Cancelling myself?

One of the things I’ve been desperate to fix for a few years now is the sheer amount of casual sexism on show on this site. A bit of context… when I wrote these reviews back in the early 00s, I was being ironic. But that doesn’t stop some of the comments I’d “cleverly” inserted into my supposedly funny reviews being cringe-inducing now. It’s a peculiar thing, really… I was writing about the 1960s and 70s, when we all knew, and still know, that “attitudes were very different”, and “that wouldn’t get made now”.

But bizarrely we now also know, in 2022, that what was okay in 2001 is now not necessarily okay, either. I mean, who would have thought that white actors in blackface, men in “naked fat woman” suits, and jokes about disabled people being lazy shirkers would one day be deemed inappropriate?

(Well, me, actually - and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one)

So, as I’m pulling together the reviews into a new format, I’m giving them a bit of a spring clean. No more reference to “busty birds”, or how a film might be improved by the inclusion of them. No more fat shaming, or clumsy comments about people’s appearance. With every deletion I’m feeling happier about my work and what it says about me. It was never meant seriously, it was always meant to hold a mirror to the films themselves and the times they were made in, bu that doesn’t make it right. I hope you agree.