A memory of misogyny #1
April 28th 2026
TW: Mention of sexual assault in a movie
When I was a teenager, I went to see one of the Riddick movies with my dad and one of my best guy friends: a gay guy that I always thought of as “one of the girls.”
I don’t know which Riddick movie it was, but it was the one with a female character that they clearly identified as a lesbian from the beginning of the movie. Then at some point during the film she is sexually assaulted: Riddick witnesses the assault and does nothing to stop it. Then at the end, it is clear that the lesbian character is going to sleep with Riddick. He grabs her ass while they’re being pulled up to a helicopter while she smiles at him. He has won her as a prize.
I was outraged by the movie. It was shocking to me that a movie like that would be allowed in theaters, that pop culture would accept this kind of exploitative, misogynist, homophobic bullshit. I now realize, in a weird way, I was one of the lucky girls, because I was shocked: as a teenager, I wasn’t totally used to this level of misogyny just yet. A lot of other teenagers had already been conditioned to accept this as normal.
What made me feel worse, though, was that my dad and friend couldn’t empathize with me, couldn’t even hold space and understanding for my anger: all they could say was “it’s a Vin Diesel movie, what do you expect?”
Now, at 30 years old, I’m beginning to see that this was part of my conditioning: to accept misogyny as normal, inherent to being human, and that I shouldn’t fight it or even express anger towards it, as if I were yelling at a tornado.
To be clear, my dad and friend were not intentionally brainwashing me. They saw it as a dumb movie. I saw it as part of a larger cultural issue, and I was scared for my safety. I was a young queer girl growing up in a culture that seemed to want to dismiss me, destroy me, eat me up and swallow me whole.
As much as I still love both of these men, they were perpetuating the problem without realizing it, and they hurt me that day. Obviously they must’ve hurt me a lot, since I’m writing about it all these years later.
I recently had an intense brush with misogyny from adult men that I know in real life, and all of these little memories, the microtraumas of being a girl and then a woman in this world are rushing back, and I’m feeling the weight of all of these experiences at once, and I’m just so exhausted and I want it to stop.
And on top of all of that, I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m one of the luckiest women in the world because I haven’t faced what other women have had to face. And that’s so fucking depressing.