So the question on the table for today is: Are asskicking women in action films an affront to “godly, awesome, beautiful, feminine women” and, well, now that you come to mention it, our heavenly Father too?
According to Christian cultural critic Nathan Alberson, the answer is “yes.”
That’s the short version of his answer, in any case. The long version is a rambling 3000-word diatribe that Alberson casts as “AN OPEN LETTER TO REY FROM STAR WARS.” Originally posted in March on Warhorn, a site I’ve never heard of before, his post is now being passed around by irritated feminists, many of whom aren’t quite sure whether his argument is real or an elaborate parody.
Having poked around Warhorn a bit, I’m pretty sure that Alberson is sincere. He genuinely thinks that characters like Rey in Star Wars are an affront not only to his own masculinity but to God, for whom Alberson seems to think he’s a spokesman.
Alberson starts out his “open letter” by addressing not only Rey but an assortment of other heroines in science fiction and fantasy films, including, among others,
Princess Leia. And Wonder Woman. And Sarah Connor and Trinity and Imperator Furiosa … and Katniss Everdeen and River Tam … And Feminist Elf-Kate from The Hobbit. … And the godmother of them all, Ellen Ripley.
The problem with these fictional women? They’re strong. And women in the real world are weak. Because God made them that way. So kickass women in action movies (and the women who play them) not only “look ridiculous,” they’re also
behaving … in ways that do not befit your sex or glorify God. … Your friends and family and fans may not laugh at you. But the angels do and history will.
I’ve seen this same argument made by antifeminists I don’t know how many times — though generally without all that stuff about God and the laughing angels. Women in the real world are, on average, weaker than men, all these guys say. So it’s unrealistic to think that any female heroine could beat up a man.
Here’s my open letter to Alberson:
Dear Mr. Alberson,
Have you ever actually seen an action movie?
Sincerely,
David
I mean, dude, seriously, you’re mad that Trinity from the Matrix can jump high and beat up dudes?
The Matrix movies are about a dystopian future in which humans “live” in a computer-generated virtual world while their bodies in the real world are used to generate electricity. And the part of the movie that seems the most unrealistic to you is that Trinity, while she’s in the video-game-like matrix, can jump high and beat up dudes?
You do remember that by the end of the movie Neo can slow down time, repel bullets with his mind, and, you know, FLY?
In the original Star Wars, Darth Vader strangles a dude with his mind, by using a mysterious force called, you know, The Force. But the unbelievable thing to you is that Princess Leia knows how to use a blaster?
It’s true that in the real world women can’t do all the amazing things that fictional women in science fiction and action films do. But, as I pointed out the last time I wrote about this goofy argument, neither can men.
Seriously, have you seen any movie with Jason Statham in it? Sure, Statham could kick my ass, and probably yours, in the real world. But he can’t actually do all the unbelievable things his characters do on film.
I mean, the first Crank movie, as unrealistic in its violence (and its physics) as a Roadrunner cartoon, ends with Statham’s character, Chev Chelios, dispatching his arch nemesis, then calmly calling his girlfriend and leaving her a message — all while plummeting to earth from a helicopter without a parachute. SPOILER ALERT: he lives.
No, really.
And here’s a sort of greatest hits compilation from all his films:
I eagerly await Alberson’s Open Letter to Chev From Crank.
And then he’ll need to write open letters to James Bond, Jason Bourne, Rambo and John McClane. And practically every character Arnold Schwarzenegger has ever played.
But of course, Alberson isn’t just worried that kickass women in action films are unrealistic. He also think they send the wrong messages to women — and to men.
[T]he cumulative effect of watching movie after movie wherein fine ladies … suddenly crunch the bones of a dozen bad guys at a time is that some silly people get the idea there’s no real difference between men and women’s bodies … .
Really? I don’t think that’s the message being sent by, oh, Tomb Raider.
Or any of the innumerable action films in which the heroine wears skin-tight, often fetishistic outfits that sexualize her in a way that most male action stars aren’t.
I mean, sure, Bruce Willis wore that cute orange tank top in The Fifth Element, but Milla Jovavich wore, you know, this:
Hell, in the Underworld movies, Kate Beckinsale wears a corset while fighting the werewolf menace.
But apparently all these women look pretty manly to Alberson.
Movies and TV were a big part of how I learned who women were. And they lied to me. They told me that women were glorified boys who tagged along on adventures, took care of themselves, and wouldn’t let you have sex with them until sometime late in act 2 when, for no particular reason, they would.
These are terrible things to learn about women.
These movies, he thinks, should have been teaching him that women were frail flowers who need to be protected by men like him.
