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A review by novabird
The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
1.0
The Final Girl Support Group
Barbie Alert!! This book is for overprivileged, sheltered or more like Chrissy character readers than they would like to admit. This book perpetuates violence against women but I read it through because it was a recommendation from someone very close to me. It glorifies and reifies the battle between the sexes, and simply places it in a new gladiatorial arena or on a new media platform stage.
Yeah, watching Slasher films as educational training on how to avoid becoming a victim was something that I never felt the need to do. Although I did watch a few just to ensure that I had my bases covered. Instead, at age 11 I snuck into our small town theatre and watched Soylent Green. The only horror movie that has ever felt compelling and the most familiar to me was, Monster, in which Charlize Theron won an Oscar. My mother starred as Blanche in the leading role of a tiny town community production of A StreetCar Named Desire months after I witnessed her trying to kill my father for his molestation of me when I was six. After her performance and subsequently stalking us, he tried to revenge kill her by drowning her in front of Mrs. and Mr. Tull and their same age daughter and myself. That story is a lot longer than that. And this event was not even the beginning of my polyvictimization nor near the end of them. Yet my mother still was my Monster despite her trying to save me. Because she taught me that to be equal with men you had to become Monsters.
So all you wanna be a contestant as a Final Girl?!?! - Are you really sure about that? I’m telling you that that trope and that genre is highly overrated.
'Our visitors are the night visitors, the child stealers, the boo-baggers, the baby guzzlers. They are the men who eat children' I would add, not only men, but women, too.
Is there a reason that all of these Final Girls don’t have children themselves or at least they’re not woven into the narrative in a way that I recognized? Is there a reason why these women choose to be childless other than Dr. Carol of course. Perhaps because Grady didn’t want to approach the real demon here of how violence is perpetuated. Intergenerational violence is as much the result of patterns repeated by men as it is by women reinforcing, abetting and being accessories to them.
The trope "Final Girl" is code for the next generation of, “Damsels in Distress.” Prior to that there was the virgin sacrifice to save the crops blah blah blah. My mother mocked being a, “Damsel in Distress,” by portraying Streetcar character Blanche's voluntary acceptance of victimization, “I always depend on the kindness of strangers,” is her most memorable line. Quote from the FGSG, "Why do women have to die for your entertainment?!" I ask, “Why do women have to be victims as a source of amusement?” It’s like Freud saying all women by nature of having a womb are hysterical. That kind of stereotyping is what has to be slain.
Yes, males have higher incidence rates and prevalence of polyvictimization.
Some research concluded that boys are more likely to suffer from poly-victimization than girls, except for sexual assault.
These studies show that girls generally have a higher risk of being exposed to sexual victimization and domestic violence. Thus, girls tend to become more vulnerable and more likely to suffer from violence.
So, read between the lines here folks, females experience more global polyvictimization because sexual abuse underpins so much of violence against females, period. Our wars and battlefields are behind closed doors, where we are conditioned to not rock the cradle. Men’s are on actual battlefields. But rarely other than in gangs do men actively pursue other men and hunt them down to kill them and when they do it’s for territory or possession and not because of their gender.
Gee whiz, am I starting to sound a bit like Chrissy? Nahh, that’s not possible, right? Please reassure me, okay?
“Each of us has a monster we must confront, a monster designed to test our personal weaknesses. And in the end, they bring about our deaths. Not literal death, but death as the conclusion of this phase and the beginning of another. Death is the harbinger of transformation, that which precedes a new life.” So says Chrissy and I would agree.
But then Grady has Chrissy also say, ““Murder is man’s attempt to steal birth from women,” she says. “We make children, they kill them. We create life, they create death. It’s the way it’s always been.” This last one counters the previous. Was Grady trying to show how deranged Chrissy was by not reconciling these two points of view?
The body retains trauma and remembers. This is even more true for women, because the very act of bringing forth new life is incredibly painful.
Chrissy is every woman, mother, sister, aunt, grandma -and gasp - girlfriend who reinforces abuse of the more vulnerable females in their circles and there are as many multitudes of these types of women as monsters as there are men. Perhaps Grady attempted to do a Yin Yang with the cycle of life and death, creation and murder but I think the editor must have kiboshed that. Or maybe they both just wanted to make a buck and make a book that is quasi a loosely formed screenplay.
