Old School Tendencies

Fury Road: when there are enough women

weareallfromearth:

When there are enough women in your cast, not every woman has to represent all women and they can have individual flaws and strengths.

When there are enough women, some can fall apart and others can hold things together.

When there are enough women, you can literally name a character Cheedo The Fragile without making a statement about feminine fragility.

When there are enough women, you know the action movie doesn’t have to preserve the one woman in order to ensure you have one woman left in your cast at the end, so women might die, just like men, and the stakes are high and real and the plot is not predictable.

When there are enough women, you can cast women with different ages and looks and body types based on what makes sense for the story - beautiful women who were selected for beauty by a character who valued women’s bodies more than their whole selves, wiry muscular women of middle and older age, built to survive, mothers who were used for the things that come with their fertility and have the fat to show for it, old fragile women who took care of others while rarely stepping outside, disabled women affected by their environment and experiences.

When there are enough women, the world feels real.

SCRREEEEECCHHHHHH!

Let’s just put the brakes on this bullshit right now. I’m going to guess this was written by a white woman, and if that IS the case, then we need to talk.

Shall we begin with the phrase “enough women”? What exactly is enough women? 50%? 40%? And enough women from what parts of the world? Because I can assure you, that 50% is not just white women.

“not every woman has to represent all women” This SCREAMS as coming from someone who has never had to look very far to see themselves represented in popular media and thus isn’t bothered or simply doesn’t notice when a piece of media has a distinct lack of PoC.

“you can cast women with different ages and looks and body types based on what makes sense for the story“ But apparently not different skin colors because that’s not at all an important or contributing factor to the experiences of women around the world? You say “looks” but here you are defending the casting choices for a movie with only about 3 WoC and claiming that’s fine since the castings “made sense for the story”.

Every time I read this horseshit excuse, I want to pull every single hair out of my head one by one. So there are no brown people? No black people? They all just fucking disappeared by the time MM:FR takes place? They were all swallowed up by a volcano? They invented space travel and ditched Earth? WHAT IS THE EXCUSE?

“Makes sense for the story” Eat my shit. Disingenuous as fuck.

Please, tell me why not having more visible PoC (no, not just women) would not have made sense for the story? AND NO, NOT TROPES OR TOKENS, because that seems to be the go-to comeback for most of these racist fucks who think our calls for more diversity in skin color means we just want PoC thrown in for the fuck of it and not as well-written, well-established characters.

I’ll be waiting.