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Can the mainstream media portray female characters as repulsive? Using the Amelia meme as an example
There was a somewhat comical culture war development lately in the UK in that a new meme was accidentally born by an online game backfiring hard. The Know Your Meme article on it is already up.
The gist of the story is this (quotes from above – bolding done by me):
Further information from the website of Prevent:
The main page of the game is here.
(Supposedly the game was discontinued by the government after the scandal, and the University of Hull was somehow involved in its development. I didn’t find a source for either claim, although I wasn’t looking that hard either.)
Non-paywalled article on the mini-scandal by some news site calling itself GB News available here.
After a cursory search on Reddit I can say that many observers agree that the developers obviously made a simple mistake. They knew that the game is supposed to target the gullible white boys that are also the target audience of dissident right-wing toxic dudebros, and one staple of the latter is their hatred of purple-haired feminist ‘arthoes’. So they thought: ‘let’s make the antagonist in the game an angry purple-haired e-thot; I mean surely she won’t generate any sympathy among dudes who listen to alt-right vtuber bros, right?’. It does sound like a reasonable assumption at first, if we want to be honest.
Anyway, regarding the reasons why the whole thing ludicrously backfired, I don’t want to repeat the arguments you can read for yourself in the articles I linked to. Instead I want to ask a simple question: if your goal is to create a fictional right-wing character who’s a repulsive woman by normie standards, surely this task cannot be that hard, can it? I mean, maybe just make her an obese, frumpy, obnoxious chavette. Maybe also a single mother and a smoker to boot. There’s no way such a character will compel thirsty dudebros to create piles of fanart of her.
But the problem is obvious, and this is probably where the developers felt trapped in a Kafkaesque manner. By adding such qualities to a female character whom you want normies to repulsed by, you are implicitly confirming that such qualities are repulsive to men in general. And that cuts too close to the bone. In this particular case, I’m sure they’d have easily gotten away with it. The only people making a fuss would be a marginal group of radical feminists unironically following their ideology to the letter, and they are essentially a minority within a minority. But that’d still mean taking a risk, and they didn’t want that.
There are a number of issues with Pathways, but one of the ones that stands out to me is that the character of Amelia is, as far as you can tell from the game itself, a faithful friend, genuinely interested in Charlie's welfare and sympathetic to him, and never depicted doing anything bad outside of the symbolic realm. It would have been easy for one of the scenarios to be Amelia bullying a non-white classmate, for instance, but nothing of the sort happens. Amelia bears the symbols of being socially unacceptable, but nothing more.
Being socially unacceptable is frequently cool. Being the radical that the teachers and authority figures all hate is inherently attractive. Moreover, Pathways is incredibly coy about actually describing any hateful or extremist content, so none of that filters down. If Amelia hated and was rude to Charlie's other friends, or ruined otherwise-pleasant social encounters or gaming sessions with political rants, then you could understand disliking her, but that doesn't happen. So instead she's just the cute girl with the British flag. She's nice to Charlie even when everyone else ignores him, and her requests, when stripped of ideological content, seem reasonable. "I'm really excited about this thing but I can't go, I know you're free on the weekend, could you please tag along and tell me how it goes?" is exactly the kind of normal request that a friend makes of someone they trust. If it were a concert or an art show, you wouldn't think twice about agreeing. The scenario about immigrants taking our jobs, however factually in error, is nonetheless a scenario where Charlie is disappointed, and Amelia is the only one to notice and offer words of comfort.
Pathways' model of the world seems to be far-right content is dangerous even to be exposed to. The correct answers in Pathways are always to stick your head in the sand and trust authority figures. For instance, in the scenario where you find a social media video claiming that Muslim men are taking emergency accommodation from British veterans, if you just pick the "find out more about this topic online" option, apparently you just find persuasive statistics and research data. You don't, for instance, research that story, discover that it's not true, and learn a valuable lesson that when you see a claim on social media, you should always try to verify it first. The overall impression I get, reading Pathways along the grain, is that far-right content is true, or at the very least, persuasive, but it is also evil. This displays a tremendous lack of confidence in the position that SOUK are actually trying to push.
But if that's your model, then you can't actually show the hateful, extremist content that Amelia believes. If you show it to people, they might start believing it. However, at that point, all that's left is a supportive friend who likes to wave the flag and go to rallies. If your choice is between that character and drones saying you must conform to the demands of those in authority, well... the choice kind of makes itself.
The last thing I would note is the clearly authoritarian line of Pathways. It generally does not say that the far-right positions it describes are false or incorrect. It does, however, frequently describe them as illegal. Sharing the video at the start might be illegal. Some of the extremist groups online might be illegal. But 'illegal' isn't a moral argument - it's a threat. "If you share this you might be punished." The recommended behaviour in Pathways is always to ignore or not engage with far-right content, even if that means disappointing a friend, to report everything to trustworthy authorities, like family or teachers, and then conform with that authority. The first thing one is tempted to say here is, "Has anybody working on this ever met a teenager?" But past that, I feel this presents an implicit model of good citizenship, and that model is to be passive and obedient. I am sure that I am not the only person who finds that model repulsive. When I was a kid growing up, civics education emphasised that we need to be independent, dynamic, creative, critical thinkers, independently-minded, and so on. Yes, it also taught us that responsibility was important and that we shouldn't break the law, but within those bounds, being actively engaged in forming our own opinions and sharing them with others was encouraged, and indeed presented as being essential in a democratic society. Going from that to... this... is dispiriting.
