Women Losing Control

Table Of Contents

Explanation of Conservative Trope

Men are more often depicted as stable with women losing control across all genres such as overreacting to something in a comedy, not handling conflict well in a drama, being overly scared in an action movie or responding to a bad break-up in a romance.

Conservative Trope Examples

  • Fool's Gold (2008)
    Tess tells Finn of her plan to go back to college, get a PhD and teach. Finn says, "when are you going to stop selling this crap about going back to school" and further denigrates academia. Finn tells her their boat sunk which she was relying on to pay for her tuition after they divorced, and so she hits him with a golf club. Finn also gets punched later on by his rival treasure hunting former associate Moe.
    Staff Aside
    The movie is great fun. But nobody wants to watch academics do their thing on screen even though it is valuable, necessary and rewarding work. So of course, there will always be an inherent conservative bias against it as it's an easy foil for screenwriters. And when assault is played for laughs, even with a woman against a man, it perpetuates a conservative mindset. It's never ok for a man to just hit a woman on screen. Men hit men all the time and women hit women all the time on screen. But conservative men like to play the victim card against women and so when women are depicted as assaulting men, they use that as ammo.
  • Fool's Gold (2008)
    Tess loses control when her ex-husband shows up by random accident on the yacht she is chief steward on. She freaks out and throws the fancy meals she is serving in front of Nigel and his daughter breaking the plates and food flying everywhere. And screams out lout and rushes out of the room right after.
  • Jurassic Park III (2001) | Women Screaming in Fear
    Teo Leoni screams so many times when startled or scared throughout the movie that we're not going to even try to document them all here. The men, however, only scream when they're being eaten. She constantly yells out for her lost son too despite the paleontologist not recommending it lest they're heard and eaten.
  • Home Alone (1990) | Women Panicking
    Kate McCallister yells out "Kevin!" on the airplane when she realizes they left their 8 year old son home alone in Chicago. She says, "I'm a bad parent. I'm a bad parent" and is really freaking out while her husband is depicted as calm and says, "If it makes you feel any better, I forgot my reading glasses." On her way to get back to Kevin she also says, "What kind of a mother am I?" And the film depicted losing Kevin as mostly her fault as she banished him to the attic the night before the flight not noticing his brother was the culprit.