Early on in my blog I worked out for myself that entertainment satisfies different kinds of urgings. The reason taste differs is that people have these different needs. In the past, if you didn’t like something, you just passed on it. The problem is that media criticism has morphed into political soapboxing. Now if you don’t get what you want, if you struggle to relate, it’s “problematic”. Well, more often than not, it’s NOT problematic. It’s just not, as toxic fans are so often told “not made for you”.
For instance, take this recent attempt to go back and retroactively spot all the reasons why Joss Whedon was always a creep. We just didn’t realize it. Or how Manhattan was a crime against humanity where The Graduate (let alone Harold and Maude) was not. Then you have the Bechdel test, ranking a work based on how disconnected female characters are from men in a work, something that, for instance, would demote the entire rom-com genre.
New voices gaining new power to make their own content is all well and good, but just because you wanted things oriented one way doesn’t mean the other way is wrong. It just wasn’t made for you.
For instance, before nth wave feminism, rom coms themselves were called “chick flicks”. Men didn’t watch them unless they were placating the women in their lives. Likewise, nerd culture was only for nerds. Now, however, all genres are being feminized. Traditionally male-centric entertainment is more often than not being written by women (and often, gay women) and that means abandoning elements that men used to like. Instead of broadening the tent it is resulting in the entertainment equivalent of white-flight, as the older male fanbase leaves and a much smaller culture of multicolor TUMBLR types are left in their place. This has happened most dramatically with Star Trek and Dr. Who but also Star Wars and is poised to happen with the MCU.
It’s very difficult when you write from a certain perspective to acknowledge that you are in effect writing from a perspective, not unlike how you don’t interpret your own manner of speaking as being an “accent”. But it’s not true that your perspective is some sort of objective truth. No matter how hard you try, it’s filtered and colored through your hopes, dreams, fears, and yes, fantasies. This is a feature, not a bug.
Again, in decades past this was no big deal. You gravitated towards what you liked and simply ignored what you didn’t. Now, as I said, media is attempting to essentially censor and memory-hole and trigger-warning-annotate anything that doesn’t fit their concept of “acceptability”.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more acute than anything related to sexuality, namely male sexual interest and women being sexy. This is why Lola Bunny has had her breasts lopped off, why Lara Croft was recast with a waifish actress with an A-cup, and countless other examples of denying any opportunity for male-gaze.
In the past, women accepted the idea that men looked to entertainment for T&A. They may not have liked it, but it was a fact of nature. Now, there is a denial of that nature, a pathologizing of nature. And it’s a very selective pathologizing considering the ever more overtly sexual expression from women (ala WAP, OnlyFans, Instagram, etc…)
But it goes beyond the obvious sexual politics. It also goes into things like plotting. Women tend to be more interested in character dynamics vs. men with action. I have not seen Wonder Woman 1984 but one of the main critiques of it is that it was boring by virtue of being very talky. And I also have not seen Wandavision but the choice to frame it in a series of sitcoms is hardly the sort of thing one would expect from the superhero genre. CW network shows all the way back to the endless c*ck-tease of Smallville have the nickname of being endless “feelings in hallways”. Modern comics tend to be full of eating scenes that feature nothing but endless reams of dialogue. Not that dialogue can’t be engaging, Tarantino had a flair for it, but men tend to like things to be more kinetic.
Feminine writing tends to focus on protagonist as victim. Male writing tends to focus on protagonist as shaping his or her own destiny, that the world is his oyster. In victim-based storytelling the main objective is to garner sympathy for the protagonist by the system keeping her down no matter what she does. Again, if you look at Tarantino, you see a mixture of both, as Chinese based cinema often functioned as torture-porn followed by revenge-porn. But in something like Kill Bill, Beatrix is still forced into the box of the hero with a thousand faces. She has to level-up. The need to expend hard work is most often absent in victim-centric narratives, where heroines are kept downtrodden or Mary Sues who coast their way to conquering the big-bad. The ultimate revenge is also sometimes denied in order to stretch out the torture-porn as long as possible (Handmaid’s Tale for instance). Female thinking isn’t really about solving problems as much as it’s about eliciting sympathy. Male thinking is about trying to learn the skills to make your way in the world. There is a space for female-centric narratives that do involve characters paying their dues. Spirited Away and Devil Wears Prada are both excellent examples. But the soap opera is to women what a cheap Chuck Norris actioner is to men. Women find comfort in wallowing in victimhood and men find comfort in cheap expressions of ultimate power.
Good entertainment builds tension rather than merely giving people what they want. It’s like the difference between junk-food and a full-course meal.
Not to beat a dead horse but again, the problem comes in how society is now attempting to put entertainment on trial and judge it against some universal notion of perfection. Men are simply not allowed to develop sexual interest in women, not without first discovering her inner-beauty at least (which is simply not how the world works). Heck, women aren’t really allowed to be sexy enough to illicit such interest in the first place. Everyone has to either treat each other perfectly (denying drama its conflict) or one should setup simplistic victim/victimizer scenarios in order to talk down and socially engineer society against the injustices du-jour, the magic schoolbus approach, more or less.
The fact is that entertainment is just that–entertainment. If people writing these sorts of deconstructionist pieces don’t themselves have guilty pleasures of their own (ahem, 50 Shades of Grey, Magic Mike, Aquaman) then they are pretty damn boring people to be around.
–othreviewer
OverTheHill Reviewer 