This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you look at the Star Wars sequels, what male character can boys look up to? Can any of them be considered heroes? Look at Indiana Jones. They wheel him out, make him useless and is replaced by a woman. Marvel is the same. Robert Downey Junior retires, and they replace Iron Man with a sassy black lady.
In modern media, white men cannot be the hero, cannot do anything heroic. This fundamentally is why these boy brands are dying. They take these properties and then the only thing the creatives want to do is tear down the characters that people like.
Boys don't enjoy literature/films with female protagonists, while girls are okay with media with male protagonists. This has been demonstrated in numerous studies:
A 2022 analysis based on PIRLS data found that elementary school boys were significantly less interested in texts with female protagonists—even when the text was otherwise identical—while girls showed consistent interest regardless of protagonist gender - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959475222001013
A 2008 British study of about 4,000 children aged 4–16 found that only 5% of boys preferred books with a girl protagonist, while 22% of girls were comfortable with male protagonists. Boys were as interested in protagonists like robots or monsters as other boys, suggesting the issue isn't solely the female gender but perhaps relatable content or format - https://lisamartinbooks.com/articles/2016/11/26/where-the-boys-are
A long-standing pattern noted by children's literature professionals is the belief that “girls will read books with boy heroes, whereas boys won’t read books with girl heroes” - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/06/gender-imbalance-children-s-literature
I didn't read the article or the paper. However, those aren't parallel statements, as currently written. The percentage of boys comfortable with girl protagonists could be higher than 5%. The percentage of girls who prefer boy protagonists could be lower than 22%.
Heroism generally involves some combination of self-sacrifice, self-improvement, hyper-agency, hyper-competency, physical and/or mental strength. Based upon their Lived Experiences of interacting with boys/men and girls/women, it'd be sensible that readers (whether it be boys, girls, men, or women) would more easily suspend disbelief for a male hero than a female heroine. And that girls/women would find a male hero more plausible than boys/men a female heroine.
It's like how preteens will more readily accept teenaged or adult heroes than vice versa, teenagers will more readily accept adult heroes than vice versa. And adults are usually disinterested in works where the protagonists are preteens or teenagers (sometimes even young adults)—a common gripe is that even kid side characters are a negative value-add to a story, just a source of annoyance, "idiot plot," and plot armor.
More options
Context Copy link
Even worse, a character who is the worst stereotypes about "urban youth". If you were trying to write eat hot chip and lie deliberately you couldn't have done it better.
Riri Williams originates nothing of her own, she works on Tony Stark's original tech to 'refine' it, she steals (literally) the Iron Man suit, gets rightfully expelled for being a massive pain in the backside, goes around then with a chip on her entitled shoulders about how this is unfair and it's only Because I Is Black. Falls in with a gang of weirdoes and criminals, knows they are criminals, happily goes along with crime and violence for money, blackmails a guy who is trying to avoid going down the same path his villain father did, frames him for her crimes so he ends up in prison, and then ends up literally selling her soul to the actual Devil, all of this knowingly and with full consent because she thinks she is Just That Special. (Disparu had great fun reviewing the series).
I am fully open to the conspiracy theory that Iron Heart had writers who were self-aware and actively rooting for its downfall. It's hard to believe anyone would lean into Riri's 'Tony Stark wouldn't be Tony Stark without the money' when the 'Tony Stark made this in a cave with a box of scraps' was one of the stand-out lines of the early MCU foundation.
The thing to remember here is that the show was conceptualized much closer to the Floyd/BLM time period. It's just been delayed forever, presumably because they realized what they made after the high faded and tried to cut it into something viable or dump it when it would do the least brand damage.
In light of the absurd views on crime that flourished then, I can understand why they decided to make the genius with the full scholarship to MIT a criminal without really considering the "Stormfront or SJW" implications.
The shaming of "mediocre white men" or "nepobabies" is just par for the course. It's a reflex.
Yeah I've always heard the writing was done quite proximal to Floyd events so it has zero moderation or sense.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It would be interesting to know why this is. My intuition is that, if I picked up a mass-market piece of adventure literature with a girl protagonist, there would be a greatly increased likelihood of there being some point in the story where the dramatic arc is sabotaged in the way that is so typical of female-protagonist stories - like the heroine actually had the power to solve all the problems in her if only she realised her own worth, or there was a solution that involves using emotional intelligence and likeableness to dissuade the villain from his villainous ways instead of defeating him, or whatever. I would find this disappointing and anticlimactic, especially in literature of a tier so low that I have no expectation of the victory-by-leveraging-wonderfulness-of-women being written in a remotely interesting way. Could a similar line of expectations dissuade other prospective male readers?
