I’ve said this multiple times on here, so some people who follow me will have heard this rant already, but:
My mom is a college professor whose special subject is media criticism and the effects of media on children. Therefore, my parents were extremely focused on moderating our media consumption. We had four TV channels and two of them were PBS. I have never in my life played a video game all the way through. I read the books my mom assigned to her students for fun (“Consuming Kids” was my favorite). My job as I got older was to screen stuff for content considered inappropriate for my younger siblings or other people’s kids. Even when we watched movies or TV or commercials, my parents would analyze them in front of us and encourage us to analyze them ourselves. What techniques are they using in this commercial to get you to buy it? What's the subtext in this scene? What message is this scene trying to convey?
So when I say that antis are Not Doing It Right, I’ve got textbooks and almost 30 years of lived experience backing me up.
There are three major problems with how antis approach media criticism.
#1: Ignoring the concept of individual analysis and multiple lenses.
A key concept in media criticism is that there is no one way to interpret a work. Certainly there's how the author might want you to interpret it, but part of communication (which is what media is) is the effect on the audience member. How I interpret a particular work is going to be influenced by my personal experiences; someone else may interpret the exact same thing differently.
And what you're specifically looking for in a work is also important. The point of analyzing something through different lenses – a queer lens, a feminist lens, a post-colonial lens, whatever – is to look at the same thing from different angles. And even then, two different people might have two different perspectives even within the same framework, looking for the same things. Consider the argument about whether specific Disney movies are feminist or not - they're looking at the same material, but coming to different conclusions based on their interpretation of it.
So you can't unequivocally say "this glorifies violence" or "this promotes misogyny" outside of very, very specific examples (I'm thinking about shit like The Turner Diaries, here). You can certainly make that as an argument, and back it up using evidence, but ultimately, that is your interpretation, not objective fact.
#2: Failing to understand what media criticism is trying to solve.
Whenever someone points out that fiction is not reality, someone always responds that it affects reality, and then will point to something like The Jaws Effect as an example of how media affects real-life things. I'm pretty sure that's what @sweetlavenderdarling is referencing.
Which: sure! I won't dispute that! The issue is failing to understand how and why media affects real-life things.
The first thing is that, barring a few exceptions, the majority of media's influence is in the aggregate. Watching one period drama with a majority-white cast is not going to make you think that all of European history only involves white people. What can make you think that the past was whites-only is if every single period drama you ever watch has an all-white or majority-white cast. Watching one action movie is not going to make you violent. What can make you violent is if the main way you see problems being handled is through violence (regardless of whether the tone is "this is a horrible thing but we have no choice" or "it's totally cool to murder people").
The second thing is that, just as we cannot claim our single opinion is objective fact, we can't claim a 1:1 cause-and-effect thing between "X is in media" and "person believes X," because different people can interpret the same thing differently. There's a difference between me watching, say, an Alex Jones broadcast vs. a longtime fan of Alex Jones listening to the same thing: I'm not going to become a conservative conspiracy theorist solely from listening to it because my perspective on it and preexisting beliefs are very different from those of than a true believer.
And we can actually see this in an example antis love to trot out: Finding Nemo. Antis love to pull out Finding Nemo as an example of people's behaviors changing (i.e. a spike in owning clownfish and blue tangs as pets) based on it being in a popular work. Here's the problem with that argument: the entire point of Finding Nemo is that keeping tropical fish as pets is a bad thing. THAT'S WHY THEY NEED TO FIND NEMO.
The scene where Nemo gets caught is treated like a human child getting dragged into a white van in front of their parents. Home aquariums are portrayed as jails where longtime residents go insane. The little girl with the braces is a terrifying eldritch murderer from the fish's perspective because she shakes them to death. Finding Nemo can't be more obvious in how it treats owning tropical fish as pets: it's not romanticized, and in fact is universally portrayed throughout the film as a very bad thing that no one should do.
And a shitload of people either didn't pick up that message or did but ignored it. Because there's no 1:1 transfer of message to audience.
#3: Failing to provide an actual solution/ignoring the next steps.
Okay, so you've identified a problematic element of a work. And you're concerned that it's going to affect your thinking or other people's thinking! Cool! Awesome! Now what?
A short list of things that you can possibly do to mitigate its effects:
- Stop consuming media with content you want to avoid, using tools like content warnings. This is why movie ratings include things like "graphic violence" or "cigarette smoking" or whatever, rather than just a letter rating: it's so that adults who want to either avoid something themselves or prevent their kids from seeing can make those decisions knowingly.
- Deliberately consume media with content you want to promote. This can be stuff like deliberately watching more racially diverse movies or reading books with queer protagonists; in extremes, it's why Pure Flix exists as a brand.
- Diversify the media you consume. Since most media effects are aggregate, having a variety of perspectives and kinds of media can dilute those effects because you're getting multiple competing ideas.
- Reduce the amount of media you're consuming, period. Do things that don't involve media consumption and don't make media consumption a background thing for other stuff, like eating or sleeping. Go for a walk without music on or spend time with friends in person without watching a movie or being on your phone at the same time.
- Identify your own biases when consuming media. Everyone has a blind spot about at least one thing, and that's okay: the point is to acknowledge it. (My mom's is British media. We were never allowed to watch horror or violent action movies or stuff that was "gross" like CSI, but British murder mysteries where someone gets strangled to death onscreen? Totally okay!)
- Regardless of what you're consuming, actively analyze it (ideally in real time). Not just movies or books, but billboards, ads, songs, nonfiction stuff like the news, labels, toys: anything that's meant to convey a message, you're supposed to analyze it and be aware of it. Which can lead you down interesting thought trains, like, "Why do so many 'natural' body care products have matte labels/packaging compared to more name brand ones?"
What doesn't help literally at all:
- Yelling at people who enjoy the content you don't like.
- Harassing people who create content you don't like.
- Attempting to parent strangers, i.e. trying to control what other people create, consume, and enjoy. That is something you can do for yourself, or that you can do on behalf of your own kids, but you cannot control what other adults do.
- Accusing people who create or enjoy content you don't like of being pedophiles. Literally I cannot express this point enough: unless you believe they are actively abusing actual children and have some kind of concrete evidence of it, do not just throw that shit out there. And if you do believe they are actively abusing actual children, based on some kind of concrete evidence, that's territory to report them to the feds, not yelling at them on Tumblr.
I realize that this is a very long response but I am Sick and Tired of antis pretending that their ship wars are somehow a force for moral good or completely ignoring their own biases to focus on stuff they personally don't like.
