Argumentative Jujitsu in the Gender War


As someone who hadn’t seen the first Maleficent movie, I didn’t know what to expect from the second movie. But of course, I had to go for the second one since my 8 yo daughter wanted to see it. Plus, it had stuck in my head when she’d recently pointed at a giant poster of a wax museum in Goa and identified the statues as being those of Harry Potter, Modi, and… Maleficent. (Apparently, she only knows Angelina Jolie in her Maleficent avatar).

The movie was a pleasant surprise. It was “not a fairy tale”, like one of the characters in the movie said. There’s the evil, scheming Queen Ingrith who knows how to push Maleficent’s buttons, thereby starting a war that she can blame on the latter. And the men in the movie are mostly inconsequential props.

The woman-as-central-and-bad-characters theme reminded me of a line by Laurie Penny where she expressed her (and everyone else’s) disappointment with how Game of Thrones ended:
“by insisting that the women were crazy all along and burning the world down with everyone inside”.
If you’re being fair, that is so unfair. Game of Thrones is anything but misogynistic. It’s just ruthless politics, a game played just as well by men as by women throughout the series. Then again, the disappointment with the ending does lead one to lash out…

Anyway, since the thought had entered my head, I turned to my daughter and tried to tease her:
“See? Women (Ingrith and Maleficent) are the cause of all the trouble.”
Not liking this one bit, she did a jujitsu move on what I hoped would be an argument and replied:
“Well, I am not a woman yet.”

Hmmph… as Calvin said about Susie:
“Leave it to a girl to take all the fun out of sex discrimination.”

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