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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

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I don't really know your politics (because I can't keep track of people's username over time), but from this thread, you seem to lean progressive. However, I don't know your particular politics and how progressive you are, so this may be a gotcha and it may not be.

But I'm wondering how you feel about things that feminists may consider demeaning to women, such as fantasy depictions of violence against women, or women in skimpy outfits, etc. I don't know what the party line is these days, but 5 to 10 years ago, people were falling over themselves to denounce a plague of violence against women in media and video games, on the basis that this normalized such depictions, ultimately causing more violence against women or more unrealistic beauty standards, not less. Anita Sarkeesian made a career on this, there were protests against movie ads that feminists found to be unsavory. Overall this sort of thing seemed to be one of the biggest issues of last decade.

To me there are at least two separate issues being conflated here.

One is the existence of such depictions, and the other is the ubiquity of such depictions.

In terms of the existence of an individual depiction, I think if it's clearly depicted as fantasy and wrong/bad/unrealistic/etc in a way that would let most people know not to expect or seek it in real life, it's totally fine. This covers most types of porn and lots of responsible media depictions. The danger is with irresponsible media depictions which depict them as normal/acceptable/excusable/desirable/etc, in ways that could make people not apply the 'fantasy' filter and integrate them into their expectations and plans about the real world. The details of that distinction are infinitely muddy and divisive, but I do feel like 'I know it when I see it' to at least some extent.

In terms of ubiquity, I think where you really run into trouble is when those depictions are so prevalent that they crowd out depictions of how things should be in reality and don't leave people with positive role models to build their own behaviors on. Like, an action movie may show a depraved killer who enjoys inflicting fantasy violence on people, but it also shows the good cop who brings them to justice as the actual role model to identify with, and TV has lots of non-action movies for people to find other role models that don't interface with violence at all. But if 90% of teen/early-twenties women in action movies are scantily-dressed incompetent bimbos with no agency who needs a man to rescue them, and 90% of young women in video games are bimbos who get kidnapped, and and 90% of young women in sitcoms are sexy dummies, and etc.... then you end up kind of hard pressed to not see that as a depiction of reality, and to find some countervailing role models to work off of instead.