Domestic Abuse Death Review Team: Fill & Download for Free

In no particular order, and far from being an inclusive list, here are a few noteworthy ones:Erin Patria Margaret PizzeyWho?Erin Pizzey started the first women’s domestic violence shelter in the world, was a pioneer in helping out female domestic abuse victims, and was a feminist up until she got what you could call excommunicated, subjected to boycotts and death threats by a a large number of other feminists.Why?Erin Pizzey has been a public enemy of the feminist movement after she found out first hand and tried to make publicly known that a majority of female domestic abuse victims are in fact also abusers (i.e. that a large percent of domestic abuse is a reciprocal two way street), and that such female ‘victims’ who were also abusers were often more abusive than their male spouses. She did not make this up, but merely documented what was confided to her by the women in her shelter.Cassie JayeWho?Documentary maker and at the time feminist Cassie Jaye made a documentary showing prominent spokespeople of BOTH the feminist movement and Men’s Right Movement. A large number of feminists ran a media campaign to get bad reviews of that documentary out and have people reject it before watching it or before being able to judge for themselves. These feminists organized petitions, protests, and threats of violence to those who were screening the film.Why?Cassie’s documentary concluded that the road to equality needs to include men and men’s issues in the discussion, not exclude them.In addition the documentary portrayed unscripted Men’s Right Activists, and unscripted feminists, with the former coming across very sympathetic and open to dialogue, and the latter very hostile and oppressive towards free speech. The way these people behaved cannot be attributed to Cassie, who truly gave every person in the documentary a chance to voice their opinion calmly.Camille PagliaWho?Social critic and Professor of Humanities & Media Studies at the University of Arts, has been at the forefront of sex positive feminism since the 60s. In 1963 as a 16 year old she wrote Newsweek Magazine calling for equal opportunity for women and denouncing programs that denied women. As a university student, she fought to take away restrictions and curfews for women, and said she rather risk being raped than not being granted the same freedom as men. Other feminists (unsuccessfully) tried to get her fired from academia.Why?Camille Paglia is a non-conformist and critically questions or even rejects a lot of the dogma of modern feminist theory. For example, she doesn’t adhere to social constructivism, and emphasizes that we can only retain equality by studying and understanding history and biology. She rejects the labels patriarchy and rape culture. From her perspective, modern feminism is infantilizing women by creating special scholarship programs excluding men, gender quotas excluding men, and safe spaces excluding men, and that the feminism that predominates now is putting us further away from equality.Christina Hoff SummersWho?Feminist, academic, PhD in philosophy, author and vlogger. Sommers is against views that see men and women as being on different teams. Her lectures are met with protests organized by feminists, who hoot, holler, jeer, and mock, and attempt to defame her and call her a rape apologist.Why?Christina wants to raise awareness that gender quotas and special programs do more harm than good, in that they stigmatize women and cheapen their hard-earned achievements. She believes the road to equality is to stop pathologizing boys and men, and to start to include and understand them and their struggles. She dislikes the ideologically inspired misrepresentation of data to push the agenda of victim feminism, and is disliked for debunking feminist misuse of statistics.Sophie DockxWho?Former Quoran, teacher, mother, my 6th ever follower on Quora, and fervent feminist. Suggested that if women want empowerment, they need to be held as accountable as men, and take responsibility for themselves and for society, just as men do. Privilege is earned, after taking responsibility. Western, intersectional, third wave feminists got her Quora account banned, effectively silencing her from any voice of dissent.Why?She claimed that institutional patriarchy does no longer exist in the West, and that Western third wave feminism is undoing all the progress feminism has achieved, and is giving the word feminism a bad rep. She seriously disliked the victim mentality of intersectional feminism and finds it disempowering.100 successful French women in a letter to Le Monde newspaperWho?A letter started by Iranian-French writer Abnousse Shalmani, a victim of rape. She wants rape to be taken seriously and started the open letter with ‘rape is a crime’. At the same time she wants to ensure sexual freedom.Empowerment comes from stopping to see women as poor little things, refusing the Victorian idea that women are mere children who have to be protected. The letter signed by the 100 women was met with a huge backlash from Western feminists who hurled accusations and insults at the authors, calling them lobotomized, misogynist, old, decrepit, rape apologists. (Yes, these feminists said that to a female rape victim, to educated successful and by all means empowered female rolemodels of all ages.)Why?Because these 100 women dared question the direction the #MeToo movement is taking.“what began as freeing women up to speak has today turned into the opposite – we intimidate people into speaking ‘correctly’, shout down those who don’t fall into line, and those women who refused to bend [to the new realities] are regarded as complicit and traitors”These 100 women’s standpoint is that it is normal that interest isn’t always mutual and that regrets can occur. That interest nor disinterest are a permanent condition, so with that in mind we should not immediately vilify people when they try more than once, nor vilify people who make mistakes in their courtship attempts.These women fear a new moral order is arising that tries to censor sexual freedom by condemning courtship attempts and denying the need of learning curves in dating.By women failing to take responsibility for their action or inaction, and by involving a mob rather than communicating directly to the person who makes us feel uncomfortable, we are turning the clock on equality, free speech and free sexuality back. By lumping every little uncomfortable interaction with a man under the hashtag #MeToo, we deny the severity of actual rape and the experience of women who got forcefully pinned down.