Indeed, it doesn't seem like boys avoid e.g. the Metroid series of video games; even if the protagonist is revealed to be female, the genre guarantees that Samus will still only defeat the final boss by getting gud. I also do not get the sense that the fandom of wildbow's Worm (whose female protagonist does not get treated well by the universe at all) leans female.
Worm was written by a man, and it shows. So was Practical Guide to Evil. It shows so hard that you can clock the author's sex just by reading the book, even when they use a totally sexless pseudonym and write an opposite sex protagonist.
A quick check confirms that Samus was created by a man as well.
If you've ever read chicklit, the difference is obvious. A female author of a female protagonist will linger on her interactions with every remotely relationship-appropriate male, to make sure the reader knows how desirable he is, and the flavor of his desire for the main character. Is he a good friend who respectfully hides it? A burning frenemy who offers aid even though he shouldn't? A simp?
As a man, reading that sort of book is alien in a way that few other things in sci-fi or fantasy manage. Like, you really go through life keenly aware that most men you interact with are at least some level of interested in you? Just because? As the default?
There is a male version of this, called "glazing", but it takes the form of gratuitous reaction shots to something impressive the male character has just done.
But women can more easily imagine being showered in attention and praise for doing something impressive than men can envision a world where they are loved and wanted just for existing.
Disclaimer: I think that last category might actually exist in anime, but I don't watch enough to know for sure.
It's amusing how online women will complain about "men writing women."
Yet, the archetypal outcome of a male author writing a female protagonist for a male audience is an unrealistically strong and independent badass female protagonist, like Samus or Lara Croft.
The archetypal outcome of a female author writing a female protagonist for a female audience is a realistically passive, hypoagentic female protagonist, like Bella from Twilight or Anastasia from 50 Shades of Grey.
It's also annoying because women aren't exactly better at writing men. I've seen some truly awful caricatures of what women think men are like (mainly from books my wife reads, and then asks me "is this accurate"). Yet the "men writing women" complainers act like this is a uniquely male offense. They don't seem to understand (or perhaps don't want to understand) that it's simply hard to get in the head of the opposite sex.
More options
Context Copy link
There are so many layers of doublethink about it, but like many other bits of feminist media criticism, "men writing women" complaints are fundamentally horror at the thought that a man might ever have sexual thoughts about a woman without permission (both her permission and the permission of You, The Female Observer). Any realism concerns are a fig leaf. All of this is trivially revealed, say, when women make a "men writing women" complaint and are then embarrassed to discover that the writer was a woman writing for women about her real nigh-universal woman experiences which they already knew they shared when making the complaint.
Closely related: women policing "unrealistically" attractive female characters as a crude disguise for envy that they're prettier than them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Mate, in the last Culture War thread we had someone on here commenting about that immigrant case saying that sure, it's totes normal for an adult man to want to bang a 15 year old girl (because men are wired to be attracted to youth and fertility). Women do learn early that simply having boobs and a pulse gets you male attention in the "I'd hit that" sense. Not that they're interested in you as a person, that's where the fantasy wish-fulfilment comes in.
I'm not saying it isn't true, or at least very common. I'm saying that as a man who is usually invisible, it's not something I can easily relate to.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why have I never seen this word before this week, and yet like eighteen references in the last few days, each of which is presented in such a way as to help normalize it? Is this a psyop?
I don't think we had a lexical gap here. I don't think a new word is called for, and if it were, I definitely don't think it should be that one. Nothing about this feels organic or warranted.
For me, this was back in April with "crashout." These things come and these things go.
More options
Context Copy link
It's popping up because it is slang and then it got picked up in the tech-sphere (which is highly adjacent to here) as the term of choice for the behavior of LLMs being overly supportive in chats.
It's all over the place right now because of people complaining about LLMs and then a bunch people picking up and using a youth term because "neat new" and "how do you do fellow kids."
More options
Context Copy link
I picked it up from my son, and it really feels like a perfect term to describe the thing in a lot of progression fantasy where the MC does something impressive, and then the focus swaps out to random other characters just to show how jaw-dropped impressed they are at how that was IMPOSSIBLE!
It hits a sweet spot as a specific term for unsightly over-praise.
Please, for the love of dog, actually fucking write this. I NEED to see the Burger Xianxia cinematic universe.
It's a copypasta that's been around for ages.
