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In movies and TV, film makers are usually more wiling to show males get injured, dismembered and violently attacked than women. Usually, when a woman is the victim of extreme violence, the camera will cut away from the act and just use a sound effect instead.
Obviously, this is not always true, but its pattern that is well known.
I think men in real life are more physical as far as fighting and also in aggressive criminal acts. There are some BA women out there but the majority is still the men.
I woulnt agree with your premise of violence against men being more accepted. Whole francises are based on violence against women, perpetrated by men. Criminal Minds comes to mind with its parade of nubile 20 year olds begging for their lives. Torture porn light.
Actually showing the hitting is more acceptable man on man. But I think that's because men hitting men is usually good guy vs bad guy. Whereas men beating women is just men beating women and yea, maybe we don't have much of a stomach for that reality.
Hollywood doesn't do anything if it doesn't make money. People shell out billions of dollars to watch X-Men, Avengers, Bourne, Bond, etc. both kick butt and get their clocks cleaned. If people started talking with their wallets, things might change.
Actually showing the hitting is more acceptable man on man. But I think that's because men hitting men is usually good guy vs bad guy. Whereas men beating women is just men beating women and yea, maybe we don't have much of a stomach for that reality.
I admit that the big end fight in X-Men and X-Men 2 when Wolverine was fighting the female villain, it made me really uncomfortable. Even if she was a villain and trying to kill him, inside I was screaming at Wolverine, "Boys don't hit girls!"
In movies and TV, film makers are usually more wiling to show males get injured, dismembered and violently attacked than women. Usually, when a woman is the victim of extreme violence, the camera will cut away from the act and just use a sound effect instead.
Obviously, this is not always true, but its pattern that is well known.
Thoughts?
This trope is being reversed or upended in the superhero and science fiction genres, where it can philosophically argued that the superhero females are as physically robust as the superhero males.
That can't be claimed for the most part in "realistic" screenplays.
For some reason men are dominating the movies-world so I guess the paying audience (men) likes violence and men as producers wants to fullfill all movies by violence (also fairytales) and actors wants to act violent roles to not to be bored to death.. I don't know if many boyfriends would come to watch nice movies with girls where nothing bad happend to anyone.. They might sleep it into the end.
I miss movies without violence but there is no many available. They tend to ruin all romantic movies too so I keep watching few old good movies again and again, lol
If the woman is going to be violent, she is going to do it at a distance and not get close up ......... where her makeup may get messed up.
Ie, defecting KGB General in "The Living Daylights" (Some of the best KGB snipers are women); Buffy (Goodbye, stake; hello, flying fatality!); Battlestar Galactica (Starbuck: In or out of the cockpit, I'm still the best shot you've got); Meg Foster shafted the enemy in The Osterman Weekend.
Now, of course, that is not across the board. Buffy still beats the thanksgiving stuffing out of people. Michelle took out machine gun armed guards with hand to hand in "Tomorrow Never Dies". The Bride seemed to always wanted to see her prey eye to eye.
In one of my psychology classes, we given the scenario of killing someone and it was shooting them from a distance, knocking them over the back of the head, or being face to face and strangling them. The prof told us that most non criminal people would pick option 1 or 2 but not 3 because most people do not have it in them to look those they are killing or hurting in the eye when they do it.
So maybe, movie wise, it is more about showing that men have the guts to do what they do.
One final thing on this. One of my co workers once "joked" that I worried him, that I seemed to be type to jump out of the bushes and try to shoot someone.
"Heck," I replied, "you don't have to worry about that. If we ever came to blows, I'd take you out at distance with a sniper rifle.".
The first word out of his mouth was "Coward!". From Leon in The Professional to Remo Williams in The Destroyer books, it seems that if one is not willing to get up close and personal, they are shown as being a lowly, unworthy type of person. If so, then it does not suit Hollywood to show the Hero of a flick like that............but how much of the audience cares how the heroine is shown?
The point of the OP (which I somewhat forgot) is not who is doing the violence but who is having the violence done to them.
Audiences are very much titillated by the threat and thought of violence done to women (female audiences as much as male audiences), but few audiences are entertained by a graphic depiction of violence to women.
Violence done to women depicted graphically in most societies is still startling and disturbing. Like violence done to children, violence done to women is used to depict the most vile of villains, the bad guy who must surely be killed by the final reel, not just defeated.
This is probably, IMO, a continued social belief that women are intrinsically and individually more valuable to the survival of a society than males are...males are simply more expendable.
Am I the only one who finds it amusing that Chriz Brown is asking about violence against women? [CENTER]Save[/CENTER]
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