The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Insufficient Man-Hating of ‘Frozen’

Posted on | October 20, 2014 | 85 Comments

Dani Colman (@DirectorDaniC) is both a feminist and a good writer, a rare combination in an age when the repetition of gender-theory jargon and a hatred of Republicans are considered sufficient qualifications for any woman to be hailed as the Next Great Feminist Intellectual. While I was attempting to find another article, I instead stumbled onto Ms. Colman’s fascinating Medium.com essay, “The problem with false feminism (or why ‘Frozen’ left me cold).”

Now, in case you missed all the hooplah over Frozen, it’s the feminist propaganda cartoon that can make the nipples of a Bryn Mawr College Women’s Studies major become erect with ideological arousal. To read the orgasmic feminist praise for Frozen, you would imagine that the script was written by Katharine MacKinnon, based on a novel by Andrea Dworkin. The enthusiastic encomiums that feminists heaped on Frozen convinced me that Karin Martin and Emily Kazyak must have been hired as script consultants (see “Feminists Worry That Disney Movies Are Making Girls Heterosexual” if you didn’t get that joke). At last, it seemed, Disney had made a film in which patriarchal oppression and the male gaze had been replaced with androgynous egalitarianism.

What gay girls can get out of “Frozen”
— AfferEllen.com

A Queer Perspective on Disney’s Frozen
— Daily Kos

8 Ways Frozen Is
Disney’s Gayest Animated Film Yet

— Eric Diaz

When a conservative Mormon grandmother criticized Frozen as an example of “the gay agenda,” she was widely mocked, but even those who mocked her agreed: Frozen is gayer than the first four rows at a Melissa Etheridge concert. How gay is it? It’s gayer than a Bette Midler Fan Club fundraiser for the Tammy Baldwin re-election campaign.

Frozen‘s metaphysical gayness is not an opinion, but an objective fact. The difference between the conservative Mormon grandmother’s view of Frozen and the LGBT-friendly media’s interpretation of the film was simply a matter of whether you are (a) a liberal who thinks a gay/feminist propaganda cartoon for kiddies is a good thing or (b) a sane normal person who thinks this is a bad thing.

Yet Frozen wasn’t feminist enough for Dani Colman:

I have made absolutely no secret of how much I disliked Disney’s Frozen. I hated it. I spent most of the movie alternately facepalming, groaning, and checking my watch . . .
It was, therefore, a huge surprise to me just how many people loved Frozen. Not just loved, but slavered over it. Critics have been downright competitive in their effusiveness, calling it “the best Disney film since The Lion King”, and “a new Disney classic”. Bloggers and reviewers alike are lauding it as “feminist”, “revolutionary”, “subversive” and a hundred other buzzwords that make it sound as though Frozen has done for female characters what Brokeback Mountain did for gay cowboys. And after reading glowing review after glowing review, taking careful assessment of all the points made, and some very deep navel-gazing about my own thoughts on the subject, I find one question persists:
Were we even watching the same film?

You can read the whole thing, but notice what Colman says, just before listing a scoreboard of romantic endings in Disney films:

I’m now counting out every feature with a love story that ends in a happily ever after. A traditional, heterosexual happily ever after, I should qualify, though it’s not like Disney is likely to actually attempt a same-sex love story any time soon. Or ever. [Emphasis added]

And later:

I’ve heard the theory that Elsa’s “Let it Go” is subtly intended as a coming-out anthem of sorts, but there’s no confirmation from Disney of that, so I’m inclined to believe it’s one of those convenient Disney moments the LGBT community can adopt with pride whether Disney wants them to or not (something of which I wholeheartedly approve, by the way). And yes, Elsa doesn’t end up with a man of her own . . . but if not ending the film with a heterosexual romantic interest is supposed to automatically out Elsa as a lesbian, then frankly Disney’s just doing it wrong.

These are just short excerpts from a long essay — please, don’t think I’m trying to distort her meaning by selective quotation — but after reading the whole thing, I was like, “What exactly is she saying here?” While acknowledging the obvious significance of the heroine’s manlessness, Colman seemed to be expressing resentment that Frozen‘s message was neither gay enough nor feminist enough.

