The title of Mrs. Schlafly’s book came to mind today when I saw a Tumblr blogger’s GIF sequence of a scene from Agent Carter a Marvel-inspired ABC series that ran for eight episodes before being canceled last month. The scene shown on the Tumblr blog was a tedious example of Hollywood feminism: A simplistic caricature of a sexist male — in this case a soldier — expresses a stereotypical sexist attitude toward the heroine, who then responds by knocking him out with one punch.
Let me begin my criticism of this by saying that I hate at least 90% of the “entertainment” produced by Hollywood over the past 25 years, and in general, I can’t stand the comic-book superhero fantasies that have become major profit generators in recent years. Spiderman, Iron Man, Wolverine, Captain America, whatever — it’s all so much childish crap, as far as I’m concerned, and I can’t believe adults would pay money to see it. My disdain for fantasy is quite general, however. Whether it’s Harry Potter or Alien or The Matrix, I’ve never been a fan of science-fiction or “sword and sorcery” dramas. The original Star Wars movie and the first Indiana Jones movie were rare exceptions to this, primarily because those films were inspired by classic 1930s-1950s adventure serials, and also because Harrison Ford was perhaps the best wisecracking movie hero since Clark Gable. At any rate, I outgrew comic books when I was 14, and have never been a fan of superhero movies, so the Marvel-inspired Agent Carter wasn’t the kind of thing I’d watch, even if it weren’t for the feminist propaganda factor. How many more times are we going to see TV networks and movie studios invest in crap projects that get absurdly gushy critical reviews — because all critics are obligated to praise anything with the Feminist™ brand — only to watch the film or TV series fail as a commercial venture? Who wants to sit for two hours in a movie studio, or for an hour on their sofa at home, watching what is for all intents and purposes a feminist sermon in the Cult Temple of Social Justice?
This token “diversity” of many TV and movie casts nowadays — does every police homicide unit in America now have a Puerto Rican lesbian detective? — is a sort of low-level background noise TV viewers have become accustomed to, but why does it seem so many of the plot lines are being scripted by writers who studied Critical Theory in grad school?
Are people turning on prime-time TV to watch entertainment or to be lectured about race/class/gender oppression? Nowadays, network crime dramas and situation comedies are as predictably political as Soviet cinema during the Stalin era. It seems almost as if all the scripts are being issued by a Central Committee of the People’s Ministry of Correct Entertainment, a group of propaganda commissars consisting of representatives from the NAACP, the SPLC, GLAAD, the AFL-CIO and NARAL, under the guidance of David Brock and Anita Sarkeesian.
Of course, merely to mention how politicized entertainment has become is to invite the accusation that you are a sexist, racist homophobe, and I wouldn’t mention it at all, except for the fact that Hollywood’s liberal propaganda campaigns are harmful and dangerous. For example, the type of “Strong Empowered Woman” feminist morality tale in the Agent Carter scene — where she knocks a man unconscious with a single punch — is apt to induce in young women a sense of inadequacy: “Why can’t I be strong and brave like that?” One notices that, during the past 20 years or so, there has been a skyrocketing increase in reports of depression and anxiety among young women, and why? Among the several factors involved, I am certain that no small part of the problem is that girls are now under constant pressure (from parents, from peers, from schools, from media) to live up to a feminist ideal. Every middle-class girl nowadays is expected to aspire to the ideal of becoming an independent, successful career woman. She must be smart! Be strong! Be empowered! And if she doesn’t become high school valedictorian and graduate with honors from Yale, she considers herself a worthless loser.
That academic fast-track competition is a pressure cooker, and there’s a high burn-out rate among Boy Genius types whose parents insist they simply must go to an Ivy League school. Why on earth would parents want to shove their daughters into that kind of meat grinder?
