OKAY SO remember that essay about the Raimi Spider-Mans and misogyny that I said I was working on a while back? I’m still working on it. And I think the movies really do have quite a lot to say about nice-guy-ism (via Eddie and Gwen), and about violent misogyny (via Norman). But they have a lot to say about more casual forms of sexism too! Surprisingly so! Which brings me to –
No-one likes the dancing scene. Even I don’t like the dancing scene. But there’s something interesting about it: the reactions of the women on the street around Peter. Even in those gifs, you can see it – women hurrying past him, or giving him dirty looks, because he’s making them uncomfortable. When Peter starts pulling dance moves on women on the street, they look disturbed and change direction.
Then the dancing montage cuts away to him ordering Ursula, his smitten next-door neighbour, to make him more cookies. Then he starts harassing MJ while she’s at work. And so on and so forth…
Which is interesting, because Peter up to this point has been the model of respect towards women. He‘s like the least likely person ever to harass women on the street, he can barely talk to MJ at first! But suddenly he’s been possessed by a symbiote that gives him aggression and bad hair. Okay, let’s go with that – except it’s clearly said in the movie that the symbiote enhances the existing characteristics of its host. That embarrassing, annoying guy who thinks he’s entitled to women’s attention? Apparently that’s as much Peter, in some sense, as Spider-Man himself is. Man, that’s saying…something kinda awkward about the Everyman Peter’s meant to represent. We just got a whole montage of him making women uncomfortable and basically non-verbally catcalling them, even before we get to the bit where he starts picking fights with his ex-girlfriend.
Like, whatever you think of that scene, I think it’s interesting that the movie went out of its way to show that. It’s a totally cringeworthy scene, but I sometimes wonder if maybe it was meant to be, just not for the reasons we thought.