tired

Here we go again.

A bunch of successful, conservative professional women are telling young women they don’t need careers to have fulfilling lives. All they need to do is avoid college (or better yet, just use it to find a husband), get married, have babies, stay home and live happily ever after.

Perhaps you’ve noticed the proliferation of “tradwife” (i.e. traditional wife) influencers on various forms of social media, or the coverage of conferences like the woefully misnamed Young Women’s Leadership Summit that recently took place in Dallas. A project of Charlie Kirk’s conservative student organization, Turning Point USA, the summit promised to focus on “foundational aspects of womanhood” such as “faith, femininity and well-being.”

The conference drew 3,000 women who, according to reports, were mostly college students or young professionals. They sported pins that read “My favorite season is the fall of feminism” and “Dump your socialist boyfriend,” and they were told by Kirk, “We should bring back the celebration of the Mrs. degree.”

“The left wants women to feel angry and like victims, and like your rights are being taken away,” a 31-year-old influencer named Arynne Wexler told a reporter for New York magazine. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in fact her rights are being taken away. Perhaps she has forgotten that the Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion in 2022?

Anyway, there is absolutely nothing new here. A certain subset of women — straight, white, conservative, religious — has always fought against gender equality for their own reasons, but mostly I’d say because it threatens their own privileged status and proximity to male power.

Nearly half a century before Wexler bemoaned “the left,” Phyllis Schlafly, lawyer, author and anti-feminist crusader, said basically the same thing: “The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy. Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”

Hmmm. I’m pretty sure it was oppressive patriarchy that prevented women from owning property, having their own credit cards and bank accounts, from earning equal pay, accessing legal birth control and abortion, serving on juries and holding public office. Until second wave feminism came along in the 1960s and 1970s, I’m pretty sure, too, that oppressive patriarchy allowed employers to fire women once they married or got pregnant, and that domestic violence, marital rape and sexual harassment were not treated as crimes. Oh, and it was feminists who pushed for Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which addressed gender inequality in education, including, crucially, in sports.

Attacking feminism because you‘ve never experienced a time when women were not, for the most part, legally equal to men springs from the same ignorant well as believing measles vaccines are unnecessary because you’ve never experienced the (largely vaccine-eliminated) disease for yourself.

Indeed, reciting the accomplishments of feminism reminds me of that classic scene in the 1979 black comedy “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” You may recall it: What have the Romans ever given us? (Just sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system and public health.)

A consistent thread in the argument against gender equality is that feminism makes women feel bad for staying home with their kids and not pursuing careers.

In Dallas last month, young conference-goers told the New York Times “that it was feminism and career ambition making them unhappy, not the broader stress of puzzle-piecing together the responsibilities of modern life.”

In 1994, then-First Lady Barbara Bush said she had experienced a period of depression and partly attributed it to “the women’s movement,” which, as she told NPR, “sort of made women who stayed home feel inadequate.” I get that. But in response, I would paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt: No one can make you feel inadequate without your consent. If you are lucky enough to be able to stay home with your children and do not feel compelled to carve out a career, more power to you.

Alex Clark, a popular podcaster and influencer who headlined the Young Women’s Leadership Conference, offered the crowd her Make America Healthy Again formula: “Less Prozac and more protein. Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.”

But having lots of babies is stressful — having one baby is stressful — and can certainly lead to its own kind of burnout.

One of the most popular tradwives in the country, Hannah Neeleman, is a Mormon mother of eight young children. She is married to a rancher who is the son of the founder of Jet Blue, has more than 9 million social media followers and, as a former professional ballerina, posts under the handle Ballerina Farm.

Last summer, in a profile published by the Times of London, she was dubbed the “queen of tradwives.” We learned that she does all the food shopping, makes all the meals and has no help with childcare. I would submit that she is a career woman as well, since she runs popular social media accounts that generate millions of dollars a year in income. In a stunning admission, her husband told the London Times reporter that his wife “sometimes gets so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.”

I could not help but think of Mormon housewives in the state of Utah, which has led the nation in antidepressant prescriptions for decades. “Most men here would just as soon their wives take pills than bother to delve into the problems, and maybe find out they might have something to do with the problems,” a Mormon mom told the Los Angeles Times in 2002, the year the prescription study was released.

Dana Loesch, a conservative commentator, radio host and author who once shilled for the National Rifle Assn., was one of the speakers in Dallas whose reality contradicts her rhetoric.

“I’ll tell you this, ladies,” she told the crowd. “You cannot have it all, at the same time. Something will suffer.”

Oh please. Loesch has it all — a career, marriage and kids.

So why can’t they?

@rabcarian.bsky.social
@rabcarian.

Sean Byrne knows how to show an audience a bad time. Sixteen years ago, the Australian filmmaker launched onto the scene with “The Loved Ones,” his proudly grisly debut about a misfit teenager who gets gruesome revenge on the boy who refused to go to prom with her. Part expert torture porn, part exploration of adolescent romantic anxieties, the film was an instant midnight-madness cult item that took Byrne six years to follow up.

