Interesting, might give off enough heat to make popcorn, who knows.

The pullquote:

So it’s hard to be mad at anyone specific, because these men who are nurtured within a system of wildly pervasive but wholly tacit male favoritism get the best of both worlds. They get to make a show of being progressive and they also get to reap the benefits of a system they’re supposedly fighting against.”

Here’s a thought: a year ago, circa Gamergate, I predicted that while Gawker wouldn’t apologize they would quietly back off the culture war stuff now that they were taking lumps for it, and said Pareene would be a better custodian of the brand voice.

So reading this I discover they installed Pareene last month, and then this:

In January, a black senior editor at Gawker.com, Jason Parham, wrote a post on his personal blog called Gawker Media’s Responsibility to Diversity, one that later inspired Cook’s release of Gawker’s diversity statistics. He was concerned in part by the creation of a new executive editorial team — cheekily called the Politburo, and featuring five male editors and two women editors — reflected a waning interest in editorial diversity. Nick Denton responded in a comment on Parham’s post with this:

“Let’s welcome, if not out-and-out racists, then at least the wide array of people with whom a conversation is possible: national greatness conservatives, Burkean Tories and business pragmatists, for instance; Christians and other spiritual people; economic liberals, libertarians and techno-utopians; and black and other social conservatives.”

Instead of focusing on a simple request, one familiar to any self-aware media company in 2015 — a commitment to “publishing and hiring more Latina voices, queer voices, black voices, and marginalized voices across its core sites” — Denton waved his hand and advocated for more or less the opposite.

So, was I wrong?

The author is cheating the reader as soon as he writes for the sake of filling up paper; because his pretext for writing is that he has something to impart. Writing for money [is], at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as if money lay under a curse, for every author deteriorates directly [whenever] he writes in any way for the sake of money. The best works of great men all come from the time when they had to write either for nothing or for very little pay.

Hello, Buzzfeed… 

19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer presages the economics of the web and modern publishing – linkbait, content farming, unnecessary pagination, endless slideshows, and other moral failures of publishing, examined in a whole new-old light.

(via explore-blog)

severnayazemlya:

funereal-disease:

dagny-hashtaggart:

funereal-disease:

wanderingwhore:

funereal-disease:

wanderingwhore:

fnord888:

funereal-disease:

A lot of “feminist porn” & associated rhetoric seems like a really good example of abuse of emotional labor. 

Recently I’ve been reading a few things by and about Erika Lust:

Lust wants to show “real sex” and tells her actors to “take the porn” out of on-screen intercourse. She demonstrates the ludicrous poses people pull in porn: arched back, stuck-out chest, pursed lips. “I tell them ‘don’t have sex like a porn star, have sex as a person, as you do in your home’.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I would be really put off if an employer asked that of me. The part of my sexuality that I sell on camera is not the part that exists for me and my partners. They inform each other, yes, but ultimately the former is work, it’s a job, it’s art. It’s not my life. Not any more than any other theatrical production would be. 

Almost all porn sells the “she’s thrilled to do this; she’s begging for it; she’d do it for free!” myth. But “feminist porn” seems uniquely intrusive in that it doesn’t just peddle the fantasy - it insists that it’s not a fantasy, that its performers aren’t truly enlightened or empowered if they admit that it’s just an acting gig to them.

It’s like…the difference between making sure your cashiers are smiling and bubbly and acting happy and insisting that they’d better actually be happy. The former I can ape, no problem. But the latter? No. I’ll act for you. That had better be enough, because you don’t get to demand access to my actual emotional state. I can pretend for you, but don’t fool yourself: it’s still a performance. 

You have a point that that’s a thing that can happen, but I’m not sure that’s what she’s going for. I don’t think she’s necessarily saying it has to be YOUR authentic sexuality, just that it has to look like someone’s authentic sexuality.

Yes, there’s still an emotional labor component (as there is in all acting), but I do think it’s still expected to be acting (see the next paragraph down referencing characters). 