What I need is something to fight for, someone to fight for, someone to protect. If you rob me of that, you rob me of my dignity as a man.
Because men are supposed to be the white knights who rescue women (mostly from men who aren’t white knights).
As men, we were born with bodies and minds crafted for war. We are the warriors, the peacekeepers, the protectors—the bloodshedders, when the time is right. Every man is a father, whether of his own children, or the people that work for him, or the folks he leads at church. As such, he must be ready to uphold what is virtuous and punish what is evil.
And so Alberson has decided that his white knight quest for the moment is to take on the “wicked men” who make action movies with kickass heroines. He feels he needs to stand up for “all the girls and women out there who want to be godly, awesome, beautiful, feminine women,” who “feel beaten up” every time they see a fictional heroine beat someone up.
If only, he laments, the fathers and/or husbands of the actresses who’ve played action heroines had “loved them enough to tell them they weren’t allowed to do what they did.”
Alberson is pretty big on the whole “men telling women what to do” thing, urging his male readers to
Protect your wives and mothers and daughters and sisters. Honor them. Make them feel special. … When you see them trying to be like the ladies in those movies, tell them no. Tell them that isn’t what you want.
Indeed, Alberson seems to think that women trying to be like kickass female action stars is one of the leading causes of divorce.
Men lie to themselves and women about the sort of women they want. Women are gullible and believe the lie and become the women they think men want. Then men reject them because men never wanted those sorts of women in the first place.
And men do reject them. Look at the divorce statistics, look at the TV shows and books and articles by women desperately wondering why it’s so hard to hold on to a man. That’s a bigger problem than the purview of this letter, but you fictional female warriors are part of it.
I’m pretty sure no man has ever divorced his wife because she reminded him too much of Milla Jovavich in The Fifth Element. Or Sigorney Weaver in Aliens. Or Charlize Theron in anything. Well, anything except Monster.
Alberson’s argument really needs to have a stake driven through its heart. Buffy, can you do the honors?
So I read this article to my boyfriend…
He cracked up because he thought that it was a giant crock of shit.
And then… he starts reading out loud…
YES. HE DID THIS. So to him, he thinks that this article, like the guy who wrote it, is a joke.
And I concur. Because this dude probably wrote that article while sitting on a giant box of fedoras. That article just REEKED of “ME ME ME I SHOULD SAVE THE WIMMENS BECAUSE I’M A MAN!”
Cri-mi-ny.
how do I embed images? Because if you google “strongest woman in the world” there’s lots of pretty good evidence that some women have the natural strength to out lift and out defend most men. Even back in the 1800s there was a woman who, if I correctly, was never defeated by a man… jusr because women *tend to* have less strength doesnt mean every man is stronger than every woman or that its some sort of moral value.
Princess Sunny Burn and others – I think these guys are also kind of living in fear that they’ll have to start doing ‘women’s work’ since the women might be inspired to want to do other things. Can’t have that!
So we get teal deers all over the place about how civilization will crumble if women do this or that “unwomanly” thing when they mean, at least in part, is that their own little world will crumble if they have to a load of laundry!
Who could have predicted that movies and television were fictional? Clearly not this Rhodes scholar.
This is all I have to say…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgmxrjxUe60
This jumped out at me, too. The whole second-act mandatory romance/sex scene, for instance, is something that virtually every feminist film critic I’ve ever encountered complains about–the whole notion that a woman isn’t completely a hero until she also has a love interest (who typically gets to save her at some point even if she’s the one with badass martial arts or superpowers or whatever) is completely the creation of the very movement he’s a part of.
@vox
“Love one another as I have loved you” and all that crap? That’s not Jesus to the Albertson types. This is Jesus.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-y-6z24Cr9b4/UVeKGQCrQeI/AAAAAAAACEA/xzNYc3h4VLo/s1600/DownloadedFile.jpeg
If Jesus came back the Earth as the unemployed, homeless man who preached about peace and caring about your fellow human he was, the far-right would decry him as a handout-loving, lazy, hippie, socialist white knight pansy.
It’s always amazing how people use religion to push whatever crazy crap they want it to push. Funny that Jesus was a middle-eastern (read: not white) guy that hung out with women and prostitutes and disabled and poor people and treated them like they were… *gasp!* ACTUAL PEOPLE! With lives and hopes and dreams and everything!
But, yeah, action heroines like Rey are totally offensive to God. Somehow. Because how else can people justify blatant sexism?
”his post is now being passed around by irritated feminists”
Don’t do that. This is how you make these people popular. If enough feminists make a buzz about this, it will make him popular with the anti-feminists. Obscurity is too good for these people.
