I know right now the MRM has bigger fish to fry. Talking about the media is a trivial tactic used by feminists for them to cover up that in the western world, there is extremely little to no oppression of women, while the oppression of men persists like a difficult weed problem. But, what I’m personally more qualified to talk about, more than the Canadian legal issues that are the cause of Dan Perrins’s courageous hunger strike, or about the Calgary Expo’s hostility to the Honey Badger brigade and their upcoming legal battle, is art.
Normally, I dislike talking about art as if it were only the product of its social context. This came out of the cultural Marxist thinking, still prevalent in academia, that all cultural products were only worthy of study for what they could tell us about the intellectual climate of their time periods, or about those time periods’ power hierarchies. There is some value in this. But now, the ability to produce art itself has become mass produced, taking power and social oppression more and more out of the equation when it comes to “figuring out” art, and it has become more and more about the individual psychological expressions of the artists, with the art functioning as personal statements but not so often political ones.
However, if something is being created for commercial purposes, the more expensive to make something is, the more power dynamics in society shape how it’s made. This was true of big monumental sculptures in the Renaissance and remains true of Hollywood films today.
When the audience of the art is the masses, and the art is expensive to produce, the richest and most powerful people will always keep a close eye on it to make sure that the message it sends promotes their ideology. Going back to the Renaissance sculpture idea; though the artists of that period were Catholic, too, it was the power of the Catholic church that ensured that, while classically influenced, their works would convey a Christian message.
Who has the power over Hollywood movies today? The audiences, but specifically, the segments of the audience more prone to bitching about movies on Twitter and other social media sites.
The entertainment review media also has a lot of power over what directors do and don’t do in a digital age, where movie makers are taking feedback and criticisms seriously and seeking to improve. As the film critic who goes by the alias The Nostalgia Critic points out, there is a lot of reason to consider this shift a good thing. After all, before movie makers could get feedback so directly about their movies, they were fumbling in the dark trying to generate successful ideas, and this led to a lot more movies that sucked.
But, I can see the writing on the wall here. When it comes to feminism, they don’t genuinely care if a movie is good or bad, entertaining and charming or dull and lifeless. They only care about the extent to which the female characters in the story are whatever they decide makes a character empowered at the time. And, this taste is shifting constantly and there is never consensus, and nothing is ever agreeable enough to please them: as professional victims, they can’t give up the power of their victim status too readily, so they have to find a nit to pick to complain about even the strongest and best female characters Hollywood can dream up.
And they’re totally fine with a movie that perpetuates negative stereotypes about men, since we all know men are just dumb oppressive shitlords who can’t keep their rape-sticks in their pants for five minutes. So you get movies like Brave, with strong female characters and a good story about mother-daughter bonding but where all the male characters are cretins, and only bowing to the whims of the mother and daughter makes the father character acceptable.
They had what I would call feminist strong female protagonists in Disney movies in the late 90’s and early 00’s that I remember fondly as a kid. Ariel in The Little Mermaid, although criticized for being crazy due to falling in love, is strong enough to challenge her father and assert her independence. Jasmine in Aladdin is a princess who wants to take a stand against the expectations society places on her as such. Belle in Beauty and the Beast is a badass bookworm who challenges traditional expectations for women and patriarchal attitudes in her society. Even Nala, from The Lion King, is a badass female character. But feminists on Tumblr have picked apart and attacked these fictional characters, who should be, by many of their standards, strong female characters.
But until all fictional women are perfect goddesses whose every action is strong and every word is an authoritative command, they cannot be satisfied. This is not likely to be challenged.
The mainstream entertainment news basically just repeats feminist tweets as authoritative golden scrolls handed down from on high. Feminists will never be satisfied by any work of fiction, no matter how in line it is with feminist principles. They can always demand more, and they always will. Their whole idea of “activism” is to cry about how they are being oppressed by the latest blockbuster and to angrily denounce the next one on Twitter.
Since they now claim to speak for all minority ethnic groups, they want more representation of them in the media. But this is ignoring that these minority ethnic groups have their own medias, made by and for them, and that the mainstream movies are made for everyone in the United States, which is a majority white country. For them, a token black person is insulting and not enough. Having a protagonist who’s a strong, assertive, independent woman who does not get hitched is still a bad thing if she has the nerve to be white, for her story to take place in a European culture, to be thin, and to be able-bodied. I’m not even kidding here.
The fact is, this maddening obsession with a distorted concept of egalitarianism and fairness is never going to end, the media is never going to wake up to it and realize that they are pandering to a crazy minority within a minority of feminists, and Hollywood will keep trying to make films that meet their demands which are never able to be met, because the feminists will still find shit to complain about. This in turn will only drive good writers, directors and other content creators away, the people who want to make good movies, regardless of their value to social justice idiots.
This vacuum will be filled with shitty feminist movies, which will be made by activists who care nothing for the entertainment value or philosophical interest or artistry of their works but only about hijacking the fame-power of Hollywood studios to turn them into produce works which fit into their radical leftist agendas. Hollywood is experiencing a peak that will be short-lived before it gets taken over by people who do not care about movies and who only want to suck the fun out of everything in order to fight the nonexistent patriarchy, to make themselves feel important. They want to ruin everything fun by injecting their paranoid misandry into it.
Don’t believe me? They’ve already got the friggin’ ACLU on their leash. You would think the American Civil Liberties Union would have more important issues to tackle than a “dearth of female directors in Hollywood”. You would also think that an organization based on libertarian principles would not be demanding that the iron fist of the state be brought down upon the private affairs of an entire industry just because a few women whined about… fewer women than men choosing to become directors?.. but you would be wrong. Enjoy the fact that the next decade is going to see the video game and film industries taken over by radical man-hating professional victims, which is already happening, while no one says or does anything.
