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There's A Feminist Mad Max Tumblr, And It's Absolute Perfection

'Feminist Mad Max' Will Help You Navigate The Post-Apocalypse
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By 

Voices Staff Writer, The Huffington Post

"Mad Max: Fury Road" has been hailed as the year's "most surprising feminist triumph" by Vanity Fair and "a feminist piece of propaganda posing as a guy flick" by decidedly more hostile audiences.

In any case, considering that Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler consulted on the film, it's clear that "Mad Max" isn't your typical gun-filled, action-packed summer blockbuster.

Thankfully, Tumblr noticed and brought us Feminist Mad Max, an account devoted to memes highlighting the badass women who dominate the movie. These women may have been kidnapped or used as sex slaves, but they aren't victims -- they're survivors mercifully dragging along the lucky men who need their help to survive in a post-apocalyptic world.

In one post, the Tumblr depicts the film's title character conceding that Imperator Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron, is the group's fearless leader. She's the one who has the best shot; she's the one who makes the tough calls; and she's the one who always seems to be saving Max from what seems like most certain death. In a nutshell, she rules and Max knows it.

http://feministmadmax.tumblr.com/post/119926563417/hey-girl-heres-an-idea-but-its-up-to-you

"Feminist Mad Max" cheekily borrows from the Ryan Gosling "hey girl" meme, using the construction to flip gender film archetypes on their heads. Make no mistake: Max is the damsel in distress here.

Take note, future action movie filmmakers:

http://feministmadmax.tumblr.com/post/119671951337/hey-girl-its-not-possible-to-survive-alone-out
http://feministmadmax.tumblr.com/post/119433896237/hey-girl-i-dont-need-to-see-the-pain-and
http://feministmadmax.tumblr.com/post/119592869242/hey-girl-i-drive-or-you-can-drive-thats
http://feministmadmax.tumblr.com/post/119266697432/hey-girl-you-can-use-my-shoulder-as-a-rifle

See more at feministmadmax.tumblr.com.

