Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

The problem was that some of the sex was also just taking away from things - there was that rather infamous scene of Littlefinger delivering exposition while instructing two prostitutes on how to do sex stuff in the narmiest way possible.

That scene was how we got the term "sexposition" and it's commonly criticised for just being bad at both things.

Sorry, I should have pot holed Correlation/Causation Gag. Though I do wonder if was any kind of behind the scenes thing that was contributing to both the preference of sex scenes and the better plot.

I definitely get that. It's just for me, given I'm not attracted to women (not that people who aren't attracted to women can't also be put off by that), I can appreciate the monologue and the fact that they actually manage to use the prostitutes to characterise Baelish well (his single-target obsession with Catelyn) as well as provide a good metaphor for the way he thinks of Ned.

Edited by king15 on May 6th 2024 at 12:38:25 PM

I mean, it turned out the people behind the show were not actually that competent?

While them running out of pre-existing material to adapt made it more obvious, in hindsight the signs were probably always were - Games of Thrones just used to havea fair lot of good stuff that that outweighed the worse parts.

There's also always been that belief among some people that more nudity = more mature (which ironically is a pretty immature idea).

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 6th 2024 at 2:40:32 PM

One part of weather people have become more puritan with sexuality is often the odd double standards with Asian Media in this regard.

Glares at Sony

Seen that brought up a lot, but never fully understood the argument since I’m not intimately familiar with the games in question.

Sony's been known to go after fanservice-heavy games from Japan to the point Japanese game companies had to tone down the fanservice a great deal in order to have those games in Sony consoles.

I pretty much agree (barring really extreme cases) there's still too many unnecesary fanservice/sex in general media, and that's taking into account it used to be worse.

The (big) problem as sex as objectification aside, fanservice and sex are like the cheapest trick in the book to get attention to me; using them front and center makes me think that you need to hook people with cheap tricks because you don't have anything else interesting going on. That is precisely why GOT stopped doing superfluous sex scenes: now that they had the public, they could cast aside the cheap trick and put the really interesting and profound ideas front and center instead.

Videogames ( having become better as they have attracted prestige and moved a beyond the horny teenager playing with one hand scene) and anime ( going there, but frustratingly much slower sometimes) have had this problem. If you need to make your character/protagonist a female inflatable doll in a chainmail bikini constantly getting in involuntay fanservice situations, why should i have faith there is an interesting character/history/idea there? The author clearly doesn't, that's why he relies in cheap tricks to keep you watching on the expense of something more meaningful. And that's again leaving the objectificatoon problem aside.

For Christ sake, it would be so cool to be able to tell people I like anime without being embarassed when we go to a shop/convention and all the other person can do is cringe at the nonstop skimpy females doing impossibly sexy posses in bikinis*. Try to convince them there is more than that when that is what the author puts first on detriment of all else.

Edit:typos, typos everywhere

Edited by Caliu on May 6th 2024 at 2:27:46 PM

I’m aware of that part, my issue lack of understanding of the point it reaches a double-standard or anti-Asian sentiment.

Fanservice is something I’m used to so I usually just judge from the perspective of how it used rather than it’s presence. There’s probably a few series I’d probably would have dropped if it was a matter of fanservice only, but simple things like story and character dynamics are generally saving graces. Nagatoro is one of the first that come to mind.

Started rewatching Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and my goodness this opening is shockingly prophetic for COVID and the governments’ failing attempts to contain it.

This is part of the reason why sex scenes are so heavily criticized.

Like. You need to understand. There's a difference between independent sex work and sex work for a pimp. The former is taking off their clothes because they are a private entrepreneur making their way in capitalism, and this is the business they serve. The latter is doing it because someone with financial or social control over them is making them do it.

Only Fans, which was discussed on the previous page, is an example of the former. It's a platform for independent sex workers to provide whatever services they want to provide directly to a clientele.

The film industry is the latter. The person taking off their clothes is not the person who made the decision that they should spend a chunk of the shoot naked and exposed for the camera. Behind every sex scene in film is a director or producer going, "Y'know, this movie would be a lot better if you were naked. Let's make that happen."

There is a world of difference between an erotic scene in an action film and someone selling nudes for $50 a pop.

This is why you can, in the same breath, be anti-exploitative sex scenes in film but also pro-OnlyFans. Sex work is a complicated topic. Platforms that put control of the performer's sex in the hands of the performer are good, and platforms that put it in the hands of an employer are bad.

Edited by TobiasDrake on May 6th 2024 at 7:28:49 AM

More than anything, I would like the sexiness to be more egalitarian in nature. Too much of the time, when anything sex related is put out front and center, it's specifically for the male gaze, not for female emotional sexual empowerment. And even if you can make that case that's it's female empowering, it's generally empowering towards being comfortable towards them exhibiting their own sexual nature and less towards allowing them their own eye candy. It sometimes becomes a question to me is it more sexually egalitarian to just have fewer of these sex displays or continue with the current male gaze oriented status quo.

But it's very possible to do egalitarian sexiness. Recent video games like BG 3 or Hades serve as good examples and templates. Have each person's personality inform their sexuality, have a multitude of body types, have each person in control of their sexual agency, and any behavior be done with consent. In BG 3, one of the characters is polyamorous and would like to get with you, but you are potentially in a relationship with another character, so before you are allowed, he asks you to get consent from your partner. Each character has a different opinion on the situation, some giving enthusiastic consent, some cautious consent, and some will break off their relationship right there if you pursue it, but everyone is empowered to their own sexual agency. With Hades, there are a lot of sexually attractive characters for multitude of orientations and again, everyone is in control of their own sexual agency, including one god who has asexual dialogue. And in Hades II, some people are very interested in Hephaestus for people who are more into bears.

