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Ready for some mild 36 year old culture war material? In 1988, BBC released their adaptation of C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe". I watched this adaptation with my children this weekend, and having recently reread the Chronicles of Narnia series, I was surprised how little the script deviated from the book. Indeed, the essentially verbatim reproduction puts a spotlight on the few deviations.
In the book, the children meet Father Christmas who gives presents to ready them for the coming fight.
The BBC adaptation follows the book word for word until the last sentence (as best as I can remember: I couldn't find the script online):
The original reading was a powerful statement, even in the time that Lewis wrote the book, and fully in keeping with his complementarian perspective. In the BBC adaptation, the interaction with Father Christmas ends unsatisfactorily, without any larger point than to provide the children with tools. The scene is robbed of the emotion and power of the original text.
Of course, the Disney adaptation is even worse, making is seem like Father Christmas is giving Susan permission to fight, and possibly intentionally subverting the original text:
Neither the BBC or the Disney is "rewriting history"; every adaptation has to make compromises to fit the medium. However I would desire that any adaptation treat the source with respect and not neuter or subvert it. In many ways, C.S. Lewis was and remains a counter-cultural force. Watering down his work to be palatable to modern audiences is a direct contradiction to his intentionally medieval outlook.
What does he mean here? This could either mean that women fight dirty and thus make the battle ugly, or it could mean that women having to fight means women getting wounded and killed and being forced to wound and kill others which is itself ugly. Or it could mean that only in a most desperate and ugly battle for one's very survival do we forgo our principles and make women to fight because we need every last body at any cost.
It's this, combined with the fact that women are a distraction when discipline and focus are paramount. If you've ever trained in martial arts you know the air is charged differently when a woman is in the gym and the minds of men will wander.
I think it's just the horses vs. elephants thing discussed over at ACOUP. Yeah, horses may freak out when they encounter an elephant in combat. But if you train the horses around elephants, they'll get used to the elephants, and then they can deal with elephants in combat just fine.
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Modern progressives have focused exclusively on the valor of action in order to share this spoil with women, while ignoring both how much war sucks and how few women actually want to do all the shitty bits of combat, including the killing. The reason women weren't shoved into the frontlines for war wasn't because of sexism, its because most women can't do the really shitty bits of war as well as men: marching with heavy shit, digging, being transported in uncomfortable deathtraps without puking, having some asswipe yell at you just to keep your head screwed on, sleeping in odd positions. Fuck, most MEN can't do that shit, which is why all-volunteer militaries outperform unwilling conscripts.
In modern hollywood we largely see women being graceful acrobatic spinny shits, or snipers/pilots/archers, anything that stops them being up close to shit that punches back. Wheedonified tiny women acrobatically backflipping dudes into walls or vidya chicks stabbing weightless blades through armored trolls has given a throughly wrong impression that men and women have 0 physical difference, both because of political correctness and progressive men being gym allergic 'intellectuals'.
Women being given 'permission' to fight just makes them ballerinas getting military medals instead of flowers at the end of a performance, not chumps getting chewed out by artillery or dying from malnutrition. Frontline fighting sucks, get your free applebees by doing shit meatheads hate, like safety PowerPoint
Essentially, they want all the valor that men get out of war, when valor was the tiniest concession that men received in return for putting up with pure horror and misery. Just without all the downsides.
Frankly I don't blame women for this. Exceedingly few women are out there clamoring for girlbosses on the front lines, with most ads for female military recruitment focusing on (much needed) POG intel or maintenance shit.
No, the ones seething at the lack of female participation are progressive MEN who do not have even the concession of a dennys veterans meal accorded to them. If military valor is not an exclusively male thing, then you are not a failure of a man for not achieving military valor. Not that people actually consider military valor much of a special achievement anymore, but progressives simply need to diminish the achievements of the men they will never be in order to make themselves look less failson.
Let’s be real, most people seething at the “lack of female participation” are angry young men upset at perceived unfairness in the gender wars. That’s true here as much as elsewhere. I should add that I have no issues conscripting women, but sending them to the front lines would be strategically stupid in any case, whatever one’s ideology.
100% true. Those men are weaklings whining that they're discriminated against wammins, idiots who use conscription as merely another cudgel in their war against women. Not a single one of these idiots actually has any intention or capability of fighting, conscripted or otherwise. Grunts dont (usually) doubt the bravery of women, they doubt their stamina to carry 100lb of shit on a 5 mile or even 30lb of shit in a sustained sprint.
