Freedomain Radio: The Logic of Personal and Political Freedom with Stefan Molyneux: 2014

The movie opens with two orphaned children – a girl, and a boy. The girl – a goddess named Maleficent – sits in a tree laughing at the sunshine, playing with toys she magically floats in the air, healing trees and generally spritzing sentimental virtues like a mall troll spraying perfume on her victims.

The boy is a dirty thief.

Do you get the picture? If not, this Nazi-level of anti-male propaganda will be repeated within the film for approximately infinity. Women – good, because magic. Men – bad, because beards.

The boy – Stefan, the future king - has picked up a gem because he is broke and hungry. Maleficent takes it away from him by force, and then throws it in a river.

Whaaaaa?

This interaction is completely insane – and immoral. A starving boy picks up an unowned gem so that he can eat, we assume, and the little witch takes it – just to throw it away. She does not offer him food, or gold, or anything else - she just takes away his treasure and trashes it. Can you imagine meeting a starving, orphaned child who is about to eat a banana, ripping that banana out of his hands, and grinding it underfoot?

Also, I don’t know if you have been to a mall lately, but if I recall rightly, women don’t seem to be particularly partial to taking expensive gems, and throwing them in a river. It is women who are responsible for the rape of the earth called diamond, mineral and gold-mining – not men.

Angelina Jolie had a quarter of a million dollar engagement ring made for her, for a year, by Brad Pitt.

Maleficent is the protector of fairy land, where there are no rulers, because everyone just trusts each other – this is the madness of GirlyWorld – you know, like in high school, where all the girls loved and supported and trusted each other, right?

King Henry is the King of Man World, and thus is greedy, dirty, bearded, swarthy, greasy, and violent. He brings his knights to attack GirlyWorld, because – why? Well, he has a beard, and thus is evil. One thing you will notice throughout the movie – and this is becoming a ridiculously prevalent cliché – is that the more male characteristics a person has, the more evil he is. Stefan as a boy is not evil, because little boys look like little girls. Later, the gay Prince who wins the Princess’s “heart” with his inept stuttering is not evil, because he looks about as capable of growing a beard as a beluga.

This level of transparently manipulative propaganda is directly lifted from the racist and anti-Semitic cliché handbook. Imagine making a movie where everyone who was good was really, really white; the ambivalent characters were mulatto, and the more evil the character, the darker his skin. Or, a movie where all the heroes were blonde, square jawed and blue-eyed Aryan blooded gods, and all the villains were hook-nosed grasping Jewish caricatures - and the more Jewish they looked, the more evil they were.

Good Person - No Male Characteristics

More EEEEvil, More Male Characteristics

More Evil, Almost There...

Total Evil Villain: There We Go!

We don’t see this very clearly, because transcendent, world spanning, man hating bigotry is about as noticeable to us as gravity – and about as prevalent.

So here we have two orphans, Stefan and Maleficent. Stefan is dirty, avaricious, ambitious, and immoral. Maleficent is glorious, brave, caring, good natured, sensitive and gentle - just run through the lexical set of sentimental virtues, and you will see her picture on every word.

In the development of the two characters, you will see a fundamental artistic truism of the etiology and progress of gender immorality: men are born bad, but women are made bad by men.

Male evil is causeless, unexplainable, irredeemable, and inexhaustible. Female “evil” arises from male betrayal. Men are bad because they are men; women are made bad by men.

Women tenderly open their hearts to men, who then sadistically cut their hearts out, leaving them bitter, angry shells of their former glorious selves.

Women can learn virtue and redeem themselves; men always just double down on their prior evils, until justifiably killed by a woman.

Sounds pretty balanced to me, how about you?

King Henry brings his knights to attack GirlyWorld, for no discernible reason – Maleficent summons her beta male tree guards, and reveals herself to be a magnificent warrior, who sweeps helpless knights from the battlefield with the power of her wings, and has some sort of magic immunity to being hit by iron arrows. Also, apparently, no one figures out that setting fire to the tree guards would be a pretty good way of taking them out – because, of course, they are men, and so compensate for their immense evil with equally immense stupidity.

