Anyone else's TV pleasure ruined by feminism?

i am generally finding most films are either about the relationship between groups of men and their achievements or where women are basically victims of rape or murder

This^^ x 1000!

PS my use of "object" was deliberate, as that's how I felt she was represented. Like a nice juicy steak he was drooling over.

Also, for all its purported "historical accuracy", I've read a hilarious take-down of it by a military historian pointing out that GRR Martin has no understanding of Medieval warfare, no grasp on tactics, strategy or logistics, and just teleports armies around the (unrealistically huge) map as the plot requires.

Also, Jon Snow is a completely shit tactician. He never managed to win any sort of battle without third party intervention, and not before he'd managed to get a load of his mates killed. I don't know why everyone was so desperate to follow him.

Goosefoot the post you quoted originally was challenging the idea that GoT had to have lots of rape and nudity because it made it more "historically accurate", by pointing out that there were lots of things about the show that were definitely not historically accurate. It always seemed to be a very selective defence adopted by people who didn't really want to think very hard about what they were watching and why. The fact that it was a fantasy surely gave it scope to take a more creative approach than just "woman's character is developed in response to her brutalisation" or "prostitution was totally normal in ye olden days so here is a man having a bath with two jolly hookers". You said yourself:

it is usual for actors on shows to be more cleaned up than people in historical settings really would have been. No one really wants to look at the pimples, boils, goitres, and bad teeth of the past.

It's a case of not being able to have it both ways. Either you're making a gritty, brutal sort of a show with narratively justifiable nudity and sexual violence (which would involve all sorts of body shapes and states of deformity, since it wasn't only beautiful, hairless women who get raped), or you're spicing it up with titillating crotch shots. Fair enough if it's the latter, but people could at least own it and not try to make intellectual claims for why it was done that way.

There's a proposal clip on Youtube where some guy proposes during a big televised US basketball game using the big scoreboard, but also going down on one knee in the middle of the court and the woman just rushes off, and the camera cuts to the cuddly mascot putting his paws over his eyes. We're clearly supposed to go 'Oh, cringe!' but surely that woman's is a perfectly normal reaction to realising that a man you're in a relationship with is an idiot who thinks this is 'romantic' rather than coercive?

I'm even noticing it in music. My niece loved a song by the Script, I think, called something like The man who can't be moved.

Dumped bloke sings of sitting for the rest of his life on the corner where he and the object of his affections met, waiting for her to realise the error of her ways and come find him.

A 13 year old thought it was romantic. I just heard "I'm a creepy stalker". I guess at least he wasn't sitting outside his love object's home.

This post really captures the horror I feel every time I see an orchestrated marriage proposal. I think it was Adele's Glastonbury set a few years ago, when this bloke was invited on stage with his girlfriend and propose to her in front of millions on live TV.

I died inside. Talk about coersion. How the hell could she do anything but say "yes"? Maybe she wanted to say yes, but she was given no choice.

I'd have dumped him as soon as we got home.

Oh well, at least I can 'helpfully' point out misogyny in TV shows for them and my DH wink

Oh god, my poor DS got treated to a full-on rant over an episode of "The Next Step" on CBBC. Plot line - "nice guy (TM)" puts girl on spot by asking her out in one of those horrendously over the top, horrendously public ways. She knocks him back because she doesn't fancy him. Everyone else on the dance team ostracises her because he's such a nice guy, and his over the top public humiliation of her demand that she date him was soooo romantic, how dare she not be kind and date him.

Suffice it to say, DS was left in no doubt as to what I thought of him, the rest of the dance troupe and the screenwriters! but at the same time.

BBC has had quite a few female led comedies recently, written by women too.

This has been brewing for me too for some time. I really (used to) love a crime drama or police procedural. But the number of shows I've switched off in the first 5 minutes because it is yet another example of graphic male violence against women. I decided to give Des a shot and lo and behold - no graphic scenes of violence, a body being respectfully taken out of a house in a coffin, not laying naked on a slab in a morgue. I couldn't help thinking it was because they were male victims.

Agree so much and wish I could turn my feminism filter off sometimes. It ruins practically all popular culture. Seriously, I kind of wish I was still unaware

I wish this too, but for parenting. I find raising my children so much stressful and worrisome the more I realise how misogynistic and just utterly fucked up the world is. I'm not so bothered for me, I'm a grown woman. I just wish I could protect my children forever.

