Lady killers

Not that it's ever not been a popular pastime, but beating women is really hot these days. On screen and off.

Mel Gibson's grotesque recorded obscenities are just the most recent and most highly publicized of such assaults. What we have going on in movies the past year is supposedly well intended violence against women. These include some films that I myself have reviewed positively, such as "Kick-Ass."  And others that I liked not so much, such as "The Killer Inside Me," 

and the two Stieg Larsson adaptations  "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"

and "The Girl Who Played With Fire." Even "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse," gets in its licks, especially when a nasty female vampire gets the Medusa treatment. And Alejandro Amenabar's arty, upcoming (July 23)  "Agora" (which I haven't seen) , the true story of Hypatia, the 4th century CE female philosopher from Alexandria who got what was coming to her for being such an uppity smarty-pants and anti-Christian, anti-patriarchal pagan.

True, "Killer" is supposed to depict a misogynist sadist and isn't meant to approve of his actions, but does that give it license to show a woman getting beaten to death? And Larsson in his books overtly states his hatred of men who hate women, yet in the books and the movies such violence is luridly demonstrated. Is it all that different from the remake of the reviled 1978 shocker "I Spit on Your Grave" in the offing, in which a violated woman's hideous revenge only follows after she herself has been hideously violated?

Then there are the films that make no attempt to excuse their exploitation of brutalized women with any kind of uplifting context or message, or the Weinstein's upcoming "Pirahna 3D,"

about which the website "Movieline" has written:

"...the marketing campaign for Piranha 3D has revolved around girl-slapping videos, wet t-shirts, straight up nudity and all-around misogyny - not to mention the implied carnage that thousands of CG-created 3D piranhas can do to an unsuspecting co-ed swimming in the water - that it has been deemed not appropriate for families attending Comic-Con next weekend should come as a surprise to exactly no one."

I'm not suggesting that these movies in themselves cause the violence against women that is so common in real life. Rather, it reflects the  audience's  fascination with and fear of the subject. And no wonder: does a day go by that we don't here about some estranged husband or boyfriend killing their girlfriend or wife?