snarp | GOSH FRANK MILLER

elongated_tito just made me watch Sin City. I know it's kind of, like, done to complain about the movie's treatment of women, but. Yeah, okay.

Eleven-year-old girl that Bruce Willis has just rescued from bad guys tells him, "I'm still a virgin, thanks to you."

...thinking of molesting and killing a little girl in terms of of "stealing her virginity" - classic Frank Miller. Hahaha, that wacky old misogynistic shitfuck. Someone give this man extensive internal hemorrhaging - this one's on me!

A little kid who has just narrowly escaped death and seen a bunch of people get shot real good isn't going to be thinking, "Oh, my god, I could have lost my symbolic sexual purity - if Bruce Willis hadn't shown up when he did -" No! Holy stolen Christ-crackers! This is not an eleven-year-old-girl thought!

I also watched about an hour worth of a documentary about a guy who molested little boys today. At no point I ever hear anyone describe the boys as having "lost their virginity." I'm not sure I ever actually heard the word "rape," either - it was always "he molested the boys" or "he did something to the boys."

It's about sex when a girl is raped, and she's supposed to have lost something irreplaceable. When a boy's raped, it's not dignified with the word - and I think the word does dignify - and it's "disgusting" and "an awful thing," and maybe he goes into therapy or something.

The girl probably gets the better deal, because there's a space for her to talk about it, and go, you know, stand crying nobly in the rain having "been forced to grow up too fast" and all. The boy has nowhere to go, and the words he gets are sicklier and vaguer, when they're there at all - the people in that documentary waved a hand in the air and said "he did something" way too much. The girl has a vocabulary in place, but the words are all wrong.

I think the problem is, someone let the rapists pick them out.

And I just ended up taking the movie a lot more seriously than I meant to, and I think I'm stopping here and putting this under a cut.

I just finished Rocannon's World, Ursula LeGuin's first published novel. It's definitely by LeGuin, so it's good, but it's also definitely early. It has a Huge Faceless Mystery Enemy Who Cannot Be Reasoned With And Must Be Destroyed. This isn't something you associate with LeGuin, and she clearly wasn't comfortable with it - they're the reason for the Journey, but just barely have a name, are there only at the very beginning and very end, and then are only kinda-sorta there.

The protagonist defeats them with the help of a Mysterious Wise Man On A Mountain, because, being a basically sensical character, he cannot overcome a nonsensical problem on his own, and thus requires an equally nonsensical deus ex machina.

In between, he deals with smaller and more comprehensible crises which are recognizably human, animal, or weather. Those parts are LeGuin. Fortunately, she learned to drop the end-paper.

Random note: I'll eat something generally thought inedible if Rosemary Kirstein hasn't read this book, because (elliptical spoiler for both Rocannon and the Steerswoman series) her Demon Cities are Rocannon's Angel Cities.

(This entry edited a few times over a few minutes after posting it, because my genius comes in spurts, like mustard.)