It’s not that they don’t experience it… but often it’s due to the system men have been part of creating.For instance:Men are at the front line of wars; women are not.This assumption is largely incorrect. In most countries, women are now permitted to engage in combat just like men (except on submarines, for some reason). Prior to that, it was men who decided that women could not fight in combat. So while this was an area of blatant sexist behaviour, it was men making these decisions for both men and women, which ends up being sexist for both.Men can’t show emotion or weakness.And if I had a dollar for everytime I heard men paying out on other men for being “pussies” or telling their sons to stop “acting like a girl” or to “harden up”, I wouldn’t have to work. I’m not saying women don’t also perpetuate this harmful attitude, but if men have an issue with always having to be “the strong ones”, then they need to be the one’s changing the dialogue. They need to be the ones offering support and a safe space for men to be vulnerable.Men are more likely to commit suicideI’ve experienced this in my own family and understand how heartbreaking it is. But, again, men need to start being more supportive of each other so those struggling with life feel more comfortable reaching out for help. It’s NOT a sign of weakness.What tends to not be discussed is women attempt suicide more often than men, however men tend to be more successful than women due to the methods used.Women almost always get custody of children in a separation.Again, the courts and legal systems are predominately run by men with around 73% of judges being men on a global scale. Men also dominate politics with around 70-80% of lawmakers in many countries being men. So it’s probably fair to say that these decisions are being largely handed down by men - so I fail to see where the sexism comes in (if the overwhelming majority of judges and lawmakers were women and men were getting the short end of the stick, there might be an argument for sexism).Perhaps the reason many women win custody is because the overwhelming majority of domestic and family violence is committed by men.**** Which isn’t to suggest men don’t experience domestic/family violence ****However, “family” violence includes other male relatives who assault or kill men in their family. A report by the NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team looked at 14 years of data for domestic homicides found that 61% of female and 18% of male homicide victims were related to domestic violence. Of the men who were killed by a female partner, 89% had been the primary aggressor and their female intimate partner had killed them in self-defense.60% of children were killed by their father or another male relative, acting alone, as opposed to 29% for mothers or other female relatives acting alone.More men are victims of violence and homicideThis is sadly true. And it’s also sadly true that the majority of men are physically and sexually abused, and also murdered, by other men. Globally, 79% of total homicide victims are men, however 95% of homicide perpetrators are men.Genital mutilation of boys (circumcision) is still legalIn countries where female circumcision is illegal, parents may still choose to circumcise their baby boys, denying them consent. Again, our legal system is dominated by men who seem willing to keep this religious tradition alive. If sufficient men objected to this, the laws would change.Men are generally expected to pay on dates - and do the asking outI think part of the reason men are expected to be the ones to ask women out is because women have traditionally be expected to the the “chaste” “demure” ones. Women who approach men tend to be painted as “easy”, “sluts”, “whores”, “desperate” or in other derogatory terms. Thankfully this is changing and women aren’t judged so negatively if they pursue a man.In terms of paying, I tend to believe that the person asking should pay (initially) simply because they are the one making the decisions. However, I’ve always offered to pay, simply because I don’t like to feel there are any “obligations” to a man who has “paid” for my company.It’s also worth remembering that women have only had something approaching equal participation in the workforce in fairly recent years. So again, the role of men paying has been cast largely because women did not have the same financial advantages. Legally enforced income equality is still an even more recent thing and wage discrepancies still exist in many industries.But things are changing here and most women I know (at least) are happy to ask a man out and pay. Which isn’t to say most are.When men suffer sexism, it’s in the same way women do… because the world tends to have been set up to keep women passive and out of areas where the rules and outcomes for society are decided.It’s not like women rule the world and have established unfair practices that discriminate against men. Men are suffering the sexist stereotypes in