As Mulan prepares for release on September 4 at Disney, questions abound. Does the new edition paint without the music or the talking dragon? Was Christina Aguilera’s soft original song at the center of American Idol for the new edition, “Loyal Brave True”, an omen? And perhaps most importantly: what does Mike Pence say about all this? After all, the 1998 edition of Disney dismayed him enough to write a blog about it.
As BuzzFeed first discovered in 2016, our long-term vice president wrote a full editorial on Mulan in 1999, on the online page of his old radio show The Mike Pence Show.
The film seemed to Pence as propaganda orchestrated through a “naughty liberal” at Mouse House to tip the scales in the debate about women in the military. (Given Pence’s refusal to dine even with a woman outdoors, his wife’s company, Karen, also known as “Mother,” is no wonder that the concept of men and women coexisting in the army also frightened him.)
“Despite her sensitive features and her voice,” Pence said in the editorial, “Disney hopes Mulan’s ingenuity and courage were enough to bring her to the army’s good fortune on an equivalent base with its naive cohorts.”
Clearly, he concluded, “This is Walt Disney’s attempt to raise the expectation of formative years to the cultural debate about the role of the military.” Apparently, no one told him that the original story that animated the film, The Ballad of Mulan, dates back to 5th or 6th-century China.
Pence cited Bambi’s enduring influence in deer hunting talks as an example of Mulan’s propagandist perspective, though he did not recommend some kind of agitprop on the component of a mischievous animal rights activist at Disney in the 1940s.
The sexism inherent in the arguments to prevent women from entering the army has been quite obvious, yet it is more refuted through the occasionally ignored story of the achievements of women within the army itself. As the Army Times points out in a list of notable veterans, women have served in the military since the American Revolution.
Dr. Mary Walker has become the first and only woman to win the Medal of Honor in 1865 after serving with the Union in the Civil War. And according to the AP, Captain Sunita Williams, who flew helicopters as a component of Operation Desert Shield, also held the record for the maximum accumulated number of hours of travel in the area during her tenure as commander of the International Space Station. La’Shanda Holmes, the first women’s black helicopter pilot from the Coast Guard, “played a key role in the global war on terror,” the AP adds.
Today, they make up 16% of the U.S. military enlisted and 19% of the officer’s corps, according to the nonprofit advisory group Council on Foreign Relations.
Coincidentally, this year’s Republican National Convention also serves as an ironic counterpoint to Pence’s old blog post. The same night the vice president addressed the army and his wife called his circle of relatives a “circle of army relatives,” Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst also praised his credentials as a National Guard veteran.
But let’s go back to Mulan. In his editorial, Pence cited the Tailhook ’91 scandal, in which several naval and marine officers allegedly attacked dozens of subordinate officers at the Tailhook Association’s annual symposium, as well as the 1996 sex attack scandal at the Aberdeen Proving Ground US Army base. evidence that gender integration into the military “was an almost total crisis for the military and for many of those concerned.”
“Living near young men and women (in some cases married to non-military personnel) at the height of their physical and sexual perspective is the height of stupidity,” Pence wrote, adding, “It is instructive that even in Disney film, the young Ms. Mulan falls in love with her senior officer! I think the politically correct Disney boys have absolutely missed the irony of this component of the story.
Of course, Pence’s logic did not take into account gender identities outdoors, the cisgender binary, or sexualities beyond heterosexuality, something that is not unexpected for one of the most prominent advocates of conversion therapy in our country, but a gap in argument.
The vice president also relied on the concept that because the military, in his opinion, simply cannot withstand the sexual assault of any woman with which they may be housed, women should be excluded from the army as a whole.
6236 Army workers’ corps reported an attack in fiscal 2019, according to Military Times, a figure that Nate Galbreath, deputy director of the Pentagon’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, accounts for approximately 30% of the actual attacks. In fiscal year 2018, 6.2% of women on active duty reported attacking, as were 0.7% of active-duty men.
It can simply be argued that these men are not members of the army at all, and that the army’s culture of harassment and violence, which was a challenge in both 1999 and it is today, has been at the center of Pence’s concerns. But that would have prevented him from arguing that women are the ones who bear the burden, obviously a bridge too far.
Since then, Pence reportedly retired from the movie blog game; has made some film recommendations over the years. Our V.P. I loved, for example, the 2018 Christian biographical drama I Can Only Imagine, starring Dennis Quaid and country singer Trace Adkins, who has a song of the same name and also sang the national anthem at this year’s Republican National Convention. Another selection of pennies? The anti-abortion film Unplanned. You look right!
But Pence’s mind on the new Mulan, tragically, remains a mystery for now. A representative of the vice president has still responded to The Daily Beast’s request to comment on the new film, however, we continue to look forward for review.