As I say, Colman is a good writer, and she obviously put a huge amount of work into her analysis of Frozen, justifying her hatred of it. However, she cannot hate Frozen more than I hated American Beauty (except for a certain scene with Thora Birch, which I enjoyed in a very bad way) but I didn’t feel the need to rant endlessly against American Beauty. It is sufficient condemnation to say that American Beauty is an anti-bourgeois/anti-suburban movie; anyone who sees it and doesn’t recognize the movie’s core message — the normal life of a normal middle-class family is an unworthy life — just isn’t paying attention.

If I do not need more than a few sentences to explain why an evil movie is evil, what’s up with Colman’s multi-thousand-word reaction to Frozen? It seems that she felt feminists were too happy that it cleared a minimum threshold, as she concludes:

I don’t want Frozen to be good enough. I’ve spent more than enough words explaining why I think it spits in the face of what we should be thinking of as feminism, and how, like a schoolyard bully, it ennobles itself by mocking its predecessors. I don’t want to think that, when I perhaps have daughters some day, this is what I will be able to take them to see; still less do I want to think that the older, more progressive features will have been deemed irrelevant in favour of the new, Frozen-style model. I applaud the attempt to broaden the range of multi-faceted female characters in animation; I appreciate the intent of having two women in prominent roles instead of the usual one, but I want to see better. And the more effusive praise we heap on a movie that shouldn’t even be good enough, the less likely it is that better will ever happen.

Of Ms. Colman’s hypothetical future motherhood — “when I perhaps have daughters some day” — I’d wager $20 against that “perhaps.”

Like so many other feminists, Ms. Colman is eager to tell us what is appropriate for our children, and to denounce us for disagreeing, but she considers her time and talents far too precious to be squandered in the ordinary business of parenthood. The feminist contempt for motherhood is a variation on how progressive intellectuals, who have careers, hold a special contempt for those of us who merely have jobs.

The reason progressives are always proclaiming their devotion to “workers” is because progressives consider people who work actual jobs to be in need of the intelligentsia’s charitable sympathy. Feminists love to talk about “working mothers,” but feminists are generally neither workers nor mothers. It takes a Ph.D., faculty tenure and a six-figure salary to be able to advocate the interests of those grubby moms who are too dumb to know what’s good for them.

Once you see through the dishonest hypocrisy of the progressive intellectual’s pose, you consider their pity an insult to your dignity. What the liberal is saying to the (allegedly) oppressed is, “Oh, you poor thing! You need my help, because you can’t help yourself.”

To which anyone with a scintilla of self-respect must answer: “Fuck you. Hate me all you want, you arrogant snob, but I need no pity.”

Pitying a person is not the same as helping a person, and the liberal’s problem is that he doesn’t know why the difference matters. They would rather do “Fondue Sets for Namibia” — promoting some kind of do-gooder project to “help” a distant person whom they feel deserving of their liberal pity — than to actually do anything to help nearby people who are less exotically “oppressed.” If your car breaks down on the freeway three miles from the nearest exit, you’ll walk the entire distance, both ways, before a liberal stops to help. Liberals are without exception the most thoroughly selfish people on the planet.

Which is to say, no, I don’t expect Dani Colman ever to take time away from her professional career to change diapers and read bedtime stories. She’s too busy explaining to the world “what we should be thinking of as feminism,” and I guess I was too dumb to figure out what she meant. Having spent a few months in a deep study of feminist theory (e.g., Natasha Distiller’s 2011 book Fixing Gender: Lesbian Mothers and the Oedipus Complex), obviously I know what I think of as feminism, but is it what I should be thinking?

So I poked Dani Colman on Twitter, hoping to elicit from her a clarification. And, wow, did she ever give me a clarification:

