Hayteria
13-11-2008, 04:28
It almost seems like a cliche by now... the social establishment accuses modern entertainment of promoting "distorted" values...
Ironic, isn't it?
For my 575th post, I've decided to make a topic about how dogmatic our society seems to be about which influences from entertainment to consider good or bad. In the debate over what to consider a bad influence, people seem to focus on how much the entertainment affects people, and I think an underexplored argument is whether or not the entertainment affecting them is necessarily a bad thing.
I remember a few years ago when people on some other web site were talking about a comic book where two female characters were rivals for a relationship with the main character who was a guy... someone brought up the idea of the two girls being with each other instead. This idea was dismissed quickly with "but this is a children's comic" despite that the same series already had nuke-launching and grenade-throwing in it; the portrayal of a lesbian relationship was thought of as actually being worse for children than the portrayal of violence. Isn't it a bit odd that people avoid taboos in entertainment that shouldn't even be taboos in real life?
Once when I was skimming over an article about Vanilla Ice one part of it caught my attention; the claim that parents wouldn't feel bad about giving their daughter a poster of him wrapped in the US flag. I myself doubt it's necessarily a good influence for a celebrity to support society's illogical flag-worshipping; the idea itself isn't necessarily a good one in the first place, and I think of it as another example of how society's own values aren't necessarily all that great to begin with let alone absolute enough to be pushed upon entertainment.
And it's not just social norms that are guilty of this; some social movements that claim to conteract the social norms have this problem as well. Many feminists claim that pornography portrays women in a "misleading" way; as if to imply that feminists do not, given the apparent inclination of much of feminist ideology to label even scientifically founded gender differences "sexist"...
It's like when people complain that certain entertainment "lies" to people about drugs, as if to imply that society was always telling the truth. At the elementary school I went to, they were teaching us that smoking one joint is like smoking 500 cigarettes at once, and at the high school I went to, they were teaching us that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol; I don't recall them saying that alcohol was so much worse than tobacco, so it seems they're changing their story.
So is it necessarily a bad thing that entertainment influences people? If it didn't, who or what would? If we were to remove the influence of entertainment, what would we have left? Society's own propaganda? And if some people rely on entertainment for information, isn't that more of a sign that they're not sure who to trust? Perhaps it's not necessarily the entertainment, nor such individuals, nor their parents, who are to blame for such things... if one is to play the blame game, perhaps some of it could be directed to society itself...
Ironic, isn't it?
For my 575th post, I've decided to make a topic about how dogmatic our society seems to be about which influences from entertainment to consider good or bad. In the debate over what to consider a bad influence, people seem to focus on how much the entertainment affects people, and I think an underexplored argument is whether or not the entertainment affecting them is necessarily a bad thing.
I remember a few years ago when people on some other web site were talking about a comic book where two female characters were rivals for a relationship with the main character who was a guy... someone brought up the idea of the two girls being with each other instead. This idea was dismissed quickly with "but this is a children's comic" despite that the same series already had nuke-launching and grenade-throwing in it; the portrayal of a lesbian relationship was thought of as actually being worse for children than the portrayal of violence. Isn't it a bit odd that people avoid taboos in entertainment that shouldn't even be taboos in real life?
Once when I was skimming over an article about Vanilla Ice one part of it caught my attention; the claim that parents wouldn't feel bad about giving their daughter a poster of him wrapped in the US flag. I myself doubt it's necessarily a good influence for a celebrity to support society's illogical flag-worshipping; the idea itself isn't necessarily a good one in the first place, and I think of it as another example of how society's own values aren't necessarily all that great to begin with let alone absolute enough to be pushed upon entertainment.
And it's not just social norms that are guilty of this; some social movements that claim to conteract the social norms have this problem as well. Many feminists claim that pornography portrays women in a "misleading" way; as if to imply that feminists do not, given the apparent inclination of much of feminist ideology to label even scientifically founded gender differences "sexist"...
It's like when people complain that certain entertainment "lies" to people about drugs, as if to imply that society was always telling the truth. At the elementary school I went to, they were teaching us that smoking one joint is like smoking 500 cigarettes at once, and at the high school I went to, they were teaching us that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol; I don't recall them saying that alcohol was so much worse than tobacco, so it seems they're changing their story.
So is it necessarily a bad thing that entertainment influences people? If it didn't, who or what would? If we were to remove the influence of entertainment, what would we have left? Society's own propaganda? And if some people rely on entertainment for information, isn't that more of a sign that they're not sure who to trust? Perhaps it's not necessarily the entertainment, nor such individuals, nor their parents, who are to blame for such things... if one is to play the blame game, perhaps some of it could be directed to society itself...