So my post on Aaron Clarey’s Return of Kings call for a boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road went a bit viral last week, garnering thousands of shares and retweets on social media and inspiring dozens of articles on sites ranging from The Mary Sue to the Guardian and even the Daily Mail, all helping to expose the manly men of the manosphere as the entitled manbabies they are, so threatened by women with power that the very thought of Charlize Theron as a badass postapocalyptic road warrior causes them to lose their collective shit.
Their “boycott” is a bit of a failure as well, to say the least. The film — which so far has garnered an impressive 98% of positive reviews according to Rotten Tomatoes — took in close to $17 million at the box office on Friday (in North America), and is expected to earn more than $40 million this weekend alone.
Admittedly, one movie did do better than Fury Road on Friday, but I somehow doubt this will be much of a consolation to Clarey and the rest of the Return of Kings crowd, given that the movie is Pitch Perfect 2, a musical comedy about an all-female a capella group whose breakout star is — to use the parlance of the manosphere — a fat chick. The horror!
Or maybe I’m wrong, and all the Fury Road boycotters went to Pitch Perfect 2 instead.
Anyway, over at Return of Kings, site founder and rape legalization proponent Roosh Valizadeh is proclaiming victory:
Even though we were incorrectly identified as a men’s rights site, the idea that Hollywood is spreading feminist propaganda has for the first time reached the ossified brains of over one million new people this week, perhaps more. Most of these individuals will never allow themselves to accept how unnatural and phony it is to have female heroes who are as strong as men, but a few of them will encounter another movie in the future that portrays women as so comically masculine that they can’t help but remember the site with the word Kings in the title that described that very phenomenon.
Aw, fellas, can’t you see that the joke is on you?
Perhaps this song with help:
I swear, I should probably post this video every other day.
@Miss Andry
Oh snap, another person who knows Scarling? Jessicka is pure awesome.
@Moocow:
I suppose (school and other) *principals* can be heroes, but most of mine definitely were not.
“Men can identify with the character while playing towards women’s envy of men by allowing them the fantasy that they are or can be men too if they want.”
I don’t even know what that is — projected uterus envy? Is there any doubt that Theron’s character is a woman and wants to be one?
For the life of them (and anyone else’s), these sad sacks cannot conceive of women doing all kinds of things in life, including tasks considered “masculine,” without (dreaming of) relinquishing their gender. It probably says something about their extremely limited (and probably unhappy) life experience.
Here’s the thing: yes, women can do and have been doing pretty much everything that a human being can do in this brief life Earth. And for long periods of human history, they have done it against great odds, overcoming obstacles put in their way by the male-created and run social structures.
But, unlike men, they also have done something as marvelous as bring to life and nurture new generations of humans, a magnificent task that no man can ever accomplish (and why perhaps so many of them devalue it so).
I suspect the uterus envy is among major, though un/subconscious, forces behind misogyny.
Lol, just seen Fury Road and I can see why it’s gotten the manly ragebros in a froth (potential spoilers ahead:), the focus on the Wives and Furiosa is so central throughout that Max almost seems like a cameo in the film. He’s great, but the story being told wasn’t his. Which was really cool.
Plus non-CGI action sequences! And war-guitar! Boom.
@Moocow:
Wow. Furiosa’s character is a way for envious women to fantasize about “being men.” Not -you know- being women who are principled, tremendously capable, and able to fight against injustice.
I pity anyone who might argue with that guy, because my head already hurts.
MRAs like to pretend that men are oppressed so that they can bully women and feel/seem like they’re fighting for equality rather than domination.
Roosh et al. just openly call for the subjugation of women.
This. MRAs are all about that thin veneer of egalitarianism. PUAs, etc. have abandoned the pretense.
Yeah, it seems like the “manosphere” has been making a big fuss about this movie. I’m still not sure why. There have been a number of films with women as action heroes – of course, many more with men as action heroes – so maybe it’s because it’s high-profile?
When I read a review of this, I thought “Cool cars!” and then “Interesting story!” not “Ha! Feminism! Kill all men!” or whatever MRAs imagine women think.
