Lisbeth Salander: Bringing Sexy Back?

If you’ve read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, you can’t help but have sympathy and possibly empathy for Lisbeth Salander. As a girl who has to defend herself through a series of misfortune in her young life, she’s seen as a tough, unusual, smart, sexual, revengeful woman.

Lisbeth Salander is a multi-dimensional character with characteristics every woman possesses.

Reading the book, you picture her as a woman who uses her every dimension to her advantage, including her sexuality. But her sexuality is not at any point the focus of the story.

But the producers of the upcoming movie based on the book think we will want to see the movie by sexualizing Lisbeth on the movie posters.

A recent editorial by Robin S. Rosenberg, Ph.D. posted on HuffPost Women sums up the issue:

But the fact that the studio has chosen to sexualize her for the ad says something about what they think of her character and/or what they think of potential viewers. Yes, I can see how they might justify portraying her this way: They could say that the ad shows how comfortable she is with her body, how it shows that sex doesn’t mean much for her, blah blah blah. But her character, and her appeal to readers, isn’t about sex. It’s about her resilience in the face of adversity — significant adversity. It’s about her persistence and doggedness to see justice done, at least according to her own moral code. These things have nothing to do with sex.

What do you think about the sexual, dominating poster being used to promote the movie adaptation?

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image credit Sony Pictures Entertainment

~Angie