Men like this have been saying this shit since suffrage.
http://api.theweek.com/sites/default/files/legacygeneric/Suffragette8.jpg
So, it’s really nothing new. Just like the rest of the anti-feminist material. ;P
Yup, tell the women in your live how much you love them and make them feel special by making their life choices all about what you want, because you’re the most important person in their lives, yes you are! What they want doesn’t matter if it’s not also what you want, because you are the big strong protector manly man, and women have to cater to your feelings first and foremost! [/SARCASM]
As for the rest of this whargle bargle:
http://36.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcsdh4Y8qd1qgp7t8o1_500.jpg
@makroth
But if we just ignore it, they’ll continue to ghink it’s okay. It’s like with bullies. Ignoring them does not work, despite all the advice insisting it does.
Dude, just say it. We all know you mean “Finn and Poe aren’t white.”
But… Reposting this crap for us to laugh at is the entire point of this site.
If Mr. Christian thinks Rey is bad, wait until he watches women in anime. Isn’t it what alt right imbeciles do anyway, or do they not appreciate anime at all and only like hentai?
I’d like to see this guy spend a day working to put out wildfires next to female fire jumpers and then see how much it bothers him that women won’t pretend to be lesser to make him feel like a “real man”.
He is concern trolling fictional characters.
Before I get to all the ways he is wrong and perpetrating an evil-ass double bind on himself and his audience AND all women, I have to process my sheer jaw-dropping disbelief at Anderson’s crashing lack of self-awareness about his rhetorical tools and his target.
I think the strength disparity between genders has a lot ore to do with socialization than natural tendency. Women can build muscle up through exercise just like men, but are discouraged from any sort of activity that might compromise their wispy feminine shapes. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been told to limit myself to lifting amounts under 40 lbs or not work on my arms at all, especially since it’s “bad enough” I’m already so tall. If people try to “helpfully adjust” my weights I threaten to drop that shit on their fingers.
I routinely lift and turn heavy clay soil this time of year. And thanks to my dad’s genes, I have muscles like a Percheron. I couldn’t be dainty and delicate if I wanted to.
And I don’t want to.
@genjones
You are absolutely right.
The Patriarchists have always had control over women’s looks and definitions of beauty. Muscles on a woman, even though beautiful in their own right, are considered ‘masculine’.
Somehow, a woman being muscular is robbing that right from men.
Men, at the other extreme are happy to go under the knife and have pec and bicep implants and liposuction to appear like they are fitter than they are. What a sick world we live in.
Women’s fashion also has created the frail woman ideal, in dressing women in impractical shoes and short skirts, as well as rewarding them for being dumb dolly shrinking violets,they have no chance of escape from the Alpha male ‘Predators’ out their, in their trackie and trainers on a night out compared to their prey being barely dressed live meat. I don’t like to say this, but I agree with some of what the likes of Karen Straghan refer to a “Toxic Femininity”, but the difference is I tend to see all polarised forms of gender stereotyping as mutually harmful, rather than just keep saying ‘it’s the wimmins fault.
GenJones: There is a very small edge to men in the upper-body-strength category, as well as ‘reach’ due to average heights. That was a reason to favor men in combat roles (not exclusively mind you–just enough to support a dominant role of men in active combat positions in the military) up until, oh, say, the flintlock. At that point, it just became “tradition” (and even then, never as strongly hewed one as these shitlords* believe).
*: So they call themselves “shitlords” and their enemies “social justice warriors”. I just can’t parse that much deliberate self-unawareness.
Jesus documentary:
Men have “reach“, women have “flexibilty” 🙂
I want to know what he thinks characters like Ripley and Rey should have done rather than survive? They’d literally be dead in their stories had they taken his advice. He’s saying he prefers dead women to strong women.
Because dead women don’t threaten his masculinity. That is how important he thinks his illusion of superiority is. It is more important than our survival. And you know what real women most often have to survive? Men.
What a tangled web.
…with us dead in the center when men decide to hurt us and other men don’t see fit to stop them. If I have learned anything from the manosphere it is that given the chance, men like this would delight in my death. They don’t want us saved or surviving. They want us enslaved, punished and often times, dead.
I don’t think so. I think he’d prefer that these stories not be written with women in the lead role. The conceit of writing his letter to fictional characters instead of to scriptwriters kind of dilutes this, but the context makes it pretty clear for me. He doesn’t prefer dead women, necessarily. He prefers weak, frail women in supporting roles with the “hero” role filled by a man.
Depends what you’re reaching with. My tongue is way longer than my husband’s.