I mean, I thought it was cool that it had feminist themes – that Furiosa’s character had such an interesting role. I meant that I don’t associate feminism with being anti-men as MRAs seem to think it is.
(Gah, I cannot write coherently. My name’s too much of a self-fulfilling prophecy today.)
What amuses me in all this reaction to “Fury Road” is the idea that somehow this is the first Mad Max film where it wasn’t *his* story, where Max wasn’t the driving force of the movie. “Mad Max” is about him – it’s his depressing back story – but every film since then, including this one, hasn’t been *about* him per se. “Road Warrior” is about a town being harassed by a sinister roving biker gang. “Beyond Thunderome” is about Bordertown and the Lost Children. And “Fury Road” is about Furiosa and the harem fleeing from/standing up to the Citadel.
In every one of those movies, Max stumbles into somebody else’s story; initially he tries to resist helping, but his better nature wins out and he comes to their aid, before vanishing back into the wild. He’s *always* been in the helper role. And hell, it’s not like he’s just a pointless sidekick here, he comes up with the big final plan against Immortan Joe, he contributes. He’s just not the center of the story because he never is. He’s the wanderer, the outsider, the road warrior. How can you claim to love Mad Max and miss something that completely obvious?
All of this is just making me want to actually SEE this stupid movie. I didn’t even know about it till yesterday.
@Aunt Edna
They clink to gender roles like barnacles cling to the hull of a sinking ship. Thus, they also (falsely) assume that everyone else sees gender roles the way they do. I think you hit the nail on the head, they do envy women a great deal.
There’s actually another aspect of toxic masculinity that comes into play here. The biggest way to get your ‘man card’ revoked or kicked out of the ‘boys club’ is to do something feminine. It’s like they’ve been disqualified from ‘proving their manliness’ and thus are automatically deemed “not a man”. This is also where A LOT of homophobia and transphobia comes from.
Here’s a ted talk (one of my favorites) about a young boy who was afraid of using an Easy-Bake Oven because it was a girl toy and how his incredible sister managed to solve this problem!
https://www.ted.com/talks/mckenna_pope_want_to_be_an_activist_start_with_your_toys?language=en
The video even contains a whole sequence of “take that!”s against assholes on the internet!
@gelar
Yeah, that comment made me NOPE out of there pretty fast. Video was hilarious though, apparently ‘college is where you learn to be gay’ according to a reactionary right-winged nutcase who thinks ‘liberal arts’ is a conspiracy by the left ‘after they took control of the media’.
PussyPowerTantrum- I seen this awesome movie yesterday and I totally see what you mean. It seems that the produces had a check list of tropes to be incorporated in to the story so they could mock them and to see how thoroughly these tropes could destroyed. I must say that they took these tropes and totally tore them apart. It was awesome. XD
I don’t think the film is particularly feminist in any analytical sense, the wives function more as a mythic symbol of the feminine, but if the “very thought of Charlize Theron as a badass postapocalyptic road warrior causes them to lose their collective shit” then watching her give a fucking epic performance as action movie heroine will push the manospherians to their breaking point. Holy smokes, she dominates the movie with a mountain of charisma and endless bad assness.
Quick Comic Book Note:
While this movie has the classic Mad Max apocalyptic aesthetic, the visuals almost immediately reminded me of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s work in both film and European comics.
By the middle the film it oddly felt visually like a 1990s Vertigo comic series, especially in the way that it successfully created and maintained a broad eccentric, almost psychedelic, tone. In the end credits I saw Brenden McCarthy listed as one of the writers and he also worked on character designs. Yes, 1980s and 90s Vertigo and/or 2000 AD fans, that Brenden McCarthy.
http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090110172759/marvel_dc/images/a/a7/Shade_the_Changing_Man_Vol_2_13.jpg
http://40.media.tumblr.com/dd6f86b4d1927bf21f8b3be9c23c615a/tumblr_n1hrqedIWX1r5dtmyo1_500.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_McCarthy#Bibliography
In comics McMarthy’s most known for his collaborations with Grant Morrison (Zenith) and Peter Milligan (Shade, the Changing Man revamp, Freakwave). I was pretty impressed with myself for seeing his influence, what can I say, I really know my 20-30 year old comics; I really bring it as an aged geek.
