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UK Politics - BoJo Kool-Aid vs Project Fear Cocktail of Terror


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Also how are Dr who, the ghostbusters or the equaliser remotely fucking role models? 

Laugh my arse off at the thought the gangs of Hackney and Tottenham were interrupting their robbing and dealing to pop home on a Saturday night and watch Peter Capaldi. 

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Why do role models need to be genderised or ethnicised or orientationised? We are an equal society when young people see people as role models regardless of how they look or present. Lamenting the fact that boys have no good role models because there are no good male characters on TV only serves to confirm that we are not a society that is truly gender equal. I am inspired by real life people of all races, genders and orientations. That's because how I was raised, which significantly included being taught racial and gender equality by my parents. 

Also where are the studies showing that fictional TV characters have a significant effect on turning kids good when their home and social lives are surrounded by crime and violence with no immediate examples in their daily lives for how to live a life that makes a positive contribution to family and society?

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1 minute ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Why do role models need to be genderised or ethnicised or orientationised? We are an equal society when young people see people as role models regardless of how they look or present. Lamenting the fact that boys have no good role models because there are no good male characters on TV only serves to confirm that we are not a society that is truly gender equal. I am inspired by real life people of all races, genders and orientations. That's because how I was raised, which significantly included being taught racial and gender equality by my parents. 

Also where are the studies showing that fictional TV characters have a significant effect on turning kids good when their home and social lives are surrounded by crime and violence with no immediate examples in their daily lives for how to live a life that makes a positive contribution to family and society?

If this is true why has there been so much effort to create more female role models? 

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Starbuck is unamused. It's worth noting that Sackhoff got a lot of this kind of shit when she played the gender-flipped version of Starbuck in BSG.

1 hour ago, DaveSumm said:

The fucking Equaliser?! That’s how short of examples he was? Yea I know I was devastated when that mediocre action film from 7 years ago got a female lead series (that I’d never heard of and had to look up).

To be fair to the cretin, The Equalizer was originally a 1985-89 TV show starring Edward Woodward as a man unleashing legally dubious vengeance on n'er-do-wells with no oversight or accountability, so was probably a huge hero figure to him growing up.

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I feel like one of the key points he's missing is that none of the 'male role models for young people' he named are less than thirty years old. Talking about what role models for the young are hits harder if you know what they are. And even if you stick with that '30-year-plus) restriction the man managed to miss the existence of almost the entire Marvel universe.

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8 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I feel like one of the key points he's missing is that none of the 'male role models for young people' he named are less than thirty years old. Talking about what role models for the young are hits harder if you know what they are. And even if you stick with that '30-year-plus) restriction the man managed to miss the existence of almost the entire Marvel universe.

Yeah exactly, he should have at least been aware of marvel projects like Hawkeye and Thor which replace their male counterparts with female ones. 

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27 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Yeah exactly, he should have at least been aware of marvel projects like Hawkeye and Thor which replace their male counterparts with female ones. 

13 years of the MCU have gone past (almost all of it being dominated by male, mostly white leads) and the only two examples you can cite are one that's on air as of this week, one that hasn't been released yet, both of which feature the original white male characters prominently.

Did you really think this was a clever response?

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2 minutes ago, mormont said:

13 years of the MCU have gone past (almost all of it being dominated by male, mostly white leads) and the only two examples you can cite are one that's on air as of this week, one that hasn't been released yet, both of which feature the original white male characters prominently.

Did you really think this was a clever response?

I think if you are looking at a trend then yeah I think it’s pretty relevant. 

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About the only thing worth complaining about with gender-flipping comic book / movie characters is that it's creatively lazy most of the time. But complaining about that in this role-model context is spurious.

I would much prefer new female and minority characters with their own unique stories that are not just riding on the coat tales of an already successful (commercially) male character. But that wouldn't stop the whining about the loss of male role models in fiction, since every new and successful female character is still displacing the screen time of a male / white / cis / hetero character. 

The truth is there is no lack of positive male role models in fiction, so whatever political barrow is being pushed here it's not about the lack of positive male role models in fiction.

 

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The gender flipping thing really isn’t that important, especially as they have been proven to be mostly unsuccessful. 
 

As a trend though it is noticeable as an over correction the way many franchises have gone out of their way to build their properties around this boring ‘idealised’ female archetype. Hyper competent, assertive, don’t need no man, bad asses is what you are going to get. That’s basically your female role model these days.  
 

I do find it quite noticeable that in contrast a lot of big budget movies and shows will often show men in a more submissive, passive , ineffectual manner, often to show just how strong and powerful the woman is beside him. Or even worse just abusive violent misogynistic bullies. I do wonder if this is the story we wanna be telling young men, how is that any better? 
 

