Western culture is not feminising. How can I tell? The travails of Disney. Disney spent billions buying male-centric franchises—Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Indiana Jones … It then proceeded to so alienate the fan bases of those franchises that it is now reduced to openly discussing how to appeal to male audiences that it spent billions acquiring and further billions alienating.
If Western culture was feminising, then Disney should have had no trouble with its feminised products. Clearly, it has had problems. Meanwhile, the Top Gun: Maverick sequel to a 1986 movie can do excellent box office ($1.5bn) precisely because it knows what it is about.
The question then becomes, how and why did Disney so alienate those male-dominated fanbases it spent billions acquiring entree to? A simple answer would be that Disney was a Princess-story factory and it turned its new acquisitions into Princess-stories—stories not necessarily with literal princesses, but with female protagonists.
There is certainly a fair bit of that. A recent study found that Disney has tended, over time, to feminise male characters in its animated movies.
For it was not only that the Disney turned those franchises into launch pads for new Princess stories. Yes, Rey in the Star Wars sequels is an obvious example of doing precisely that. Nevertheless, there was rather more going on.
We can tell this from the Mulan live-action remake. The original 1998 Disney animated Mulan—despite controversy at the time of its cinematic release—acquired some popularity in China. It was seen as an engaging adaptation of the original story: a story deeply familiar to Chinese audiences. Worldwide, the film was a box office success.
The 2020 live-action Mulan remake was not a box office success. It was not for many reasons, but it was also emblematic of the problems of what YouTube critic Critical Drinker calls our post-creativity era.
2020 Mulan turned a female-protagonist story into a “woke” great-because-girl female-protagonist story. It turned a story of filial piety—a girl disguising herself as a boy to train and become a soldier in place of her disabled father, and struggling to overcome the limitations inherent in that—into something rather different.
Animated Mulan becomes accepted into the team of soldiers and triumphs through cleverness and teamwork. What makes the story resonate so well is there is nothing special about Mulan. She takes what she has and works hard at becoming better and succeeds in, and through, doing so. There is no hint of great-because-girl: rather it is fine being girl. Being a girl imposes limitations on her that she has to deal with and overcome: which she does—but not without genuine struggles—by sheer persistence and being clever, a problem-solver.
The key difference between a traditional Disney Princess story and contemporary Disney “woke” Princess story is the injection of great-because-girl. Live-action Mulan is a prodigy warrior with extra qi (or chi) who can do what the boys can do, but better. This is a cinematic version of a classic failing of feminism—by taking a blank slate view of humans, turning what men do into the standard for women. Women are great because they can do everything men can do, but even better. Feminist antipathy for stay-at-home mothers expresses this valorisation of matching men.
Live action Mulan is also much more politically conformist, even retrograde, in its denounement of Mulan celebrating service to the Emperor and going off to be a soldier. Animated Mulan rejecting a job as imperial advisor, and returning to her beloved father, is much less deferential to public authority.
The live-action film virtue-signals at the expense of story and understanding. It sacrifices clever cultural engagement for much flatter message-signalling.
If you want to watch a story set in China about women warriors, then the recent Chinese drama (C-drama) hits of Legend of the Female General and Shadow Love are available. These are smart, character-driven stories with the pervasive professionalism and sense of beauty—anchored in the cultural confidence—that one expects from contemporary costumed C-dramas, which are very much not based on trashing cultural heritage or we-know-better disrespect for source material.
Costumed C-dramas regulary have strong female lead characters while also having strong male lead characters. (As it happens, the male lead characters in both the aforementioned dramas are played by Cheng Lei; the female leads by Zhou Ye and Song Yi respectively.)
The case of Star Wars
The decline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe from its Avengers: Endgame highpoint, and the dwindling of the Indiana Jones franchise, also represent failures in intelligent creativity, with significant dashes of great-because-girl and signalling-over-story. But the epitome of the failures is what was done to the Star Wars franchise.
