You are lucky Montanans. I swear every state will be more liberal than Ohio by 2030.
Funny Events of the "Woke" world
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
You are lucky Montanans. I swear every state will be more liberal than Ohio by 2030.
The point here is one that is pretty well established in the discourse around modern superhero movies, namely that the whole aesthetic and gaze of these movies is simultaneously incredibly fetishistic and completely asexual in a way that comes across as incredibly insincere and corporate. Everyone is beautiful 24/7 and the camera wants you to know about it. We spend scene after scene looking at incredibly sculpted bodies. The camera often focuses incredibly specifically on the bodies of shirtless men or women in tight outfits. However, diegetically, these films are completely asexual. They exist in a world where sex isn't even a thought people have, let alone a thing people do. People can like each other, but noone is ever horny. No characters ever have sexual chemistry with one another unless it's accidental, and even then there seems to be a deliberate effort to scrub out anything that might be intelligible as sexuality from these movies where the camera lingers on rippling abs and tight asses for a significant proportion of the runtime.
It's pretty obvious why this happens. It's an aesthetic that is designed to appeal to the broadest possible audience. People in general like perving at bodies, but conservatives don't like open displays of sexuality and they really don't like children being exposed to anything that registers as openly sexual. The goal is to create something with the broadest possible marketing appeal that isn't going to offend anyone, has as little cultural odor as possible and gives the appearance of being politically meaningless (although of course, it isn't. Nothing is politically meaningless, least of all superheroes).
It's authoritarian on several levels. Firstly, because it is a deliberate concession to people who actually want to remove any honest discussion of sex from society altogether in the interests of "protecting children". It's conveying the moral lesson that repression is good. That you can perv all you want as long as you never acknowledge what you're doing. Secondly, it's authoritarian because the diegetic world it creates is utopian and sanitized. It's not a world where people are allowed to think or act like humans, they have to be better than humans, and there is something a bit cryptofascist about that. Fascism ultimately demands perfection of everyone. It's a noose of acceptability that closes and closes until noone is good enough.
There is a very strong sexual component to fascist ideology, both historical and current. Fascists are also fetishistic and obsessed with idealized bodies, but will typically deny any kind of erotic component to this obsession because they have to pretend to hate anything "perverse". That's actually a pretty big part of the psychology of fascism.
While I’ll call this a very good and interesting read on the subject, the sexual subtext of superheroes isn’t exactly unknown - Wonder Woman and BDSM is a famous but by no means isolated example.
However I’m not terribly convinced there’s a motive beyond broad audience appeal, mainly to families with children, to explain the lack of open horny in things like the MCU. Like I’ve watched every one of those things multiple times cos I’m a hopeless tragic and I struggle to think of one where you could have had a reasonably natural transition to one apart from Iron Man 1.
I have no idea how anyone who watches these movies can come away thinking the world they exist in is utopian and sanitized. And I feel it should go without saying that judging how much a person acts like a real human being based on the amount of sexual activity they do or don't engage in is incredibly immature, to put it mildly.
The tweet I linked to cited the first two Terminator movies even though only one of them has a sex scene and said scene exists for the purpose of procreation. In fact, the tweet seems to care more about looking at idealized bodies rather than the act of sex itself, which makes the criticism of "sexlessness" all the more baffling.
This just reminds me of the ridiculous uproar over Penn Badgley deciding to do less sex scenes in You for the sake of his own comfort. A decision that should have been met with support and understanding given the horror stories we've read about actors being exploited for the sake of titillation caused a section of the Internet to accuse him of everything from being adulterer to advocating for the return of the Hays code. And just like the Gamergaters who fly into a panic when they think their animated boobs are being taken away, these guys conveniently ignore the numerous movies and tv shows that continue to push the envelope when it comes to risque material.
Maybe people whining about how one genre of film doesn't have enough spank material for them should put this much energy into educating children about sex and consent or maybe even look into the health risks that actors deal with to maintain these idealized bodies. I'd certainly say the latter is much more relevant to film and much more harmful than not seeing Captain America and Black Widow screwing like rabbits.
In many ways, that's kind of the point I'm making.
