Originally posted on April 19, 2012 by Clara Bow

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It was another bad week for a radical feminist to go to the movies. Is it possible that The Vow and The Lucky One will be in theaters at the same time? So I chose to see a horror movie with a roughly gender equal cast, written and produced by Joss Whedon. If you are unfamiliar with Joss Whedon, he created two modern, science fiction, feminist icons, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and River Tam. He doesn’t use women just for eye candy, not just.

The Cabin in the Woods is about five college students who go for a weekend to, you guessed it, a cabin in the woods. However, this is not a predictable horror movie. It goes to great lengths to point out how it is complying with or confounding horror movie conventions. In fact at the end, the characters overtly discuss the conventions: a whore, an athlete, a scholar, a fool and a virgin walk into a cabin. They will be sacrificed. The movie throws in some ancient gods, myth and ritual, but follows the same basic outline. In the SAT analogy of movies, Cabin in the Woods is to horror as Galaxy Quest is to science fiction.

Whore and virgin, those are the two female options. The movie sends up that notion, but does that make it feminist? This leads us to the idea of balance. In this movie the characters are brave, clever, stupid, funny, and sexy, and both genders enact these qualities. A man takes his shirt off and so does a woman. A woman kills a zombie and so does a man. Lesser feminists would say this is gender balanced and call it a day. No so fast fourth wave feminists.

The problem has to do with context and power differential. In our culture viewing a woman taking her clothes off is more exploitative than watching a man do the same. Any women’s studies class will teach you that rape is not about sex, it is about power. Of course, sex is about power too, but we’ll not muddy the waters here. In a strange, “snake eating it’s own tail” kind of way, equalizing actions and qualities between genders is only equal in a world without patriarchy. In the Schroedinger’s box of movies The Cabin in the Woods could be feminist. Then we watch it, and it must become just another piece in the patriarchy.

Could this be said about any movie made in the patriarchy? Yes. But it is better than a kick in the head? Indeed, and twice as funny.