Pirates of the Caribbean & Male Disposability
July 22nd, 2007 by Glenn Sacks, MA for Fathers & Families
Like many American parents, I've seen/endured all three Pirates of the Caribbean movies. (My humble, untrained opinion is that the first was good, the second one poor, the third one marginal).
I'm accustomed to the standard in TV and movies that we can kill lots and lots of people and it's OK, as long as the people are not women or children. However, even taking this into consideration, Pirates 2 and to a lesser extent Pirates 3 take male disposability to an extreme.
There is a lot of senseless, pointless bloodshed--killing of men--in both movies, so much that even my dulled sensibilities were a little offended. Stands are made and battles are fought with little reason, or with tacit acceptance that it's OK that a lot of men are going to die to serve very narrow interests. Nobody seems to notice or care that tons of pirates and British soldiers are being killed.
One of the few (if only) times we take note of people being killed is a powerful scene at the beginning of Pirates 3, when hundreds of pirates--including some women and children--are being hanged by the British.
Did anybody else see the movie that way?
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July 22nd, 2007 at 8:29 pm
i agree with your opinion on the pirates movie....how about how men get slapped by a woman who feels insulted?...doesn't the government , legal system and educational institutions all pander to women....men need to be the bean counters today
July 22nd, 2007 at 10:13 pm
You hit the nail on the head: I haven't even seen #3 and I have no plans to see #3 simply because of the mass male-only slaughter in #2. It seems the only vehicle they could use to tell the story was sink/destroy yet another ship full of men...oh yeah...and let's show half the crew fall to their deaths at the beginning in the most amusing way possible.
It's unfortunate since I think Depp did a good job...Except for the "Great Wheel" fight scene (which was hilarious), #2 was just one of the most unoriginal movie I've seen in awhile.
July 23rd, 2007 at 4:59 am
These movies, in fact almost all movies these days, see males as bullet stops and nothing more.
July 23rd, 2007 at 11:32 am
Nah, I think that's going a little overboard on the interpretation. Can't really let today's values be applied to a movie that takes place in an age where chivalry was still a big thing.
Watch Starship troopers. Plenty of women die in that one :p
July 23rd, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Duy, It is all about context: in mainstream movies, except in horror movies, amusing deaths will only be men...serious deaths can be both men and women...
For instance, it does not bother me how many men die in war movies or most period pieces since usually each death serves a purpose (in war people die, etc). In the case of Pirates, which I would hardly consider a "period piece" and which was supposed to be a family movie, the movie simply depicts mass slaughter for the hell of it. There was no rhyme or reason. It was a poor movie: the only thing the director could do to move the plot along was to have Our Hero sink yet another ship for absolutely no purpose. The moral was that men are expendable for laughs. I know I for one wouldn't have taken my kids to it simply because I believe that life (and death) is supposed to serve a purpose. Imagine if those ships would have been full of women instead of men, the director would have never sunk them...plain and simple. Or, since we know that there were female pirates on Jack Sparrow's ship, imagine if that ball full of men that fell to the bottom of the chasm would have had a woman in it ... just one... Disney wouldn't have financed the movie (especially in the family movie genre)...period...end of paragraph...
So, a serious scene showing the hanging of men and women is fully acceptable (as in #3)...but I guarantee that there won't be any women dying in a "funny" scene depicting the slaughter of a crew.
In the case of Starship troopers, you're absolutely right. Again, this was supposed to be a period piece (in this case, the period being the future). Every death did serve a purpose to forward the plot. Mass slaughter was fully acceptable because that was the point...humanity was being brought to the brink.
July 23rd, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Well, the wholesale violent deaths of men is generally realistic in portraying most of history - after all, that's was practically the definition of manhood - the willingness (and damned near expectation) to die for your family.
The fact is that action movies are about violence for amusement, and historical action movies are about historical violence for amusement. So we have amusing battles where hordes of men slaughter each other. The absence of women is not surprising.
To me, I'm always more bothered by the way that, in any of those movies, the way that extras lives are considered immaterial. The deaths of hundreds are less important than the hero's romance. Particularly bothersome is when a hero goes back to rescue some important character (often a woman), at the cost of the lives of numerous extras - friend and foe - and everybody cheers when he gets there, because her live was more important than all those non-speaking-parts. It just irks me.
Really, action-movie morality is so bizarre, fixating on it's sexism is only a drop in the ocean.
I can only think of Kung Fu type movies where the villainous extras that will be quickly and heroicly dispatched by the protagonist are ever female.
July 23rd, 2007 at 1:55 pm
This conversation reminds me of a board I was on years ago when the sci-fi show "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda" first came out. If you watched that show, you may have noticed that often women were portrayed (both evil and good) as leading teams of "male grunts" who were then fighting/dying while their female leaders (the one's with speaking roles) always escaped... I noted on this Andromeda board that I found this hierarchy illogical. Not because more often then not, the leader was female...I was ok with that. I had a problem with the dearth of "female grunts" within each of these teams. Logically, if there are female leaders then there should be female grunts working their way up to be those leaders.