Is there a parody yet of the fake-hero archetype, in which everyone around the main lead thinks they are an amazing cultivating power-scaler, and in reality they're a bumbling fake?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am both dispirited by the increasing influence of Chinese cultivator tropes, and cheered by the reminder that, yes, people are people (and often have bad taste).
More options
Context Copy link
What's this, Snow Crash fan fiction?
Gotta make it present tense for that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's used widely elsewhere in modern zoomer-ish parlance from what I can tell.
More options
Context Copy link
A quick search indicates that this forum saw its first use of "glaze" in this sense 11 months ago.
More options
Context Copy link
It's relatively new, but I've seen it around more than one week. What you observe happens with all buzzwords, including "psyop".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The last major intended-for-girls cartoon that didn't have this, that being MLP G4, had an absurdly large male following precisely because it lacked this.
The show bible for My Little Pony is on archive.org, and it has some interesting things to say about how they positioned the world. It's also from 2009 so it predates the woke spillover:
This sounds right to me, though the contrast between the corpospeak and the graphic design is certainly pretty jarring. I never watched it (not even when it was big), but there's a richness to the detail of the world and characters. Contrary to modern female character design, every character page has a "bad points" section as long as her "good points" section, and this is probably one of the reasons it had such a strong following in its heyday. Characters' bad points cause conflicts or avoidable problems, creating room for the ponies' good points to shine and resolve them.
The target audience was very carefully designed, and they knew they were targeting boys too (given the bronies of the 2010s, perhaps it worked a little too well). Some cut-down quotes from p65, if you want to read it in detail:
While MLP was a breakout exception, it's an existence proof that the suits used to know how to make girl shows that that boys could watch. But all we have now are the corpses of old franchises going to resyk to be turned into slop. Why haven't we seen other major media cater to girls-but-also-boys in this way, instead of the torrent of flawless mean-spirited girlbosses that we did get?
An important distinction here: "modern female character design" does still produce characters with lots of bad points, but not on purpose.
More options
Context Copy link
Because someone mentioned it above: the flawless mean-spirited girlboss is a religious thing, and most show writers are, if not necessarily that religious, encouraged in that direction by the suits. Problem is, of course, that because their religion is a religion of hatred, people need to have some other motivation to watch it.
The best example of a show post-MLP to not be outwardly religious in this way is Gravity Falls.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Young boys also enjoy Bluey.
I hate everything, but I like Bluey.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Evolutionarily speaking, a woman's worth is largely dependent on immutable physical characteristics (modulo things like plastic surgery), so these sorts of stories tend to psychologically resonate with women. They don't have to go wrest their value from the external world like men do.
I once asked my mother why so many Hallmark movies copy the "It's a Wonderful Life" plot where a woman makes a life-altering wish, gets transported to another timeline, and then realizes she doesn't like it and has to find a way back. She responded, "oh, the movie is telling you that actually everything is great for you already, and you're just too stupid to realize it!"
That one strikes me as perfectly reasonable and not necessarily anticlimactic...
"worth is largely dependant on immutable physical characteristics" is true evolutionarily speaking about all forms of life
Well sure from a deterministic perspective this is trivially true, but the sense we are using it is that a woman doesn't have to do anything in order to be wifed up and have a decent lower-middle-class family life except excercise judgement over which specific suitors she ought to choose. In this frame, far from being slop, Twilight is actually the core female struggle heightened by supernatural fantasy elements.
@self_made_human's recent posts about the pretty-but-dim model from this week's thread are a sad counterexample. You might get no shortage of men wanting to sleep with you, but it was the social technology of enforced monogamy that made them commit. Identifying who will stick is a prerequisite to choosing a suitor, and seems like a much harder question.
More options
Context Copy link
Consider the number who become obese, refuse to socialize, or are just unpleasant and offputting, there's clearly a 'something' she has to do.
She just has to avoid failing; she wins by default. It's completely different from a man, who can be nice, safe, reliable, and still end up completely overlooked.
There is a reason Fluttershy is the most popular of the mane six. Butterscotch would have ended up FA.
The default for secular western women is an obese woman too unpleasant to hook the men she does manage to attract, but that's ok because she has no way of knowing if she can trust him anyways.
You’re overestimating the effect weight has on a woman’s desirability. The most unattractive aspects of the median secular modern woman are tattoos and piercings, which are things she had to actively do to herself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So, you take a work of fiction with a male main character. It falls into the "Men want to be him, women want to be with him" tropes and everyone is happy. You try to do the same thing with women? You create a woman that women want to be, and men don't want her or you create a woman men want, but women don't want to be her.
