Years ago, when this site was young, we got so many people commenting to let us know “It’s just a show – lighten up!” that we expressly forbade this point of view in our comment policy. It wasn’t just the sheer volume, redundancy and dismissive tone of the comments that prompted us to get rid of them. It was also that it’s just not true.
I can’t tell you how times guys have disbelieved my claims to have gender-expectation-defying interests, preferences or activities, then cited television and movies as their proof I’m lying in some weird attempt to manipulate them. For example, women on TV and movies are always thrilled about getting flowers, they say, so when I say, “Oh, thanks, but actually having those anywhere near me will upset my allergies and lead to a bad headache”, I must really be saying, “I have secretly found someone else because your penis was inadequate and I hate you and your damn flowers.”
Another example: all women dream about their weddings. Men knows this because TV shows have given them the scoop. Remember the episode of Friends with the pillowcases? Even Phoebe was into it, and no one could be more of a strange loner misfit than Phoebe, therefore I must be lying when I say I have no interest in a wedding, mine or anyone else’s, ever. (In fact, I find them creepy.) Every woman wants a big diamond engagement ring to impress her friends, according to TV and movies, so what am I trying to pull when I claim I don’t? I must be trying to set men up to make mistakes so I can throw tantrums at them. Yes, that must be it. (I never even threw tantrums as a child, but women on TV and movies always do, so there!)
And of course, when I don’t get angry at men failing to recall my birthday, which I usually don’t recall myself, or for being late or for canceling last minute, which I totally understand and have to do myself sometimes, what I’m really saying is that I don’t care about them. Because the women in TV and movies always secretly seethe about this stuff, I must be secretly seething too – unless I just don’t care.
The sad fact is, a lot of people (including women) cite TV and movies as if they provide definitive evidence that all women feel/think/do X, and any individual woman claiming otherwise is lying, clearly for the purposes of manipulating somebody, the way all women do. I can’t defeat one stereotype without getting backed into another one.
The truth is, pop culture is not just fun and games, and that’s why “It’s just a show” is bullshit. Culture – and current culture has always been pop culture, and always will be – is the medium through which the privileged people educate all the other sorts of people on how they are supposed to behave so as to inconvenience the privileged the least they can with their undesirable yet necessary presence. I really am supposed to not only like flowers, but to accept them in lieu of kept promises and fidelity – not because it’s on TV but because that would be ever so convenient for uncaring and cheating men. What the person who criticizes me for diverging from TV portrayals of my gender is really saying is: “Don’t you know this is your responsibility? Even if you don’t like flowers, you still need to like the damn flowers because men need their women to be plug ‘n’ play, easily replaced! Men have nations to conquer and important things to do. They can’t be bogged down with trying to remember what each new current girlfriend likes, which is why it’s so crucial you all like exactly the same shit! Jeez, you selfish bitch!”
Pop culture has way more power than the law to change how people think and feel. We need laws to protect people from bigotry, but if you want to make people feel stupid about being bigots, pop culture can do that. After all, it’s what’s made people feel perfectly comfortable and righteous about being bigots.
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There was this awesome cop in Criminal Minds who had obsessive compulsive disorder (and wasn’t anything like Monk) who was shown as the one person on the force who really cared about the homeless on his beat.
There’s also word of god for Bones, but yeah, huge dearth of portrayals if I’m going to oneshot characters. Of course, the entire cast of CM is probably depressed, but that’s another story.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
This is the one thing that drove me nuts about Toph. We can’t have a blind person who’s really blind, ever. At least I have Teo.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
Nonono, because then it’s you either being deliberately hypochondriac to inconvenience them specifically and trying to get attention, not being “tough enough” with your other conditions to cope drug-free in silence, or clearly something you’ve done to cause your various maladies. That, or it’s your parents’ fault.
Oh, or you’re crazy or incompetent or anti-vaccination or a hippie/religious nut for NOT wanting to take medicine because of side effects/drug interactions.
