and well-marketed female action heroes in movies, or even more in video games? Certainly the marketers and executives shoulder a good deal of the blame, but just like in early feminism I think one of the worst enemies in this case is women themselves, or rather, in their response to such media.
Davis' Cutthroat Island has been torn apart by many 'feminists' who insist that her character isn't strong enough, or that she should be more independent and able to move freely like any man. *patpat* That's right, sweetums, let's just rewrite all of history for you. It's not like ever since Aristotle made his completely bigoted and false assumption about women simply being the incubation pods for babies - that is, not contributing anything more than space for a full child to be implanted by a man - that women have been discriminated against in the Western world. The Abrahamic religions certainly didn't make things any better, and brutal tribes such as the Mongols and the Vandals pretty much covered the rest of the known world for anti-woman stances.
Criticizing a period piece for having women forced to be subservient is like criticizing a mammal for having to defecate.
Some of the most common complaints are that the women are too much like men, or they aren't enough like men. It seems like you can never win. Someone's always quick to start a riot about sexism whenever boobs larger than an A-cup appear on a video game character, yet as the blog Busty Girl Problems (http://bustygirlcomics.com) will attest, real-life women with such figures are never so defended.
Fuck, Metroid: Other M was decried as demeaning and sexist for showing post-traumatic stress disorder coupled with the return of a father figure. Don't believe me about the PTSD? Just google Metroid and PTSD and see what articles pop up. Real soldiers complimented the game on how realistically it portrayed their suffering, yet armchair crusaders managed to shift popular opinion and shit all over a very real and well-handled issue.
So what's the real reason that more female-centric action movies and games haven't been made? There is none. There's just a bunch of prejudice and imagined issues that come together and keep legitimately good storytelling out of the spotlight.
So the next time you're watching a Jet Li movie, just think: 'In another world that could have been Angela Mao.'
Goodnight, and stay safe.
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