How would you reconcile enjoying “problematic” media with a belief that media largely impacts our perception of the world, sometimes negatively? For instance, media has reinforced sexist tropes that influence how men view and treat women today, and I’d prefer that these portrayals be avoided or clearly presented as incorrect. However, I also enjoy unhealthy relationship dynamics that I wouldn’t support in real life (not incest, I don’t think that’s inherently wrong, but underage is more iffy).

incredifishface:

incredifishface:

philosopherking1887:

Because philosophers are all about making distinctions, I’d like to talk about a distinction that a lot of people on this hellsite seem to have trouble with: the distinction between the events depicted in a work of art and the work’s stance toward those events. (I’m saying “the work’s stance” and not “the artist’s stance” because those can come apart for a variety of reasons. The artist’s failure to effectively convey their personal stance in the work due to incompetence is the most common one, but the work can also become skewed away from the artist’s intentions through censorship, or the artist might experiment with a perspective different from their own… Anyway, the important thing is the implied stance of the postulated author of the work, who is not identical with the real-world creator, but is the hypothetical agent who could have intended all of the features of the work.)

I should hope it would be obvious that depicting events of a certain type is not equivalent to endorsing them. A simple example: both The Birth of a Nation and 12 Years a Slave depict violence by white people against Black people, but the first portrays it as just and necessary, while the second portrays it as cruel and unjust. Gone with the Wind portrays the defeat of the Confederacy as the tragic loss of a beautiful way of life, while Lincoln portrays it as a just and hard-won triumph for humanity. Different war movies can convey different attitudes toward the violence of war. Films like Rambo (presumably; I’ve never seen it) and Inglourious Basterds revel in it; films like Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk may portray it in great detail, but in a way that aims to sadden and disgust rather than thrill the viewer, to emphasize the horror and waste of war rather than the excitement and heroism.

With sexism and sexual violence, the typical way of depicting it without condemning it is not to acknowledge it as such. If jokes about nagging wives, vapid blondes, women being bad drivers, etc. are presented without comment or challenge as invitations for the audience’s laughter, the work is sexist. But the work can also portray those things in a way that condemns them, either by having a character explicitly criticize another’s sexism, or by dwelling on the discomfort of women who are subjected to these stereotypes. The work can acknowledge the stereotypes while challenging them, as does Legally Blonde, which shows just how intelligent and resourceful the supposedly stereotypical “vapid blonde” can be. [I’m putting the rest under a cut because this is getting really long.]

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the one thing i have to add

(the thing is, this IS a sensitive subject, and it deserves being talked about with the extension and thoroughness that allows for nuance and refined arguments. And you’re an extremely eloquent and clear minded individual and basically you just nailed it on the head.) 

rynfinity

“so much goodness and truth.  the only thing i would add, and i know some (most) social justice folks will take issue, is that not every story has to be, or have a, moral.  yes, works which aren’t/don’t do then depend on the reader to have a sense of right and wrong…”

What Ryn said.

Stories carry with them, intentionally and more often not, a lot of information about the societal views, mores, customs, and values of the person who writes it. And so, SJW can always find things to criticise and reasons to burn a writer for. 

But the thing is, stories are not pamphlets, statements of intention, political programs, codes of ethics, guides for life. They do not mean to sell you an idea either. And you don’t have to buy it, whatever it is.

One of SJW’s and anti’s favourite phrase is “fiction doesn’t happen in a vacuum”. No. And neither does reading or consuming media. A piece of media doesn’t fall into an empty, helpless vessel ready to be filled, unable to defend itself from whatever it is its exposed to, absorbing uncritically its values. It meets a brain that contains its own ideas and cultural background and values and thoughts. Respect people’s intelligence, is what I’m saying. We can tell reality from fiction. We know what we’re about, son.

What pisses me off the most about SJWs is precisely that they negate the intelligence and common sense in everybody else besides themselves. Only they are strong enough and clever enough to see the insidious values behind a work and must protect the brainless plebs from its noxious influences. I don’t know you, but black and white mentality, immaturity, intolerance, and inability to distinguish between fiction and real life, don’t scream “superior intelligence and discernment” to me.

Yes, I completely agree with @rynfinity… though that could have been another extremely long post and a half (about debates in the philosophy of art regarding whether the primary value of literature is moral. Long story short: all the scholars who have taught me say the answer is no, and I believe them).

I do think that all works of literature (or maybe art more broadly) at least implicitly convey a stance toward their content, though @incredifishface is quite right that you often have to be aware of the generally accepted mores at the time in order to know what it is. We tend to assume that the stance of, say, mafia movies toward their protagonists is “Yes, these are horrible people, but isn’t it fun to take their perspective for a couple of hours?” (Ask me about my Nietzschean views on why we enjoy that so much… or don’t.) We assume that the (postulated) filmmaker generally shares our values, unless we have reason to believe otherwise. But the ultimately disapproving stance is completely implicit because it just isn’t the point of the movie, and filmmakers assume people are reasonable enough that they don’t have to come out and say “You know I don’t approve of breaking people’s kneecaps if they don’t pay protection money, right?”

If you’re coming from a very different culture and you don’t know the mores of the source culture, you might misinterpret the stance of the work because you’re not making the appropriate assumptions. There’s an especially funny example of this in the original Star Trek, in the episode called “A Piece of the Action.” (I thought you might especially appreciate this example, Fishie…) The Iotians, a relatively young culture with a tendency to imitate other cultures, are left with a history book from Earth called Chicago Mobs of the Twenties, and when the Enterprise shows up a hundred years after they get this book, they’ve modeled their entire society on 1920s Chicago gang culture. The original conceit may just be that they didn’t know the difference between a history book and an instruction manual… but imagine that they had been left with a collection of pulp novels or films about 1920s Chicago gangs. They might still have come away with the impression that this way of life is admirable, because often in such works we’re intended to root for and sympathize with the mobsters, even as we reflectively disavow their code of ethics.

The thing is, SJWs (I’m glad you used that term; I was shying away from it because it’s so often used by conservative dudebros to mean people with a reasonable concern for the well-being of others, but there’s certainly a type of SJW that annoys reasonable progressives just as much as any dudebro on Reddit) treat us all like we’re Iotians – complete with their penchant for imitation.