a system they have largely been responsible for establishing… only in different ways.I think it’s fair to say that sexism against women hurts men as much as it hurts women.So do men experience sexism?Yes. I don’t think anyone is denying this.But it’s by and large a side-effect of their sexism against women. If men don’t like the violence and lack of support they experience, then they actually have the power to change those things.Women aren’t going to prevent them from doing that.Sources:Women in combat - WikipediaGender differences in suicide - WikipediaAre There Gender Differences in Suicide?https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/12634_Chapter5.pdf Current Numbers | CAWPhttp://www.coroners.justice.nsw.gov.au/Documents/2015-2017_DVDRT_Report_October2017(online).pdf https://www.unodc.org/documents/gsh/pdfs/2014_GLOBAL_HOMICIDE_BOOK_web.pdf

When I walked out of Suicide Squad, with my face in anguish, my friend asked me if I needed a drink. We drank (okay, mostly, I drank) a six-pack of Guinness and talked about the movie for three hours.There was a lot of criticism, particularly from me, but I’ll try to distill it down. Still, be warned, this is going to be very long. I liked the idea of Suicide Squad and it was the first time since the Christopher Nolan movies that I was excited about a live action DC film. I got feelings about Suicide Squad, is what I’m saying. Let’s dive right in:The movie got hacked to death in the editing room. Some characters are introduced twice (in terms of their infographic showing up and giving us fun facts). At one point, the movie stops entirely to absorb the shock of the characters finding out something the audience has already been told two times. This is not good screenwriting or narrative, but the way it’s cut seems to make it seem more like it’s the result of last-minute changes and not a deliberate decision by a bad writer. I didn’t mind the over-the-top character graphics for their introductions, but several of them are not especially memorable or interesting and they kind of clash with the grim, gritty aesthetic of the rest of the movie (and DCEU at large). If you’re going to have that bright, but dingy neon-light aesthetic, I feel like they should have gone for broke and had the whole movie shot in that kind of style (not just the infographics and arguably the Joker/Harley flashbacks), and have the graphics be more recurrent throughout the movie.There are too many fucking characters and too many of them fill the same roles, or no roles at all. It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if every character was a unique personality, but they’re really not. Diablo and Deadshot have similar characters in “family man with tragic backstory” but they don’t compare, contrast or interact in any meaningful way. Rick Flagg is constantly shown to be “Not as cool gun guy as Deadshot”. The Joker and Harley Quinn really have no reason to be in this movie (especially the Joker, more on him later), except to sell merchandise. Killer Croc and Diablo both feel like they should have roles as kind of the heavy of their group as the people with legitimate superpowers, but they’re both not. Why are both Enchantress and Incubus here? One would be plenty.About half of the characters are worthless and/or stereotypes. As briefly as I can make it: Captain Boomerang is in the movie as comic relief, except everybody does funny things at some point (or is made funny through being the straight man) so he feels completely unnecessary. Diablo is a cholo stereotype, but has a moving backstory, but is completely undercut by his own introduction. You killed your family and swore off using your fire powers—except to write cutesy little text messages in the air? Fuck off please. Katana is given no screentime or focus, but then she cries and mugs for the camera expecting us to feel emotionally attached to her while Rick Flagg looks straight at the audience and tells us her husband’s soul is in her sword. Speaking of Rick Flagg? Fuck him too. The whole point of Suicide Squad is “extraordinary people (who are also supervillains)” and he’s a good soldier, but does nothing exceptional for the entire movie, making him neither of those things. Give his screentime and role to Katana if you can’t be bothered to have him even do something cool. Slipknot has 90 seconds of screentime (if that) before being unceremoniously killed. So long, 100% of Native American representation in modern comic book movies—the kicker being that Slipknot had a great excuse to be there from both a plot and screenwriting standpoint. Amanda Waller is at the top of a skyscraper and he can climb anything. Why kill him (from a screenwriting view)? Why not kill Captain Useless Boomerang or Rick “I’m so generic I should be on the cover of, I don’t know, pick a first-person shooter” Flagg?Killer Croc pisses me off so much he gets his own bullet. First of all, that makeup was amazing, but generally speaking, Croc is inhuman and gigantic. I