I recently went to hang out with my sister for an afternoon. During this time we got to chatting and somehow fell upon the topic of Star Wars. She’s an enthusiastic nerd about these films, so we probably got there when she mentioned her love of the female protagonist for the movie. Because she is also a very enthusiastic 3rd Wave feminist.
I said something about how I couldn’t figure out why she needed assign a gender to a protagonist to enjoy being entertained, and that I enjoyed the character and didn’t care when their genitalia looked like.
She came back with “Well, you don’t have to worry about that, because you’re a guy. You get all the protagonists you want.” To which I replied with “And all the antagonists too.”
She then went off on how she is able to enjoy SW Eps four, five and six more now because she see these films as the dudes (Luke, Han, Lando, and probably Chewbacca too) putting aside their ambitions to unite behind a woman and get her into the leadership of the rebellion (or some such business).
I then went on to monlogue with something very close to the following:
“You can’t do that. You cannot see yourself as ‘A Woman’ first. You are a individual human being first. Once you put yourself into a box of ‘I’m a woman’ or ‘I’m black’ as the first part of your internal identity, you have lost and you will never have another happy day in your life. You may get happy moments, but they will be at the expense of those who are not like you and they will be made from spite and envy.”
“The moment you let someone tell you how to think of yourself, you have lost your true identity as an individual and as a human being. And it is someone else telling you to believe that. You do not do that to your own mind. It has to be fed to you, usually by someone telling you that the opposite of you is ‘bad’.”
She then quit speaking to me for a solid five minutes and when she did speak, the subject was changed, but the glare was the same.
We will meet up again. Probably in the next few weeks. She’ll keep the SJW bottled up until she can’t any more and I’ll unleash my individualism speech again, and maybe this time the glare will be replaced with a reasonable reply.
Or maybe not. But I’ll keep giving the speech to her and everyone else who has been SJW’d until I get one.
Gender of the proto-Jedi protagonist is irrelevant. My biggest bitch about Ep. 7 is they basically retold the same damn story from Ep. 4. Of course, in the feminist trope of “anything you can do I can do better”, female-Luke gets to the same level of Jedi abilities at the end of the movie that male-Luke got to at the end of his second movie, all without benefit of a Yoda. Then again how much training does one need to face off with a Darth Vader fanboy with anger management issues?
Sir, I’m gonna print and frame that there speech, and hang it on a wall in my gunroom.
Those are words that bear long and deep contemplation. I hope your sis does exactly that with them.
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
This
“You can’t do that. You cannot see yourself as ‘A Woman’ first. You are a individual human being first. Once you put yourself into a box of ‘I’m a woman’ or ‘I’m black’ as the first part of your internal identity, you have lost and you will never have another happy day in your life. You may get happy moments, but they will be at the expense of those who are not like you and they will be made from spite and envy.â€
“The moment you let someone tell you how to think of yourself, you have lost your true identity as an individual and as a human being. And it is someone else telling you to believe that. You do not do that to your own mind. It has to be fed to you, usually by someone telling you that the opposite of you is ‘bad’.â€
This. A thousand times, this
“You can’t do that. You cannot see yourself as ‘A Woman’ first. You are a individual human being first. Once you put yourself into a box of ‘I’m a woman’ or ‘I’m black’ as the first part of your internal identity, you have lost and you will never have another happy day in your life. You may get happy moments, but they will be at the expense of those who are not like you and they will be made from spite and envy.â€
“The moment you let someone tell you how to think of yourself, you have lost your true identity as an individual and as a human being. And it is someone else telling you to believe that. You do not do that to your own mind. It has to be fed to you, usually by someone telling you that the opposite of you is ‘bad’.â€
Bloody brilliant, oh Master of Philosophical word-smithing and verbal smack-downs….. Can I steal that for a story? Not sure exactly where I’d use it, but it’s too epic to leave laying fallow.
Can we cut the preliminary chitchat and get to the nub of the issue?
The self-styled “social justice warriors” are neither warriors nor are they in service to Social Justice.
They are petulant children whom their elders have had quite enough of, thank you.
I did not spend much time being petulant in my youth, because my elders imbued me with the idea that further petulance would being punishment to my corporeal self.
We need to revive that process.