Look, my daughters are both highly intelligent. My oldest graduated college summa cum laude and, at age 27, is already the vice-principal of an elementary school. My youngest has never made less than an A, and she scored 99th percentile on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Yet I don’t want any of my children, boys or girls, to enter that Nerd Olympics where they’re locked into an all-or-nothing academic gladiatorial combat against the overprivileged offspring of the decadent plutocratic elite.
Let the rich folks send their kids to Brown and Columbia, Stanford and Duke, Oberlin, Occidental, Georgetown and Northwestern. Having seen the kind of wicked immorality that typifies the students and faculty of such schools, I wouldn’t want my children anywhere near those “elite” campuses. The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved. No responsible parent would let their kids attend an anti-Christian school like Harvard, and the road to Hell is paved with Yale diplomas.
From the warped value system promoted at our “elite” universities emerges the dangerous feminist fantasies promoted by Agent Carter.
Anti-American values: @ABC's "Agent Carter" punches a U.S. soldier in the face. pic.twitter.com/KyA1zMXZej
— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) June 9, 2016
It’s highly symbolic, you see: The American soldier is the villain in this scene. Beyond the standard feminist depiction of white heterosexual males as perpetrators of sexist oppression, the Hollywood elite never misses a chance to express its anti-patriotic, anti-military sentiment.
Feminism is a hate movement that calls itself “social justice.”
‘Four Legs Good! Two Legs Bad!’ https://t.co/hryU4hYnSX #tcot pic.twitter.com/13c0aqinJR
— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) June 8, 2016
That gif isn’t from the Agent Carter TV series, it’s from the movie Captain America: The First Avenger. Which, all things being said, is actually a good period piece. Steve Rogers/Captain America is one of the best characters to have made the silver screen in years. In The Avengers he has a great line: “There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure He doesn’t dress like that.”
Oh, and for the record, any private mouthing off to an officer would be lucky to only be knocked down by a punch, no matter what the decade is. The character in question was established earlier in the movie as being a bully, but the Army in a time like World War II needs every man it can get.
The scene was from the first Captain America film not the series. My favorite Agent Carter scene is something else.
https://youtu.be/9Ag0PtH3g-s
You might want to give the film another try. The first part, before Rogers gets artificially boosted, has some very interesting things to say about what makes a man.
The Agent Carter series ran for two seasons of eight episodes each. If you didn’t enjoy the first CA film, chances are you wouldn’t like the series.
My favorite (and surprising) recent film that has some good things to say about the measure of a man is The Way, Way Back. Definitely not superhero, sword and sorcery, or science fiction. Watch it all the way to the end.
I suspect the dislike of superhero movies is a generational thing. To Boomers its childish, and to Millennials, it will be passe’, but this is the Golden Age of Superhero Movies.
“Nowadays, network crime dramas and situation comedies are as predictably political as Soviet cinema during the Stalin era.”
This made me think of Law and Order: in 20 years of programming only a handful of guilty black murderers, even though we know that 80% of homicides are committed by black men. The funniest thing was the episode based on the OJ Simpson case: the celebrity murderer was white–and guilty.
Late Law and Order became a parody: lots of wealthy white elites committing brutal murders for ridiculous reasons.
You know, as I was reading, I was looking for a quote to cap this post when I put it on Facebook, but every time I had one, I kept reading and found another brilliant statement.
Which is why celebrities get away with claiming they’re more scared of white, middle class men than they are of black thugs.
Every middle-class girl nowadays is expected to aspire to the ideal of becoming an independent, successful career woman. She must be smart! Be strong! Be empowered!
Except of course when she’s had a few drinks, at which point she becomes a quivering mass of victim-goo. The Patriarchy’s secret weapon in its fight against feminine supremacy is a six pack of Bud Light.
I was tangling with a feminist on the IMDB over the so-called feminist nature of the “Mad Max” remake. In the end she gave up and snottily challenged us men to just try to take on Furiosa, Charlize Theron’s character.
If a feminist has to brag about a fictional character’s ability to beat up men then she’s pretty much exposed her belief system as fictional.
