feminism throughout the ages: “aretha franklin vs. shrek 2”

“oh good” you say to yourself, reading this blog. “another white male mansplaining feminism.”

well FUCK you ’cause apparently if i don’t care, then i’m considered to be “part of the problem”, but when i speak up i’m “uneducated,” “ignoratn,” and “primary knowledge of women comes from watching scarlet johanson as black widow.” there’s no pleasing you motherfuckers. so instead of applying my unique skills to yet another mansplanation, i’ll be applying my flawless logic knowledge to calculate the trajectory of feminism, using music and pop culture.

so without further a dudes, let me pull up wikipedia and start researching as i write this: back in the 50’s and 60’s music was made by primarily white males (crazy how far we’ve come) who all sang about forcing some young poor girl to dance with them or not-so-vaguely threatening them with physical harm should they not love them back. buddy holly (RIP), the beatles (RIP), and elvis (RIP?) all wrote songs of this kind, and teens of the 1950s ate that shit up because men wore tight pants and apparently it was perfectly acceptable to backhand a woman if she didn’t agree with you? christ.

well along comes aretha franklin singing “respect” in 1967 and getting all the tight-pants men fuming. i must admit, i owe my 100% success rate spelling “respect” to aretha. i googled “songs for women by women” and all 1,784,960 results were “respect” by aretha franklin, so it’s safe to say that it’s an important song. BUT THEN. disaster struck in the form of bonnie tyler and footloose. what have you done, bonnie. ol’ bon sings the song “holding out for a hero” seemingly as a direct atttempt to retcon all the positive social change that aretha made, like disney did when they bought star wars and melted all the gold of the expanded universe to make a solid gold cock ring for kathleen kennedy.

now “holding out for a hero” never reached the popularity or timelessness that “respect” did, and thank fucking god for that. but it definitely put it into the minds of incels everywhere that women, in fact, do need a white knight to save them. as footloose faded into “shitty 80s movie that started a much better acting career” obscurity, “holding out for a hero” disappeared into the dark, anti-empowerment night… that is, until shrek.

no one really expected a terribly animated movie starring mike myers, eddie murphy, and fart jokes to change the trajectory of modern culture, but maybe it’s part of the reason why we haven’t been allowed to make contact with intelligent life in the universe. so shrek was a runaway success that spawned an international musical (yes, really), a wikipedia page dedicated to shrek video games, and most importantly, a fucking sequel. and believe or not (i didn’t either) shrek 2 was the highest grossing animated film of all time until toy story 3 came out. and what fucking song did shrek 2 use for the final rescue scene? yeah, it wasn’t aretha franklin.

so the highest grossing animated film of the time revitalizes “holding out for a hero” like a necromancer raising a corpse from the dead, but the corpse was buried in a manure field. and now it’s the mid-2000s and you’ve got aretha vs. shrek fighting for the fate of women of everywhere for all time. pitting shrek against a song from the 1960s certainly seemed like an unfair fight for the time, but shockingly… shrek didn’t hold up well over time. huh. so the title goes to ARETHA FRANKLIN EVERYBODY, GIVE IT UP FOR ARETHA. fuck you, shrek.

so aretha franklin and “respect” won out over shrek in the end. good news, women: you’re free. this white male says so.