Alright, listen up. You are going to watch the second trailer for the all-new, all-female Ghostbusters. You are going to laugh. You are going to think it looks scary and fun and good. You are going to like it. You are going to publicly admit that you like it.
Or else.
See? That wasn’t so bad, was it?
No, seriously. It wasn’t so bad. This is not a discussion.
Now, obviously, nobody can honestly look at that movie trailer and claim not to like it. There’s simply no good reason not to like it. That only leaves bad reasons. And the worst reason of all is therefore the most likely: The people who are criticizing this movie hate women.
The Ghostbusters trailer is currently the most “disliked” movie preview on YouTube; some 800,000 fans have clicked the thumbs-down button, indicating an organized campaign against the film (for comparison, the Captain America: Civil War trailer has only 12,000 dislikes)… Things reached a fever pitch yesterday when James Rolfe, host of the popular “Cinemassacre” YouTube channel with over 2 million subscribers, announced that he wouldn’t even deign to watch the film…
The vitriol directed at Ghostbusters seems to come in two forms: angry screeds in comments sections and people’s Twitter mentions, and videos like Rolfe’s, which try to justify the pushback as an idealistic defense of the original franchise’s legacy…
Embedded in all of these preemptive and logically flimsy complaints is an obvious subtext: that the issue of appearance matters more than actual quality, and that the idea of a female cast taking up the mantle of a very male film series is just somehow wrong.
Got that? If you express any reservations whatsoever about this important and groundbreaking motion picture, you’re just revealing your sexism and misogyny and mansplaining and other words you shouldn’t want people using in reference to you. Just admit it. You hate women. There is no other possibility.
Whatever you do, don’t be like this guy:
I believe in equal treatment for women. That's why I'm not pretending the new #Ghostbusters looks funny or scary or in any way good.
— Jim Treacher (@jtLOL) May 18, 2016
If you hold women to the same standards as men, you’re a misogynist.
Your time is done, MRAs. Your precious Venkman has been replaced. Get ready to weep big fat male tears as the literally dickless Ghostbusters shatters all box-office records.
I ain’t ‘fraid of no patriarchal assumptions about women’s roles in society!