According to one proverb, “history is just one damned thing after another.” History is chaotic, in other words, and therefore meaningless. But according to another proverb, an even more cynical one, “history is written by the victors.” History does indeed have a meaning: “our” inevitable triumph over “them.” Those on the “right side of history” have not only the military, political or legal power to prevail but also the intellectual, spiritual or even moral power to impose their interpretation of history on those who have chosen the “wrong side of history.” The latter deserve their humiliation and other forms of punishment, a point of view that equates revenge with justice. Feminists now prevail (with their racial and sexual allies) in the public square. They have spent the last fifty years, in fact, rewriting human history in order to legitimate their own political ascendency, their own “hegemony,” in a world that relies on “identity politics.”
All of this was on my mind as I read through a recent issue of Aeon, an e-zine that specializes in middle-brow articles on high-brow topics such as philosophy and science. Every issue includes a short video documentary. Consider The Mushroom Hunters (Caroline Rudge, 2019). After all, the blub on Aeon’s website says what countless politically correct publications and productions have been saying for the past half century: “In this animated adaptation of the poem [by Neil Gaiman] performed by his wife, the American musician and artist Amanda Palmer, its themes of inherited wisdom, female power and humanity’s irrepressible pursuit of knowledge are visualised in striking watercolours to offer a richly imagined perspective on the relationship between science and culture.” What’s not to like? Well, read on.
Mushroom is a classic example of feminist propaganda that masquerades as objective truth—or at least as the kind of “received truth” on which feminist ideology, like any other ideology, depends. I hesitated before using the word “propaganda.” Thanks mainly to Joseph Goebbels, that word has become a notoriously subjectiveone. It refers now not to the propagation of ideas in general but to the propagation of sinister ones in particular—which is to say, ones that “we” dislike or fear and therefore oppose. It refers also to manipulative forms of persuasion, as if all forms of persuasion were not manipulative to some degree. Nonetheless, I use the word “propaganda” according to its current usage in common parlance. I do think that feminist ideology, any ideology, is sinister because of its hostility toward men. And I do think that this expression of it is unnecessarily manipulative. Watch the video closely, and keep it handy so that you can illustrate quickly what happens when ideologues in our time discard the crude pedagogical methods of earlier times and replace them with (relatively) subtle forms of indoctrination.
Before discussing Mushroom, though, I want to mention a similar film that made its debut almost twenty years ago. A detailed analysis of it appears in the first volume in a series of four that I wrote with Katherine Young: Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). Made by our very own National Film Board, The Goddess Remembered (Donna Read, 1989) was a much more ambitious project than Mushroom. It relied on high (expensive) production values, especially its glowing cinematography of rural Ireland, to promote the conspiracy theory of history, which underlies ideological feminism (and all forms of ideology on both the left and the right). In the beginning was a Great Goddess, who reigned benevolently over a primeval paradise. Men and women lived together in perfect equality and harmony with nature. Then came the Fall. This was due either to invasions from without (male conquerors led by their cruel gods) or rebellions from within (male malcontents led by their cruel gods). Suffering has prevailed ever since. But wait. The rise of feminism is a harbinger of paradise regained, of the Goddess restored.
Sound familiar? It’s a revision—no, a reversal—of the biblical story or, to be accurate, of post-biblical interpretations of it. The main difference is that the original story assigned guilt for human suffering to both the primeval man and the primeval woman along with their male and female descendants; later interpretations assigned the guilt primarily to the primeval woman and her female descendants. This feminist riff assigns guilt for “original sin” only to primeval men and their male descendants. I’m not making this up. Many feminists, especially since the 1970s, have made that very claim. Consider, for instance, Naomi Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), Marilyn French, Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: Harper, 1991).
We have a few ancient carvings in ivory or bone of female figures –that is, pregnant women. Did these represent goddesses? If so, was the “original” deity a goddess? And even so, would that prove any modern theory about the status of Paleolithic women? We have no comparably ancient images of male figures. Does this mean that ancient people had no interest in gods? And even so, would that prove any modern theory about status of Paleolithic men? What if ancient people carved other figures, including male figures, in wood or some other material that decayed long ago? We don’t know. We don’t know even what why ancient communities created the famous cave paintings. Did they use these images to worship the animals? Did the painted animals have some kind of magical function to foster successful hunting expeditions? Or were these paintings among the first human efforts at interior decoration?
Back now, though, to Mushroom (https://aeon.co/videos/observe-everything-neil-gaimans-celebration-of-cultures-journey-from-science-to-knowledge?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter). It’s much shorter than Goddess. But there’s one additional difference, a much more important one. The expected viewers are young school children, which makes this film much more dangerous than one for adults who have already converted to the true faith of feminism. The explicit topics are human evolution, history, science and women. The implicit topic is female superiority, or male inferiority. The mushroom “hunters” are women, after all, along with a few children and “minorities.”
Now, look again at the title. “Mushroom hunting” is a politically expedient euphemism for “mushroom gathering,” of course, because “hunting” connotes the killing of animals, not plants or fungi. And those who risked their lives to hunt for big game, or at least to lead the hunt, were men. Why not give women a status that’s explicitly equal to the status of men but implicitly superior? (Killing animals is gory and icky, but gathering mushrooms is relatively clean and cheerful.) So, women and men were all “hunters.”
Notice also the narrator’s whispery, ingratiating and almost reverent voice as she informs viewers, through poetry, about the accomplishments of women. She takes a few seconds to dismiss and lament male accomplishments. Then, she takes most of the remaining time to laud and almost sanctify women (and, for good measure, minorities). Women invented science and all other good things, see, because men were too busy killing or being killed, too fond of death and chaos or whatever.
Throughout, the narrator makes statements that are either very tendentious (but in line with feminist ideology) or unverifiable (a routine feature of feminist ideology and other ideologies, one that believers seldom acknowledge even, I suspect, to themselves). According to this “documentary,” for instance, the slingshot (a weapon that, presumably, only men made and used) was originally a leather pouch in which to carry infants (a convenience that, presumably, only women made and used). So women, being wise and benevolent—unlike men, presumably—invented science, technology, the arts and everything else of value. Who knew? More to the point, who could know?
My point is not that our remote male ancestors contributed everything of great cultural value and therefore that our remote female ancestors contributed nothing of great cultural value (let alone of great demographic value). On the contrary, I reject the ideological doctrine that “men created patriarchal culture” for their own selfish and oppressive purposes, while women stood around passively for a few hundred thousand years. Women have always participated with men in the creation of culture. And the consequences of doing so, by both men and women, have been both desirable and undesirable. It would take a lengthy paper to explain that and summarize my theory of how things came to be as they are. Fortunately, Young and I have already written a whole volume about the history of men over the past ten thousand years (since the Agricultural Revolution) and about changing perceptions of the male body and its potential contributions to society as a whole: “Replacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History of Men” (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). My point is that Mushroom, like Goddess, gives the distinct impression, reinforced directly and indirectly by clever “cinematic” techniques, that society should not only glorify women but also demonize men. This will never do.
