The way books and movies have degenerated is extremely dissatisfying for me. All of the futures they draw are unattractive. It’s not even that they are inordinately dystopian. Instead, they are boring and lame. I think this is because they are directed at women. It goes without saying that male and female sensibilities differ significantly. And because publishers and movie studios have decided that their primary audience is women, they have stopped making stories that interest men. We’re supposed to adapt to the sensibilities and conventions of plots aimed at female readers. Well, I think we’ve all had enough of that.
I believe we are waiting for the first post-feminist movie and book to come out and reach a mass audience. Perhaps it will be a remake of some older intellectual property like Conan the Barbarian or a James Bond who isn’t crying all the time. A male character who talks and acts like he isn’t afraid of being canceled by the longhouse for projecting the male gaze at some attractive woman. Preferably one of the major themes of the story should be the hero just doing whatever the hell he feels like doing and it upsetting as many women in the story as is theatrically possible.
But you know, I think I’d prefer if the story were completely new and original. The Zoomers need their own myths and their own heroes. It would make sense that these new stories are of this time and don’t need to harken back to the actual stone age.
Maybe a good framing for such a myth could be a post-collapse world where the niceties of the feminist project just have no place in the scarcity and violence of a devastated landscape. Humanity returning to an environment of tribes and survival of the strongest. So, it doesn’t have to be Conan in the Hyperborean Age. It can be the day after tomorrow and somewhere between Iowa and Arkansas. New stories based on timeless truths.
And you know what? I don’t think it will be too long before we start seeing books and movies going in this direction. It won’t be the big five publishers or the Hollywood studios. It’s going to come from someone who controls a platform that is popular with the young men. Some “influencer” who has tens of millions of followers and can monetize a property that he can sense will be popular. And after the first break out it will be copied by a bunch of wannabees and before you know it the big players will be drooling for a piece of the action and everything else will blow away in the wind.
And this is not because we want this to be so. It’s because its opposite has been pushed on the population for decades and it has proven destructive. A pent-up force representing human nature held back from its natural course is about to sweep away many of the feminist projects in a raging flood of normalcy. One thing. I think Sydney Sweeney’s career will be in the ascendancy. Conan needs a curvy woman to drape over his shoulder as he ascends the throne of Hyperborea.