When they’re not trying to catch Critical Race Theory and tackle it to the ground, reactionaries today like nothing more than attacking things as “woke.” What’s woke? The list changes every day, and so I’ve decided I need to track the new additions as they emerge in right-wing media and social media. I’ll be putting out these Week in Woke updates every, well, week, for at least as long as the right-wingers remain obsessed with the word.
So lets see what things are woke this week:
Children’s Television
The suppsedly evil forces ofLGBTQ are making steady inroads into television programming for young children, antiwoke agents insist. According to Andrea Widburg at The American Thinker,
Of late … Nickelodeon has been bringing [its] edginess to the preschool set, culminating, this year, in the station’s going all out to ensure that the pre-kindergarten crowd learned about pansexuals and the magical LGBT rainbow. It must have come as a surprise to the woke college graduates staffing Nickelodeon that parents dislike the new pedophile-esque edge to the programming, because the cable channel, a Viacom flagship, has seen a 70% drop in its audience in just four years. …
Nickelodeon used Blue’s Clues & You, a program aimed at preschoolers, as the basis for a video in which … a singularly untalented man who prances about in a crude, mocking stereotype of femininity named “Nina West, sings a graceless song about a cutesy gay pride parade. Those little ones who watched the video got to learn about lesbians, gay men, asexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals, and transsexuals.
Hey, we wrote about that here. I guess we’re on top of the whole woke thing.
Meanwhile, Christian Toto of American Greatness complains that the “wokification” of TV for slightly older children is also getting LGBTQ-ized out the wazoo.
today’s kid-friendly shows routinely address sex, gender fluidity, race, and other complex topics that some parents think their youngsters aren’t ready to absorb. They are part of a broader cultural shift, often called the Great Awokening, that includes the advancement of social justice themes in many television shows and other media aimed at older teens and adults. ….
These shows include:
Netflix’s animated series “She-Ra and the Power of Princess” featuring gay, transgender, and nonbinary characters. …
DreamWorks Animation’s “Madagascar: A Little Wild,” a series on both Peacock and Hulu, featuring an LGBTQ pride-themed episode along with a new, nonbinary character, Odee Elliot, voiced by nonbinary actor Ezra Menas. …
Netflix is preparing an animated version of “Antiracist Baby,” a book by Ibram X. Kendi based on his adult work, which teaches toddlers to confess their racism. Nickelodeon recently announced that its reboot of “Rugrats,” a popular 1990s series, will feature a single lesbian mom.
It’s almost as if LGBTQ people are … people, deserving space in the vast arena of television.
Victoria’s Secret:
The iconic female lingerie company has gone “woke,” accuses Occidental Dissent, and is taking aim at “sizeism, lookism, racism, sexism and transphobia” by replacing its famous “Angels” with a radically more diverse selection of models who aren’t necessarily even models, including athletes Megan Rapinoe and Eileen Gu, actor and tech investor Priyanka Chopra Jonas, plus size model Paloma Essler, Brazilian trans model Valentina Sampaio, and South Sudanese refugee/model Adut Akech. Some of these so-called models are even (brace yourself) in their thirties. Sounds utterly boner-crushing.
“The brand is pivoting to fat, ugly and “trans” models because it was using too many attractive models to sell lingerie,” Occidental Dissent’s Hunter Wallace complains, joking that “Victoria’s Secret in our new progressive era is that she has a dick.”
“Wokeness Warriors Take Over the Pentagon“
According to lawyer and former Marine officer Mike Berry, writing in the Washington Examiner, the aforementioned Wokeness Warriors are deliberately distracting the US military from its mission to protect the country, attempting to turn it into “a testing ground for social policy experimentation.”
Berry continues:
Instead of monitoring external threats, the Pentagon is on a mission to identify and remove whomever it labels as extremists from America’s armed forces. Ironically, the CEWG has yet to define what it means by “extremism.” Extremism is usually defined as the threat or use of violence to achieve an ideological agenda. But the Pentagon is now poised to expand upon that definition to include constitutionally protected speech. In other words, sticks and stones may break our bones, but words are the biggest threat.