Grant Morrison. SWAMPY!! (OK, I have a very limited comics exposure. Sandman, Arkham Asylum and Swamp Thing is it)
Both Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing and Gaiman’s Sandman predate the Vertigo imprint, which started in 1993. The editor who brought both Moore and Gaiman to DC, Karen Berger, ran Vertigo and the line had a spectacular run in 1990s and 2000s. Preacher, The Invisibles and Fables are some of the more famous titles, but Vertigo put out a lot of quality stuff at a time when there were almost no popular non-traditional super hero titles.
*heads upstairs for her graphic novels* I need to read them now.
Also V for Vendetta and Hellblazer.
The PUAs sees the MRAs as comitting the sin of wanting genuine equality, not male dominance over women like they do.
These cloth-eared dunderheads simply can’t hear or understand that toxicity goes both ways. There are plenty of men who are poisonous to the women in their lives or just in their surroundings, but that’s not the major issue for feminists.
Men are themselves poisoned by these attitudes and behaviours as are men on the receiving end of many of those attitudes and behaviours. After all, “boys don’t cry” or, more pointedly, “big boys don’t cry”, directly harms far more boys and men than girls or women. When boys are told they can’t wear pastel colours, especially pink, or play with dolls (one bloke we knew included GIJoe action figures in his ban on “dolls” for his kids), it’s the boys who suffer from both missing out on something childish and perfectly harmless and, more importantly, having their sense of themselves as growing-up-to-be-a-man-one-day undermined and undercut by the nagging fear of not being/doing it right.
I suppose the shareholders in Chucklefucks & Dunderheads Inc. really don’t want to know that their dads, other relatives, teachers, workmates, pastors and their friends,/i> have done/ are doing them more harm than good. In many cases, their mothers and women relatives and friends have also bought into this nonsense so they reinforce those toxic messages. This stuff can be more persistent in the social environment than all those pesticides we worry about in the physical environment.
I wasn’t actually going to see Mad Max; I’m not really a movies-full-of-explosions sort of person. However, I decided to see it just to spite the MRAs. I’m glad I did. Holy shit, this movie is amazingly good. The fight scenes are excellent, the script is tight, the whole composition is visually amazing, and Theron kicks so much ass that comparisons to Michelle Rodriguez are not out of order.
Which other movies did Aaron Clarey hate? I may need to watch them too.
I’d bet that part of their problem is Charlize Theron’s costuming. Extremely short hair, dirt, sensible clothes, a prosthetic arm? What the heck, that’s not the Roosh-approved version of hot! And Theron can hit easily all their markers for how a hot woman should appear, so it’s a double betrayal that she’d allow herself to be styled so. I mean, it’s not like she has a history of taking risks and an Oscar from a movie where her character was less than a smoking hot hottie, amirite?
I’ll bet that they can suspend their disbelief long enough to enjoy a female action hero as long as she’s styled in a conventionally attractive way and doesn’t challenge her male costars (or quickly falls in love with post-challenge). As soon as boners stop be catered to, though, the ish hits the fan.
Did you guys know that George Miller had his wife edit Fury Road? She’d never edited an action movie, and he wanted her to do it so it wouldn’t look like every other action movie.
@katz:
That’s awesome. IMDB tells us that the editor was Margaret Sixel; is this the same person? She certainly doesn’t have any other editing credits to her name.
Okay, apparently I suck at searching. Margaret Sixel in fact has seven editor credits and five assistant editor credits to her name, including Happy Feet.
Looks like she succeeded. Look at all these manly-man heads aspolodin’!
Oh, and Charlize Theron has also weighed in on how much she loves and appreciates Furiosa for breaking the Hollywood mold:
Someone should be along to peel Aaron Clarey off the ceiling any minute now.