inkskinned:

oh, women can be terrible. violent, self-serving, horrible. any person in retail knows “can i speak to your manager.” white women helped vote trump in. my bully was a woman. i’m sure to certain people i’m angry, snappish, aggressive. i know women who were arrogant, annoyingly two-faced, willing to sacrifice anyone to get ahead. 

i have every belief that if you put thirty “send this back i ate most of it but i hated it” women on an island, something bloody would happen. i have every belief there are women who are abusers, who are toxic, who have sexually assaulted others, who are horrible, cruel people.

but two cis men writing the experience of women on an island alone is not gong to work. they are going to have to rely on stereotypes in order to inform their writing. i don’t know what it’s like to be a boy amongst boys and i wouldn’t try to convince people that i do. unless they tirelessly work to ask girls: what is it like for you, it’s going to be a mess. i predict a mousy white girl being bullied by minority “bitches”. i predict the movie we’ve all seen before, of the “cool girl” versus other girls, where the vapid pretty one is the boss and the plain-but-smart girl is the hero. it won’t break any barriers.

and i worry. how often will their clothes deteriorate into scantily-clad teenagers. how often will they stand washing themselves in virginal-seeming half-shots of naked backs, idolizing the femininity of children. how often will the one in charge say something like “you’re all a bunch of girls,” how often will the words “ew, you’re such a girl” come out of her mouth. or the reverse: the “girly girl” is shown as helpless, stupid, hopeless, our heroine rolls her eyes and says, “girls” “i can do this because i have three bothers” “you fight like a girl”. and of course: “don’t be such a girl.” i worry we’ll see what we’ve become accustomed to: two-dimensional props parroting misogyny, dog-whistle writing because “whaaattt… i thought you wanted more female representation!!”, lackluster dialogue that teaches young girls it’s okay to hate each other – look at how terrible women are, after all – without any sort of genuine character development in the meantime.

the thing is, when i say “women can be terrible” I’m speaking as a woman. it’s completely different when a man says “women are terrible” and this movie seems to want to ignore that. you’re coming from a place of privilege to point out how awful a minority could be. are you really, really sure that’s groundbreaking?