Oppression Porn
It’s a shame this term isn’t more widely used. I’m noticing an awful lot of “art” (if you can call some of this shit art, of which I do not) falls into the category of oppression porn.
Oppression porn is a work of art, whether it be a movie, TV show or book, that depicts the kind of hellscape leftists are fond of shrieking about. You know, a book that covers all the lefty bugaboos – gays being oppressed, women being oppressed, minorities being oppressed, etc. Oh, and in these stories, the oppressor is always a straight, Christian white male.
You have to see it to fully understand.
A good example would be Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. You know what that’s about. This deeply anti-Christian book was first published in 1985, and a film adaptation was released in 1991, but it wasn’t until Hulu made this stupid novel into a TV show – now on its third season – that this story became the pop culture juggernaut it is.
And what timing, with the election of the evil Bad Orange Man and all.
But it’s far from the only work of its kind. A few years ago, a blatant ripoff of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was published – a book called When She Woke by Hilary Jordan.
So, in this novel, the US has been taken over by some eeeeevil Christians, and abortion is – gasp – outlawed! But instead of putting criminals in prison, said criminals are captured and their skin is changed to a lurid color according to their crime. Murderers have their skin turned a bright, fire-engine red. The protagonist of this novel, a woman who is having an affair with a preacher, gets an abortion, gets caught and is colored red, then let out into the population.
This is profoundly stupid and makes no sense. If we’re talking about a freaking psychopath, having bright red skin isn’t going to stop them from killing people. Letting truly dangerous people into the population is a horrifyingly bad idea.
Oppression porn is usually nonsensical in the creator’s desire to depict their ideological enemies as Pure Unadulterated Evil.
Oh, but this is far from the only example. Back in 2013, I took a trip back home, and flew out of RDU (Raleigh-Durham International Airport). I got past security and excitedly went over to the Hudson Bookstore (of which is now closed, which really, really pisses me off) and browsed the display tables. I saw a book called Christian Nation by Frederic Rich, and I figured it was some silly bit of leftist nonsense, and it was. I picked it up and read through the summary on the cover flap, and it was just as idiotic and ridiculous as I expected it to be.
The premise? An alternate timeline in which John McCain and Sarah Palin win the 2008 election. McCain mysteriously dies in Russia (heh) and Palin becomes the 45th President. Shortly after her inauguration, the US devolves into some silly war between Christians, aka the “Holies” and the pious, diverse, atheist, Authentic Americans known as the “secs.” Their last stronghold is Manhattan of all places.
The story is told by some effeminate douchebag named Greg, and there are two other characters – Emilie, his wife the atheist cunt, and the token non-white guy, Sanjay, who is not only Indian-American, but gay to boot! It’s super mega diverse! Excuse me while I vomit.
I remember taking a picture of this book with my phone, but I couldn’t find it. Sadly, Ace of Spades was the only conservative blog to give this silly book any real coverage. It’s old, but still funny as hell:
This Right Here Is Some Really Stupid Isht
Review of Christian Nation from USA Today
You gotta see the ridiculous trailer too, and the publisher’s page, of which has a reader’s guide.
Let’s just say I, uh, managed to procure a copy of the book long ago, but never bothered to read it because the excerpt I did read was bad enough. It was boring and incredibly insulting. Not a good combination. It’s not surprising that this book was pretty much dead on arrival…there’s much better oppression porn out there.
Oppression Porn in YA
The young adult market is absolutely rife with oppression porn, and has been ever since the success of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. Dystopia was all the rage for a few years, and would have faded away if it weren’t for the success of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale. A few years ago, every publisher was pumping out Hunger Games ripoffs every year…now it’s pro-abortion, pro-feminist oppression porn.
Oh, and pro-illegal immigrant oppression porn, and pro-Muslim oppression porn.
I’ve already written about Laura Moriarty’s American Heart, a book that simply wasn’t good enough for the lefty gatekeepers of YA because the protagonist was a white girl. It got accusations of white savior-ism and such. But a challenger appeared.
That book is called Internment and it is by Samira Ahmed. It’s about a teenage girl and her family being shoved into an internment camp for Muslims. Very similar to the plot for American Heart, only the Muslim girl in question saves herself, I guess, and doesn’t need some white girl to help her. Or something. The author was born in India but grew up in Illinois, so that’s why there was no vicious backlash against this one.
