There's another Snow White

In my last post I reported that a "warrior princess" Snow White film was being made. I suggested that modern culture had trouble accepting women as feminine creatures. As if to prove my point, I discovered that there's another film version of Snow White being produced called Mirror Mirror. This one stars the daughter of musician Phil Collins, Lily Collins:



Lily Collins as Snow White



Obviously I can't complain about the promotional picture shown above. That's certainly a feminine representation of Snow White.

But she doesn't stay that way. She ends up as a swashbuckling leader of a group of bandits in the forest. Lily Collins says that:

Our Snow White starts off as the fairytale princess we all know and love and then she progresses into a young woman and much of a fighter.

Just as Kristen Stewart was left with bloodied knuckles after her fight scenes, so too has Lily Collins found the fight scenes difficult:

While “Snow White & The Huntsman” has offered images of a warrior Snow White, Lily too, in “Mirror Mirror,” has some fight scenes.

“This was insane training,” she said of preparing for the role. “I’ve been fight training and fencing for about three months now… I was kickboxing, doing some stuff on wires. It’s been really intense.”

And all that training has left Lily a little worse for wear.

“I’ve gotten a lot of bumps and bruises, but so far no bad injuries,” she said.

So to prepare for the role of Snow White an actress now has to spend three months kickboxing.

Which raises a serious issue. If a girl wants to develop her feminine essence - so that she brings it out to its fullest and most admirable extent - then how does she go about cultivating it?

Modern society does not care much for this task. A girl will get no positive guidance from the mainstream culture. Watching actresses kickbox their way across the silver screen or the TV set isn't likely to help.

But if girls don't cultivate what is most admirable in their femininity, then won't they feel disconnected in their self-identity? And won't it be more difficult for men to feel instinctively connected to them?

Here's one small piece of advice I can offer. A young woman should look at herself in the mirror and observe her body: the elegance of her hands, the slenderness of her arms, the softness of her breasts, the warmth of her eyes and her smile. And she should try to match this truth about her body with her inner presence. Does her inner sense of self match what her own body has developed toward?

A bloody Snow White

A new Snow White is being filmed. True to the modern age, Snow White has been transformed from "the loveliest of them all" into a warrior princess.

Snow White as a warrior princess

The actress playing Snow White, Kristen Stewart, has been doing so many intense fight scenes that she was photographed with bloodied knuckles:

Is this something to worry about? In the sense that it's another example of a trend in modern society, I think that it is. Things go wrong when people don't identify wholly with their own sex. If you are in any way set against yourself as a man or a woman, then it becomes difficult to express yourself adequately in relationships with the opposite sex.

What does the recasting of Snow White suggest to girls? It suggests that to be the heroine you now have to mix a considerable amount of the masculine in with the feminine. It suggests that the feminine by itself is inadequate or inferior.

It's a pity the film makers went this way, as the preview suggests that the film is well made and likely to do well at the box office.

Charlie & Boots

A brief film review for Australian readers.

I saw Charlie & Boots on DVD last night. It's a road movie in which a father and son reconnect. I have to give credit to those involved: there was not even a moment of guilt mongering in the film, unlike so many recent Australian releases. The film isn't that deep, but I enjoyed the humour and the scenery - it works well as light entertainment.

I'd give it a 7 or 8 out of 10.

If you've already seen it, feel free to add your own comments.

Why do Pandorans get to be traditionalists?

The blockbuster film Avatar has just been released. It's about a group of humans who wish to mine the resources of the planet Pandora. The humans are portrayed as white, industrial society imperialists and the Pandorans as pre-industrial, close to nature indigenes. One of the whites is rescued by a Pandoran woman, taken up by the tribe and learns to love their traditional ways. He becomes the hero of the film by turning against his own race and leading the fight of the natives to preserve their existence.

The blogger Fjordman is not impressed:

Avatar has to be one of the most anti-Western and especially anti-white Hollywood movies I have seen in a long time.

The hero is the U.S. Marine Jake Sully who has been sent to the planet-like moon Pandora because humans desire the mineral resources found of Pandora, which is inhabited by a race of tall, blue-skinned aliens, the Na’vi. They have a non-industrial civilization technologically inferior to ours but apparently spiritually richer and in perfect ecological harmony with the natural environment. The hero predictably falls in love with the native culture and connects with a native girl ...

