How Hollywood Handles Women in Peril (Guest Column)

variety.com:

We love movies about women in peril. From “Gaslight” to “King Kong” to Jennifer Lopez with a ridiculous haircut in “Enough,” audiences will almost always pay to watch a woman stare helplessly as a doorknob slowly turns, or hold her breath as a shadow looms next to where she is hiding.

But as much as we like these movies, we have also been asking for a couple decades now, is it OK that we like these movies? Is it insensitive or exploitative?

Is it actually entertaining to watch a woman character be tortured or murdered just to give her pretend spy or superhero husband something to do?

The international conversation around the #MeToo movement has amplified these questions. As women and men have told their stories of surviving violence in the