Big budget anti-male movies of the early 90s

1990 was the beginning of the end, part 3

A young Brad Pitt as hustler in 1991’s deeply misandrist “Thelma and Louise”

Note: this article is part of a larger work that I am currently composing. Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2

In the early 90s, as part of a contrived and coordinated trend initiated at the highest levels of power, radical feminism began to get bankrolled by Hollywood.

I will hereby cite a few examples, which shouldn’t be taken an exhaustive catalog. Again, it is important to note that the following movies were assuredly not indie, arthouse fare with miniscule budgets, but were in fact major productions with hefty financial support from powerful studios.

The opening salvo of this propagandistic barrage was 1991's Thelma and Louise, which is at least as viciously anti-male as Dances With Wolves is anti-white. Every single male character who shows up in this film (with the possible exception of Harvey Keitel as an enigmatic lawman) is deeply unsympathetic. Some are merely pathetic clowns, while others are adulterous creeps, and still others are con artists, thieves, and rapists.

Those who disliked the rampant misandry of Thelma and Louise and made their thoughts known were instantly shot down and dismissed as misogynists (apparently objecting to men being depicted negatively means that you hate women). This highly touted, critically-lauded film wasn't as high-profile as Dances With Wolves, nor as much of a runaway success, though it did feature several A-list actors (Geena Davis, Susan Sarandon, Keitel), in addition to a young Brad Pitt. The film was directed by Ridley Scott, further indicating its clout as a big-budget production.

Mainstream media lavished effusive praise upon Thelma and Louise, with Time magazine running a fawning article titled "Why Thelma and Louise strikes a nerve," which it duly gave front page treatment.

Given that the movie was only a modest success, one can’t help but note the artificiality of this prominent “news” outlet giving Thelma and Louise such attention, or suggesting that the movie somehow speaks uniquely to women, as if any such consensus had been reached. The patent astroturfing here should be obvious to anyone with eyes to see.

*******************************

In the early 90s, male-bashing became a mainstay even in movies geared towards men, such as James Cameron’s Terminator 2 (1991), in which heroine Sarah Connor delivers a cringy rant, apropos of little, about how men are inherently destructive, unlike women, who are inherently nurturing and kind.

Similarly, in Jon Singleton’s violent inner-city drama Boyz In the Hood, a random hoodrat girl sassily declares, “How you know that God is a ‘he’? Maybe God’s a ‘she'!” Putting aside the unlikeliness of this particular character dabbling in feminist theology, the response of Ice Cube’s character might be even more ridiculous: “If God was a bitch, there wouldn’t be no nuclear bombs, no wars, no shit like that, cuz that ain’t in bitches’ nature!”

Again, as with T2, this gratuitously anti-male dialogue (though Cube speaks of women as “bitches,” he is in fact, like Sara Conner, lauding women’s ostensible superiority to men) has nothing to do with the plot, and to compound the absurdity, it is being spoken in a film with far more likelihood to draw a male audience.

It is hard not to conclude, from these examples, that men were being deliberately targeted with egregious insults in movies that are supposed to be geared towards them. (It would be a scenario repeated much more pointedly decades later, when the Gillette company, which makes it profits by selling products to men, launched their infamously ill-fated anti-male advertising campaign in 2019.)

Other feminist movies of lesser note which were produced and released in this period include A League of Their Own (1992), about the brief time period in the United State(s) during World War 2 when women played professional baseball, due to the men being drafted, as well as a disastrous “re-imagining” of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic American novel The Scarlet Letter (1995).

In the latter, Hawthorne's tragic fallen woman is transformed into a righteous symbol of female sex-positivity, who is unfairly persecuted by the patriarchy. In addition, Christian whites are villainized, while American Indian pagans are portrayed as heroic and valorous (in a subplot which, needless to say, does not appear in Hawthorne's novel).

The Scarlet Letter flopped mightily, and was thoroughly skewered by critics, but the very fact that it was made, with Hollywood heavy-hitters like Demi Moore, Gary Oldman, and Robert Duvall in the starring roles, indicates the extent to which the radical feminist psyop had truly taken hold.

A League of Their Own is admittedly less egregious in its propagandistic push, and to a certain degree even amusing (containing the now classic line, “There's no crying in baseball!”); still, who in the world was asking for a movie about the professional women’s baseball league that briefly existed as a novelty in the early 1940s before disappearing forever?

Clearly, A League of Their Own was not written and produced in response to any grass-roots popular demand, but instead was foisted on the moviegoing public by diktat; which is to say, its subject matter suited the psyop.

(to be continued)