What might happen if women’s rights evaporate has been examined in nightmare detail. Mad Max: Fury Road offers a solution.

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If you’re going to bring feminist propaganda to the masses, there are worse ways than in a giant exploding truck covered with knives. In case you haven’t seen Mad Max: Fury Road yet, it’s two hours of seat-clutching, wall-to-wall explosions, giant art trucks covered with guitars that are also flamethrowers, howling Technicolor vistas, and blood on the sand. When the credits rolled, I felt like my eyeballs had been to Burning Man without me. I was thoroughly entertained.

The fact that Fury Road is so much fun is almost certainly part of the reason the antifeminist keyboard-slobberers who inhabit the murkier corners of the internet are pushing for its boycott. Last week, the website Return of Kings led the charge for men and boys to refuse to see it. “This is the vehicle by which they are guaranteed to force a lecture on feminism down your throat,” wrote contributor Aaron Clarey. “This is the subterfuge they will use to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity.” He must be worried that his men’s rights comrades might, over the course of two hours of high-octane car-chases, momentarily forget to hate feminism. Fury Road — in which an ass-kicking half-bionic heroine defies death to rescue five young women from sex slavery — might be an existential threat to recreational sexism because it is so enjoyable.

Patriarchy, it turns out,
is prettiest when it’s on fire.

In the long history of dystopian science fiction, Fury Road’s premise of misogyny is not without precedent. Violence against women is part of almost every popular fantasy of social collapse, from 1984 to Game of Thrones, in which rape and the threat of rape is part of every woman’s storyline. But Fury Road reminds the viewer that the liberation of women is not just a prerequisite for social equality — it’s is also a damn good story. Patriarchy, it turns out, is prettiest when it’s on fire.

The film opens in a howling desert. It’s somewhere in the not too distant future and all the boys have gone horribly wrong. Everyone has PTSD because the world ended and they’re still alive, and the warlord Immortan Joe controls the water supply, and with it the people. His community, the Citadel, is the kind of misogynist nightmare one imagines gives the readers of Return of Kings a guilty thrill: The women are kept as brood stock and literally milked to feed the elite. But here, violent masculinity has become social disease. Almost everyone is sick, even the young warriors called war boys, whose greatest dream is to get hopped up on nitrous and die in battle.