My "Sin City" Sin

My little “Queen Kong” rant is not the first time I wrote about annoying sexist shit in “innovative” movies. I got some serious hate mail this past summer when Entertainment Weekly published a little letter I wrote regarding Sin City. I wrote:

I found your article on Sin City to be depressing. What is it about male-comic book writers? No matter how creative they are, no matter how far their imaginations can go in developing complex alternative worlds and building on wild ideas, they seem to be utterly unable to conceive of women characters as anything other than leather-clad prostitutes, strippers, or Madonnas whose pure love redeems their men. Frank Miller seems like a really interesting man. I eagerly await the revolutionary day he comes up with something outside of these tired (and, by now, boring) stereotypes.

OK, so I admit that I should not have clumped all male comic-book writers in with my complaint, as it made me sound like one of those male-hating feminist bitches, when I am actually a people-hating feminist bitch. That was definitely a mistake, and people let me know it. I agree that not all male comic-book writers suck, as many are wonderful storytellers and visionaries. (I’m thinking Neil Gaiman and Daniel Clowes, por exemple.) However, I stand by my bitching about female characters in Sin City, which I admittedly have not read nor seen. I do know that the movie seemed to require that none of the female characters wear clothes of a covering sort, including the character who works in a prison. I could deal with that if the men characters all wore revealing get ups as well, but that seems to be a ridiculous notion. Men? Without clothes!?! Never! And could it’ve killed him to not fall into the Madonna/whore dichotomy, a lame false situation if there ever was one.

Anyway, my favorite hate mail was from someone who turned out to be a freshman in college who was featured on some HGTV show for his Spiderman collection. Sadly, I no longer have that masterpiece to share (believe me, you would’ve loved it), but when I read it to one of my co-workers, he was slightly afraid that this guy might actually hurt me since I dared to insult his hero. (Somehow, I think that Frank Miller has heard it all before and that he could give a fuck what I think, which is fine by me.)

The most fun way to respond to someone who sent you a nasty email calling you a shit-eating asshole (I am paraphrasing here) is to respond with two words: “That’s nice.” Man, that sends the Rush Limbaugh set into a tizzy! Something to keep in mind for the future.