Let’s get this straight (pun so very much intended)
@rsmccain
I’m going to preface this by pointing out that you are a vocal, self-identified conservative, and I am a vocal, self-identified liberal, so we are going to disagree on certain key points without much chance of ever seeing eye-to-eye. So I’m not going to try to convince you of anything, and I’d appreciate your doing me the same courtesy.
With that said, please don’t patronise me. I’m a professional writer, a trained storyteller and a rather competent linguist, so please take me at my word when I say I’m quite aware of the subtext of my work, and I don’t appreciate the implication that I don’t actually know what I wrote.
So your issue seems to be that, by using the word “heterosexual” twice in a particular context, I am “problematising hereosexuality”. Frankly I’m not sure whether to respond academically, or from the standpoint of being a straight woman with a very satisfying sex life, but since I’ve written about my own sexuality in other forums I’ll stick to the academic.
Disney has a long history not of “problematising” homosexuality, but of effectively effacing it. This comes from a long-ago decision by Walt himself to appeal to the broadest possible demographic, and if you want to know more about that you can read it on my tumblr. At the time it was a perfectly rational decision and one that certainly played a role in Disney’s early near-monopoly on the family entertainment market, but times have most certainly changed. Homosexuality is increasingly de-stigmatised, and positive adult non-heterosexual role models are beginning to be visible in mainstream media. “Orange is the New Black”, for example, has received much justified praise for placing gay/lesbian, transgender, multi-racial and lower-class narratives on the same footing as the narrative of white, upper-class Piper. It isn’t about overpowering or replacing heterosexual narratives: it’s about increasing the number of non-heterosexual narratives to match. Equality, not subjugation.
In children/family entertainment, those role models don’t exist, and this is a problem because there is an irrefutable correlation between exposure to positive relatable role models as a child and mental health (of the I-don’t-hate-myself variety) as an adolescent. It’s like the theory that the characters in Winnie-the-Pooh are stand-ins for different mental health issues: a child with no knowledge of depression can still tell a parent they feel like Eeyore. A young adolescent struggling with his/her sexuality benefits enormously from positive portrayals of the full spectrum as a child, because even if the adolescent in question ultimately determines that s/he is straight, that decision can come from an unbiased and egalitarian understanding of all the possibilities.
Disney is the world’s largest provider of family entertainment — more than that, Disney has (until recently) been the textbook in the question of what and what “isn’t” appropriate for family entertainment. That means that if a child were to reach into a barrel of DVDs of animated movies and pick one at random (discounting the collected works of Ralph Bakshi because let’s not be idiots about this), that child would have literally no chance of picking one with a protagonist who isn’t a zero-on-the-Kinsey-scale heterosexual. Heterosexuality isn’t a problem, but that is. Heterosexuality isn’t just the norm in animated entertainment — it’s the only. And the two times in my “Frozen” essay that I use the word “heterosexual” are, in fact, to point out that that is the case. In the first, I qualify that my table of “happily-ever-afters” only includes heterosexual relationships because those are the only ones available to include. In the second, I draw attention to the fact that certain “Frozen” fans use Elsa’s lack of any relationship as indication that she is a lesbian, and I rather lament the fact that that seems to be the best Disney has to offer its LGBTQ fans.
So it’s really a stretch to say that I’m “problematising heterosexuality”. A feet-behind-the-ears, Cirque du Soleil contortionist stretch, if I’m honest, because at best I’m not really saying anything about it. I’m saying that it’s a sad, sad situation that the largest provider of family entertainment in the role has such a dearth of positive role models for LGBTQ families and children that even a slight deviation from the established and *very* heterosexual Disney model is lauded as a breakthrough. On an entirely personal level, I have absolutely no issue with heterosexuality, though it would probably say something about my self-esteem if I did. I do have an issue with non-heterosexual individuals not being able to enjoy the same ability to relate to beloved characters that I do. It’s not fair, and frankly it’s bullshit. Pointing out — twice — that the Disney model is exclusively heterosexual isn’t “problematising” anything except the fact that it’s exclusive.
Now, if I’m still complaining about heterosexual narratives when there’s actual equality in media, feel free to call me on it then.

OK, briefly to reply:

