Critics – rather dull, uneducated critics – of the men’s human rights movement have expressed delight that the Wachowski brothers, who made the trilogy of Matrix films, are now the Wachowski sisters. You can find a couple of these critics’ stunningly uninformed articles at Flavorwire and even the Guardian if you want a good shaking-my-head laugh at their poverty of understanding.
The Guardian author Noah Berlatsky claimed that “It’s certainly satisfying to imagine the horror of MRAs discovering that their beloved Matrix was created by two transgender women.”
The Flavorwire author Parker Molloy collapses the transgender sisters into one woman:
It’s with some amount of glee that I inform redpiller1985 and those like him that it’s too late for MRAs to push back against the “infection” of “transsexualism.” You see, The Matrix, holiest of men’s rights literature, was co-created by a transgender woman.
Beyond the silly conflation of MRAs with other red pill groups, of course, the entire notion of a red pill that can make one return to reality/sanity comes from the movie Total Recall of 1990, not The Matrix that came out nine years later. The then Wachowski brothers “borrowed” this idea much as they “borrowed” Kung Fu movie fights scenes – shamelessly. In the feminist enclave of Hollywood, the safest way to be a man is to become a trans woman – a woman so much better than women-born-women that one trans woman won the woman of the year. Men, it seems, dominate everything, even being women.
For men’s rights activists, “the red pill” is a metaphor, a useful one for sure, but in the end, it is just a metaphor – it is not holy writ nor an icon. The Matrix movies were about waking up to reality – the reality that understanding gender, male or female, cis or trans, is a lot more complicated than most people realize. That the Wachowskis have crossed over to the other side of the gender binary does little more than prove there is an irrefutable gender binary.
Metaphors, of course, can always be twisted by one’s opponents. I’ve heard a Muslim posit that the focus on the Crucifixion means that Christians worship murder. Likewise, judging the entire men’s movement by twisting the red pill metaphor is like judging the articles in the Guardian and the Flavorwire by the taste of their authors’ toilets.
The authors Parker and Noah seem to think that transgender people like the now Wachowski sisters are some challenge to either masculinity or those who support men’s rights. This is, of course, ludicrous. While feminists would tell the authors to “educate themselves” (feminists always prefer to be lazy and let men do all the hard work), I will take a moment to explain how “masculinity” works in the men’s rights movement and the larger red pill world.
Masculinity is not toxic. Men built human society and almost everything you see around you. Did women help? Not if you believe feminists, who claim that women were too oppressed by patriarchy to do much of anything (except steal men’s ideas for use in Matrix movies, perhaps). Lose masculinity on Monday and the world is dead before the weekend.
Masculinity in men is overwhelmingly demanded by straight women. Feminists, of course, go even further and seek to instill masculinity into women as well, urging other women into things like STEM fields and dirty construction jobs that most women avoid. Although heterosexual women might say disparaging things about men and masculinity, women’s choices of mates say the most about what women want beyond what they claim they want.
Some men, like those pickup artists at Return of Kings, seek to pander to women’s desires for masculine men. On the other hand, MRAs like me see requiring masculinity as superfluous – women and feminists do a great job of that already through sex, and there is no reason for men’s rights activists to duplicate their efforts – what would be the point?
Rather than requiring masculinity, I choose to support men who are masculine as well as those who are not. Masculinity is not toxic. However, as a MGTOW, who avoids all relationships with women, I will go so far as to affect non-masculine traits to deflect attention I get from women. A sexually appealing man who rejects a woman’s advances can expect a hostile response up to and including a false rape accusation (as in the UVA “Haven Monahan” and Columbia “mattress girl” cases). But a feminized man has a lessened chance of running afoul of women’s feelings of entitlement to men’s sexuality.
Both authors are too thick-headed to grasp the nuances of different groups within the men’s movement, so I expect them to continue to lump us all together in ways that would horrify them if they were caught so lumping women together, this is their loss. Understanding the nuances of various men’s groups as well as the horrible claims and expectations that all feminists place on men would give them great insight into everything from the Trump political campaign to the myriad failures in their own blue pill lives.
Too much of a pill to swallow, obviously, and for them, permanently. That is okay; I guess – not everyone is worthy.
