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There isn’t a week in which someone in Hollywood is not trying to advertise themselves by making the most woke statements possible. This time director James Cameron and actress Jennifer Lawrence are the perfect example of this unbridled competition for attention. In a video for Variety, Jennifer Lawrence said she recalled that “when I was doing Hunger Games, nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie.”
Although after the generalized derision for her cinematographic ignorance she clarified that “that’s certainly not what I meant to say at all”, the truth is that she assured that it was explained to her that “girls and boys can both identify with a male lead, but boys cannot identify with a female lead.” Beyond the fact that it is false that there have been no female protagonists in action films before her, her statements highlight one of the harmful consequences of radical feminism flooding Hollywood: in its eagerness to take credit, the feminist movement tries to change history to make people believe that everything was worse for women before their irruption into politics
Paradoxically, this renders invisible the women who did help pave the way in the industry in general – and in the action genre in particular – through their effort and talent, and not through artificial quotas.
Doris Day in Calamity Jane (1953), Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. (1966), Jane Fonda in Barbarella (1968), Sigourney Weaver in Alien (1979), Linda Hamilton in The Terminator (1984) and many, many other actresses, now seem not to exist for feminism.
Their existence would prove that today’s radical feminism is not the only possible salvation for women, and that they really have nothing to fight for beyond what each one can achieve on her own merits as an individual.
All of these characters prove that male viewers can indeed identify with female protagonists, as long as, of course, they are well-written, well-acted, and believable characters despite the hyperbolic nature of the action genre; not like the boring, photocopied feminist female characters that monopolize today’s cinema.
James Cameron and toxic masculinity
Coincidentally, two of these iconic female characters were forged by James Cameron, who directed Sigourney Weaver in the sequel Aliens and his ex-wife Linda Hamilton in the first two Terminator installments.
Despite the very masculine traits and behaviors he gave these fictional women, James Cameron now seems to be joining the woke trend of blaming men and masculinity for all of society’s ills.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, perhaps daunted by the possible failure of his new Avatar installment, James Cameron said that testosterone is “a toxin that you have to slowly work out of your system.”
According to him, this impetus caused by the male hormone led him in the past to vehemently confront executives to defend some of his projects such as Avatar or Titanic, and now he regrets it.
Perhaps James Cameron is undergoing some kind of hormonal cleansing to deconstruct his masculinity that has led him to forget that it was precisely his vehemence that enabled him to achieve his two biggest successes. Or perhaps he is simply trying to give a headline with which to promote his new film by pandering to the woke horde, so intent on pointing to men, masculinity and the patriarchy as the scarecrow with which to keep the masses distracted.
We don’t know if resorting to woke ideology is merely a publicity stunt, or if the Hollywood crowd is truly so politicized that they believe it. In any case, we should show them that an increasing number of us are fed up with their ideology conditioning their art and lowering its quality.
Not watching Avatar 2 would be a smart way to force James Cameron to recover some of the lost testosterone for his next movies.
Ignacio Manuel García Medina, Business Management teacher. Artist and lecturer specialized in Popular Culture for various platforms. Presenter of the program "Pop Libertario" for the Juan de Mariana Institute. Lives in the Canary Islands, Spain // Ignacio M. García Medina es profesor de Gestión de Empresas. Es miembro del Instituto Juan de Mariana y conferenciante especializado en Cultura Popular e ideas de la Libertad.
Social Networks: @ignaciomgm