As we saw in the other Disney movie “Frozen,” women always possess great talents and abilities without any prior training or experience whatsoever. Maleficent shows no hint of her army-destroying martial powers prior to taking on all the King’s men; she is a woman, and therefore is magnificent and powerful and competent without ever having to undergo the inconvenience of rigorous training and preparation. She plays with toys, heals trees, dances with fairies – and then destroys an army! She never has to learn any of these skills; she is just born with them, because all women are somehow born with thermonuclear labia capacities.

All these unearned skills and magical powers granted to women in stories throughout history are merely metaphors for the magic vagina that gives young women value that they do nothing to earn. I has vagina, therefore value.

When we understand this, we can understand that all the magic of Maleficent’s GirlyWorld is merely the magic of youthful female desirability, which Angelina Jolie rules because, as the most beautiful woman in the world, she rules the real world as well.

The fact that in ManWorld, men are dirty and hard-working and ambitious, while in GirlyWorld, women laugh and play and dance and sing, is merely testimony to the insane degree that women take for granted the safe, clean and technological world created by men. Try to imagine a day when women wake up and thank men for providing sewers, electricity, plumbing, roads, frozen food, refrigerators, dishwashers, laundry machines, smartphones – the list, literally, goes on without end. Can you imagine women ever acknowledging the tragic reality that men invented labor-saving devices for women before they invented life-saving devices for men – laundry machines were invented for women before basic safety devices for male miners? Of course not, it’s all “men are pigs,” “rape culture,” and “muh patriarchy.” Despite controlling 80 percent of domestic spending, women consider themselves a tragically put-upon underclass – because, as we all know, the motto for men throughout history, in lifeboat situations, was, “women and children last.”

In this metaphorical set, Maleficent’s wings are in fact her breasts, or sexual power – they start small, when she is a girl, and grow large, when she becomes a woman. They allow her to defy gravity, just as a hot young woman’s sexual appeal allows her to deny the economic reality called having to work buy her own drinks, or pay for her own dinners and trips. (A young woman I know told me that her friends love going out for an evening armed only with cab fare home, knowing that young men will buy them drinks all night long. This is called “empowered,” not lazy, manipulative and parasitical.)

Maleficent and Stefan become friends – and then kiss – but after Maleficent fatally wounds the King, the dying monarch offers his crown to whoever kills Maleficent. Taking advantage of their former friendship, Stefan drugs Maleficent, but finds he cannot bring himself to kill her, and so instead burns off her wings with iron – a substance deadly to fairies – and returns them to the king as proof of his victory.

It is essential to remember that, on the King’s orders, someone from the castle is going to kill Maleficent – Stefan in fact actually saves her life by only taking her wings.

Next comes the most important moral dichotomy in the movie. Immediately after Stefan effectively saves Maleficent’s life by taking her wings, Maleficent comes across a crow in a net about to be beaten to death by a farmer, who is tired of the crow eating his seeds. Maleficent turns him into a man – thus taking his wings!

The man – named Diaval – says, “What have you done to my beautiful self?”

Maleficent replies, “Would you rather I let them beat you to death?”

Diaval mournfully regards his missing wings, and then replies, “I’m not certain.”

Maleficent says scornfully, “Stop complaining! I saved your life!”

Diaval lowers his eyes and murmurs, “Forgive me… In return for saving my life, I am your servant.”

I am so susceptible to propaganda that I did not even notice this until watching the movie for the second time, but it is truly a jaw-dropping sequence.

King Henry has ordered his men to kill Maleficent. Stefan saves Maleficent’s life by taking her wings. She plots revenge, destroys lives, murders her former lover, drives an innocent child into exile for sixteen years – and is considered justified in her actions.

Maleficent saves Diaval’s life by taking his wings – then snaps at him to stop complaining, and turns him into a slave for the rest of his life.

Notice any slight moral double standards here? Look closely…

Imagine this scene: Maleficent wakes up to find her wings have been cut off. Stefan smiles at her.

Maleficent screams, “What have you done to my beautiful self!”

Stefan laughs and replies, “Would you rather I let the King’s men kill you?”

Maleficent lowers her head. “I’m not certain.”

Stefan snaps scornfully, “Stop complaining! I saved your life!”

Maleficent lowers her eyes and murmurs, “Forgive me… In return for saving my life, I am your servant.”