Because you’re not really that sick, there’s no way!
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
Not that there isn’t delusional behavior on both sides of that argument…
I never “got” the D&D = Satanism argument (remember back when devil-worshippers were the thing to be afraid of a few years back, and then it was atheists, and now it’s Muslims? *sigh*), but every time I see a story linking video games and violence or the internet and bullying, I just have to think people are deliberately finding excuses. It’s easier to vilify Facebook than it is to teach people about online safety and take responsibility for their own and their children’s actions, and it’s easier to blame Grand Theft Auto for a school shooting than it is to analyze a culture that glorifies violence and the confront how people are treating each other generally.
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
How bizarre is it that the type of fiction being cited as portraying people with disabilities in a fairest light is *fantasy*, the one genre where one could most easily expect magic to cure whatever crippling damage one could suffer?
Nuria(Quote) (Reply)
Yeah, the idea of depression as a plastic, chemically fluctuating state doesn’t occur to people who haven’t gone through it themselves, or sometimes if they’ve seen a loved one go through it. Even situational depression, people tell you to just suck it up, move on with your life, etc. and everything will be better, because apparently we live in a world without far-reaching repercussions to anything at all ever.
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
I know that’s what Lucas thinks and I know that’s what’s in the novel. What I’m saying is that it’s a dangerous myth that redemption works like that – the same as telling people, “John Sweeney must’ve really looooved Dominique Dunne to want to hurt her that much, and we’re sure if she’d just been patient and given endlessly, he’d have been Cured by the Power Of Love and become a Loving Person.” It’s not just Lucas – fiction has been perpetuating forever the idea that a thoroughly corrupt person can be redeemed and learn to love at the last minute, through one act. This is a very dangerous idea, and anyone who’s studied the harder aspects of psychology and neuroscience knows: the sociopath personality is not as flexible as a non-sociopathic personality. Someone who’s done bad things that weren’t terribly far outside her cultural norms can reform, yes (see Xena). But someone who slaughters children and turns on his wife at the first whiff she’s been near another man at whatever age he is in Ep III is not going to get MORE capable of empathy twenty years later.
The only way to take the end of Jedi halfway seriously is to assume Vader has narcissistic personality disorder, sees Luke as an extension of himself rather than a human in his own right, and wants to symbolically “save” himself by saving Luke. This puts him back right with the Force and everything, but even if at this point he wants to love his children, all he can really feel is satisfied with how they will carry on his legacy (extend his ego), because the narcissistic brain just doesn’t bend any other way.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that my read of the story is what Lucas intended. It isn’t. I’m arguing that what he gave us is a gross distortion that made a whole generation think you can fix the sociopaths in your life if you just give, give, give enough or put the right treatment programs into the prisons. And neither concept is at all true. We wasted the entire freakin’ 80s on both, hence (as I said before) the backlash of cultural representation about how you cannot cure these people. Even when they claim to sincerely want treatment, no one’s been successful at “curing” them. Downgrading the condition a little, but developing their empathy? Just can’t happen to any serious degree post-childhood.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Of course, the entire cast of CM is probably depressed, but that’s another story.
That’s why the real FBI doesn’t run around personally chasing serial killers all the time – they generally just write the profiles from a distance and let the cops handle it. No one could be in a constant state of “stop the killer before he does it again” without a severe depression following. Cops involved in chasing down just one serial killer or rapist sometimes have difficulty coping or coming to terms after the fact.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I think the reason people shout so loud about video games is to drown out the quieter voice from those who know the truth: bad parenting is probably the most common factor in kids turning out to be really sick adults.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Huh. It took a trip to the hospital when I was a child visiting my grandparents (who had a cat) for ANYone to take my cat allergy seriously. I couldn’t breath, and it got progressively worse the longer my siblings & I stayed at their home. I DID need a shot of a steriod so I could start breathing, and stop panicking. And it took the doctor to make sure they realized I couldn’t go back to their house, or I’d get another asthma attack. And my older sister STILL told me it was “all in my head”.
