The Sexual Politics Of "The Hunger Games"

If there were ever a good time to be a young woman, this isn't it. As if a massive backlash against contraception and sexual freedom, a recession and a perverse diet culture weren’t enough, it’s almost impossible to get tickets for the new "Hunger Games" film.

As you certainly know by now, in "The Hunger Games," Katniss Everdeen is a teenage girl living in a dystopian far-future America where children from slave communities are forced to slaughter one another on television for the amusement of the wealthy. Katniss is moody, rebellious, deeply committed to protecting her mother and baby sister, and can incidentally shoot a man’s eye out through his windpipe. Right now, millions of nice young ladies all over the world want to be her. This should probably worry Rick Santorum more than it seems to.

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