Bernadette Soriano

It is a truth universally acknowledged—though rarely footnoted—that a man in possession of a Letterboxd account must be in want of belittling a female-led film. It starts with a swipe: one-star. Then a sigh: “mid.” And finally, the fatal blow—an 87-word review consisting solely of a Pulp Fiction quote, an “IYKYK,” and a GIF of Robert Pattinson smoking.


This is not merely a matter of opinion. This is what I call emotional epistemicide: the slow, platform-mediated erasure of knowledge rooted in feeling, intuition, or feminine-coded forms of interpretation. And nowhere is this subtle violence more prevalent than on Letterboxd — a site that, though marketed as a personal log, functions more accurately as a tasteocracy for cinematic gatekeeping.

Reader, I am becoming Fleabag. But, like… season 2 episode 1.

Let us begin with Pierre Bourdieu—French sociologist, patron saint of taste theory, and the man who made it intellectually legal to judge people for their Spotify Wrapped. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Bourdieu argues that “taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” That is: what you like is never just what you like. It’s a map of who you are, where you’ve been, and what you’ve been socially permitted to admire.

Film bros, by and large, align their taste with high-cultural capital. They venerate directors like Nolan, Fincher, and Villeneuve because these auteurs offer technical precision with an illusion of intellectual weight. Their Letterboxd favorites read like a manifesto of controlled chaos: Whiplash, Fight Club, The Lighthouse. 

These aren’t just movies—they're masculine rites of passage, each one a cinematic protein shake designed to bulk up their critical legitimacy. 

Meanwhile, emotional, slow-burning films led by women or directed by marginalized voices are treated as a threat—not because they are “bad,” but because they exist outside the paradigm of permissible prestige.

This is not a debate over films. This is a class war of affect.

To further our descent into academic madness, we must invoke Miranda Fricker’s theory of epistemic injustice—a philosophical concept describing how national minorities are often discredited as knowers. Fricker describes two key types: testimonial injustice (where someone’s knowledge is dismissed due to bias) and hermeneutical injustice (when someone lacks the social tools to make sense of their experience).

When a woman writes on Letterboxd that The Virgin Suicides “felt like girlhood under glass,” she is engaging in a hermeneutic act—using metaphor and mood to describe a lived aesthetic experience.
 
But when a man replies, “this was boring, nothing happened,” he is not just offering critique; he is dismissing a form of knowledge that doesn’t conform to rationalist, masculine-coded analysis.

And the algorithm agrees. Her review gets 3 likes. His gets 3,000.

This, my friends, is algorithmic epistemic violence—a concept I am now coining for my forthcoming TED Talk entitled “Your Faves Are Not Deep: A Memoir.”

You may think the male gaze was a 1970s film theory relic, buried somewhere between Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema and your first Women’s Studies class. But on Letterboxd, it lives. It thrives. It makes lists like “Top 100 Films Where She’s Hot but Also Sad.”

The male gaze has simply evolved—becoming less about where the camera looks, and more about who gets to do the looking. Today, it's not the lens that objectifies—it’s the review. 

A man’s dismissive comment on Past Lives (“idk didn’t hit me lol”) may seem harmless, but it reinforces a system in which emotional resonance becomes a liability. Feminine interiority is either mocked, minimized, or aestheticized beyond meaning.

This brings us to the most insidious form of critical violence: aesthetic extraction. Films made by women or queer directors are allowed to thrive only if they are visually lush and narratively ambiguous, so long as they don’t ask too much of the viewer emotionally. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is embraced because it’s painterly, slow, tragically restrained. But had it ended with a yelling match and a scene of emotional reckoning, a man would’ve written: “ughh so melodramatic.”

In short: they’ll tolerate women feeling, but only if it's pretty.

Now, allow me to pivot—because no Fleabag origin story is complete without neuroscience.

Research in affective neuroscience has shown that emotions are not “less rational” forms of cognition; they are integral to the way humans make meaning. Panksepp’s work on the seeking system suggests that our pleasure in narrative is not purely intellectual, but deeply affective—we chase meaning, we crave resonance. So when women and queer people cry over Aftersun, it’s not weakness. 

It’s neurobiological literacy.

And when bros of the world sneer at those emotions, they are performing emotional repression as a flex. What we’re seeing is not bad taste. It’s limbic underdevelopment.

Let me be clear: I am not asking men to cry at The Notebook. (Although... try it sometime?) I am asking that we expand the definition of critical authority. That we treat mood, memory, and affect not as extras, but as valid interpretive frameworks.

Criticism is not just formalism and plot mechanics. It is an autobiography, it is context, it is presence. Every review is a declaration: this moved me, or it didn’t. And if your framework for understanding cinema disallows emotional response? That’s not neutrality. 

That’s emotional illiteracy posing as objectivity.

And I’m sorry, star boys, but just because Hereditary didn’t “scare you” doesn’t mean it’s not a masterpiece. It just means your psyche is running on Airplane Mode.

Yes, this is my fourth wall break. 

But it’s also a call to arms. A cry for critical pluralism. A demand that we stop treating emotional engagement like a Yelp review for serotonin. That we stop ranking vulnerability like it’s a film festival award category. That we will no longer accept cinematic intimacy being valued only when it can be abstracted, depersonalized, or turned into an A24 Tumblr gif.

Because what if film isn’t just story or style—but a limbic interface? What if watching Aftersun isn’t consumption, but co-regulation? What if our tears during Blue Valentine are not indulgent, but bio-empathic acts—responses from a nervous system still brave enough to mirror pain that isn’t its own?

Men have always mistaken stoicism for sophistication. But true engagement with cinema—like true love—requires attunement. And attunement demands emotional porousness, not repression.

So no, we’re not logging films for serotonin. We’re logging symptoms. 

Letterboxd is not just a platform for opinion; it is a cartography of the self, a slow bleed of what we allow ourselves to feel in public. And every time we reduce emotional response to cringe, or classify vulnerability as bad taste, we are not sharpening our critical lens—we are sanding it down until all that remains is detachment.

We are building archives of ache, indexes of interiority, timelines of tremor—because in a culture that rewards distance, to feel deeply is to resist.

So next time you see a woman crying over Céline Sciamma, don’t condescend. Don’t reduce their emotional fluency to “vibes.”

Ask what nerve it struck. Ask what ghost it stirred. Ask what part of them needed it.

And then—

Log that.