Bond girls are sexy! Bond is sexy! Wait a minute. Am I still allowed to say that?
Of course I personally watch James Bond movies more for the girls than for Bond. I’m still allowed to say that, too. If my feminist protectors on the Left have their way, I wonder how much longer that will be true. It’s hard to say, anymore, exactly whose side the professional feminists are on.
In Thursday’s News Observer online, writer Craig D. Lindsey notes another group of Bond fans: “women who enjoy the movies even though, on the surface, they objectify women.” There is, indeed, something hypnotic about it all. It’s entertainment, and nobody but an idiot would confuse it with anything else.
The author concludes this ambitious effort by admitting that though the Bond girls were smart and self-sufficient, they ended up “subservient to James Bond in his world.” And Lindsey’s conclusion is that even feminists like Bond movies because – well – they like Bond. That they find him sexy, which makes them no different from the bikini-babe-ogling men they criticize.
What all too few of them seem to appreciate is how nice it is to live in a world where, as we sit in the dark with a bag of popcorn on our lap, we can still ogle whomever we want.
Perhaps the real reason that serious feminists – those not wholly owned by the Left – are no longer nitpicking about frivolities like the Bond girls is that we realize we have bigger fish to fry. Every article or blog post in which we nag men about movies showing sexy things in bikinis is another wasted opportunity to deal with the real problems women face. The feminist establishment on the Left refuses to look honestly at the subjugation of its sisters in the Middle East. Nor will it acknowledge that Islamists are importing this oppression to western countries. It would rather carp about dirty old men making movies about luscious twenty-somethings, or the dearth of grandmothers in plum roles.
The Left – and most of the media, which it controls – seems only able to chase after one fad at a time. If the officially-approved feminists are tired of bitching about the treatment of women in films, it is not, unfortunately, because they care about the treatment of women in other parts of the world. It is because of their fascination with multiculturalism. One is almost tempted to think that if they still tut-tut at all over girls in bikinis, it’s only because Mullah Somebody-or-Other has already voiced his disapproval.