For Rey—the central protagonist of the sequel trilogy—is the epitome of great-because-girl. She can just naturally do everything better than boys. She can fly the Millennium Falcon better than Han Solo. She can just naturally manipulate the Force. She can just naturally beat Ben Solo/Kylo Ren in hand-to-hand combat. She does not need training, she does not need experience, because great-because-girl. The contrast with the story arc of Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars trilogy is painful.
Yet the problem with Disney Star Wars goes beyond great-because-girl. It is also the weaving in of the corollary of bad-because-boy. Han Solo is turned into broken down dead-beat Dad. Luke Skywalker—a character of not only great physical but also moral courage in the original trilogy—is turned into a pathetic hermit who had tried to kill his own disciple and nephew because of a vision.
The introduced male characters are either light relief (Finn), blundering macho-man (Poe Dameron) or angry evil juveniles (Kylo Ren, General Hux). This did not work. Each film in the sequel trilogy did worse box office than its predecessor: The Force Awakens ($2.1bn), The Last Jedi ($1.3bn), The Rise of Skywalker ($1.1bn).
This was more of a problem than it might appear, as Disney had paid $4bn for Lucasfilm and these were very expensive films to make ($245m, $317m and $275m respectively, plus distribution costs). The Star Wars TV series ranged from the strengths of Andor and early The Mandalorian to the sick joke of The Acolyte.
The Disnefication of Star Wars has been such a non-success that Disney is now left wondering what to do to get young male audiences.
Disney did not screw up in this way—and screw up again and again in franchise after franchise—because the culture was feminising. Disney’s problem was precisely that the culture was not feminising.
Disney’s problem was the way it, Disney, had feminised. The problem of feminisation—and we in the West have serious problems from feminisation—is not from the feminisation of culture in general, but from the feminisation of institutions and organisations (and of their internal cultures).
This feminisation can come from women literally becoming a majority of an occuption or industry (demographic feminisation), or it can come from women reaching sufficient critical mass as to create an effective veto that pushes an organisation—and its products—in a feminising direction (feminising dynamics). This is especially true if the organisation or institution become a vector for feminising status games.
As I discuss here, feminising is very different from being gender-egalitarian.
Demographic feminisation can also matter if it affects feeder industries. The book-to-movie pipeline worked when men dominated the publishing industry. Now that the publishing industry is about 80 per cent female, men have largely stopped reading new books, and the book-to-movie pipeline is a lot less healthy than it used to be.
Feminisation of institutions and organisations is far from an insoluble problem, but we cannot deal with it until the prog-sexism of if you criticise men, it’s feminism; if you criticise women, it’s misogyny is dead and buried. Dealing with the problems of feminisation not only includes stopping the law from encouraging employment of women-because-women, it also requires modelling good male behaviour and acknowledging and blocking bad female behaviour.
Nor is it just problems of feminisation per se, it is the wider problem of trashing heritage—of trashing the embedded learning (and yes, wisdom) of the past—in the service of a shallow, self-inflating, mutual signalling from elevating correct belief, correctly expressed, as the core of “being moral”. Elevating the moral and cognitive splendours in progressive heads becomes the central concern. Feminist feminisation—the entrenchment of great-because-girl and bad-because-boy (which is, of course, deeply sexist)—is part of the wider problems of progressivism and its deeply flawed relationship with information, epitomised by deciding that a person with a penis can be a woman and that sex is not biologically defined.
Disney’s problems are part of a wider malaise, as seen in the various discussions of the decline of Hollywood. Disney’s trashing of franchises through great-because-girl and bad-because-boy is part of a trend.
As YouTuber Nerdrotic so well expresses it:
24:33 Jody Whittaker, who started her reign as the first female Doctor, would end it in an era when we cannot define a female.
One commenter expressed the problem with the great-because-girl and bad-because-boy dynamic thus:
The biggest problem with modern screenwriting is that women aren’t allowed to struggle and men aren’t allowed to triumph.
