Are They Coming for James Bond Next?

He’s survived the evil machinations of Blofeld, Goldfinger and Dr No but can he survive his most powerful adversary yet, the Social Justice Warrior?

The trailer for the next James Bond movie ‘No Time to Die’ is imminent and the net is already awash with speculation over plot and approach. As a fan I’m just hoping that the film isn’t one more cowardly surrender to Woke Wankerdom.

I have to say, the signs aren’t good.

I‘ve been a James Bond junky since, aged ten, I snuck out to the living room to watch From Russia with Love after my parents had gone to bed. The sight of two wild gypsy girls wrestling remains burned in my memory (and explains my liking for women with long dangling earrings and heavily applied mascara) but it is the character of Bond that hooked me. The brutal but sophisticated Connery incarnation, a Scottish bruiser in a Saville Row suit, intelligent, calm under pressure, willing to risk it all for his ‘mission’, invariably a matter vital to Queen and country.

As I have grown older, Bonds have come and gone, but more than the actors playing him have changed. Some modifications to his character have been necessary – Connery was a bit too slap happy with the ladies and the snobbish attitude to those not fortunate enough to be born Brits of a certain class and race, shared with his creator Ian Fleming, is a welcome elision.

Lately however, a certain ’correctness ‘has crept in.

In the late 90s he was given a female boss, ‘M’, the head of MI6. Although played by the excellent Judi Dench, their scenes together took on a different flavour, with Dench always the scolding mother. It was all spelled out rather too obviously in her first appearance in GoldenEye. ‘I think you’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur’, she says at their first meeting.

Hear that at the back did you, feminist critics?

The old Bond is a sexist in the sense of not seeing women as equal in ability to men. A scene in Goldfinger when Connery slaps a woman on the arse and tells her to leave because it’s time for ‘man talk’, comes to mind. But the evidence for Bond as misogynist, which we need to remind ourselves in this age of lexical gerrymandering means a woman hater, is non-existent.

Quite the opposite, in fact. He loves the ladies.

Unless they’re out to kill him.

While the Bond girls have got stronger willed and less vulnerable (and therefore more interesting), they have been less likely to sleep with him. Compared with old ‘Rogerer’ Moore who used to get through five women a film, Daniel Craig can’t get laid, his blue-balled Bond only managing an average of one.

And now this year some Total Tit (the capitals are well deserved) has pushed the idea of the next Bond not being a man at all. Actor (well it would be wouldn’t it) Dominic West suggested that the next Bond should be ‘transgender’. Instantly his idea was taken up by activists of the bearded lady sort.

Why?

Well here’s transgender actor/activist, Scott Turner Schofield explaining:

“He’s a cultural institution…The idea of including trans men in that—and the impact it would have on culture by creating visibility and accepting trans men as the be-all-and-end-all-of-men—cannot be underestimated.”

There you go. They wish to enlist Bond in the culture wars, using him, an icon of masculinity to change the very definition of masculinity to include…bearded ladies.

So it’s not about creativity or shaking up the formula of the films. If it was I’d be all in. For example, for personal reasons (ahem) I’d love to see a bald James Bond. A black Bond would be fine too as long they didn’t turn him into Shaft.

It’s politics. Of the crazy left variety.

Similarly, last month talk resurfaced of the next Bond (this is likely Craig’s last) being an actual lady (without a beard – although perhaps I’m presuming too much. Damn it’s getting confusing). The Guardian almost wet itself over the rumours that a black woman (Lashana Lynch) will be taking over the 007 codename.

Even Craig and former Bond Pierce Brosnan have given their royal assent to a female Bond.

Bloody actors, again.

They should be well aware that Bond is a uniquely male fantasy. He was dreamed up by Ian Fleming on the eve of his wedding when at 43 and a lifelong (and rather swinging) bachelor, he began contemplating his future captivity. Bond is literally a middle-aged male escape fantasy. Jetting around the world bonking women and besting other men while enjoying luxuries such as caviar and champagne (unimaginable when it was written in a Britain still facing war rationing) in exotic locales.

Of course, men having fantasies of escape from their hum drum responsibilities is considered suspect while female fantasy such as the Fifty Shades of Grey series, involving being tied up and beaten by a rich man, is accepted as wholly innocent.

Men, male thoughts, male interests and even male fantasies are problems, you see.

Thank Christ then for Barbara Broccoli. Current Bond movie producer and daughter of the original Bond producer ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, she told the Guardian, “Bond is male. He’s a male character. He was written as a male and I think he’ll probably stay as male.”

She added, “We don’t have to turn male characters into women.”

Or women into men.

But now that Bond has been tamed, how long before he’s neutered? Will some future producer give in to the forces of righteous Woke Wankerdom amassing to give old James, or at least his manhood, the final chop?

How about a compromise. Bond is just one of MI6’s double O agents. They can make one of the others an obese, bi-racial, wheelchair bound, hair lipped, bearded lady with a stutter and terrible dandruff.

Just leave my James Bond the hell alone.