  1. “Equality”? Ma’am, the most recent federal government research indicates that heterosexuals outnumber the gay/bisexual population more than 40-to-1 (97.7% heterosexual vs. 2.3% gay/bisexual) in the United States. What should “equality” of representation look like, under such circumstances? The combined membership of Southern Baptist churches probably exceeds the total LGBT population of the United States, but how many Southern Baptists are employed in Hollywood or at the major broadcast TV networks? On what basis, really, should we impose quotas in the media?
  2. Your offering of the “young adolescent struggling with his/her sexuality” as a presumed object of pity — “We must have more gay characters, so teenagers feel better about themselves!” — bears a near-zero resemblance to most actual gay teenagers I have known. At least three guys I went to high school with died of AIDS. Only if “struggling” is a synonym for “enthusiastically pursuing” could it be said that those dudes ever struggled with their sexuality. And don’t even get me started on the lesbians I knew in college. The idea that every homosexual is a helpless victim who is just one slur away from suicide is one of the most ridiculous myths that liberals have ever created, and they’ve created quite a few. But why even mention global warming?
  3. Is there “a dearth of positive role models” in the media for, say, hillbilly children? I mean, Disney hasn’t produced any movies about Princess Shonda who lives in a double-wide trailer and marries the King of Long-Haul Truckers. Exactly what kind of character qualifies as a representative role model for any particular child, and how close must the representation be before we assume the child can identify with such a character? I’m not Jewish, but I love Mel Brooks movies. I’m not British, but I love James Bond movies. The assumption that gay people can only relate to overtly gay characters in media is a theory that suffers from a shortage of factual proof. Common sense and anecdotal evidence suggest otherwise.
  4. Your emphatic description of yourself as “a straight woman with a very satisfying sex life” is rather at odds with what struck me, in your critique of Frozen, as your emetic aversion to screen depictions of heterosexual romance. Given your overtly anti-heterosexual tone in criticizing Frozen, what are we to make of your assurance that you “have absolutely no issue with heterosexuality,” and that your “self-esteem” would be at stake if you did? You insist that your criticism arises from a disinterested concern for “actual equality in media.” You have no direct personal interest in the representation of homosexuals. However, as a philanthropic humanitarian, you feel that they are victims of unfair bias. OK. As mystifying as your attitude is, I accept that you are sincere both in your (personal) heterosexual satisfaction and your (political) gay sympathy.

Have I been reading too much feminist theory? Have I misconstrued the meaning of what I have read? Or is it the case that for Dani Colman, as for many other women who call themselves “feminists,” this label means whatever any woman wants it to mean?

It does often seem thus. Whatever any woman is angry about, that’s “feminism.” If she gets stopped for speeding, the speed limit is a manifestation of patriarchal oppression. If her checking account is overdrawn, male supremacy is to blame. Sexism explains why her thighs look so fat, and if the service is too slow at Starbucks, that’s misogyny. Also, if a woman’s anti-male political principles seem to be at odds with her own very satisfying heterosexual life, it’s just right-wing hate when you sarcastically point out the contradiction.

An infinitely elastic definition cannot actually define anything. Feminism either is a definite political philosophy, or it is not.

But if intellectual coherence and consistent political principle are important to you, you cannot be a liberal. You can be a Marxist feminist or a lesbian feminist, but “liberal feminism” — what does that mean?

There I was, reading Dani Colman’s critique of Frozen and thinking, “Wow, she’s a hard-core feminist.” I figured her idea of an acceptable Disney cartoon would be to turn Monster into a musical comedy with Aileen Wuornos as the romantic protagonist. And yet somehow I totally misread Ms. Colman who, in fact, is so enthusiastically heterosexual that she could never be one of those pathetic lesbian weirdos like Lauren Morelli. While Ms. Colman has endless pity for helpless queers, she “absolutely” isn’t one of them.

Why would anybody want liberals to like them? It’s a mystery to me.

 

Comments

85 Responses to “The Insufficient Man-Hating of ‘Frozen’”

  1. jakee308
    October 20th, 2014 @ 1:09 am

    Found a picture of Dani.

    Verdict: Perhaps not actively gay but has experimented. Hangs with the Lipstick crowd and has a satisfying love life only if the guy is into strap-ons (on her) and abuse (of him typical liberal beta male).

    And by satisfying, I mean she has a list of those she can call up on short notice (who obviously don’t have a rich love life themselves) for a booty call and then kick them out.
    (When she’s gotten off, they get out.)

    But then I read what you and she wrote before I saw her picture so my opinion may be tainted. (by their works shall ye know them)

  2. DeadMessenger
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:15 am

    McCain, this is one of the best blog posts ever. (I know, I say that often.)

    I love the sarcasm – the snark – the wordplay – the righteous ranting – the mockery of that which is stupid or ill-conceived. I had phrase after phrase, sentence after sentence I wanted to quote and comment upon in reply, but there’s just too much.

    But I can say that Ms. Colman suffers from what my mother used to call “diarrhea of the mouth”. I would have wandered off a quarter of the way into her discourse, but Stacy, you stuck with it, so I have to give you props for that. You must have the patience of a saint.

