What sticks with me most about the latest Star Trek movie isn’t a sense of adventure or excitement, but of infuriated distraction. Among the first females we see on screen are the two in Kirk’s bed. Two is a good number of women, apparently, because it’s also the number of female characters who have any weight in the plot. We don’t see them speak to each other; not even about men. When they do speak, it’s largely out of emotion, often with tears, occasionally petty and at entirely inappropriate times (like on a stealth mission to a hostile planet). The female uniforms are irrationally sexy for the kind of work being done, and at one point Carol changes in front of the camera for no explicable reason at all. Female nudity is so gratuitous now that apparently there’s no need to even attempt to work it into the narrative.
I do what any angry consumer does today: I angry-tweeted. A lot. I was just going to do one, but once I got going…I couldn’t stop. Since my tweets forward to facebook, soon I was in a gender argument with a defensive male acquaintance. He eventually apologized, I said thank you, and then he had to post one more comment: “It’s still a great movie.”
And that’s when I realized that we were having fundamentally different conversations. For him, this was simply a side-issue to an otherwise great film, so far to the side, in fact, that it had little influence on the overall viewing. For me, it was so blatant and distracting that it interfered with every moment, disturbed the entire experience.
This is what we mean when we say that men—even feminist men—don’t see sexism the way we do.
Marginalia 