With the week over at last, and with a lot more stability than last time, I leave you with these final thoughts.
With the week over at last, and with a lot more stability than last time, I leave you with these final thoughts.
First, on the announcement front, we're planning a themed week where we focus on a specific show and how it relates to a specific country's climate. The week will begin the week after I acquire the pic I need to illustrate my point: a specific No Girls Allowed entry involving something culturally specific... but not to our culture.
Now for the meat of things. This week was the week of the Oscars. Not too keen on all the politics, but that's the current era; we're already the Divided States of America, and part of me wonders if that was intentional.
Now, the Oscars are ostensibly supposed to promote excellence in filmmaking. They don't; this fact has been documented several times. So, because of that, I wanted to talk about a trend that's been bugging me, and yes, it involves the way female nudity is used.
Today we're talking about Science Fiction, or Space Fantasy or Future Fantasy or whatever unscientific thing they're calling it now. Typically Sci-Fi has been seen as the realm of nerds, and the typical perception of a nerd is someone who is scrawny with a nasally voice and glasses, who'll never get a date because they're too much of a geek. For that reason, Hollywood has always had a problem with getting their beloved 18-year-old males to see it, since all they're gonna come up with it people who're more interested in gadgetry and tech than anything 18-year-old males are "supposed" to like. Give me a fictional universe and you can bet a large portion of the fanbase has created its own explanations for how everything works, all in incomprehensible gibberish that sounds scientific but means nothing.
So the Hollywood execs decided to go the extra mile and add sexy women, because that seems to be their default to how to "improve" things.
Thus we get stuff like Oblivion, where a woman shows her butt as she skinny dips through the water; or Jupiter Ascending, where the first thing the camera does with a woman who had her youth restored is show her bare butt to the camera (there's a PG-13 joke here, but this blog is trying to be family-friendly); or Terminator 3, where a sexy female Terminator travels back in time, and shows her butt (noticing a trend here?) to the camera. Sex was even added to both of the first two new Star Trek films, showing women in underwear for no reason other than gratuitous pandering. One shot even held a clue to a viral website, with the assumption being the perverted 18-year-old male viewer would be too distracted ogling the woman to notice or care. I think it's safe to say Gene Roddenberry would never approve of his franchise going in that direction.
There's a particularly insidious side to this, too. Men get to show their butts on camera in these films, too, and it's getting more and more common. There's X-Men: Days of Future Past with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, The Martian with the main hero of that film, and now that the T-800's being used more as a hero now, he has that, too. The common link between all of these is that these men are the heroes, while the women being exposed are all villains. It's essentially sending the signal that attractive men are good guys, but attractive women are evil. It also sends the message that a woman should never be intimate or proud of their bodies, or they're bad people for some undefined reason other than society being run by men and standards being hard to break.
But don't worry! There are heroic women who bare all in fiction. There just aren't any villainous men who do the same. Clearly the director doesn't want the girls to fall in love with the bad guy. Feel free for the guys to bag the bad gal, though!
This is just an example of the double standard of how nudity is used in fiction with regards to men and women. Once again, female nudity is being put somewhere it doesn't belong just to titillate the perverted guys in the audience. But when it comes to equal-opportunity fanservice, there's specific rules that make them look good. I have no love for Hollywood, not as long as they keep doing things like this and making it seem acceptable.
So why pat Hollywood on the back when they deserve to be slapped instead?
First, on the announcement front, we're planning a themed week where we focus on a specific show and how it relates to a specific country's climate. The week will begin the week after I acquire the pic I need to illustrate my point: a specific No Girls Allowed entry involving something culturally specific... but not to our culture.
Now for the meat of things. This week was the week of the Oscars. Not too keen on all the politics, but that's the current era; we're already the Divided States of America, and part of me wonders if that was intentional.
Now, the Oscars are ostensibly supposed to promote excellence in filmmaking. They don't; this fact has been documented several times. So, because of that, I wanted to talk about a trend that's been bugging me, and yes, it involves the way female nudity is used.
Today we're talking about Science Fiction, or Space Fantasy or Future Fantasy or whatever unscientific thing they're calling it now. Typically Sci-Fi has been seen as the realm of nerds, and the typical perception of a nerd is someone who is scrawny with a nasally voice and glasses, who'll never get a date because they're too much of a geek. For that reason, Hollywood has always had a problem with getting their beloved 18-year-old males to see it, since all they're gonna come up with it people who're more interested in gadgetry and tech than anything 18-year-old males are "supposed" to like. Give me a fictional universe and you can bet a large portion of the fanbase has created its own explanations for how everything works, all in incomprehensible gibberish that sounds scientific but means nothing.
So the Hollywood execs decided to go the extra mile and add sexy women, because that seems to be their default to how to "improve" things.
Thus we get stuff like Oblivion, where a woman shows her butt as she skinny dips through the water; or Jupiter Ascending, where the first thing the camera does with a woman who had her youth restored is show her bare butt to the camera (there's a PG-13 joke here, but this blog is trying to be family-friendly); or Terminator 3, where a sexy female Terminator travels back in time, and shows her butt (noticing a trend here?) to the camera. Sex was even added to both of the first two new Star Trek films, showing women in underwear for no reason other than gratuitous pandering. One shot even held a clue to a viral website, with the assumption being the perverted 18-year-old male viewer would be too distracted ogling the woman to notice or care. I think it's safe to say Gene Roddenberry would never approve of his franchise going in that direction.
There's a particularly insidious side to this, too. Men get to show their butts on camera in these films, too, and it's getting more and more common. There's X-Men: Days of Future Past with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, The Martian with the main hero of that film, and now that the T-800's being used more as a hero now, he has that, too. The common link between all of these is that these men are the heroes, while the women being exposed are all villains. It's essentially sending the signal that attractive men are good guys, but attractive women are evil. It also sends the message that a woman should never be intimate or proud of their bodies, or they're bad people for some undefined reason other than society being run by men and standards being hard to break.
But don't worry! There are heroic women who bare all in fiction. There just aren't any villainous men who do the same. Clearly the director doesn't want the girls to fall in love with the bad guy. Feel free for the guys to bag the bad gal, though!
This is just an example of the double standard of how nudity is used in fiction with regards to men and women. Once again, female nudity is being put somewhere it doesn't belong just to titillate the perverted guys in the audience. But when it comes to equal-opportunity fanservice, there's specific rules that make them look good. I have no love for Hollywood, not as long as they keep doing things like this and making it seem acceptable.
So why pat Hollywood on the back when they deserve to be slapped instead?