‘Lord of the Flies’ VS ‘Heathers’…

A few years back some male film makers were going to try and do a female remake of ‘Lord of the Flies’ but couldn’t sell it because all the backers thought that if a group of girls got stranded on a deserted island with no boys they wouldn’t try to compete to the death. They would just end up cooperating because without men or the patriarchy to influence women, everything would be fine… I thought about ‘Heathers’ and realized that maybe women just compete in different ways but perhaps even that wouldn’t be a factor anymore if girls were in a life or death survival scenario… Thoughts?

Let us see…

“Let us see whether the vast majority of the so-called ‘insurmountable barriers’ that the world draws are not harmless chalk lines.”

-Lou Andreas Salome (12 February 1861 – 5 February 1937. Russian-born female psychoanalyst and a well-traveled author, narrator, and essayist. Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Paul Rée, and Rainer Maria Rilke.)

Nayyirah Waheed

“I am relieved when I see the feminine presence in a man’s eyes. It means he has a peace I do not need to bring to him.” -Nayyirah Waheed

Detail of a man’s face

The Wolves…

I noticed them change

It was the smell I noticed first.

The stench of twisting, multiplying hormones.

It always preceded them.

No amount of cheap Safeway deodorant can cover that odor.

I saw skin disappear beneath unwelcome hair.

Voices deepen into growls.

Like a virus, it spread.

And once that toxin poisoned the boys,

They were capable of doing things you never thought they’d do.

No matter where you hid,

They sniffed you out.

And, for the boys that didn’t change with the rest,

Those who were left behind,

Those that didn’t have the taste for the blood…

They had only one choice too.

Run.

-Quote from the movie, ‘Boys in the trees’

-Artwork from Shamsia Hassani -Afghanistan- femme street artiste.

Common Sense…

There is no such thing as ‘reverse racism’ or ‘reverse sexism’ because it is literally impossible for the oppressed to oppress their oppressors. The oppressed do not hold political, economic, and institutional dominance over society therefore, they have no power to ‘reverse oppress’ the ones who do hold that dominance. Anyone who tries to argue against this common sense fact is delusional or an obvious oppressor.

Ways of Seeing

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another….

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

― John Berger, Ways of Seeing