unconsciousplots:

vardaesque: can we just appreciate the fact that thor 2 had absolutely no boob shots or male gaze shots and the only eye candy shot we got was a totally pointless-to-the-plot slowly panning upward shot of thor’s abs glistening in the sunlight I have no idea why people girls are celebrating that a movie in a genre with a huge female viewership has male objectification. Or are we just reveling in the male objectification..?

Hi! Your resident enby (non binary) will try to tackle this one without getting terribly sarcastic or snippy because ey is operating on too little sleep. (Also go ahead and change that girls back to people, we’re not all women here.)

1) Superhero movies do have a large female audience, this is very true - but movie studios and directors very rarely remember that. See Star Trek Into Darkness for a good example of this.

2) Women get objectified all the time. This is one of the very few times you are going to see a gratuitous full body scan of a male character in a big studio film. Which would still be morally grey but -

3) Thor has a pretty big role in the plot. (Duh) He’s a fairly complex rounded individual, considering he’s a Norse god. Thor has his own agency, his own motivations, and affects the plot on his own. In movies where females get the same camera pan that Thor did, they don’t. They are reduced to 2D or 1D characters, they don’t have any agency whatsoever, and they very probably could be replaced by sexy lamps.

Which makes this a very different deal.

The scan of Chris Hemsworth’s beautiful abs was not male objectification, because in the context of the film, Thor was not an object. Thor was a character. That scanning shot was a reward to the male-oriented fans, true, but it did not say “LOOK PRETTY BODY. no character. just body.” Which, tbh, is what a lot of the female shots say in other films.