I'll bet you had to read stuff like this:
Near the close of this century, Roland Emmerich's Independence Day (1996) may appear to be a politically correct, action-packed thriller, but it really reflects the Christian Right's anxiety regarding female sexuality and women's desire to control their own destinies through financial independence, birth control, and abortion. On the surface, Independence Day seems to present strong women in either powerful positions or saving the world. However, structural and semiotic analysis of the archetypal female sexual images and anti-feminist subtextual messages reveals that the film reinforces patriarchal myths concerning women's power and sexuality.
In her debut, the aliens' mother ship gives birth to smaller ships that resemble huge vagina dentata hovering above all of the world's major cities. Washington D.C.'s huge phallic structures, shot from an extremely low angle, appear erect and ready to rape the huge vaginal spacecraft. However, the symbolic rape cannot occur with the smaller phallic weapons. In fact, the viewer sees the daughters of the mother ship destroy these phallic monuments (fig. 9). As a matter of fact, many audiences have cheered when the White House explodes (fig. 10), which is obviously a critical message to both of the Democratic presidents--Clinton and the film's President Whitmore. In the end, the men of Earth conquer the aliens when phallic nuclear weapons symbolically rape the daughter-ships' vagina dentatas only after disarming their diaphragm force-fields.
--Independence Day: Reinforcing Patriarchal Myths about Gender and Power. By: Hobby, Teresa Santerre, Journal of Popular Culture, 00223840, Fall2000, Vol. 34, Issue 2