get why they wouldn’t want to do that (budget, mostly), but they really should have anyway. Second, Killer Croc isn’t actually dumb. He’s not insanely smart, but he’s cunning, reasonably intelligent and very serious in tone. I usually forgive changes from the comics, but they need to have a reason. There’s no reason for him to be as dumb as he is, even if you need a dumb guy in the script. You have Captain Fucking Boomerang, who you already made into a worthless garbage pile for that. The fact that Killer Croc isn’t dumb serves as another commentary on his character in the comics and cartoon—people have assumed things about him his whole life due to his appearance and that shapes him as a person. Third, why is he a black stereotype? The character (without his “condition”) has been depicted as black in the comics, whether or not he was originally intended that way. But he’s never in any other media to my knowledge leaned into a bunch of #problematic stereotype BS. “B.E.T.”, give me a fucking break, DC. Fourth, if you’re going to lean into him being black, okay, but can you do it for a reason that’s not a cheap snort in a movie that ended up being about 30% cheap humor by volume? There’s room for interesting shit there. You could have his character serve as commentary on how appearance ties into behavior—IE, you become a monster because you’re treated like a monster because you’re seen as a monster (just show that instead of having a guard tell us), good shit to work in if you have a decent screenwriter and can give Croc a couple minutes, and if you’re really pushing being black as a forefront aspect of his character, the social subtext writes itself. Or do the reverse—have him be somebody who turned to crime because of his environment and longstanding impacts of systemic racism, or his feelings about himself as a black man and not actually his condition of being a literal monster. Just do something instead of leaning on “Haha! It’s funny because the monster is a black man, and you can tell he is because he speaks in (kind of) ebonics, wants BET in his cell and the last scene of him is him smiling at videos of big booty bitches. This is black culture, right?” Fucking hell. Oh, and lastly, why are you putting a big fucking metahuman in your movie and you’re barely gonna give him a decent scene of being strong and throwing shit around? Have him toss a car, Killer Croc can do that. Have him pull a man into the water and tear off his arms, he can do that. HAVE HIM THROW A ROCK AT HIM (he can do that, even though that’s actually Batman saying that line). If you’re not going to CGI the 12-foot Killer Croc the world deserves, then at least present him as a horror movie monster. The makeup is still amazing (and the actor’s pretty solid, at least I think so from what little stands out around the crushing weight of him being a stereotype that was dated before I was even born), but I’m just baffled by how wrong everything else with Killer Croc went.One more individual character bullet although it’s really more about the plot: Amanda Waller is a dumbass in this movie. She should be one of the smartest and definitely the shrewdest completely not-super human in your cinematic universe. But the entire plot kicks off because she fell asleep alone with Enchantress’ heart. There are two easy, thirty-second fixes to this: either 1. Don’t have Enchantress escaping be her fault. or 2. Have her plan for Enchantress to escape so that she can prove the world needs her pet project, as well as forging them into a team. Either of these can be handled really easily by either removing the scene where she falls asleep and replacing it with something else, or giving Waller a thirty-second sequence in the epilogue (or maybe post-credits), where she is confronted by Rick Flagg (or if I had my way, Katana, since I wouldn’t write Rick Flagg in the goddamn movie) and confirms for the audience that it was on purpose (to the audience, if not the characters, somehow, I think that would be best).Enchantress is boring and so is Incubus. Aside from some cool hip swivels from Cara Delevingne they do nothing cool and add nothing aside from being a generic threat. You could very easily replace them with any villain of sufficient scope (and give that CGI budget to Killer Croc, maybe). A lot of Superhero movies (Especially Marvel, though DC also has this problem thus far, lookin’ at you, Ares and Steppenwolf) have very weak villains. Some of those movies get carried through their weak antagonists by having a good enough movie surrounding them that the bland villain is there for the cool and interesting good guys to bounce off of. I think since the rest of Suicide Squad is so bad, it really stands out how absolutely forgettable they are. Except for Cara Delevingne’s hip swivels. Those stay with me.Okay, the big one. This is it. The main event. The one we’ve all been waiting for.These characters shouldn’t be in this fucking movie. At least, the Joker shouldn’t, not really. He