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An update to a post I made after Christmas lamenting the state of children's books, and all their on the nose, "current year" agenda pushing nonsense. Specifically an update in reply to this comment.
Roald Dahl goes PC in a world where no one is 'fat' and the Oompa-Loompas are gender neutral
archive link
You can read the litany of changes for yourself. I guess I missed the boat on stocking up on Roald Dahl children's books. As is feeling increasingly typical these days, there can be no escape from current year. Fuck me I guess.
Here is a list of the changes. Roald Dahl could have written a whole book of short essays about each individual change and how it's retarded:
https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds_of_changes_made_to_roald_dahls_books/
Ironically, they didn't race swap Charlie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_and_the_Chocolate_Factory#Race_and_editing
Anyway, I can accept that new cultural products will tend to be terrible, for reasons including wokeness, but when it comes to the glories of the past, I think of us in the position of Irish monks in the Dark Ages: unable to produce, but duty-bound to preserve. So pushing back hard against this sort of thing (or indeed Puffin's past decision to put a sexualised image of a child on a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory cover, on the grounds of giving it "adult" appeal, about which they have never repented, as far as I know) makes sense.
Time for sensitivity readers to modify problematic parts of Orwell?
I was curious about this (as I'm always up for looking at a sexualized image of a child) having not heard of it before, looked it up, and must say that even by the standards of 2014 (which in my view quite frankly weren't that modest), calling such an image "sexualized" seems to me to be a major stretch. There's literally not a single part of the child's skin exposed but that on her face and a small amorphous portion of her leg near her knee and most of her clothed body is essentially entirely obscured by long hair and a giant boa. If it's sexualized, then so is my grandma going to bingo.
There's been more sexualized stuff on Nick Jr. (Stephanie is a legendary pedo fap icon, even making an appearance in the pedo visual novel that is in my username. They wiped a good portion of the clips of her in her classic outfit, which was later changed for obvious upskirt reasons, off of YouTube though, so that's the best example I could find at a glance. It's actually not strictly from Nick Jr. either as it is apparently a clip from Icelandic TV before the Western adaptation of the show, but she wears the same outfit in at least one season of that and in many cases exposes herself more (along with doing the same song and dance featured in the clip).)
Trying to say this in the least accusatory/inflammatory way possible, but I find it interesting how the posters here who are at least somewhat anti-woke and presumably anti-pedo (at least in explicit communication) can rant all day about how woke types are supposedly so silly for being on such a hair trigger about anything that might be right-coded, trying to get some truck driver or whoever fired for using the "OK" hand sign, and yet not look at what they so often decry as "sexualized" in regards to children and think that they're maybe doing basically the same thing, overreacting to every minor possible-but-probably-not-even-and-if-even-still-barely-anything instance of their chosen "worst thing imaginable" (or perhaps "bitch eating crackers"), which maybe explains the oversensitivity) issue (which for the woke left is equivalently racism). For example, this is another commercial from Korea that was also criticized as inappropriately sexualizing the young girl in it and it also just seems like not much at all to me.
Of course, I'm basing my opinions off of actual empirical evidence of what might actually trigger a sexual response in the types of people who might sexually respond to media of children were it sexualized (like me), which I suppose is not necessarily the standard your average "normie" is going to use, and yet it does seem to me to be a better one. After all, if "sexualization" doesn't have anything to do with actually being sexy or at least trying, then what is it?
Conversely, to me certain segments from this network television program did in fact depict some quite sexualized/sexy children (that is, I watched them more than once, occasionally at certain times) and yet I didn't seem to hear a peep of protest about them (except on /pol/, where the complaints were about the interracial pairings of some of the kids). (There is a search engine suggestion for "dancing with the stars juniors controversy" but it seems to be about people disagreeing with the final winner of "Disney Night".)
It very much often strikes me as similar to left-wing outrage: frequently random, illogical, and disproportionate with the offense even from their point of view, in my perspective. (Yet, much like on woke venues in regards to anything right-wing, due to how much even suggesting "This isn't even that [X]." tends to get you accused of actually being a crypto [X]ist (which in my case doesn't apply as I am an open [X]ist here), I am essentially the first person that I know of to bring this issue up in neutral company at all.)
Edit: Sorry for the sloppy proofreading. Two links have been fixed if you couldn't figure out they were just YouTube videos.
It's the designated stereotype 1930s-boudoir-dancer-prostitute outfit; you can more easily accept that label if you make that association (I don't find that outfit attractive even when it's actively intended to be, and have no idea why people like it aside from maybe 'it leaves so much to the imagination' and connotations of 'those clothes will definitely be coming off soon').
The Korean commercial is... yeah, it's absolutely bait, but it's restrained and aesthetically pleasing enough that the people complaining about it can be mocked for what being mad about it says about them (weird how "no u" can work as a counter to claims of murderism).
Don't traditionalists and progressives also agree that sex in general is bad with the relatively small distinction that progressives are more tolerant of the corner cases that don't involve a straight biological woman (using their blanket of "sex positivity" to deny a distaste for it)? I've yet to see one example in their propaganda literature that even portrays a woman at all much less a girl; it's exclusively boys and men interacting in ways that would only be appealing if you're reading it for the
articlesoppression narrative.And clearly they're worried about nothing; we put more (admittedly, non-straight) sexual material in front of the average child's eyes and the rate at which they're getting laid is in massive decline. Maybe the trads doth complain too much; teaching that straight sex is morally wrong and that women are right to lord it over men because men have a duty to women is exactly what's being taught. Narcissism of small differences, after all.
"Sexualization" is the spear counterpart to "his advances made me feel unsafe".
Both have definitions of "what the viewer sees" embedded in it, and the "Hello, Human Resources?" implicit call to action is the same- it's a way to abuse the fact that people will/want to go white-knighting for the "victim", and men have figured out that invoking the social power [that having daughters give them an excuse to use] is as effective and just as abusable as women invoking the social power [that the capital class give them an excuse to use].
I don't think it's any more complicated than that; the only time anyone appears to use the word is when speaking critically (one would just say 'sexual' otherwise).
The protest space from the traditionalists is already closed over "all dancing is sexualization", so neither they nor their opposition can back off their positions even if they wanted to. Of course, neither side can consistently spot it which... suggests to me that the outrage is fake.
I feel like that depends on which traditionalists. Abrahamic traditionalists? Probably in most cases. Those informed more by pre-Abrahamic traditions? Powerful and dangerous especially in the wrong form or hands maybe, but I don't think automatically bad.
This is definitely an interesting comparison to make and I do largely agree.
Most modern dancing anyway. I don't think anyone fully believes that all dancing including many traditional, intentionally chaste forms of dancing is sexualized.
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