I suppose now, I’d get the giant needle instead!
Gategrrl(Quote) (Reply)
I miss them both.
Gategrrl(Quote) (Reply)
Well, the issue is it’s not just the bad parenting. That’s a factor, but when the social structures in place that promote shoot-’em-up games in the first place are constantly present and manifest themselves tangibly or reinforce that paradigm via that cultural media like video games, there’s bigger issues at play.
The video games themselves aren’t making people behave a certain way, or even promoting certain behaviors, but are rather indicative of a set of cultural attitudes that do.
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
My brother’s wife is the same way. She keeps trying to get me to take my brother’s dogs, and thinks I’m just being lazy and uncooperative when I say no. After all I have dogs.
Yeah, non shedding low oil dogs. Every time I’m near my brother’s dogs, I break out in an ugly red rash, which she has seen.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
Right, absolutely. But like you were talking about yesterday, good parenting is what teaches a kid to filter cultural influences through personal values. The parents who neglect those teachings the most tend to be the most anxious to deflect the responsibility elsewhere.
Also, I can’t imagine a “bigger issue” than bad parenting. Broader, maybe, if that’s what you meant. But we treat kids like property, and that’s the root cause of so much dysfunction. There’s a back and forth flow between cultural problems and familial problems (a culture is, in many ways, just a huge family), so what’s rotten in one generally causes something rotten in the other, and I believe removing a bit of rottenness from either can remove a corresponding bit from the other.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Yeah, bigger was probably a poor word choice. I just wanted to be clear that I wasn’t saying, “It’s not just a show… but it is just a video game,” you know?
I wish Privilege Denying Dude hadn’t been taken down, there was a really excellent one saying, “Context doesn’t matter, we live in a vacuum.” It was going to be my go-to macro!!
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
You can make your own now!
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Oh, DON’T get me started bro, I am a D&D and other type role-player
When I worked at Borders I had one Juicy-couture-wearing mother demand to know if the It Girl series was “some kind of cult like Dungeons and Dragons”. I fought many potential facial expressions down to say politely, “No, they’re nothing alike,” and as I could not in fact cast Magic Missile at her retreating back I settled for a furtive stink-eye. 
Jack Chick and his Christian-extremist ilk are the main culprits behind the anti-D&D campaign, along with that one notable suicide that involved a teen boy standing on a stack of Monster Manuals and Player Handbooks in order to hang himself in his closet. A book or game that so much as pretends that magic and/or other “gods” exist + volatile youth showing an interest = moral panic.
Thanks to that one Chick tract, my friends and I like to wail, “BLACKLEAF, NOOOOO!” whenever a character dies in game.
ACW(Quote) (Reply)
More sadly, a world wherein people absolve themselves of having to show genuine compassion to others by pelting them with platitudes.
ACW(Quote) (Reply)
Also, the issue isn’t even whether we can prove that pop-culture is a ‘dangerous’ or even and ‘influential’ force. Cos while we do all that research and analysis, the discussion usually gets derailed; which is what the TROLL wants, clearly.
The issue is whether it is OVER REACTING to write a critique, type a blog, make a video or have a little rant about a pervasive or at least heavily consumed thing such as ‘pop-culture’. Which it, of course, is not.
I think it is a derailing tactic: to create a straw-(wo)man whose blogs are MORE influential or more real or more harmful than pop-culture. In creating this straw-man, the status-quo loving troll can ignore power structures; putting what a blogger says on a par with what an internationally syndicated TV show character says (or even above).
It’s like attacking a homeless person for saying ‘I hate the government’ but turning a blind eye when the president says ‘I hate homeless people’.
Jen(Quote) (Reply)
yeah and the fact that these ads can be transmitted directly into our homes, on our streets, everywhere really. We can’t avoid them AT ALL. Yet a critique of them is openly discouraged, like we have to just take it and we aren’t allowed to even engage with it on a critical level because that would be ‘OVER-REACTING’.
