A Tale of Two Movies, and the Men Who Think About Them

I was relieved last week that the editors of this fine magazine didn’t assign me to review Barbie. Because then I would have had to see it. And there are some stories too horrible for even a veteran Culture War correspondent to cover. The task fell to my Spanish friend and colleague Itxu Diaz, who did a superb job of exposing the film’s anti-male offensive, made more insidious by using the world’s most beloved doll as cover.

The innocent desire of girls and moms to see their precious possession brought to life on screen — particularly in the lovely form of Margot Robie — made them the perfect prey for feminazi indoctrination, while they paid for the propaganda. By the time enough unsuspecting moms realize they’ve been had, Barbie will have joined the worldwide billion-dollar club. (READ MORE: Movie Fest: TCM’s “Summer Under the Stars”)

I do intend to see the other monster hit of the summer, Oppenheimer. But even without having seen either movie, I got pulled into their ideological radiation by two male friends in opposite camps. The contrast in their exchanges with me reflects the irreconcilable divide of America today, specifically as it pertains to manhood. For the country to survive, the unmanly philosophy of my progressive friend — pseudonym “Richard” — must be utterly quashed in November 2024.

Few creatures on Earth are more pathetic than male feminists like Richard. They cast their lot with the angriest, bitterest, ugliest subculture extant to further damage the essence of civilization, the family. To attain this nadir, they must assume the “crusader for women” canard at the cost of reason and truth. Their crusade somehow never extends to defending women from erasure by “transwomen.” (READ MORE: Medically Transitioning Minors: The 6th Circuit Strikes Back)

They demand gender equality by denying gender disparity, such as the physical superiority of men and child-bearing exclusivity of women. They reduce the logical aversion to feminist incoherence as “fear of women.” And they rail against the nonexistent Patriarchy as idiotically as director Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, the movie Richard felt he had to defend from my right-wing attack, though I was only the messenger on Facebook.

It all started when a smart liberal friend (I still have a few despite my mass cancellation by my former Hollywood circle at the dawn of Trump) asked me for the conservative party line on Oppenheimer. I said it was overwhelmingly positive, then threw in the widespread mockery of Barbie as a feminist screed by critics I respect — Itxu, Ben Shapiro, and the Critical Drinker. This stuck in Richard’s beta-male craw, so he came at me loaded for beaver.

He pointed out I hadn’t seen Barbie and followed with the standard leftwing false note of curious sympathy, which usually translates into, “Why do you care so much?” Richard’s variation was “What are you afraid of?” I said I was afraid to waste three hours of my time and God knows how much of my intellect watching the mad, moronic output of a feminist shrew warp the minds of sweet little girls who like to play with Barbie dolls with male-bashing putridity.

Rather than address my point, Richard went the social justice route. He asked if I think men and women should have equal rights, citing the Equal Rights Amendment. The Equal Rights Amendment? I hadn’t thought about the ERA since the Senate laughed off an attempt to resurrect it last April. And before that, not since 1980, when a true heroic woman, Phyllis Schlafly, mustered enough conservative opposition to kill it. “What I am defending is the real rights of women,” Schlafly said at the time. “A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.” What kind of dweeb, I thought, would have the ERA polluting his mind? Only the aforementioned male feminist.

Richard then attempted the foolish liberal trick of masking a complex question as an easy one. “Do you support equal rights regardless of sex? Very simple question for a yes or no answer.” I responded that absent physical differences, equal rights would not be an issue. But does a midget have the same right as a normal person to go on an amusement ride if his head is below the safety bar? The answer is no. A similar distinction must be made about men and women, I said.

Richard finally fell back on the old trope that my opposition stemmed from fear of women. I asked him if a male athlete who opposes “transwomen” in girls’ sports is scared of them, or merely more aware of the unfairness of it? His mike-dropping victory cry was that I attacked Barbie without seeing it, which I never denied. In the end, however, I had wasted my time with Richard as if I had gone to see Barbie.

But then came a much more rewarding, intellectual text exchange with my conservative buddy, “Bob” (a Washington DC power lawyer, hence the pseudonym), over Oppenheimer. Naturally, it led to the eternal question. Was the atomic bomb creation and its double-drop on Japan justified? Yes, Bob and I agreed. But Bob had a personal stake in his opinion. (READ MORE: Oppenheimer: A Reprieve From Woke)

“My father was a 19-year-old quartermaster on a destroyer, who spent his days dodging kamikaze planes at Okinawa,” he texted. “Japan had 7,000 kamikaze planes and one-million zealous defenders dug in on those islands for an invasion that would have cost hundreds of thousands in American casualties. My father said that every Marine and Navy man who would have borne the brunt of that invasion supported the bomb. No exceptions. Hollywood can take its moral ambiguities and shove them up its collective rear end.”

And that, in my view, includes people like Greta Gerwig and Richard.

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