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View all search results‘Tilik’ a sexist film? Really?
Societies are more punitive toward women who are physically aggressive than toward men who behave similarly.
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I
t has been curious to see how a seemingly apolitical and nonideological – therefore quite harmless – film like Tilik has sparked a heated controversy, especially on social media, after it was uploaded to YouTube last month.
The film has drawn ire from all four directions of the political and economic compass, so much so that somebody shared a tongue-in-cheek yet serious four-quadrant diagram breaking down the four types of outrage on WhatsApp. The diagram’s X axis represents the spectrum of economic beliefs from far left to far right and the Y axis represents the spectrum of political beliefs from authoritarian to libertarian.
If you are a left-wing authoritarian, you will perceive the film as insulting to villagers; if you are a right-wing authoritarian you will deem it as an offense to women who wear the hijab, even to Islam.
Meanwhile, a right-wing libertarian will believe the film is an attack on the free market because it was financed by the regional government and a left-wing libertarian will slam the film for reproducing negative stereotypes about women.
In this article, I seek to criticize the left-wing libertarian view of the film and use Julia Suryakusuma’s article “‘Tilik’, sexist stereotypes and our collective insanity”, which appeared in The Jakarta Post on Sept. 16, as a jumping off point.
Julia, as well as other film critics with feminist leanings such as Intan Paramaditha, tends to view the film as reproducing negative stereotypes about women as gossipers.
Well, stereotypes do contain some kernels of truth. Evolutionary psychologist Anne Campbell in her 2013 book A Mind of Her Own: the Evolutionary Psychology of Women debunks feminists’ ideas that women are inherently more peaceful and less violent than men.
