“If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And here I make a rule – a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.” – East of Eden
About 3 months ago there was a very interesting side conversation of the main article topic in the comments. The movie 300 came up and how it was or wasn’t a good illustration of conventional masculinity. I’ll just say that from a purely pulp fantasy perspective I loved the movie. And as a fantasy it was great, but both men and women like to romanticize various times and stories in history to suit their desires, as well as reinforce their beliefs.
I think many retromasculinty subscribers get caught up in what YaReally calls LARPing – live action roleplaying – with regards to how these fantasies become romanticized ideals that were neither true of that period, nor are they really relevant for contemporary times. With today’s communication and ubiquitous movie animation it’s all too simple for the less socially savvy to latch on to old books heroic ideals.
But as I said, I loved the movie and I can see how heroic movies in this theme appeal to men frustrated by modern societal circumstance. If that mythological fantasy inspires them to greater aspiration I would say they do serve some purpose – for personal visualization if nothing else.
Unfortunately anything that celebrates masculinity today just becomes a target of ridicule and homosexual shaming for heterosexual men. It’s ironic how a fem-centric society will embrace flagrant homosexuality as normative yet when a heterosexual man celebrates his maleness he’s shamefully suspected of being homosexual himself. This in effect is a way to contain conventional masculinity in something that the Feminine Imperative hopes will control it.
I have on 3 separate occasions at 3 separate evangelical churches seen the ‘going off to war’ scene from 300 used as a ridiculous marketing tool to inspire ‘christian’ men to go to a Christian Men’s weekend retreat. It’s the part where the 300 are ranked up in front of Leonidas and he’s surveying their fitness for battle. The language is in french and the english subtitles are swapped in for some suitably ridiculous dialog between the men and Leonidas and Leo’s wife (whom he refers to as “snuggle bear” or some shit).
This is a good example of the feminine-primary ridicule of masculinity that Churchianity co-opts into Christian Culture. They are all too ready, maybe even more ready, to pander to men’s LARPing instinct while simultaneously ridiculing anything that might hint at men celebrating their maleness – much less finding any realistic empowerment from it. And the real tragedy is that it’s these self-same christian men who are creating these parodies of themselves.
The Imperative Awakens
I’m going to paraphrase a bit here, but there’s an idiom that states if you can control the art and imagination of a culture you can subdue that culture. I may be butchering that, but the drift is that when you supplant an ‘organic’ idealism with the ideological seeds of what you believe ‘ought to be’ you begin by stirring the imagination at an early age.
When we’re in our early youth we’re like intellectual sponges from the age of 5 on into (and beyond) our teenage years. So it should come as no surprise that male idealism finds its most formative roots when we’re kids. Even when our imaginations aren’t fed by myths and stories boys will take up the role of creating them for themselves. The details of exactly what we create and romanticize are less important than how we came to identifying with it and how it influences our identities later in life.
I’m prefacing here with this to give you an understanding of just how easy it’s become for a feminine-primary social order to influence this nascent idealism in boys and later men. The human race is one based on stories. First it was oral histories and later those were recorded in written languages. Telling stories is how we used to learn, and really still do in a more detailed fashion with the rise of technology and global communications. When boys are playing out the roles of characters presented to them they are enacting the ideals of what’s represented in those stories.
SPOILER ALERT – If you haven’t seen Star Wars, The Force Awakens yet, you’ll want to skip this next part until you do.
I recently watched the latest installment of the Star Wars series, The Force Awakens, and as you might guess it’s virtually impossible for me to see any popular media without my Red Pill Lenses on. Going in I had no doubt that I’d be subjected to the messaging of the Feminine Imperative, but I loved the original series and even the much maligned prequels, so I knew I’d want to see this one.
I fondly remember seeing the original Star Wars in the theater when it released in 1977. I was 9 years old and I absorbed the fantasy and mythology of it as you might expect a boy would. Heroism, daring, fighting, and all the comic book bravado I was already steeped in was more than satisfying, but there was also the element of mythology and moralism that crept into the story arc in the sequels.
Of course I couldn’t appreciate it then, but that mythology was a carefully crafted aspect of the original stories. There’s a great book, and I think documentary, called The Power of Myth about the Star Wars series that I later found an appreciation for as I got older and made the connections with the classics I also loved in college.
So with this in the back of my head I went to see The Force Awakens, and with a Red Pill perspective I could appreciate the complete, feminized, bastardization of this original, well crafted mythology.
Granted the story arc carefully followed from the original Star Wars movie; Death Star, small weakness, heroic last minute attempt to destroy it, galaxy saved when the bigger Death Star explodes, the end. The basic plot is essentially the same and left me thinking that this was more of a rewrite than any real progression from the original trilogy.
Overall it felt very hurried. There was the presumption of familiarity with, and between, all of the new characters, but within the familiar formula-theme (you know the Titanic sinks and you know the Death Star explodes) the lack of character development is obviously something the writers will explore in future sequels.