This is more a recurring than a universal pattern, but it is a strong recurring pattern. Hollywood’s problems are not some general failure of films and television, they are specific to Western entertainment and Hollywood in particular.
Culture matters
The story-telling and audience engagement problems of Hollywood come down to what happens when your industry becomes infected by toxic, moralised status games without the cultural ballast that shines through in C-dramas. Hollywood’s ability to engage audiences has declined due to moralised status games that are not only without cultural power and resonance, they have deliberately degraded their ability to have such.
We Homo sapiens are a very social species. Being a social species is a huge evolutionary advantage—about half the animal biomass on the planet is made up of social species.
What makes this evolutionary success even more striking is that very few animal species are social species. Competition between genetic lineages within species creates a coordination problem very few species solve, and even fewer do so at scale.
Eusocial insects solve the social coordination problem by not attempting to coordinate across genetic lineages. Instead, they create non-reproducing females that serve the lineage of their queen and mother.1 Social coordination in eusocial insects becomes a technique within a genetic lineage in competition with other lineages.
Humans do something extraordinary: we coordinate at scale across genetic lineages. Non-kin cooperation at scale is the great Homo sapien achievement.
We solve the problems of coordinating across competing genetic lineages through language, through turning status into social currencies of cooperation, and through norms. Norms generate robust socially-coordinating expectations.
Turning status into social currencies of cooperation rest of us suppressing dominance behaviour. We replaced it with:
prestige—status through conspicuous competence, that can be prosocial by encouraging actions that help third parties; and
propriety—status through following norms, that can be prosocial by use of stigma to discourage actions that harm third parties.
We Homo sapiens—due to our highly cooperative subsistence and child-rearing strateigies—evolved these mechanisms for social cooperation that functional human cultures mobilise effectively.
Yes, cultures are collections of life-strategies that are disseminated within, and reinforced by, interactions within a group: including within or across localities. We Homo sapiens spend around 20 years being embedded within connections well before we become significant economic transactors, which is plenty of time to embed cultural framings and social scripts into our cognition.
Yet our cultures do more than generate life-strategies, as language requires us to be self-conscious. Language requires us to be able to assess, assemble and transmit packages of information. Cultures are also ways of managing the consequent burdens of being self-conscious—including being conscious of our own death.
This is why cultures include myths, stories, fables, folk tales; why cultures include things that have mythic power, speaking to archetypal human concerns and experiences. Cultures build on, indeed mobilise, that we humans cognitively model significance, not facts.
Cultures provide their members with mythic resources, shared ways of understanding the world and handling its pressures. This is very much part of the life-strategies of self-conscious beings.
Cultures also provide their members with mythic resonances, with ways of speaking to each other that have emotional depth. Indeed, one of the remarkable aspects of human culture is that such things can also speak across cultures. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings legendarium was about creating mythic stories for the English, but that very cultural rootedness has given them mythic power that has proved to be resonant across cultures.
All of this is impoverished by activism that throws all this away in favour of pre-concieved markers of righteousness. These markers of righteousness have proved to have far less resonance—both within Western cultures and outside them—than creative products that have all the mythic power, resources and resonance that comes from cultural confidence.
Chinese netizen contempt for the baizuo—the “white left”—picks up on the narrow, arrogant, impoverished, class-based provincialism of contemporary Western left-progressivism. As there some correlation between creativity and unethical behaviour,2 strong cultural guardrails likely discourage the disrespect for cultural heritage and source-material which has become such a feature of contemporary Western “entertainment”.
The profound, flattening, impoverishment involved in imposing pre-set markers of righteousness in what they produce and support is why activists—and those playing their toxic status games of self-righteous signalling—colonise and degrade existing entertainment franchies, as their preferred option, over creating their own stories. They lack access to, or respect for, what generates genuine mythic power.
Even worse, they proceed to inject awful life-lessons into their products precisely because they have rejected cultural heritage in favour of what is, in essence, collective narcissism from shared status plays. You cannot create things of mythic power if you recject, degrade, deconstruct and decolonise what generates mythic power.
