Several years ago — I could look it up — I interview Phyllis Schlafly about her book Feminist Fantasies. Mrs. Schlafly, in many ways one the most influential American woman of the 20th century, laughed about how “tough” feminists sometimes claim to be. Certainly few of them had the steely strength of Mrs. Schlafly who, during World War II, worked her way through college at a defense plant where her job included test-firing .50-caliber machine-gun ammunition. One of the columns collected in Feminist Fantasies is about the 1997 movie G.I. Jane, which Mrs. Schlafly correctly describes as “a psychological lesson designed to abolish the stereotype that men and women are different, and to make Americans believe the myth that women can perform in combat just like men.” Good luck winning a war with a military organized according to social justice ideology.

The title of Mrs. Schlafly’s book came to mind today when I saw a Tumblr blogger’s GIF sequence of a scene from Agent Carter a Marvel-inspired ABC series that ran for eight episodes before being canceled last month. The scene shown on the Tumblr blog was a tedious example of Hollywood feminism: A simplistic caricature of a sexist male — in this case a soldier — expresses a stereotypical sexist attitude toward the heroine, who then responds by knocking him out with one punch.

Let me begin my criticism of this by saying that I hate at least 90% of the “entertainment” produced by Hollywood over the past 25 years, and in general, I can’t stand the comic-book superhero fantasies that have become major profit generators in recent years. Spiderman, Iron Man, Wolverine, Captain America, whatever — it’s all so much childish crap, as far as I’m concerned, and I can’t believe adults would pay money to see it. My disdain for fantasy is quite general, however. Whether it’s Harry Potter or Alien or The Matrix, I’ve never been a fan of science-fiction or “sword and sorcery” dramas. The original Star Wars movie and the first Indiana Jones movie were rare exceptions to this, primarily because those films were inspired by classic 1930s-1950s adventure serials, and also because Harrison Ford was perhaps the best wisecracking movie hero since Clark Gable. At any rate, I outgrew comic books when I was 14, and have never been a fan of superhero movies, so the Marvel-inspired Agent Carter wasn’t the kind of thing I’d watch, even if it weren’t for the feminist propaganda factor. How many more times are we going to see TV networks and movie studios invest in crap projects that get absurdly gushy critical reviews — because all critics are obligated to praise anything with the Feminist™ brand — only to watch the film or TV series fail as a commercial venture? Who wants to sit for two hours in a movie studio, or for an hour on their sofa at home, watching what is for all intents and purposes a feminist sermon in the Cult Temple of Social Justice?

This token “diversity” of many TV and movie casts nowadays — does every police homicide unit in America now have a Puerto Rican lesbian detective? — is a sort of low-level background noise TV viewers have become accustomed to, but why does it seem so many of the plot lines are being scripted by writers who studied Critical Theory in grad school?

Are people turning on prime-time TV to watch entertainment or to be lectured about race/class/gender oppression? Nowadays, network crime dramas and situation comedies are as predictably political as Soviet cinema during the Stalin era. It seems almost as if all the scripts are being issued by a Central Committee of the People’s Ministry of Correct Entertainment, a group of propaganda commissars consisting of representatives from the NAACP, the SPLC, GLAAD, the AFL-CIO and NARAL, under the guidance of David Brock and Anita Sarkeesian.

Of course, merely to mention how politicized entertainment has become is to invite the accusation that you are a sexist, racist homophobe, and I wouldn’t mention it at all, except for the fact that Hollywood’s liberal propaganda campaigns are harmful and dangerous. For example, the type of “Strong Empowered Woman” feminist morality tale in the Agent Carter scene — where she knocks a man unconscious with a single punch — is apt to induce in young women a sense of inadequacy: “Why can’t I be strong and brave like that?” One notices that, during the past 20 years or so, there has been a skyrocketing increase in reports of depression and anxiety among young women, and why? Among the several factors involved, I am certain that no small part of the problem is that girls are now under constant pressure (from parents, from peers, from schools, from media) to live up to a feminist ideal. Every middle-class girl nowadays is expected to aspire to the ideal of becoming an independent, successful career woman. She must be smart! Be strong! Be empowered! And if she doesn’t become high school valedictorian and graduate with honors from Yale, she considers herself a worthless loser.

That academic fast-track competition is a pressure cooker, and there’s a high burn-out rate among Boy Genius types whose parents insist they simply must go to an Ivy League school. Why on earth would parents want to shove their daughters into that kind of meat grinder?

Look, my daughters are both highly intelligent. My oldest graduated college summa cum laude and, at age 27, is already the vice-principal of an elementary school. My youngest has never made less than an A, and she scored 99th percentile on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Yet I don’t want any of my children, boys or girls, to enter that Nerd Olympics where they’re locked into an all-or-nothing academic gladiatorial combat against the overprivileged offspring of the decadent plutocratic elite.

Let the rich folks send their kids to Brown and Columbia, Stanford and Duke, Oberlin, Occidental, Georgetown and Northwestern. Having seen the kind of wicked immorality that typifies the students and faculty of such schools, I wouldn’t want my children anywhere near those “elite” campuses. The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved. No responsible parent would let their kids attend an anti-Christian school like Harvard, and the road to Hell is paved with Yale diplomas.

From the warped value system promoted at our “elite” universities emerges the dangerous feminist fantasies promoted by Agent Carter.

It’s highly symbolic, you see: The American soldier is the villain in this scene. Beyond the standard feminist depiction of white heterosexual males as perpetrators of sexist oppression, the Hollywood elite never misses a chance to express its anti-patriotic, anti-military sentiment.

Feminism is a hate movement that calls itself “social justice.”











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