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.]
Somebody dug this up and liked it and I still like my answer, so here it is again.
Loki is the Philosopher King 