“Wouldn’t it be a good idea to write a story about some boys on an island showing how they would really behave, being boys and not little saints as they usually are in children’s books?”
That’s William Golding, author of “Lord of the Flies,” explaining his sudden inspiration to write his now-legendary book. This week, the world learned that two plucky Hollywood directors thought it would also be a good idea to remake Golding’s classic into a film starring an all-female cast.
Brace yourself for the bad news: These two plucky Hollywood directors, unfortunately, are male. Here’s the even worse news: Amidst the comforting cloudy mental nests formed by their male privilege, these two plucky Hollywood directors apparently forgot that a sizeable segment of the population has gone barking mad.
“Lord of the Flies,” you might be surprised to learn from much of the press this week, is not about humanity’s inherently fallen nature. Nor is it about the dangerously thin line between civilization and savagery. If your high school English teacher taught you that, please publicly shame her immediately. No, “Lord of the Flies” has one central focus, and one focus only. Coincidentally, it’s the same central obsessive focus shared by our current tribe of batty leading feminists: Toxic masculinity.
Women Are Never Evil, You Sick Chauvinist Pigs
“An all women remake of Lord of the Flies makes no sense because…the plot of the book wouldn’t happen with all women,” New York Times columnist Roxane Gay declared on Twitter, making me wonder if she’s ever been to a sixth-grade slumber party. (If you haven’t been to one, know this: They almost always degenerate into a pillow-strewn wasteland of popcorn, treachery, and copious weeping.)
Other writers joked that a female “Lord of the Flies” would obviously and inevitably morph into a peaceful island paradise—you know, like the very real place where Wonder Woman grew up. By my personal scientific assessment, there is a 99 percent probability that anyone who makes this point has never spent significant time in a sorority house, where there is often unlimited cereal, a frozen yogurt machine, and occasional tales of terror that would make your hair stand on end.
“Not every story makes sense to gender-flip,” wrote Yohana Desta at Vanity Fair. “Particularly if that story is William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies, a vicious tale about a barbaric boy-made society. The concept alone,” she continues, “disregards the point of the book!”
Get it? “The point of the book” is that boys—just boys!—are inherently bad.
The Truth Is Just So, So Triggering
Some of this wackiness, I presume, was merely pulled out of thin air. Some of it, however, is based on some famous comments from Golding himself, introducing the audio version of “Lord of the Flies.” Explaining why his book was focused on boys, not girls, the author immediately noted the obvious: “I was once a little boy–I have been a brother, a father, I am going to be a grandfather. I have never been a sister, or a mother, or a grandmother. So, this is why I wrote it, really, about little boys.”
He wrote, in other words, what he knew. But then Golding went on, noting—rather problematically, really!—that girls don’t run the world. “If you land with a group of little boys, they are more like scaled-down society than a group of little girls would be. Don’t ask me why, and this is a terrible thing to say because I’m going to be chased from hell to breakfast by all the women who talk about equality.”
He went on, a bit apologetically: “This has nothing to do with equality at all. I mean, I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men, they are far superior and always have been.” Oh, Golding, you scamp. Flattery will get you everywhere. It will also somehow convince modern feminists that “Lord of the Flies” has nothing to do with women!
Golding goes on to note that introducing girls into the book would dilute the story’s ultimate point, because “sex would have raised its lovely head, and I didn’t want this to be about sex.” So, in the end, what is the book about? Is it about the differences between men and women? Is it about, as one Twitter sage declared, “systemic male violence and how it replicates?” Get ready, for Golding tells us quite clearly: “Lord of the Flies” is about “the problem of evil and the problem of how people are to live together in a society, not just as lovers or man and wife.”
Oh. Well, never mind. Women apparently don’t face “the problem of evil.” They clearly don’t struggle with those “beasts in the human psyche which have to be curbed” that Golding described in a Purdue University interview in 1962. When Golding said in the same interview that he was saying to his readers, “Look, you think you’ve been reading about little boys, but in fact you’ve been reading about the distresses and wickedness of humanity,” he surely only meant half of humanity.
Case closed, am I right? I can’t help but think of some wise words from Jack Handey, noted sage of “Saturday Night Live.” “Maybe in order to understand mankind we have to look at that word itself,” Handey once noted. “MANKIND. Basically, it’s made up of two separate words, ‘mank,” and ‘ind.” What do these words mean? It’s a mystery and that’s why so is mankind.”
Indeed, Mr. Handey. Indeed. But I’ll tell you one thing: The word “woman” sure isn’t in “mank” or “ind”! It’s nowhere to be found! The evidence is in: We ladies have nothing to do with the world’s chaos and madness and problems. Nothing, nothing at all.
