* Apparently.
Janet Albrechtsen performs some pretty impressive mental gymnastics in her column in The Australian: A tale of two standards. And by impressive, I mean intellectually dishonest.
Albrechtsen ridicules feminists because Sex and The City 2 is about shopping – and ridicules feminists because the first movie was better than the second – and then blames feminists for a woman being stoned to death in a village in Iran in 1986:
Left-liberal critics have derided The Stoning of Soraya M as a message movie. Too close to “lurid torture porn”, Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. Local echo Tim Elliott at The Sydney Morning Herald dismissed the film as a predictable message movie where the men are “leering archetypes of Islamic patriarchy”.
So, two male journos don’t like the film and feminists are to blame? Where would you be, Janet, without feminism? Handwashing your husband’s undies, no doubt.
This is the ugly result when political correctness and cultural relativism meet movie critic. Their Goldilocks critique goes something like this: if you’re Al Gore talking about climate change or Michael Moore dumping on capitalism, then your message is just right. But a movie with a message about Islam being co-opted by men to denigrate, violate and kill women is, yawn, just too much message. “I know stoning is bad, but I want a movie about it, not a sermon,” Elliott wrote.
Um, Janet? Why don’t you direct your frowning displeasure at the two journos who wrote the things you disagree with? Not feminism.
Unless you’re a movie critic trapped in the mindset where it’s only acceptable to make stark judgments about Western culture. In which case, you get a little queasy about a movie that speaks with moral certainty about the evils of Islam being used to stone women to death.
Damn straight. But not the very next bit:
And while Western feminists navel gaze about their latest work-life imbalances and play games to decide whether they are more like Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte or Miranda, Islamic feminists have other things on their agenda.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