Wonder Woman was created in the 1940s, which were a relatively permissive era in regard to sex. During the second world war, a lot of societal taboos about sex were just kind of put aside for a while. A significant chunk of the population were being sent away possibly to their deaths, so you had this brief climate of hedonism where everyone just wanted to make the most of the time they had. In the 1950s, there was a huge backlash and things got very, very conservative again. From the 50s onwards mainstream comics in the US were heavily censored by the comics code authority, so any kind of acknowledgement of sexuality was not really allowed.
There's that scene in Watchmen where Laurie and Daniel have just had sex, and they have a short but explicit discussion about how they liked wearing their superhero outfits and it made everything hotter for them. That is a very intentional and pointed moment, because it's explicitly taking aim at the fact that, for a long time, you could draw buff men and and women in skintight outfits but you couldn't acknowledge that there might be some erotic potential in that. Unfortunately, like everything about Watchmen it feels to me like the 90s took that and just ran it into the fucking ground by going full fetish 24/7, and I think nowadays we rightly find that kind of hypersexuality a bit cringe.
I don't think anything consciously malicious is going on, I think Marvel and DC and the other studios are just following trends and trying to appeal to the broadest possible audience, but at the same time that doesn't change the fact that we've kind of gone back to the 50s.
Sure, MCU films in particular tend to skew quite childlike, but they're still universally PG-13. They're not made for babies, and there's a huge discrepancy between the way that sexuality is scrubbed out of these films when compared to other forms of taboo or not-particularly-child-friendly material like violence, horror elements, character death and so forth. I'm not even talking about characters literally boning down on screen, but things like characters having overt sexual chemistry or engaging in normal adult flirting. That's why I think the modern superhero film aesthetic feels so weird, artificial and corporate to many people, because it doesn't handle sexuality in particular in anything like the natural way that older PG-13 films might have tried to do.
A movie rating isn't decided by the studio, its the rating they get. Disney would almost certainly prefer their movie to be rated G rather than PG-13. And if you've ever been to a screening of a MCU movie, you know a very significant chunk of the audience is much younger than 13. This isn't censorship or anything like that, disney just want as much money as possible and they know family will avoid movie with sex scene because it lead to awkward conversation they'd rather skip and a lot of kid will be bored by those scenes anyway. Now that superhero movie are the dominant movie genre, they kinda by default have to be family friendly, once that fad pass and something else become dominant (maybe pirate movie) you'll see more adventurous superhero movie being made again (for smaller budget), and those will lean more heavily into the sexual aspect.
Er, yes, but it's based on what things the studio decides to put in. They could make G rated superhero movies if they wanted.
Sure, but then they would have to remove all the fight and explosion, stuff that kid actually want to see. Simply put, if little kid really wanted to see super hero in sexualized way (and parent didn't really care about it) then superhero movie would be filled with those.
Sure, but they will have a very strong idea of what rating they are aiming for, and if they don't get the rating they want they will generally reedit and resubmit the film to make sure they do get the rating they were aiming for.
Again, there is a lot of stuff in the MCU movies that would be extremely inappropriate or disturbing for younger children, which is why they are not G rated. Sometimes the violence in these films is quite cartoony, but it can also sometimes be quite real and visceral. Characters die in these films, sometimes in quite nasty ways. There is genuine peril and frightening imagery which many young children would not be able to handle.
Of course, some will. Again, the fact that many kids of my generation grew up watching stuff that was not age appropriate at all (like the Terminator films) should probably attest to how resilient children actually are. But this should also tell us that children aren't innocent little lambs who passively absorb all the media they consume. They often get a real thrill out of seeing things they're not supposed to see, provided it doesn't cross the line into being too upsetting or real for them.
I realize the original quote was about sex scenes in particular, and in that sense I get why the connection to the Terminator films seems really arbitrary and dumb, but the more I think about it the more that connection does make a weird amount of sense. There's a lot of body fetishism in the Terminator films. I don't think it's an accident that they put Arnold in a lot of leather biker gear in both films.
Like, I don't think it's a particularly hot take to say that a major theme of the Terminator films is dehumanization, and that part of how dehumanization is shown is through this kind of intensely fetishistic view of bodies devoid of sexuality. In Terminator 2 this theme is sort of relegated to a secondary status because the main emotional arc is now more about parenthood, but it's still very much there.
