It doesn’t take much to become a feminist hero.
Take, for example, Olivia Wilde. She’s currently being feted as one of the most talented people in Hollywood, despite the fact that her first film, Booksmart, was a box office dud, and her current effort, Don’t Worry Darling, is currently charting in at 39 percent on RottenTomatoes, despite the presence of two of the industry’s biggest stars, Harry Styles and Florence Pugh. Wilde herself began as a rather untalented actress – remember her woodenly stammering out lines on House? – but now she’s become something bigger: an Important Person.
We know she’s important because she talks about the sexism she experiences routinely. In 2014, she talked about how difficult it was to get stories about women made.
That must have come as a shock to literally every person who has ever seen more than one film or television show. The same year she complained about how hard it was to get films about women made, Alfonso Cuaron won an Oscar for directing Gravity, about a female astronaut.
But, you see, because Wilde is an Important Feminist Voice – and we know this because she keeps telling us, over and over again – this means she doesn’t have to act like a decent human being. As it turns out, Don’t Worry Darling is an off-screen disaster as well as an on-screen disappointment (it currently pulls a 39% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes). The disaster began with Wilde lying about the former star of the movie, Shia Labeouf. She said in an interview:
“He has a process that, in some ways, seems to require a combative energy, and I don’t personally believe that is conducive to the best performances. I believe that creating a safe, trusting environment is the best way to get people to do their best work. Ultimately, my responsibility is to the production and to the cast to protect them. That was my job.”
She then dumped on him personally, claiming that she fired him because of allegations from his former girlfriend about emotional abuse, adding, “Particularly with a movie like this, I knew that I was going to be asking Florence to be in very vulnerable situations, and my priority was making her feel safe and making her feel supported.”
More feminist heroing! Except it wasn’t true: Labeouf released emails and texts showing he left the production because he didn’t have enough time to rehearse with the rest of the cast. Labeouf said, “Firing me never took place, Olivia. And while I fully understand the attractiveness of pushing that story because of the current social landscape, the social currency that brings. It is not the truth.”
The only true thing Wilde said, apparently, was that she was interested in making a safe, trusting environment on set. But not for Florence Pugh. For Harry Styles. She reportedly began making time with the star of her film pretty quickly after reaching the set. Of course, she was in a long-term relationship with Jason Sudeikis at the time; the couple had two children. In April 2022, Sudeikis had her served with papers while she was onstage doing press for her new film.
All of this made Pugh rather upset, apparently. She reportedly was angry that Wilde had hooked up with Styles while Wilde was still with Sudeikis – and she was just as angry that Wilde and Styles were making out between takes. Sounds like true feminism heroism!
And herein lies the point: all it takes to be a feminist hero is to parrot a bunch of Left-wing talking points about how women are victims. You don’t actually have to help women or be a good person or anything like that.
Take, as case study #2, Hillary Clinton. She’s back at it with a new series on Apple TV called Gutsy. From the trailer, it appears that the Hillary-produced, Hillary-starring docuseries is about Hillary’s heroism. Promoting her new film, she told CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell that her gutsiest decision was sticking with Bill Clinton:
Was that even gutsier than allegedly threatening Juannita Broaddrick, who says Bill Clinton raped her? Here’s Broaddrick describing the gutsy feminist heroine:
But again, Hillary says she’s a victim of the patriarchy, so we must take her at her word.
Or take Meghan Markle, a C-list actress who became a princess by marrying into the British Royal Family – and who now says that she’s a victim of racism and sexism. She accused unnamed members of the Royal Family of bigotry, saying that they asked her about the prospective skin color of her child; she blamed the Royal Family for her decision to take Prince Harry to the United States and re-enter the entertainment industry. She’s a feminist hero, too, even though she’s apparently a rather wretched person. She recently likened herself to Nelson Mandela by proxy. Here’s the story she told The Cut:
“She recalls a moment from the 2019 London premiere of the live-action version of The Lion King. “I just had Archie. It was such a cruel chapter. I was scared to go out.” A cast member from South Africa pulled her aside. “He looked at me, and he’s just like light. He said, ‘I just need you to know: When you married into this family, we rejoiced in the streets the same we did when Mandela was freed from prison.’ ”
Sure, she’s rather terrible. But she’s certainly a feminist! Here she was in 2019:
The same holds true for our vaunted male feminists, too. Being a male feminist is an incredible way of hiding your own sexism and evil, as it turns out. Harvey Weinstein was an avid feminist – joining the Women’s March, talking up Gloria Steinem, and all the rest. That didn’t change the fact that he was a terrible sexual predator.
No one’s politics should buy them out of simple decency. But as long as you’re on the Left, you can get away with it for a pretty damned long time.