We're all in it together.

i’m a misandrist. that means i hate men. i’m not a cute misandrist. i don’t have a fridge magnet that says, “boys are stupid, throw rocks at them.” my loathing cannot be contained by a fridge magnet.

i am not an equality feminist. i don’t believe that an asymmetrical world will be cured by polite obsequence to male-dominated systems. i am not a liberal humanist. i don’t believe that i need to stand up for men when they’ve been standing on top of everyone else.

misandry is not a political program; it’s a stance. i don’t care whether hating men is a good or bad feminist strategy (and i care even less what men think about misandry). i don’t think i have a responsibility to change the world. i think i have a responsibility to survive.

imagine being born into a world where your experiences are not represented, where your work is undervalued, where your body is always open for comment, where your friends are routinely harassed and abused, and where this situation will literally be your reality for your entire life. if you’re a woman, you don’t have to imagine that world because you already live in it.

if you’re a man, you never have and never will live in that world. but try to imagine what it feels like. i’ll tell you: when i think about the kind of world we live in, i feel simultaneously hopeless and infuriated and i oscillate so quickly between those two emotional extremes that i literally start to get dizzy.

being a woman in this world feels like getting buried alive. think about that. think about feeling that every day.

why do i have to answer the question “why do i hate men?” when men don’t even stop to ask why they have always hated women. i have to answer the question because men can’t tolerate for one second the sort of contempt they’ve had for women for thousands of years.

why do i hate men? because life is short. my life is getting shorter by the day and i want to fill it with women. in this sinking ship of a world, i just want to enjoy a tiny little space, a room, if you will, of my own. i want that room to be full of women and free from ego, hierarchy, sexual advances, and violence. i hate men because i can’t even have that fucking room without them knocking on the walls. you have the entire fucking house. go play in it. find something else to do.

i hate men because it’s not my job to fix masculinity; it’s my job to heal from it and to be together with my sisters as we try to make it through a hostile world. and yet i am expected to patiently educate men on how not to be an asshole. here’s my only tip: stop spending so much time around men. they’re assholes.

i hate men because men hate me and the burden to take the high road should not fall on my shoulders.

i am friends with some men, yes. usually these are men who have some experience of marginalization (whether via their race, class, gender identity, sexual identity, what have you) or who have gone through the self-interrogation and relational deprogramming necessary to build meaningful community with women. you don’t just get to read a book and you’re golden. you have to get fucking baptized in menstrual blood as far as i’m concerned.

Noirvember: Discovering Japanese Noir by Marya E. Gates ( @oldfilmsflicker)

As many Tumblr users know every year the month of November becomes #Noirvember. After celebrating by myself the first year (though I did ask Tumblr to join me), the tradition is now in its 8th year and it’s exciting to see how far its grown!

Over the years I’ve seen hundreds of films from the traditional noir cycle in U.S. cinema (roughly 1941 - 1958), but for the last few years I had promised my friend Tyler (aka @filminfilm​) I would give Japanese noir a chance (especially the Nikkatsu Noir set that @criterioncollection​ put out a few years back). Thankfully, last year the launch of FilmStruck coincided with Noirvember and I could finally make good on my promise! 

While I watched more than just the following films, these are the ones that have really stuck with me a year later. Some of these films were made concurrently with the U.S. noir cycle, and some of them are decidedly neo-noir (looking at you Seijun Suzuki, you wild man you)

DRUNKEN ANGEL, 1948 (dir. Akira Kurosawa) 

This film brings frequent Kurosawa collaborators Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune together to the seedy underworld of post-war Japan. Mifune plays a small time crook who bonds with a jaded physician after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. It’s bloody, it’s brooding, and it’s about as noir as you can get.

STRAY DOG, 1949 (dir. Akira Kurosawa) 

Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune join forces again, this time on the right side of the law in one of cinema’s first buddy-cop films (this is no comedy however). After rookie cop Murakami (Mifune)’s Colt pistol is stolen during a blistering heat wave, veteran detective Satō (Shimura) joins him to solve a crime in which it was used.

