Male, Female Films

Deborah Hornblow is on target in her June 14 article, “A Double Standard for Male and Female Emotions on Film.” I for one am tired of these male character-dominated films being accepted as worthy of “general” audiences and consider the majority of them “boy-joy” (for a male audience) flicks.

It is annoying to me, as a woman, to watch the perennial self-aggrandizement of men through the sanctification of male bonding and war in Hollywood films, while listening to them haughtily refer to works like “The Joy Luck Club,” “Sense and Sensibility” and “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” as “chick flicks.”

VICTORIA VIDAL

North Hollywood

*

Perhaps male suffering and male bonding in such movies as “Saving Private Ryan” is ennobling in a way that female suffering and bonding in “Ya-Ya Sisterhood” is not because men in such movies are risking death and fighting for something much larger than themselves--the defeat of the Nazi war machine--while Sandra Bullock and the women in “chick flicks” are picking the lint out of their emotional navels.

One looks outward and sacrifices for a greater good. The other looks inward in order to shore up a withered self-esteem. That one is more profound than the other no one seems pressed to understand except disgruntled feminists stretching for a grievance.

CARL MOORE

Lomita