soaks up a lot of screentime for a pretty disappointing performance and doing very little of consequence. But as the movie stands, Harley Quinn is also given no reason for being there. She’s a completely normal woman with folie a deux, wearing high heels in a warzone. She doesn’t have superpowers, she’s not particularly special in any other regard. Why’s she there? What made Amanda Waller go “yes, I need this completely nutty but otherwise regular petty criminal on my elite secret black ops team”?Well, if it was handled better, she’s a strong personality and good at manipulating and reading people. She was a professional psychologist for god’s sakes, a fact that everybody seems to forget as soon as her backstory’s over (I’m looking at you, Arkham games. Arkham City has the worst Harley Quinn in history, including every awful New 52 redesign and this movie, don’t at me). So her role should be manipulating people for the benefit of the Squad and the plot. How do we do this? Well, give her Deadshot’s interaction with Diablo, for a start. It makes sense for her to see somebody who’s a quiet, withdrawn pacifist, be told or learn that they have phenomenal powers they’ve sworn off using and want to needle them and make them snap. Imagine Human Charisma Engine Margot Robbie putting up her hands super innocently, looking at a still-burning Diablo and saying, “Whoops. Sorry buddy, I was just trying to get you there, you know what I mean?” Second, give her an actual character-based scene with at least one other character (maybe Deadshot since he seems super protective to her in the third act for like, no reason as the movie is cut) instead of just playful, skin-deep banter.That said, that’s essentially me writing fanfiction. As it stands, you cut her from the movie and you’ll lose nothing, except for millions of dollars from Hot Topic. So like, I get the financial sense of it, but not the character, screenwriting, directorial or practical in-universe reasons. She’s just poorly handled, which is a shame because Margot Robbie would have done great with a better screenplay.The Joker though. Hoo boy.I’m in a minority here when I say I actually really liked his design in this movie. It took some time to grow on me, but it did and I was having trouble figuring out why until I watched MovieBob’s review where he said that the Joker was originally a gangster, but they updated that image to a blinged-out white-trash methhead kind of gangster. I actually like that idea a lot and I think it was smart to move away from anarchist crazyman as nobody’s going to beat Heath Ledger at that for a hundred years (and this might not be true for everybody, but the best “jokey/funny” Joker will always be Mark Hamill’s, and the best old-school gangster will always be Jack Nicholson’s). The design isn’t the problem.Jared Leto is a problem, maybe not the biggest one, but certainly one. He’s not great. For all the stories of him method acting psychotic on set, he’s absolutely underwhelming in screen presence. Also, cutting up a pig or sending bullets to people? Not really Joker moves. He should have been method acting by pulling pranks, or telling deplorable fucking jokes, y’know, the thing the Joker is named after. He doesn’t come across as funny, clever or intimidating on screen. He’s a completely bog-standard druggie gang boss, just with a weird appearance. There’s nothing interesting about him beyond the design. What’s more important though is the mishandling of his role in the story.Harley Quinn and the Joker have an abusive (sometimes mutually) and codependent relationship, based out of Harley’s complete and utter devotion to him. Batman the Animated Series, showed this very well (as it should, since it created her). The Joker functions better with her, but probably doesn’t feel love, and certainly doesn’t process it in any healthy capacity if he does. Harley is an exact contrast, her life has gotten measurably worse, but she’s so head-over-heels that to her, it doesn’t matter. Their relationship progresses in the cartoon and comics to the point where Harley gets fed up and leaves, but deep down she still loves him.You know what’s a terrible way to show all of the things I just said?This. Just, all of this. One hundred percent of this scene does not work if you like and understand the original characters. It’s hard for me to put myself in these shoes, but I don’t think it works even if you know nothing about them too. There’s a neat idea in here of the Joker escaping and Harley tracking down an initially resistant Joker, but it doesn’t work because we’re given no reason for why she loves him or wants to see him at this point—all we’ve seen is him physically torturing her in her work environment. She should want to be as far from him as physically possible. At this point in the screenplay she’s not even that crazy, so it doesn’t work. They removed her reason for being in love with the Joker, but then acted like it still existed for the rest of the movie. This