March 13th, 2009
by
Yonmei
Last Friday I was sitting in a cinema with a bunch of friends and friends of friends, waiting for The Watchmen to begin.
And then the trailer for Lesbian Vampire Killers came on. And in the space of a minute or two, I was reminded that to most of the straight people in this auditorium, I’m just a target. Not a real person. A straight man with an axe planning to kill lesbians is kinda funny, isn’t he? All jolly good fun.
I want this film to bomb and die at the box office. I want it more than I can tell you. I want it to be a massive, multi-million loss. I want the makers to quit. I can’t avoid the damn posters, I can’t avoid the damn trailer: but I can at least want never to see a sequel in the trailers, on the posters, on the Internet, in the film reviews.
Trying to protest it: hell, what’s the point? Pickets, protesting, letters, public anger: I already know what most of the straight people buying tickets to have fun watching lesbians being killed will say: Lighten up. It’s just a joke.
None of the lesbians who saw the poster said that. We shrugged at each other resignedly. It’s the kind of thing that happens. The boys throw stones in jest: we die in earnest. The dominant narrative about what lesbians are, what we do, why we exist: to titilate and amuse straight men. By dying, if we can’t do it any other way.
The only slash panel I got to at Redemption, the dominant narrative had even got there: two people on the panel, one of them a straight man, who began the discussion by saying he didn’t know much about slash but he wanted to know where the femslash was.
And for some reason still unclear to me, the audience of slash fans, any of whom were better qualified to sit on the panel than this ass: we told him.
…five minutes into The Watchmen, the only two lesbians had been brutally murdered.
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Yonmei at
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Filed under Sexuality & queerness, TV & Film, female characters, geek sexism, horror, slash | Comments (13)
Saw an ad for this movie on the one phone box in this village. It replaced some other het white male misogynistic ‘comedy’ poster.
I also hope that all the DVDs are remaindered, sent back to the distributer and incinerated, perhaps in the name of creating electricity, so at least it’s not just a massive waste of resources. And that the people who think up these stories aren’t ever given the time of day ever again in the greater LA area.
I would have read that title as being about lesbians who killed vampires, but then I also have trouble figuring out the specifics of the itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny-yellow-polka-dot bikini…
I initially thought that it was about lesbians who killed vampires, and thought great! A gay Buffy movie! Then I looked closer.
I agree with what Yonmei said.
There is a short film about a lesbian vampire hero, titled In Twilight’s Shadow, whose lesbian director would like to see turned into a feature or TV series, which might be worth supporting instead. I haven’t seen it — heard about it on AfterEllen, where there’s an interview with the director. (And this is the MySpace page for the short film.)
The other two lesbians in Watchmen were left completely out of the movie–one of whom was actually butch.
Violence against women is the primary reason I’m not seeing Watchmen–I had enough of that in the book form. Sounds like it’s even worse in the movie. Unsurprising, given 300. Okay, unsurprising, given movies.
I am a lesbian, I am a movie buff, and I take all this with a pinch of salt. That movie has been around in concept for years so it’s not just because we have two funny men wanting to kill us all in a ‘jokey’ fashion.
The movie was referenced by Lister in an episode of Red Dwarf, that I believe was called Legion. There are films that are in the same spoof genre that kills teens, black people, white people, gay men, lesbians, old people. Take all this away and we’re left with some dire boring movies.
I know that this is referenced in the title that they are “Lesbian Vampire Killers” and I agree with a previous poster that the title could be misinterperated to being a slayer who is a lesbian.
A film is a film and a film title is a film title. No matter how much you complain about it, people will still watch it because it has the blokes from Gavin and Stacey in it.
Would you be less annoyed if the main characters in it were also lesbians? I doubt it. If you want to watch a lesbian movie, go rent “but I’m a cheerleader” or “lost and delirious” this is a fun film, just let the boys have their movie and then it’ll disappear for a few years at least.
Wow. Rant over…
This was dutifully picked up by The Hand Mirror.
Crow,
The movie referenced by Lister was “Attack of the Surfboarding Killer Bikini Vampire Girls” and all we know about it was that it had a female protagonist. It was definitely a nod to a certain genre, but wasn’t what this movie appears to be: two straight men slaughtering a bunch of lesbians in the face of almost certain temptation.
I like camp horror movies, but from the trailer this one clearly misses the point badly. It’s not even Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town.
I am sorrowed and disgusted that someone should do that. If it were Negroes instead of Lesbians, the PC outrage would be over the top.
Why can’t people stop with the hate-mongering. It isn’t funny. There are all sorts of ways to amuse or even tittilate. That kind of crap shouldn’t see the light of day (or the dark of night).
Even a middle-aged, straight, white nerd of a geek (i.e., me) can see that, why couldn’t the people who made that?
I’m with you about the way lesbians are “used” by straight men as a “girl-on-girl” narrative that has nothing to do with lesbian experience and everything to do with what amuses men. I totally am.
But at the same time, doesn’t your experience at the slash panel you mentioned demonstrate that slash buys into this exploitation by using gay men for an irrelevant, titillating narrative the same way straight men use lesbians for their own irrelevant enjoyment? This has always frustrated me as a gay man, but when I try to explain why “yaoi isn’t gay”, I’m at a loss for words.
There are some very big differences between a movie like this and slash (and slash isn’t the same thing as yaoi), and starting with the question of exploitation rather than content, there’s the fact that this movie was made to make money, and that it in fact made £648,634 at the box-office on its opening week-end (sorry, Yonmei), whereas slash isn’t for profit.
Daniel, it’s my personal impression that being turned on by “two men together” for women, or “two women together” for men, is a form of sexual orientation, orthogonal to what we might call the “Kinsey spectrum” of lesbian/gay to straight.
I don’t object to men – gay, bi, or straight – getting off on their sexual fantasies of “two women together”. What anyone else fantasises about to get off is their own business.
But, the money and power structure in the world is such that the public narrative of “lesbians” is, overwhelmingly, presented as “women who get men turned on in a particularly kinky way”. This is not the case for the women who fantasise about “gay men”: there is no public narrative of “gay men” meaning “men who get women turned on”. (There is an annoying, sexless public narrative of a gay man meaning “a man who is a woman’s best friend who never himself has sex and isn’t attracted to her”.)
If men who got turned on by “two women together” could get their titillating narrative only via amateur, not-for-profit publications written and published by each other, mostly based on the repeated motif of two women who are each other’s best friend and comrade – if the Bechdel test had had to be invented to define a film in which two men talk to each other about something other than a woman – if that were so, your complaint would have some point. Especially if a man could not identify as gay in a public online space without getting pestered by sexual invitations from straight women who regarded a man saying he’s gay as a sexual come-on.
As it stands, I presume your complaints arise because you barged into online space for slash fans, tried to divert the conversation to your own needs, and got slapped down quite hard for interrupting a discussion that had nothing to do with you.