Around '60-'70s,
second-wave feminism was at its pinnacle. Forthright feminists like Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, and Susan Sontag would become the voices of the silenced gender. 'Twas also a time when Marlena Shaw recorded
Woman of the Ghetto. It was clearly a time when women just won't put up with men's bullsh*t anymore. (No, sir. They'll make you eat yo sh*t.)
It was also around that time when acclaimed filmmaker Sam Peckinpah would make three of his well-known films: The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, and The Getaway. Like Sergio Leone, Peckinpah was/is a hero to the testosterone audience, with men being the lead characters in most of his films.
In 1969, he made
The Wild Bunch, which is a tribute to the then-fading Western genre. It starred William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, et al. as a group of aging cowboys/outlaws on to their one last hit — this would later become allegorical since
The Wild Bunch is one of the last cowboy films who hit it big at the box office (along with
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid). During
the film's sanguinary finale, there's a scene that seemed somewhat women-unfriendly: Pike Bishop (Holden) shoots back at a woman who shot him. He shouts, "
Bitch!" as he fires a bullet at the woman. (Prior to this scene, Borgnine's character used a woman as his "shield" — she is eventually sprayed.)
Borgnine in The Wild Bunch
