Wokeness as a Tax on Human Nature

This is how Nell Minnow’s review of the new Snow White film begins. I’ve put the part I want to highlight in bold:

To be fair—and fair is a word of double importance in Disney’s live-action remake of its first animated feature—a 2025 version of “Snow White” is as thorny as those wildly gnarled trees that keep grabbing Snow White (Rachel Zegler) when she’s trying to run away from the huntsman ordered to kill her. The Grimm brothers’ story was written more than 200 years ago. The Disney movie came out almost 90 years ago, in 1937. Even those who do not consider themselves especially “woke” might be troubled by a heroine who waits to be rescued, singing “Some Day My Prince Will Come” as she gazes into the wishing well, merrily keeps house for seven dwarfs, with a mute one named Dopey, and is awakened by a non-consensual kiss from a prince she has never seen. But there is still enormous affection for the original film, and audiences will want its essential elements re-created.

The question I want to ask her is: Why? Why would those who do not consider themselves especially woke be troubled? Minnow never says. She assumes. As a professional writer, she no doubt has confidence that her audience will pick up what she’s laying down. And in that confidence, she declines to spell out why someone in the audience would be “troubled” by a heroine waiting to be rescued.

Her disclaimer is undermined by the logic of the paragraph. The vast majority of the people who find Prince Charming’s kiss “non-consensual” are, in fact, woke. The vast majority of the people who get mad that Snow White pines for true love are, in fact, woke. It’s not merely an issue of third-wave feminism. Wokeness, understood this way, entails approaching society with an expectation that it mirror your scruples. And, perhaps mostly importantly, wokeness keeps its strength by refusing to explain itself. It doesn’t answer your questions. It doesn’t justify its position. Wokeness proceeds straight from “troubled” to "problematic” without passing Go.

Occasionally some of my readers will say they’re surprised to hear me talk like this. They infer from my critiques of Trump and Christian nationalism that I’m mostly sympathetic to woke ideas, or at least don’t feel the need to call them out like a typical right-winger. This is an understandable inference. But my foremost motivation as a Christian writer, for many years, has been to help evangelicals get out from under the tyranny of bad thinking, especially bad thinking in the service of tribal alignment. Doubtless I fail at this often. But if I go down, I want to go down at least insisting that a Christian can believe 1 + 1 = 2, no matter how many ridiculous or even dangerous people happen to agree with that.

The entire Snow White kerfuffle is woke capital at its most naked. Of course, it all starts with Disney’s insatiable greed, and their (heretofore accurate) belief that Millennials will gobble any freeze-dried slop they cook up as long as it lets them pretend to still be kids. I haven’t even read that much about the star of the film, only enough to know that apparently there were some old social media posts she had to delete after—stunner—the Internet found them.

That some people find Snow White to be an offense against feminism is not surprising. I imagine this was probably true in the 1930s, too. Instagram did not, after all, invent the idea that women can do better things than fall in love. What’s more novel about this whole thing is that there is a comfortable class of media voices that express genuine shock and dismay that anyone could actually still like this story.

Of course, the reality is that love stories are, always have been, and probably always will be very, very popular. Remember how J.K. Rowling waited patiently until all the advance and licensing checks for the Harry Potter series had been cashed before she dragged Dumbledore out of the closet? It reminds me of Taylor Swift’s feminist reinvention, fully subsidized by royalties from songs about why Romeo should date the girl next door instead of the cheerleader. Feminist fantasies run on the fuel they get from normie hopes and dreams.

In a recent post, Freddie Deboer highighted the increasing elite prominence of books that encourage women to get divorced and hook up with as many men as possible. These kinds of memoirs are doing really well among a certain kind of reader class. For all I know, they might be getting traction in circles closer to me too. But Freddie points out something important: The third-wave liberation fever dream of living your life from one Tinder date to the next depends almost entirely on your refusing to accept the fact that one day, those hot guys won’t want to hook up with you. You won’t always be 25. The fact that you might still find it thrilling won’t mean anyone else will. And so, as Freddie concludes, for all the talk about how our sex drives make monogamy “unnatural,” perhaps it’s even more unnatural to live in denial of time.

This is why I find it helpful to think of wokeness as a sort of tax on human nature.

Wokeness, in its most visible expressions, asks people to apologize for their humanity. It asks women to be ashamed of loving Snow White’s love story, or of daydreaming about being the princess in the castle. It asks women to live in defiance of the realities of aging or the loneliness of middle-aged life without a spouse or children. It asks men to repent of their competitiveness and physicality. It demands that they enjoy an all-female reboot of Ghostbusters or the angsty tokenism of Disney’s Star Wars universe. Wokeness insists that parents not parent, that teachers not teach, that leaders not lead.

Such a spirit is not just politically illiterate. It cuts against “the givenness of things” in a way that grieves the spirit. People, especially nonwhite people, do not enjoy being spiritually taxed for their natures as men, women, parents, and workers.

Source

As long as the American Left is beholden to a performative surprise that people aren’t boycotting Snow White, the American Right will make a lot of emotional sense to people that identity politics say it shouldn’t make sense to. The Woke Left has not so much abandoned the self-evident realities of human nature as it taxed it. And we all know what red-blooded Americans think of taxation without representation.