The Third Estate Sunday Review focuses on politics and culture. We're an online magazine. We don't play nice and we don't kiss butt. In the words of Tuesday Weld: "I do not ever want to be a huge star. Do you think I want a success? I refused "Bonnie and Clyde" because I was nursing at the time but also because deep down I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of "Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue" or whatever it was called. It reeked of success."
Sunday, August 09, 2015
We Hate Stupidity
And too often, stupidity is all that Ms. magazine's blog has to offer.
Last week, brainless blogger Carter Sherman raved over Bryan Fuller who produces the violence porn series Hannibal (which NBC thankfully cancelled this summer).
She was thrilled because Bryan Fuller drew the line at rape.
He'd write episodes revolving around murder and torture and cannibalism but he's just not interested in rape.
Carter's gush included:
“I don’t want to do rape stories on the show because I don’t find them entertaining. I think that they’re exploitative,” Fuller told BuddyTV in 2014. “I just feel very strongly as a feminist and somebody who likes women. I just can’t derive any sort of entertainment pleasure from it.”
Last Saturday’s episode, “The Great Red Dragon,” reveals just how deeply this attitude is embedded in the show’s DNA. In the novel Red Dragon, a serial killer nicknamed the Tooth Fairy rapes his women victims’ near-dead (and dead) bodies. While Hannibal implies that this violation occurs, the show doesn’t linger on the details—in fact, only eager-eyed viewers likely notice that a sexual assault happened at all. Instead, Hannibal treats the women’s bodies with respect and grace. It emphasizes who the women were in life, how they mattered to the people who loved them. It doesn’t reduce them to their genitals.
Nor does the violence porn treat rape like anything other than a whispered aside.
For the record, rape is a crime.
It is an act of violence.
Bryan Fuller has no willies over other violence.
Maybe he's kidding himself about why he avoids portraying rape?
Just like he kids himself that doing yet another male dominated show is what a feminist would create?
Rape is rendered invisible -- the only violent crime that is -- and Ms. magazine thinks that's feminism?
Do they not realize how many women it took to get rape treated as a serious crime?
And now they applaud it being reduced to an offscreen whisper, a minor detail, not even a plot point?
Shame on them.