There are plenty uses for shitbirds in service that there is plenty of shit for women to do outside of frontline roles. The US army is not a lean mean fighting machine with spess mehrines ready to solo a terrorist base, its a methed out powerbottom using its ridiculously organic logistical capability to vomit a Starbucks onto a FOB within 48 hours of the HESCO fortress being setup. Conscripting women would just mean the milspec mafia would need to find a new way to skate. This still doesn't solve the progressive problem of women not getting to participate in the 'glory' of war, so I'm not sure they would stop bitching about women 'not being allowed' to serve.
I'm still not convinced that "getting to participate in the glory of war" is a significant progressive issue anywhere other than videogames. They might want the college benefits, though.
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As much as I appreciate a colorful analogy…chill out. Disagreeing with you doesn’t categorically make someone a weakling, whiner, idiot, or whatever. Be more specific or be more tactful.
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Don't you think "this achievement is actually not very valued today" diminishes your psychoanalysis?
Maybe. its still not a 0, and its still largely men getting this accord, so progressives keep acting to diminish it further or claim women/gays/minorities are the real beneficiaries of a valorized history - all the kvetching about any WW2 show not having enough blacks or how the supercool vikings really were 40% women raiders. I don't see progressives trying to get more women into waste disposal or being day laborers, but I call that a wash since media doesnt give a shit about those guys either.
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I am reminded of the recent trend in video game translation of also erasing references to gender, even in cases which were deemed non-offensive by Americans just 20 years ago: Pikmin 2 remaster, Live-A-Live remake, Yokai Watch (notable for also removing references to obesity and advisability of its negation), Resident Evil 4 VR, Attached Picture is of the TTYD remaster.
At least your example has the justification that C S Lewis wrote a different type of text (i.e. a novel), than one which producers needed (i.e. a screenplay), so changes were unavoidable. But a video game script in Japanese or in English is the same type of text, the only changes needed are those which are limitations of technology, like if the game engine only supports item and in-game characters names of 7 or less characters.
I think the justification for making even fictional socities blind to gender dimorphism in humans, is to make it unthinkable in reality. So that if the consumer of media does encounter someone not yet blinded, he is to made to feel perplexity (for making a distinction based on a difference of which the consumer doesn't perceive the existence) and hostility (according to contemporary mores, not making a distinction is the default, and insufficiently justifying making a distinction is called "discrimination" and highly frowned upon).
Such is one possible tool to socially construct a consensus of gender blindness.
/images/17168274960505376.webp
I've noticed a trend in character creation along those lines - 'male' and 'female' in character creation are replaced with 'body type 1' and 'body type 2', and then player characters are referred to exclusively as 'they'. World of Warcraft is an example of this. It frankly makes me feel very uncomfortable and aggressively dehumanised.
What I find most frustrating about it is that it seems like the progressive case against doing this should be obvious - removing all gendered words and enforcing a single pronoun on everyone seems like, well, misgendering. If you took seriously the concern that using the wrong gendered language for someone might be cruel or even traumatic, it seems like you should be sensitive to this, and want to provide more options, rather than throwing everyone into a de-gendered basket of 'they'.
I conclude that they do not in fact take seriously that concern, and that it was and is not the actual underlying motive. Or at least, if there's a motive along the lines of "don't be cruel", it is not applied evenly to everyone, and indeed making certain types of people uncomfortable might be good.
I have never understood this cope, they unambiguously code to "male" and "female" and if my memory is correct in ER they even correspond to a masculine and feminine voice when you select them.
That's another sign to me that it's not a particularly earnest gesture of inclusion - they are obviously male and female, with nothing changed but the names. No additional work has been done, so no additional expense has been incurred. From a development perspective, changing the names of the genders is a trivial task, and defaulting to singular they in all dialogue is slightly cheaper and easier than having distinct male and female variations.
The banner is inclusion, arguably, but the actual itself is profoundly lazy, and insofar as what it does is ignore or misgender everybody who identifies as anything other than they/them (which at last count was approximately everyone), it's actually less welcoming and inclusive.
But it's easy, it looks trendy and/or fits the cultural moment, and if it continues, by reducing the diversity and variability of humans - making everyone a bland, standardised they - it suits the interests of systems designers. A perfect symbol for the time, really.