Basically, the white characters are portrayed as brutal, greedy and insensitive beasts who rape the environment and destroy other cultures with a smile in the search for profit. The main antagonist is the white Colonel Quaritch, a brute who hardly possesses a single positive character trait. The final climax of the movie is when he screams “How does it feel to betray your race?” to the protagonist while he is trying to murder him.

Although a few of the white characters such as Jake Sully are portrayed in a more redeeming light this is only because they totally reject their own civilization and join the other team in the fight. In other words: the only good whites are the ones who utterly turn their backs on their own destructive and evil culture. As reviewer Armond White put it, “Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.”

Fjordman isn't alone in taking the film this way. Another reviewer writes,

Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy ... it's undeniable that the film ... is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

If we think of Avatar and its ilk as white fantasies about race, what kinds of patterns do we see emerging in these fantasies?

In both Avatar and District 9, humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress. Then, a white man who was one of the oppressors switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior ...

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare ...

There are two things that have to be explained about all this. The first is why white liberals would fantasise about being traitors to their own race. The second is why liberal moderns, who think of themselves as progressives, would support the traditionalism of non-white societies.

It can seem very confusing. In the film the native Pandorans are portrayed in the most positive terms for having "a direct line to their ancestors". You would think, then, that the whites in the film would be encouraged to have a strong sense of ancestry and ancestral loyalty. But they don't. Quite the opposite - their path to redemption is to become race traitors.

So why do liberal moderns have a fantasy of fighting against their own race? I put forward part of an explanation just a few weeks ago. I'd noticed that Australian men were being told that domestic violence was a product of a patriarchal male culture. In other words, men committed violence against women in order to perpetuate their own unjust privilege in society.

I cautioned men against accepting this idea because of what it logically entailed. Once a man accepts that masculinity and masculine culture are an oppressive source of privilege and injustice, then he loses moral status and authority in society. This in itself is bad enough, but worse follows. What the domestic violence campaigners then tell men is that they can redeem themselves, and restore their moral status and authority, by breaking ranks with other men and acting against the masculine culture. They are redeemed, not only by forfeiting their own masculine self-identity, but by identifying in opposition to the masculine in society.

And a similar logic applies when it comes to race. Once a white person accepts the idea that whites are privileged at the expense of the non-white other, then there is a loss which will be hard for the most conscientious and politically aware to bear. Such people will want to speak with moral authority in society, but how can they as white oppressors? The path to redemption is, again, to break ranks and to identify with the non-white other in opposition to other unenlightened whites.

This helps to explain why some liberal whites are so obsessed with an anti-white/pro-other agenda.  It comes to express their self-concept and identity. It lies at the heart of how they see themselves and the ground on which they stand.

But why do white liberals praise what is traditional and non-liberal in native societies? Why are the Pandorans allowed to express a connection to ancestry and to defend their own culture but not whites?

If I understand Lawrence Auster correctly, a possible answer is as follows. There are white liberals, white non-liberals and non-white non-liberals. All three are necessary for the liberal script to play out in society. White liberals see themselves as morally virtuous because, in contrast to white non-liberals, they are open and accepting of the non-white other. But this then requires the non-whites to remain something "other" to the white liberal. What could be more "other" to the white liberal than non-white traditionalists?

In other words, the white liberal is practising his "virtue" by identifying with non-Western traditionalists. He is being a liberal in the very act of romanticising what is traditional and non-liberal.

Here's something else to consider. Liberals want equality and yet there appears to be inequality of power and wealth between different races and cultures. How can this be explained?

There are left liberals who believe that such inequality came about when one group of people, "whites", invented race and racism as an excuse to dominate and exploit other groups of people. Therefore whites are exceptional - exceptionally bad, that is. All that's necessary to restore equality is to attack white privilege and power.

If you believe this, then you'll get upset with any expression of white group identity. Even the most harmless expressions of such identity will be condemned as an attempt to defend "supremacy". But the identity of other groups won't matter so much, since they aren't seen as being tied to power, privilege and inequality. In fact, they might even be tied to resistance to whites and therefore be seen as progressive.

This is another reason for whites being treated differently to others and not being allowed to express a communal identity, whilst the identity of other groups gets a free pass.

