I just recently caught parts of Joss Whedon’s movie Avengers: Age of Ultron on TV that I hadn’t seen before.
Sorry, I’m not much for movies based on comic books. I haven’t read comic books since… well, it was more decades ago than I care to admit. I made an exception with the Iron Man movie trilogy (if that’s what it turns out to be), and thoroughly enjoyed it, but I had little interest in The Avengers, and about zero interest in anything more removed from the Iron Man movies than that.
I have, however, been a big fan of Joss Whedon for a long time. Many years ago the author Jon Katz and I had an e-mail exchange for a while, and he convinced me, against my better judgement, to check out the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which took a while to grab me, but I eventually binge-watched the entire seven seasons (sorry, I don’t count comic books as TV show seasons, and haven’t read them). It wasn’t, as some have suggested, a reversion to my childhood fascination with vampires (starting with the original book Dracula, which I read several times as a boy). Nor was it, as some ladies have pointedly suggested, that I found the girls on Buffy so attractive that this one factor overcame my judgement. Instead it was a fascination with his superb story-telling, absurd premise, pop-culture references and all.
My respect for Joss Whedon deepened with Firefly and Serenity, and even with Dollhouse, which doesn’t seem to do much for most people and is admittedly pretty dark and weird.
Of course, in this time I became familiar with Whedon’s very public, very feminist positions. His opinions on the subject were at odds with my own, he was claiming that even thrid-wave feminism was just an acknowledgement that “women are people” even while they made huge progress in the First World in their efforts to dehumanize, demonize, and disenfranchise men, reducing them to second-class citizen status. Virtually nobody has a problem with the “women are people” assertion in the 21st Century, but a great many women now seem to have a problem with the concept that men are people. It’s way past time to stop counting that as progress.
Still, he seemed to me well-intentioned and misguided rather than malevolent in his opinions, and I’m in the minority in mine, and he focused a lot on non-First World situations where the reality is still very different, so… whatever.
Then the movie “Age of Ultron” came out, and the feminists that he had championed for so long turned on him and started to devour him. They didn’t like, on some grounds that aren’t entirely clear, that the character Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow turned out to have been sterilized as part of a government’s raising her to be a dedicated assassin (not exactly a stretch), and somehow that indicated that Joss Whedon was really sexist. They also didn’t like, again on some grounds that aren’t entirely clear, that sometimes-reprehensible character (Tony Stark) made a not-very-admirable attempt at a joke, proving himself “not worthy” in a scene designed to explicitly show that he was not worthy.
And so on, and so on… bottom line is, as is apparent to pretty much everyone but the Social Justice Warriors and would-be Social Justice Warriors themselves, you can never, ever be Politically Correct enough for the Social Justice Warriors. You can’t play their game and win. In the end, they will turn on and devour their own kind, because the foundation of their world-view is self-loathing.
Whedon seemed to withdraw from work and the world, and I assume he thought about the situation, but apparently it didn’t prompt him to reconsider his own position as a SJW.
I noted all this in passing, and I tried to note the irony while not taking any pleasure in it.
Of course, when the Gods decide to piss in your Wheaties, they may not be through anytime soon.
After a short lull when there was a dearth of Whedon news, we heard that his wife is divorcing him, accusing him of multiple infidelities, and of being a “fake feminist”.
I have no idea whether or not this is true, and don’t consider it my business. But notice the huge leap here; it is stated flat-out that he cannot have been unfaithful to his wife and be a feminist.
Really? Let’s flip this and see how it stands up.
Obviously, a woman can be unfaithful to her husband and be a feminist, feminists everywhere will applaud her independence with zero regard to the covenant that she freely entered into or the solemn vows that she took.
But lets make it even more symmetrical. Suppose there was a successful lady who publicly supported men’s rights, later on her husband makes a big show of accusing her of being unfaithful in the marriage, and therefore a complete hypocrite on the men’s rights issue. Does that make sense? Would she be broadly condemned in public for her actions? Would all of her fans abandon her because of her poor husband? Would feminists declare that her action removes her rights to that political opinion?
Not a chance.
In my opinion, this is not about the man not being a feminist because he was unfaithful. This is about him not being a feminist because he was disobedient. It reveals the true nature of feminism, that first and foremost it demands obedience from men.
Of course, she has to be even more the victim, because we practically worship victimhood in this culture now. We are also told that his wife is complaining that her health has been ruined. She has “Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”.
Puh-leeeze.
That’s obviously much more dire than “simple” Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the kind that combat veterans often suffer from, because it’s “complex”. It requires explanation.
I’ll bet it does.
So, when a man is unfaithful in a relationship the woman gets lawyers on her side, they make up a dire-sounding disorder to sue him over, set about wringing every bit of his money from him that they can and ruining his career. When a woman is unfaithful the man is supposed to suck it up, be supportive, admire her independence, and very possibly raise or pay to raise some other man’s child under threat of force.
Okay, back to the movie in question, the “Age of Ultron”:
It’s made obvious in the movie (and previously) that Bruce Banner and The Hulk (if that is a plurality) are susceptible to Natasha Romanov’s/Black Widow’s charms. Okay.
Toward the end of the movie, though, she’s on a screen in the cockpit of an aircraft using her “connection” to The Hulk to feed instructions to him on what her controlling organization (that’s a little fuzzy at this point) wants him to do next. She has in effect been controlling him this way for the entire story, even using outright trickery at one point to force Bruce Banner to transform into The Hulk against his will, then “talking him down” again to his transformation back into Bruce Banner whenever they’re through with The Hulk.
From the beginning, whatever her own feelings might be, Natasha’s job has been to control Bruce Banner with flirtation and to control The Hulk with her vulnerability. The first works because he’s a lonely guy, the second because he is a good guy, but Natasha is doing this for the sake of the team and the team’s goals, not for him. She has become the Hulk wrangler, reducing him to the role of an animal to be wrangled, and she seems to think this situation can go on indefinitely.
This time, however, The Hulk calmly (Calmly? Anyone got a problem with that?) and maybe a little sadly reaches out and cuts her off in mid sentence, cutting off communications. That’s the last we actually see of him.
He knows she’s used him, manipulated him. The Hulk, or Banner, or both are giving up on her rather than allowing his subservient and obedient role to continue. He would not hurt her, he need not challenge her, confront her, argue about it or try to change her mind, because bottom line, whatever she thinks, he is in control of himself. He doesn’t require her permission or approval for his own actions. He just cuts communication.
I’ve read some other interpretations of this act since, but my honest first reaction was “good for him”. Ultron himself made a big point in the movie of having “no strings” controlling him. It’s a theme of the movie, but it was The Hulk that had the courage to cut his own.
From anyone but Joss Whedon I’d immediately conclude that this is a MGTOW moment. This is the very essence of MGTOW. Not acting against women, not railing against women, not disliking women, but just deciding not to allow those strings, even if there is a cost to the decision.
Good for him.
We are shown a scene in which Black Widow seems to show great sadness about this. If that’s what it was, it lasted maybe a minute or so, and it was back to business. Even for that minute it’s not clear whether she’s mourning the loss of Bruce Banner, or of her control over him. She has failed in her assigned task. Whether that bothers her more or less than Bruce deciding that she’s not worth playing the pawn for is not clear.
Is it just possible that the Hulk’s final act of disobedience is the scene that actually motivated the feminists to attack Joss Whedon, but they just chose other scenes to focus the attacks on because they made less revealing targets?
– Robert the Wombat