"“Mad Max” Is A Feminist Playbook For Surviving Dystopia"

"Fury Road — in which an ass-kicking half-bionic heroine defies death to rescue five young women from sex slavery — might be an existential threat to recreational sexism because it is so enjoyable...

Violence against women is part of almost every popular fantasy of social collapse, from 1984to Game of Thrones, in which rape and the threat of rape is part of every woman’s storyline. But Fury Road reminds the viewer that the liberation of women is not just a prerequisite for social equality — it’s is also a damn good story. Patriarchy, it turns out, is prettiest when it’s on fire...
The logic of the neo-misogyny espoused by men’s rights activists and Return of Kings commenters is grounded in the idea that, as Clarey puts it, “when the shit hits the fan, it will be men like Jack Mad Max who will be in charge.” Come the inevitable collapse of civilization, women will need men to protect them. The so-called natural order will reassert itself, the thinking goes, and hot babes will go crawling back to the kitchen to make cockroach sandwiches where they belong. What’s threatening about Fury Road is the idea that when the earth burns, women might not actually want men to protect them. Men might, in fact, be precisely the thing they are trying to survive...
Perhaps the real reason that this film has upset the neo-misogynists so very much is not just that it throws their Return of Kings fantasy into vivid, horrible relief, but that it offers the possibility of redemption for all of us."
http://www.buzzfeed.com/lauriepenny/the-fast-and-the-feminist#.xl1Wj4Xpk

(Warning: Hella spoilers in the second half of the review)

I want "Patriarchy, it turns out, is prettiest when it’s on fire" on a poster.

I loved this movie, and in addition to all it says about gender, I found myself reading in similarly bleak commentary about race: Almost everyone is white, and members of the cultish society at the center of the film cover themselves in chalk to become more white. And to become really indistinguishable from each other. And I think that says something about the sort of expectations we have for ourselves in a post-apocalyptic world of extraordinarily scarce resources. Not just men, but white men will take control and eliminate or subjugate everyone else - and difference will be grounds to be considered an "everyone else".

And if we don't want that to be true, we should talk about it?