Amelia may be wrong on various issues, depending on perspective, but the activities she wants to engage in - talking to people, sharing videos, making online discussion groups, going to rallies and waving signs - are things that in other contexts would be encouraged. If you swap the ideological content around, and imagine a Pathways with an authoritarian nationalist government, and where Amelia is a liberal socialist, she would probably be celebrated. It's just so nakedly about wrongthink that it occasions this strong emotional response, and the easiest way to express that response is to say, "WTF, Amelia is based, actually".
Your point about the game telling the player that Amelia has "extreme" opinions without saying what those opinions are reminds me of a post I wrote a few years ago. Supposing the journalist Alice wants to smear Bob because Bob said something Alice doesn't approve of. The thing is, while Alice doesn't approve of it, she knows that most people agree with Bob, so simply stating what Bob's opinion is (e.g. "I don't think trans-identified man belong in women's prisons") won't work as a smear tactic. Instead, Alice talks about Bob's opinion in a circuitous way: "Bob has faced criticism for his political opinions, which have been widely characterised as transphobic". This allows Alice to get away with implying Bob said something hateful and in so doing turn her readers against him. The longer this goes on, the more Google search results get clogged up with articles about how hateful Bob is but without quoting anything he's said, and the harder it gets to find out what Bob actually believes. I'd hazard a guess that an outright majority of people asserting that JK Rowling is transphobic would, if pressed, be wholly unable to cite a specific opinion she has expressed on this issue.
Likewise here. The people who made this game knew full well that the opinions expressed by people like Amelia (e.g. "it was outrageous that the police turned a blind eye to the grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale etc. for so long") sound perfectly reasonable to most people. Actually having Amelia express such opinions in the game would have the opposite of the desired effect, in much the same way it would if Alice attempted to defame Bob by quoting him directly. The only way to get away with it would be for Amelia to jump off the slippery slope by having her express extreme opinions (and naughty words) wholly unrepresentative of the modal British conservative activist.
It definitely reminds me of one of my journalistic pet peeves, which is the one you describe in that Substack post. A news story will tell me that someone said something offensive, or made comments interpreted as offensive, without ever telling me what they actually said. This irritated me at first because I want to know what the person said so that I can decide for myself whether I agree that it's offensive. Later on I concluded that it's just because the outlet does not want me to decide for myself, but would rather I passively accept this judgement.
Sometimes this is relatively inconsequential. I'll use a local example. Last year a football player was suspended after using a 'homophobic slur' on the field. Notice how nothing in that article tells you what Rankine actually said. You can go and click all the links down the bottom to related stories, and none of them tell you what he actually said. Fortunately I chased that one up and what happened is that, during a game, he called another player a "faggot". That's it. That one word. I'd argue that what Rankine said was rude but not much more than that. It's on about the level of calling someone an "asshole" or a "retard". Given that AFL players are young men (Rankine was 25) in a highly-masculine competitive environment, I expect a bit of salty language from them, so I think this particular incident wasn't a big deal, and doesn't warrant much more than maybe the team captain saying, "hey, keep it under wraps on the field, okay?" But the news story does not report what actually happened, and it looks like the AFL wanted to signal how much it hates homophobia, so Rankine was punished disproportionately.
Once you start noticing this sort of circumlocution, it appears everywhere. I think the policy that I've adopted is that if you want me to be outraged about something someone said, the first requirement I have is that you tell me what they said. You can censor it if you like - you can bleep it, or say "the N word" or "the F word", or whatever makes you feel more comfortable - but I don't get outraged on faith.
I'm sure everyone here has noticed similar. In this case, "hateful opinions on immigration" is a category that can cover everything from a person just saying "I think we need less migration and more border protection" to a person saying "I hate all Pakis, they're cockroaches and we ought to drive them all into the sea". What we know is that Amelia has wrongthink, but if we've come to learn that wrongthink is a category that covers everything from advocating mass murder to politely stating facts that someone else finds inconvenient, the category itself loses its force.
I'm not sure how you don't see why the left might find the use of "faggot" objectionable in of itself. Obviously supporters of LGBTetc. would object to the use of homophobic slurs as a general-purpose insult, as it strengthens semantic associations between homosexuality and undesirability.
Oh, I can see that. But all insults are objectionable in and of themselves - that's the point of them. This particular one is not an insult I would use myself. In this particular case I think that the punishment for the insult was grossly disproportionate, and even if you disagree with me, I came to that conclusion on the basis of looking at the insult itself and the context in which it was used, which are things that the news story strategically concealed. It's that concealment that I'm objecting to.
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