I’ve never worked for Erika Lust, specifically, but that is absolutely what every “feminist porn” company I’ve ever shot for has wanted. Emotional, soul-baring authenticity. When workers speak up about this, or about how the director’s demands to perform a certain way are incompatible with their request for authentic sex, they get fired. 

also i had to sign a form saying i wasn’t doing it for the money

“This McDonald’s job is yours…if you can prove you don’t actually need money and just really really love flipping burgers.”

the director’s demands to perform a certain way are incompatible with their request for authentic sex

Tell me more about this? I think I know what you mean, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

To give an example: I was given the directions “masturbate like you do at home, to a real orgasm” and also “lie on your back”. These things cannot possibly be accomplished simultaneously. And yet. Similarly, I was given the instruction to wear clothes that “expressed my personality and made me feel comfortable/relaxed”. I did - incidentally, an outfit I’ve worn both on camera and escorting. Upon arrival the same person who said that told me my attire was unacceptable and to change into an outfit from wardrobe which he picked out. It was not comfortable and the situation made me nervous, and a worse performer, and also less ~authentic. I think they would make better porn, and a better working environment, by just admitting it’s a fiction an optimizing for that.

Have you read Mikey Way’s article “Fuck Your Feminist Porn”? It gets at what we’re talking about here, and does it excellently to boot.

They had me sign a form in which I promised that filming for them was just a hobby, not my job. … [T]his company gets everyone so worked up about them supposedly being an ethical alternative to mainstream porn that nobody notices that they’re an international corporation paying next to nothing for people to style, shoot, produce, edit, and perform in their own work. It’s okay, though—it’s just a hobby!

tl;dr feminist porn is predicated on drawing lines between “regular women’s sexuality” and “pornified sexbots” (to quote Twisty Faster). It profits off sex workers’ labor while being terrified to admit that its employees are, in fact, sex workers. Because that would be gross and terrible.

Interesting. It’s curious how much the porn you describe echoes the ideas of anti-porn feminists like Dworkin and MacKinnon (particularly that sex for pay is inherently and obviously degrading) despite being nominally sex-positive, and clearly not anti-porn in the strict sense of the term.

This seems like a ‘serving two masters’ problem. A lot of amateur porn already fills one of the niches described above. Many people post naked pictures and video of themselves masturbating/having sex as a hobby, and they don’t need to sign a contract to know that’s what they’re doing. Presumably what the feminist porn offers above and beyond this is a level of professional polish (in terms of cinematic production values and actors/outfits/scenarios that the audience is more likely to see as attractive), but the thing is that “professional” by definition means it’s someone’s job. And while people enjoy their jobs to greatly varying extents, that’s at least as much a matter of remuneration and treatment by coworkers and bosses (as wanderingwhore and the Mikey Way article allude to) as it is of the quality of the work itself, let alone whether the work appears enjoyable to an outside observer.

In conclusion, a lot of this reminds me of the forms of internal discipline and panopticism described in Discipline and Punish, and that’s kind of creeping me out.

I think I know what you mean by your last bit, but can you elaborate?

This passage from traditional authoritarian power to modern totalitarianism can be precisely rendered through superego in an old joke of mine. Let’s say that you are a small child and one Sunday afternoon you have to do the boring duty of visiting your old senile grandmother. If you have a good old–fashioned authoritarian father, what will he tell you? “I don’t care how you feel, just go there and behave properly. Do your duty.” A modern permissive totalitarian father will tell you something else: “You know how much your grandmother would love to see you. But do go and visit her only if you really want to.” Now every idiot knows the catch. Beneath the appearance of this free choice there is an even more oppressive order. You seem to have a choice, but there is no choice, because the order is not only you must visit your grandmother, you must even enjoy it. If you don’t believe me, just try to say “I have a choice, I will not do it.” I promise your father will say “What did your grandmother ever do to you? Don’t you know how she loves you? How could you do this to her?”

– zizek

Is this necessarily about “feminist porn”, or even an ideologically-driven issue? It seems to be the adult industry as a whole that’s placing more emphasis on, I guess, the performance of enjoyment.

