“Transparent” creator Jill Soloway has a bold statement for male directors who film rape scenes
Yes, girl! Transparent creator and showrunner decried male filmmakers who film scenes about rape against women. Jill Soloway spoke at the Sundance Film Festival, on a panel hosted by Geena Davis’s Bentonville Film Festival.
Joined by actors Jessica Williams (The Daily Show) and Michaela Watkins (Lazy Eye), the panel discussed the fight for gender equity in Hollywood.
“I would like to make a blanket statement to ask cis men to please stop making movies about rape, stop portraying rape,” Soloway said.
Soloway’s answer to why rape figures so prominently in a male-created pop culture is profound, and we hope all men, whether in entertainment or not, listen up.
When Williams asked Soloway to explore the question, she brought up the most recent rape controversy surrounding director Paul Verhoeven’s Elle. The film earned actress Isabelle Huppert an Oscar nomination. One review out of Cannes described the film as “a lighthearted rape-revenge story.”
“I’m gonna get really deep. We’re gonna talk about Paul Verhoeven for a second. I actually believe they envy our vaginas and our vulnerability, and so they project their desire for their own vulnerability onto women, and then they make films about raping them to be able to experience the feeling of the being-done-to, letting go, which they can’t do as straight men,” Soloway said.
“They have to do the done-to; laminated onto cis male heterosexuality is ‘I do to’ and so they project the ‘done-to’ onto women. They project the ‘done-to’ onto queer people, and they make movies about rape so they can be in the feeling of being ‘done-to’ against their will, which I think is actually their fantasy. And I just want them to stop projecting onto our bodies everything.”
We cannot express enough how much we agree.
