This is where I disagree with both of them.

I always find it odd how squeamish people are about the P-word, and how they assume that artistic erotica therefore cannot at one and the same time be called (soft-core) "pornography".

It's as though if we refer to it as pornography then the feminerrorists have won!

I agree with Wil about the misogyny in certain movies being disgusting. Although personally, I don't view the extreme horror movies as the worst offenders; I think the most pernicious movies are the movies that masquerade as 'normal, family fun' but have very few female characters that have any sort of personality outside their romantic involvement with the male actors in the film (including everything from Spiderman to Oceans 13). They subtly try to convince women that they are not meant to have individuality or autonomy - that they're not interesting enough or good enough. Women make up 50% of society, why don't they make up 50% of the 'interesting' characters in films?

At least Solomon is up front about how offensive his movie is; most films don't warn anyone of how brainwashing and bigoted they are.

(As a passionate movie geek, I cried over this once. And yes, I know how excessively geeky that is.)

Too true, brother! You were built to be a fuckwit and are CHOOSING to embrace it! Hurrah for self-determination!!

SG is porn. Get over it.

personally i think the only truly egregious offense here is calling torture porn "horror". it's like calling 50 Cent hip hop.

The feminerrorists have won!

I just read Whedon's blog and he is my fucking hero.

i lol'd

I don't exactly disagree with this - in fact, I about 90% agree. But with a caveat: I'm okay if your movie doesn't have any interesting female characters. Lawrence of Arabia did not have any female characters to speak of. There seems to be a problem in movies where a writer comes up with movies without any female characters, and then they stick a totally boring one in there for no reason. The most egregious example of this I can think of offhand is The Score, where Angela Bassett was cast, and the character had literally no purpose in the movie. Better just to make the movie without women if the only role you can find for them is to nag, say, some driven cop about how he's neglecting his family in between the chase scenes that the audience actually came to see.

The other thing I disagree with the way you phrased it - I don't think they are "trying" to convince women of anything. The problem to me is much more that they aren't thinking about women at all, beyond that if you have a hot woman or popular actress in with the men, ticket prices go up.

i'm with WilWheaton (and TheFuckOffKid).

and please don't tell me that this has anything to do with pushing boundaries.

You've got to keep trying. Eventually it will open for you.

I'm all for letting the girls decide what they want to do - after all, it is their choice. But if I were an SG, I wouldn't - this whole thing smacks of sleaze and I get enough of that in my daily life (even without nudes on the net) and I don't really need more.

That, and I think the most offensive thing to me is that he apparently has the impression that SG is full of crazy wild girls - perhaps he's confusing the site with Girls Gone Wild? Now, I understand full and well that most of us (both members and the girls) like to go out and have a good time, but what an awful stereotypical thought process. In reality, most of the girls are your everyday women, going to school and working jobs that they might love or might hate with a passion, and fighting with their boyfriends or girlfriends just like everybody else. I dunno. I get the message of 'Whee, look at these crazy freak-o girls, aren't they outrageous? Let's parade them around like slabs of meat!' How insulting.

I wasn't trying to be funny or sarcastic. I was asking a question about something that I was curious about. I thought that Wil was a technology expert who was hired by the site to write about technology, so I was curious about why he is writing about movie marketing.

More than a bit of a tangent, but it's interesting how much of a schism in thinking there is in many ways here about "torture porn" vs. "real porn." There seems to be a squeamishness about actual porn, meaning anything harder than SG and ranging from Hustler to Ron Jeremy to misogynist reality porn, to the point that some are very reluctant to attach the p-word in any way, shape or form to this website's content. It seems to me that the mindset is that "traditional" pornography generally shouldn't be discussed in the same breath as Suicide Girls because it fails the empowerment of women test.

On the other hand, the immediate inclination about the recent torture porn featuring attractive women mutilated for entertainment looks to be, if not to defend it, at least to deride questioners of it as too sensitive, too p.c., to pedantic. Despite how saavy we think we are about the MPAA and FCC's double standards about sex and violence, the 'empowerment test' enters the equation when women engage in sex on film, but not when they're depicted as graphically tortured on film.

Even at the top level, there are strict restriction about SGs appearing in hardcore porn films, but the site staff looks to have entered into some sort of visibility/publicity partnership for SGs to support this torture porn. Yes, of course it's a quite unfair comparison - the restriction is to prevent SGs from appearing on competing sites; still, I suspect that the outcry on this site would be much greater if an SG or ex-SG appeared in a graphic porn scene than as the victim in torture porn similar to Captivity.

I don't know, I'm making a lot of leaps just based on how I see certain reactions so I'm sure many will strongly disagree. But the contrast struck me so quickly enough that I found it interesting.