When he did, he went in a different tonal direction with “The Devil’s Candy,” a surprisingly emotional psychological thriller about a heavy-metal-loving painter who moves his family to a beautifully rustic home, only to lose his mind. Working in recognizable horror subgenres, Byrne entices you with a familiar premise and then slowly teases apart the tropes, leaving you unsettled but also invigorated by his inventiveness.

It has now been a decade since that distinctive riff on “The Shining,” and for Byrne’s third feature, he once again pillages from indelible sources. “Dangerous Animals” draws from both the serial-killer thriller and Hollywood’s penchant for survival stories about hungry sharks feasting on human flesh. But unlike in the past, Byrne’s new movie never waylays you with a surprise narrative wrinkle or unexpected thematic depth. He hasn’t lost his knack for generating bad vibes, but this time he hasn’t brought anything else to the party.

The movie stars Hassie Harrison as Zephyr, a solitary surfer who explains in on-the-nose dialogue that she prefers the danger of open water to the unhappiness of life on land. An American in Australia who grew up in foster homes and who lives in a beat-up old van, Zephyr encounters Moses (Josh Heuston), a straitlaced nice guy whom she hooks up with. Not that she wants him developing feelings for her: She takes off in the middle of the night so she can catch some waves. Unfortunately, Zephyr is the one who gets caught — by Tucker (Jai Courtney), a deceptively gregarious boat captain who kidnaps her. Next thing she knows, she’s chained up inside his vessel out at sea, alongside another female victim, Heather (Ella Newton).

Like many a movie serial killer, Tucker isn’t just interested in murdering his prey — he wants to make something artistic out of his butchery. And so he ties Heather to a crane and dangles her in the water like a giant lure, pulling out a camcorder to record her final moments as sharks devour her. Watching his victims struggle to stay alive is cinema to this twisted soul and Zephyr will be his next unwitting protagonist.

Working from a script by visual artist Nick Lepard, Byrne (who wrote his two previous features) digs into the story’s B-movie appeal. Tucker may use old-fashioned technology to record his kills, but “Dangerous Animals” is set in the present, even if its trashy, drive-in essence would have made it better suited to come out 50 years ago as counterprogramming to “Jaws.” With Zephyr’s tough-girl demeanor and Tucker’s creepy vibe, Byrne knowingly plays into genre clichés, setting up the inevitable showdown between the beauty and the beast.

But despite that juicy setup, “Dangerous Animals” is a disappointingly straightforward and ultimately underwhelming horror movie, offering little of the grim poetry of Byrne’s previous work and far too much of the narrative predictability that in the past he astutely sidestepped. There are still subversive ideas — for one thing, this is a shark film with precious few sharks — but Byrne’s sneaky smarts have largely abandoned him. Rather than transcending expectations, “Dangerous Animals” surrenders to them.

One can’t fault Harrison, whose Zephyr spends much of the movie in a battle of wills with her captor. Because “Dangerous Animals” limits the amount of sharks we see, digitally inserting footage of the deadly creatures into scenes, the story’s central tension comes from Zephyr trying to free herself or get help before Tucker prepares his next nautical snuff film. Harrison projects a ferocious determination that’s paired with an intense loathing for this condescending, demented misogynist. It’s bad enough that Tucker wants to murder her — beforehand, he wants to bore her with shark trivia, dully advocating for these misunderstood animals. It’s an underdeveloped joke: “Dangerous Animals” is a nightmare about meeting the mansplainer from hell.

Alas, Courtney’s conception of the film’s true dangerous animal is where the story truly runs aground. The actor’s handsome, vaguely blank countenance is meant to suggest a burly, hunky everyman — the sort of person you’d never suspect or look twice at, which makes Tucker well-positioned to leave a trail of corpses in his path. But neither Byrne nor Courtney entirely gets their arms around this conventionally unhinged horror villain. “Dangerous Animals” overly underlines its point that we shouldn’t be afraid of sharks — it’s the Tuckers who ought to keep us up at night — but Courtney never captures the unfathomable malice beneath the facial scruff. We root for Zephyr to escape Tucker’s clutches not because he’s evil but because he’s a bit of a stiff.

Even with those deficiencies, the film boasts a level of craft that keeps the story fleet, with Byrne relying on the dependable tension of a victim trapped at sea with her pursuer, sharks waiting in the waters surrounding her. Michael Yezerski’s winkingly emphatic score juices every scare as the gore keeps ratcheting up — particularly during a moment when Zephyr finds an unexpected way to break out of handcuffs.

But Byrne can’t redeem the script’s boneheaded plot twists, nor can he elevate the most potentially intriguing idea at its core. As Tucker peers into his viewfinder, getting off on his victims’ screams as sharks sink their jaws into them, “Dangerous Animals” hints at the fixation horror directors such as Byrne have for presenting us with unspeakable terrors, insisting we love the bloodshed as much as they do. Tucker tries to convince Zephyr that they’re not all that different — they’re both sharks, you see — but in truth, Byrne may be suggesting an uncomfortable kinship with his serial killer. But instead of provocatively pursuing that unholy bond, the director only finds chum.