It’s important to keep this copping of the old formula in mind, because what J.J. Abrams does in this effective retelling is important when you begin to see the bastardization and the influence of the Feminine Imperative in the story. For the past decade there’s been a popular push to assimilate old, formulaically successful films and story franchises and retell them from a feminine-primary perspective. Recently that was the Mad Max rehash that casts the main character as an ambiguously masculine woman. In 2016 the ‘all-female-but-don’t-call-it-all-female’ version of Ghost Busters is slated for release. Hell, even 300 got the ‘make it feminine primary’ treatment with its sequel.
It’s no secret that there’s been a dearth of original storytelling in Hollywood for the better part of the 21st century. Thus, the want to return to the old magic that got the last 3 generations inspired. 80’s cartoons, now classic sci-fi and fantasy franchises, and golden era comics serves as a deep well of movie-ready stories, but none are retold without the ubiquitous pervasiveness that the Feminine Imperative requires of its storytellers today.
Killing Heroes in Male Space
I was not shocked in the slightest that the first heroic casualty of the film would be Han Solo; and slain by his neurotic, identity conflicted son no less. It was apropos for a retelling of the classic formula that would see all semblances of conventional masculinity erased from what is intended to be a new classic. Han Solo represented the last of a kind, the brash, self-assured, cocky scoundrel that women cannot resist – the “I love you.” “I know.” brand of rake.
In an earlier iteration Captain Kirk from the original Star Trek series held the same old books bravado, and minus the outlaw, anti-hero aspect of Solo, Kirk was essentially the same character (if not with a bit more responsibility). If I had the stomach to do so, it would be an interesting social experiment to do a cross-generational comparative analysis of the characters from the original Star Trek series cast with the Next Generation cast of the early 90s. Even if you only have a cursory understanding of both series, you can see the generational capstones evident in the main characters of each generation, separated by less than 30 odd years.
It might seem a bit foolish to use flights of fancy as archetypes that define the character of a generation, but remember this is science fiction, and that genre describes a want for how that generation sees the future unfolding – even when it is just fantasy. Were it not de rigueur for the franchise I might expect J.J. Abrams to delete the iconic “A long time ago”, part of a galaxy far, far away.
What Star Wars and other long established story franchises represent to the prophets of the Feminine Imperative is twofold. First and foremost they represent familiar vehicles into which the ideological messaging of the imperative can be palatably digested. Second, they represent opportunities of the retribution and restitution for perceived wrongs that feminism has always sought after.
Paint it Pink
As I mentioned earlier, these classic feminine-interpreted remakes are glaring examples of the lack of any truly creative storytelling for some time. I had to laugh a bit when I’d seen that The Mighty Thor (classic conventional masculine archetype) had been “bravely” replaced by a female Thor in the comics recently. The story formula remains the same, but the gender is swapped. Not for nothing, but if Marvel were truly ‘brave’ about a gender swap they’d make Red Sonja a ginger male barbarian who goes around wantonly killing women to prove he’s as good as any woman in combat.
However, the gender swaps, the killing of long established, storied masculine characters, and the appropriation of classic, heroic masculine story formulae (even all-male comedies) all represent the jealous need to retell and rehash in a way that denies and discredits Male Space. The attempts (like Star Wars) are feeble retellings of exactly the same stories with women characters and women’s interests inserted into what formerly accounted for male space storytelling.
Blue Pill readers may read this last assertion and think, well, that’s kind of a stretch, but what you should ask yourselves is why those well established franchises are such attractive, more attractive, endeavors than making the efforts to create a new story to tell that conveys the same, feminine primary, social narrative? Why remake Mad Max as a woman? Why give Thor a sex change rather than create a new character in a new franchise that embodies the same ideals the imperative hopes will ride on the old ones?
Because that ideology, by and of itself, is neither believable nor admirable to men. Those bastardized, contrived notions of feminine empowerment are only legitimized in a world, fantasy or otherwise, that was created by men. So we get a girl Jedi (my guess is Disney will eventually make Rey a princess) who is all things to everything. And we get a bumbling, reluctant male “hero” who’s stumbles along needing her aid at every obstacle. Compare the character of Finn with that of Han Solo and you begin to understand why Solo needs to die when the Star Wars franchise playground passes into the hands of a director who’s been steeped in feminine-primacy for a lifetime.
Now, all of this might seem like an effort in pointing out the obvious for most Red Pill aware men. After all, it was this time last year that I wrote the Red Pill Lens, and even if I hadn’t most Red Pill men are painfully aware of how saturated in the imperative that popular media/culture truly is. Bear in mind, the Disney marketing juggernaut had the entire world aware of all the new characters’ names, the basic plot and a million different co-branding effort in every imaginable, and unrelated, variety since the beginning of June this year.
But all this comes back to the stories we tell ourselves. What flights of fancy we romanticizes and idealize (idolize?) in our youth, as well as the ones we reminisce over later in life. It’s one thing to point out how boys are taught to gender loathe in school or how our teachers instill us with their own ideological bents, but that learning goes far beyond the formal institutionalized kind. Flights of fancy, imaginative storytelling, the games we play as children and adults are indulgences we want to play a part in willingly. We like that kind of teaching, we look forward to it; but even so, feminine-primacy is ready to co-opt that desire for it’s own ends.
And that is how you subdue a culture.