  3. Julie Pascal
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:16 am

    Frozen wasn’t bad. It had really cute parts and was a fun story. The songs were bleh. I honestly don’t get why anyone thought that aweful “let it go” was a great song. The scene was good and the older sister had essentially decided not to try to be good anymore… but the *story* was a basic “you cause what you try to prevent” moral tale as the parents misunderstood the advice/prophecy of the stone trolls. Like Oedipus but without the incest. And there was a major love story with the younger sister and it was pivotal to the plot, IIRC.

    Everything so many different people were trying to read into it was just stupid. Thought so at the time. Annoyed me the way most of those types of things do.

  4. Julie Pascal
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:17 am

    Honest… I had skipped over the part where you mentioned Oedipus. So that’s weird.

  5. Jason Lee
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:28 am

    “Equality, not subjugation.”

    That’s not how it’s working out:

    http://www.adfmedia.org/News/PRDetail/9364

  6. Jason Lee
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:30 am

    Lyrics from Frozen’s popular song “Let it Go”:

    It’s time to see what I can do
    To test the limits and break through
    No right, no wrong, no rules for me I’m free!

  7. Julie Pascal
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:30 am

    I think that one of the “problems” I have with feminism as it exists and with SJWs is this notion that one can not identify with anyone not like one’s self in every particular. Now… maybe most people just can’t. Or maybe merely a bunch of people really cannot, but that is so entirely weird to me. I read a lot. I have read thousands and thousands of novels since I was a kid. The whole POINT is to identify with these other people, to imagine you’re someone else, and to be someone else for the duration of the book. I never once pulled my head out of a Louis L’Amour novel and smacked myself in the forehead and said…What was I thinking? I’m not a pugilist! I’m not male! I’m not in love with that girl with cornflower eyes who glanced shyly in my direction when I rode into town all dust and sweat on my bad tempered blue roan! That would be icky!

    When, really… when did “art” become about me? That wastes the whole point of it.

  8. RS
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:55 am

    I do have an issue with non-heterosexual individuals not being able to enjoy the same ability to relate to beloved characters that I do. It’s not fair, and frankly it’s bullshit.

    Not fair? How? Only a Leftist could write those words. And so, we see the seeds of demanding a Propaganda Ministry to make sure that there are a sufficient number of appropriate themed stories and characters to meet a political-social “need.” And of course, if Disney doesn’t want to do it because only 2% of the population will actually pay to see it, then we’ll just make them do it for the greater good. After all, it worked with Christian pastors . . .

  9. concern00
    October 20th, 2014 @ 3:14 am

    1. My kids will be devastated.
    2. As a Christian parent, I think I need to vet my kids’ movies more (they’re not watching How to Train Your Dragon 2 for obvious reasons).
    3. Women who can’t have children are physically broken.
    4. Women who don’t want children are mentally broken.

    (and forgive my blatant generalizations; there are women who don’t want children that I love and cherish very much.)

  10. Daniel Freeman
    October 20th, 2014 @ 4:46 am

    An eidetic imagination is a rare gift. Treasure it and use it wisely.

  11. PeterP
    October 20th, 2014 @ 8:02 am

    Does Ms. Colman demand that Disney make movies with happy endings for polygamists? There are a fewer positive role models for them than there are for gays.

  12. robertstacymccain
    October 20th, 2014 @ 8:45 am

    Trust me, you should read the book. Or actually, any of the books about gender theory and lesbian psychology. Long after the last Freudian psychoanalyst has retired, radical feminists (and post-structuralist advocates of Queer Theory like Judith Butler) are still obsessed with Freud and Lacan, Oedipus, incest, kinship theory and (dear God) penis envy.

    They are wwaaayy over-thinking it and why? Because they’re intellectuals who believe that they must have their own theoretical infrastructure with which to meet any and all criticisms. It’s like the way 1970s radical feminists were always devoting at least a chapter’s worth of their books to Engels theory of the connection between the family and private property. Why? Why all that anthropological/historical analysis? Simple: Because if you are engaged in a project that is so obviously contrary to common sense and human nature, you need a rationalization to justify yourself.

  13. CrustyB
    October 20th, 2014 @ 9:00 am

    Note to self: Call people “Tinkerbell” more often.

  14. Scoob
    October 20th, 2014 @ 10:13 am
  15. Adobe_Walls
    October 20th, 2014 @ 10:37 am

    Some times I think you’re reading too much coherence into the feminist literature you’ve been studying. Just because all the lunatics in any given group of lunatics are saying the same thing over and over again doesn’t give their ravings coherence. Have you considered that what appears to be the progression of an ideology is actually merely a succession of lunatics each one-upping the previous lunatic?

