Mad Max and the Anti-Feminist Truth

The preview for Mad Max: Fury Road made it look like a grrl-power movie and some people were touting it as a great feminist flick, so I wasn't very excited about it. After a few friends assured me that it had been misrepresented, I relented and bought a ticket for this past weekend. I'm glad I did.

Fury Road is full of absurdities and impossibilities, but plausibility has never been a major element of the Mad Max franchise. In such an unlikely world, feminism wouldn't be so out of place. I mean, why not? Spiked and armored columns roaring about the desert wouldn't exactly be a realistic feature of a fuel and water starved post apocalyptic world, so it's no more implausible to posit a female warrior woman ruling the nightmare metropolis of Barter Town or taking on the mutant armies of Immortan Joe. Everything is bigger and badder than it could ever be in the real world and that's one of the things we love about these movies. More guns, more insanity, big explosions, and bigger bad guys. But when it comes to feminism, this movie is much more consistent with the facts of life in the real world than it is in other areas.

In fact, Fury Road is one of the most anti-feminist movies I've seen in a long time.

Here are a few anti-feminist principles that it gets right:

• Without a gun or comparable weapon, almost no woman has a reasonable chance in a fight against a below average man. Without Max to fight for them, Furiosa and Joe's harem girls would have been killed or captured very early in the story.
• Objective, widely accepted and enforced moral standards are essential for civilization.
• The physical infrastructure of civilized society (buildings, roads, farms, machinery, weapons, etc.) is almost exclusively created and maintained by men.
• Women are at the mercy of men. They always have been and always will be. If a woman is not under the protection of one man (father, husband, policeman, soldier, etc.), she will be easy prey for some other man. If there is a woman living in peace, she is either isolated from the rest of humanity or else there is a man somewhere threatening violence against anyone who might wish her harm.

You don't have to like it. You can rage against it all you want. It remains the truth:

Feminists are living out a fantasy that is only made possible by a solid--if understated--patriarchy.