Maleficent then spends the rest of the movie making King Stefan sandwiches, rubbing his feet, picking up his dry-cleaning and washing his floors, in humble gratitude for the fact that he saved her life.

Women would go insane at such a humiliating depiction – but no one even notices it if the victim is a man.

Also, why did Maleficent need to enslave a man to save his life? She could just have used her magic army-destroying powers to get rid of the farmer, and set the crow free. Maleficent has infinitely less justification for enslaving the man then Stefan has for taking her wings – the man Diaval is not allowed to mourn his loss for even two seconds, but the woman Maleficent is given over an hour of screen time to mourn and plot and abuse children and kill her former lover. She turns him into various creatures – which he hates – and constantly puts him in death-magnet situations of danger, and scorns his trembling attempts at good advice.

You see? Men are disposable slaves; women are dark justified goddesses of retaliatory magic.

Mmmm, I can almost taste the patriarchy, can’t you?

Watching the movie, I understood that Maleficent’s “wings” were a metaphor for her breasts, and watching Angelina Jolie – who recently underwent a double mastectomy – awaken from a drugged sleep and howl in agony at the surgical removal of her “wings" made me pretty uncomfortable. I prefer a bit more acting in my movies.

A woman believes that she has value because she is sexually attractive, but then, when a man impregnates her, she loses her sexual attractiveness. The “loss of wings” is a metaphor for Stefan impregnating Maleficent that night in the forest, which caused her to lose the sexual value of her breasts, as they transition from sexual objects to baby feeding bags.

If we understand that Maleficent is the King’s mistress who gives birth to a child, the rest of the movie makes a whole lot more sense.

Historically, bastard children are great problems to royal families; when the King has a child with a mistress, he does not want to kill the child, but the child can lay claim to the throne. (Shakespearean plays are rife with the problems of bastard royal children.)

The bastard child is usually raised a great distance from the palace, and not told about his or her Royal lineage. The child is kept as an emergency backup monarch-to-be, in case the Queen proves infertile, or illness or war carry off the legitimate heirs to the throne. This the fact that the child in the movie – in reality the child of Stefan and Maleficent, but passed off as the child of the Queen – is sent away to a distant cottage and raised without knowledge of her Royal lineage, would be standard operating procedure for the head criminals in society.

Once we understand that the child – Aurora is her name – is really the love child of Stefan and Maleficent, we can understand why Maleficent never falls in love again, and basically grows into a brittle and aggressive spinster. In history, few men would wed a woman who gave birth out of wedlock, for the simple reason that she had clearly signaled her sexual greed and irresponsibility, and thus he could never be sure that he would actually be raising his own children. She loses her wings permanently after being impregnated by Stefan, because by giving birth to a child out of wedlock, she has permanently lost her sexual appeal to other men. (There is a reason why Monica Lewinsky remains unmarried…)

This also explains why Maleficent is obsessed by Aurora, and continually watches over her – because Aurora is not only her child, but also the only child she can ever have.

On the baby Aurora’s christening day, pixies arrive to give her blessings – the first blesses her with beauty, the second with happiness. What sort of messed up set of priorities is this? Nothing about intelligence, or wit, or creativity, or self-knowledge, or wisdom – she should be pretty, and then giggly, which is all she ever turns out to be, which is even worse than falling into a never-ending sleep.

What is the curse that Maleficent puts on Aurora on her christening day? That she shall die by being pricked by a spinning wheel on her sixteenth birthday. Historically, a spinning wheel was a dowry present for a woman getting married, so this curse is basically for Aurora to die giving birth to a child when she is 16. ("Prick" is slang for “penis,” of course; a finger is a metaphor for a penis, which enters the woman on her wedding night and makes her bleed.)

Sleep is a metaphor for a lack of self-knowledge – people sleepwalk through life if they act automatically, without self-reflection, which basically means without being told the truth by those around them, particularly their parents.

So the curse means a continuation of the sexual disasters and dysfunctions of the bloodline – Aurora will get pregnant, just as Maleficent got pregnant, and these disasters will just repeat, over and over again, because Aurora will never wake up to reality, to the truth, which is withheld from her.

