5 Ways Rey Kicks Feminists In The Face

SPOILER ALERT

By Janet Bloomfield (aka JudgyBitch):According to the Wookieepedia, Rey is a ‘force sensitive human female scavenger’ who conducts her trade on the planet of Jakku, located in a remote section of the Western Reaches, thirty years after the Battle of Endor. These factoids are all relevant to who Rey is, as a person, but since feminists have a hard time seeing individuals as humans (and are embarrassingly ignorant about science fiction worlds in general), Rey was immediately proclaimed a feminist heroine because she has a vagina and does manly stuff, like pilot ships, fix them when they break and speak more than one language.
Naturally, it didn’t take long before feminists started in-fighting over Rey, with enthusiasts declaring her freaking amazing, and detractors muttering over her “Mary Sue” status. I’m particularly amused by Casey Cipriani, writing at Bustle, who writes “[t]he very existence of Rey was a bright spot in the often dark pit of female representation in science fiction, particularly in Hollywood blockbusters.”
Really, Casey? Didn’t feminists just wrap up caterwauling over Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road? Are your memories really that short? And what rock do you need to live under to have missed that whole Terminator and Alien blockbuster franchise thingy?
Does Star Trek ring any bells in your empty little head? How about Avatar? Anything? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller……?
Other writers have noted that feminists invariably embarrass themselves thoroughly when they try to pretend they know anything at all about science fiction, so I won’t carry on with that line of commentary. However, I will note that while feminists know jack shit about scifi, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to presume they know something about feminism. How does Rey stack up as an explicitly feminist character?
In a word, she doesn’t. Here are the top 5 ways Rey kicks feminists in the face.

1. Rey is fit, strong, and beautiful

There is absolutely no reason filmmakers could not have cast a more sturdy actress as Rey, and robustly proportioned characters are not strange to the Star Wars universe. A truly feminist film would have cast Lena Dunham or some other troll proportioned actor in this role. This would have required a slightly larger costuming budget, and some explanation for how Rey is managing to scrounge the calories required to maintain such heft, but if writers can explain away an entire clone army with one comment, then surely ten thousand extra calories could be similarly negated.
Rey kicks feminists in the face by being everything they are not, and everything feminists actively and openly despise in other women: she is fit, beautiful and strong. Protein World might be a good planet for her to visit.

2. Rey has no natural mechanical talent

Like most Star Wars fans, I think, I like to pretend that Episode I, II and III didn’t really happen. Jar-jar who? But recall that wee Anakin was busy assembling 3CPO for shits and giggles. In the clusterfuck that was the poor boy’s life, he found solace in fiddling with intensely complex neural networks because it was fun and amusing to him, and he had natural talent for doing so. His piloting skills were just as natural. He was force sensitive to the max, and all his other talents flowed quite naturally from that premise and required no narrative explanation.

Not so with Rey, because the writing team quite rightly understands that even when women have the ability to develop such skills, they tend not to be interested, and such skills must necessarily be explained by the story itself. Rey scavenges various Imperial battle relics that litter the planet, learning what parts are useful and how they work because if she doesn’t, she starves. Rey understands the workings of various ships and equipment and devices because she must. She has no natural curiosity, no innate fascination with the relics, and one can imagine that if the traders on Jakku were to suddenly become interested in botany, she would turn her interests to finding whatever plant specimens survive on such a barren world, with no lingering thoughts for the capacitors and condensers she previously concerned herself with.
The “Mary Sue” whiners conveniently ignore the narrative that requires Rey to know how the mechanics of machines work, because her survival depends on it. A truly feminist film would have made this knowledge second nature for Rey, and in doing so, contradicted what almost everybody knows to be true as a matter of course: girls don’t care about that shit, unless they have to care.

3. Rey is maternal

BB8 is, hands-down, the most adorable droid to ever exist. He is a big ball of squeeeeeeee! Look at him:

His features are neotonous: they mimic the features of infants, to encourage a nurturing response from humans, particularly female humans. That giant head, almost as big as his body! The large, round dark eye that avoids looking too cyclopsy by having another ‘eye’ offset nearby. His round body, that almost looks cuddly. The adorable way he bounces and rolls across the terrain. The way he can cock his head to one side, like an inquisitive puppy. He’s so cute! Rey cannot resist him, and even when offered 60 portions (!), she refuses to give him up. BB8 is her baby! She must protect, nurture and guide him!
Now, some might argue that Rey understands the value of the map, and understands that she is charged with a mission of galactic significance – she must get BB8 to the Resistance! The fate of the galaxy depends on her! But this is bullshit. The minute she clarifies that Finn is part of the resistance, she enlists him to get BB8 to safety. Rey can’t leave Jakku. Her family might be coming back for her. Screw the galaxy – she’s been abandoned, and nothing matters to Rey more that her own inner, emotional survival. Only the threat of immediate annihilation changes her mind, and it is not until the wise Maz Kanata tells her that the belonging she seeks lies ahead of her that Rey gives up on Jakku. Even then, Rey isn’t invested in the future of all living things, she’s invested in her own, and her surrogate baby.
This is how mothers understand the world. Your baby must survive. Nothing else matters. Every fibre of Sarah Connor’s being is invested in her son John, every bead of sweat of Ripley’s body drips with her intense need to save Newt, and Rey needs to get her little droid to safety. Very few women are immune to the pull of maternal instinct. The ones who are, we call feminists. Feminists utterly despise that most women are motivated by maternal instinct. They want the nuclear family destroyed! They want Rey’s heart ripped out and stomped into oblivion! Fuck that droid, fuck everything except you, Rey.
Rey’s having none of it.
#Sorry, feminists.

