So this afternoon I was talking to a friend about the different ghostbusters movies, and what the various pros and cons of them are. This reminded me of a situation I experienced when the movie first came out, and I have some OPINIONS about that, so strap in for a ride.
https://youtu.be/XG2sj_zmb-w
Here’s the context you’ll need. My friend and I wanted to watch a movie, and we had a few to pick from that she’d never seen before. One of the options was Ghostbusters, and that’s what we were leaning toward.
Her husband came in a minute later and asked which one we chose. On hearing that it was Ghostbusters, his actual reaction was, “Oh. Should I go to the other room?”
Both of us stared at him kind of dumbfounded. “Um. Why?” I asked, even as my friend said, “she came over to watch movies with us. Why would you leave while she’s still here?”
His reply was, “But isn’t that one a chick movie?”
The room was full of heavy implications that not only would it threaten his masculinity to watch a movie starring all women, but that having women cast in main roles literally changed the genre. As a bonus, he had absolutely no idea why I was shooting lasers through his head with my eyes, and why his wife got upset at him and demanded that he stay.
To be fair to him, he didn’t mean anything by it. He wasn’t consciously trying to denigrate women or promote toxic culture. He was just regurgitating cultural views that had been hammered into him for his whole life. (And so have we all, if we’re being honest.) Nevertheless, he still did it.
All of us have been socialized with stuff like that. The real difference between him and us in this context? He’s a white man. Nothing about having those views has ever harmed him. He’s never NOT seen himself in a movie before. He’s never had to get past the idea that good movie-making doesn’t revolve around seeing himself represented in something.
And so he ended up with this strange idea that he wasn’t welcome/allowed to watch something made about another demographic than his own.
The All-Girl Ghostbusters is Culturally Significant
We didn’t have a conversation about that at the time, but I really wish we had. (Although I am better prepared with vocabulary and long thought now than I would have been then.)
So let’s have that conversation now, even if it is a few years late.
You see, even though the new ghostbusters movie is a campy comedy, which purposely tells goofy jokes and has a bunch of nerds as main characters who do and say socially awkward things, IT MATTERS.
It really, truly does. And here’s my take on why.
Trope Subversion| Hey. I am a sucker for some good trope subversion anyway, so doing it well is always gonna be my cup of tea. Now, yes. Just as the original did, Ghostbusters relies heavily on using tropes to make a joke or point. And it does it well.
But when it subverts a trope, it doesn’t just do it for kicks and giggles. Many of the twists are very purposeful. The girls having to rescue the dude (which we will talk about in a sec). Making the mathy, sciency, tech character not be a dude. Even having the big bad at the end take a bunch of shapes that weren’t the expected scary things. (Which the original also did with the marshmallow guy.)
Over everything else, though, is the fact that there isn’t a token girl. How many times do we get a show or a game where the main team is a whole cast of dudes, all with different quirks and traits, and then there’s the one girl. Often whose quirk/trait is that she’s the girl?
Smurfette
Miss Piggy (Earlier on, anyway, Pre-Janice. But even then, Janice is pretty minor.)
Princess Leia
Penny in The Big Bang Theory (at least in seasons 1–3)
Elaine Benes in Seinfeld
Kanga in Winnie-the-Pooh
April in The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy
Black Widow in early Marvel (pre-Valkyrie and Captain Marvel)
Eleven in Stranger Things
Wonder Woman in many Justice League iterations
Hermione Granger
Dot from Animaniacs
Gadget from Rescue Rangers
Eowyn (sorta. She’s awesome, but not really even an MC. Still the only LOTR girl who does anything at all.)
Wendy the Koopaling from the Mario franchise
Buttercup in Princess Bride
Laura Dern’s character in Jurassic Park
Bryce Dallas Howard in Jurassic World
Karen Gillan’s character in the newer Jumanji. (I don’t think it counts that Jack Black was playing a teenage girl. He’s still Jack Black.)