Or there's the issue of dissent. There are left-liberals who see themselves as dissenters to the establishment (even though they are themselves a significant part of the establishment). But how do you demonstrate your dissent? If you think the establishment is a conservative bulwark against reform, then you can express your dissent in a predictable way - by advocating for progressive reform.

But what if you see the establishment as a soulless, materialistic, powerful Western industrial complex squashing the small, indigenous tribes in its path? Then perhaps you will express your dissent by identifying against the Western power complex in favour of the disappearing underdog tribes with their ancient wisdoms.

You might even then have a politically legitimate way to identify with things that you really do feel are lacking in more atomised modern liberal societies. You might even sound at times like a bit of a traditionalist - just not for the mainstream Western culture which retains its negative status as powerfully oppressive and destructive.

Review: Trust the man

Trust the man has just hit pay TV in Australia. It's a romantic comedy (aka chick flick) about two couples struggling through crises in their relationships.

The first couple have done a role reversal. Rebecca is a successful actress returning to the stage after having children; Tom has given up a job in advertising to stay home and look after the kids.

The second couple, Tobey and Elaine, have been living together, as "free spirits", for seven years.

The film doesn't put a liberal gloss on the relationships. The stay-at-home dad situation isn't working well. Tom is having a crisis in masculine identity and doesn't know who he is. His one consolation is internet porn. Rebecca, for her part, resents the suggestion that her role as wife and mother is now secondary to her career.

Nor is Elaine happy. She can no longer convince herself that she wants to live the single girl lifestyle forever. She now wants to get married and have kids. Tobey, though, is not good husband and father material. He is suffering an existential angst, which keeps him disengaged from life and selfishly immature.

The couples split apart. What can reconcile them? Here the message of the film is a little confused. To some degree, the film goes against liberal orthodoxy. The two men, both of them aimless and disoriented in their lives, realise that there is something worth striving for.

For Tom, it's family life. He misses his children and can't bear to live apart from them. So he tries to gain control over his more destructive behaviours. For Tobey, it's his love for Elaine. To win her love he has to be more serious and sincere in his attitudes.

So the basic message isn't too bad. It's that love and family are goods worth striving for as a man - that they justify an adult commitment to life.

So why is the film largely unsatisfying? One reason, I think, is that the two men are presented all too well as being cut adrift in life. They are hollow men, without a sustaining connection to their own masculinity, to work, to community or nation, to church, to nature or to culture.

Not only does this make it hard to identify with the men as characters, it also makes their eventual turnaround seem desperate. They are clutching at something left over, something offered to them by the much more grounded and mature women in their lives.

Nor do either of the men really challenge the overall drift of things. In the final scene we see Tom and Rebecca in a plane, now happily reconciled. Rebecca's career is going well, and the reinvigorated Tom has won the gushing admiration of a stewardess for writing a book about childcare.

This is a return to the more orthodox liberal idea that we can build a life around our own individual "projects", like book writing, and through status and career success.

The film doesn't really seem to have taken us anywhere. We started out with Tom being dissatisfied with what career status and career success brought him; now we're supposed to think that he's finally arrived through ... career status and success.

It makes me think that liberals, even when they recognise that something has gone wrong, have rejected too much to be able to offer a persuasive alternative.

Miss Potter

I went to see Miss Potter with my wife on the weekend. I'm pleased to report that it's not too bad.

The film does set up a typically liberal set of concerns, namely the restrictiveness of class, gender, family and marriage. To the disappointment of some mainstream critics, though, the film isn't really transgressive in its politics. The upper-class family is shown to be ultimately warm and caring, albeit overly class conscious, and Beatrix Potter happily renounces her single girl philosophy when she meets the right man.

It's not an especially deep film, but it's charming, and refreshing in its lack of rancour. A good couples film.

More Hollywood lies

Glory Road has just been released in Australia. It’s a film which claims to be the true story of the Texan Western Miners basketball team, an all-black team, which unexpectedly won the 1966 championship.

The film vilifies white America. It contends that black players weren’t accepted on university basketball teams and that the all-black team was met with racial violence and intimidation. As the American film critic William Arnold describes it,

In the middle of the film, there’s a devastating sequence of events that begins when one of the traveling Texas Western Miners is brutally assaulted in the restroom of a Southern restaurant by “crackers,” beaten bloody and then shoved head-first into a toilet in which we have just seen a man urinating.

