Images Of Women In The Film The Last House On The Left

Visual images are extremely prevalent in modern western culture and they are nearly impossible to overlook with the various avenues of technology and social media. Visual images and depictions of women are particularly pervasive, yet society seems to overlook what specifically these sources are conveying about women. These images tend to clearly detail the ways in which women are expected to look, be treated in relation to those they encounter and act to all sexes. With consideration of all the representations of women within our culture, film or cinema, is possibly the most dominant of composing a particular way of grasping societal conventions. Images of women in cinema, therefore, are in a position to become so ingrained in society

Rape sequences in films frequently show rape as a response to women moving outside the norms of submissive behaviors and embarking on independent behaviors. For example, in the film The Last House on the Left, when the two women head out of town alone and meet a young man their age, they are then brutally assaulted both sexually and physically by a gang. The portrayal of the two young women going out alone appears to be punished by being assaulted in the film. Like this particular movie, some films have coupled a woman’s independence and rape. Frequently, films depict rape as a cautionary tool or consequence to women who choose to step outside the traditional roles provided by the patriarchal

Milburn recruited 137 students for an undergraduate college campus to examine two specific variables of: exposure to objectifying images of women and exposure to fictitious magazine account of a date or stranger rape (Funk 1). The short clips of the R-movies contained degrading scenes of male dominance, female availability and female objectification. The fictitious magazine account displayed two scenes, one describing a woman and a man who met at a bar and both has a lot to drink and ending with the man forcing himself on her and having sexual intercourse. The second scene described another drunken woman, who had a man approach her and force himself on her and complete the act of sexual intercourse. The results from this post facto experiment are as follows: watching the objectifying video results in participants, more so males, believing that women being raped received pleasure and “got what they wanted.” Additionally, men who held more traditional views of gender and men who did not hold such views were equally as likely to attribute blame to the victim for the rape as well as receiving pleasure. In regards to the stranger rape magazine scene, males stated that there was a five percent chance of them acting like the perpetrator and an eight