Males despise women not because we solely have the power of birth and creation but because we also hold the keys to destruction and death. Menstruating women prove this every single time they have a period. Then when they become crones and act as gatekeepers and attend hospices or act as death doulas. Virgins, plant seeds of potentiality for future trees of legacy. Women of child bearing years bridge these two. Men do not have such a plain 3 fold identity that embraces life and death and everything in between.
1 in 3 Canadian children experience childhood trauma. 44% witnessed violence in their homes.
Grady portrays his troupe of Final Girls as weak, often with devastating physical weaknesses, wheelchair bound, agoraphobia, addicted, almost complete denial, and as LGBTQ. I sort of get the sense that he knew enough about women’s trauma responses to incorporate: flee, fight, feed, f_ck and freeze and that he typecast each accordingly . Where are the Ordinary Girls, the Slightly Above Average Girls, the Girls Next Door as a Final Girl in all his cookie cutters?
Where are the Aileen Wuornos (the true life serial killer who had had enough abuse) types?
What really ticked me off was the lazy writing of, “I’m the fastest girl in the world,” that made it into publication. I am being kind here. Umm Grady? Umm… editor. ….How is that type of hyperbole not seen as cartoonish and therefore mockery?
Good things: the characters are very memorable despite being typecast as weak and the faint motif of the consequences of neglect but still evident.
The ending was good, even better than, "I know what happens to those [final] girls. They turn into women. And they live,” in the fact that it's ending is superb, with a restorative justice theme.
This review was deliberately meant to antagonize readers and make them think about what they choose to consume as material. When you choose to support this type of content you are reinforcing and perpetuating violence against women.
I can understand what you were trying to do Grady, but if a woman wrote what you did and framed it in the same way but with men being stalked and killed by women would it be published?
Double standards.
Grady go and eat a large piece of Humble Pie with dirt in it or maybe the entire pie.
Girls grow the f up and stop buying into this kind of crap! Rewatch Barbie until you finally get it, there are never any Final Girls. We adapt. We evolve.
And some try their entire lives to not become monsters.
Barbie Alert!! This book is for overprivileged, sheltered or more like Chrissy character readers than they would like to admit. This book perpetuates violence against women but I read it through because it was a recommendation from someone very close to me. It glorifies and reifies the battle between the sexes, and simply places it in a new gladiatorial arena or on a new media platform stage.
Yeah, watching Slasher films as educational training on how to avoid becoming a victim was something that I never felt the need to do. Although I did watch a few just to ensure that I had my bases covered. Instead, at age 11 I snuck into our small town theatre and watched Soylent Green. The only horror movie that has ever felt compelling and the most familiar to me was, Monster, in which Charlize Theron won an Oscar. My mother starred as Blanche in the leading role of a tiny town community production of A StreetCar Named Desire months after I witnessed her trying to kill my father for his molestation of me when I was six. After her performance and subsequently stalking us, he tried to revenge kill her by drowning her in front of Mrs. and Mr. Tull and their same age daughter and myself. That story is a lot longer than that. And this event was not even the beginning of my polyvictimization nor near the end of them. Yet my mother still was my Monster despite her trying to save me. Because she taught me that to be equal with men you had to become Monsters.
So all you wanna be a contestant as a Final Girl?!?! - Are you really sure about that? I’m telling you that that trope and that genre is highly overrated.
'Our visitors are the night visitors, the child stealers, the boo-baggers, the baby guzzlers. They are the men who eat children' I would add, not only men, but women, too.
Is there a reason that all of these Final Girls don’t have children themselves or at least they’re not woven into the narrative in a way that I recognized? Is there a reason why these women choose to be childless other than Dr. Carol of course. Perhaps because Grady didn’t want to approach the real demon here of how violence is perpetuated. Intergenerational violence is as much the result of patterns repeated by men as it is by women reinforcing, abetting and being accessories to them.