Our esteemed host wrote:
But that’s just it: young women can become strong and brave like that!
Oh, it’s unlikely that they’ll become strong enough to cold-cock a grown man, but they certainly can become stronger and braver than the norm, if they work at it.
The thing is, young men are working at it, too. You noted yesterday that your teenaged sons are hitting the weights, to try to add muscle, to compete against other guys for the hotter chicks. And the hotter chicks are the ones who are also in the gym, trying to get stronger.
Yeah. When ever I watch crime dramas, I note the same thing.
I don’t watch those very often.
Unfortunately, superhero movies are not childish. I wish to God they were!
They are filled with profanity, untoward sex, and unrelenting violence. I thought those hideous Batman movies were the bottom of the barrel until they put on the Daredevil series (a Netflix original). A character had his head slammed repeatedly in a car door until blood was pouring out like a waterfall.
It was ghastly.
They’ve stolen comic books from children.
I wish I could go see a movie about superheroes as I recall them, so I could get a little rush of nostalgia for my long-lost childhood. Sadly, no. If I want that feeling, I have to dig out some old comic from the ’60s or ’70s.
In The Avengers, it seems like half of Manhattan was destroyed. In Man of Steel, almost all of ‘Metropolis’ was trashed, with skyscrapers falling over and the like. Had that movie been real, the civilian casualties would have been in the hundreds of thousands.
It’s pretty bad when The Big Bang Theory is the most realistic show on TV.
Your point about girls being depressed because of these expectations makes me think of something I thought of years ago. I read another article about some celebrity hottie who claims she eats fried chicken all day and never works out.
Here’s the thing, even if it’s true, that’s the blessing of a good metabolism. And bragging about something like that is causing just as much (*more* in my opinion) of a problem with the way girls look at themselves as the women who starve and overexercise.
Now I’m not someone who thinks these things are *responsible* in the sense that these girls are somehow not at fault for their bad choices. But think about the skinny girl who busts her butt to be skinny or the girl who isn’t fat but is not at all hot who looks at this hottie saying she looks this way and has the best of all worlds and thinks: what’s wrong with me?
Obviously I’m not saying she shouldn’t be allowed to say it, but IMO she is a self centered a hole for doing so.
Some actual standards would be more helpful, yes.
Martial arts, ladies. You get strong, and you learn some self-discipline.
Exactly. This scene was a British special agent cold-cocking a brand-new recruit who wasn’t expecting it, which doesn’t push the bounds of believability for me.
I actually liked Agent Carter. For one thing, the clothes were beautiful, and I understand that the actress actually found period clothing for the series.
Hayley Atwell is pretty hot ….
That is pretty standard comic conceit. The Earth gets threatened with utter destruction five or six times a year.
The Men in Black movie made fun of it with Agent K being all upset about the upcoming destruction of Earth, and his superior being blase’.
My real concern about this trend is that it will have terrible real-world consequences. Many–it seems like most–female characters turn out to be badass, death-dealing ninjas the second they need to be. A waifish bit of dandelion fluff like Keira Knightley can beat a 300 pound brawler into submission without breaking a sweat.
I have a female friend–police officer, Taekwondo expert–who once said “I have trained for years and you haven’t, but if you grab me in a bear hug and flop on top of me, your 100 additional pounds will crush me like a nut.” Sad, but true. Some girl is going to assume that she can just punch a guy in the face and, due to the “Knightley Exception” to the laws of physics, he will go out cold. Instead, he will return the favor and she will end up on a slab.
In the first Thor movie, it was only a small town somewhere in the southwestern desert that got trashed.
Stan Lee, the creator of Marvel comics, was a New Yorker, and almost all of his superheros were based in New York, though, shockingly, Spiderman came from a working-class family in one of the déclassé boroughs. The Hulk, however, was from New Mexico or some other southwestern desert state where nuclear weapons had been tested.