YouTuber Rudyard Lynch argues that the travails of California—which the travails of Hollywood are a subset of—are what happens when you have every advantage, but throw culture away.
49:00 California is a perfect example of the tragedy of commons due to atomization where you’ll see staggering wealth next to enormous poverty. … there’s no concept of the commons or the society. ... 49:40 Societies are held together by shared ties, beliefs, and experiences, all of which California has killed on purpose.
Nor are the problems of Hollywood a problem with female-audience preferences. East Asian and South-East Asian societies show plenty of signs of female preferences mattering in entertainment. The amazing popularity of BL (Boys Love) stories across East Asia and South-East Asia testifies to the power of women’s consumer preferences. Lots of women clearly love watching pretty men be romantic with each other—much to the frustration of the CCP and its censors.
At least two major BL series that fans were eagerly anticipating—Eternal Faith and Immortality—have been locked away indefinitely in “censorship gaol”. Meanwhile, the Chinese entertainment industry proceeds to sell to the overseas demand, pretending that BL shows shot in China, with Chinese stars, in Chinese, are Thai, Singaporean or Taiwanese.
A show such as Kill to Love may be about a torrid, even toxic, relationship between two men, but it also drips with cultural confidence. Costumed C-dramas have no shortage of “strong female characters”. What they entirely lack is great-because-girl and bad-because-boy. The moral caste system of modern Western left-progressivism—where person of colour is better than white; female is better than male; gay is better than straight; trans is better than cis; based on spurious fetishisation of “marginalisation”—is also entirely lacking.
There is none of the if you criticise men, it’s feminism: if you criticise women, it’s misognyny nonsense. Characters do things for character-driven reasons. Costumed C-dramas include some quite creepily effective portrayals of female sadism, for example. They are entirely comfortable with both male and female heroism, male and female villainy, and everything in between.
Also, mobs are bad: this a VERY strong theme in costumed C-dramas. There is plenty of reasons within Chinese history to decide mobs are bad—Cultural Revolution anyone?—but I do wonder if the dramas are also making a comment about online mobs.
Modernising China is by no means immune to the difficulties of masculinity in feminised education systems; issues with parenting styles; with finding partners and with finding purpose in highly routinised societies. This extends to cultural critiques of androgynous male celebrities (some of whom are quite androgynous). Nevertheless, the cultural confidence of C-dramas—and the sheer quality that they regularly attain, that is generating ever-greater global audiences—exposes how dysfunctional so much Western “entertainment” has become.
One can understand the cultural concern about androgyny, without endorsing media effects Theory. East Asians, including East Asian men, have very gracile faces. There is a lot of male beauty among the top Chinese stars. They also typically do their own wire work.
Take the example of rapper, singer, dancer and actor Wang Yibo, who started as a member of a Chinese-Korean boy band. He used to regularly dye his hair (often blue), he likes girl’s jackets, wears rather feminine jewelry, rock climbs, races motorbikes and cars—seriously, as in 8 hour endurance races—was the only actor to be a Chinese Olympic torch-bearer in Paris, sang the theme anthem for the China’s 15th National Games, tried his hand at Beijing Opera, and is most famous for playing a cold, stoic warrior with a penchant for cutting the arms off bad guys. Apart from Tom Cruise (not a singer), how many Western stars would sing while hanging off wires a hundred metres or more up in the air? He has lots of female fans inside and outside China.
It is not as if media products from China never have propagandistic elements. One reason I stick to the costumed dramas is precisely to avoid such. Even Chinese historical dramas can be very cleverly constructed propaganda. But Hero is very clever precisely because it is so well done, using mythic cultural resonances, character and story so well. It is not, in any sense, typical.