This should be alarming to everyone, no matter their political persuasion. If the Constitution no longer presents an impediment to appeasing the woke commissars on the far Left, it won’t be long before speech that has always been protected by the First Amendment suddenly becomes criminal.
Pretty sure they’re looking for white supremacists trying to use the armed forces as a fertile ground for recruitment; these guys are generally fairly easy to identify.
Meanwhile, American Renaissance warns that the increasingly “woke” Pentagon is handing out “reading lists of critical race theory books as part of the Pentagon’s new anti-extremism and diversity training within the ranks.
No, not THE READING LISTS. We’d better ban these books before they ban us!
The Tolkien Society Goes Woke
Speaking of reading: the very serious and reverent Tolkien Society is losing the plot, John Daniel Davidson in The Federalist laments. Its upcoming summer seminar is set to feature a whole bunch of papers that, Davidson insists, would be an “affront” to the old man himself, were he here to hear them.
[T[his year, seminar attendees will be subjected to something different. Papers to be presented include, “Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings,” “The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Antiracism,” and “‘Something Mighty Queer’: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien.” Pretty much the entire program is like this.
The best thing we can say about a Tolkien conference that presents papers on, say, “Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings,” or “The Invisible Other: Tolkien’s Dwarf-Women and the ‘Feminine Lack,’” is that the scholars in question do not know the first thing about Tolkien or the meaning of his work.
The worst we can say is that they hate Tolkien and his work, and would like very much to destroy it.
Indeed, how else can we account for such a conference? “The Lord of the Rings,” like “The Hobbit” and “The Silmarillion” and Tolkien’s entire corpus of writings on Middle Earth, has almost nothing to say about the concerns expressed in these papers or the worldview from which they spring. There are no “transgender realities” in the Lord of the Rings.
Ah, go orc yourself.
More The Week in Woke in a week. Stay tuned.
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It’s really funny when they claim children aren’t ready to learn about gender identity yet. Because lots of boy toddlers are drawn to “girl” things and lots of girl toddlers are drawn to “boy” things because they haven’t been fully socialized to conform to gender roles yet. It’s the adults who discourage kids from clothes and toys that are gender coded the opposite of the kid’s sex. If kids shouldn’t be learning about sex and gender yet, why are you telling little boys “no, that doll is for girls?” Why aren’t you just letting them be an innocent kid?
@ allandrel
Commando has a much better title to being a woke film.
Single dad, bringing up his daughter. Happy to do ‘girly’ things with her but also teaches her traditional ‘boy’s’ activities. And listens to her when she calls him out on his homophobia. Also has a hyper competent female sidekick who actually saves the day and rescues Arnie!
Also a creepy PUA bloke gets dropped off a cliff.
Imagine complaining entertainment isn’t brainless enough!
Way back in the nineties I watched Alfred J. Kwak and learned about acid rain and Apartheid and wondered whether robots have feelings, but I’m sure those were just happy-go-lucky children’s things that I was “ready to absorb”. Because if there’s one thing everyone knows about children, it’s that they are all the same and each and every one of them is interested in and/or traumatised by the same things.
@ .45
My memory of all things Tolkien is very dim (the most vivid being that time I rolled around laughing while reading the Silmarillion), but I remember reading some newspaper article about fanfiction, where they’d used a screencap of Aragorn and Legolas from the movies, the caption saying, “This is as close as these two get in the original story, but fanfiction takes things farther.” Which seemed suspect, since I thought I remembered all the dudes in LoTR routinely kissing each other.
(Though it may have been something that happened once or twice and just seemed alien to me, so it loomed large in my memory. )
If I recall correctly, there was a character that they had planned as trans in the show, but they thought they couldn’t get away with it. So officially, there is no transgender character in the show. But they had planned one of the princesses as trans (Perfuma, in case people were wondering).
@Battering Lamb:
If I recall correctly, there was a character that they had planned as trans in the show, but they thought they couldn’t get away with it. So officially, there is no transgender character in the show. But they had planned one of the princesses as trans (Perfuma, in case people were wondering).
