Opinion: What calls to boycott ‘The Woman King’ are really saying
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The movie “The Woman King,” directed by Danny Boyle and co-written by Ben Affleck, is set in ancient China during the Tang Dynasty. It follows a woman, the story’s main female protagonist, as she, along with a slave girl, travels to the mysterious city of Xu.
In our review, we called the movie “engaging and adventurous, especially for women.”
So what’s the fuss over this movie?
The big complaint is that Boyle and Affleck wrote the script with an agenda—one that would paint women as the victims of a system, to use the movie’s words, that’s rotten to its core.
Here’s a snippet—or a line, in case you were too busy watching the film when you heard about it:
“I remember the first time we arrived in Xu, I started to cry.”
“Why was I crying?”
“Well,” she says, “the city looked like a dead city.”
Women are the victims of the patriarchy, not the perpetrators of it.
So many years later, this isn’t new. In the ’60s, women’s lib was a feminist battle cry. Now, as you know, women are in the majority. It’s a war cry that has died.
The battle cry, for many, began to fade a long time ago when feminists realized that they didn’t want to be in the minority anymore. They wanted to be equals with men.
But they didn’t want to be alone anymore. They wanted to be part of a movement, something they felt was bigger than themselves.
And then that movement faded away, in one of those waves when you are a part of something for too long.
Now, women, you complain about your lot in life. You want a bigger voice in the world. But something was wrong when you got that voice. Maybe it wasn’t you who got it. Maybe it was society that gave you that voice.
So now, you want equality, but not equality with men. You want to belong to a movement, but there isn’t a unified movement that makes women equal to men.
Maybe you are one of the many women