Can we talk about how the Deadpool movie, which the media has largely referred to (in so many words) as a fuckboy’s wetdream, not only gives a female sex worker an empathetic role, but treats her and her work more respectfully than about 99% of so called feminist media?
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At no point does the movie imply that Vanessa is tainted because she is a sex worker. At no point does the movie imply that Vanessa is unworthy of love because she is a sex worker.
At no point is Vanessa portrayed as “broken.”
At no point does the movie imply that being a sex worker makes Vanessa a bad girlfriend. At no point does Deadpool ask or expect Vanessa to sacrifice her job for their relationship.
At no point is Vanessa slut-shamed for her job, by either protagonists or villains.
Think about that.
Denigrating sex workers is so taboo within the Deadpool movieverse that even the villains won’t do it.
We know that Vanessa experienced sexual abuse, and that it’s shaped the person she’s become and influenced the choices she’s made. The movie clearly acknowledges that sexual abuse is real, and that it is damaging, and that people who experience sexual abuse struggle to lead “normal” lives and get “normal” jobs.
But the movie never hands sexual abusers the mic.
There is no sexual abuse porn in this movie. There are no voyeuristic rape flashbacks. There are no misogynist monologues. The audience learns about Vanessa’s abusive past from Vanessa, on Vanessa’s terms, through Vanessa’s own words.
This seems like the bare minimum of dignity any female character should be granted, yet so much media fails to meet this extremely low bar.
The movie makes it very clear that Vanessa has a life outside of sex work. She does not live on a stripper pole. Sex work is something Vanessa does. Sex work is not who Vanessa is. She has an apartment. She wears pajamas. What other fictional universe can say the same? I can think of one tv show, but that’s about it, and that show’s viewership is nothing compared to Deadpool’s.
Now on the one hand, I’m not necessarily happy that Vanessa’s character arc revolves almost entirely around her romantic relationship with the lead male protagonist. But on the other hand, I find it very refreshing to see a sex worker in the media whose character arc does not revolve entirely around the fact that she is a sex worker. Hate to say it, but for sex workers in the media, being relegated to the role of love interest is actually a step up.
Most feminist media would rather pretend sex workers don’t exist than write storylines of any kind for them.
This.
And the people who call Deadpool a fuckboy’s wet dream sure as heck didn’t watch the same movie I did.
The movie has:
A very funny moment in which the joke is on those who assume that sex workers have abusive pasts, not on the sex worker. (The comparing abuse thing gets ridiculous enough that they’re both clearly lying).
The male lead repeatedly posed in female come-on positions. This one is my favorite:
He’s even on a bearskin rug in front of a fire. The humor in this pose is “Haha, isn’t it silly to pose a character like that.” It’s designed explicitly to make people think about how commonly female characters are shown in these kinds of ridiculous poses. Going to tell me that’s not a feminist visual joke?
An under-age female character who is never sexualized. Yeah, this girl
Look at that. A practical costume, her breasts are minimized rather than emphasized. We only see Negasonic Teenage Warhead as badass, not “cute.” And she’s treated like a teenager, not a child or an adult.
Oh, and Deadpool doesn’t rescue Vanessa in the end. He throws her a weapon so she can rescue herself. Which she does, because she’s badass.
I’d actually call Deadpool a feminist movie, and an important one. Why?
Because they probably tricked an entire bunch of fuckboys into watching a feminist movie ;).
So, why was it so feminist?
Two words: Ryan and Reynolds.
Ryan Reynolds wanted to do this movie. He wanted to do this movie for years. Reynolds is basically a Deadpool cosplayer who managed to convince a movie studio to pay him a lot of money to be a Deadpool cosplayer.
Guess what Ryan Reynolds also is?
A feminist. He says he’s going to push for even more badass ladies in the sequel. (I think we’re going to see Vanessa with superpowers. They had her long enough to expose her to the agent, if not to activate it).
I’d love to see Vanessa with superpowers, and I enjoyed the hell out of Deadpool.
I forgot one, and an important one.
When we are shown the strip club Vanessa works at, it is not filmed the way movies always film strip clubs.
It’s filmed as if we were going to an office. It’s just “this is where Vanessa happens to work.” No low shot angles to show off women’s bodies, no soft porn music.
Just very…matter of fact.
Can we also bring up that Deadpool does NOT shame Negasonic’s name choice? It screams OC but he’s still supportive of it.
Of course he’s not gonna shame it, it’s the best fucking thing he’s ever heard in his life and he’s pissed at himself that he didn’t think of it first.
I’m also gonna add in here: the sex montage. Like I went into the movie knowing about it, and fully expected things to be Awkward because I was seeing the film with a male friend. But the way they did the sex montage was not the typically “sexy” Hollywood Sex Scene. It was a cute montage documenting the shift from a simple date/fling into a legitimate long-term relationship, that somehow just happened to be done through silly, somewhat kinky sex. Like I fully expected at least mild cringing but it was fucking adorable.
Also the strap-on bit! Showing in no uncertain terms that Wade is cool with being sexually submissive! Not making a man getting pegged any more or less comedic fodder than the rest of their various sexual acts! Treating pegging and potential femdom it as another normal aspect of Wade and Vanessa’s sex life!!
It should also be noted that there’s only a three year age gap between Ryan Reynolds and Morena Baccarin (Vanessa), at the time of filming Ryan would have been 38/39 and Morena 35/36, giving them probably the smallest age gap between an onscreen couple in any popular movie. Because Ryan refuses to work in a romance plot with women ten years (or more) younger than him, because he thinks it’s degrading for the ACTRESS he’s playing opposite, and it is, in nearly every George Clooney romantic comedy he plays opposite a 20 something year old woman when he himself is like 50 something and that’s just creepy, a dude in a romance plot should NOT be old enough to be his love interests father, that should never ever be a thing.