  16. Adobe_Walls
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:03 am

    No one wants to be a mere 2.3% of the population. Any subset of a population that small has to choose one of two survival strategies. They can either keep as low a profile as possible or puff up, stand up and roar in order to seem more powerful. Why feminists thought they needed a survival strategy at all mystifies me. Women are a slight majority of the population all they have to do is be.

  17. dwduck
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:11 am

    Personally, I prefer this one. Plus she’d likely find it much more offensive, which is a bonus:

    http://img.pandawhale.com/99385-crazy-cat-lady-starter-kit-Q9r7.jpeg

  18. Eric Ashley
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:13 am

    Libertarians use that puff and huff strategy too.

  19. Dianna Deeley
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:14 am

    Excellent point, well said!

  20. Daniel O'Brien
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:32 am

    McCain remains the master of the Burn! Nice rebuttal, Stacy. Well worth the read.

  21. Bob Belvedere
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:32 am

    Stacy wrote: Have I been reading too much feminist theory? Have I misconstrued the meaning of what I have read? Or is it the case that for Dani Colman, as for many other women who call themselves “feminists,” this label means whatever any woman wants it to mean?

    For all Leftists, everything and anything means what they want it to me. That allows them room to maneuver around the conflicts with Human Nature and the rampant inconsistencies in their Ideology. To sane people [ie: non Ideologues] this attribute of theirs is rightly seen as the Lunacy of Philistines.

  22. Bob Belvedere
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:36 am

    They can either keep as low a profile as possible or puff up, stand up and roar in order to seem more powerful.

    Like cats, you mean?

  23. MmmDarkRoast
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:39 am

    Amazing that for all her eloquence, and intellectual gifts that her essay’s central premise is so illogical, flawed, and oblivious to economic reality. And has anyone else noticed that the people who whine the most about inclusion on the left, are careerists, and elitists living on some of the most expensive real estate in the country? I’ve noticed this phenomenon the most amongst feminists, and as McCain has done in the past, could compile a laundry list of young women guilty of this blatant hypocrisy and disconnect.

  24. M. Thompson
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:48 am

    I’m thinking Chihuahuas here myself.

    Or other small lap dogs like Yorkshire Terriers or Pomeranians.

  25. Bob Belvedere
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:50 am

    That works too, but, it seems to me in this case, pussies are more relevant.

  26. MmmmDarkRoast
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:52 am

    No self respecting man would date a woman who identifies as a feminist, unless they’re a masochist. For any other man it’s a no win situation.

  27. Weedlord BonerHitler
    October 20th, 2014 @ 11:59 am

    I kept waiting for an explanation for the claim “Frozen‘s metaphysical gayness is not an opinion, but an objective fact. ” Sure, you could read it that way, if you were so inclined, but do you really think most people will see anything except a cartoon about a pretty lady with ice powers?

  28. Weedlord BonerHitler
    October 20th, 2014 @ 12:06 pm

    Full disclosure: I saw Frozen last Christmas with my extended family, and everyone seemed to like it. Even grandma, who generally isn’t comfortable with seeing teh gayz on TV. She doesn’t think people should advertise their abnormal sinniness. But even she liked Frozen, and thought it sent a good message about “not shackin’ up with the first bum who comes along.”

  29. ajpwriter
    October 20th, 2014 @ 12:14 pm

    Colman has earned her share of detractors.

    This Strong Worded Rebuttal to her original Frozen piece comes at things from a feminist perspective and is NSFW, but utterly hilarious:

    http://chezapocalypse.com/thefrozenthing/

    I’ve written on her myself:

    https://medium.com/ajpwriter/troll-rape-2014-7860baae3c0a

  30. Eidolon
    October 20th, 2014 @ 12:25 pm

    Ironically I agree with her summation almost word-for-word, at least in the sense that it frustrates me that people liked Frozen so much, considering that it is an incoherent, idea-less, theme-less butchering of an interesting original story.

    My biggest problem with it is that it has no thematic ideas. Elsa’s powers are not representative of anything inside herself, and thus make for a boring and pointless story. The Let It Go song has no meaning, despite having an excellent musical rendition. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I disliked it so much and that’s a big part of it. What does it represent? What is she even letting go of? Ties to other people? But she likes her sister; the happy tone doesn’t fit; etc.

