The Review Revue

The film and media review website Pajiba is a favorite among we ladybrains. The site's tagline says it all: Scathing Reviews for Bitchy People. What's not to love? Their reviews are required weekly reading: well-written, punchy and usually quote-worthy. Remember the Twilight review? As it turns out, vampires don't explode in sunlight, they turn into Ziggy Motherf*cking Stardust.

But Pajiba's Monday review of The Runaways was stuffed to the gills with gross, demeaning descriptions of the women onscreen, replete with and bitch-and-whore bombs, almost unreadable past author Brian Prisco's gendered insults. He argues that the film could have, and should have, treated the band members of The Runaways more seriously in the context of women in rock, a good and fair point. But I can barely distill that above the liberal use of words and descriptions that are so hatefully loaded for women.

It's not a coincidence that Prisco also authored the only other Pajiba review that has ever inspired similar ire with we me. In last year's review of Sin Nombre, Prisco writes that a gang leader attempts to rape the film's protagonist because he finds her "alluring." Ah, the rape as a compliment canard. For anyone who hasn't seen the film, in this scene the gang leader is trying to assert his authority on a train packed with terrified immigrants. His attempted rape is a power play. The main character is a pretty girl, but her allure had nothing to do with the attempted assault. The fact that the same gang leader attempts to rape another girl earlier in the film, also to assert his authority over another gang member, makes this statement even more bizarre and incorrect.

Ugly women get raped. Fat women get raped. Old women get raped. Frumpy women get raped. Disabled women get raped. Any woman who isn't considered traditionally beautiful in the very, very narrow American standard--they get raped, too. So do men of all descriptions. And it's not because they flirted or dressed slutty or drank. It's because some dudes didn't treat them like humans.