Anyone who’s been following my work for some time knows that I’m no fan of feminism, and I’ve probably forgotten more articles that I’ve written on why than you’ve probably read.
Just to recap my beliefs on it, feminism is a concept that did well to exist when women didn’t have rights, but since they got them generations ago, feminism should have been a movement that died a peaceful death. Only it didn’t, and it kept being resurrected and now shambles around like some kind of rotted zombie, mindlessly devouring anything in its path.
Emphasis on the mindless.
The entitlement of feminists is astounding. No matter what they come across, somehow it has to be about them. This happens in almost every social or political issue that arises no matter how tertiary. If they see it, it’s sexist.
It’s just like Anita Sarkeesian once proclaimed…
If there’s one thing feminists love to attack, however, it’s the culture, and wouldn’t you know it? Just today I stumbled across two examples of just how ridiculous feminists get when it comes to things like escapism.
Let me quickly detour to set up the first example.
Star Wars is good again. With Disney+ releasing its first live-action Star Wars show, The Mandalorian, I’m actually excited to see the Star Wars brand in my streaming suggestions again. I might write a longer review of it at a different time — let me know if you guys would be interested in that — but the quick and dirty breakdown is that it’s a space western staring a badass bounty hunter who proclaims that weapons are a part of his religion and is one day thrown for a loop when one of his bounties ends up being something he didn’t expect.
It’s Firefly, meets Cowboy Beebop, mixed in with some old Clint Eastwood flicks and wrapped up in a Star Wars package. It’s like Disney actually read my mind while I was sleeping and produced a show just for me. It’s Disney, so who knows? They may very well have done that.
In any case, it’s good, so feminists are mad about it.
Why are they mad? Well, according to feminist writer Liz Shannon Miller it’s because The Mandalorian is more geared toward appealing to men than women. In fact, one of the biggest problems she has with the show is that a woman doesn’t speak until 20 minutes in, and then she’s not even given full credit as a character in the credits.
It fails the Bechdel test so horrifically that Miller had to take to Medium to explain her horror immediately:
And then you watch it, and you’re enjoying it… and then 20 minutes in, a woman speaks, and you realize that it’s the first woman to speak in the entire episode. And then you get to the end credits, and you see that character, voiced by Emily Swallow, is listed as “Armorer,” and she’s the only damn woman to speak in the entire episode.
To Miller’s credit, she does say that the show is good — and it is — and she knows that Carl Weathers should get his stew on, but the fact that she’s so caught up in her own feminism that she feels the need to make this an issue is sad, and I mean that word when I write it. She’s consumed enough that, even after getting a horrible feminism-focused trilogy and one good spin-0ff movie with a female lead, she can’t relent and just let a good show be good despite its lack of female characters.
The sex of a character doesn’t matter. That the character is well written and well placed does matter.
I feel bad for Miller, but her words are worth highlighting because I can show you what happens when feminists like Miller get what they want.
I could point to the aforementioned trilogy with frontwoman Rey, but I have ad nauseam. If you would like to read my thoughts on those movies, you can click on the link below.
Instead, I’d like to point to a different show that has taken the feminist checklist, checked off all the boxes, then wrote in a few more boxes to check and checked those, too.
The CW has recently begun airing Batwoman. Long story short, it’s awful, and I’m not just saying that as a guy who opposes modern-day feminism. If I had written a parody for a feminist superhero show, then Batwoman is what it would look like.
I’ve already written up some details about it, which you can read here.
(READ: The New Batwoman Show Is Bombing and Once Again, SJW Journalists Blame the Wrong Thing)
To give you a quick rundown, Batwoman was focused on girl-power from the get-go. Even in the trailer, cringy feminist lines were delivered to you, one after another. They put so much focus on the feminist aspect of the show that writing a good show came second.
Going back to The Mandalorian, I’m having a hard time finding any place where even a piece of Batwoman’s spirit could survive in it. It certainly didn’t in the main Star Wars sequels, and if they had tried to shoehorn some kind of feminism into Mandalorian then the show would have, frankly, lost its flavor. The Mandalorian is a return to a galaxy far, far away, and trying to inject modern politics into it would have taken people out of it.
If you need more proof, then feel free to peruse the second feminist outrage about feminist media gone bad I saw today, and that’s with the failure of the Charlies’ Angels reboot put together by Elizabeth Banks.
Banks decided that she was going to create a woke Charlie’s Angels and wouldn’t ya know it? It bombed harder than Hiroshima.
Why did it bomb? Feminism is why as my colleague Brad Slager wrote of the film’s failure earlier today:
An additional issue was the overreliance on making this a ‘’girl-power’’ film. Banks was insistent in the pre-release promotions to sell the concept of female empowerment. The problem here is that ‘’Charlie’s Angels’’ already has that built into its DNA. The basis is this is a group of females who can operate on an action level normally occupied by males. By turning this already empowered property into more of a woke message film they repelled a potential market.
As a result, instead of giving, say, the young male crowd a reason to show up, they provided them with all the reason to stay away. The exit polls on the film reveal this was a major flaw. Instead of appealing to all demographics this weekend, ‘’Angels’’ had an audience that was 66% female. That is a massive imbalance and shows how males avoided this film outright.
Banks even took it upon herself to cry sexism before the film was even released, basically telling men that while the movie was not for them, we had better show up and enjoy it anyway or we’re sexist. We didn’t show up, but we’re not sexist. Men didn’t show up to watch a woke Charlie’s Angels for the same reason we didn’t show up to watch The Notebook. It simply doesn’t appeal to us.
It has nothing to do with sexism. In fact, the 2000 reboot of Charlie’s Angels debuted to number one at the box office and stayed there for two weeks.
The bottom line is that men should be able to enjoy things that are just for them, just as it should be okay for women to enjoy things that are just for them. If someone wants to make a Star Wars production that would appeal mostly to females, then so be it. If you don’t make it politically charged or make it about messaging, chances are you may find a solid chunk of men who enjoy watching it too.
In other words, don’t ruin it with feminism. As we can see throughout time, feminism ruins everything. It ruined Ghostbusters, Batwoman, Super Girl, Doctor Who, and any women who signed on to it are now consumed by it like Miller.