After being begged, Maleficent makes a modification to the curse, which is that Aurora can be awakened by true love’s kiss. Just as in “Frozen,” it turns out that this kiss, this love, must come from a woman, not a man.

At one level, this appeals to the vanity of girls and women who love to imagine that, although they want to become mothers, they can “do without men!”

A deeper level, this is the beginning of mankind’s awakening to the basic reality that it is the lack of love from women that is killing the world. Women’s well-documented verbal, physical and emotional abuses within the family – statistically, greater than men’s – is beginning to be understood, and the first indications of focusing on the immorality of so many women as the most necessary dysfunction that needs to be addressed to save the world, is underway.

People are so terrified of women that they can only assign them a tiny shred of moral responsibility for healing the world after spending roughly 90 minutes obsessively praising them. The movie Maleficent is willing to give women the message that they need to love their children more in order to heal the world only after endless scenes of women being wonderful, healing trees, flying, dancing with fairies, loving open heartedly, being endlessly victimized, and so on. This requirement for endless flattery before giving a heavily veiled metaphorical message is characteristic of those living under a dictatorship, a “chicktatership” perhaps.

Another message that appeals to the vanity of women is that Aurora can be raised by essentially three neurotic lesbians – the trio of verbally and physically abusive pixies in the movie – and emerge an absolutely wonderful and radiant young woman, who giggles and laughs, emerges from leaves, plays with fairies, loves unreservedly and unconsciously and heals the broken heart of the woman she calls her “fairy godmother,” who has been watching over her since she was born – all phrases used to describe a real mother who is being passed off as a mere relative or friend.

Again, we see that pure female influences in the life of a child – with the exception of Maleficent – always produce wonderful offspring, while whatever a man touches turns to ash and hate and fire and death.

In the final scene, when Maleficent finally speaks maternal words to Aurora, promising that no harm will ever come to her, Aurora “wakes up,” which is to say that she is finally told the truth about her family, and her origins, and who her mother really is. Maleficent actually apologizes, expressing sorrow and regret, which is not the most common female trait in the world, at least in my experience. In fact, feminism, by making women eternal victims, has stripped them of their ability to apologize, and thus to take moral responsibility, remain sensitive to empathy, and grow as human beings. Believing in the patriarchy means never having to say you’re sorry.

Much has been written about the “rape” scene in the movie, where the future King removes Maleficent’s wings while she sleeps, which is considered analogous to drugging a woman, and then raping her while she is unconscious.

I have some problems with this interpretation – not least of which is that Stefan’s supposed rape is considered a crime, but not one commentator has mentioned anything about Maleficent’s theft of Stefan’s gem, which really set the whole story in motion. If the young Maleficent had not stolen the boy’s gem, he would never have had to go and work in the Castle, and never would have been infected with the desire to become King, and therefore would never have cut off her wings.

It would have been immensely powerful if Maleficent had apologized to Stefan for stealing his treasure when he was a little boy, particularly since she only threw it away. I mean, imagine what a wonderful scene it would have been if, when he returned to her as an adult, she had apologized for her theft that drove him to the Castle, and invited him to stay with her, and work to overthrow the unjust King. However, it seems to have crossed no one’s mind but mine that Maleficent did the boy an enormous wrong, and sent him down a very dark path through her imperious theft. However, the idea that a woman would genuinely apologize to a man in a movie remains in the realm of fantasy; I think we will sooner see an orc run for president than witness such an improbable spectacle.

I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m beating the same drum with the same stick, but really, this level of contempt for masculinity has to be noticed before it can be stopped.

It is not healthy to tell women that men are bad – is not healthy to tell daughters that fathers are bad – it is not healthy to tell wives that husbands are bad, because the absence of fathers is killing the world. It may sound like I speak in hyperbole, but I’m deadly serious. Just look up the statistics on the children of single mothers; I will let the fatal math make my case.

A society without respect for men has no respect for property, or nature, or currency, or solvency, its own children – or its own future, which shortens every single day.

Ladies – you need men, your children need men, the civilization you rely on was built by, and rests on, the labors and talents of men. Stop putting us down, stop supporting those who put us down, because it kills your capacity for love as much as it murders ours - and without love, without respect, without virtue, we are less than animals, because animals can survive without such glories.

We cannot.