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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2443 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 9, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Now that references to periods are considered acceptable in children's media, why weren't they before? Everything Disney has done so far on this subject has been pretty tactful. (Turning Red, the Baymax short, the Molly McGee episode)

My best guess is that it's because periods are associated with sexual maturity, making it a casualty of the larger taboo of references to sex in children's media (which is a perfectly understandable taboo). But my mental models of how other people think are usually wrong, especially in regards to Culture War topics, so I figured I'd ask you guys.

There’s no reason to glorify it or celebrate it in popular media, and is something mothers teach their daughters about. For this same reason, we don’t have cartoons about people taking a shit on the toilet. I imagine once we have such a cartoon of lauding someone dropping a load, some will be out cheering about the destruction of another taboo. It’s a gross facet of the human body, hence why it can only be represented implicitly.

The more interesting question is what the Disney psychologists are trying to engineer when they portrayal the development of sexuality. What kind of relationships are they promoting, what kind of love interests, is this “equitable” etc? Because you can engineer someone to develop a preference or fetish based on what shows you shill them when they are young. But I haven’t watched Turning Red so I can’t dive into that. But I wonder, if most fathers knew that their daughter’s media exposure in youth informs their preferences when they are older, whether they would not take greater control over media exposure.

For this same reason, we don’t have cartoons about people taking a shit on the toilet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyone_Poops

I imagine once we have such a cartoon of lauding someone dropping a load, some will be out cheering about the destruction of another taboo.

South Park has a few episodes like this, but doesn't get credit from the people who would normally be cheering that for what should be obvious reasons.

Because you can engineer someone to develop a preference or fetish based on what shows you shill them when they are young.

Indeed; the furry fandom is relatively new since the medium over which that fetish propagates is similarly recent. That said, the protagonist from Turning Red (and indeed, all the pandas) was a fat CalArts blob and not Lola Bunny, so it's not likely to have much of a seductive effect on the men or women who watch it.

whether they would not take greater control over media exposure

"Mom good dad bad" (or its related "mom good dad missing") has been room temperature in media for the past 20+ years for a bunch of reasons, and that's not generally something the parents who want that control are going to base their criteria on- their objections tend to be more short-term about "it encourages kids to be more hyper or selfish" (or the general "it seems today that all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV") rather than the background temperature.

Now, you could conceivably get away with this if you carefully curated the media selection they had access to ensure they don't grow up assuming that men are all as stupid and shallow as the TV suggests they are, but the problem is that, like escaping any gravity well, you need some serious effort to pull that off and not end up doing the equivalent of (topically) intentionally failing to deliver food to the menstrual hut (and through those actions prove the TV is right).

For this same reason, we don’t have cartoons about people taking a shit on the toilet.

Aren't bathrooms / toilets / urine and feces common sources of the crude humor often found in cartoons?

The more interesting question is what the Disney psychologists are trying to engineer when they portrayal the development of sexuality

From their perspective, not discussing periods is just an example of conservative sexism and body-shaming, and keeps important information away from girls and women?

Potty humour appears endlessly in children's media. I'd say you'd probably have a harder time finding a cartoon that doesn't mark poop/fart jokes than finding one that does. No one's going to laud a cartoon about dropping a load because it's already common place.

Which cartoon do you have in mind whose plot is about taking a poop (versus a poop joke)?

Captain Underpants has a major antagonist who's a giant toilet. Silent Butt Deadly is an episode of the cartoon 6teen that revolves around a character trying to poop.

Feces is referenced in cartoons all the time. It's almost never showed on screen because of S&P stuff, but it's talked about.

You say that "you can engineer someone to develop a preference or fetish based on what shows you shill them when they are young", but isn't that anecdotal? I'm not disagreeing with you, I'd just love to see research on people who watched Willy Wonka as a kid and developed inflation fetishes.

The implicit view our media-makers seem to take is that taboo-breaking is intrinsically good. Turning Red, whatever it did, was sold as a boundary-pushing film with scatological subject matter discussed frankly. But is that itself venerable? Why are we celebrating that as an unmitigated good?

Our culture, our art, tends toward this destructive impulse. Watch the language: we break taboos, smash sacred cows, subvert expectations, break stereotypes, and so on. Correspondingly, what is traditional, conservative, or restrictive to nearly any capacity is represented as backwards and fearful, rather than as healthy and signalling a robust community.

What movies have been made in our lifetimes wherein a character's negative snap-judgments on an outsider have proven correct? When has art made within the last fifty years even come close to endorsing a societal taboo as good and wholesome? When has "boundary-pushing" for its own sake ever been represented as the deeply lazy and pathological trait it often is in reality? Barely ever.

Mainstream superhero films.

It's a fundamentally conservative genre where heroes exist to defend the public from change. Obvious, stylized costumes signpost good and evil. Problems are not subtle, though occasionally, only the heroes can see through a villain's deception. Fortunately, they tend to be able to bring overwhelming force to bear. After the violence is over the heroes settle down to eat shawarma and wait for the next ideologue to threaten dramatic changes to their way of life.

Comics have been through a series of deconstruction/reconstruction cycles on the subject. Blockbuster movies haven't kept up with comic-book weirdness, and continue to play it straight. Marvel may play around with genre and storytelling, but they consistently remain in the bounds of heroic, straightforward narratives.

Frankly, I think you're wrong to identify the destructive impulse as foundational to our art. It's a trend that comes and goes, an ongoing Hegelian synthesis. Yeah, "subverting expectations" got a lot of mindshare in the wake of Game of Thrones' disastrous conclusion; when people talked about prestige TV, they had a ready-made catchphrase. But those catchphrases, those trends, exist on a substrate of quality art. They are attempts to differentiate in a market with higher production values than any time in history. They're working on you, right now, when you can bring examples to mind for one trope but not another.

And when audiences wise up and roll their eyes at "subversion," its edge will be lost, until some fresh-faced exec pitches an honest, refreshing show about interesting people doing interesting stuff.

My go-to for this is Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs - the technological improvement is a disaster, and the father is proven correct in his impulse to not partake nor support it. He never eats the food from the invention!

It's been a while since I've seen the film, but I do remember that.

Also, the Lego Movie. Its message is that sometimes "conformity" is good! Being a teamplayer means following some rules and sometimes curbing your impulse to be your own peculiar creature.

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