... or should I say that she is encouraging MGTOW.
MGTOW, if you didn't know, is Men Going Their Own Way. It's where men bail out of all of their traditional roles vis a vis women - husband, father, boyfriend, provider and protector. They take care of themselves and women can go take care of themselves. It's not hostile to women, at least not definitionally, it just has no need for them.
When I watch trailers for movies like Captain Marvel where women play the traditional male roles*, I think of MGTOW. It's a license to men to check out. "We don't need you. There is no unique role for you to fulfill. We don't value what you can do because we can do it all ourselves." Really? Outstanding! Goodbye!
Some young men of my acquaintance, well, juvenile males, to be more precise - they do nothing manly as far as I can see - have gone full MGTOW and are gratifying all of their desires. They are quite willing to live in squalor. They can work low-wage jobs and survive just fine. Video games give them a social outlet and a chance for competition and praise. Porn gives them all the sexual release they need and then some.
Captain Marvel and cultural elements like that give them full permission to go their own way. Why not work part time, play video games and devour porn? It's not like they're bailing out on their responsibilities to society. Just look, women are strong and independent. Grrrrl powr all the way!
Not only that, when they support the grrrl powr movement, out of pusillanimous self-interest, they can feel virtuous. They are stepping aside so the sisterhood can take its rightful place in the world. They're helping dismantle the evil patriarchy by refusing to become evil patriarchs. It's all upside.
Sadly, single, childless women in their 30s are starting to figure out what happened to all the good men.
Update: You know what's missing from both sides? Any mention of love.
* - My very favorites are the Marine Corps recruiting ads where they feature female infantry. You go, girl!
4 comments:
When women are encouraged to invade/colonize male spaces, and men are prevented under threat of government violence to object, then men naturally retreat.
You know, I can see you complaining about this sort of thing in regular movies with actual people, but complaining about women taking on "traditional male roles" in Superhero Movies makes no sense. I mean, while they have a muscular guy playing, say, Thor, the things that Thor does are so far beyond what an actual flesh-and-blood organism can do that it makes just as much sense to use a weedy little guy or a tiny woman for the role. Superman's musculature is completely irrelevant, there is no way a material object can do the things he does, and he isn't even human anyway, he might as well be Mighty Mouse. If you stuff somebody into an Iron Man suit, the suit is doing everything, and their own musculature not only isn't even relevant to what they are doing, it takes up space that would be better used by more suit material, and it would be marginally more believable for it to be piloted by a tinier person. And so on, and so on. Even the ones that are supposedly just "enhanced humans" like Captain America, Hawkeye, or Black Widow routinely do stuff that no real person can actually do, regardless of sex.
These movies are all about dreaming what it would be like to do things that are not only not humanly possible, but not even physically possible using anything we know exists. Whether the wildly implausible person is male, female, or some kind of jacked-up rodent is entirely beside the point.
Men don't like competing with women. There's no glory in it. If you win, you beat a girl. If you lose, you lost to a girl.
Tim, I guess I see the superhero movies as idealized people. Yes, it's all hokey fantasy and stuff, but the heroism and power is something kids can pretend to have.
What I question in myself is what I'm asking little girls to pretend.
Eponymous - bingo.
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