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?
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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
"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).
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