    The film does hit one extremely feminist note, however. The younger sister goes off to search for her sister in exactly the way feminists want young women to do these days. She is praised for her willingness to take action; yet she does so incredibly foolishly, with no forethought whatsoever. She gives her kingdom over to some guy she’s known for a day, and just heads off in the general direction of her sister. She lucks into an inn, freezing and starving, and there finds a man to do the actual hard work for her. He just happens to be helpful and kind, though she does no checking whatsoever to make sure of this beforehand. He could easily just take her back to his place and kidnap her for money or other things, but of course he doesn’t, and everything turns out great, and they fall in love, etc.

    This is exactly the kind of thing feminists encourage women to do in bars. Go into a dangerous situation with no plan, ladies! And then go home with any strange man; there’s no way anything bad could happen! We praise your daring and courage to do amazingly stupid things with no hope of rescue if they go badly!

  31. Adobe_Walls
    October 20th, 2014 @ 12:41 pm

    Perhaps; but neither Libertarians or libertarians are worried about their survival. They are however worried about our survival. This explains their mystification as to how it’s possible they haven’t converted the rest of us.

  32. Adobe_Walls
    October 20th, 2014 @ 12:43 pm

    Actually I had something else more in mind.

  33. Adobe_Walls
    October 20th, 2014 @ 12:51 pm

    oops

  34. Weedlord BonerHitler
    October 20th, 2014 @ 12:58 pm

    Wait, I’m confused. If you read Elsa without subtext, then her ice powers are just witchcraft, which has many precedents in fiction. But the conservative case claims that there IS a subtext that cannot be ignored, i.e. that Elsa’s powers are a metaphor for her her lesbianism, which is why they must be kept secret and denied. Doesn’t this reading totally fall apart if you think that they are “not representative of anything inside herself?”

    If her powers are not representative of anything, there’s no gayness to object to that I can see.

    Also, Anna rushes off into danger because it’s an adventure. Like Bilbo Baggins, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, the Narnia kids, and pretty much every adventurer in any story ever, she has to go unprepared and face danger because if she didn’t, it would be an extremely boring story that no one would like.

    “What did you think of Frozen?”

    “It started off okay, but then it started dragging once Anna set off on her mission with a platoon of heavily-armed guards, and then most of the movie was just them bivouacking and scouting ahead while sending out messengers and such.”

    “Yeah, it was strange they wrote it like that.”

  35. If All You See… » Pirate's Cove
    October 20th, 2014 @ 1:02 pm

    […] blog of the day is The Other McCain, with a post on feminists and […]

  36. M. Thompson
    October 20th, 2014 @ 1:06 pm

    True, but I’m thinking more of the noise output.

  37. Mary Landrieu’s Roughing It Up There in DC | Regular Right Guy
    October 20th, 2014 @ 1:24 pm

    […] The Insufficient Man-Hating of ‘Frozen’ […]

  38. Adobe_Walls
    October 20th, 2014 @ 1:26 pm

    Maybe some people should get out more or more likely, less. Didn’t some old dead white guy once opine that sometimes a kids movie is just a kids movie?

  39. Eidolon
    October 20th, 2014 @ 1:28 pm

    Well, I never argued there was a lesbian subtext, and I don’t think RSM did either actually. I thought he was arguing about the article some feminist wrote in response to it, which was overtly hostile to heterosexuality.

    The reason the story sucks is that the powers don’t connect to her character. If it’s supposed to be about lesbianism then it makes no sense that they make her more powerful, and there’s no evidence of that throughout the film. The “Let It Go” song doesn’t connect to anything at all. Is she being more of a lesbian by being alone? I can’t figure out how a person sings a happy song about isolation, at least if one doesn’t enjoy being alone. She doesn’t seem to enjoy using her powers before or after that scene (except at the pat and stupid ending, I suppose). It’s just badly done; nothing connects to anything.

    I guess the fact that she doesn’t end up with a man is supposed to be part of the lesbian thing, but that seems like a weird assumption, that not being with a man at what I would guess to be something like 25 was in fact evidence of lesbianism.

    As far as Anna being an idiot, your examples prove my point. Bilbo goes off with seasoned adventurers; having no skills himself he would never have gone. The Narnia kids don’t make a decision to go on a grand quest, they just explore a land and get caught up in it. Plus everyone in Narnia supports, helps and equips them. Luke Skywalker is a soldier with a soldier’s training and equipment. Harry Potter is at a school training him to use mystical powers and does not just set off to attack Voldemort by himself with no training; and even he has friends and makes plans before adventuring.