Toxic status games
It is ironic that entertainment products of a Leninist tyranny (China) do not preach at you while “entertainment” products of Hollywood—and the Anglosphere more widely—absolutely do. Why do the latter preach at audiences in this ultimately franchise-destroying ways? Why do they trash the received cultural heritage and the canon of franchises? Because of toxic status games and the deliberate rejection of cultural grounding, and so of mythic power.
Modern Western societies are the product of the Emancipation Sequence, starting in the early C19th, where—in the Anglosphere—free people voted to liberate slaves, Christians voted to get rid of exclusions on Jews, Protestants voted to get rid of exclusions on Catholics, whites voted to get rid of exclusions on blacks, men voted to get rid of exclusions on women, straights opted to get rid of exclusions on gays and lesbians.
This was a process of persuasion and inclusion which utterly contradicts bullshit progressive stories of heroic “overthrow” of oppression by “morally special because marginalised” groups. The Emancipation Sequence was about recognitions of common humanity and shared membership of societies; not some nonsense moral hierarchy of special-though-lived-experience.
Creating moral caste systems, and then injecting them into stories, ruins stories by subordinating character and plot to message. It is part of how activism degrades realms of human action through requiring them to adhere to pre-conceived patterns, rather than operating according to their own internal logics. The activism within Western entertainment strangles story; C-dramas let story breathe.
If you look at the past and all you see is “white, patriarchal, imperialist, heteronormativity” you have not only ludicrously flattened the past into a caricature (distorted) and cartoon (simplistic) distortion of reality, you have cut yourself from any learning from past human achievements and all the mythic, resonant, resources of cultural heritage. Falling into these cartoonish caricatures of the past makes it that much easier to simply discard the constraints of canon—and respect for source material—and indulge in self-righteous signalling of one’s own virtue, based on the moral splendours in your head. More particularly, the moral splendours all those playing the same status games agree are in their heads.
These shared status games are thorougly toxic: toxic to understanding; to respect for material and audiences; to creativity. Once such status games take hold, they can—demonstrably—degrade entertainment franchise after entertainment franchise. Those playing these toxic status games no longer serve or respect the franchise, the material or the audience—let alone the fans. Instead, it becomes all about how clever and moral you and yours are: a moral performance that degrades and flattens cinematic and other performances.
Precisely because it is a toxic status game, it comes with inbuilt contempt towards the fans who love an entertainment franchise for what it is. Hence all the rhetoric about “toxic fandoms” and the utterly arrogant reworking of material to play to these shared, toxic, status games. (Calling the fans “toxic” is the iron law of “woke” projection in operation, yet again.)
As YouTuber critic Critical Drinker puts it:
1:50 … people are annoyed because it’s becoming increasingly obvious with every passing episode that Kenobi isn’t really about Kenobi. It’s just another example of Lucasfilm milking a popular legacy character for their name recognition, then altering their personality, removing most of their agency, charisma, resilience, skill and intelligence, and generally diminishing them, so they can place second fiddle to the new original character that the show is actually focused on …
There is something really odious about millionaire directors, and very well paid producers, executives and showrunners, “subverting”—i.e., trashing—entertainment franchises loved by millions of people who have far less “privilege” than they. This is an exercise in domination and colonisation, whereby those with institutional power take over something and trash it to serve their status and power games.
They do not create new stories with mythic power; they “subvert” what other people value, to show their social and status dominance, creating shallow products stripped of mythic power. The more they disparage and disregard the sources of myth, the more creating works of genuine mythic power becomes beyond them. They are, indeed, denizens of a post-creative era.
Entertainment franchises that have decades of history are full of characters who do not “fit” with the progressive moral caste system of person of colour is better than white; female is better than male, gay is better than straight; trans is better than cis, from spurious fetishisation of “marginalisation”. This is most true of male-oriented entertainment franchises, so they are the ones which get so destructively “subverted”.
