Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape

Hunting Girls develops an intellectually engaging and nuanced discussion of the portrayal of strong women in popular films. As any rich philosophical work does, her probing analysis and carefully developed insights leave us with more questions than answers. What should a strong female hero look like today in the context of continual problem of sexual violence?

This book was produced a couple of years ago before the MeToo surge delighted the public media with lurid tales of anything from horseplay in the office to sexual assault disguised as a job interview, or performance review. That makes Kelly's work all the more chilling. To write this book, she collected both statistical and anecdotal evidence to show a growing tendency to attack and assault women even as strong women emerge in the media, business, and political world. She traces the drift of Title IX from addressing and funding the equalization of athletics and education to the institutional empowerment of women. Kelly opens a much-needed discourse on our current trauma culture, the obsession with safety and security when the threat cannot be identified and the conflation of terms such as survivor and victim, assault and harassment. Well, you know, I agree with Kelly in that the First Amendment certainly doesn't protect anyone from getting hurt feelings because "they are hearing what they don't want to hear." But, I wouldn't limit that to young people at all. This book should definitely be on your desk or nightstand if you are in any teaching or coaching profession including parents of teens and tweens. This is a book that demands critical thought of the reader.

This is an excellent book on how Hollywood portrays strong female characters. If you are interested in the relationship between violence and women (specifically how this relationship is articulated in media/popular discourse), I recommend that you read this book in conjunction with Women as Weapons of War, also by Oliver. Like her other books, Oliver’s writing is clear and engaging, her argument is innovative, rigorous, and easy to follow. In fact, I would not hesitate to recommend this book to my undergraduate students (as long as they are careful readers with an average intelligence, I am sure they can benefit from it).

This book covers some important topics...the issue of rape on college campuses which is getting a lot of public attention. It also covers the increasingly prevalence of female action heroes, focusing particularly on YA movies like the Hunger Games and Divergence (although 50 Shades of Grey gets some mention, despite being in a pretty different genre I'd say...)Despite enthusiasm for the topics I feel left wanting…particularly as this is an issue “near and dear” to my own interests. I felt it was perhaps a bit too much in the tradition of literary criticism, in which she begins with a particular viewpoint and assembles “points” to support that viewpoint (some of which were good points…others, I felt, were stretches.) I was hoping for something a bit more nuanced, balanced and evidence based. It’s more an advocacy book than a scholarly one I’d say.My other concern, perhaps larger, is that she “takes on” movies featuring strong female protagonists…but offers no proscription for what she’d like to see instead. I worry this could have a real negative impact on discouraging many of the exact movies that have challenged previous stereotypical portrayals of females. She seems to put media in a double bind…complaining we don’t have enough female action heroes, but also complaining about the violence they experience once the movie industry starts to produce them. You can’t have female action heroes without them being targets of violence any more than you can have male action heroes without the same. In some ways, worrying over it could be perceived as more patronizing than egalitarian.I think the observation that the boyfriends attacking the girls in some movies was really interesting…I’d be curious if an actual empirical analysis bore this out as actually more prevalent with female heroes than male (although I do remember some male examples of femme fatale wives, like in Total Recall). But there could be something intriguing about this relating to some real anxieties regarding violence toward women that mean something for female audiences.Which brings me to the point that the whole book seemed to miss that most of these movies were heavier for female audiences than male and often produced by female authors. In that sense (and also based on research evidence), I didn’t find the argument that the movies anesthetize audience to violence toward women very convincing. I believe that reflected the authors worldview rather than anything “true” in movie audience’s experiences. It’s that line that I found to be a real disconnect with the actual experience of most of these films (granted, I never saw or read 50 Shades of Grey, but my observation was, again, whatever issues that book/movie had, it still tended to dominate with female audiences.) No evidence for these claims were offered (and research on media effects tends to be disjointed and controversial anyway.)So lots of nuances and issues I just felt were lacking in her coverage.However…sometimes reading books with more extreme views can be a lot of fun, even if I/you don’t necessarily agree. On a more basic level I found the book to be badly organized and repetitive. There was real disconnect between the two aspects of the book...campus rape and movies featuring female heroes. The attempts to connect the two were not convincing. That made it less enjoyable just as a text.So…I guess overall I was disappointed.

Brilliant analysis by renowned feminist philosopher, Kelly Oliver. Her readings of mainstream films featuring hunting girls make this work very accessible to non-philosophers, and her take on the current epidemic of date rapes on campus make this a provocative and informative read. I very highly recommend this book, no reservations!

compelling and insightful!

Excellent and timely read. Oliver deftly explores the persistence of sexual violence in the media and on campuses across the nation. Essential reading and highly accessible.

Hunting Girls by Kelly Oliver is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in late May.A difficult read, primarily because it's a social critique that turns one's stomach as it turns to face a mirror on a society that dually embraces a woman's predatortress prowess and shames her meek defenses against lustful, double-crossing witnesses.