In the comic book original, the USAF was testing a Gamma Bomb, above ground, when Rick Jones drove into the test area, on a lark. Bruce Banner took a Jeep out to rescue him, and threw Rick into a trench, but the Gamma Bomb went off before Dr Banner could jump in himself.
Beer is a white cisheteronormative patriarchal weapon.
Our esteemed host wrote:
The problem is that those schools have cachét, and college grads with Ivy League degrees get extra “points” when it comes to résumés and getting their chances in the business and professional world. These are the government clique schools, and surrendering then solely to the depraved means even more of the depraved wind up writing and enforcing government regulations.
What is needed isn’t to eschew those schools, but to take them back!
That’s why 1) you never throw the first punch; and 2) you never, ever, let the six-foot something guy get a grip on you, because you are dooooomed.
I’m not sure its shockingly, but otherwise, yep.
I don’t know. Most guys that size (which includes moi) would just look at you kinda annoyed. Others might just grab you by the arm or shoulder,, and put you down in a chair, and wait until you’ve given up your silly notions.
I may have done both.
Do as the French king did to the Templars, and then rebuild for the Internet age. Trying to uncorrupt the unwilling is a problmeatic enterprise, he said politely.
Exactly.
Bud Light?! Have you no standards!
You have my sympathies.
Man of Steel had so much destruction that all I had to say was “Superman didn’t save the city. He lost.”
Horrid, horrid movie.
Threatened. Yes, threatened. Not actually destroyed.
Just part of modern life. And doing my part to try to oppress women back into civilization. 🙂
Don’t allow any Federal money to go to the exclusive schools. Problem solved.
I turn them over my knee. Done that a time or two. I didn’t use an ash shovel like John Wayne did on a certain pretty actress, however.
You’re advocating giving feministas the real stuff?
The chair will now entertain a motion to expel Thompson from the Heteronormative Patriarchy. The Charge: Giving real beer to feministas!
Early Law and Order was no better. I couldn’t stand to watch that bilge.
Hey, it’s a way to show maybe we’re not as evil as they claim we are. And before I was married, I was drinking in places that didn’t serve sex in a canoe.
Have you ever had sex in a canoe? It’s damn dangerous. You’d be better off doing it in a hammock.
Such weak attempts at defense will only exacerbate your situation.
Harvard endowment is…36 Billion.
Yale’s is ….almost 24 Billion.
Princeton’s is….20 Billion.
Add in the Ford Foundation’s 10 Billion, and we’re hitting 90 Billion.
These places need to be destroyed, and the earth salted. And considering they have done so much to hurt America, I don’t mind burning them down.
Specifically, white cisheteronormative patriarchs wearing plaid shirts, jeans, scuffed boots, and smelling vaguely of barn.
My favorite type of patriarch.
Surprised you didn’t demand a substitution of Corona or Dos Equis.
As a mildly interesting and off-topic aside, somewhere I heard a bit of an interview with Sebastian Stan, the actor who played the Winter Soldier in the Captain America movies, and who is Romanian.
He was asked what his favorite comic book was as a kid, and he said, “I didn’t have any comic books. I was a Communist.”
Yeah, I dig period costumes, too. I have books on clothing history and such. I remember going to a Civil War museum in Montgomery AL when I was a girl and admiring the old period dresses and uniforms on display. I sew, and if I could be a costume designer, I’d be in seventh heaven.
Heh. Stereotype, check!
(With all respect)
Those would be the Taco Tuesday specials, ma’am.
There were a few good ones. Before S. Epatha Merkerson became the Lieutenant, she was a working class mother in an early L & O episode (“Mushrooms”) about a young black boy who kills her baby. The boy, eager to prove himself to a gang leader, takes on a hit job but, because he can’t read, he gets the address wrong and shoots up the wrong apartment, killing an 11 month old baby.
There was a lot that rang true in that episode, including the lack of literacy in poor black neighborhoods and the hand-wringing over how to punish a minor child for a murder. Too bad future Law and Orders were not that honest.