The problem with books like Internment and American Heart is that they never acknowledge the reasons people like me are so deeply resentful of Islam’s creeping influence upon the West. A lot of Muslims are violent terrorists. A lot. I’m not making this shit up. Muslim majority nations in the Middle East are usually dystopian hellholes. Not even being a freaking princess guarantees you freedom in, say, Dubai for example! The ruler of Dubai’s youngest wife, Princess Haya, ran away and fled to London with her two children after finding out that he lied to her about his daughter, Princess Latifa, and how the poor girl was punished after her attempt to flee Dubai. They live like the royalty they are, but that’s only on the surface. They’re still treated as shamefully as any poor Muslim is treated.
These kinds of novels also do not acknowledge that terrorists often victimize more moderate Muslims. No, it’s always evil whitey doing this. Leftists love telling us right-wingers that Muslims are often the primary victims of terrorism – and they are right, to an extent – but this is never, ever reflected in pro-Muslim oppression porn.
Then there’s the Black Lives Matter oppression porn, like the wildly popular The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, and Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro. The Hate U Give was made into a movie starring actress and (highly annoying) activist Amandla Stenberg.
There is a series called Diary of a Haunting by M. Verano (it’s a pen name). The second installment, called Possession, is the diary of a black girl who just wants to be a singer, but comes down with an illness that’s quite obviously a possession…meanwhile, race riots are all over the news, and might be coming to her neighborhood soon. Probably not strictly oppression porn, but when I read the summary for this, I immediately thought, “black lives matter…Jesus, people.”
But the one sub-genre of oppression porn that the publishing industry loves is anything relating to abortion and the patriarchy.
Stories like Matched by Ally Condie, which is about an evil society choosing a person’s spouse. Or Bumped by Megan McCafferty, in which a virus makes older women infertile, making teenage girls highly coveted because they’re the only ones that can have babies. At least in this story, girls are richly rewarded by these old couples for having babies, but the whole concept of being obliged to produce offspring for whatever reason is something I see a lot in YA dystopian fiction. Oh, and in Bumped, Christians are stupid and evil. That’s another trope you find in this oppression porn. Can’t forget Wither by Lauren DeStefano, in which the life spans of humans is greatly reduced, thanks to genetic engineering or something, so girls are being kidnapped and forced into polygamous “marriages” to produce children. Bumped, for all its hateful anti-Christian invective, at least makes sense in that yes, desperate people would greatly reward a girl willing to give up her offspring.
Right now I am supposed to be reading the ARC of The Grace Year by Kim Liggett, but it’s just so vomit-worthy that I simply can’t. It’s not going to be out until October, so I still have time to torture myself into finishing it.
But it’s set in a patriarchal dystopia where men rule, and where every girl must be married, lest she be a shunned freak or forced into prostitution, like the other rejects. For some reason, this evil patriarchal society claims that girls have some magical potent power, and that when they turn sixteen, they must be exiled for a year, for reasons. Oh, to “release” their “magic” into the wild so that they’re “ready” for marriage and motherhood. This exile is called “the grace year”. Yeah, it’s stupid and ridiculous, and I’m only 4% in. Sigh.
Just a couple more examples, from the same author: Article 5, by Kristen Simmons, sees the largest three cities in the US – New York City, Los Angeles and Washington DC, abandoned. The Bill of Rights is abandoned too, replaced by the Moral Statutes. Yep, more anti-Christian oppression porn. The main character lives with her “rebellious” single mother, and her boyfriend basically gets her mother arrested for violating Article 5 of the Moral Statutes. And what is Article 5? “Children are considered valid citizens only when conceived by a married man and wife.” Sigh.
This author has yet another dystopian oppression porn: The Glass Arrow, which takes place in a world where girls are hunted down, captured and auctioned off as breeders.
Is This Just Political?
I am not just ragging on these silly stories because I’m biased. None of these are remotely plausible. The idea of the US becoming a Christian theocracy is just utter nonsense. The Church barely has any power these days. Christians are routinely and viciously mocked in popular culture. You don’t get praised for becoming a Christian, but you do get praised for leaving the faith behind.
As for the Republican party, not everyone is a Christian and even the Christians within the party are all different. Almost all of us would agree that the separation of church and state is an important concept. Without it you get Saudi Arabia or Iran. No fucking thank you.
These stories make me think of Don Quixote – the guy who, after reading way too many romances, decides to become a knight. He has a lot of misadventures, of which include fighting windmills, of which he believes to be giants.
Feminists are modern day Don Quixotes, having read too much bullshit feminist theory, and are now racing across the countryside, fighting windmills.
Anyway, the threat of authoritarian Christians is non-existent. These paranoid fantasies have absolutely no bearing on reality, but they’ll continue to be published because the Democrats want everyone in the US to be conditioned to hate Republicans, conservatives, Christians and anyone that might pose even the remotest threat to their power.
