This has bugged me for a long time, but my pique came to a head yesterday when I was watching the early Ray Harryhausen effort “It Came From Beneath the Sea”—you know, the one with the giant octopus that attacks San Francisco?

A lovely actress whom I had never been aware of before named Faith Domergue played a female scientist specializing in marine biology. Throughout the movie, despite being Kenneth Tobey’s love interest (You remember him, right? The hero in the original “The Thing From Outer Space”? Later a villain in “Billy Jack” and one of the air traffic controllers in “Airplane”?) she was completely professional, always composed, bristling at sexist comments and assumptions from the male pigs around her (this was in 1955, remember). And yet when the giant octopus that she had insisted was real while everyone else pooh-poohed the idea finally appeared, she screamed like a teenage girl at an Elvis concert. Why would she do that? She was the only one who was expecting to see a giant octopus! The men around her, in contrast, looked startled or went into action (getting the hell off the beach); only the woman screamed.

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