They may have succeeded in sneaking at least one past the radar:
http://she-raandtheprincessesofpower.fandom.com/wiki/Jewelstar
If you’re familiar with the old-school version, Jewelstar and his sisters used to be known as the Star Sisters; whether the gender transition took place on a Watsonian as well as Doylean level is an exercise for the viewer.
@Masse : when I first read the Lord of the Ring I though Gandalf and just about every non hobbit character to have a wives, they just left her at house. (I was about 8-10 at the time)
The books don’t talk much if at all of love and desire. Which make sense since it’s a war story and the events aren’t too conducive to talk about that, not to mention a bunch of characters are either asexual or not interested in regular middle-earth entities. (Gandalf for example). It would not be my first choice to talk about gender roles, desire, or love because of that.
@ Ohlmann
Yeah, I remember I assumed the kissing (which may or may not have actually happened) being a regular greeting or some such in their culture, I didn’t assume it was sexual.
Many a good fandom discussion has started by wondering why something isn’t mentioned or why something’s been left out. I do think that’s worth looking into.
I read somewhere some time ago that the Frodo/Sam dynamic was based off of the master/servant dynamic that Tolkien would’ve been quite familiar with growing up, but which has (evidently) all but disappeared in modern times. So any friendship between them has to take that into account, I think. Doesn’t preclude them becoming genuine friends or more, of course, just that the originally intended social dynamic likely wasn’t ‘good friends’ at the start of the journey.
And as for another recent ‘gater-style blowup over wokenesss, evidently some fanboys are up in arms over certain casting choices in the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. In addition to a Black actress being chosen to play Death, Dream’s sister-brother Desire is going to be played by a nonbinary actor. Said fans are upset by the ‘forced’ inclusion of wokeness in their favorite series, while Gaiman is looking at them (paraphrased) like, ‘did you guys actually, you know, READ what I wrote back then?’
@Cyborgette
The media in a nutshell: Men raging are frightening and worthy of a “viewing the state of society with alarm” type story. Women raging are Karen jokes.
Or even ent-ities.
(BTW, do the entwives have ent-titties?)
Since Shakespeare has been mentioned (albeit kinda tangentially) I thought I’d share that I recently listened to an episode of the historical podcast Not Just the Tudors about an Elizabethan playwright (slightly before Shakespeare) named John Lily, who apparently had quite a lot of queer themes in his plays, which were fairly popular at the time but later got forgotten (probably at least partly because of their non-heteronormativity). For example, they talked about a play called Galathea which features a love story between two girls disguised as two boys, which ends with them going to get married with the blessing of Venus (who suggests that she’ll change one of them into a boy at the church door, but it’s left unknown if that offer is accepted, and even if it were, that’s still pretty queer). I can’t look up a link now, but it’s worth seeking out, this was fascinating.
Can just imagine what the anti-progressive league would have to say about that [early] modern dude and his “wokeness”.
@Redsilkphoenix:
Yeah, Desire was pretty blatantly androgynous in the comics, as well as looking like a Patrick Nagel drawing. Of course, those aren’t mutually exclusive; Nagel did a lot of artwork that managed to be somewhat minimalist and boundary-crossing at the same time.
@Threp
Honestly what bothers me more is that “men responding to hardship with violent, misogynistic anger” is seen as normal and even sympathetic.
OT, but could anyone here perhaps make an educated guess as to what this thing’s:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist.php#gammadrive
thrust to weight ratio would likely cap out at? I expect the engine weight would be mostly in the magnets, and whatever bracing was needed to attach it to the payload since this would be load-bearing. In the limit of adding more and more engines, the max acceleration would tend to this value.
@Threp:
The media in a nutshell: Men raging are frightening and worthy of a “viewing the state of society with alarm” type story. Women raging are Karen jokes.
White men, let’s not forget: men of color expressing anger, however peaceably, or justifiably, is grounds for declaring hunting season.
@Cyborgette
Same. That pisses me off too – it’s a pathetic weakness and failure in a person, that has somehow become normalised as understandable.
@Full Metal Ox
Yep. The white man pass is alive and well over here, too.
‘Cause god[dess] forbid kids learn to be accepting and kind towards people regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or race or, horror, see themselves or their parents reflected in the characters on T.V.
