The new Ghostbusters trailer was released this week, and with it came a hotbed of debate: Was it sexist to hate the trailer?
All intelligent human beings know the answer is no, but given some of the comments on the YouTube clip, you’d assume that the problem wasn’t the writing, or even the casting, but, ew, women.
I imagine, back in ’84, a darkened cinema… The trailer for Ghostbusters comes on, and a women turns to her girlfriends and sighs. “Why! Why is this full of MEN?”
DrewYetti has a point, it is actually feminist propaganda that women can be scientists and engineers, just like men.
So… Having a movie trailer show four women doing their jobs is shoving gender down someone’s throat. How was this never said about, say, The Usual Suspects, Top Gun, American Psycho, Snatch, Independence Day, Good Will Hunting, Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, Seven, or The Green Mile?
Really average troll.
I could go on, but it’s too depressing. Please note, I picked things that had just been posted, I didn’t have to go looking for these. And the likes and supportive comments that follow are pretty awful. Mind you, I did read YouTube’s comments section, what was I expecting?
One more for the road, eh?
Here’s the thing: It’s not sexist to hate a movie trailer. It is sexist to hate a movie trailer because it’s full of women, because you think women aren’t funny, because you think it’s unusual that women would be scientists, or because you think only “dumb bitches” will watch.
Here’s the thing: This trailer was full of 10-foot tall ghosts vomiting slime onto people and still some people thought the least believable thing was Kristin Wiig’s math skills.
It’s weird and new and strange and I don’t like it.
To take it one step further: It’s so rare that a movie – let alone a beloved remake – would have a female cast, that even the idea of it seems foreign to many people. The notion that a movie doesn’t have to have men in the leads makes some people uncomfortable, even if they don’t know exactly why. The movie becomes “other” – in the same way a movie featuring an all-black cast gets treated as “other”. Hell, some people are so weird about race that they spin out when a single character is a different colour to what they had in their head – think Rue in The Hunger Games. Or John Boyega and Star Wars. But I digress.
As far as I can tell, the sexist comments have all been written by men. Men who can’t see their privilege, who are used to watching movies with male casts and bad jokes and not taking to YouTube to vent about it. Granted, Ghostbusters is a beloved franchise, but anyone who has seen the second movie knows we are not exactly dealing with the Picasso of movies here.
Something about this trailer has poked the hornet nest, and I’m very interested to see what happens next.