And on a scene-by-scene basis, did this trend ever present as feminist, in the sense of serving a cause? I don’t think the big pioneers - Beautiful Agony, Met-Art and the other ex-Warsaw ops, even fucking ALS - ever presented as such. At the most, Abby Winters was “we love women loving themselves a/o each other: so let’s monetize it!”

On a broader “who is a star” basis, again more character work - compared to Jenna Jameson, Sasha Grey had much more of an “average” body but was much better at performing enthusiasm, that’s a common theme of stardom these days. With the meteoric rise of James Deen and the fall of steroid woodsmen, even the men.

But what if that’s just a function of supply and demand? In the ‘70s and ‘80s “being willing to do porn” was a saleable attribute; as more people became open “willingness plus hotness” was the thing. Competing on that axis gave us plastic monsters - the pompadour of humans - and by this point where hot people are willing for free, talented sexual performance is the differentiating factor.

Also with the expansion of the industry with so much free content, from an economic perspective a lot of modern stars are effectively elite courtesans that use films as demo reels for escort bookings arranged over social media, that probably selects for skilled charismatics.

Facebook just served me this. At first I was like “Time to get off your baby? What?”

And then I was like “ohhhh, Facebook just served me a Spanish-language diaper ad and then awkwardly translated it into that.”

And then I was like “Wait, what?”

nebranska:

this buzzfeed article has two staff members that worked on it, six total words, over twice as many emojis, and a full youtube rip of the sandlot. this is the fucking end of click bait websites. this is the epitaph of hell. what the fuck is buzzfeed even doing anymore

This is one of the best and most fairminded treatments of the subject I’ve seen.

Of all the “Juicebox Mafia” first wave of big-name bloggers I thought Matt Yglesias was the best writer but recently I’m almost thinking that was a bit of a handicap because it left him stuck as just a writer.

I think he FINALLY realized that the “sharing the consensus wisdom of 2002 Harvard with 2006 Internet” shtick was played out as that stuff filtered into the general population (under his influence, among others), which was nice but going on to the density stuff seemed bizarre - drilling down on one “wonk” topic and writing a fucking *book* struck me as a career step down from where he was (though maybe understandable given influence from the familymembers who made their name as writers back when books were a thing).

(Also he had a kid and that might have slowed him some - it’s always a shame and a waste when writers start treating their families as more important than their writing and their audience. The correct role model is Rousseau.)

And contrasted to, say, Ezra Klein working his way up the value ladder and building his empire at the Post and then Vox, it was a little underwhelming.

But for all that, looking at this you remember he’s still got it, his voice is the house style of Vox, only he can actually do it well.

So is Breitbart aiming for like, right-Salon? Because that’s probably a viable niche tbh.

Sometimes I wonder how few years you would have to go back in time before The Discourse became completely incomprehensible.

(relevant)

Under Kilborn the Daily Show satirized the institution of “the news”. For all his sound and fury and reputation - making waves on Crossfire, etc. - Stewart turned it into exactly what it once mocked: a self-important and self-satisfied institution that looks at the size of the audience it cultivated by trading access for attention with the powerful, and sees in it moral authority.

Which to all appearances is what the audience prefers, anyway.

Anyway, what brought me to that was thinking about something. I’m very much a text guy so I kind of categorize 4chan and stuff like that as a primarily text medium with occasional illustrations, but there’s a reason they’re called imageboards.

And one really interesting thing about imageboard culture is how big it is on the concept of personification. I’ve talked about polandball and the other countryballs, which come from Krautchan, and Pepe (”sad frog”) and Feelsguy, but also things like the suit/greenface Anon, Fawkes mask Anonymous, /v/irgins, Le Happy Merchant, Captain Sweden, Iron Pill, and Big Red. Always been fond of the Japanese-style moe anthropomorphization, too - ebola-chan and all that.

