My intention today was to mull over the Pope’s firing of a Catholic bishop in Texas, and the apparent takeover of the Church in certain parts of the country by conservative extremists for whom the term “good works” has lost its meaning. But then I came upon a story being covered by YouTuber TUG and thought I might fold it into the church story. But it grew too big for that, so the church story will have to wait till next time.
So, what is this fascinating new story? It appears that the radical feminist website Jezebel is being shuttered and all its employees out of a job for now. The Associated Press reported that
In a memo to the company, G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller said he made the "very, very difficult decision to suspend publication of Jezebel" after an unsuccessful search for a buyer for the website. He said it became clear that the parent company's "business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel's."
Reading between the lines, the website’s content only appealed to a fringe element in a time when people were growing weary of trying to appease self-victimizing fanatics who did not want to be appeased, and a MeToo movement that forced them to “believe all women” regardless of the truth. Such cases as the Rolling Stone libel case in which it “defended” as being “good intentioned” the publishing of a fake story falsely accusing a University of Virginia fraternity of gang rape, and the purely vindictive and personal responsibility-averseness that characterized cases like that of Johnny Depp, called into question the credibility and motivations of accusers and their supporters:
TUG highlighted this 2007 story https://jezebel.com/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-cause-uh-we-have-294383 about what a roomful of Amber Heards would be like which apparently fell through the cracks, and even the writer of the piece treated physical abuse of male partners (even admitting that studies show that 70 percent of “nonreciprocal” violence is perpetrated by the female partner) as some kind of joke, advising men not to “mess” with women. Of course the people working in the office space behind this sign…
…wouldn’t be interested in that sort of thing (see previous image, apparently what their real purpose is), since I suspect that to find enough cases to pay the rent the stories of divas and drama queens are fair use. The 2001 killing of an unarmed Hispanic male in Bellevue, Nelson Martinez Mendez, by Bellevue police officer Mike Hetle, was set off by his sister, angry that he was leaving for California and she would have to pay the rent herself on the apartment they shared. She admitted later at the inquest that in trying to think of something to get the police to respond to as he was leaving for his car, she lied about him threatening her with a knife.
By the way, Hetle was recently convicted of the murder of a black National Guardsman in Florida; as neighbors they had the usual disagreements about “noise” and when the Guardsman approached Hetle’s door to discuss the matter, Hetle came out gun blazing, even as his victim was running away. Here Hetle is threatening to shoot the man’s wife too:
Anyways, advertisers were pulling ads as they realized that such content providers were alienating “mainstream” consumers and were seeing fewer and fewer “hits.” While large publications like the Washington Post decided to suck it up and folded its independent money-losing feminist website The Lily into its main website instead of just chucking it altogether (no doubt because of internal politics), other feminist media companies like the curiously named Bitch Media closed their doors because of falling eyeballs for both their content and the advertising that paid their bills.
We can also see this in relation to the latest MCU film The Marvels, which had the lowest opening weekend box office of any of the 30-odd MCU films. Why? People talked of MCU “fatigue,” some are criticizing the incomprehensible screenplay and the barely-there direction, and others have noted its lack of “believability” and real suspense, since the female “hero” leads—particularly Captain Marvel, who played by Brie Larson has the personality of a corpse—seem completely invulnerable to pain or injury, so you know how a fight with the “bad guys” will turn out without even seeing it. The main “bad guy” is a woman who looks like she’d rather be in another movie, and the shoehorning in of eye-rolling “comedy” has nothing to do with character development or moving the narrative forward.
But others are pointing out that the film’s marketing and “message” alienated the core audience for these types of films from the jump: males. The film makes tiresome gender statements of empowerment, and in typical feminist fashion it only follows its own rules when it suits them (the place-swapping reaches absurdity when instead of being presented with the conundrum of a character “swapped” into space wearing her own clothes as in the other “swaps,” she somehow miraculously “swaps” into the space suit of the original inhabitant).
Nothing “bad” can get in the way of this female-centric partnership, and old grievances from prior installments are quickly put aside and forgotten with a word or two by the lazy writers. The male characters—the ones who are not those expendable, anonymous guys in the red shirts of Star Trek parlance—are, as written by the female screenwriters, mostly placeholders because they don’t want to be accused of being totally “woke.”
But what did the principles, particularly Larson and director Nia DaCosta—who somehow got this big-budget project with only two-count-them-two prior theatrical films to her credit—think the “problem” was? What else, blame anyone handy as long as they were not other females. They ignored the fact that even “good” reviews of the film were offered only tepidly, as if the reviewers felt forced to acknowledge that the film’s politics were in the “right place” in our over-woke society.
Larson has gone Jada Pinkett, to about the same level of criticism for a massive ego, alienating and demeaning people, and preferring to gaslight them instead of giving them a valid reason why they should happily consume an awful-tasting product. Larson’s accusations of “sexism” and the like by male viewers only reinforces their suspicion that The Marvels deliberately doesn’t try to “speak” to them, just non-stop pokes-in-the-eye.
Of course all of what we are seeing here is that for too long certain people have been getting a free ride to say and do whatever they want regardless of its negative effects on logical thought processes. Offending and demeaning the sensibilities of others only leads to alienation and increasingly blasé attitudes about what they are told and “accused” of. Naturally with the aggrieved crowd, the answer to this is not self-examination, but to just yell louder in the usual annoyingly sarcastic way, which the principle way people respond to it is simply blocking their ears and shutting their minds to the “noise.”
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