We Hunted The Mammoth
Conservative cultural criticism is beyond parody these days. Consider the following reflections on Disney and its “Gay Black Hole” from someone called S. D. Wells on NaturalNews.com, which is neither natural nor news but rather a lot of health disinfo and right-wing conspiracy theories.
Disney’s Strange World, a cartoon flick featuring a gay teenager, belly-flopped hard at the box office Thanksgiving weekend, doing so very poorly, and costing so very much to make, that it is now expected to lose something like $147 million when it’s all done.
The rhetoric of the anti-trans movement — and Republican politicians — is getting more apocalyptic and eliminationist by the day. And anti-trans violence is getting worse. Last week, a man in Tulsa, Oklahoma, firebombed a donut shop after it held a drag event.
Well, it looks like our dear old friend fiend Vox Day won’t be able to make his racist superhero flick after all. Because he’s apparently lost all the money he raised for it — a cool million bucks — to a cryptocurrency con artist who was supposed to be safeguarding the funds, the Daily Beast reports.
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre recently announced that it will be putting on an original play in which Joan of Arc, world-famous crossdresser and military hero, will be portrayed as non-binary. Predictably, this has aroused right-wing culture warriors and transphobes more generally, who consider the very notion of a genderqueer Joan to be an abomination — and an insult to women.
It’s been a strange experience watching Disney transformed, at least in the minds of far right culture warriors, from a relatively staid, goody-two-shoes entertainment conglomerate into a symbol of “demonic” perversity — for the crime of incorporating LGBTQ+ characters in their media properties.
So Disney/Pixar’s new Toy Story movie, Lightyear, came up a bit short at the box office last weekend, taking in 50 million dollars, some 20 million dollars less than Disney was expecting. And homophobic culture warriors are over the moon, insisting that the poor performance of Lightyear was the result of the film’s alleged “wokeness,” with parents righteously outraged over a blink-and-you-might-miss-it kiss between two female characters.
Yesterday the rigt-wing mediasphere went bananas over an ambiguous comment from the top James Bond producer seemingly suggesting that maybe, just maybe, at some time in the future, James Bond could get rebooted as a non-binary super spy.
It really doesn’t take much to get rigt-wing culture warriors hepped up about some new supposed outrage. It doesn’t even have to be real — in a lot of ways it’s preferable if not.
Consider the case of the non-binary James Bond.
