he cartoon character Pepe Le Pew has just been canceled for
“promoting rape culture.”
You might say that canceling a cartoon character, who it must be remembered is not a real person, is the latest example of wokesters competing to see who can do the most outrageously stupid stunt and get away with it.
Or you might say it's an example of how ideology destroys culture. I defy anyone to name a single instance where an ideologue of any stripe ever created anything worthy of admiration. Killing 100,000,000 innocent people in an attempt to make everyone the same doesn't count.
You might even say I'm arguing over trivia, but it tells us a lot about where the wokesters are headed. Pepe Le Pew ought to be a feminist icon, always giving women unwanted sexual attention, manspreading and annoying female skunks with his strong cologne. But the eyes of ideologues see everything in the same shade of black and white, so they deliberately misunderstand him.
The movie Little Women is similarly misunderstood. I had to fortify myself with six cups of coffee to get through what is essentially a chick flick (based on Louisa May Alcott's Civil War era book), but, not that it matters, Little Women is not a feminist movie at all.
No, it's a depiction of what happens when women, who are the owners of sexual selection, become lost and confused when there are no real men around. In the movie, the women talk about whom they are supposed to marry and discuss whether this or that guy is rich enough and whether others will approve. They talk about how they ‘love’ this one or that, but there is no passion there. They toy with the idea of getting married to some dandy who hangs around, but there are zero sparks between him and any of them. When one of the women steals the other's boyfriend, she is sad but forgives her.
Debby Does Dallas had more passion than that.
It is only when a big masculine guy shows up and plays Beethoven on poor deceased Beth's piano that one of the characters suddenly discovers that there is this thing called sexual attraction. Her recognition of the fragility of life finally aroused by his gesture, she gets the hots for the guy and runs after him. It is the only part of the movie where any of the characters acts remotely like a real human being.
The theme in this movie, it seems to me, was not that women have just as much right as men to become famous writers, or that they were oppressed by society in some way that was different than how men were oppressed (bearing in mind that 700,000 of them had just been oppressed in the worst way possible), but that they had missed out on life because they had all become conformist.
They are still conformist today, but in a different way. Only the thing they're conforming to has changed. Conformism is part of women's biological programming (and admittedly it's a relative term—all social animals must be conformist to some extent). The struggle they face is not with the Patriarchy, but an internal one. In fighting the battle against the patriarchy, or against any pre-defined enemy, they lose their humanity and their perspective on life.
If only Alcott had known that her ideological descendants would end up trying to cancel a cartoon skunk, she might have put more tachyons and flying saucers in her book.
mar 09 2021, 6:02 am
