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Sorry, manbabies, the real problem with the Ghostbusters reboot isn’t misandry but racism

 March 3, 2016
  · 205 Comments
Oh, wait, wrong ghost movie

Oh, wait, wrong ghost movie

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Today will go down in history as a dark day for manbabykind. For today, the lady Ghostbusters trailer dropped. And there was much wailing and tweeting of tweets.

Let’s take a stroll amongst the wailing manbabies on Twitter, indulging their ridiculous rants.

And then let’s talk about what’s really wrong with the Ghostbusters trailer, which has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with race.

First, the manbabies:

There were those who pulled out the old “my childhood has been raped” nonsense.

There were those who strenuously insisted that their anger at the female Ghostbusters had nothing whatsoever to do with misogyny, nuh-uh, but was rather a reaction to the trailer’s objective terribleness.

There were the fat-shamers, because at no point in history has a fat person ever been funny.

There were Trump fans:

Hell, there were so many Trump fans that one observer made a helpful Venn diagram:

There were even a few Knights Who Say Cuck:

Some raised the specter of WHITE GENOCIDE:

Some worried where the evil feminazis would strike next:

Others offered somewhat less comprehensible critiques:

One Tweeter summed up the day on Twitter with a little haiku:

And another Tweeter left us with this existential question:

Still another raised the possibility of a second reboot with a rather different cast:

And this guy helped us put it all in perspective:

So what happens once we step back from all the manbaby whining, and the jokes about the manbaby whining. and actually watch the trailer? Well, be my guest:

I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit underwhelmed.

There are a few funny moments, but the trailer sort of steps on them. It’s hard to tell if this is a terrible trailer for a good film, or if the Ghostbusters reboot will end up being, well, basically a female version of Adam Sandler’s godwful Pixels.

But the really distressing thing that the trailer reveals is that the three white gals in the movie are the scientists, while Leslie Jones’ Patty is relegated — or so it seems from the trailer — to the tired, stereotypical role of sassy black sidekick who may not be educated but who “knows the streets.”

This racial/racist failure has not exactly gone unnoticed; it’s already inspired thinkpieces and polemics on sites ranging from The Root to The Inquisitr, as well as in innumerable Tweets.

The original Ghostbusters, however hallowed it has become, was infamous for a similar racial failure. That movie’s “black ghostbuster,” played by Ernie Hudson, was so forgettable, and so obviously a token, that the designer simply left him off of this recently reworked Ghostbusters poster featuring his three white comrades.

Despite all the complaints by angry manbabies about the gender-swap of the main characters, it may well turn out that the real problem with the film isn’t that it’s too radically different from the original, but rather that it is too similar — at least in its inability to imagine a black character as more than a token or a stereotype.

The one thing that gives me some hope is Jones herself, an amazing comedian who may have been able to transform her character into something more nuanced and less stereotypical than what we see in the trailer.

I guess we’ll see.

Posted in: empathy deficit, entitled babies, gender policing, men who should not ever be with women ever, misandry, misogyny, no girls allowed

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  1. @SFHC

    Spot on. Every problem is too small for feminists to be allowed to care about, and there’s no problem too small for MRAs to whine about until the end of time.

    Reply

  3. FYI, Leslie Jones had no problems being the ordinarily one in the group, and even embraced it. So where the racist angle is, I don’t see it. Having all of the characters be scientists wrecks the synergy of the group, as there has to be one person who isn’t a scientist/believer that can come at it from another angle, ground the other three, and who also has other real-world skills.

    Reply

  4. “FYI, Leslie Jones had no problems being the ordinarily one in the group, and even embraced it. So where the racist angle is, I don’t see it. Having all of the characters be scientists wrecks the synergy of the group, as there has to be one person who isn’t a scientist/believer that can come at it from another angle, ground the other three, and who also has other real-world skills.”

    No one’s saying there shouldn’t have been an “ordinary” character. What they’re wondering is why the *one* person of color had to be that character.

    Why is this so hard to grasp? I’m seriously asking. I don’t know how much clearer to make it.

    Reply
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We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.

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