What is more sexist, a billboard ad of Apocalypse throttling Mystique or the patronizing of women?

[Jayjay]

Yes. That's who I was referring to. The X-Man (sorry, X-Person) franchise is giving its women prominent leadership roles where they're full partners to the men on the screen and she thinks that this is inappropriate and that their weak and pathetic gender shouldn't be portrayed in combat roles.

This wasn't a picture of a man abusing a woman, it was a picture of two warriors locked in combat. Her narrow minded prejudices didn't even allow her to see this but instead to pigeonhole it into her myopic, preconceived little box.

Locked in combat? Sorry, I can't see that in the poster. It's just one guy choking a woman who looks completely helpless.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Ya, that's the point. Apocalypse is so powerful that the heroes are completely helpless against him. They have other posters with Storm and Cyclops blasting each other and being matched as equals. They have other posters with various characters, both male and female, looking like general badasses.

Taking one image in isolation from the entire marketing campaign and completely absent any of the context behind the image is no different than chopping out half of someone's sentence in order to make it look like you're quoting him as having a position unrelated to anything he actually said. X-Men is far more about the role of strong and powerful women being equal members of the team than any other superhero genre and Mystique is even more central to that concept than any of the others.

 

[abaddon]

The poster says in effect “Look at the odds this female warrior is up against!” It is not depicting a helpless damsel in distress, it’s presenting a crisis that everyone damn well knows will be resolved in her favor when she turns the tables on the big bully and eventually kicks his ass. That’s all implicit right there in the poster itself. They can't show you the resolution of the crisis, but you KNOW what the resolution will be already, so to complain the poster shows a powerless "damsel in distress" is to strip it from its fuller context (as if the poster's a stand-alone item and the movie should be ignored) as part of an ideological song-and-dance.

 

[abaddon]

Oh, didn’t mean to echo Mr. Sawyer so closely.

Hat’s off to Tom Sawyer’s posts, I’m with him on this!