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What do you think?
Rose McGowan Slams 'X-Men' Billboard for Promoting Violence Against Women
Rose McGowan is slamming Fox for using an image of Jennifer Lawrence being choked by a male villain as a billboard to promote X-Men: Apocalypse . The billboard shows Mystique in the tight hand grip of Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac ) in one of the final scenes of the movie.
justjared.com
I'm a fan of the X-Men movies and don't really agree with Rose here, curious what other people think?




I think it was a weird scene to choose to put on a billboard when it's a fairly small part of the story.
It's important to frame it in the context of the much larger history of media using violence against women to sell anything from shoes to coffee to films. It has been normalized for ever and it does contribute to normalization of violence in real life. It's easy to look at the image and think there's nothing shocking about it but that might be because we are so accustomed to seeing it.
Fox apologizes but not enough to remove the billboards.
I agree with Rose 100%
I am a fan of X-Men, so I know fighting will obviously be the biggest factor in the series. A fighting style billboard makes sense... but why do they have to show it like this? Why couldn't they show two characters engaged in a fight with no clear winner or loser? Why couldn't they show a female character winning against a male one? There were so many ways they could have presented this ad, yet they chose this.
I'm with Rose. I feel like there could have been plenty of other scenes to illustrate "only the strong will survive", to feature big stars, to show something exciting. I guess the problem is that this is how we so frequently see women in action films: as objects requiring rescue, as play things, as violatable. The irony being of course that Mystique is usually not that kind of character! But if we didn't see women again and again in these situations, a one off billboard looking like this may not be such a problem.
I agree that using this image out of context is an extremely poor choice. It sensationalizes violence against women and doesn't even represent the film particularly well. The story in the film does include violence, but taken out of context like this normalizes it.
It makes me think of those mind-blowingly sexist ads from bygone days that people sometimes post about. But our current advertisers aren't much better. They're just subtler sometimes.
I don't necessarily love the billboard, but I totally get why they chose that image and I get why they didn't realize the connotations.
Jennifer Lawrence is a big deal. Lots of people love her, and lots of people are going to be more interested in the X-Men movies because she's in them and because Mystique is an interesting and complicated character. She's one of the film's big selling points.
The goal of a billboard or trailer selling a movie (or other story) is to catch your attention and heighten your interest. Tension does that. Tension is the engine behind the majority of the stories we consume via movies, TV shows, and books. Every good story has this idea of something we love or something that's noble being threatened.
So, if you want to sell X-Men... take the biggest name the movie's got and imply that that beloved person/character is being threatened by the bad guy/opposing force. It's logical. It gets attention. It creates personal investment.
It was a terrible idea, in this case, because the person being threatened happened to be a woman and the opposing force happened to be a large, brutal-looking man... but I don't see it as being an intentional exploitation of violence against women as a general theme.