By Yasmeen Banu
Oppressed Majority, the short film that went viral in less than a week since its upload on Youtube by director Elénore Pourriat depicts a day in an alternate universe: a universe where women are obnoxious, uncouth, uncensored, certainly ungraceful, and completely oblivious about it.
Pierre is an ordinary man going about his day normally, except the problem is he realizes that his day gets weirder by the minutes.
He sees women jogging bare-chested, he notices a women urinating in an alley, and he gets taunted by a women whose language is too crude for him to be comfortable with while waiting for the traffic. It soon escalated to a point where he was sexually assaulted and was visibly shaken by it.
The way the women in this film has complete disregard for what’s wrong and what’s right is not only unsettling, but downright frightening.
What’s even more unsettling is when Pierre thought that out of every women he came across that day, his wife would definitely be the exception, the one who would believe him and tell him how wrong what happened to him was. But she soon became indifferent to his plight.
The film revolves around the idea of a matriarchal society, the worst fear a man could possibly confront- castration, and how real the horror of being assaulted- whether verbally or physically is.
Pourriat said that once her video went viral, she started receiving messages that “were so aggressive” she had to delete them. But she kept one message that said “More patronising feminist bullshit. Keep whining, bitches!” When she read that, she was more determined to continue making films.
If the roles in the film were reversed, a few of the situations in the film would have been a matter of “boys will be boys”, but because the distinction between what’s right and what’s wrong is clearly shown in the film, it distinguishes gender inequality and proves that if it makes you wince, and if it makes you uncomfortable, it probably means it was never meant to be that way.
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