18-year-old mayor jack zimmermann bankrupted his city by funding a
giant hockey rink/sports complex called Ice Town. years later, he falls in love with eric
bittle, the cheerful deputy director of the samwell parks department
Slytherin won the house cup 6 years in a row before Harry started Hogwarts and then Gryffindor kept winning after that and I just find it really unrealistic that in 11 years Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw never won it once. If the teachers award house points just for answering questions correctly in class, it seems strange that the house that values intelligence and the house that values hard work above everything else never got enough points to win the cup at least once in all that time
Severus Snape was blatantly biased in favor of Slytherin house when giving and taking away points. We have seen that McGonagall, Sprout, and Flitwick were all relatively impartial in this regard, so the Slytherins had a massive advantage over the other houses for the six years before Harry came along. Of course after Harry arrived, Hogwarts lowkey fell to shambles and the following seven House Cup competitions had weird shit affecting their outcomes- time travel, international wizarding competitions, a literal takeover by Death Eaters, and so on. Additionally, we see point inflation occur over the course of the series- Harry, Ron, and Hermione dealing with the Sorcerer’s Stone earned them 50/60 points each while the very next year their tomfoolery with the Chamber of Secrets earned them 200 points each. The points are completely arbitrary.
The House Cup competition hasn’t been fair for a long, long time, and that’s why it’s been dominated by Slytherin and Gryffindor.
It is a community service initiative started on behalf of Pokémon GO players, hereby referred to as Trainers, in order to improve relations with the local communities, and community leaders. The purpose of #pogopickup is to remind Trainers to clean up litter in the areas they meet up to play, and to always be respectful and mindful of the world around them.
Bring an empty shopping bag with you and pick up trash any time you’re out catching Pokémon. This will clean your community, and believe it or not, has been second nature to you for your entire Pokemon careers, most of you at least. In every game, you always carried around two things: Pokémon, and a bag. As you walked, when you came across loose items on the ground you would pick them up, and put them in your bag.
We encourage all trainers not to forget about this important aspect of being a Pokémon Master, and to #pogopickup your trash wherever you go. Take pictures of your full bags of litter after a Pokéwalk and tag them #pogopickup and #[your city] to help better relations between player and community in your area too!
If Sanders doesn’t get the nomination, and you can’t see yourself voting for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, then don’t. Vote third party.
Consider the Libertarian or Green Party.
Don’t feed the establishment by voting for Clinton, and don’t feed authoritarian isolationism by voting for Trump.
No. The absolute largest chunk of people considering changing their votes at the moment are disappointed non-conservatives. There was barely any competition among republicans; from the get-go, the voter base united behind Trump. If non-conservatives split their votes across multiple fronts, they WILL lose.
Voting third party in America throws your vote directly into the garbage. Our system does not work like Australia’s. You don’t get a second or third choice, and candidates who win aren’t going to look at the numbers and say “I see 25% of Americans voted Green, I should implement Green policies.” That’s not how it works. Conservative voters overwhelmingly back a single party, the GOP, while non-conservative voters are the ones that scatter across multiple, weak fronts when faced with an unappealing Democratic party nominee. Think about it like this:
The majority of Republican voters support Trump and are not changing their vote even though party leaders and figureheads are universally decrying him. They’ve been groomed for decades by the GOP to be this way, and now party leaders have lost control of the impressionable voter base they created for themselves. There’s nothing they can do about it at this point. While a small number of Republicans can and are switching parties, it’s not very much. Meanwhile, Democrats are floundering, trying to decide which front to unite under. Some of them go to the Green party or Libertarians, sure; the rest stay with the Democratic party in the hopes that even with people leaving, they will have enough to block Trump. But Trump doesn’t need a majority of total Americans to vote for him; he only needs more than the other candidates have. Do you understand what I’m saying? Trump could get 10% of the vote, but as long as no other party has more than 10%, he still wins. The second you split the left and middle across three or four fronts, the right seizes control. This is how it goes down every single fucking time we go through this.
The other thing to consider is that the electoral college is NOT going to weigh in favor of a third party. Doing so would be political suicide. They are paid to vote certain ways, and not doing so would fuck up their careers. Even if an entire state votes in favor of a third party, the electoral college is going to vote for whichever primary party matches up the closest, and sometimes not even that. Their votes are counted when making the actual choice of president; ours are not. They proved that with Gore. The majority of Americans voted for him; the electoral college installed Bush anyway and told us to suck it up. The question at this point is whether they’d risk it a second time, and we have to hope that they won’t, which is why we have to unite under a single front to block Trump.
If anyone needed proof Suicide Squad was made by two eighth grade boys stacked in a trenchcoat.
I feel like every time I start feeling like this would be worth watching the production team says some shit like this and I just honestly….
your starter in pokémon games: OP af, highest level pokémon on your team, can defeat other trainers single-handedly
your starter in pokémon go: this is my 12cp charmander and if he tries to fight anyone he will die immediately. he is literally the weakest pokémon that i own. he can’t do anything but i love him
Maybe I’m overthinking this, but the whole point of fandom is to overthink things. So, imma go for it.
There is a very strong link between anxiety and warmth. One of the symptoms of really bad anxiety is your hands get really, really cold. Like cup-your-best-friend’s-face-and-watch-her-shriek cold. Because the body feels like it’s under attack, thus the blood rushes away from the fingers.
Holding a warm cup of hot chocolate or tea is a really great way to reassure the body that nothing is wrong. It sends a feeling of well-being, of safety.
Now, the fact that Jack sees itty-bitty Bitty as a source of /warmth/……