Jen(Quote) (Reply)
There’s also word of god for Bones,
Really? Which characters?
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
The problem we run into with trying to get a sense of any Dark Side character’s psychology is the phlebotinum issue – in this case, the fact that drawing on the Dark Side of the Force causes physical and psychological changes in a person.
Which creates exactly the problem that you’re describing – a story in which human psychology is influenced by a fantastic, extra-personal for of evil still winds up looking an awful lot like so many of the supposedly “realistic” stories we see where a sociopath or an NPD can be changed and redeemed.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
Fred Rogers is one of my personal heroes. A few years after his death I started reading up on him, and discovered just what an amazing person he was.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
Exactly! My kidneys would work if I really wanted them to! I’ve gotten a transplant, so I should be all better now, and the fact that I’m on more medications now is a sign that I’m malingering!
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
I’ve been roleplaying for almost twenty years, and I still can’t cast Magic Missile. Jack Chick lied to me!
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
Both Brennan and Zach Addy are said to have Asperger’s syndrome. This was however not (yet?) diagnosed within the plot of the series.
Sabrina(Quote) (Reply)
Attackfish, having stated that I still resent that my sister said oh-so-long-ago (when she was a child) that my asthma was “all in my head”-she probably doesn’t remember saying it- I admit that I’ve caught *myself* questioning other people who say THEY have allergies. It’s not because I don’t remember, or know, what it feels like to be poo-pooed and have my possibly deadly condition *minimized* by my own family, mostly extended. It’s a knee-jerk reaction. It’s like a programmed reaction given so much exposure to that attitude–kind of like the one mentioned by another poster in another thread, where the commenter’s liberal feminist boyfriend said something about women not being funny, and she shoved it back in it face that he was repeating something he knew wasn’t true.
That’s a huge reason why I love this site, and why I think Jenn & the other writers here are doing something important. How can you question your own reactions if you *don’t realize you’re doing them* in the first place, and that there’s a *reason* why you have them unthinkingly?
Gategrrl(Quote) (Reply)
Having grown up in an incredibly feminist home, I don’t do it much on a feminist level, or a disabled level, but I had a hard time as a monogamous bisexual not implying that non monogamous people were somehow less than when trying to explain that not all bi and poly sexuals want to simultaneously have a partner of each of the sexes they’re attracted to. Also, I kept having to quash a suspicion that part of the reason my best friend who is a trans man was so unable to see anything feminine in himself was the deeply warped idea of womanhood and manipulative passivity his family raised him with. I still think that the idea of womanhood his family tried to instill in him is damaging, but have come to realize that it didn’t cause his transsexuality,
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
“The problem we run into with trying to get a sense of any Dark Side character’s psychology is the phlebotinum issue – in this case, the fact that drawing on the Dark Side of the Force causes physical and psychological changes in a person.”
I think Anakin has a further problem in that, even given that his personality has been altered by the Dark Side phlebotinum, there doesn’t seem to be anything there to redeem.
And that’s a failure of characterization, more than anything. He was intended, as far as I can tell, to have been capable of strong bonds of love and loyalty, which get twisted into desperation due to loss and lead him to the Dark Side, at which point Motive Decay ensues. If that was the case, he wouldn’t have any need to suddenly gain empathy, just have the initial empathetic side awakened by his son.
But that’s not the Anakin we see in the movies. The Anakin from the movies is obsessive and arrogant even before he’s affected by the Dark Side. He’s never really allowed to be affectionate, just possessive, which makes him appear to lack true empathy altogether. And, if his violent reactions to his mother and Padme’s deaths are selfish, why should his decision to sacrifice himself for Luke be any different?
Which leads me to this conclusion – George Lucas probably didn’t intend to write a story where a sociopath/NPD is redeemed due to one act. He just couldn’t tell the difference between that and the character Anakin was supposed to be.
Ikkin(Quote) (Reply)
Yes!!!! This is what I was trying to get at. Thanks!
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
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