If you watch the following trailer and you have anything negative to say about it, you are a misogynist.
I didn’t like this trailer, but only because I hate women. Due to my deep-seated loathing of all females, I can’t enjoy watching them being really funny and interesting and not at all annoying. If you released the exact same trailer with male characters doing and saying the same things, I would love it because I think that’s the way the world should be. There is no other possible explanation.
Or maybe there is, if we can trust the word of a woman.
Mollie Hemingway, a female girl person who is not a man, has a theory about Sony’s response to all the Ghostbusters criticism. Over at The Federalist, Hemingway writes:
I have an open mind about the film. But it is the least-liked trailer in YouTube history, and its marketing doesn’t seem designed to overcome its problems.
What if the movie is just awful and the geniuses at Sony are doing what they do with bad “Christian” films? What if it’s so bad and unfunny and such a betrayal of the original that the only marketing idea they have left is to make feminists feel obligated to go see it? And what if Sony is just trying to trick them into renting out movie theaters out of solidarity with the cause by running this bizarre social justice warrior style campaign?
As Hemingway notes, this would explain the weirdly confrontational response to all the fan criticism. The filmmakers and their allies could have said, “We get it, everybody, but we think you’ll be surprised when you see the movie. Please just trust us.” Instead, they’ve declared war.
If you don’t like that trailer, says Judd Apatow, you’re probably a Trump fan. (The worst insult a Hollywood big shot can imagine!) If you say you’re not interested in seeing the movie at all, you’re pilloried by feminists. Or how about this actual Hollywood Reporter headline: “‘Ghostbusters’: How Sony Plans to Out-Slime the Online Haters.”
And then there was this:
The entire cast of Ghostbusters is here next week and now @HillaryClinton is coming, too! Get your Woman Cards ready.
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) May 17, 2016
What does a Venn diagram of “Ghostbusters fans” and “hardcore feminists” look like, anyway? Who is the target audience for this movie?
And in none of this is there any attempt to win over the skeptics. I’m no marketing expert, but it seems pretty dumb to try to “out-slime” people who are criticizing your movie.
Hemingway seems to be onto something here, but I’m not sure I should trust her. After all, she’s a woman. If I don’t like Lady Ghostbusters, that means I hate women. And yet now, a woman just made me wonder if Sony is deliberately setting fans against feminists so they’ll have somebody to blame if the movie bombs. It’s a paradox. I find myself boxed in, and the box is slowly filling up with my male tears.
At least they can’t take away the memories of my now-shattered patriarchy. I can still look back fondly on the good old days, when us men were still… in control.