Rare Entertainment

Image:  White Male Character One is learning to control his superpowers- the ability to turn everything around him into cinders in seconds-so, White Male Character Two has set up target practice. The targets are unclothed female bodied mannequins- big breasted, narrow waisted- with big X signs on their torsos. Barbies without the annoying hair. Or clothes. Boom, boom, boom. High fives all around. Congratulations, you’re officially a man. Er, mutant. But manly mutant.

Image: Jon Hamm playing a umpteenth variant of Don Draper, a role he’ll probably play over and over in the next few years- a White Male Character helping a (younger) White Male Character score. “See anything you like?” he asks over a Fancy Hidden Communication Device because we are in a Very Cool Progressive SciFi Show. Younger White Male Character directs his attention to a Very Lovely Brunette eliciting surprise from Jon Draper Hamm because clearly the Very Lovely White Blonde standing right there in her cleavage-showing dress is The Most Obvious Choice. Interesting, he murmurs, and then the next ten minutes are devoted to Young White Male attempting a seduction- while a half dozen men listen and watch via Fancy Hidden Communication Device because we are in a Very Cool Progressive SciFi Show. Did I mention Award Winning? We are also Award Winning. Unfortunately-ahem- for our voyeuristic leading men, the night ends badly- no sex, just murder.  And because we’re the Award Winning Very Cool Progressive SciFi Show, the woman turns out to be a mentally unhinged murderess.  I feel blessed. There’s still forty minutes before the episode ends. It can only get More Progressive. (It does: more dead women, one still a girl).

Image: A half-naked woman being beaten bloody by a man straddling her. In the imaginatively named town of Vice, you can have every forbidden pleasure you choose to pay for- your partners? Synthetics or Not Real People. Coincidentally, these Not Real People are shaped like Extremely Hot Women programmed with Real Memories and capable of feeling Real Pain (we are never shown them feeling Real Pleasure: presumably the White Male Characters who seem to form the general clientele in this Pleasure Town are only interested in Real Pain). Anyways, this is almost two hours of an AI-becomes-sentient-and-is-hunted-down-but-survives story aka The Not Real But Real Woman is stalked, hunted, beaten up, violated and Emerges Triumphant….to be a sidekick to the Real Male Cop. Ah! The twist in the tale: our heroine turns out to be Not The Real Heroine much like she is not a Real Woman.

X Men: First Class grossed over USD $353 million worldwide when released in 2011, Black Mirror has been nominated or has won major awards every year since its first episode in 2011, and Vice- well, Vice had a limited theatre release in 2015, and then was released to DVD- and made around #1 million USD.

In the span of two weeks, I’ve managed a random sampling of available entertainment in terms of critically acclaimed and/or popular (or neither!) in a genre and am served up the same thing every time: images of women being brutalized emotionally and physically. Sometimes this brutality is An Important Plot Device- what would Our Leading Male Characters Do Without Motivation- but other times, it’s just there. The stuff you only notice subconsciously most of the time, the peripheral, the scene, part of the stuff that’s there because it helps you suspend your disbelief, because yes, a woman is being violated and you don’t have to pay attention to that if you don’t want to, so the story feels just like real life.

Image: In the thirty seconds it takes me to get a token for the subway ride, the young couple nearby move from a silent-tears-and-recrimination kind of fight to the hands-around-your-throat kind of fight; he has his hands around her throat, shoves her into the wall and walks away. She follows, still crying.

Image: Two young girls strung up on a tree in a UP village.

Image: A smiling, smartly dressed young woman stands next to a car at an automobile expo. You can’t sell the dream without the woman, can you?

Image: A news story about a woman who committed suicide after her rape was filmed and circulated on Whatsapp.

Image: Two people in a public argument on the road- you whore, I hear him say, see what I will do to you.

You see the problem I have: separating fact from fiction and wondering where the line exists.

Sometimes I think: this isn’t real, this is a stupid movie that you’ll turn off in a minute or forty, when you are really, really sick of it, and then you never have to think about it again.

But it is, and it is and it is and it feels like somebody should be sick to death of this story already, should say, this is overdone, let’s start anew, but no, it’s so foundational that even when we tell stories about the future- the marvelous, miraculous future with star ships and mutant genes and time travel and artificial intelligence- it’s the same as the stories of our past, the ones with dragons and historical accuracy- the same old story: the visceral hatred of women, invisible in its ubiquity.

And I think about it every day.