When I went and saw Mad Max: Fury Road, I saw it with a few people I had just met during a game jam that same weekend. Seeing trailers in the months leading up to release I’d thought, “ugh, looks like another cash-in, boring, whatever” and I was only really interested in the film when I started hearing good buzz along with learning that people were Mad On The Internet About Women in a Movie in regards to it. So we took a break and went and saw it and we were all absolutely blown away and so hyped up and in love with it and it was a fun sorta-surprise and bonding moment with new friends.

In retrospect the talk of Fury Road enraging MRA types seemed to have been exaggerated, especially by progressives wanting to feel good for liking a movie. The film was a critical and commercial success and the vast majority of people that I saw discussing it were either talking about how rad it is or had normal, legitimate criticisms that come with any film or with any other piece of media.

The hatred for the new Ghostbusters, though, has not been exaggerated at all. Any discussion on it anywhere is way more overtly politicized than talk of Fury Road and either way more negative or way more stiltedly positive.

I love film and media. I got a degree in them and I work in video production as a career. The thing I’m best-known for has “film nerd” in the title. Film is important to me and I feel that it’s important culturally. Representation of certain groups within film is also important. So in saying “stiltedly positive”, I am not at all saying “female characters onscreen don’t matter”. They do matter. It’s so, so alienating and frustrating to look at my favorite medium and many of my favorite films specifically and have to really search to see anything like myself and it’s a special joy and a genuine moment of human connection when I find that. I almost always find it through characters who are dudes in films made by dudes (because most films are made by dudes starring dudes) but I’ll take it where I can get it.

On top of being a woman, I have short hair and don’t really feel comfortable in makeup or dresses. I’m neurotic and I’m not a very emotional person and I have a really morbid weirdo sense of humor. The amount of overlap between my life experiences and the life experiences of the women I see in media is close to zero. If you know of anyone in movies or TV who looks or acts even remotely like me, woman or not, then PLEASE hit me up, because the best I’ve found so far as far as looks go is Tig Notaro and for everything else Mark Corrigan/David Mitchell (and, well, looks for David Mitchell as well).

Back when most of what I wore was graphic tees and blue jeans I had two Ghostbusters shirts that I wore so often that at least one of them had holes in it. My love for it kind of emerged from my obsessive love for The Blues Brothers and my (admittedly bizarre) crush on Dan Aykroyd. Aykroyd came up with huge, dense tomes for these characters and these stories, like he wrote up pages and pages of backstory and mythos for both movies, which is so weird and so fascinating considering that by wider cultural perception he was just an SNL guy making 80s comedies. Blues Brothers is a profoundly strange movie, both in structure and in content, and it’s worthwhile if only on that level, and Ghostbusters is a fun, solid lightning-in-a-bottle comedy. Elements of it are clunky or problematic and if I re-watched it right now I might feel a little differently about it, but it was definitely important in my film nerd genesis.

But, y’know, suddenly it’s bad. People have decided that the first Ghostbusters isn’t that good anyway. Anyone who likes it or has any kind of emotional attachment to it is a manchild. The new one is good because it has women in it. Women like it and men don’t like it, so it’s good, and if you’re a woman you should like it. Did you know that women never liked the original Ghostbusters, only idiot manchildren did? Yeah, that was news to me too!

Again, representation is important. I want more women-led comedies to come out. I want more women-led films to come out. I was really hoping for another Fury Road here because it felt SO GOOD to see a woman with power and agency in a film. I don’t love The Hunger Games or Frozen (more than anything I’m apathetic towards them) but I feel like they’re a step in the right direction. When I was ten I wanted to be Ash Ketchum. If you were as into Pokemon as I was, there was no girl equivalent to Ash Ketchum (Misty was cool but I had no interest in being her). Seeing little girls wanting to be Elsa or Katniss is pretty great and it’s something that wasn’t afforded to me not that long ago.