I AM WAITING, 1957 (dir. Koreyoshi Kurahara)

Quite possibly my favorite noir I watched all last year, this romantic noir finds two lonely souls, an ex-boxer and a nightclub singer (naturally), briefly connecting in a diner, before their mutual dream of love and contenment get crushed by a syndicate of gangsters. 

TAKE AIM AT THE POLICE VAN, 1960 (dir. Seijun Suzuki) 

What can I even say about Seijun Suzuki that hasn’t already been said??? Suzuki had previously made pop song films and the occasional Yakuza films for Nikkatsu before this twisty whodunit. After a guard is suspended when a prison truck is attacked and a convict inside murdered, he decides to take justice into his own hands. 

CRUEL GUN STORY, 1964 (dir. Takumi Furukawa) 

This was my first introduction to Joe Shishido aka ol’ chipmonk cheeks (not pictured). Shishido was tired of being cast in melodramas because of his handsome looks, so he had cheek augmentation surgery in 1957 and began to make crime films. He certainly has a flare for them. In this film he plays ex-convict Togawa who upon release from prison is roped into helping a seedy mob boss with an armored car robbery.

PALE FLOWER, 1964 (dir. Masahiro Shinoda)

Director Masahiro Shinoda was inspired by French poet Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal for this lyrics Yakuza pic. After being released from prison hitman Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) gets entangled in a mutually destructive relationship with a seductive gambling addict named Saeko (Mariko Kaga).

TOKYO DRIFTER, 1966 (dir. Seijun Suzuki)

While most of this film is in color I felt like I needed to use this shot from the black-and-white opening sequence because it’s a clear influence on Quentin Tarantino’s RESERVOIR DOGS (’92). With a jazzy score and a plot that is so twisty you need a roadmap to follow it, this film from Seijun Suzuki follows Tetsuya Watari as he becomes a hunted drifter after his Yakuza gang deactivates and he turn he turns down the leader of a rival gang’s invitation to join them.

A COLT IS MY PASSPORT, 1967 (dir. Takashi Nomura) 

Featuring a spaghetti-western-style score, this hardboiled film follows a hitman (Joe Shishido, again), who is torn between two rival gangs. Shishido said of the nearly 170 films he made for Nikkatsu, this remains one of his personal favorites. 

BRANDED TO KILL, 1967 (dir. Seijun Suzuki) 

What the heck even is this film. People get shot by arrows. A Yakuza assassin (yet again played by Joe Shishido) has a fetish for sniffing steamed rice (no really). This is Seijun Suzuki at his bonkers best, combing the hardboiled elements of noir with 1960s pop-art aesthetics. Nikkatsu was so unhappy with the final product that Suzuki was blacklisted and didn’t make another film for ten years. How wrong could they have been???

It’s because they’re women. Just. I’m going to stop you right there and tell you, yeah, it’s disliked because it’s a movie starring women.

“Well no but see it’s actually because it’s a reboo-”

Of the top 15 highest grossing movies of 2015, 9 were either reboots or sequels and 5 were adaptations based on books or comics. [x] You don’t hate the new Ghostbusters because it’s not original enough. It’s because they had the audacity to cast women in a movie not marketed specifically for women. It’s because it’s a reboot of a movie starring men and they cast women.

“Honestly I just didn’t think it was all that funny-”

Don’t be an asshole. That is not why THIS movie’s trailer, above all the outrageously shitty movie trailers made, got the most negative reaction. The movie’s made by and starring people who are already established as marketable. It stars SNL cast, which, again, is really goddamn marketable. It’s an established and popular franchise (and tapping into those has already proven to be really fucking marketable, if last year alone says anything.)

In 2014 only 12% of all clearly identifiable film protagonists were female. (For the purpose of the study, protagonists = the characters from whose perspective the story is told.) [x] People complaining about Ghostbusters are the same mouth-breathing troglodytes who complained that Star Wars cast “ANOTHER girl!” in Rogue One. (Or complained about Rey in Star Wars, or Furiosa in Mad Max, etc. etc. without any fucking end in sight oh my god.) People hate the trailer because they hate women stepping out of the 12% of place they have.

When someone says this, they’re changing the subject from sexism to them.