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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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I'm still thinking about the Barbie movie. It occurred to me that, among the many plausible readings, there's one in which it's a parable about the responsibility that comes with the red pill.

After Ken reaches Kenlightenment, he immediately uses Facts and Logic to convince everyone in Barbieland that patriarchy is superior to all other forms of government. All of the Barbies agree to live under this system, but Ken worries that they may change their minds. And so, after the Kens are put in charge, they schedule a vote to change the constitution so that no woman can ever hold a position of power again.

Ken didn't do anything wrong when he convinced women to choose subservience, but he did do something wrong when he tried to force their permanent subservience. It's not that he didn't care about making the world better for the Barbies, it's just that he cared even more about making the world better for him and the other Kens. And despite his confident exterior, he knew deep down that patriarchy might not actually be the best system, so he needs a failsafe. Ken went from Jared "freedom of association" Taylor to Richard "peaceful ethnic cleansing" Spencer. That's when he became the villain.

To be clear, I am not trying to actually read the intent of the filmmakers. I just find it interesting how everyone can see a reflection of their own values in the movie. Some of my favorite political satire is stuff that doesn't take a clear stance, and when political propaganda is done so clumsily that nobody is sure what stance is being advocated, it accidentally becomes great satire.

Like, I'm not even sure the film does have a political message. I would just as easily buy that it's supposed to be a comedy without an real agenda as I would that it has an agenda it poorly communicates.

Taking note of the fascination with a two hour long Mattel commercial. Realistically it’s just a movie that’s intended to sell toys. It has a poorly communicated feminist agenda because the feminist agenda isn’t what the movie is about, the filmmaker just thought it was supposed to be there these days, and besides a two hour long toy commercial does need a plot somehow.

The movie is primarily aimed at nostalgic millennials, not the young girls the toys are made for. It markets to people who grew up with the toys, but is more interested in using the toy brand to sell a film, not the other way around. Movies made to sell toys look like the ones on this list this list. They are animated, have child-friendly ratings, feature the toys center stage, and have a point of view that is neither critical nor deconstructive of the product featured, unlike the 2023 film.

To say the themes of the movie are only there due to the director just making the motions downplays the intent and artistry of the director, Greta Gerwig. Gerwig is known as a feminist director and earned a fair amount of buzz for Ladybird back in 2017. Regardless of how you feel about her work, looking at the three major films that she wrote and directed shows she has a point of view. The themes of her movies are not incidental or accidental, regardless of whether or not they're attached to a Mattel product.

Barbie is especially interesting due to the casting of Ryan Gosling, a masculine icon of problematic young men, as Ken. This has led to the film having a crossover appeal to both women and the incel and sigma subcultures of young men, who are attempting (successfully IMO) to co-opt the film's themes into their own thing with all the Ken memes. There's a lot to see here, and dismissing the movie as a Mattel commercial is reductive. People are not wrong or misguided to analyze a cultural product like this.

It’s targeting wine aunts who will buy dolls for their nieces.

To add complications, the 30 something millennial woman is the target audience Mattel was missing when selling Barbies, because they might refuse to buy Barbies for their daughter.

Turning Barbie into a vaguely feminist hobby horse, and neutralizing the old knocks on her, helps sell the dolls to parents who want to buy them for their kids. Barbie was in danger of becoming low status.

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I worry there won't be common values shared by men and women in the future and so marriage will become, in a large sense, contracts for reproduction among cultural aliens

Ah, black culture continues taking over America.

Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

Also known as the "hot take" rule.

If you're saying something that's deeply out of the ordinary or difficult-to-defend, the next person is going to ask you to explain what you mean. You can head this off by explaining what you mean before hitting submit. The alternative is that the first half-dozen responses will all be "can you explain in more detail", which increases clutter and makes it much harder to follow the conversation.

Please choose either avoiding dropping hot takes, or backing them up in some way.

Some truth in that but Mattel's strategy is to be an IP company like Marvel, they obviously want to sell toys but the movie itself is part of a bigger strategy to make more movies and such.

It's interesting that whenever I've seen this issue brought up, I've never seen anyone propose a solution beyond "... And thus you can see why my political opponents' positions are so destructive, and must be stamped out permanently by re-education of !"

Do you know of any analysis that breaks that pattern in good faith?

Increasingly I feel like the left-right culture wars are becoming men-women culture wars.

Slightly different take on where exactly the line is... is this recent drop via MR.

Are women liberal because they’re unmarried, or are they unmarried because they’re liberal?