Not to splash cold water on the idea, but is there any way to tell if someone on OnlyFans is doing so of their own free will or is being trafficked? I'm sure the site would protest that it works hard to prevent the latter, but that's a song we've heard before.

One of the reasons why credit card companies cracked down on porn sites wasn't just that their owners were prudes; it was that a lot of the content was being sourced in... less than ethical ways and the sites weren't doing enough to prevent it.

We can go on and on about how society's mores drive sex work underground and enable exploitation thereby, but that doesn't change the fact that the exploitation exists.

Yes, and if people were actually designing their laws around fighting that exploitation instead of actively screwing over sex workers etc, that'd be great.

Somebody should maybe tell the people making the "anti-trafficking" laws etc.

I think there's also a difference between nudity in animation/video games and live-action works. In the former, while it can still make viewers/players uncomfortable or distract them, at least it doesn't have the angle of exploiting actors, or making them uncomfortable (though there are grey areas like if the lines are very suggestive, or if the character is modelled on a real person), as it isn't actually a real person getting naked.

Edited by king15 on May 6th 2024 at 1:39:36 PM

Aren't credit card companies cracking down on porn because porn consumers are notorious at buying porn then refunding it? That's what I heard recently.

Animated/drawn content has the additional complication of creating some grotesquely unrealistic body imagery, which has already been seen to have distorting effects among certain demographics. As just one example, I've heard of women getting cosmetic surgery to look more like anime girls. That's kind of sickening for any number of reasons.

That's news to me? From what I recall, it tends to be more a mix of people either not wanting their company brand anywhere near NSFW stuff and being worried about potentially getting hit by some overly vague law supposedly aimed at sexual exploitation.

I mean, that's not really unique to animated content, is it? Fashion companies have been manipulating photos of their models for ages, for example.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on May 6th 2024 at 3:50:08 PM

Unfortunately, you're right. Unhealthy body imagery promoted by media is a thing that occurs in all cultures and has persisted throughout history. Just look at comic books.

Edited by Fighteer on May 6th 2024 at 9:52:36 AM

That's a good point I didn't consider. I suppose the issue comes from the fact that a lot of animation is purposefully stylised with exaggerated body proportions, often for reasons beyond sexual fanservice, but then people base their expectations off that.

You're also right that it isn't exclusive to animated works. I think the thing is there's nothing inherently wrong with having a work full of good looking people, or people, of their own volition, changing their body (in healthy ways) to something that makes them more comfortable, but I definitely think media should make efforts to show that being stick thin or uber-bulky aren't necessary to be healthy, or necessary to be considered sexy.

Edited by king15 on May 6th 2024 at 3:25:43 PM

For the purposes of being sexual egalitarian, having proper representation for all sexual orientations is necessary, whether it be live-action or created, at least in the realm of mainstream works. It being live-action vs. animated/computer generated matters less so on that front. There have been instances in more sexually repressive cultures where they would hire women adult dancers for off-hour "voluntary" office parties. If they replaced the actual people with virtual or animated performers, would the culture be any less hostile? Or for a less extreme example, booth babes in Video Game conferences, where both men and women developers co-mingle. If a piece of work is considered to be mainstream and supposedly for all audiences, but for the purposes of fulfilling prurient interests, it only goes in one direction, it states something about who the industry truly considers their main audience. Same deal if the industry releases dozens of otaku works every season, but 1-2 fujoshi works in the same period, if we want our fanservice works segregated.

We see it with gacha games too. The tits and bums lure in the boys, who are easily induced to pay lots of money to get more of what was promised, all so they can develop parasocial relationships with the pretty pictures. Any nod to representation is purely to increase the potential audience of whales.

I don't care about sex appeal per se. That's fine. It's how grotesquely cynical it is in its manipulation of its target demographics that bothers me.

Edited by Fighteer on May 6th 2024 at 10:18:26 AM

I suppose I have my preferences and tastes for this, and this is innately a pretty subjective topic.

I'll also note that there's double standards between depictions of male and female sexuality. I'll probably gloss over the topic but I can summarize this double-standard as "sex is viewed as something men do to women". A lot of these double-standards are consequences of this mindset.

To throw in my two cents beyond this:

Generally, I believe the key thing with a Ms. Fanservice-type character is empowerment. Her sexuality is something that she engages in deliberately and for her benefit. I will also note that sexuality should not be portrayed as a zero-sum game either, in fact I'd say it should be portrayed as a sort of mutual liberation.

There's also, of course, the matter of how much sexualization you should be going for. On the one hand I think it's fine that we fantasize about sexuality, but there is such a thing as being trashy. I'd say, basically if you're writing your own Rule-34 fanfiction, don't be too surprised if it's treated as such.

I'll say I've also felt as though certain works of media like sci-fi shows shoehorned in to look cool and hip, which mostly has the effect of appearing adolescent.

With Baldur's Gate 3, I'd say it...goes further in certain respects than I'd have expected it. IE, things like being able to boink a mind flayer are...weird, and probably does cross the line into "writing our own R34 fanfiction".

I will say that Baldur's Gate 3 is good in that relationships feel genuinely romantic, not just sexual. My character's relationship with Shadowheart feels like an actually well-written love story about a member of an abusive cult learning to find happiness outside her cult through love. This is genuinely art.

Where I'd say it fails most is that romantic arcs are character-initiated rather than player-initiated. As in, "literally every fucking party member tried to make a pass at me and had to be turned down". This, I think, creates an uncomfortable situation for players.

Why should every piece of entertainment go in every direction? You can make many, each with a particular direction.