interaction does call to mind a real-life domestic dispute, which is not what I particularly want for these characters, but I get a sense of where they were going with it. If your “dark, gritty, realistic DCEU” version of Harley and Joker is to just double-down on it being an uncomfortable, abusive relationship and play it one-hundred percent straight, I can almost respect that. Unfortunately, the next time we see Harley and Joker in a flashback…Okay, so as a fan of the animated series, I hate the idea that Harley got dunked in the same acid vat as the Joker (and by extension, I hate that this is a thing in the New 52 that inspired its presence in this movie). The core of their characters is that they are not the same. Harley is, at least initially, hopelessly in love with an absolutely soulless and remorseless monster. Viewers should constantly alternate between thinking that maybe the Joker has genuine affection for her and realizing he’s basically a jack-in-the-box, but somebody’s taken the clown and replaced it with a knife. He should be a lot of things, funny, twisted, murderous, dangerous—something the animated series did masterfully. You knew the Joker was terrible for her, but at the same time, you could understand how she fell for him, because he’s just that manipulative and charismatic. Dunking Harley in the acid and implying that she’s now just girl-Joker completely undoes everything interesting about their relationship and power dynamics. So for me, personally: fuck this scene, and fuck you, whoever was writing the New 52 when this originally happened.But taken on its own context in the movie, it’s also complete nonsense. Harley shouldn’t have fallen for the Joker because she got elctro-tortured, unless the DCEU Harley does absolutely fascinating things on the weekend. But even if you’re going with their relationship being built on a foundation of physical torture instead of emotional manipulation, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. This flashback plays with swelling music as if this is a beautiful moment, a rebirth. But everything we’ve seen of them thus far has been absolutely, one hundred percent abusive, with none of the Joker’s charismatic manipulation. They pay lip service through this scene to the idea that the Joker really loves her. But their entire relationship is abusive, and not just a little bit, all the way. Their relationship started with him torturing her, and then she pointed a gun at him and he slapped the fuck out of her. This isn’t emotionally manipulative or abusive, it went to physical abuse immediately out of the fucking gate. You can’t present this as both an unhealthy, but romantic relationship and then double-down on all the characteristics of real-life domestic abuse. Especially considering the length of the movie and how much time this subplot eats up out of a substantial runtime.You need to pick one. And then you should probably make it smaller. The Joker serves as a kind of narrative timebomb for the entire second act of the movie, building suspense of “Oh shit, the Joker’s going to show up”. But he shows up, shoots a gun, explodes (but obviously lives) and then he’s gone. This makes everybody feel sorry for Harley, but if you just took out him showing up entirely, you could either manufacture a better reason for that, or just use that runtime to build up the characters and make them interact so they feel like a meaningful whole, instead. He shows up again at the end to bust Harley out of prison, so why not just skip his initial appearance and have that be the only one not in a flashback? It’s a solid sequel hook, it’s just undercut by him having nothing that adds to the plot during the actual movie itself every other time he appears.So to sum it up I guess: Suicide Squad was cut into pieces in the editing room and reshoots on top of already having a poor plot structure, poor understanding of what makes the characters interesting in the comics and really, really weak characterization even for its radically altered version of them. Yes, it sets off a lot of fireworks and has a pretty decent soundtrack. But honestly, even most of the action isn’t that memorable. It’s hard for me to remember any interesting action beats that weren’t Deadshot doing something neat with a gun or Diablo turning into a completely unconvincing CGI demon. It might be fun for you, but I’ve said this before on Quora and it bears repeating: Just because you like something does not make it good. I like a lot of things that are objectively pretty terrible but for whatever reason, it strikes a chord with me (RWBY is my go-to example), and that’s okay.Suicide Squad was hot, wet garbage. But hey, at least Captain Drongo Fuckin’ Boomerang had a unicorn fetish, while you faintly hear the sound of a studio executive in the background furiously masturbating and going “Holy shit, did you see how much money this Deadpool movie made? Put something from that in.”I’m sure this was a total coincidence. Right guys?