(Yes, they're distinct male and female types now, but they don't need to be. For instance, in Splatoon 3 there are no gendered body types or identifications - everyone is just an androgynous little squid-kid. I guess the justification there would be that the characters are prepubescent and shouldn't have visibly different physical characteristics, but still, that is a long way from the time when the Pokémon manuals explicitly recommended that the children playing choose the character of their own gender.)
(Alternatively, consider the character creation in a game like BattleTech - there are no gender-locked features. It's been a little while since I played, but I believe that instead you just pick body characteristics from a big chart, so beards, breasts, etc., are perfectly interchangeable. Then at the end you pick pronouns from a drop-down menu. What's gone is any sense that these characteristics form two natural clusters. Instead of men and women, what we have are a bunch of isolated, chopped up body parts that can be reassembled in any combination. It's hard not to feel a bit dehumanised.)
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I agree with your general point but lets also add some more recent culture war material.
Greta Gerwig which wrote the screenplay and directed Barbie is writing a Netflix film adaptation of first two films of Chronicles of Narnia. Considering her other films I suspect it is going to go much further than the older Disney adaptation in subverting the original material as this article persuasively argues. https://religionunplugged.com/news/2023/7/28/how-barbie-shows-greta-gerwig-is-the-wrong-choice-to-direct-narnia
But I would expect even a current Disney adaptation to also go much further.
The article ends with
I would really like to see an alternative. Maybe the people who have successfully made some level of youtube career out of condemning hated woke adaptations that disrespect the original material should pool resources together and try to create themselves some faithful adaptations, starting with less ambitious targets. The Critical Drinker who is a writer might be able to do something interesting. There is a real audience out there willing to pay for faithful adaptations, and there is money to be made. Like we have alt social media and video platforms, although it would be much more expensive, it would be nice to see an attempt for an alternative platform for tv shows and films.
If copyright is an issue, there are stories in the public domain like Ivanhoe, and more that will join them.
I stopped watching a while ago so I don't know how it's going, but the person who seems to have found the most success building a platform for conservative/outsider film-making is Dallas Jenkins. But I don't know that you can generate that sort of grassroots enthusiasm for most stories, even Christian ones. I think people are specifically willing to pay for his (pretty fun) take on the Gospels in a way they wouldn't for other products.
The Daily Wire is trying, but it's not looking good when the very critic you cite (who they actively courted) was lukewarm on their last movie (Ladyballers). Maybe Snow White will be good because they'll stick to the source material but we'll see.
I just don't think they can play at the sort of scale that does certain movies/properties justice (The first Narnia cost $180 million...a couple of decades ago). There's a reason Hollywood has a chokehold on blockbusters. Luc Besson got $200 million for Valerian after a surprise hit in Lucy, in an attempt to have his own franchise. It bombed, he will never see that sort of money again. Very few entities can absorb those losses.
My inner LLM thinks this is where someone should bring up the possibilities of using AI to level the playing field, at least somewhat.
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Was C.S. Lewis truly counter-cultural at the time? I think it’s only because the counter-culture and the mainstream flipped in recent years that C.S. Lewis’ views would be considered anything transgressive. His attitude towards women was fairly standard for a mid-20th century British man and his Christianity would have been shared by the majority in society.
Lewis and his society were simply closer to the reality of war.
Even to this day, this attitude is held when the rubber meets the road. Ukraine didn't put both men and women on the frontline and Ukraine did not stop women from leaving on the grounds that they had to fight and there was very little outrage about it.
People just don't want to be told they can't do X, even if they had no intention of actually doing that thing.
Uh, doesn't Ukraine put women in combat?
Frontline duty is 100% voluntary for women, while men are both drafted and assigned to the frontlines.
Even if you had complete equality in the draft, sending women to the frontline would be poor practice for the same reason that sending 50 year old men to the frontline in a total mobilization scenario would be poor practice, or for the same reason that you wouldn't train people with terrible eyesight to be pilots if you had the choice.
Not even as FPV drone pilots? I know my wife gets seasick when I show her J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's cooking videos, but surely not every woman's vestibular system is this underdeveloped.
Any skill requiring 3-demensional thinking and hand-eye coordination favors men. Video games and chess have proven this beyond all doubt.
I can't comment on the viability of women as drone pilots in the absence of men, but if you have men available you would obviously want them as a first option.
Beyond all doubt you say. What studies would you pull out if people demand evidence?