“American Thinker”….rarely if ever has a media outlet’s name sounded more ironic, because I SERIOUSLY doubt anybody associated with it does anything even close to thinking.
From what I’ve read Victoria’s Secret are moving away from the “Angels,” and doing other alterations to their products and advertising, because their traditional male gazey type stuff isn’t bringing in enough customers anymore.
Tolkien Society suddenly “woke”? Oh please, people have been talking about racism/anti-racism in The Lord of the Rings & his other works for decades.
My brother knows more about Tolkien than I do, but I had an interesting discussion with him awhile ago about anti-Asian racism and LOTR. The text in question wasn’t the book itself but a letter Tolkien had written about it where he said something like the Orcs had “Mongol” features that’d be unattractive by European standards.
So the issue was whether he was endorsing that view or just saying that others might see it that way. It could be a bit of both.
In Middle Earth, the “races” are more like different species (hobbits, men, elves, dwarves, etc.). Hobbits are clearly supposed to be like rural Englanders, but it doesn’t seem there’s necessarily a correspondence between other Middle Earth races and human ethnicities.
Now, some of the humans are mentioned in passing to have darker skin than others, but that can have unfortunate implications since they’re “wild men of the East” fighting for Sauron (the main villain) – or made to fight for Sauron, which is different, but still they’re seen as “wild.”
It would be interesting to compare this kind of orientalism to, say, the portrayal of the Dothraki society in A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones or Calormen in the Narnia Chronicles (Calormen being this corrupt/exotic empire, like how Europeans might have viewed medieval Islamic societies, and maaaybe also inspired by ancient Babylon or at least how it’s portrayed in the Bible as this big, bad civilization).
As a queer Tolkien nerd, that conference sounds amazing! Death of the author means that no matter what Tolkien intended, if we can find evidence for something in a close reading, the interpretation is valid and worth sharing. It beats rehashing another discussion on the blue Istari or whatever the critic would prefer.
> Dalillama
Ah, I did not known this. Thank you for the shared information !
The Tolkien Society has had annual summer seminars on various topics since 1986; presumably they’re getting a little scrambly for topics that will both draw an audience and get people to submit papers.
Previous controversial topics have included ‘Tolkien the pagan’,’Women in Tolkien’; and ‘Politics and Middle-earth’; as well as such clickbait as ‘Tolkien and trees’, ‘Tolkien and Birmingham’ and ‘Tolkien Down Under’.
Other papers to be presented are
-“The Burnt Hand Teaches Most About Fire”: Applying Traumatic Stress and Ecological Frameworks to Narratives of Displacement and Resettlement Across Cultures in Tolkien’s Middle-earth
-Projecting Indian Myths, Culture and History onto Tolkien’s Worlds
-The Problematic Perimeters of Elrond Half-elven and Ronald English-Catholic
-Hidden Visions: Iconographies of Alterity in Soviet Bloc Illustrations for The Lord of the Rings
– Translation as a means of representation and diversity in Tolkien’s scholarship and fandom
For those snowflakes, it’s one seminar in 25 years- chill.
Tolkien: From what I know some of the content, comes from how certain readers react to it, or analysis of fanfiction. So I think people here may be a bit disappointed.
There is another Tolkienevent countersheduled to appeas the shocked “fans”.
Re She-Ra: The reaction comes fast, since the show run for 5 season end ended last year. Could be that we get a few more tears at the end of the year (if the two-partfinale should win a Hugo).
Re He-Man: The funny think is that this one is made for Fans of the Original, there is another one in the works, as far as I know.
I have my doubts that He-Man will be missing for long, the trailer has him a lot. If I have to bet, I would say that Teela is probably the second most important maincharacter of the show. The other chances about are we are lyving today and not in the 80s, and it is logical that she should learn both of this secrets some day. I liked the first trailer.
If the Federalist thinks the Tolkien Society shouldn’t be getting embroiled in ‘woke’ politics; they’re going to hate this 1938 letter condemning racism, from someone who was very into Tolkien stuff.
Bit more on the subject here…
https://www.good.is/articles/jrr-rolkien-nazi-letter