Not planning on seeing the new Ghostbusters this summer? You must be sexist.
When Sony released the first trailer for the new film in early March, it didn’t go over well. In fact, it became the most disliked movie trailer in YouTube history. Ouch.
But the movie’s initial unpopularity isn’t due to the fact that the trailer was just not funny, or that Sony is proving that it’s clearly out of ideas. Nope, feminists, constantly on the lookout for something to whine about, are convinced it’s because Americans are sexist.
A Forbes writer blamed negative reactions to the preview on “a bunch of angry, misogynistic twerps of all ages spending the last two months ‘down-voting’ said trailer because Sony and Paul Feig had the gall to cast four actresses as the title characters.” Naturally, these are the same “twerps” who “are angry that the last two Star Wars movies had female leads.”
Cosmo blamed it on the “dumb sexist critics.”
And the Huffington Post went so far as to say that people who deny that their dislike of the upcoming movie has anything to do with gender, suffer from “passive sexism.” NBC echoed this by saying that “Ghostbusters backlash” is a symptom of the gender divide in America today.
To try and garner support for the film, Ellen DeGeneres had the four female leads on her show on May 25th. The episode also happened to have Hillary Clinton as a guest. Just a coincidence, of course, because there’s nothing political about the new Ghostbusters, nothing at all.
In order to ensure that the newly feminized Ghostbusters is a box office success, the Los Angeles Times says that women have “an obligation” to see the film when it comes out on July 15. The article’s author insists that sexism is “most stubbornly entrenched in cinema, of all the popular culture industries.” Oh, is that why Frozen, directed by a woman and starring female leads, smashed box office records?
Here’s a thought: gender equality will be reached when Americans are allowed to judge movies based on their merits, and not based on the gender of the actors. But this is probably the wrong election year for that kind of thinking.
