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Putrid gender politics in Brimstone

Putrid gender politics in Brimstone published on 2 Comments on Putrid gender politics in Brimstone

All righty, so I’ve been watching Brimstone. It’s a canceled show with John Glover [the awesome! also gay!] as the Devil goading on some guy with a fascinating nose. The guy is Ezekiel Stone, who went to hell for killing his wife’s rapist. Now back from hell, he has a second chance at life on earth if he can round up 113 escaped souls and shoot out their eyes, sending them back to hell.

Well, the gender politics of this show are FUCKED UP. First of all, any women who come back from the dead inevitably seduce poor hapless male mortals and KILL THEM WITH SEX. For example, in Carrier, a 1920s flapper, institutionalized for being a typhoid vector, pops up and kills by kissing. She prompts instantaneous death by coughing, while CGI-enhanced yellow bacteria swarm out of the victims’ mouths. All of the female damned souls are like the equivalent of WWI anti-STD campaigns. “She make look pure, but…” But underneath her fair exterior is a vile hellhole of germ-ridden filth!

Wait…it gets better! Ezekiel, having died 15 years ago, suffers from the knowledge that his wife, Roz, is still alive. He mopes about her frequently, which is fine because people do that. In one ep, though, he hangs outside her house, watching her. Clearly adhering to the detached-from-reality-schema in which breathing down an unsuspecting person’s neck is oh-so-romantic, he considers introducing himself to her. His landlady, who’s sarcastic, snappy, intelligent, novel-writing, bouncy and much more interesting than his Sainted Widow, advocates a reunion with arguments taken straight from stupid romance novels.

Ezekiel has previously had a fling with a detective, Ash, who turned out to be an evil serpent goddess [?!], so he has been sexually active since his death. Though Brimstone’s men can be sexually active, we shall see how punishment befalls the Brimstone women if they dare to express desire. For Roz, the path to punishment begins when Ezekiel sees that Roz has a boyfriend who seems really devoted to her. Ezekiel becomes very distressed. Okay, fine, that’s also psychologically plausible.

So over half of the episode sets up Ezekiel’s mope and Roz’s boyfriend. Roz still remembers Ezekiel fondly and cries over him, but I’m starting to think that the episode will end with Ezekiel leaving Roz alone to live a happy life with her boyfriend. But no.

The Swift Narrative Hammer of Misogynist Doom smites Roz for having the temerity to be unfaithful to the memory of Ezekiel. You see — Roz the Sainted, Innocent and Clueless suspects nothing, but her new boyfriend is actually the serpent goddess in disguise! She wants to possess Ezekiel’s wife if she can’t possess Ezekiel. Or perhaps she wants to turn into Roz so that Ezekiel will love her, which is awfully pathetic of a super-powerful serpent goddess who is, incidentally, set up as the only escaped soul that the Devil fears.

Of course, since Roz’s new “boyfriend” is actually A MONSTER FROM HELL, Ezekiel the Heroic Stalker must swoop in to save the day. He scares off the Villain Who Dared To Entice Roz To Getting On With Her Life.

Then, just to make sure that Roz remembers her appropriate place as an inviolate globe of widowed purity, Ezekiel leaves Roz with a gift…one of the snow globes that she loves so much. It contains a bride and a groom with the title FOREVER. She therefore has a tangible reminder that she should be eternally faithful to Ezekiel, even beyond his death, and never commit the sin of being sexually interested in someone again.

As a woman, Roz has two choices. She can either be a sexually active person and get damned to hell and lumped in the same category as the serpent goddess who wants to destroy the world. Or she can remain faithful to the memory of her dead husband, who should be GONE THE FUCK AWAY AND NOT EVEN A CONSIDERATION, and keep her vagina closed and untouched by penises, like a GOOD WOMAN. It’s an unsophisticated, brainless version of the Madonna/whore complex. What offensive narrative laziness.

2 Comments

Would be nice if she had the alternative of screwing the entertaining landlady, but I bet that idea isn’t even on this virginwhore map. *wry*

Oh, and in a way it is, since the serpent goddess is like, a goddess.. Ohh, Ezekiel is also jealous since his widow’s new lover is secretly a woman! Hee hee.

*sigh*

Crap obviously written by men.

Putrid gender politics in Brimstone

Everybody knows that good girls/women don’t have sex.

Ah! Gotcha. Kidding!

I’ve never seen this particular show, but your review of it makes me want to watch it and laugh at the blatant discrepancy.

Ever see the 2008 movie “Elegy” with Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley? Not my usual thing, but I went with a friend. Kingsley is a professor; Cruz is a former student. He “seduces” her, and “they” fall in love. Only he is obsessed with the idea that she might find a younger lover. But – pause here for irony – he has another woman, closer to his age, with whom he meets occasionally to have “no strings sex.” (That concept has always puzzled me.)

The nerve of him had me mentally sputtering. WTF? You have found the so-called woman of your dreams. She is young and beautiful. Younger than you, sir. But you still um SCREW this older woman who thinks that you and she have an exclusive relationship?! Double traitor!

Then I realized the moral of the story. Men are allowed/encouraged to have sex. With as many people as they please because even if they love one person, they need that “escape hatch” of sex with another person. So they don’t feel suffocated. Women, on the other hand, should NOT have sex. OR if they do, they have to be exclusive to ONE man. And even if they are exclusive to that ONE man, the women have to accept that the man requires OUTLETS. So she has to suck up that he can do as he pleases. Because by her having SEX in the first place, she has fallen off the pedestal.

Back again to … good girls/women don’t have sex. Eeeump! Guess I wasn’t kidding after all ;-D

D7ana

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