“No Time to Die” director acknowledges that James Bond was a rapist, and Reddit’s right-wing culture warriors cry foul

We need to talk about James Bond. The debonair master spy and mass seducer of women is looking a lot less charming today than he did back in his glory days in the 1960s and 1970s. As any relatively conscious person who’s watched an older Bond film in recent years can tell you, Bond was less a seducer than a straight up rapist — tricking, blackmailing and sometimes physically forcing women to have sex with him.

But some longtime fans of Bond really don’t want to hear about it. That’s part of why it made such a stir when the director of the upcoming 007 movie No Time to Die recently acknowledged that Bond, James Bond, was a rapist.

“Is it ‘Thunderball’ or ‘Goldfinger’ where, like, basically Sean Connery’s character rapes a woman?” director Cary Fukunaga told one interviewer. “She’s like ‘No, no, no,’ and he’s like, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ That wouldn’t fly today.”

Actually, Fukunaga is only half right here: Bond didn’t commit sexual assault in Thunderball or Goldfinger; he did so in Thunderball and Goldfinger.

In Thunderball, he forced kisses on a nurse as she fought back, then later follows her into her room against her continued protests. You can guess the rest. Goldfinger was less subtle. Bond threw the memorably named Pussy Galore to the ground in a hay-covered barn loft and forced himself on her, while she actively resisted him (until she decided she was into it — because by the movie’s logic all women want to be raped by 007.).

If you need a refresher, or haven’t seen the movies in the first place, you can watch the scenes here and here.

These are only the most notorious of Bond’s predations; throughout the movie series, especially during the Connery era, Bond seems to grope, slap, or otherwise sexually harass or assault almost every comely woman in his general vicinity.

Watch here to see some of Bond’s least appropriate behavior.

I decided to look on Reddit to see if anyone was talking about Fukunaga’s comments, and I found the most, well, intense discussion in the KotakuInAction subreddit, the home of the site’s Gamergate dead-enders and other right-wing culture warriors. They’re a pretty angry bunch, especially when it comes to pop culture that, in their mind, has gotten too “woke” for its own good.

There are the outright deniers, like the commenter called asterKnight48902 who declares that it “[l]ooks like whoever came up with that is borderline delusional.”

And there are those who consider Bond’s style of, er, seduction to be perfectly ok — and also, somehow, consensual. “Women like sexually aggressive men who murder people,” explains East_Onion. “Get over it.”

“Words mean nothing, as usual,” complains GreenOrkGirl. “Anyone who is not a so[y]boy is a rapist now.”

In another comment, she added

Thanks to modern “feminism” that word lost its meaning. In media you cant distinguish real rape victims (no one cares about them), from “omg he complemented a woman, what a RaPiST!!!

“I can’t wrap my brain around this,” writes Krombopulos-Snake. “So, consensual sex with women trying to kill you is now rape.”

“Women ,though they’re loath to admit it these days, prefer strong agressive men,” asserts 0llygruntt. “Most of the bad boy Chads, that they’re longing for, are of that ilk.”

Another commenter, blaizken_420, complains that “having masculine straight sexuality is considered worse [than murder] now.”

As far as many of the commenters are concerned, talking about the rape scenes as rape scenes is a bigger sin than putting the scenes in the movies in the first place

ForPortal accuses the director and those who think like him of being iconoclasts, in the worst sense of the word,

look[ing] at James Bond the same way the Taliban looks at a Buddha statue – as an affront to their religion that must be destroyed.

Justiceavenger2 declares that

The woke crowds entertainment is ruining established franchises and celebrating it on twitter.

Others talk boycott.

Burningheart1978 declares that Fukunaga’s comment is just “[a]nother reason (not that I needed more ) to give this double woke seven a miss…”

“Ok so that’s the final nail in the Bond coffin huh?” sososomanythrowaways comments, “It was already going poorly a few movies back.”

Some just want Fukunaga cancelled.

“Remove the director,” demands carmachu.

It’s a tad ironic how those who are the loudest opponents of so-called cancel culture are so eager to cancel their ideological foes.

There are, I should add, a handful pf cmmenters in the thread who acknowledge that Bond is basically a psychopathic rapist, like JaredLJohnson, who writes,

In Goldfinger he literally throws Pussy Galore around a barn and then pins her down and physically forces himself onto her until she stops fighting back. In Thunderball he kisses Fiona multiple times as she fights him back and tells him no. In Live And Let Die he stacks the deck against Solitaire who believes in the tarot readings in order to bang her, which probably constitutes rape by deception. In multiple movies he physically assaults women before trying to initiate something sexual with them. You could pick pretty much any Bond from the 90s or earlier and find a sex crime — coercion, sexual assault, date rape — in almost any movie. You fucks can downvote me, but look at any of those scenes and imagine the movie isn’t about Bond and they look an awful lot like sex crimes.

Sure do.

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