(Adapted from a Facebook comment.)

I have not yet seen Mad Max: Fury Road, although I am very excited about seeing it sometime soon. I re-watched The Road Warrior over the weekend, and have thoroughly enjoyed the various retrospective pieces about the film series. Perhaps even more so, I have felt an extreme sense of Schadenfreude with regard to the way certain people of the MRA persuasion are reacting to the film, generally without even having seen it. Apparently a movie set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which men are not the sole focus of attention is absolutely terrifying to some people (and not for any reason having to do with the “post-apocalyptic part.”)

A piece by Breitbart writer John Nolte, as quoted and summarized by bspencer at Lawyers, Guns & Money, offers praise to the film’s view of feminism, at least as Nolte perceives it, from a presumably conservative viewpoint (it is Breitbart, after all):

“Fury Road” is nothing like the diseased modern-day, left-wing feminism spread by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Miller’s women are not victims, are not Julias, are not dependent on a central government to solve all their problems, are not wallowing in a narcissistic cult of their own victimhood, and are not acting like men.

In fact, just the opposite is true. Miller’s heroines are beautiful, feminine, and breaking away from a cult of personality and its tyrannical central government. These are feminists who have come for their God-given rights, not emasculate. They don’t crybaby, they act. They don’t tell others how to behave, they fight. They don’t want to take away your rights, but they damn sure are demanding their own.

These are women too busy being strong and independent to collapse into a helpless ball of harpy outrage over imagined offenses.

I’m intrigued by this verbiage: “the diseased modern-day, left-wing feminism spread by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.” This typically comes from people who are decidedly anti-feminist. I know little to nothing of John Nolte, but his presence on the Breitbart site puts him squarely in the “conservative” camp, and the general tone of his review leads me to think that he is normally not one to give much credence to feminist viewpoints.

I’m pretty sure Nolte doesn’t mean this, but by characterizing modern-day feminism the way he does while praising the movies’s main female character, he seems to be making a case for a much more strident, even militant, form of feminism. It’s not just that he might prefer his feminists looking like Charlize Theron (who, much like Monica Bellucci in The Passion of the Christ, is beautiful even when smeared with mud and donkey poo).

Still Monica Bellucci. Still beautiful. (Via imgkid.com)

Still Charlize Theron. You know the rest. (Via Indiewire.com)

Nolte also appears to respect Theron’s character’s willingness to fight for her rights and her interests. Is Nolte suggesting that women are wasting their time asking the government to take their various needs seriously, and that they should adopt more of a DIY posture?

Take the issue of campus sexual assault (you knew I was going there, right?) By Nolte’s reasoning, women shouldn’t bother pressuring university administrators, police departments, and legislators to address the issue. They should just start taking the motherf***ing perpetrators out.

Somehow I doubt that’s what Nolte meant. He probably typed his column with one hand, anyway.