Sometimes a cigar is just a carcinogenic fun tube.

For reasons that are too complicated to go into right now, I'm suddenly honour bound to write something daily. Fortunately, I'm not bound to write something long, complicated or even halfway-readable thus my goal remains within the realm of the possible.

So I was writing a review of when I got distracted by the memory of something I read about a completely different film, Kick-Ass. The films most notorious element was Hit-Girl, an 11 year old who says cunt a lot and has been trained as a brutally violent "superhero" by her father. The reviewer complained about how sexualized the character was, noting that at one point she even wears a "fetishistic schoolgirl uniform".

I'm not going to bother reviewing Kick-Ass myself, a film that I didn't like very much and that clearly thought it was so cool. But one thing I wouldn't accuse it of was overly sexualizing Hit-Girl, when she does disguise herself as a schoolgirl the only layer to the costume is that it's supposed to point out the difference between the child she's assumed to be and the killer she actually is, a symptom of the film never getting round to deciding if a child whose been conditioned to viciously murder people without remorse is tragic or fabulously awesome. It never felt like moral ambiguity, more sloppy storytelling but it's not, you know, a sex thing.

This is a long preamble to my main point which is that adult (or at least late teenage) woman dressed as schoolgirls have become such an ubiquitous fetish, a fetish so mainstream it barely counts as a fetish, that people have forgotten that schoolgirls also dress as schoolgirls because they actually are schoolgirls. Suddenly depicting schoolgirls is automatically sexual. Also that swearing a lot and killing people is automatically sexy. That seems somehow indicative of our cultures fucked up attitudes but maybe it's just that I'm trying to cut down on caffeine and everything feels very far away.

PS: As creepy as I find parents who put their kids in child beauty pageants, I find parents who arm their children and get them to kill people a lot creepier. This may also explain why these characters are almost always girls, if they were boys they might remind people too much of real child soldiers used by drug cartels, the Khmer Rouge, various other genocidal groups, etc. That would definitely push the story towards tragic.

PPS: Yes I know that they sometimes use girls as soldiers too.