Before You Go

14 Badass Female Authors
Louisa May Alcott(01 of14)
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Though best known for her somewhat treacly, semi-autobiographical novel Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s real life was far more adventurous than the domestic interludes she described in her most famous work. Alcott was an abolitionist; her family’s home served as a station on the Underground Railroad. She later served briefly as a nurse in a Union army hospital, going on to write a (partially fictionalized) report entitled Hospital Sketches about working in the hospital. Her sentimental fiction for young people has been the source of her fame, but Alcott preferred the pulpy thrillers she wrote pseudonymously for adult audiences. Alcott remained single throughout her life, once explaining that she felt she had a “man's soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman's body... because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man."
Mary McCarthy(02 of14)
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After an abusive childhood, writer Mary McCarthy rejected the Catholicism of her upbringing and turned to atheism and Communism. She later grew disillusioned with the Soviet Union but retained her very liberal politics until her death. She controversially defended the Vietcong during the Vietnam War, even visiting Vietnam multiple times during the conflict and reporting critically on the American military’s brutal tactics. In the 1970s, McCarthy covered the Watergate hearings. Despite her busy career as a critic, novelist, and political activist, McCarthy managed to fit in four marriages as well as a close friendship with Hannah Arendt.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz(03 of14)
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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, born in Mexico in 1651, was a poet and intellectual who secretly taught herself how to read and write as a child, defying restrictions against girls’ education. Her private study raised her to such a level of proficiency that she began to gain admiration and fame for her learnedness and skill as a writer, and she wrote a public letter, “Respuesta a Sor Filotea,” arguing women have a right to pursue education. Unfortunately, her political progressiveness conflicted with her devout Catholic faith. Juana became a nun in 1669, and after increasing pressure from the Catholic hierarchy, she seemingly gave up her literary pursuits in the 1690s -- though not before making remarkable achievements in her field.
Nellie Bly(04 of14)
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Nellie Bly was the pen name of Elizabeth Jane Cochrane, a boundary-busting American journalist born in 1864. Bly made her name through daring reporting. She resisted editorial pressure to focus on women’s issues such as homemaking, and instead spent time as a foreign correspondent in Mexico. She later made headlines by feigning insanity in order to write an exposé on poor conditions in a mental institution, which was eventually published in book form. She also took on the challenge of beating Jules Verne’s fictional Around the World in 80 Days standard, ultimately making it around the globe in 72 days and briefly setting a record.
Edith Wharton(05 of14)
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Unlike many women of her time, Edith Wharton benefited from her family’s great wealth, and she used her financial advantages to the fullest. Over the course of her life, she wrote several important novels (including The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth). In 1921, Wharton became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when her novel The Age of Innocence was awarded the prize. She also became influential in the field of interior design, befriended many prominent intellectuals such as Henry James and Theodore Roosevelt, and devoted herself to caring for refugees during World War I. Living in France at the time of the war, Wharton not only wrote articles on the conflict, but also provided food and housing to women and children displaced by the war. France bestowed the Cross of the Legion of Honor upon Wharton in thanks for her relief work.
Zora Neale Hurston(06 of14)
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Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God has made her a household name, but it wasn’t the only awesome thing she accomplished in her eventful life. Hurston had a degree in anthropology and conducted anthropological and folkloric research throughout the South, as well as the Caribbean, writing several books on her research as well as drawing from it for her fictional works. In one instance, she studied a turpentine camp in Florida and documented the white male workers’ sexual exploitation of black women, a practice of forced relationships she referred to as “paramour rights.” For some time, Hurston lived in Honduras, where she had ambitions of locating the ruins of an undiscovered Mayan city, though unfortunately no such discoveries were made.
Edna St. Vincent Millay(07 of14)
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Edna St. Vincent Millay won widespread acclaim for her poetry at a young age, but she was also well known for her colorful personal life. Politically active, Millay was arrested in 1927 for protesting against the Sacco-Vanzetti executions. She had several affairs with women during her school years, and later had a long and remarkably progressive marriage to Eugen Jan Boissevain, who managed the domestic duties so that Millay could focus on her career. The two reportedly had an open marriage and engaged in other sexual flings, though they remained married until Boissevain’s death.
George Eliot(08 of14)
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Mary Ann Evans, who published under the pen name by which she is still widely known, George Eliot, was one of the greatest novelists of the Victorian era. Prior to writing such canonical works as Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss, Eliot worked as a professional writer and edited The Westminster Review -- a very unusual role for a woman at the time. Though not an outspoken feminist, she was willing to buck social norms. Her longest relationship, with the married writer George Henry Lewes, scandalized society; he was unable to obtain a divorce from his wife, so they chose to live together out of wedlock. Their arrangement lasted from 1854 until his death in 1878, and despite being an intellectual himself, he was very supportive of Eliot’s writing and aided her in her work. She wrote all of her seven acclaimed novels during their 24 years of cohabitation.
Mary Wollstonecraft(09 of14)
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Mary Wollstonecraft is best remembered for penning A Vindication of the Rights of Women, an early feminist manifesto published in 1792. But she wasn’t all talk -- her life also exemplified her belief in freeing women from societal restrictions. Wollstonecraft earned a career as a translator and writer and became part of intellectual circles that included great male thinkers of the time. Her personal life was unabashedly unconventional: She proposed to her first lover that she live platonically with him and his wife, had a child out of wedlock with her second love, Gilbert Imlay, and eventually married philosopher William Godwin, but maintained a separate residence from him during their marriage.
Carson McCullers(10 of14)
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Though novelist Carson McCullers, author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, suffered from severe, lifelong health problems, she managed to have a pretty cool life. After a divorce in 1941, McCullers, moved to New York, where she joined an art commune in Brooklyn Heights named February House. She lived there with other brilliant artists and intellectuals including the poet W.H. Auden. After the war, she moved to Paris, where she became close friends with writers such as Tennessee Williams. McCullers continued working throughout her life, writing novels, short stories, poetry, and even a play, despite suffering from debilitating illnesses, including repeated strokes that left her partially paralyzed by only 31.
George Sand(11 of14)
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George Sand was the pen name of Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, a French novelist whose predilections for masculine dress and sexual openness were highly unconventional in her 19th century milieu. Sand found men’s clothing more practical and comfortable than cumbersome gowns and corsets worn by women of the time, and her habit of wearing men’s garments in public earned her notoriety in Paris. She also smoked in public, which was fairly unheard of for a woman at the time. Though she married at 18, she left her husband nine years later and went on to engage in a string of affairs. She numbered such figures as Frederic Chopin and writer Jules Sandeau among her conquests. She wrote not only novels, but political essays that expressed her socialist beliefs, and even started her own newspaper.
Hannah Arendt(12 of14)
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Political theorist Hannah Arendt, who was born to a Jewish family in 1906 Germany, not only wrote such seminal works as The Origins of Totalitarianism, she dealt with totalitarianism up close. Arendt was unable to teach at German universities due to her Jewish lineage, but she nevertheless remained in Germany until 1933, studying philosophy and anti-Semitism. Her controversial studies led to an arrest by the Gestapo, and shortly thereafter she fled to France, where she worked with Jewish refugees. She was active in the Zionist movement, helping Jewish children displaced by the Holocaust resettle in Palestine. Arendt later escaped to America in the midst of World War II. She went on to become a U.S. citizen and prominent intellectual. She held a variety of academic posts at prestigious universities and was made the first female lecturer at Princeton University in 1959. Arendt never stopped being controversial, however; her writings continued to generate heated debate throughout her life, but she never censored her views to avoid backlash.
Harriet Ann Jacobs(13 of14)
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Harriet Ann Jacobs only published one book, but it was a huge one; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was an account of her escape from slavery, and one of the first slave narratives published by a woman. The memoir recounted her experiences as a slave, her sexual harassment at the hands of her master, and her daring escape. She spent seven years hiding in her grandmother’s home in a cramped attic so that she could be close to her young children, later moving to the North where she became involved with the abolition movement and dedicated herself to providing education for freed slaves. She was a prominent activist advocating for better conditions and treatment for freedmen during and after the war.
Katherine Anne Porter(14 of14)
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Katherine Anne Porter wasn’t one to be tied down, despite the domesticity and demureness expected of women at the time. She ran away from home and married for the first time in her mid-teens; when her husband turned out to be violently abusive, she left him, moved to Chicago, and briefly made a living as an actress. Soon after her first marriage officially ended, she began a career as a writer, ultimately becoming well known for her short stories and for her novel, Ship of Fools. For several years, she spent a significant amount of time in Mexico, where she became involved in leftist political circles and befriended Diego Rivera, though she later turned against the Mexican leftist movement and was harshly critical of it. Porter was ultimately married and divorced four times, and was a celebrated writer and teacher, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1966.
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