Uhura in Star Trek (old AND new. The recent ones have not been better.)
This list is nowhere near exhaustive, and it’s already unreasonably long. This phenomenon is called the Smurfette Principle, and as you can see by this list, it is not limited to days long past.
(Watch these links)
Don’t get me wrong, it is getting better. I mean, this last Star Wars movie had Carrie Fisher, Laura Dern, AND Daisy Ridley all in the same movie. (Albeit never all in the same room, sadly.)
We’ve gotten gems like Murder on the Orient Express that gathered a large number of amazing actresses all in the same train. MIchelle Pfeiffer, Judi Dench, Daisy Ridley, Penelope Cruz, and Olivia Colman. (Cast still had twice as many men, but like, this is good!)
But the fact remains that in this, the year two thousand nineteen, the age of smartphones and robots on mars, we are still getting movies that act like the human population is 85% male.
It’s so ingrained in our collective psyche that I once started writing a book that was a bit of a heist story, and was putting together my characters for the crew. I ended up with three men and three women. Then my traitorous brain thought—just for a half second though!—is this too many women? Should I change one of them?
A mere moment later, I realized what I had done, and how silly it was. The numbers were even. But we are taught to see more men than women as equal balance. (There are scientific studies about this which are very fascinating.)
And if this can happen to me, someone who is aggressively active in trying to subvert toxic behaviors in media, it can easily happen to anyone. It will still happen to anyone, until we make active, conscious changes to the media we produce.
Movies like Ghostbusters and Ocean’s 8 do that. They are massively important because they provide hard evidence that a movie can be well-crafted and also star women. That female movies are not outliers or niche only. That a sci-fi story can just have girls in it and still be a sci-fi movie.
They show women being successful at doing the exact same thing men have done in a similar movie, and pulling it off with flying colors. They show that there is a market for that sort of thing. They show that movies with women in them are not just for women.
These movies are important for people like my little nieces, who are lucky enough to be growing up in an age where they have cool action women to look up to in media. Where they are shown that they can be anything they want to be, and not just the idiot secretary or the sexy decoration or the action hero that’s only actiony because her personality is just a man with boobs.
(Look. I love Xena. I really do. But man with boobs.)
If I’d had movies like this as a kid, so much of my life would have been different. (And easier, honestly). This is a topic for an entire other post, but my single greatest regret in life is that I didn’t have Sofia the First as a kid teaching me that girliness wasn’t shameful. Or having Holtzmann teaching me that girls could do science if they wanted to. I could have been spared a lot of growing pains and figured stuff out about myself so much sooner.
I want my nieces to have what I didn’t. And that’s why this movie matters.
Genderbending| The thing about this one is that most of the men who hate it think that it’s just a gimmick. In fact, a lot of women even think it’s a gimmick as well.
The problem with that? It reinforces the idea that if a man is in a thing, it can be serious or funny, but if a woman is in it, it can only be a joke or a marketing ploy. And that, in turn, socializes u s further into the “maleness is cool and girliness is embarrassing or lesser” hole.
Ghostbusters deals with this amazingly on a number of levels. The most obvious example being the intentional use of Chris Hemsworth’s character as a secretary who doesn’t pass the sexy lamp test and must eventually be rescued.
It’s simultaneously funny and poignant. Because let’s be honest, how many times has a movie done the exact same thing to a female secretary and no one noticed? There are even female main characters who don’t pass that test.
And as funny as the sexy lamp test is, it’s also not completely a joke.
Flipping the switch on the stereotype of the stupid secretary hangs a lantern on it. We’re not used to seeing a dude who is that incompetent being surrounded by brilliant women. It makes some (mostly men) uncomfortable, as a result. And that, in turn, reminds us, however subtly, that it IS a stereotype and not just the way women are.
If seeing a thing happen to a man makes you uncomfortable, why is it okay happening to a woman?
