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Last weekend the boyfriend and I settled in for a nice and dull evening at my house. We curled up with the cats in my bed and popped a movie into my fabulous iMac as we eagerly awaited the beginning of the movie. I had just gotten 3:10 to Yuma from Netflix and the boyfriend really wanted to see it, even though he didn’t particularly care for westerns. I thought it looked decent, and I’d heard some okay things about it, so I didn’t have many objections.

It was one of those movies that was good, but terrible at the same time. I couldn’t really put my finger on what bothered me about the movie. From my perspective, it was a movie about people and their complex morals and personalities and all that… except, when you finished the movie, you didn’t feel like you knew much about anyone who was in it. It was a movie about character development that didn’t really spend much time on character development. And I thought about it some more, and the only thing my brain kept saying was “damn westerns”, and I blamed masculinity for the movie’s pathetic failure in my mind.

I spent a lot of time during my last quarter in college watching war movies, the Vietnam War and WWII in one class, and various wars in Latin America for another. I didn’t really understand what I had done to deserve so many war movies in one quarter, but I dealt with it best I could. Some were documentary style, and others were traditional movie-goer films. After that quarter, I never wanted to watch another war movie. In a less than one month period, we had watched the following:

Full Metal Jacket
Rambo
Green Berets
Platoon
Heaven and Earth

The scary part is the list of movies she wanted us to watch was twice as long, but we had to prioritize what we watched so the other TEN MOVIES were dropped off the list. The movies all had something in common: huge, raging, testosterone fueled MEN. Big, scary, hard, masculine, AMERICAN MEN fighting teeny, tiny, puny, worthless, impotent, Vietcong. Whether the American men failed at their masculinity or not, all of these war movies focused on the fact that yes, they are men, and yes, war is hard, but we can still be masculine, even if we lose. Heaven and Earth went so far as to show that when a man’s masculinity is taken away from him by the teeny, tiny, impotent Vietcong he suffers extreme psychological trauma, beats his wife, and subsequently kills himself in the nude in his hippie van. If that doesn’t warn men of the consequences of losing their masculinity then I don’t know what is.

It’s not just war movies, westerns are the same. Men riding around the unsettled west with big guns and stolen horses, doing dirty things to women and either being the best villain ever or taking out the best villain ever. Either way, westerns and war movies rely on one basic trait from which they grow from: masculinity. Now, the same can be said of femininity and romantic comedies, but I’d rather have the particular trait that is associated with my gender be used as an excuse for bad humor and tender moments than war, rape, domestic violence, suicide, murder, mayhem, and many other violent acts.

But the bottom line is, I’m calling a moratorium on war movies and westerns in my movie obsessed life. I just can’t handle it anymore, it’s too much, it’s too violent. The men are always fighting to prove one thing: that they are better than the other guy. And even if the director, screenwriter, whoever, claims that this is not what their protagonist is doing, it still looks like to me, the raging feminist. I embrace breaking stereotypes whenever possible, but I don’t think the movie industry will be doing that any time soon with westerns or war movies. I’m just glad that westerns have fallen out of popularity over the past decade or so.