    Certainly heroes have gone about a quest in various ways, but typically there’s a period of equipping and training that precedes going on the quest. Rarely does one embark on a quest with no gear, training or plan, and even more rarely does that go well. If a character is going to go on an adventure unprepared that’s almost always because someone more prepared dragged them along (Arthur Dent, Bilbo, etc.). I can’t really think of a good story where someone just wandered off to try to achieve some goal without using at least the minimum of experience or equipment. Besides, the Narnia kids, who are the closest to Anna, have the benefit of being children who do impractical and dumb things for that reason. I guess the crap story doesn’t even seem to indicate that Anna and Elsa were taught by anyone, so I can take that as evidence for why they’re so profoundly stupid throughout the film.

    You can pretend the story makes sense and is well-written if you want, but it’s not true. The thing is slapped together and incoherent; if you know anything about the Snow Queen story you can actually see places where the story was poorly torn apart and reconfigured. It’s just junk. I hate it a little more because of the feminist stuff, but that’s not a very large part of it. Lesbianism doesn’t make up any part.

  40. K-Bob
    October 20th, 2014 @ 1:51 pm

    Figures they’d refer to “The Lion King” as the one to “top.”

    I never understood the effusive fandom for The Lion King. It’s not even in the same class as the incredible trio of Aladdin, Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast. Not even close. It’s bland to the point where I thought at first Disney was going to lose its ass on it.

    Instead, they did something new, and hyper-amped the thing via massive advertising and “tie-in” marketing at unprecidented levels. Do you folks remember how Disney did a ridiculous amount of pre-selling via merchandise, many months before the thing was ever released? Prior to that, the merchandise was always timed to hit the stores DURING the release.

    I suspected the idea was to hype it so damn much that people were determined not to hate it–no matter what–because they’d spent so much damn money on the stupid toys for their kids, and buying the Elton-John-including “pop hit” soundtrack, long before finally getting to see the thing.

    Notably, all the leftists who loved to bash Disney for turning the harshness of the Middle Ages and the nastiness of Grimm’s tales into sanitized, idyllic myth, fell all over themselves to see Disney do the exact same thing to the condensed vision of Africa that the film was made to be.

    I haven’t seen “Frozen”, and after reading this (and noting the ridiculous amount of “earned media” it got on the hard left channels), I think I’ll just pass.

    Instead, I’ll watch “The Incredibles” again. Now *that* was good.

  41. K-Bob
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:02 pm

    Uh oh, what’s in the sequel to Train your Dragon?

    I thought the first one was ok.

  42. K-Bob
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:03 pm

    …so pass me that bag and the model glue!

  43. K-Bob
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:09 pm

    Lunatics are genuinely crazy. Intellectuals can be otherwise very sane people, but they fall prey to this notion that you can coerce reality by creating these fanciful flights of utopian structures and make society conform to them.

    It’s a lot like how the Obama Administration is now so freaking deluded over “how things get done” that they clearly believe that once you’ve created the PowerPoint presentation, then program barack’s telepropmpter, the rest all happens by magic.

    Nobody on the left knows a damn thing about hard work.

  44. kilo6
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:15 pm

    Yeah, about that “freedom” and “liberation” thingy, typically when a person “liberates” themselves from the moral order they become enslaved to their base passions and their offspring (if any are even conceived or survive to be born) fall into the arms of the state for lack of a stable family structure.

  45. concern00
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:16 pm

    Just your ordinary run of the mill promotion of homosexuality.

  46. kilo6
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:18 pm

    Some start their training even earlier …

    http://i.imgur.com/gYGBial.jpg

  47. kilo6
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:27 pm

    and don’t forget her car …

    http://i.imgur.com/v2YGZ

  48. Adobe_Walls
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:32 pm

    Please tell me that’s just someone’s really bad idea for a Halloween costume.

  49. JeffS
    October 20th, 2014 @ 2:38 pm

    Beta males, seeking to get laid no matter what the cost, fit that bill.

    Gamma males, hmmmmm, the jury is out on that one.

  50. On Leftism, The ‘Intelligentsia’s Charitable Sympathy’, And Mad Clowns | The Camp Of The Saints
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