Thread by @EpistemicHope

Lately, I've been noticing that the women in movies are, well, hot.

When I was kid, I just thought of women in movies as "women."

Over the past year or so, I've become more attuned to generic attractiveness. Suddenly, it's starkly obvious that the actresses are all extremely beautiful.

Now, watching a movie trailer, the female characters read as "unusually attractive woman" / "sex object" / "person that I'm supposed to be attracted to."

I feel an undertone of anger about this.

I think the anger is mostly coming from a sense of how much this delegitimizes the female characters.

Like, movies often depict female badasses, but they're _always_ exceptionally hot. As if to say that you can only be a badass, or your badassery will only be appreciated, if you're hot.

(Top of mind is the actress in this trailer: )

Fuck you! - There are plenty of people (men and women) who are awesome, or who should aspire to awesomeness, despite being average looking.

In fact, it's not just badassery. It's the same with other traits. Love interests are often given some kind of endearing personal qualities, but this is undercut by the fact of their hotness.

I recently watched some of "absolutely anything".

(As a side note, this is a movie whose setup doesn't allow for even the slightest amount of conflict. Every plot point is completely contrived.

Not only does the main character have the ability to cause any change he wants to the world, this includes "reversing his actions" and "causing himself to have good ideas about how to use his powers."(!) With those constraints, any problem that could arise is trivial.

But he spends 5 minutes at improving the world, finds that his first wishes were not precise enough, reverses them, and then gives up to commit suicide!!!)

Anyway, the love interest is depicted as a likeable person, with some modicum of integrity, who cares about books, awash in a system optimized for capitalizing on outrage and spite. The characterization is shallow, but it's understandable why a person would like her.

But she's ALSO stunning, which pisses me off.

_Of course_ the protagonist is into her. Obviously, every straight guy in a 30 mile radius is into her. And that would be true if she had the personally of a stick of wood.

The outlier level of beauty changes the whole dynamic.

Especially, because in movie world, the incredibly attractive people all act as if they are normal levels of attractive, as opposed to having a radically different experience of life from the median person, as those actors and actresses have in real life.

And, furthermore, I feel annoyed at the attempted manipulation of me, the viewer.

I don't like that my culture is constantly trying to hack my motivation and evaluation system using this (newly, to me) extremely overt strategy.

Fuck you, movies-as-a-whole.

@threadreaderapp unroll