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Notes -
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".
It's also interesting considering how students might square this with the messages they receive in their other classes. In both secondary and primary school, a lot of the material we covered preached the virtues of civil disobedience, using the canonical examples of MLK Jr., Rosa Parks, Gandhi and to a lesser extent the suffragettes. I can't imagine present-day British schoolchildren are receiving fewer lessons about MLK et al. than my generation did, and it isn't hard to imagine how this could induce a sensation of cognitive dissonance: history class at 10 a.m., in which you learn the importance of civil disobedience against clearly unjust laws; followed immediately by civics class at 11, in which you learn that a good British subject follows all laws to the letter, no matter how ridiculous they are on their face. (Being arrested for watching a political video?)
It's another reminder of how woke people reflexively arrogate to themselves a monopoly on virtue. Paul Graham once posed a rhetorical question to his students: "do you hold any opinions which you would feel uncomfortable expressing in front of any of your friends or family?" If you answer in the negative, you're most likely a conformist, and it stands to reason that if you'd lived in the antebellum south or Nazi Germany, you would have gone along with what everyone else was doing. It's easy to be an Oskar Schindler in hindsight.
Woke apparatchiks in the British civil service commend to the high heavens historical examples of civil disobedience against Jim Crow etc., but this does not inspire in them any methodic doubt in whether any modern laws are unjust. The attitude seems to be that disobeying unjust laws is heroic and noble – but, in a staggering coincidence, we just so happen to live in an unprecedented era wholly devoid of unjust laws, and in which the only speech the government censors is speech which deserves to be censored.
I'll go on a slight tangent and say that I've had a similar experience in religious contexts. I was raised in a liberal mainline Protestant church, and as I grew older came to understand more of theology, more of the meaning of the Christian tradition I came to hold close, and this required developing practices of skepticism and resistance. The church I was raised in, on the institutional level, frequently erred, so I had to strengthen my ability to resist.
At times I have been tempted to become Catholic; if nothing else, there is more, proportionally, that the Catholics are right about than that my original church is right about. Proportionally, they do a better job of holding to the gospel.
But - they demand a kind of total submission of the intellect, a "free choice to trust in the Church's religious authority". A probabilistic judgement that on balance the Catholic Church gets more things right than such-and-such Protestant church is explicitly not enough.
I feel a bit of the same tension here. Let's grant that my resistance against the institutional authority I was raised with was justified. Boy, isn't it convenient that this other one is the perfect, correct institutional authority, against which resistance is never required? How wonderful for Catholics to be part of the one tradition wholly devoid of error, confusion, or misrepresentation. How amazing that the erring heart of man is present everywhere but among the doctrinal pronouncements of the magisterium!
All right, so, the Catholics have an answer to that one - the Holy Spirit infallibly preserves the church from error. I am Protestant enough in my bones that I don't think it works like that, or at least, not nearly so expansively as they think it does.
But to return to the secular - His Majesty's Government is not infallibly defended by the Holy Spirit. It's even less plausible that they are the one authority that must never be questioned or resisted. They don't even claim some sort of divine thumb on the scales. So why is it heroic to follow the demands of conscience and in every case but this one? What makes them the exception? Is it some naive faith in historical progress? Modernity or secular rationality functioning like a kind of revelation? That sounds more like the liberal optimism of a century ago. It is something more deconstructive or postmodernist? But then why should any one authority be immune to deconstruction? Whence comes the certainty lurking beneath the surface here?
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