illlusen:

I sometimes see these absurd threads online with titles such as “Is Dario Argento a feminist or a misogynist?” When I see discussions like this, I can only think that people are very confused about what feminism is. Misogyny is hatred of women; feminism is not love of women, it’s a political movement. Surely Argento, when creating a movie like SUSPIRIA (1977), was not conscious of being part of a political movement to bolster women’s freedom. He was, according to interviews, working out nightmare visions in his head. He was trying to create visceral cinema, and his cinema is powerful and has had a lasting impact on audiences; but not because it’s feminist.

What does the audience think about when watching SUSPIRIA? Is it that they wish women had equal pay, equal representation in culture, were taken more seriously, had an easier time negotiating with men, suffered less sexual objectification and harassment? Are the female characters in it living in a meaningfully realistic world of gendered politics? Are men in it implicated for their violence, or for their unthinking privilege that they benefit from at the expense of women? And most importantly, do audiences viewing it suddenly understand how the world looks from the interior of a specifically female consciousness?

Alternatively, in recent years, people tend to mistake movies in which female characters “show badass broads avenging themselves” (to quote an article in BUST magazine), as feminist. But again, people think that everything that is not misogynistic is feminist. Just because a movie features female protagonists does not mean that it’s feminist. For instance, when people say Russ Meyer is feminist, they might want to be aware that he was quoted as saying “What do women know about sexuality anyway?” and that his intended audience, in his own words, was “some guy…in the theatre with semen seeping out of his dick.”

Russ Meyer was part of the tidal wave of mainstreaming the objectification of women in the 1960s. And while some of his films feature “badass broads,” it’s important to remember that for Meyer, those broads were largely sexual fetishes. And while I understand that the experience of watching FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (1965) can be empowering for female viewers, it’s going too far to suggest that Meyer himself had a feminist agenda in mind when he was making it. I’ve even seen female writers attempt to imbue dictionary-definition misogynistic movies such as Lucio Fulci’s The NEW YORK RIPPER (1982) (a prototypical slasher in which any woman who arouses or talks back to men is slaughtered) with feminist virtues. One writer’s reasoning was that RIPPER is feminist because women watching it engage in a gender-performative switch, identifying with the male killer; or in other words, it’s feminist because it has a male gaze. This is what I mean when I say that people are confused.

Anna Biller, Feb. 5, 2018 "Let’s Stop Calling Movies Feminist”