Watchmen
Due to incredibly hateful, misogynistic comments made by its screenwriter in a recent press interview, I have canceled all plans to ever see Watchmen.
David Hayter said that people who saw the movie and didn't "get" it should go see it again just like the character who got raped came back to her rapist. Then he went on to make it much worse with an "apology" in which he admitted he'd made a poor choice of metaphor, but insisted that people who were offended by his comments simply didn't understand that the rape was okay because it was a "horrific act, that ends in a love story".
Not too surprisingly, fans of the movie were quick to concoct justifications along the lines of, "That's not what he meant!", "What happened in the story was a lot more complicated than that!", and of course the good old blame-the-victim standby, "This is just more radical feminist overreaction!". But I'm not going to bother responding directly, because these defenses miss the point entirely. This situation is not about the movie, or even about what what Hayter meant.
This is about about what it means when a man makes a comment which is viciously hurtful to women and people respond to that comment by falling over themselves to tell women they have no right to be offended by it. This is about a society in which white men continue to insist that they have some kind of "right" to stand over everyone and judge the validity of their feelings.
This is about women standing up and saying, "Your comments were deeply offensive, period. What you 'really' meant is completely irrelevant, and trying to claim that 'just' being oblivious somehow nullifies the harm you have done is even more offensive. It may be less offensive to be insensitive than it is to be malicious, but it is absolutely not inoffensive."