I would expect a “traditional” “family-oriented” woman to be both more conservative and more willing to settle.

Having participated in the modern dating market, it's pretty staggering how different your reception is 'on the apps' with moderate in your bio versus left-wing. Changing that one detail literally 4x'd my response rate.

moderate in your bio versus left-wing

Which one did better?

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Much of that gap disappears when age is included in the analysis.

I don't really care what happens at the senior center speed dating session.

I'm interested. This would, I think, imply that old single women, whether never married or no longer married due to either divorce or death, are even more in favor of dems. Like, what's happening there? Why is that the case? What's driving it, and is it just a historical phenomenon that is likely to disappear as that generation of old ladies disappears, or is there something more fundamental happening?

Iirc divorcees are more liberal than single women as a whole, and you’d probably expect them to skew mostly middle-aged and older.

I worry there won't be common values shared by men and women in the future and so marriage will become, in a large sense, contracts for reproduction among cultural aliens.

I think that's a reasonable concern, and at times it does seem to me to be concentrating that way, but overall I'm reminded of the quote that "no one will win the battle of the sexes: there's too much fraternization with the enemy."

This is what I thought hydro meant when he called it a 2 hour toy commercial.

In my description the feminism is integral to the advertising strategy, where Hydro describes it as ancillary or unnecessary, just tacked on because it's a thing you do these days.

There's a big difference between "Let's make a toy ad... What's popular... Feminism!" Implying that, idk, a Barbie movie from 2002 would use patriotic themes the same way.

Versus "Let's use a long form film to reposition our branding from a lower-prestige to a higher-prestige tier by using feminist branding to rework how parents view our product."

I'm honestly shocked how much play the film is getting, and how many Ivy-League feminists I know are dressing up in pink to attend the film, many multiple times! It's getting significant cultural space, for an IP adaptation that probably deserves to be closer to the Battleship movie.

Compare Bud Light. They just threw some branding at the wall.

I think, to be clear, a Barbie movie from 2002 would have patriotic themes. Possibly feminist-patriotic themes, because it’s a girl movie, but patriotic themes- maybe Islam references and the American way freeing women to walk around without a burka or something.

Hollywood in 2002 was extremely careful about being Islam critical.

Even prior to 9/11 they changed the villains in The Sum of all Fears to be Neo Nazis instead of Islamists.

This has led to the film having a crossover appeal to both women and the incel and sigma subcultures of young men

A bit off topic, but what exactly is the sigma thing? My vague sense it's a rebranded MGTOW (attempting to leave all the pathetic parts behind) but could use an explainer.

It started out as the usual internet autists that systematize any topic to make wikis about the millions of niche political ideologies or genders applying their talents to the "sociosexual hierarchy". The pseudopsychological concept where we attempt to understand human social relations using the terms designed for pack wolves like alpha and beta. Which got pretty popular in the redpill/PUA circles at some point.

Like any incomplete model it had to be extended to fit enough archetypes to please everyone, and sigma is essentially the MGTOW archetype, or as he is classically called, the Übermench, the man who lives life according to his own principles.

People started to make graphs and to try to rank the archetypes, eventually putting sigma on top because, well he's better than the alpha because he's beyond the hierarchy since he refuses to acknowledge it, which not only sounds like immense cope it is also extremely memable.

So the internet did what it does best and started making ironic meme clips of movie characters "acting according to their own principles" and getting praise for doing insane self serving evil shit, most especially with Patrick Bateman who's already a meme icon in his own right.

And then it just followed the usual process where every ironic meme slowly turns post-ironic when people start thinking that while idolizing Walter White murdering a whole bunch of people for his own gain is funny because it's so wrong, there's also a kernel of truth to the idea that, as a man, social norms are burdensome and you deserve to pick your own fate.

So in a nutshell, the Sigma male started out at somewhat ridiculous element of a theory of social hierarchies and became a memetic exploration of will to power.

And we pretty much seem to have stabilized at MGTOW-but-post-ironic and with a better aesthetic than middle aged men whining about getting shafted in their divorce.

Like any incomplete model it had to be extended to fit enough archetypes to please everyone, and sigma is essentially the MGTOW archetype, or as he is classically called, the Übermench, the man who lives life according to his own principles.

I thought it originally had a "spergy" quality to it. Basically like a James Damore-type guy who is too autistic to often notice let alone care about social cues and women.

Then somehow Tommy Shelby became a sigma.

I believe the original poster boy for it was Keanu Reeves who also has his own meme connotations but is pretty definitely the transcendental sperg that does stuff for its own sake.

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