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When we think of the topic of violence and the movies, we almost always think of films like the ones Bob Dole has denounced—as well as some he was careful not to denounce (because their stars feature rich Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger). To be sure, a few feminist films might come to the minds of some of us, films like Marleen Gorris's A Question of Silence which depicts a spectacular act of violence on the part of three women who beat to death a male shopkeeper when he tries to stop one of them from stealing. Not-withstanding such exceptions, however, we are more apt to think of male action/adventure movies like the Die Hard series (not, if I remember correctly, denounced by Dole) or the slasher films that appeal to adolescent males as examples of the kinds of violent representations that are troubling to our society.
As these examples suggest, violence is the province of men, and insofar as they enjoy engaging in it or watching it, feminists have viewed them as sadistic. Yet recently critics, preeminent among them feminist critics, have interrogated the commonplace view that male genres necessarily elicit sadism on the part of men and have elaborated a theory of the masochistic pleasure of the male spectator of movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. (Films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the reasoning goes, invite an identification, whatever the sex of the viewer, with a persecuted heroine.) These same theorists explain that only men can occupy a masochistic position in such a way that they subvert patriarchal power dynamics because for women, as Silverman (1992) points out, the masochistic position is too close to the norm.
While feminists have developed a highly nuanced theory of men's relation to violent representations, they tend less to analyze than to denounce representations that embody and explore women's