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Ready for some mild 36 year old culture war material? In 1988, BBC released their adaptation of C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe". I watched this adaptation with my children this weekend, and having recently reread the Chronicles of Narnia series, I was surprised how little the script deviated from the book. Indeed, the essentially verbatim reproduction puts a spotlight on the few deviations.
In the book, the children meet Father Christmas who gives presents to ready them for the coming fight.
The BBC adaptation follows the book word for word until the last sentence (as best as I can remember: I couldn't find the script online):
The original reading was a powerful statement, even in the time that Lewis wrote the book, and fully in keeping with his complementarian perspective. In the BBC adaptation, the interaction with Father Christmas ends unsatisfactorily, without any larger point than to provide the children with tools. The scene is robbed of the emotion and power of the original text.
Of course, the Disney adaptation is even worse, making is seem like Father Christmas is giving Susan permission to fight, and possibly intentionally subverting the original text:
Neither the BBC or the Disney is "rewriting history"; every adaptation has to make compromises to fit the medium. However I would desire that any adaptation treat the source with respect and not neuter or subvert it. In many ways, C.S. Lewis was and remains a counter-cultural force. Watering down his work to be palatable to modern audiences is a direct contradiction to his intentionally medieval outlook.
What does he mean here? This could either mean that women fight dirty and thus make the battle ugly, or it could mean that women having to fight means women getting wounded and killed and being forced to wound and kill others which is itself ugly. Or it could mean that only in a most desperate and ugly battle for one's very survival do we forgo our principles and make women to fight because we need every last body at any cost.
It's this, combined with the fact that women are a distraction when discipline and focus are paramount. If you've ever trained in martial arts you know the air is charged differently when a woman is in the gym and the minds of men will wander.
I think it's just the horses vs. elephants thing discussed over at ACOUP. Yeah, horses may freak out when they encounter an elephant in combat. But if you train the horses around elephants, they'll get used to the elephants, and then they can deal with elephants in combat just fine.
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