Like, it’s telling that the very first thing GamerGate did, on coming to self-awareness and realizing they were a thing, was to create Vivian James and start investing charisma in her.

clawsofpropinquity:

theunitofcaring:

Thought prompted by having watched way too much television at work this week: 

what we need are variable length television episodes. The entire problem with Law and Order is that, if they’ve found the bad guy and we’re only at minute 20, he’s not the bad guy. Even if it’s four minutes from the ending there’s probably still a twist coming, so someone is going to pull out a gun and/or jump out a window. You know everything you need to know about how an episode is going to play out just by looking at the clock. 

Movies have this problem too. No, the protagonist isn’t going to die, we’re only 45 minutes in. No, their grand plan to crush the villain isn’t going to work, we’ve still got another hour that they’re going to have to fill somehow. Okay, this grand plan is going to work, because we’re down to eight minutes.

Reading a detective story or law story is pretty much the exact same problem - setup, obvious misdirection, apparent resolution that we know is a lie because we’re only halfway though the page count.  I knew Harry Potter wasn’t dead because I could feel seventy more pages in my hand. 

And that’s print, so we can’t fix it, but now that lots of people read on ebooks I’m astonished there’s not an app that lets authors set false endings and false lengths to their stories. And has no one recut Law and Order to be a thousand times less predictable just by virtue of not always lasting exactly 43 minutes plus commercial breaks?  I would pay a lot of money for a Netflix-of-lies full of television episodes and movies of varying length and thus, for once, genuinely unpredictable. 

Not sure this is solvable for movies* or books, but I think variable length tv is on it’s way in. British tv has always had, compared to the US more variation in episodes per series (often because of actor availability) and more variation show length between series, including season of the same show. They’re more willing to vary episode lengths within a show too, and it’s quite good for suspense like that trick where the extra long series finale resolves a bunch of plot threats unexpectedly quickly, leaving the viewer unbalanced, that works much better with an 85-minute episode or whatever than with a US style two part finale. 

Anyway I’m fairly sure the reason British tv is so much more variable is that a) the schedules are more flexible b) miniseries are way more popular so people are okay with a Luther series of three 80 minute episodes or whatever it was. Netflix is even more extreme in terms of point a, and webisodes and minisodes are ramping up b, so the potential is there for good things on this front!.

*Well, it’s already somewhat solved for movies as a whole because standard running times have expanded so much: when I first started watching Hitchcock and Hammer Horror movies I would always get blind sided by the ending - it’s only been 90 minutes!

(and can’t you just turn off page count on your e-reader?)

Don’t think variable length will help much because no matter what the length is you’ll still be able to go “hey, there’s still 15 minutes/25%/wevs left”. You could do it if viewers watched blind to the length which I suppose could technically work on Netflix where you’re not tied to the “4 regularly spaced cliffhangers that keep people bound for 3 minutes worth of ads” model, but I don’t know how many people are going to be like “Ah, a new episode’s out! I know what I’m doing for the next 2 hours and/or 30 minutes and will be satisfied either way, and don’t mind that without a scrollbar to tell me I can only skip around through VHS-style FF/REW controls.”

You can kind of get away with stuff like that in movies - consider the fake happy ending to The Ring - because not that many people will be thinking “ah yes, this is 106 minutes long and my internal timer that I started after the previews and kept up the whole time I was sitting enthralled in a dark room says we’re only at 87”.

I think if anything the way to deal with this is to wield the audience’s genre/medium-savviness against it. Joss Whedon’s always been good at that but what was really a master class in the technique was the first two seasons of Veronica Mars. You’d be like “well, obviously that guy can’t be the perp behind the case-of-the-week because he’s clearly in the middle of a multi-episode character arc that would fuck up/a member of the main cast” and then an act or two later you’d be like “welp”.

Well the really Kontextmaschine thing to say would be that she’s as good or better than I am at listening in on the tune America’s humming to itself and singing it back in response, she canonically browses tumblr and has long been rumored to lurk 4chan (which is not absolutely ridiculous - she’s our generation too and Lorde, who’s in her extended clique, workshopped Royals on /mu/) and God knows what else she gets up to on those days when she’s not in the mood to be a media object so she doesn’t leave her house.