Interestingly, the producer/director of the show posted an excellent response in total agreement. He basically said that they in the writers room never thought of that and that they would be sure to include more women fighting (and dying) in future episodes. Sure enough, within a few weeks, there are an episode portraying the attack of a village by some sort of marauders...Again, the leaders of this village were often women...but this time the "grunts" of the village we made up of men AND women and both men and women were slain in defense of their homes. This was literally the first episode of Andromeda that actually depicted the death of an "unimportant" female.
The funny thing was, while discussing this issue on the board, many (probably most) people agreed with me...but you also had a man or two that simply said they didn't want to see women die..period. It was far more acceptable in their eyes to see men die, but that women are supposed to be sacred.
I find this sentiment interesting since, if I bring up the number of male casualties vs. the number of female casualties in modern movies, I usually get the "don't worry...it's just a movie" argument to shut me up....but then in the next breath these same people think it is more acceptable in their eyes to see men die then women...ok...seems a bit hypocritical: so if it's just a movie, then why do you find that it is more acceptable for men to die then for women? If it is just a movie then it shouldn't matter either way...
July 23rd, 2007 at 8:01 pm
It was such a violent death of Alec Baldwin at the hands of the state in 'Team America World Police'. Why such violence against men? Who pulls the strings in this industry.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:55 am
Isn't this movie only accurately reflecting the role (never explicitly stated) of men?
We are the 'buffer sex'. We stand between women and the inevitable fate of all
species when population pressures begin to kick in.
Take war for instance. Nearly always fought over a resource under contention.
There's your definition of population strain right there - too many people, not
enough resource. Ergo, some must die, just as inevitably as gazelles die on the
African savanna when the rains don't come.
We might think it's our manly duty to do the fighting, but plenty of men on the
winning side don't live to see who won. A war is a cull, pure and simple. A male
cull.
The same psychological devices that are used to blind men from seeing this are
in play elsewhere and everywhere. It's why only the crimes we commit fill the news
every day, while the crimes women commit are barely criminalised, much less
reported. It's why so much less money is spent on our health and well-being.
It's why we are completely disposable when a relationship breaks down. It's why
we get executed and women don't. It's why we get to work all our lives, and
women get to experiment with lifestyle choices.
If anyone doubts that the male's role is to die when humanity's numbers over-reach,
I ask them to recount a single moment in history when the numbers of women were
so reduced by disaster that there became a noticeable shortage of them.
As for shortages of men, I can think of several instances, some on huge scales,
within the last 100 years alone.
July 28th, 2007 at 2:06 am
Rob Case writes: "I ask them to recount a single moment in history when the numbers of women were so reduced by disaster that there became a noticeable shortage of them."
In China, the imposition of a one-child-per-family restriction in 1980 led to an increase in sex-selective abortions, due to biases in Chinese society in favor of male children.
The result has been a wide disparity in the birth rate of females to males.
In the early 1980s, the sex ratio for babies in China was 108.5 males to 100 females.
By 2004 it was 120 males for 100 males, and by now it is has probably reached 130 boys for 100 girls.
By comparison, Alaska's sex ratio as of the 2000 census was 107 men to 100 women.
(The China and Alaska data are useful as an indication only, and are not directly comparable, since the China data are for live infant births, whereas the Alaska data are census counts of all people of all ages.)
On this basis, there is a very noticeable shortage of females in China today.
July 28th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
The woman shortage in China is the consequence of government mandated population
control, allied with a popular preference for boy children.
Adult women are not being slaughtered.
The only females suffering are the unborn - a group that has never been
associated with women in general in regards to protection.
Not sure about the relevance of Alaska to this, but if you are simply making
the point that there is a woman shortage there, there have also been woman
shortages in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada. Nothing to do
with women dying in large numbers - everything to do with more men emigrating
there.
November 27th, 2007 at 9:50 am
[...] I'm not saying Jessica would reject any complaints about the knife block--perhaps she would agree with men's activists that it's offensive. But it seems that Jessica and many other feminists tend to see popular culture as "offensive to women" when, in reality, popular culture is far more anti-male than anti-female. This is particularly true when depicting violence--a dozen men can die in a movie or cop show and scarcely anyone blinks, but when a woman dies, it's a big deal. To pick one example, see my blog post Pirates of the Caribbean & Male Disposability. [...]
December 1st, 2007 at 6:10 am
I just wanted to drop by and bump in with the fact much of the abduction of women by vikings involved the fact the True Religion demanded the exposure of children to the elements to be assured they were fit enough to survive.
