Film Review: Let the Right One In

We watched this last night, having had it sat on the side for a week or so. I rented it because lots of people told me it was excellent, but then left it sat there, telling myself I needed to be in the right mood to watch a foriegn language film, that I could only watch it when able to concentrate, etc... Foriegn language films have a bigger mountain to climb with me than Anglophone ones.

( somewhat spoilery review below the cut )

I'd fully recommend giving this film a viewing, if you can stomach the unflinching style of the gory bits. I'd give it 8/10. You can watch the trailer here.

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The Gordian Knot of instituitionalised sexism - a stream of consciousness

Because I am poorly and have no spoons, I got into a fight I possibly shouldn't have started last night, with someone who winds me up with his sexist behaviour at regular intervals. I'm not going to link to it, because I don't want this post to be about that specific incident, but about the generality. It ended up with him saying to me that I have no right to complain about him not linking to women's views unless I, personally, spoonfeed him women's views to link to.

Now, my instinctive reaction to that is to think fuck you! Why should I do all your work for you, you lazy git?... But that's possibly counterproductive for two reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, as I have discussed before, men will happily self-promote in ways that women won't. Mediocre men will shout from the rooftops about how awesome they are, and the more mediocre they are, the more they shout; awesome women, because of shyness, or socialisation that women who shout are harpies, or insecurity about their awesomeness, are much less likely to self-promote. This is made worse by the fact that very few people will look beyond what is waved in front of their faces, so the shouty men get noticed and the quiet women don't; very few people are willing to hurt somebody else (of whatever gender) by telling them they are mediocre if they are, and so the mediocre people get promotion they don't deserve, just by being shouty (Iain Dale is a PRIME example of that); and thus the cycle that to be noticed half as much as a man, a woman has to be twice as good continues in our supposedly post-feminist times.

The second reason my reaction is counter-productive is male priviledge. Male opinion aggregators are used to being spoonfed. This is unfair and annoying, but telling them to look beyond their spoonfeeding is telling them to do more work that they don't see a reason to do. Even if that were not the case, it takes a special kind of person to resist being spoonfed, why would anybody give themselves extra work to do?

This gives us two reasons why the blokosphere is self-perpetuating, and those two reasons feed into and reinforce each other. Even a completely non-sexist feminist ally man will often unconsciously perpetuate sexism under these circumstances. This is a problem I have been talking about for years, and I still don't have a suitable sword to cut this Gordian Knot. Nobody else seems to have one either.

How do we go about forging one, people?

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