Frightened by the incident, their confidence shaken, the Miners thereafter find, in an even more shocking scene, their motel rooms trashed, their personal belongings violated and the slogans “Niggers Die” and “Coons go home” scrawled all over the walls in what looks like either red paint or blood.

From here, the battered team takes a long, solemn bus ride to Seattle for its next game. When they arrive, the mood is so grim that Haskins’ assistant wants to give up. But Haskins can’t, because it’s become a moral crusade for him. “Just THINK of how these boys have been degraded and humiliated just because they’re black.”

Cut to the Seattle University game, where the fans are booing just like all the rest of the rednecks we have seen. And as a consequence of this abuse – the restaurant, the motel, the Seattle U fans – the Miners lose the game: the only loss of their magical season.

The Melbourne Herald Sun reviewer, Leigh Paatsch, fell for this portrayal of events. He came away from the film with the following belief about the Miners’ season,

Incredibly, until that time the very presence of non-white players was barely tolerated by schools, coaches or spectators.

Indeed, for much of the season chronicled by Glory Road, the Miners’ star players … are subjected to treatment seemingly lifted wholesale from a Ku Klux Klan guide to social etiquette.

Paatsch ought to have been more sceptical. The maltreatment of the black basketball players depicted in the film did not, in fact, occur. If we return to William Arnold’s review we finally get to the truth,

First, neither the restaurant nor the motel scenes actually happened to the Western Miners. This was divulged to me by the film’s producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, when I interviewed him a month before the film was released, Those incidents were made up, he said, “for dramatic purposes.”

Second, the racist reaction of the Seattle U fans is a fantasy. When I questioned the scene in my review of the film, a number of readers wrote to confirm my suspicion. “I was at the game,” one writes, “I was 12 years old at the time … It was a great game but there was no racial booing toward Texas that I remember.”

Another writes: “I am black. I was 16 when I listened to that game on the radio, and I don’t remember hearing any racially motivated booing, or any comment on such a response. I’m certain it never happened …”

Moreover, the ’66 Seattle University Chieftains were hardly the lily-white foe the movie depicts. As former player Mike Acres testifies in a recent issue of the Seattle University newspaper … they were “a predominantly black team. Four of our six top players were black.”

So the key scenes are made up. Why? Jerry Bruckheimer claims that it is for “dramatic purposes”. The problem is, though, that the film is being advertised as a true story, rather than dramatic fiction.

Jerry Bruckheimer must know that most people will respond like Leigh Paatsch, and accept the “dramatic” scenes in the film as historic fact, and draw negative conclusions about white Americans, their history and culture. In other words, Bruckheimer must know that the fabrications will have wider consequences than just adding cinematic drama.

It is another case of Hollywood manipulating public feeling. There’s not much we can do about it right now, except, of course, to distrust any Hollywood film dealing with such issues.

I can’t finish without one final quote from William Arnold. He too doesn’t accept that the fabrications in Glory Road are justified on dramatic grounds. He ends his review with this forthright comment:

When the movie untruth slaps you in the face, it’s not artistic licence: It’s a lie.

Depraved hero?

The film Kinsey has just been released in Australia. From reading the reviews in the press, a certain picture of the life of Alfred Kinsey emerges. He was a dedicated scientist, meticulously researching the lives of wasps until he discovered how ignorant Americans were about sex (he learnt this from his own virginal experiences on his wedding night, and from reluctantly being given a marriage class to teach as a young professor at Indiana University.)

Determined to gather scientific information about sex, he set about his pioneering work to study the sex lives of Americans. In 1948 he published his work Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male which revolutionised attitudes to sex by showing how common a wide range of sexual practices were, such as homosexuality, pre-marital sex and adultery. Kinsey is therefore to be regarded as a courageous scientist, who overcame ignorance so that people could enjoy sexual liberation.

What a great view of the man! Trouble is, it's bunkum. The real Kinsey was something very different, as the following facts demonstrate.

1) Kinsey was not some innocent, sexually naive wasp scientist who was "accidentally" made aware of the sexuality issue when given a university class to teach. According to a biographer, James H. Jones, Kinsey as a teenager was already a nudist, a masochist and had same-sex attractions. According to Jones, Kinsey wanted early on to have his sexual preferences regarded as normal, and realised that to achieve this it was best if he cast himself in the role of a "detached scientist".