There's a scene in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor is sexually assaulted by an orderly while under sedation. It's not a particularly graphic scene, and it's up to you how darkly you want to read the implications, but if you consider Sarah's position it's honestly pretty horrifying.
Somehow, our little child brains all glossed over that one.
Also, there are two sex scenes in the Terminator (arguably three if phone sex counts).
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Okay now I feel bad cos I forgot about Ginger and her boyfriend. Like I remember they were killed but I’d entirely forgotten they’d been having sex prior to the Terminator’s entry.
People attacking Rachel Zegler's Snow White in the name of ‘feminism’ prove that women can't win
Don't we want an empowered, independent princess, though?
Attacking Snow White?People attacking Rachel Zegler's Snow White in the name of ‘feminism’ prove that women can't win
Don't we want an empowered, independent princess, though?www.glamourmagazine.co.uk
I guess you could say that Zegler was left out in the cold.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/podcast...pts-following-blasphemy-accusations/nb645ozfh
Not woke by itself, but remember, "both sides are bad."
https://unherd.com/thepost/cancelling-our-comedy-show-proves-our-point/
Remember, "cancel culture isn't real."
Not woke by itself, but remember, "both sides are bad."
https://unherd.com/thepost/cancelling-our-comedy-show-proves-our-point/
Remember, "cancel culture isn't real."
What a dishonest little article that is.
Firstly for completely misrepresenting what Linehan is disliked for, acting as if he's being targeted for perfectly reasonable stances. He's not-- he's turned into a seriously unhinged, vitriolic figure.
So they booked the venue and kept one of the acts secret, even from the proprietors-- and then when it turned out to be Linehan, the venue was no longer happy for it to go ahead. As is their right. They don't owe anyone their space, he's not entitled to it. His presence would damage their reputation because he's a hateful nutcase.
If you want to book acts who're widely known for attacking minority groups, then you can't keep that fact a secret from the venue you're hiring and then act surprised-pikachu when the venue isn't happy to proceed.
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Linehan's going to have to sue his wife for divorcing him over his protected views.
Silvanus already covered it, but I don't think you know who Linehan is.
He is an absolute husk of a person at this point. His entire identity, personality and life has been rotted out by his insane crusade against trans people. He used to have friends in the British media establishment who would come out and apologize for him, but even they've given up at this point because Linehan is so rabidly transphobic that he's become embarrassing to other transphobes. Except of course this criminally unfunny loser who pissed the last of his public credibility away by taking a job for the GB News, a channel ironically more funny in its complete, laughable incompetence than any of these out of touch old men who claim they're being cancelled have managed to be in fucking decades.
Like, a few years back the National Lottery fund, which donates a portion of the money people spend on state-run gambling to charities, issues a grant to a small charity called Mermaids that provides support for gender variant children and their families, basic stuff like counselling and networking. Linehan took personal offence at the idea of any care for trans children short of full on electroshock conversion therapy (he has, after all, compared the provision of medical care to trans children to Nazi experiments) and started a campaign to prevent the charity recieving this money, which resulted in the grant being withdrawn. This backfired incredibly fucking hard because anyone whose soul hadn't died somewhere in the TERF pipeline immediately recognized that this is what might be referred to as a "dick move", but it perhaps gives an indication of how fucking lost this man is.
Linehan has also been formally cautioned by police for stalking and harassing trans people. He's been banned from twitter multiple times for engaging in targeted harassment.
If this is your standard for "cancel culture", then cancel culture absolutely, 100% isn't real. Minor celebrities becoming unpopular because they use their position in the public eye to act like absolute, loathesome dickheads is not cancel culture, it's that basic human impulse not to stick your face in dogshit.
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For some people, "cancel culture" is "not supporting my demands that you be eradicated".
This will sound harsh, but I am glad some jobs are being automated away. I am so happy some people have no jobs because their jobs are obsolete. If your job consists of copying and pasting data on a large spreadsheet without programming a solution to automate it, driving a truck vs managing multiple self-driving trucks with a mix of radar and satellite, being a cashier vs managing multiple self-checkout lanes, etc. You are likely either an idiot or closed-minded.
Or live in a society where that's the job you can get.