Last night I attended Bettakultcha event, hosted at the Leeds Student Union. It was a fantastic night and as far as I could see from where I was sitting, went pretty smoothly. Then, once home, I made the potential mistake of opening up Tweekdeck to the #bettakultcha hashtag. There I discovered, a perhaps dying horse, that I shall give one last flogging to.
Between presentations last night, a short film was shown. At least, it was attempted to be shown, since about half way through it finally gave up due to technical difficulties. As far as I could see at the time, there was nothing in the film that was outrageous or beyond mildly controversial.
It turns out however, that there was a rather large altercation between a member of the audience and the producer of the film. There was also a fair amount of overspill on twitter — mostly divided between people who thought that the film was sexist and disagreed with its showing, and those who didn’t think it was sexist and were therefore okay with it. Usually, there would also be people who thought it was sexist, but were okay with that, but Bettakultcha is a fairly progressive crowd. In order words, nobody was arguing in favour of misogyny, just the interpretation of this particular film.
For anyone who hasn’t read Exploring Leeds’ version of events, that’s probably the most level-headed place to start.
Now here’s my problem: I have spoken out against sexism, I despise misogynists and I am all for fairer positioning of women in the media, but no matter how I look at it, I simplycannot interpret the short film we saw last night as sexist* . It’s not that I know it’s sexist and think it’s okay, I just don’t think it is. I know I’m repeating myself there, but it’s important.
* Since writing this initially, having spoken to people on the other side of the disagreement and actually becoming friends with some of them, I do now understand and appreciate their point of view. I still don’t entirely agree, but I can see where they’re coming from.
The film in question, Killing Amy, is presented in the format of a Bettakultcha presentation, where the killer gives a sideshow talk on his motivations and methodology for the murder. The film includes a very brief section of fairly sexual imagery – slightly risqué, but certainly not what I’d call “hardcore porn”. I’m not sure whether it was this alone which provoked the film to be branded as sexist, or this in the context of the rest of the film, but the buzzwords flying around twitter seemed to be “sexist snuff porn”.
I agree with ExploringLeeds that perhaps a short warning before the film would have been pertinent. I also agree that the reaction in terms of heckling was absolutely the wrong response. We all see things we don’t particularly like on a daily basis, but if the movement for equality wants to be taken seriously then we need to do things in a professional manner. A quiet word with the organisers would have been far more suitable.
What I don’t agree with is that the film needed any apologies. I’m not going to talk about whether the film was great or poor, vanilla or controversial, but I don’t think it was misogynistic. I’ve heard a lot of words thrown around on Twitter, but very few solid arguments as to why the film should be considered sexist. Well, here’s a few reasons why it shouldn’t:
- The message was in-character. Even if the protagonist of the film was sexist, that doesn’t mean the film itself is. In turn, that character was portrayed as a bad guy, so the film didn’t endorse his views or actions.
- The film was realistic. Most murders of this type are men who kill women. That’s a fact that doesn’t change whether we like it or not. I’m not saying we should revel in that fact, but statistically speaking, male-on-female violence is more prevelent.
- We only saw the first few minutes of the film. Combine this oversight with the first point and apply it elsewhere? Suddenly American History X is a film about how awesome it is to be a neo-nazi murderer. I’m not personally prepared to judge the film on what we saw.
- Just because the “porn” scene (that I’m not sure I’d call porn) included a woman doesn’t make it sexist.
- Just because it contained “porn” doesn’t make it sexist. Porn isn’t inherently sexist. Sure, most mainstream porn is geared towards men, but you can’t retrospectively apply that as an attribute of the medium — that’s a non sequitur.
- I’d hardly call it “porn” anyway. What was shown in that film was certainly no more explicit than many mainstream films. When you consider that Antichrist, Seven Songs, Baise Moi and Cannibal Holocaust have all been shown in regular cinemas, it makes this film look pretty damn tame. That said, I don’t think the sexualisation of women in Hollywood films is okay — but we do have to judge things relative to the zeitgeist.
- It’s certainly not “snuff” – I mean, for a start, there wasn’t any violence whatsoever in what we saw.
If anyone can enlighten me on exactly how the film was sexist, go for it, but even as someone who is vehemently feminist, I can’t find any aspect of it that is sexist. I also have to ask — and I know this is an argument usually used by sexists themselves, but I feel in this case it is fair to ask: would this argument have even come up if the male and female roles in the film were reversed?
*prepares for incoming flame wall*
Edit: There was a continuing debate (which ended amiably) on @claireOT’s blog.
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