Feminisation matters because it becomes an avenue for the feminist arrogance of great-because-girl, bad-because-boy that naturally leads to trashing male heroes—who are bad-because-boy—and replacing them with great-because-girl protagonists. Feminisation also matters through reducing the functioning of organisations and institutions via the trashing of team work; tone-policing; safetism; “bring your whole self to work” stupidity; elevation of “feels” and emotional safety; and undermining of trust; with relational aggression to enforce conformity.
It is how feminisation is such an avenue for left-progressivism’s disastrous relationship with information, and the sources of myth, that does the real damage. Once you use the imagined future as your benchmark of judgement, you not only make splendours in people’s heads central to their identity, so that they and theirs believe that they own morality—that their highly moralised status games are morality in operation—but you kill the respect for past experience, received heritage and anything else that fails to conform to those moralised status games. This turns out to include anything with genuine mythic power and resonance.
Once you buy into these toxic status games, you do not have the humility to have respect for canon. On the contrary, “subverting” canon to play to the shared status games becomes the way to go. Folk of shallow experience—riffing off even shallower Theory—produce message-over-story, caste-over-character, degradations of previously beloved entertainment franchises. They do not construct culture, they degrade it.
Cultural confidence gives you so much more to work with. You can build on past human achievement. You can use a shared language with audiences. You can appeal to human universals precisely because you are anchored in a particular cultural heritage and how it expresses such universals. You can revel in a sense of beauty. The cultural confidence of current C-dramas and past Hollywood creations shows how this works.
A fundamental driver of culture—particularly of myth—is the tension between the known (order) and the unknown (chaos). Cultural heritages express those tensions in ways that have proved resonant to people: for ideas have to resonate in order to replicate.
Valorising a delusion of knowing the imagined future—making it the benchmark of judgement, of moral standing, of being on the “right side of history”—while denigrating the distillations of past experience, and archetypal human concerns, is not culture, it is anti-culture. Such toxic status-games may resonate within very particular social networks, but its anti-culture products do not resonate more widely.
So, the culture is not feminising. The trashing of entertainment franchises, the travails of Hollyood, come from the downsides of feminisation of institutions and organisations intermingled with toxic status games that degrade entertainment franchises precisely because they throw away the creative energy that comes from engaging respectfully with past human experience and achievements. If you cannot respect human achievement, you have no model to stand on. You become part of the post-creative era, where so-called “creatives” become shallow pretenses of the same, policed by a whole network of cultural commissars (DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers …).
Setting the imagined future as the benchmark of judgement, as left-progressivism does, generates—as there is no information from the future—maximum valorisation from minimum information. It is not grounded in understanding, but a pretense of the same. It elevates the imagined, but unknown, future at the expense of the knowable: indeed, at the expense of the only sources of knowledge we have access to, the past and the present. It does not represent that exploration of the unknown through struggle and effort—that discovery of the complexities of being human—that generates mythic power; instead substituting highly conformist pretensions that resonate so narrowly precisely because they are about in-group status, not understanding: understanding that they are too informationally impoverished, and culturally bankrupt, to generate.
By their fruits, ye shall know them. The fruits of these culturally-degraded, and degrading, toxic status games are rotten to the core.
References
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Generally non-reproducing. Part of the dynamics of eusocial nests and hives is “worker policing”—stopping workers reproducing.
According to the Storme et al 2021 meta-analysis, 0.24/0.25 when using objective measures of unethicality.
Yes, I was so puzzled by what happened in those 'sequel' Star Wars films (I didn't bother to go and see the third one). And this as just an ordinary middle-aged mum who saw the first as a (very young) teenager and the second and third only on TV and have never seen the prequels. I fully expected Rey to persuade Ren to overcome the evil Emperor and for there to be a match between as they ruled 'happily ever after' and then I suppose Luke could have opened a Jedi retreat on Skellig instead of spontaneously combusting or whatever happened to him! That's certainly what I expected as an ordinary punter and was greatly disappointed - never again!
This article strangely gives me hope. I wonder how we get to the point where the institutions realize that they can’t survive if they don’t course correct in line with the culture that supports them.