Going beyond movie news, the Los Angeles Times editorial board decided to forget the raging proxy war in Ukraine, inflation, our open border, tarnished elections, and single-party government to weigh in on “gender-neutral” film awards. This is another example of cultural revolution in reverse, where media elites use their commanding heights to influence popular opinion.A thousand-word December 21 editorial urged, “Award shows can smartly lay out” what it called “a plan to get rid of these categories” of gender. The drastic proposal to reclassify prizes aligns with the media’s transsexual agenda.
But this grooming of the populace — disguised as social progress — went uncontested until film reviewer Wade Major of the CineGods website took the bold step of writing a corrective letter to the editor of the Times.
Major’s dissent should be saluted for bucking the politically correct coercion by journalists who want the Academy Awards and other film organizations to radicalize. Major warned the Times, “You’ve set the stage for a cultural dumpster fire.” But destruction is exactly what the Times wants when it promotes tyrannical change to how we perceive gender and make movies about it.
Defending the distinction between male and female, Major argued that “sex-segregated acting categories celebrate not just performance but the diversity of those differences, without which audiences would enjoy no emotional connection to performance.” This is the crux of the crisis: Men are not women, and vice versa; their souls are equal, yet acting and characterization express specific experiences. The Times editorial means to abolish more than categories; it aims to shatter ideas of spirituality and facts of human difference.
While endorsing the gender-neutral-awards trend already initiated by several industry groups, the Times got caught up in confusion: “Dissolving gendered categories for Oscars or Emmys would not magically give women parity with men in accessing substantial acting roles.” The editorial bemoaned that “the entertainment industry is still weighted in favor of men” and conceded that “awards still play a part in the ecosystem of Hollywood.” The term “ecosystem” exposes nebulous non-reasoning.
But Major’s doubt is more precise: The Times is “painting new-age misogyny with ‘progressive’ lipstick, notably the idea that if we pretend men and women aren’t different, inequality will disappear.”
The Times editorial is dishonest. Board members ought to individually sign the diatribe rather than pretend objective wisdom through an institutional stance on questions of gender and equity. They should admit to aiding the destruction of heterosexual identity. Not saying what they’re really after — a social transformation, transsocialism — is why we must read the media with skepticism.
The Times praised the ridiculous example of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s decision to go gender-neutral (declaring male and female ties in both lead and supporting-acting categories), but the facts are laughable. Major, a longtime LAFCA member, revealed the group’s actual lunacy: “I can testify that the group remains deeply divided. The change passed by a single vote, with insufficient debate, procedural anomalies and no outright majority.”
Fact is: Film journalists desperately yearn to appear progressive; legacy media then serve that bias to the public by implying a consensus that doesn’t exist. It’s merely fiat, same as Democratic Party dictates that corrupt media misrepresent as “bipartisan.”
Some back history: The farce of gender-neutral awards began at the far-left Village Voice when gender activism (feminist and queer-preferential practice) dominated that publication’s movie poll from 1999 to 2005; it was disbanded thereafter. Loss of interest? Coming to reason? Reason has disappeared from Millennial discourse. Now, the point is to turn moviegoers into deferential nonbinary soldiers.
That’s why the Times wants the Oscars and Oscar-watchers to ditch the basic idea of sexuality that makes life — and movies — fascinating.
Other than James Sweeney’s Straight Up, there hasn’t been a good sex comedy this millennium; #MeToo has destroyed cinema sexuality. Remember how Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront and Sally Field in Norma Rae fought against and for unions (respectively), both using masculine and feminine approaches that made those issues fresh and interesting? Look at Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara and Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone for female and male versions of the American dream, and marvel at the individual physical, moral, and historical performance that makes those characters recognizable and unforgettable.
Denying such gender differences is another form of media tyranny and progressive fascism. Seeking to abolish gender identity, the L.A. Times pushes for gender equity the same way mainstream media push for socialism — a backwards revolution in thinking and behavior.
― عباس کیارستمی (Eric H.), Wednesday, 4 January 2023 14:19 (one year ago) link