Stu presents: Smusings!

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Part 1: An Unequal Foundation



First off, to better understand the relationship between Action movies and gender, we have to go back to the beginning of the genre in its modern form, which was (in my opinion) the 1960's. There, while the overall gender dynamics varied from film to film, whether it was the toxic masculinity and aggression of the men in The Dirty Dozen and The Wild Bunch, or the relatively "sensitive" characterization of Frank Bullitt, there was still a fairly consistent throughline to these films' gender portrayals, whether they were contemporary or period pieces; the men were the primary drivers of the action scenes, while the women tended to be more on the sidelines, either as collateral damage, background dressing, or as supporting characters to the male protagonists, like Cathy in Bullitt, who has to take a step back from the violent world the titular detective inhabits when she stumbles onto the bloody aftermath of a crime scene:



And, while there were exceptions to this rule even during the early days of the genre, these were still few and far between, and even some of those examples still got buried underneath the overall sexist attitudes of the films themselves, such as when Goldfinger portrays Pussy Galore (ugh) as being won over by the personification of "Mad Men-era" chauvinism himself, James Bond, when he forces his extremely well-travelled penis onto her after incapacitating her physically. Additionally, the scene takes on an even more regressive light if you remember that Galore admitted in the novel that she was sexually abused by her uncle, which resulted in the "pathological malady" Ian Fleming's words, not mine) of her lesbianism, which just needed to be cured by the touch of the right man, an aspect that, while not explicitly confirmed in the film, is still implied with her remark about being immune to Bond's manly charms (and that's without even taking the allegations about Sean Connery's misogynistic personal views into account, either).