A quick note on objectification
I just realized why it felt so good to see a movie (Mad Max: Fury Road) that could talk about the horror that is rape and sexual violence without feeling the need to show any of the violence for “impact.” It’s not just the horror of seeing that kind of degradation of women, it’s that those kinds of scenes reinforce the objectification and make the viewer complicit in it. A human being, albeit a fictional one, is being used as an object to entertain the viewer or to get them to react. How can you claim to be speaking out against the objectification of women if you objectify them with the very art you’re making to show the wrongness of it?
We know what happened to the Wives. We don’t need to see it for ourselves. We don’t need to make them into objects to spark our feelings of outrage or disgust. We are outraged at their treatment because they are human beings. Fury Road has the integrity to insist that women ARE NOT THINGS, and then it backs up that statement with EVERY SINGLE SECOND of screen time.
Coming on the heels of my disappointment with show GoT’s choices in depicting the Sansa/Ramsay/Theon arc, the contrast with how Fury Road dealt with that issue was striking, and this analysis gets to the heart of what was different about it.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1JkaQrz.
Tags: GoT, tw: rape, fury road, objectification.
