"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"

[seabeyond]

8. this review is what i got from the series. tell them he is feminst

forget what your gut tells you, and society will see that we all follow.

http://tigerbeatdown.com/2010/07/29/the-girl-with-the-lots-of-creepy-disturbing-torture-that-pissed-me-off-on-stieg-larsson/

Our Hero, Mikael Blomkvist, is what we might refer to as a “breast man”; when he is not hunting down depraved serial killers, he spends a lot of his time resting his head on the breasts of the lady he is sleeping with, kissing breasts, noting when ladies are not wearing bras, and commencing his sexual endeavors by “stretch[ing] out his hand to touch her breast.” Blomkvist comes into contact with a lot of breasts, because a lot of ladies want to sleep with him. At one point Blomkvist takes a time-out from his liaisons amoureuses to read the “sensational debut of a teenage feminist,” after which he wonders “whether he could be called a feminist if he wrote a novel about his own sex life in the voice of a high school student. Probably not.” Cute. (A not super-normatively-attractive middle-aged anti-fascist journalist writing a novel starring a “very good-looking” middle-aged anti-fascist journalist whom ladies line up to get breast-grabbed by does, apparently, get to be called feminist.)

And then, of course, there is feminist heroine Lisbeth Salander, the super hot (“with the right make-up her face could have put her on any billboard in the world”) damaged skinny white chick with a bunch of tattoos (“in spite of the tattoos and the pierced nose and eyebrows she was…well…attractive. It was inexplicable”) who kicks ass. Boy is that a new one in the universe: the super hot damaged skinny white chick with a bunch of tattoos who kicks ass. Lisbeth has a penchant for Doc Martens and body art (as we all know, an immediate indicator of profound emotional disturbance). She is, of course, the best computer hacker in Sweden, and she spends some time torturing the man who raped and tortured her. Also she hits a serial killer over the head with a golf club in an effort to save Blomkvist, with whom she has fallen in love despite her general inability to feel emotional connections with other people. That’s badassery for you. Despite these unassailable feminist credentials, Salander repeatedly describes herself, and is described by others, as a victim: “Bjurman had chosen her as a victim. That told her something about the way she was viewed by other people”; “…this was the natural order of things. As a girl she was legal prey”; “he had never been able to shake off the feeling that Lisbeth Salander was a perfect victim.”

So, feminist heroine? Maybe not so much. Salander reads more like masturbation fodder for dudes who want to pretend they aren’t sleazy; Tomb Raider for manarchists, if you will. She hates herself, she “look[s] fourteen,” and she has “high cheekbones that [give] her an almost Asian look.” I don’t even want to touch that last one, honestly, but I am not the first person to note that there are some especially inappropriate tropes of Asian ladies currently circulating in our culture, and they are not, shall we say, feminist. Reading Salander as a feminist icon for our times is a pretty challenging endeavor. About the best thing you can say about her is that, unlike Larsson’s other characters, she at least has some depth.

People who write about dead ladies make a shit-ton of money (see: Patterson, James; Cornwell, Patricia; Koontz, Dean; &c ad nauseum). Even more people want to read about dead ladies than want to write about them; which, as a lady, stresses me out. I like murder mysteries and I like thrillers. But I am getting fucking tired of those stories revolving solely around rape and torture. Packaging that nastiness up as feminist is icing on an ugly cake. There are men who hate women: I am aware of this. Anyone who has ever tried living as a woman is aware of this. I don’t need a ten-page explicit rape scene to bring this point home; I need only to leave my house.