That she too noticed that the worm turned somewhere in the last few months, and that she maneuvered this intentionally in full knowledge where it would go, that she knows that “a black girl tried to spin what was essentially personal jealousy as a race thing, in the process rudely rebuffing my attempts to seek unity on the grounds of Correct go-(white-)girl feminism, and then mean online media and Black Twitter picked on me over it” is actually going to be a good place to be when the backlash will be kicking in during her next album/tour cycle, that it’ll align herself with where her audience of white-girls-not-like-Coachella-white-girls-I-mean-but-not-NOT-like-Coachella-white-girls will be at by then.

(That all this is on purpose delicate and tangential enough to be disclaimable if it’s obsoleted by the next cultural turn, like how she went from doing a feather-touch War on Christmas song in 2007 to in 2014 having a throwoff line about vicariously enjoying the existence of gayness as a sign of cosmopolitanism in her growing-up-and-moving-to-the-big-city song.)

That if media try to force this meme and take on Taylor fucking Swift not only does that revalidate the picked-on pose she’s so good at but gets increasingly ridiculous as she settles in at the apex of pop culture, but it might even be the overreach that breaks the fever, like McCarthy taking on the U.S. Army, and having her name stamped on a major cultural turn (for which a nontrivial constituency will be grateful) is a good step on the way to becoming Queen of America.

Seriously, how fucking Kontextmaschine a response is that?

I don’t actually believe it though.

(Though in the course of even mooting the theory I’ve started to convince myself.)

Well good morning to you too.

(So I realize I’ve been shit-talking other writers a bit recently. And hey, that’s actually a pretty traditional way to break yourself as a writer, by tearing others apart. So let’s make that an occasional series. Here’s entries 1 and 1.5 on Fredrik de Boer, 2 on Ozy Frantz. Might as well keep doing it until sempai notices me.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates will never say in 100 words what he could in 300, and will never say in those 300 words anything new or interesting enough to justify 100.

He’s endlessly fascinated with himself, convinced the most banal observations and experiences are transmuted to gold by his involvement. I can’t count how many times he’s invoked “in college I realized my juvenile ideas had been immature and self-flattering” as some mark of distinction rather than the baseline minimum, a foundation on which actual insight can be built.

Or presenting himself as some clear-sighted visionary for reading books on the Civil War and dragging his kids out to battlefields and historic sites - which I’m pretty sure History Dads have been doing since Lee surrendered at Appomattox - and then turning it into who knows how many articles, blog posts, book proposals in which he sucks his own thumb - among other parts - over the brilliant insight that The Civil War Was About Slavery.

The thing is I’ve seen this before. Another thing he keeps coming back to is his childhood, being raised by a black nationalist father - the kind of guy big on discipline, effort, and racial pride who would be easily recognized as a conservative in an environment where his ethnic identity was THE nationality. And I really respect those guys, and a lot of it is for their ability to instill a sense of confidence and drive in their kids that propels them into a solid middle- to upper-middle class life coming from an environment where a lot of people don’t even come close.

But when those kids get there… I’ve run into a few of them. And boy are they convinced they have wisdom to bestow, and boy does it get a little ridiculous sometimes. “Son, I grew up on the streets, so I’mma tell you how to be a creative-class yuppie, son.”

Honestly a lot of time it seems like they’ve absorbed wisdom as an aesthetic, a style, and confused that with actually being wise. Now that’s a trap anyone can fall into - I spent a while mistaking people for smart when they were really just fans of spaceships and Science!, myself - but a big part of the path to actual wisdom is dragging yourself back out again.

