Mad Max: Fury Road has earned near-uniformly rave reviews for being the sort of action movie that leaves other action movies wanting, creating a savage beauty from its cyber-circus freaks and their desert smash-’em-ups, and generally being a hell of a good time. However, it can’t be that much fun, because there are women around. Women—always ruining the post-apocalypse with their refusal to go make sand-sandwiches while the men do men things—have infiltrated the film, and made it all about their tired feminist agenda of not being sex slaves to a warlord. And Men’s Rights Activists are not having it.
As noted by The Mary Sue, the MRA blog Return Of Kings—the online paper of record “for heterosexual, masculine men” to declare their dominance, by making a safe space where they don’t have to talk to women or gay people—has proudly asserted its masculinity with a blog post complaining that a movie’s use of female characters threatens it. Specifically, writer Aaron Clarey believes men could find themselves “duped by explosions, fire tornadoes, and desert raiders into seeing what is guaranteed to be nothing more than feminist propaganda, while at the same time being insulted AND tricked into viewing a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their very eyes.” How, he asks, could Australian director George Miller have so ruined and rewritten George Miller’s creation in such a way that so blatantly disregards this Australian franchise’s proud American heritage? America is where men live.
While Clarey admits that he has not actually seen Fury Road—obviously not wanting to have his penis ripped off and replaced with a Betty Friedan book—he just knows that the film is feminist propaganda from seeing the previews, which prominently feature Charlize Theron’s character, Furiosa, talking and doing things. “Charlize Theron sure talked a lot during the trailers,” Clarey laments, but even more egregiously, “Charlize Theron’s character barked orders to Mad Max. Nobody barks orders to Mad Max.”
Indeed, other than his commanding officer in Mad Max, his captors in The Road Warrior, and Tina Turner in Beyond Thunderdome, Mad Max is simply always in charge of his own destiny as a pawn who’s manipulated by circumstance into various power struggles he wants no part of, and is almost never being told what to do more than once or twice per movie. And certainly never by a woman, except when they are women.
Also raising Clarey’s suspicions that something wasn’t Men’s Right here were the reports that The Vagina Monologues’ Eve Ensler was brought in as a consultant, with Ensler offering Miller her own experience with talking to sex slaves in the Congo. While Clarey casts some suspicion on Ensler’s qualifications—something that’s been echoed in protests beyond his self-proclaimed “manosphere,” it must be said—his biggest issue with Ensler remains that she writes monologues for vaginas. Therefore, he realized, “Fury Road was not going to be a movie made for men. It was going to be a feminist piece of propaganda posing as a guy flick,” blatantly tricking you into seeing it with its promises of car chases and explosions, which traditionally only happen around men. But, it turns out, all that smoke obscuring the screen is nothing but a smokescreen.
“It looks like that action guy flick we’ve desperately been waiting for where it is one man with principles, standing against many with none,” Clarey writes of the still-elusive action movie ideal, which Mad Max promises yet fails to fulfill. Why can’t we have just one action movie about a lone man taking on other men? When will we finally get a Taken sequel that isn’t just Liam Neeson reading from Our Bodies Ourselves?
In fact—like a sports movie where the underdog triumphs, or a romantic comedy where a couple doesn’t immediately realize they’re in love—we may never have that sort of action movie, because Clarey has seen his own grim vision of the future. It is a cinematic wasteland as scarred as the modern male psyche, roamed by Hollywood vehicles tricked-out with feminist agendas, and fueled by “the trope [that] women are equal to men in all things, including physique, strength, and logic.” That is, unless real men band together in a protest worthy of their masculinity: refusing to see a film, then going on the Internet to warn other men that it has ladies in it.
So do yourself and all men across the world a favor. Not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible. Not all of them have the keen eye we do here at ROK. And most will be taken in by fire tornadoes and explosions. Because if they sheepishly attend and Fury Road is a blockbuster, then you, me, and all the other men (and real women) in the world will never be able to see a real action movie ever again that doesn’t contain some damn political lecture or moray about feminism, SJW-ing, and socialism.
Despite Clarey’s warnings about these feminist morays, burrowing in the sands of our action movies and eating all our masculinity and cuttlefish, Fury Road is projected to make around $40 million in its opening weekend. And if that happens, someday, some movies may not even be about men at all.