Speak for yourself, I want a woman who can knock me unconscious.
Sam Hyde has some advice about this.
More options
Context Copy link
A true man of culture, I see.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Male audiences might not want modern Hollywood female lead character because Hollywood writers often insinuate the woman of the show doesn't them in her life.
I firmly believe there is a good number of strong female characters that western/American male audiences have been fans of. Even in the action-centric genres, Ahsoka from the the Star Wars Clone Wars tv show, Katara from Avatar, and Vi from Arcane, Gwen Stacey from the newer Spiderman are all examples of very well received female characters. These aren't solely male fantasy waifu audiences either, and had strong female fandom components as well. They run a gauntlet from girly-feminine to tomboy, unabashedly straight to gay, supporting characters to show leads, and so on.
But they all also have very clearly dear personal relationships with men in their life- and not even necessarily romance fantasy waifu stuff either. Ahsoka is the apprentice for (secretly married) Anakin Skywalker, and it's a mentor-mentee relationship with no sort of romantic tension between them. Katara was the center of one of the larger (fan-insisted) love triangles of its time on television, but she's also a sister who simultaneously gives sass and cares for her brother and is almost defined by her consistently demonstrates compassion for strangers female and male alike. Vi is punk-butch aesthetic and unambiguous lesbian, but one of her closest relationships- and deepest regrets- is regarding her surrogate father-figure Vander, and her regret at getting him and her adopted brothers killed. Gwen may be in a tragic/doomed romance trope with Spiderman-Morales, but the emotional crescendo of character conflict/character arc in the second movie is her reconciliation with her father.
None of these characters are defined by their romantic relationship with the main man of their narrative. However, they also all have close and personal relationships with the men in their lives, the sort of thing that they worry/anger/fear over and would fight for. They wouldn't fight beside / for the men in their life merely because 'it is the right thing to do,' but because it's personal and they care and if someone threatened to take the men they cared about away from them, it would be visceral.
By contrast, what sort of personal male relationship does Brie Larson's Captain Marvel treasure enough to fight for? In the Star Wars sequel trilogy, what is Rey's emotional connection with Finn, her co-lead and the series larger self-projection male role? In Rings of Power, who is Galadriel's male emotional connection... besides the awkward love interest of the Dark Lord himself?
These aren't characters who show any particular desire / want / interest with an emotional relationship, romantic or otherewise, with the men in the setting who might serve as an audience proxy. Captain Marvel is stoic and most personal relationship is an abusive one she destroys the moment she girlbosses harder. Rey is... hard to place, since she's somewhere between oblivious / stuck in a fated romance / the trilogy was a thematic mess. Galadriel's indifference towards her own subordinates spawned sociopathic comparisons in her first episodes.
But note that all three of these characters have romantic love interests! It's forced / non-central / etc., but the nominal titulation is there if that was all that it took to get male investment. Captain Marvel got ship-teased with War Machine. Rey and Kylo Ren are having sexy abb scenes in the second movie. Galadriel and Sauron are the bad boy trash.
But I doubt much of the male audience could see themselves having a warm or interesting conversation over dinner, let alone something more. Polite discussion at best, maybe, if not barely restrained impatience / apathy. Oh, sure, they'd Do the Right Thing and save you if you were in danger, but only with the same emotional intensity as stranger #XYZ.
Compare that to a character who might not be a lover, but who might love you as a brother, or a mentor, or a friend... how many Strong Female Characters would extend even that?
How can you write such list and omit The two strong women in western action movie canon: Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor? Zero girl bossing, 100% believable authority, Significant Relationship Stuff, all while exhibiting classic female traits. I’ve never heard a single guy say anything bad about either character.
What made them such great and believably strong characters is that they were strong women instead of being "strong" teenage girl romantic fantasy protagonists. A show vs tell difference. Anyone who's seen a mother on the warpath for their children knows they can be really fucking scary. That's the energy channeled by Ellen Ripley at the end of Aliens and Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. That's what made them both so believable for teenage boys because which teenage boy doesn't know a mother (their own or some friend's) whose wrong side you really don't want to end up on?
It really is a shame both movie franchises ended after only two movies.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My gut says that it's something very profound and evolutionary. In the ancestral environment, a boy has to earn his place as a man (by hunting, fighting etc) whereas a girl grows into a woman without doing anything per se. It would make sense for boys to seek out male role models for that reason.
Also a boy's hero journey might be more interesting to a girl than vice versa because women have higher levels of cognitive empathy or perhaps it resonates with women in an evolutionary "selecting a winner" kind of way.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link