Small Mercies: Sorority Row (Stewart Hendler, 2009)

Hey! You may have noticed that these newsletters have been a bit shorter lately. Finally, I can tell you the reason: I have been putting the final-final-final touches on my third book of non-fiction, DILF: Did I Leave Feminism.

It's about coming out as a dude after spending my adult life as a public feminist, and how transmasculine people seem to be one of cis feminism's longest-standing blind spots. It traces the places where trans and feminist theory connect, and where they create friction, with the goal of creating a feminist vision that unites all gender-marginalized people against the patriarchal ideology that denies our dignity, our bodily autonomy, and sometimes our mere existence.

The book is slated to be out October 2025; you can pre-order your copy here, or – if you want to do yourself a solid and support independent bookstores – here. The more pre-orders I get, the better the book does, and the more likely it is to come up in search rankings for "trans men" before Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage, which would be nice. So go ahead and pre-order, and let's get those just-asking-questions numbers!

It’s hard to explain the casual misogyny that permeated the 2000s, if you weren’t there, but here’s one attempt: It was a time when every single woman who got killed in a slasher movie got penetrated through the mouth. 

The mouth is the most polite orifice you can penetrate on-screen. There were ‘80s movies that were more graphic, and crueler — the curling iron in Sleepaway Camp being the apex and/or nadir — but after several decades of being protested by women's groups, filmmakers couldn’t get away with that so easily, and had to find a workaround. If you penetrate a woman through the mouth, you get to show her with her jaw open, wrapped around something, so it sort of looks like a blow job. The mouth also associated with women’s speech, or women’s protest: Screaming, talking, all those things it’s supposedly “annoying” for women to do. 

Thus, in 2005's Wrong Turn, it’s barbed wire in the mouth, an axe blade through the mouth; in 2004's Saw (I’m told) it’s a reverse bear trap on the mouth; in 2009's Sorority Row, it’s a bottle through the mouth for the drunk girl,  and a flare in the mouth for the hot girl, and a tire iron through the mouth for the talky girl, accompanied (of course) by the killer helpfully explaining “that girl really needs to stop talking.” 

These are the moments when you can see the movie Sorority Row was intended to be — stupid, cheap, sexist, an unimaginative reboot of an equally stupid and cheap and sexist film from the 1980s, about a big male killer mowing down a bunch of barely characterized and frequently naked sorority girls during a house party. 

So when I tell you that Sorority Row is not that movie — that it’s a blast; that it’s surprisingly smart; that it’s one of the funnier slashers I’ve seen recently; that it laughs with its doomed female characters, but not at them — you’re naturally going to ask me what happened. And my answer for you is two words: Carrie Fisher. 

Carrie Fisher happened to this movie, my friends. She has a small role, as the dorm mother of the titular Sorority, but — as she very often did, and was very rarely credited for doing — she also rewrote its script, turning what should have been unwatchable into a delightful black-comic romp. I’m not sure how much of the original script is even in there, at this point, or if it matters, but if you ever wanted to see a slasher movie written by legendary wit Carrie Fisher, the little-known and largely forgotten Sorority Row (2009) is your chance.