On that note is the discussion about why four dudes in the 80s can run around being super dorky/awkward, womanizing, and making dick jokes, and can come across as likable heroes all the same, while four women who run around being super dorky/awkward, inventing cool gadgets, and making jokes that don’t rely on genitalia to get a laugh are somehow considered annoying and unlikeable.
That’s a sincere complaint I have heard multiple times about the girl ghostbusters and never once about the boy ghostbusters. Yet (and this is partially subjective, of course) the boy ghostbusters are honestly either the same or worse, in terms of doing annoying crap.
Bill Murray’s character is trash. He spends the whole movie treating women like prizes to win or objects to own, but still gets the girl at the end after literally having changed nothing about himself to make her like him, when she didn’t in the beginning. He makes dick jokes all over the place and kinda just acts like nothing anyone says or does is as important as himself.
But this isn’t annoying? Because I find it highly offputting. What I don’t find offputting? A scientist being a little socially awkward, but trying her best.
Why does our society expect women to be pristine paragons before they are acceptable, but men can be literal garbage, but are considered awesome for doing one cool thing? (Yes, I’m looking at you, Snape.)
A great example of this is Katara, from Avatar: The Last Airbender. A surprisingly high number of people I’ve talked to think she’s the most boring character in the whole show. Which seems odd to me, since she becomes one of the strongest waterbenders in the world, takes out Azula when Zuko couldn’t, has a very strong moral compass, is amazing at taking care of everyone in the group (who would certainly not get by without her), has fantastic courage, and on top of all that is gorgeous.
Why? Well, “womanly” work is largely invisible. Taking care of people, making sure supplies and money are doing okay, keeping track of a thousand little things… it’s the stuff that every mom does, and no one ever notices. The only part of that she doesn’t cover is the scheduling, which Sokka is meticulous about, and he gets very direct, active, on-screen credit for doing so.
Katara is the closest thing that show has to a perfect woman, but because she comes across as slightly buzzkill-ish about it, suddenly none of it matters, and she’s “Super annoying”.
Ghostbusters has not been immune to this problem. If we look at the script and casting objectively, none of the women do anything that would be considered problematic if their male counterparts had done so. In fact, the only thing I can even think of that a man would not have done is probably the part where they shot the ghost in the groin instead of center mass.
And for those of you in our studio audience who feel like that was “too feminist” of a thing to do, and was super uncalled for, let me ask this: why?
(This is a legit complaint I heard. Actually, from the same guy above, who didn’t want to watch it in the first place.)
Literally any woman being attacked by someone or something that presented as male would have that thought go through her head. I guarantee it. Having external genitalia is a very distinct weakness, and any person who has spent her whole life being afraid to walk outside after dark because men with this specific weakness will prey on her is GONNA be thinking about how to exploit that. It’s literally the first thing we all would naturally do.
Men have exploited the weaknesses of women in movies for decades. Cry me a river.
Men laugh at crotch shots in YouTube videos. But as soon as a group of women come together to powerfully make it a viable weakness, they’re offended? Ask what they’re really offended about, then. Because it isn’t the fact that a crotch shot was used for humor. Once again, cry me a river.
The point being that this movie hung a lot of lights on a lot of problematic behaviors simply by showing those things happening to men instead of women. And many men were horrified at what they saw.
If this applies to you, think about why that is.
Feminism| Another complaint I’ve heard about this movie from many different people is that it’s “too feminist.” Let’s break that down for a sec.
FIrstly, yes, there are some radical feminists who give everyone else a bad name. They go too far. But feminism is not the culprit. Extremism is.
With that in mind, what does being against feminism actually mean?
Not wanting equal representation in movies, congress, business, or panels.
Not wanting equal pay or job opportunities.
Not wanting equal ability to vote or participate in the community.
Not wanting equal rights to control personal property or bodily autonomy.
Not wanting to be believed when something happens.