The trope "Final Girl" is code for the next generation of, “Damsels in Distress.” Prior to that there was the virgin sacrifice to save the crops blah blah blah. My mother mocked being a, “Damsel in Distress,” by portraying Streetcar character Blanche's voluntary acceptance of victimization, “I always depend on the kindness of strangers,” is her most memorable line. Quote from the FGSG, "Why do women have to die for your entertainment?!" I ask, “Why do women have to be victims as a source of amusement?” It’s like Freud saying all women by nature of having a womb are hysterical. That kind of stereotyping is what has to be slain.
Yes, males have higher incidence rates and prevalence of polyvictimization.
Some research concluded that boys are more likely to suffer from poly-victimization than girls, except for sexual assault.
These studies show that girls generally have a higher risk of being exposed to sexual victimization and domestic violence. Thus, girls tend to become more vulnerable and more likely to suffer from violence.
So, read between the lines here folks, females experience more global polyvictimization because sexual abuse underpins so much of violence against females, period. Our wars and battlefields are behind closed doors, where we are conditioned to not rock the cradle. Men’s are on actual battlefields. But rarely other than in gangs do men actively pursue other men and hunt them down to kill them and when they do it’s for territory or possession and not because of their gender.
Gee whiz, am I starting to sound a bit like Chrissy? Nahh, that’s not possible, right? Please reassure me, okay?
“Each of us has a monster we must confront, a monster designed to test our personal weaknesses. And in the end, they bring about our deaths. Not literal death, but death as the conclusion of this phase and the beginning of another. Death is the harbinger of transformation, that which precedes a new life.” So says Chrissy and I would agree.
But then Grady has Chrissy also say, ““Murder is man’s attempt to steal birth from women,” she says. “We make children, they kill them. We create life, they create death. It’s the way it’s always been.” This last one counters the previous. Was Grady trying to show how deranged Chrissy was by not reconciling these two points of view?
The body retains trauma and remembers. This is even more true for women, because the very act of bringing forth new life is incredibly painful.
Chrissy is every woman, mother, sister, aunt, grandma -and gasp - girlfriend who reinforces abuse of the more vulnerable females in their circles and there are as many multitudes of these types of women as monsters as there are men. Perhaps Grady attempted to do a Yin Yang with the cycle of life and death, creation and murder but I think the editor must have kiboshed that. Or maybe they both just wanted to make a buck and make a book that is quasi a loosely formed screenplay.
Males despise women not because we solely have the power of birth and creation but because we also hold the keys to destruction and death. Menstruating women prove this every single time they have a period. Then when they become crones and act as gatekeepers and attend hospices or act as death doulas. Virgins, plant seeds of potentiality for future trees of legacy. Women of child bearing years bridge these two. Men do not have such a plain 3 fold identity that embraces life and death and everything in between.
1 in 3 Canadian children experience childhood trauma. 44% witnessed violence in their homes.
Grady portrays his troupe of Final Girls as weak, often with devastating physical weaknesses, wheelchair bound, agoraphobia, addicted, almost complete denial, and as LGBTQ. I sort of get the sense that he knew enough about women’s trauma responses to incorporate: flee, fight, feed, f_ck and freeze and that he typecast each accordingly . Where are the Ordinary Girls, the Slightly Above Average Girls, the Girls Next Door as a Final Girl in all his cookie cutters?
Where are the Aileen Wuornos (the true life serial killer who had had enough abuse) types?
What really ticked me off was the lazy writing of, “I’m the fastest girl in the world,” that made it into publication. I am being kind here. Umm Grady? Umm… editor. ….How is that type of hyperbole not seen as cartoonish and therefore mockery?
Good things: the characters are very memorable despite being typecast as weak and the faint motif of the consequences of neglect but still evident.
The ending was good, even better than, "I know what happens to those [final] girls. They turn into women. And they live,” in the fact that it's ending is superb, with a restorative justice theme.
This review was deliberately meant to antagonize readers and make them think about what they choose to consume as material. When you choose to support this type of content you are reinforcing and perpetuating violence against women.
I can understand what you were trying to do Grady, but if a woman wrote what you did and framed it in the same way but with men being stalked and killed by women would it be published?
Double standards.
Grady go and eat a large piece of Humble Pie with dirt in it or maybe the entire pie.
Girls grow the f up and stop buying into this kind of crap! Rewatch Barbie until you finally get it, there are never any Final Girls. We adapt. We evolve.
And some try their entire lives to not become monsters.