Naturally, more men survive being naked in the snow than women due simply to birthweight.
December 10th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
So many opportunities for relevant discussion here it is hard to narrow it down. I'll start with the original point, the wholesale slaughter of males in the entertainment industry for its own sake. Gratuitous killing on screen was probably influenced by the invention of the remote control. When producers likely had a mere second to grab your attention before losing it to a rival, it just made good economical sense to pack as much sex and violence into a show as possible since apparently dialogue is just not attention getting enough. Quantity (male) vs. Quality (female) killing- is it a reflection of our reality? Are we just desensitized? Whether we are talking about gang wars in our streets or the bombing of nations men are the predominant casualties. Are we desensitized because we are over exposed? Is there a feeling that men seem to perpetuate it therefore they somehow deserve it? I remember my first exposure to a Sylvester Stallone movie in which he kills every man on the island with just the weapons he carried on his person, apparently all the guards on the island were incredibly poor shots despite thousands of rounds fired at him, in the end he retrieves his daughter and walks away a hero. I thought of all the other movies in which the only consequences for taking multitudes of lives was a hearty congratulations, you rogue! In the movie Terminator the protagonist admonishes his protector cyborg against the taking of human life, the manbot then shoots slews of uninformed Law Enforcement agents in the leg and humorously boasts of not one Casualty! We expect our young men to be completely aware that this is only fantasy, not real life, but everyday I see young men who think gun ownership is casual and cool, mine neighbor is my enemy. Gun-toting, dope smoking gangster brawler Snoop Dog is America's darling, hosting Nickelodeon award shows. (okay getting off topic) Its not that mens lives are more trivial but is it an exaggerated example of art imitating life? The reason we don't see as much publicity (and I disagree with that by the way, man kills his wife-news footnote, woman kills her husband-Primetime Special) because it doesn't happen near as often. The vast majority of women in prison are there for conspiracy charges, they are the wives and girlfriends of dealers or drove the get-a-way car. When women kill, it's usually to get away from men who have tormented them mentally and physically for years and they see no other way out, they aren't really a danger to society because chances are they will never kill again. Statistically, they will be sentenced for a much longer prison stay and will do the whole time. Men killing their wives is so common-place they are sentenced to the fraction of the time and will get reduced sentences for 'good-time'. So the killing of women in prime time is usually reserved for more lurid content as the victims of horrific sexual crimes (remember remote-control theory), with the occasional female perpetrator revenge killing thrown in as surprise plot twist.
Btw- let's not get side-tracked into thinking that China is the only place on Earth or in history that has practiced sex-selection. This has taken place in Ancient Greece, Africa, India etc. even the 'civilized' Victorians had a dead baby drawer in their houses. As long as there was a dowry to be paid, female babies were an economic detriment and therefore better disposed of. Just recently a girl in Pakistan was sentenced to death by stoning because her brother was dating outside of his caste. Acid attacks, female castration, witch burnings, sex slavery...etc. so before we get too carried away with the romantic notion that women are treated as sacred objects and men are not, let's look at the larger picture.
December 11th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Bronwen: "When women kill, it's usually to get away from men who have tormented them mentally and physically for years and they see no other way out, they aren't really a danger to society because chances are they will never kill again. .... "
You were ok right up until you started spewing standard feminist propaganda. For instance, do you know that 42% of Domestic Violence Homicide victims are male? - not the disproportionate numbers you have been lead to believe as evidenced by your "Men killing their wives is so common-place" misstatement. Before you go down the men-are-demons/women-are-angels (or victims or etc), you should take a look at a bit more info then what they teach you in highly-skewed "women's studies" classes. Here's a list:
http://www.acfc.org/site/PageServer?pagename=WV_DV_Billboard&JServSessionIdr00
http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071109210657.htm
http://www.mediaradar.org/media_fact_sheet.php
http://news.mensactivism.org/node/8818
As a gender egalitarian, I do not buy many of the women-as-perpetual-victim claims made by modern feminism. I think their one-sided view of life is disingenuous to both men and women, and their lack of a holistic approach to gender politics is only successful in perpetuating some sort of gender war and not in addressing the real problems of gender inequality.
Incidentally, as a general rule, I don't spend a lot of time on long-dead threads, but you are certainly welcome to comment further and I will come back. If the conversation turns interesting (ie: if you are more then simply a troll looking for attention), then I will be happy to discuss the subject further...We on this site are always open to feminists joining the discussion. Generally, censorship is not condoned here (unlike most feminist blogs).
June 5th, 2008 at 8:21 am
hi, I harshal from india.This film was absoulotly very nice & picturied. THE CAPTION JACK SPARROW his action is very perfectly & nice. Part one the pierrets of carribben was fantastick. & also this movies heroien i like it. please sent the massage to heroien & the symboll of this coin are also good in this picture please create part 4