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I saw propaganda around that recently, I didn't really take it that seriously - just thought it was part of the same desperation causing them to look for men. Because, if you're going to use women as combat troops, it seems deeply unwise to let half your manpower go.
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What percent of Ukrainian front line troops are women?
Good luck finding a real answer to that question. BBC claims 5,000 but that's almost certainly an egregious lie. My guess is that the real answer rounds to zero.
I'm willing to change my estimate if you can find a single story of a woman killed while storming enemy lines.
The UKR army is like 800k strong which translates to roughly 225k troops on the front.
Given ukraines manpower problems having 2% of your frontliners be women might be reasonable. After all while a 23 year old man is probably better than almost any 23 year old women a 23 year old women might outperform a 45 year old man.
2% is fairly low. Frontline troops can mean Artillery gunners, FPV drone user ect, there are so many different combat roles in the military that they can find the least bad role for women to save more men for the infantrymen.
I take it you don't play co-ed sports. It might be worth an effort post, but there are lots of reasons why men are better than woman at combat that even this age gap wouldn't come close to erasing.
I suspect that this is where the 5,000 number comes from. But if women are being used on the "frontline" to save men for the actual frontline then "frontline" is a pretty meaningless term.
I play co-ed hobbyist sports but nothing professional. A women who lifts takes creatine and can do Frontflips can be more athletic than 20% of men aged >40. Obviously this doesn't describe many women but this maybe describes the top 1% of women which corrisponds to roughly 100% of women on the real front lines.
There's a big issue that's hard to mention which is that "frontline" can mean "any combat role where getting shot at is a real concern" (which is why I suspect it's 2% of the UKR army) and "guy in the trenches". What of these roles that I could find on /r/combatfootage would you describe as "the front lines"
I suspect the 5k would call all 5 "front line". I would probably exclude 4.
I would define frontline in a similar way to you. Frontline = high risk of death + proximity to enemy forces. Whether a particular role is front line would depend on how many people died doing it, but many of those roles could definitely be considered front line.
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C. S. Lewis quite explicitly believed that his Christianity was not shared by the majority in his society. He is very clear that he believes that Christians are a minority in Britain, even though it was the middle of the 20th century and the number of people writing 'Christian' on the census was an overwhelming majority.
See, for instance. Mere Christianity p. 62, where he writes, "My own view is that the Churches should frankly realise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives." That book was published in 1952, and the passage I quoted was based on a radio talk he gave in the early 1940s. Lewis believed that as of 1952 most British people were not Christian.
For Lewis, being Christian in a meaningful sense is very much not just a matter of identification, nor of lip service. He understood himself to be counter-cultural.
I bumped into an earlier example when reading G. K. Chesterton's autobiography. Born in 1874, he writes that he was taught Christianity at a mainstream school by teachers who were not themselves Christians. This took me by surprise. We are talking about around 1890, and there is a Cathedral near where I live, built 1879, spires added 1913-1917. There is a contradiction between Chesterton's account of his post-Christian upbringing at a time when people are still building Cathedrals.
Chesterton doubles down, proposing that enthusiasm for Empire was a substitute for loss of Christian faith. People need to believe in something, and if Christianity has faded, they will latch on to something else.
My guess at the social history involves Darwin and the debates following his 1859 publication of The Origin Of Species. The London intellectuals of the generation before Chesterton respond by quietly giving up on Christianity. Meanwhile, others are participating in various Victorian Religious Revivals. Christianity looks healthy, but society's thought leaders have abandoned it. Christianity rots from the top down, and elites, such as C. S. Lewis experience a post-Christian country, while others are still happily attending Church.
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Seems like Lewis was in retrospect correct.
Yes, quite probably. He was certainly a critic of merely cultural Christianity.
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Hear, hear.
There’s a statement which I’ve heard semi-frequently in church and on Christian radio, and I know not its provenance: “God has no grandchildren.” It means that people may be culturally similar to their Christian parents and ancestors, but faith in Jesus as savior and God as father is an individual matter, not a familial/cultural one. For example, my father’s stories of his conversion have been vitally important to my own faith, but my faith has a different genesis (pun intended) and is inextricably mine.
Institutional churches, like the Church of England, tend to lose sight of this fact and settle for children inheriting the faith of their fathers, putting it on a shelf for safekeeping like the family china and bringing it out on holidays.
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