Now I suppose the obvious counter would be I’m just repeating an old racist trope, of Black intellectuals as just simian imitators puffing themselves up above themselves. So, then, when you look at, say Spike Lee movies or ‘90s Fox sitcoms or contemporary black feminist blogs where “the ~enlightened brother~” is a stock comic trope, that’s just… internalized racism, right? Pf, nah. What it is is your low expectations, seeing someone go through the motions and taking that as good enough. ☯✟ Follow for more soft bigotry ✟☯

Now that’s his subject matter, when it comes to style - as a person, I’d put him in the 99th or 98th percentile of writers; as a professional writer he’s still above average, but making him the flagship brand of a magazine that’s constantly selling itself on its history publishing the greats of American letters? I think he needed another good five or ten years of polish before he could even contend for that level, but he’s sure not going to get it getting published in front-cover packages for what he’s turning in now, and then praised to the heavens as some kind of Second Coming. When in an earlier one of these I said Freddie de Boer was finding his voice in venom, I’m talking about things like the line about Coates’ “creepshow commenters asking him to forgive their sins”.

You see from the pulpit to the sidewalk to the, uh, movie theater, black America has kept up a tradition and practice of public rhetoric that’s really fallen out of white life. And Coates draws on that. He’s clearly angling to speak with “prophetic voice”, basically in a cadence and idiom derived from the black church, that preeminent organizing institution of African-American life, with preaching as an accessible path to esteem and power for the clever and the loquacious, preachers as a leadership corps in social activism and public life.

The thing is, again Coates is familiar with the preacherly cadence but doesn’t seem to have internalized how and why it works. It’s like when you ask a kid to draw a future airplane and they put wings everywhere, wings where they won’t generate lift, wings that would foul the air of other wings. Honestly, I think it might have to do with picking it up from a father who had in him a captive audience rather than from the actual church from preachers with an eye towards keeping souls in the pews.

You see, the preacherly cadence, like all good cadences, is about rising and falling action, building your audience up and then bringing them back down, concentrating your energy and then releasing it in a focused beam. But Coates knows how to build intensity, but not how to bring it back down again. Instead of escalating from a baseline escalation becomes the baseline, devaluing his starting point by comparison, offering no local maxima and thus no climactic moments. He knows how to build a theme through repetition - his recent work littered with the increasingly stale buzzphrase du jour, “black bodies” - but not how to break or twist the repetition and pour all that energy you’ve built up into an original, novel thought.

The end result is a plodding drone of a tone, piling words on words on words unto infinity, it’s writing as prog rock. The preacherly cadence is at root an oral form, but you can tell his first medium is text, if he ever tried to speak this stuff in front of an audience he’d at least notice them tuning out halfway through, notice that he was just making himself hoarse without eliciting more of a response.

And really, that’s the telling bit. That’s the part that gives away the game, that the promotion of Ta-Nehisi Coates, all the self-congratulatory media attempts these past few years to put black figures up front in the public eye, it’s not about putting power in black hands but as a maneuver in a status games among whites, that these guys aren’t being looked to as thinkers but as mascots.

(There’s an old joke from when the Republicans were the “black party”, but even then more in thematics than in actual power - “What do you call a black man at the [annual fundraising] Lincoln Day dinner? The keynote speaker.” [related])

Because really, what is whiter - what could possibly be whiter - than trying to distance yourself from your whiteness, trying to show how with-it you are, by latching on to some black celebrity, praising him to the heavens, wielding your fandom as a talisman, and not even noticing that you’ve managed to pick a guy with no goddamn sense of rhythm?

Cassetteboy remix the news: Taylor Swift forces government u-turn on welfare spending

Mashup artists Cassetteboy edit the last month’s TV news coverage, including the first Conservative budget in 20 years and its impact on the NHS; the financial crisis in the eurozone and how Greece is coping with record debt; the Confederate flag and its implications for the race debate in the US; Taylor Swift’s influence on the prime minister; and Iain Duncan Smith’s music career

Monthly Compilation Features In Enthusiast Magazines I Have Subscribed To

Aftermath (Flying Magazine)

Culled from NTSB reports of plane crashes. The pilots are usually at fault. If only they had been better. Learn from their mistakes. Occasionally the victims survive.

The Armed Citizen (American Rifleman)

Culled from news media reports of good Americans using guns against bad people. This is why you own a gun. Be inspired by their triumphs. Occasionally the perpetrators die.

antoine-roquentin:

This probably comes a little late, but congratulations, Greece.

