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I made this point before, but I think people truly underestimate how utterly brainwashed people can be by media.
As a non-culture war example that I've given before, I play a game called Commands & Colors: Ancients. It's a tactical dudes on a map game that has a bunch of Roman battles you can simulate. And it has cavalry. But these aren't armored knights, they are just dudes on horses. They are squishy, don't hit that hard, and mostly only useful for flanking or chasing down weakened units. If you try to form a wedge with them and ride right into the enemy's center with them like you see in movies, they will all die, and you will lose. Badly.
I played probably 50 games in a row with a guy who did that every single time. And no matter how many times I explained to him these aren't armored knights, these are just dudes on horses that predate that by about 1000 years, it never stuck. He couldn't stop thinking in terms of what he saw in movies. It had monopolized his brain, with it's rich sensory experience, in a way 50 less visceral personal experiences on a board couldn't displace.
Likewise, the US public at large has been brainwashed by decades of Hollywood action girlbosses, and nothing but. I honestly believe this is where all the confusion about men playing in women's sports is coming from. Forget all the scientific facts about male puberty changes versus female puberty changes, and documented physical advantages in nearly every measurable physical attribute, be it strength, reaction time, depth perception, you name it. Forget the fact that every 4 years in the Olympics you see the men's divisions regularly annihilate the women's divisions if you compared them apples to apples. 30 years of Hollywood girlboss action movies renders all that moot in the minds of most. The Olympics doesn't have a badass soundtrack, and dozens of camera angles edited together with just the right amount of CGI to saturate your brain in dopamine. So most people in their heart of hearts believe women can easily beat up men, or that men might be a little stronger.
The average MSNBC consuming normie probably has beliefs not that different from when Adam Conover beclowned himself on Joe Rogan arguing about how sports were sexist if men outperformed women in them.
You mean in a medium where: people have fantastical powers; get up after taking ridiculous beatings; fights that are choreographed in the heroes favour, women can be given unrealistic advantages? Yes. Is it part of a concerted effort? Yes it is; just the same as how media was criticised and influenced under previous cultural censorship. Even under that previous censorship, it came out through pushing women into roles and different ethnicities into new roles and criticising it when done badly. The status-quo has been feminism and women's equality for a few decades now. We got Black presidents in movies, many many times, before we saw Obama became president, and a woman president is just a matter of time now as well. A group of people thought that society would be better if women were more equal and ethnicities like Black Americans can have equal rights and opportunities with the rest of the population, and influence on the media was an important tool in making that happen.
The ironic part of the cultural control is that we project present values back into depictions of the past as well. It leads people to think that people in the past behaved within current cultural frameworks. This seems to create a perception erasor for the people in the present whose main context with the past is through that same media. Most people only really understand concepts like ancient rome through the lens of movies and television shows, maybe a few documentaries if they are more inclined. Shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation were epically popular at the time, but the values explicit to that show are normalised for today's audience. The same perception that caused the opponents to run their 'knights' head first into your troops is the same impulse that sees women as being equal by default. The sad part though is that with the abundance of dopamine hits, in our 'brave new world', people can pick the drug of their choice, or their entire perspective of how the world is.
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