Not wanting to destroy rape culture.
Not wanting to make the world safer for women.
Not wanting access to equal education and healthcare.
None of those are bad things to want. And that’s literally what feminism is: wanting those things.
What is feminism not?
It isn’t wanting to kill all men.
It isn’t wanting to become manly or destroy femininity.
It isn’t wanting to control men.
It isn’t wanting to oppress men in the same way that women have long been.
It isn’t wanting to destroy families.
It isn’t wanting to get special treatment for unfair reasons.
Literally, all that rational feminism is is “Please don’t treat us as second class,”
So yeah, if Ghostbusters is too feminist for you… we might have a problem.
Given all that, is there such a thing as “too feminist”?
I would say no. There cannot be such a thing as “it promotes equality too much”. Literally, that’s impossible to do. (And going back to the extreme “feminists”, they are not promoting equality.)
Why am I a feminist? Well, there are a thousand or more reasons, but here’s just one that matters very much to me personally.
I have medical conditions that require regulatory medications. I haven’t taken those medications in several years because literally the only way to get them is to have a doctor re-prescribe them every few months. And I cannot afford that. And yet
AND YET
Male birth control options (which have literally zero effect on health and are entirely based on a dude’s sex life) are over the counter at just about any store you could walk into. It’s hard to NOT find options for guys.
My health is affected by people who are worried that women can’t make responsible enough choices about their bodies. I have no autonomy in what I do with my medications, because that same medication might be used by someone somewhere to *GASP* make her own choices about having children. THE HORROR.
Yeah. The state of healthcare in 2019 America is that a bunch of old white men in congress still have more control over my personal health than I do.
That’s a little bit of a tangent, but it gets the point across that feminism is not a bad word. It’s not something that “ruins movies”. It’s not something that is going to harm our society by having it.
A movie literally cannot be “too feminist” for you unless you actively don’t agree that women should have rights, autonomy, and political franchise.
Secondly, which parts of this movie are aggressively feminist aside from casting women in it?
I sincerely don’t know the answer to this. Even if we include extremism-infected forms of feminism, there isn’t anything there. They never promote hating men. They never rape a man or take advantage of him. They never make light of that having happened to a man. They never rudely discount the opinion or witness of anyone based on their being a man. (In fact, the opposite happens. They are discounted by a man who doesn’t believe what they say.)
And if we don’t include not-really-feminist aggressive feminism, there’s still nothing there outside of simply showing women doing a job that men once did in an older movie. And if that’s the thing that rubs you the wrong way, well, once again, that’s definitely a problem, and it’s not on our end.
In fact, I think it’s rather obvious, on close inspection, that the movie makers were very careful about that. They made absolutely sure that, even though this movie is a campy comedy, they took the portrayals in it very seriously. They did nothing that can reasonably considered problematic.
Therefore I posit once again that a feeling of “too feminist” stems entirely from “not being used to seeing women do the things men used to do.” Casting women as main characters is the only “too feminist” flaw this movie can be said to have, and that just doesn’t hold up under any kind of scrutiny.
Well, I’m sorry this was so long. But I had a lot of things I really needed to say.
If you stuck with it all the way to the end, here, then thank you. I’m proud of your reading endurance. Let me know what you think of the points posited.
In conclusion: The boy ghostbusters was important. I’m not going to say that it didn’t do things for movie making that changed everything, because it definitely did. But socioculturally, it didn’t age well. But as the ghostbusters franchise has always been about pushing limits and breaking barriers, I think that the girl ghostbusters held up its end admirably.
We need more movies like this, where being a woman isn’t just a joke. Where we can be heroes despite our flaws. Where we can be scientists and warriors, and awkward nerds all at the same time. Where our stories don’t rely on a man to save us or make us whole. Where we get the respect of good scripting, acting, and moviemaking. We need more role models for my sassy little nieces to grow up watching.
We need more like Ghostbusters.
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