Hillary Clinton badly needs feminists in her camp. She may have a lock on anyone who burned their bras during a 1960s campus protest, or got schooled in political thought by a Joan Baez album. But millennial feminists are more interested in Bernie Sanders and safe spaces than the “first woman President.”
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So what better way to get into feminist good graces than to stick up for the cause du jour: the all-female Ghostbusters remake set to hit theaters this summer. Clinton will join the Ghostbusters cast on the Ellen show to promote the movie.
The entire cast of Ghostbusters is here next week and now @HillaryClinton is coming, too! Get your Woman Cards ready.
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) May 17, 2016
The show is being billed a real moment for women, as one of the “most powerful political voices” sits down with the cast of a medium-budget action film remake. The gesture is meaningful, according to Twitter’s feminist elite, because, as Jim Treacher points out, the original Ghostbusters is basically just a movie about oppression.
https://twitter.com/JenKirkman/status/732652267715727360
The film is getting lukewarm early reviews, and fans of all genders are skeptical of the movie after the trailer. But criticism of the new Ghostbusters is suddenly a political hot-button, and anyone who disagrees with its necessity is siding with oppression: it’s not that critics don’t like the movie, it’s that they simply don’t like women.
Thankfully, Clinton is coming to the rescue—and she’s clearly hoping that her gesture resonates. Unfortunately, this outreach may be as tin-eared with women as the rest of her campaign. Social justice warriors are notoriously hard to please. While Ghostbusters has become a feminist cause, they’re up against other SJWs and allies who are concerned that the film has racial as well as gender issues (the Guardian, for example, wailed that the new movie “shrinks black womanhood for the ease of the white gaze”).