Kinsey was not, in fact, the first to follow this path. In Germany, the homosexual Magnus Hirschfeld had campaigned to decriminalise homosexuality in the 1890s. In 1919 Hirschfeld established an Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, along much the same lines as Kinsey's own later institute at Indiana University. As one supporter of Hirschfeld has admitted,

Although he preferred to project himself as an objective researcher and scientist, Hirschfeld himself was gay and a transvestite, and participated in the gay subculture of Germany. For these activities he gained the epithet "Tante Magnesia" - "Auntie Magnesia".

2) In 1948 American culture was not exactly sexually innocent. An older, more conservative sexual morality seems to have broken down in the early 1920s. Miles Franklin, an Australian novelist, wrote in her biography that,

When I returned to New York in 1923 Freud had swept the field. The Puritan dams were broken ... Margery Currey said all the numerous office girls with whom she was in contact had 'been through it'. The lid was right off virtue, men told me.

When American soldiers arrived in Australia in the early 1940s, the strength of the "playboy" ethos amongst them was strongly noted and criticised. (It was still considered unmasculine in Australia at the time to be a "ladies man".)

So Kinsey was not really courageously swimming against the stream, but rather pushing on an existing current. That's one reason why his work Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male was so well received in America, despite its tremendous flaws.

3) Important aspects of Kinsey's work are unscientific and inaccurate. For instance, Kinsey claimed that 10% of people are homosexual and up to 35% of people are bisexual, thereby demonstrating how "normal" homosexuality is. These figures, though, were not obtained by random sampling. Instead, Kinsey interviewed volunteers, whom he sought from various groups, including sex offenders in prison and male prostitutes.

There have been many large-scale scientific studies since Kinsey, none of which come even close to claiming that 10% of the population is homosexual. There were two major surveys in the 1990s, one from Britain and one from France, which both arrived at a figure of 1.1% for men. If you include men who have ever in their lives had homosexual sex, the figure (in the French study) rises to 4.1%.

4) Kinsey was not a mild-mannered scientific type, engaged in a detached observation of people's sex lives. He was an extremely depraved man, even by today's standards, determined to prove that all sexual behaviour was normal (he once said that there were only three sexual abnormalities: abstinence, celibacy and delayed marriage).

As examples of Kinsey's unwell condition, consider the following: Kinsey crudely attempted to circumcise himself with a pen-knife, he was once hospitalised after another particularly severe masochistic incident, he once tried to force a tooth-brush into his own urethra, he encouraged his own wife to commit adultery with a co-worker, and most disturbing of all, he believed that children were sexual from birth and he trained pedophiles to record information about the responses of children they were raping.

So the image presented by the media of Kinsey doesn't fit the facts. Why then do so many journalists persist in looking up to Kinsey as an admirable figure? Herald Sun film reviewer, Leigh Paatsch, for instance, claims that the film Kinsey examines his life "even-handedly" and that,

The man's only mistake was to speak loudly about sex when the moral majority preferred it to be whispered as a dirty little secret.

In other words, Leigh Paatsch not only fails to condemn Kinsey, he effectively says that Kinsey made no mistakes except to upset the prudish majority.

The reason why Kinsey still commands respect, I think, is that his work fits in well with the basic liberal principle, so influential today, that there should be no impediments to individual will. Most intellectuals have accepted this idea, and this makes them sympathetic to the direction of Kinsey's work. Kinsey, after all, tried to prove that restrictions on human sexuality were simply "repressions" established by nothing more than irrational social convention.

If Kinsey is right, then there are no justifiable limits to individual will in the field of sexuality. It becomes a case of "anything goes", in which we are free to choose, according to our own will, in any direction.

It is a shared commitment to this ideological principle which leads reviewers like Nicki Gostin to praise Kinsey for his "respect for individuals" or Phillipa Hawker to note Kinsey's discovery that sexuality is "not as fixed" as might have been supposed or Phillip McCarthy to claim that Kinsey "helped end the tyranny of one-size-fits-all-sex".

Such reviewers are more interested in the liberal morality of an unimpeded individual will, rather than the more conservative belief that there exists an objective morality for the individual to live up to, and that some forms of sexual behaviour are less healthy, less elevated and more destructive than others.