4. Rey loves men

Rey commits double treason in The Force Awakens, loving not only her surrogate baby, but men, too. When BB8 startles at the presence of FN-2187, Rey reacts as any mother would and she gets ready to kick some ass, but the moment she figures out that FN-2187 is Finn, and an ally, Finn becomes part of the world she must protect and guide.
The spectre of sexual violence is entirely stripped from The Force Awakens, which ironically, removes one of the principle mechanisms by which feminism can foment mistrust, fear and hatred of men. Slave Leia in her gold bikini and poor Oola fed to the Rancor all contributed to a sense of women being particularly vulnerable in the Star Wars universe. Leia’s magnificent outrage at Jabba slobbering his big, nasty tongue at her lent a certain satisfaction to her strangling the fucker to death. Yeah, Leia! I find it incredibly amusing that feminists despise Leia for looking hot in that bikini, all the while ignoring the fact she choked her abuser to death. Leia failed to play the victim card, and instead took fate into her own hands. Feminists hate when women do that.

Rey has no particular narrative reason to fear men in a sexual way, because the writers removed that element (presumably so feminists didn’t have tantrums and threaten to bomb them), but in doing so, they remove the most narratively plausible reason Rey might be suspicious of men, as men. There is no reason for Rey to fear men, so she doesn’t. Instead, she whole-heartedly and affectionately embraces them, and they embrace her right back. Personal favorite moment: when she rips some thingy-doodad out of the control panel of the Falcon and waves the broken wires around in front of Han, excitedly declaring that she ‘fixed’ the problem. Under normal circumstances, Han would not be pleased at anyone ripping shit out of his consoles, but her enthusiasm and genuine warmth overcomes him.
Rey loves and trusts the men who are clearly her allies. She will kill men, when required, but not because they are men – she kills them because they are trying to kill her. A feminist film would cast men as threatening, dangerous, untrustworthy, disloyal, treacherous and hazardous to a woman’s health, because that is the very heart of modern feminism: men are poison simply by virtue of being men.
Rey doesn’t have to reject that narrative, because it isn’t there. The writers deal a death blow to feminism by refusing to hate and vilify men.

5. Rey loves women

Leia’s face when it happens. She dies inside. All we know about Rey is that she was left on Jakku by individuals we assume are her parents, and that she is counting down the days until they return. Once she accepts they aren’t returning, Rey is adrift, without parents or history to anchor her. Just who Rey’s parents are is of the subject of intense fan speculation, and no doubt, we are going to discover lots of interesting things about Miss Rey as the story unfolds, but in terms of the narrative itself, Rey is motherless. The dark undercurrent of misandry in feminism has been noted by many, many authors other than just myself, but the even darker foundation of misogyny often goes unnoted. Feminism hates men and masculinity, but it hates women and femininity even more.
One of the more ironic titles in feminist literature is a compilation put together by Robin Morgan called Sisterhood is Powerful. Morgan, collecting feminist work in 1970, was writing at the very edge of what evolved into modern feminism. Writers like Warren Farrell and Karen de Crow were desperately trying to steer the ship towards true equality – towards the recognition of men and women as equally valuable, equally worthy, equally human. They were court martialled by more powerful feminist voices and sentenced to exile, and the misogyny of feminism exploded across the culture. Perhaps the sine qua non of feminist misogyny is the treatment Jezebel meted out to Lena Dunham. The unfortunately proportioned Dunham had the temerity to pose for Vogue Magazine and the jealous, bitter harpies at Jezebel paid ten thousand dollars for the unretouched photos of Dunham so they could mock, deride, humiliate and eviscerate one of their heroes.
That’s feminism.
Rey descends the ramp of the Falcon to join the triumphant Resistance and finds Leia, barely containing her sorrow. Rey rejects her feminist duty to be jealous of Leia, to mock Leia, to scorn Leia for caring more about a man than the fate of the galaxy, and instead finds comfort in her arms. Perhaps we will discover that Leia and Rey have reason to love one another, but as it stands, they connect because they loved a man, and they mourn his loss. As women.
Women uniting in shared sorrow over the loss of a man they loved is a powerful force in the universe, and one that feminism has tried their absolute best to destroy. In many ways, they have succeeded. The Force Awakens restores more than just the Star Wars universe and all that we love about scrappy, triumphant underdogs defeating tyranny and jackbooted thuggery.
It restores the love between men and women, between women and women.
Rey is no feminist.
She has too much goodness in her to ever fall to the Dark Side.
Suck it, feminists.
Lots of love,
JB

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