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Lowkey spent forever on this and might turn it into a poster, enjoy! This is sort of an au, hence the different clothing and the different tack on the horses

Close ups ⬇️

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

I first watched it when I was a fourteen year old girl, the same age as Elliot Page’s character in the film, and I was disturbed certainly, it’s a disturbing story, but it’s also the story that most single handedly made me a feminist.

I, like a lot of girls at the time, eschewed the label of “feminist.”

“Oh I believe in rights for women but I’m not a feminist.”

Like it was a dirty word. We were taught culturally that it was a dirty word . Feminists were crossing a line. They were annoying. They were queer. They were gender nonconformist. They lived outside of the expectations for girls and women. They did not play the game of wanting to be wanted by men, of existing for male excitement. Feminists weren’t hot. And even as a young teenager I knew that to be a woman and not be hot, not be wanted by men, was to live in absence of a very specific kind of power and acceptance.

I watched Hard Candy on a whim. I had just seen Elliot Page in Juno and I was crazy gay for him (though denying this at the time) and picked up Hard Candy at a local dvd resale store because I saw he was in it.

And it changed my life.

For context, I grew up on Law and Order SVU — SVU specifically. From an inappropriately young age it was one of my favorite shows. And as much as I think SVU can get the trauma of rape and assault right, being a child aware of what a constant threat sexual violence against women and girls was fucked me up. Rape has been one of my biggest fears from the time I was ten. It still is.

And here was this movie that put the power in the hands of the teenage girl who was so at risk for abuse. The movie starts out and you think you know where it’s going. Man lures young girl he met online to coffee shop. Man makes girl feel older and mature. Man takes girl home to his apartment.

Sitting there, a high school freshman in my living room on a Saturday night, I was waiting for the turn, for the teenage girl to become the teenage victim. Then when the turn finally came it was like I could suddenly breathe again. A grown man exposed for his indecency by underestimating a teenage girl, that girl lecturing a grown man on his predatory behaviors, a teenage girl refusing to be played with or manipulated, one who takes matters into her own hands because no one else has.

So many moments in that movie were utterly formative for me.

And almost every man in my life who watched it could not understand the poignance of it. They absolutely felt Elliot Page played the villain. Sure, Jeff did some bad things, but he didn’t deserve what he got! That girl was psycho! She’s crazy! And I played along with this, talking at great lengths about how the ambiguous morality of the film was ground breaking and how it was really about vigilante justice. I wanted so badly to prove it was the art I knew it was. Why wasn’t it being heralded as a seminal psychological thriller like Memento and Se7en? It impacted me more than either of those films.

It’s not even a particularly violent film! There isn’t any gore! There are some blurry shots of a surgery, but no real blood, no graphic brutality. David Slade, who frankly should be a more acclaimed director than he is, intentionally shot close ups of the actors faces during these intense and disturbing scenes. He focused on the emotion and the performance. He didn’t want to show the violence of it, but rather the mental game and the psychological impact of that violence. And yet men cannot get through this movie without wanting to throw up.

Do you know how many horrific and lengthy rape scenes I’ve watched? How many dead women with mutilated bodies I’ve seen larger than life on movie screens? Horror and mystery are my favorite genres. I have to look up the content warnings for every fucking horror film I wanna watch to prepare myself for potential triggers. And cis white men, self proclaimed film aficionados, can’t handle the SUGGESTION of serious violence being done to another cis white man on screen. Then it becomes too out there. Too gratuitous. Too fringe to be anything but a controversial indie flick relegated to the bargain bin at second hand dvd shops.

The refusal to acknowledge the brilliance of Hard Candy as both a work of art and a cinematic statement infuriates me. I sigh everytime someone asks me what my favorite movie is, waiting for the uncomfortable look I’ll get. Hard Candy is a disturbing movie because of its subject matter and it’s frank discussion of pedophilia and sexual abuse. But the character of Hayley Stark, a 14 year old girl who takes back symbolic agency for women and young girls as a whole, who gets revenge on a sexually violent predator, is 100% a sympathetic character. She is a part of me. I feel her rage and I feel her unspoken motivations. I get it. I get her. And I’ve long since grown tired of trying to make it a movie “film buff” dudebros will respect.

It’s not for them. It is not about them. And they can’t stand it.

If Liam Neeson indiscriminately tortures and murders people to save his daughter from being sold into sexual slavery, he’s a badass. A hero.

So why is Hayley Stark a monster?

“I am every little girl you ever watched, touched, hurt, screwed, killed,” she says toward the end of the film.

Asirpa! She's the deuteragonist of Golden Kamuy alongside Sugimoto and she's really great. I love the dynamic between the two a ton... also I find her to be a really well rounded female character who manages to be silly, serious, naive, and mature all together.

ARE YOU A VOID OR ABYSS PERSON.

Pennant-winged Nightjar (Caprimulgus vexillarius), male, family Caprimulgidae, order Caprimulgiformes, South Africa