Unconscious Sexism For The Fail

[omorka]

So, last night after the movie, had an interesting conversation with cheshirebast about which characters we identify with. I have a "Venkman" patch on my uniform, but that's because it's brown. I don't identify with movie!Peter at all, and in point of fact think he needs a good kick in the ass most of the time - but the moments when he pulls out the heroism

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Re: Long comment is long 1/2

[omorka]

I found the Watchmen scene disturbing enough as it stood. The part about that particular set of gender expectations that gets to me is that if a girl isn't interested, it doesn't make her less feminine - in some eyes, it makes her more so - but she's generally expected to have sex anyway, despite not being interested. With guys, the reverse is true - not being able to get it up is a blot on his masculinity, but it excuses him from pressure to perform, despite him still having fingers and a tongue.

It isn't Peter's hitting on everything with two X chromosomes (and possibly some things with only one) that bothers me, it's his tendency to use people as means to an end rather than an end in themselves. And I think that's still seen as a more negative trait in a woman than in a man, although I think depictions of women acting that way are more common now than they used to be.

I've always been slightly sympathetic to Peck in that sequence; if I'd been in his position, I'd have wanted to inspect the place, too. But the pairing as it stands is the Overstuffed Petty Bureaucrat vs. the Bill Murray Antihero Character, which is a stock conflict pairing for a Murray movie, and we all know we're supposed to root for the small business owner versus the government bureaucrat because this is the '80s, after all.

Making it Wendy Peck vs. Peter Venkman makes Peck's position even more sympathetic, I think. (I might be wrong. I don't find the lawyer in the second movie all that sympathetic, and it's a similar match-up, but, unlike Peck, she has direct evidence that this shit is for realz, yo, it having been five years post-Gozer at that point.)

William Atherton is hot. That's all I have to say about Peck!fic.