This has not been a good week for the men’s rights cause. (Which is fine because, well.)
But let’s say you believe that men – well, white dudes in their late 20s or early 30s who maybe watch the Hangover movies without realizing Bradley Cooper’s character is an unapologetic sociopath – are constantly being persecuted for their maleness, and that this persecution is pervasive at all levels of society.
Like, you can’t even yell rape threats at TV reporters without being held accountable for your actions! (And if you’re about to argue that “fuck her right in the pussy” is not a rape threat, well, shout those words in that order at the post office and see what happens.)
Anyway, Julia LeConte wrote an excellent post-mortem on that earlier in the week, so I don’t have to re-litigate it. Which is just as well, because there’s an even dumber new men’s-rights shibboleth to confront.
See, there’s a new Mad Max movie out this week. First one in 30 years, and it’s fantastic. But there’s a lady in it, and that’s scary.
Don’t freak out. Mad Max: Fury Road still stars a dude. Tom Hardy has been cast as the eponymous hero, Mel Gibson being both too old and too politically radioactive to consider hiring for a $100 million studio action epic. But it straps him in alongside a new character: Charlize Theron’s equally fearsome Furiosa.
Furiosa is as much of a badass as Max – and perhaps even more so. He has a knee brace she has a prosthetic arm made out of what looks like a pneumatic clamp. He drives his signature Interceptor she drives a great big truck, and knows how to use it as a weapon as well as a vehicle. And where Max spends the first act of Fury Road as a fairly passive character, it’s Furiosa who sets the picture’s plot in motion when she rescues five young women from the clutches of a post-apocalyptic death cult.
Also, Furiosa is not that much of a lady. Theron plays her as vengeful, committed and capable she’s not there to bat her eyes at the hero and wait for him to save her. She has her own skills, her own agency and an awful lot of weaponry. She’s someone to be admired or avoided, depending on your own agenda.
Which brings me to the remarkable response of a guy named Aaron Clarey, who writes that the presence of Furiosa means Fury Road “is guaranteed to be nothing more than feminist propaganda,” with his beloved hero/icon Max effectively being replaced by this new character.
Now, people imposing their own ideology on a movie they haven’t seen are pretty easy to dismiss. And this guy, who’s constructed an entire conspiracy out of the movie’s trailer and what has to be a deliberate misreading of two early reviews, is entirely dismissible: I’ve seen the movie, and his fears are unfounded.
This of course did not stop the internet – or at least a certain portion of it – from springing into offence over this latest imagined dick-punch whether or not the emasculation of the Mad Max franchise is real or not, it’s a chance to yell about something else and draw attention away from the Shauna Hunt fiasco. (Besides, until everyone has a chance to see Fury Road, this issue is open for deliberation, right?)
It must be terrible to be so afraid of women that the idea of one of them fighting side by side with a male hero somehow signals the end of all existence, but that’s where this ends up. There’s no other explanation, unless of course there really is a massive feminist conspiracy afoot in Hollywood – in which case, surely the Black Widow’s subplot in Avengers: Age Of Ultron wouldn’t have triggered such a backlash among female viewers earlier this month.
That backlash was confronted by The Mary Sue’s Sam Maggs in her review, and I mention Sam specifically because the release of her book The Fangirl’s Guide To The Galaxy felt like one of the few unambiguously positive things for women in pop culture this week. Though it’s subtitled “a handbook for girl geeks” and is unapologetically aimed at young women who love nerdy things like Buffy, Batgirl and Doctor Who, it’s a great read for anyone who’s interested in geek culture because geek culture, by definition, is open to anybody.
I bought two copies at TCAF last weekend – one for my 13-year-old niece, who is already digging more deeply into the things she loves than I ever could at that age, and one for myself, because Sam’s a writer of considerable intelligence and warmth and I would like to know more about how she sees the world.
Spoiler alert: it turns out she’s hopeful for the future and welcoming of new visions and new ideas. It’s shocking, right? Almost as shocking as Charlize Theron being a compelling action hero in a Mad Max movie.
Except that neither of those things is shocking at all. Not if you live in the real world.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