So if people get something out of this movie because it stars women and it has a positive impact in that way then that’s wonderful. That makes me happy. But something I haven’t seen touched on in the feel-good tweets and thinkpieces is the fact that Paul Feig has said that studio interference prevented Kate McKinnon’s character in Ghostbusters from being openly gay. In 2016 you can get gay married but Sony’s still freaked out by the prospect of a lesbian Ghostbuster. Ah, yeah, we’re breaking ground here and trampling all over convention and doing something new and cool and progressive, but if you want a lesbian actress to be able to play a lesbian character in a big movie then you gotta slow down. I’m not going to let a single person try and guilt me into liking or supporting a big release film that isn’t allowed to have a Dreaded Gay in it under the guise of feminism. I really wish that any number of weirdo female directors or just any number of genuinely alternative stories from people in marginalized groups got this amount of outpouring of love and press. I would love to see this level of passion for whatever modern equivalent of A Question of Silence or Jeanne Dielman or Meshes of the Afternoon lies in wait that might never get made because studios wanna keep rebooting old ideas and cashing in on free press derived from controversy.

Yeah, the people hurling disgusting racist abuse at Leslie Jones and completely losing it over a Hollywood reboot ~’cause women~ are significantly worse than people who are excited about it and pushing for it and sharing photos of happy girls dressed as Ghostbusters or Kate McKinnon dressed as Scully for Halloween as a kid on social media. I am legitimately happy for those girls and for the apparent incremental change towards more diverse characters in media. The takeaway from this essay should NOT be “both sides are just as bad” because they are not and I am not here to play into misogynistic vitriol or argue against representation. I’m not saying Feig and whoever were setting out to cynically manipulate audiences or politicize their film, either. Whether the studio planned for this kind of reaction all along I really don’t know. I also haven’t even seen it yet. I’m exhausted from all of this and don’t really want to see it because I was tired of it before it even came out (but I probably will anyway because that’s not the fault of the movie itself but of how toxic our culture is and how much stock we put into a person liking or not liking a thing as identity).

It’s definitely a part of a wider cultural problem. Did you know that if you’re a young woman who doesn’t support Hillary Clinton, you probably just hate your mom? Or it’s because you want to have sex with Bernie Bros? To people like this you don’t like or dislike a candidate or film based on its own merits, you like or dislike it based on how well you’re performing your political affiliation as they see it. I don’t doubt that there are people way further to the right who feel pressure to say they hated this movie even if they liked it because now it’s a feminist lightning rod and any discussion of it is inherently tainted by divisive rhetoric. It feels similarly to how I’m not a big fan of Feminist Frequency and didn’t think Gone Home was a particularly good game, but the amount of hate those two sincere, benign things have gotten because of where they are politically is legitimately frightening, and I feel like discussing them in a negative light summons the kind of people who give a woman death threats because she made some dry academic videos about women in video games.

I don’t know if I’m really helping anything by making this. I’ve been sick of Ghostbusters for months and I was all set to finish up my next essay script on Hannibal, which is a legitimately weird, legitimately queer and grotesque masterpiece and a happy place for me, and cut that essay before I got busy this weekend but I got riled up about Ghostbusters and needed an outlet. I just get grossed out when political rhetoric is used by consumers to shame people into or out of liking a film, especially in a way that reinforces gender binary MAN VS WOMAN garbage, alienates people, and is profitable for a studio who is being hailed as brave and feminist but was too scared to let Paul Feig put an explicitly gay lady in a PG-13 comedy.

Kate McKinnon realized that she was gay while watching the X-Files growing up. That’s really powerful and that kind of awakening and moment of self-realization and affirmation thanks to media, especially weird cult media, is common among marginalized people. The power of representation and affirmation in film is a beautiful thing and it shouldn’t be lessened or cheapened. So don’t let a movie where Paul Feig had to pull a Dumbledore ‘cause Sony was so scared of gay people cheapen it and don’t let that kind of movie be the best that you’re willing to hope for.