Having more female role models is a positive thing. It does feel like we are going through a period of over correction though, and when that happens you wonder will it ever flip back to the centre 

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I guess women being portrayed as badass, don't need help from no one archetypes perhaps highlights that the decades of being fed that kind of male archetype has always been sloppy character writing. Similarly female supporting character who are weak and ineffectual passed without notice, until people started writing male characters that way, then all of a sudden it became a bad thing.

But it is also true in the real world that men can be pansies and women can be arseholes. And we should not make those traits appear better or worse merely because of the plumbing that was installed in utero.

 

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4 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

About the only thing worth complaining about with gender-flipping comic book / movie characters is that it's creatively lazy most of the time.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't Marvel and DC known to rehash their stories with alternate timelines / interpretations, with 3 Spiderman movies covering the same story and who knows how many comics? I don't think being creatively lazy is an issue for them. I'd guess they looked at their sales and name recognition is worth more than creativity.

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5 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I guess women being portrayed as badass, don't need help from no one archetypes perhaps highlights that the decades of being fed that kind of male archetype has always been sloppy character writing. Similarly female supporting character who are weak and ineffectual passed without notice, until people started writing male characters that way, then all of a sudden it became a bad thing.

 

 

I’d say strong assertive female characters have been a thing pretty much my entire lifetime, it’s not new. You get the sense feminism started to exist only 5 years ago right now.

Quote

But it is also true in the real world that men can be pansies and women can be arseholes. And we should not make those traits appear better or worse merely because of the plumbing that was installed in utero.

We are in agreement here. We shouldn’t be prescriptive about what kind of characters can be played by what ‘plumbing’ they have. However I do think more and more that is the case. 

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40 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

We are in agreement here. We shouldn’t be prescriptive about what kind of characters can be played by what ‘plumbing’ they have. However I do think more and more that is the case. 

The logic of this escapes me.

It's like complaining that more and more women are moving into construction jobs. It's a traditionally male dominated area that is *still* male dominated, yet the problem you've identified is an unfair bias towards women, because there are more female construction workers than there used to be.

If you focus - as this MP did and you appear to be - entirely on the trend, as if that were the only indicator of a problem, then you will never achieve equality in any area of life because any indication of progress will be waved around as an indication of bias.

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9 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Hyper competent, assertive, don’t need no man, bad asses is what you are going to get. That’s basically your female role model these days.  

“Why woman not wear dress and be nice like mommy.”

is what you’re really saying. God the far-right nationalist movements tend to be so whiney.

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

We shouldn’t be prescriptive about what kind of characters can be played by what ‘plumbing’ they have. However I do think more and more that is the case. 

Because in the good ole days no one ever, ever cared about how a characters race, sex, or sexuality. Because everyone understood  they were to be white, straight, and embodied traditional gender norms.

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27 minutes ago, mormont said:

The logic of this escapes me.

It's like complaining that more and more women are moving into construction jobs. It's a traditionally male dominated area that is *still* male dominated, yet the problem you've identified is an unfair bias towards women, because there are more female construction workers than there used to be.

If you focus - as this MP did and you appear to be - entirely on the trend, as if that were the only indicator of a problem, then you will never achieve equality in any area of life because any indication of progress will be waved around as an indication of bias.

Again, I think pointing out the trend is important, because it shows a direction of travel.

If we think that the way we portray the sexes in the media is important to the social fabric ( and lots of people clearly feel that was hence the large push to create a very particular positive female presence on screen) then shouldn’t we also pay attention to the way men are portrayed? Why is ok to worry about female stereotypes but not male ones?

If we want equality then what we’d want is a whole range of characters where sex and gender doesn’t totally define who they are allowed to be. A lot of energy has seemingly been poured into correcting for the past by throwing in a load of lazily written ‘strong independent women’ characters at basically all the major franchises, whilst at the same time making men nothing more than the butt of the joke. It was funny for a bit but then you wonder if it will get to a point where things will even out. 
 

Fletcher comes across as rather ridiculous because it seems like he’s connecting lack of male Doctor Who’s to crime, but on a wider point he is kinda right that there is an assumption that men just have it easy, that they can just glide through life. But the trend lines on a number of areas don’t look good for men, for instance doing worse in education. At what point do we look at that and have to start writing more ‘strong independent don’t need no woman bad ass men’

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You know whose comic-book hero’s original backstory was really stupid? Super-girl’s. Well the original one at least Jimmy Olson created her by accident through a magic totem.  It was written around the silver-age of comic books so par for the course.

If super-girl was made today there would thousands of hours of videos, blogs,  subreddits of angry man-babies(and some women-babies) just screeching  about how the existence of super-girl was worse than if marvel  cut the balls off Superman and made him watch Lois lane and Lex Luther  have sex.
 A similar reaction if bat-girl was made today. Or she-hulk. Or X-23 etc. My point is the internet was a mistake and it’d great if people didn’t the whining of a really loud opinion on 4chan as the true representation of general public sentiments.

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