Nothing better illustrates the crackup of the Feminist Mind than a resurfaced statement by the First Lady—correction, First Partner—of California. “What I have done with both my daughters and my sons is, if I’m reading a book and the protagonist is a male, I just change the he to a she,” said Jennifer Siebel Newsom, involuntarily puncturing her presidential hopeful husband’s Everyman bubble. She added, “I do it for my sons because I want them to see that women can be the center of a story, that women matter, that women are interesting.”
Ms. Newsom is delusional on all counts here, and a typical progressive menace to art (not to mention her children’s mentality). By gender-swapping the male hero, she has fabricated an unreal character utterly alien to both boys and girls. She contradicts her second point in that if women mattered and were interesting, she wouldn’t have to infuse them with male personalities.
However, there’s one huge difference between their Hollywood and that of the current woke pygmies. They made men’s pictures that appealed to women, and women’s pictures that men appreciated.
And finally, like boys everywhere, her poor sons cannot escape women as the center of the story — even those they might have loved if the characters had been left unchanged.
Meanwhile, ordinary girls are being deprived of inspiring heroines because of the fanaticism of their adult guides. This is true of both sexes, since only subservient men are welcomed into the mainstream writers’ club. Yet Western literature contains more than two thousand years of powerful and memorable female characters.
From Penelope in The Odyssey, devising clever ways to remain faithful to her wandering husband during ten years of pressure from parasitic suitors. Through Shakespeare’s immortally human creations — Juliet (Romeo and Juliet), Cordelia (King Lear), Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing), Kate (The Taming of the Shrew), and throw in Lady Macbeth for GOAT villainy. Through the magic fairy tales — Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty. Through the golden age of British women writers, culminating in the still beloved Jane Austen and her finest character, Elizabeth Bennet. To the 20th Century — Daisy Buchanan, Scarlett O’Hara, Lolita, and countless more.
None of these icons are of any interest to the feminist art curators of today. Because, like Jennifer Siebel Newsom, they loathe and fear real men and women. And they make their disdain known by deliberately repelling them from page and screen.
As American History X writer David McKenna noted last week on the excellent Film Threat podcast, “Right now, Hollywood seems to love alienating half the country. They gotta stop with that.” But they can’t, David. Because the liberal message is all they know how to do. And they would rather burn down their industry than appeal to these deplorable traditionalists.
The old Hollywood studio moguls — L.B. Mayer (MGM), Jack Warner (Warner Bros), Adolph Zukor (Paramount), Darryl F. Zanuck (20th Century Fox) — would be puzzled by what McKenna described, the deliberate rejection of a majority audience for ideological reasons, leaving aside artistic incompetence. For one thing, most of them were secular Jews, yet they produced the most inspiring religious pictures ever made — Quo Vadis, The Robe, The Song of Bernadette, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur. Any of them would have bankrolled superstar Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, rather than force him to use his own money to finance it, like every one of their successors did.
But it was in bi-gender appeal that they excelled. All the filmmakers were men, and masculine moviegoers had no end to entertainment — cops and robbers (Cagney, Bogart, Robinson), swashbucklers (Flynn, Power, Fairbanks), comedies (Keaton, Marx Brothers, Hope, Lewis), and the ubiquitous Westerns (Wayne, Scott, Ford, every male star). Of course, there were plenty of sexy screen sirens to entice them — Harlow, Hayworth, Gardner, Monroe, Loren — any of whom would melt down feminist brains today.
However, there’s one huge difference between their Hollywood and that of the current woke pygmies. They made men’s pictures that appealed to women, and women’s pictures that men appreciated, with movie stars for all — Gable, Cooper, Grant, Loy, Davis, Crawford, Stanwyck. Because they understood a fundamental reality that feminists have battled to deny, to the depletion of their own power. Men and women like, even love, each other, including the old film girlbosses. Here are three classic examples:
Laura (1944). The breathtaking Gene Tierney plays a powerful advertising executive who’s the obsession of several men, and is receptive to some of them, ultimately hardboiled detective Dana Andrews. Key line: “My mother always listened sympathetically to my dreams of a career … and then taught me another recipe.”
Mildred Pierce (1945). Joan Crawford portrays a divorced restaurant tycoon who carries single motherhood too far by spoiling her selfish adult daughter (Ann Blythe). Key line (to great movie cad Zachary Scott): “I like you, Monte. You make me feel … I don’t know, warm.”
All About Eve (1950). Bette Davis dominates as Broadway star and diva Margot Channing dealing with a devious young rival (Ann Baxter) and aging. Key speech:
Funny business, a woman’s career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you get back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we’ve got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we’ve had or wanted. And in the last analysis, nothing’s any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed, and there he is.
No female star on screen today would ever utter that speech. But it will outlast any of their dialogue this century. And some of us writers will strive to equal it.
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