Can’t wait to see how Richard Seymour spins the referendum as a victory for Richard Seymour.

kontextmaschine:

I wonder exactly which day it was that the amount of time Comedy Central had spent broadcasting The Daily Show finally caught up to the amount of time they had spent broadcasting PCU

This was supposed to be a culture war joke, in fairness on further reflection I was like “yeah but maybe put all the hours of South Park, Tosh.0, and The Man Show on the PCU side too.” Maybe the Kilborn years, even.

Okay, for the benefit of all the followers I’m getting with absurd ages in their profiles, let me explain this one.

When Comedy Central started in the ‘90s, they didn’t have much original programming, and what they did was mostly one-off (but frequently rerun) specials - filmed standup sets, basically.

So what they ran was mostly secondhand content they’d picked up rights to, and what was most common were these two movies, I swear to god I’d seen them run back to back and then over again, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same one run twice in a row. One was Throw Momma From The Train, a Danny DeVito comedic riff on Strangers On A Train.

The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.

Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, '60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.

And it’s not like oooo, this was acceptable once upon a time, it’s that when I was growing up, this was the official line of media social liberalism. Who was that anon asking about the '90s? In the '90s, liberal Hollywood was putting out “message movies” the messages of which were America Is Finally Free, Thanks To Brave Heroes Like Larry Flynt Depicting Women As Violently Degraded Sex Objects, And Thank God For His Heirs Like Howard Stern, Still Fighting The Good Fight.

If you don’t know who Howard Stern is, he was the foremost crude “Morning Zoo” radio DJ in the country.

Like, in the '90s, white, blue collar (or “dudebro”) tits-n-beer vulgarity was plausibly coded left/liberal/Democratic. And that’s a little disorienting to remember.

I mean hell, Benny Hill was aired in part by an official arm of the most socialist Anglosphere government ever. Benny Hill.

If you’ve never seen Benny Hill, it’s from the British “light entertainment” tradition, a little variety but kind of sketch comedy, only a lot of the “comedy” was basically dirty old man leering. Sketch leering. Episodes famously ended with sped up comedic chase scenes where Benny would try to catch and grope some pretty young girls, then turn and run away as they tried to catch and punish him.

Now by the '90s that was already a bit off, but still, it ran in reruns on Comedy Central. It ran on fucking PBS.

If you ever wonder why intelligent educated sensitive me is wary of if not actively hostile to so much of what passes for modern cultural liberalism, it’s because it pattern-matches so closely not only to the apocalypse visions conservatives were warning of when I was growing up, but to the liberals’ versions as well.

prokopetz:

silkktheshocka:

texasuberalles:

freyjapup:

Its been NINE YEARS and i still dont think anyone knows exactly why teen titans was cancelled

Same reason Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series were canceled: Girls liked it. Bruce Timm finally up an’ said it out loud in an interview a while back when he was asked why in the hell GL:TAS had been canceled when it was doing so well on every front; DC’s animation department has institutionally decided that feee-males don’t/can’t/shouldn’t like superheroes, so even if a show is drawing in great viewership numbers and has great toy sales, once they find out that it’s popular with women and girls, they pull the plug on it. Cartoon Network loved Teen Titans— two million viewers for new episodes will do that— and wanted a Season Six, and the production staff was already in the planning stages for it; they were going to have a big arc about Terra and why she was Living Normal, and do a lot more with the extended Titans team members.

This is so fucked up.

To elaborate on this point a bit, the reason this happens is that modern television merchandising aims for total market segregation.

In a nutshell, it’s much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.

This is why children’s toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits they’ve decided to use is “boys versus girls”.

Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? That’s market segregation in action.

The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; they’re viewed as “stealing” the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully “owns” it.

This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? It’s not just artificial, it’s deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying “this is the ways it’s always been” or “this is just what the market wants”, they’re lying through their teeth - this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.

(Interestingly, the reverse isn’t always true: if a specifically girl-targeted show unexpectedly becomes popular with boys, sometimes rather than being cancelled, its merchandising will shift to court the male collector’s market. TV execs are so sexist, even their sexism is sexist.)