It’s Saturday night and you know what that means: I’m sitting on Twitter watching other lonely people argue about things that don’t matter. At least this time there are dead strippers involved.
The latest feminist outrage surrounds the trailer for the upcoming film Rough Night, which appears to be an all-female rip off of The Hangover series. About a minute into the first-look, the film’s stars — Scarlett Johansson, Ilana Glazer, Kate McKinnon, Demi Moore, and Zoë Kravitz — kill a male stripper during a bachelorette party in a cocaine-and-booze-fueled accident.
See the trailer below:
Apparently, I didn’t get the memo that dead stripper jokes were passé. Feminist writer Chelsea Summers took to Twitter to declare the movie’s premise haram.
As far as I’m concerned, strippers aren’t sex workers (or I’m going to the wrong clubs), but that didn’t stop the outrage train from leaving the station. Other social media users piled on:
Self-described dominatrix and popular tweeter @iamyevgeniya, even called for a boycott:
Some female-friendly outlets gave their thoughts too. Cory Stieg at Refinery29 makes it clear that “Strippers are people, and sex workers unfortunately have to tirelessly remind people of this over and over.” In other words, stop laughing you guys.
“When it comes to pop culture, there’s an alarming density of jokes and inaccuracies that get weaved into the way we talk about sex work. “Just like any stereotype, these representations are usually dehumanizing, and they misinform the general public about what sex workers are really like,” wrote Tina Horn, a former sex worker, in a 2016 story about sex work for Refinery29. Even stripper murder movies have been done before with men doing the killing, like in 1998’s Very Bad Things.”
Stieg later discusses the obviously unreasonable stigmatization surrounding sex work, implying that these jokes lead psychopaths to murder prostitutes. If you thought that trailer looked funny, you should feel bad. He ends his think piece by acknowledging the important fact that “we haven’t actually seen Rough Night.” Still, that tidbit didn’t stop him from getting upset.
Over at the The Mary Sue, a website dedicated to “highlighting women in the geek world, and providing a prominent place for the voices of geek women,” Jessica Lachenal didn’t like how the fat lady killed the hot dude with no shirt on, decrying the “utterly messed up joke.” Treating the film like some sort of genocide, Lachenal writes how she has “real hard time seeing how anybody can justify such a terrible, awful premise.” After all, she posits, “If your feminism doesn’t stand for the rights of sex workers, then it isn’t intersectional, and if it isn’t intersectional, then who are you actually fighting for?”
Indeed.
The good news about all this hubbub is that if you don’t want to go see this latest Hollywood rehash, just say it’s because you’re a super-serious feminist.