Oh well, at least I can 'helpfully' point out misogyny in TV shows for them and my DH

(Though actually my biggest bugbear about GRR Martin is just that his prose is so unbelievably turgid that it's utterly unreadable... Still, de gustibus non est disputandum and all that.)

I think you've made the point for the OP you quoted here. It's a fantasy series - therefore it isn't a very sensible defence to say that all the sexual violence and lingering shots of smooth, naked female bodies are there for the purposes of historical accuracy. There are ways of conveying "dark and earthy" without having to have naked peasant women with perfectly waxed pudenda on display every other minute

Also, for all its purported "historical accuracy", I've read a hilarious take-down of it by a military historian pointing out that GRR Martin has no understanding of Medieval warfare, no grasp on tactics, strategy or logistics, and just teleports armies around the (unrealistically huge) map as the plot requires.

So if he can do this with whole fucking armies, he could come up with a better plot device than rape. If he wanted to. The key being that he doesn't want to.

Completely. I am so tired of every TV series beginning the first episode with gratuitous, totally unnecessary female nudity just to pander to male audiences. Working Moms, Mrs. Maisel, the list goes on and on. I hate it.

I’ve found my people! Agree so much and wish I could turn my feminism filter off sometimes. It ruins practically all popular culture. Seriously, I kind of wish I was still unaware

In regards to men marrying for money in the old days, Austen often has the men preying on women due to have large inheritances, like Wickham and Willoughby. But noticeably they're the Bad Guys.

Yes, I think that's largely true. She gives a lot more moral leeway to the circumstance of the women in needing to look for security. It's pretty clear throughout the novels I think that she sees money as being potentially corrupting for both men and women, and she suggests that indolence is also corrupting. Many of the male and female characters who are rich enough to be indolent are morally corrupted.

But her answer is also ambiguous in other ways - it's arguably adds a lot to Mr Darcey's charm that he is both not such a prick after all, and also is the owner of pretty nice digs. And my sense is that she's not unsympathetic to the need for a man to marry well in some cases as well. Willoughby wasn't portrayed as evil in the same way Wickham was, for example, and his crime was really courting where he wasn't going to be able to follow through, despite the pain it caused others. He was weak rather than evil.

IN any case "It's fantasy, you can just remove sexual violence (which has little to do with nudity) is about as sensible as saying, "just take out the war/battles/politics/torture/bad people/human sacrifice. You could but it wouldn't be the same story. A bunch of nice people in a land where nice things happen.

Romantic comedy movies in general tend towards being really creepy. Almost invariably there will be a man pursuing a woman and not taking no for an answer. In real life it would be somewhere between annoying and terrifying to be the female character in most romantic comedies.

And it's never the same story in reverse, because a woman pursuing a man would naturally be viewed as needy and pathetic and trying to trap the man into marriage.

@Packingsoapandwater I had exactly the same reaction! I remember it was Tan France to a gay guy who was sad about not having children and I was horrified at how glibly he said "oh don't worry about that! Just get a surrogate!" Also Jonathan Van Ness is NB now so yeah I'm kinda over Queer Eye.
Feminism "ruined" a bunch of 70s/80s movies for me, like Grease, St Elmos Fire, etc. Emilio Estevez's character in the latter one is just a stalker, that's it, and it's framed as if it's really romantic.

In regards to men marrying for money in the old days, Austen often has the men preying on women due to have large inheritances, like Wickham and Willoughby. But noticeably they're the Bad Guys.

It's a fantasy series, dragons aren't really a very sensible criticism. And it's meant to be on the dark and earthy side, all round. Anyone who doesn't like that obviously isn't going to like the show but the story has narrative coherence, including all the violence.

I think you've made the point for the OP you quoted here. It's a fantasy series - therefore it isn't a very sensible defence to say that all the sexual violence and lingering shots of smooth, naked female bodies are there for the purposes of historical accuracy. There are ways of conveying "dark and earthy" without having to have naked peasant women with perfectly waxed pudenda on display every other minute.

“I got the same undertones from The Social Network. Men were bizniz men, talking tech** and stress, with women were there but in minor cameos and often more emotional/theoretical discussion topics.”

Yes. Also
I enjoyed it, but I had that feeling that even though what’s his name was being portrayed as an arsehole, a lot of blokes could watch it and see him as some kind of straight talking hero.

While it is stupid to lump all woman-driven comedy together, and while the tone and content of Miranda and Fleabag are different, I think there is a similarity in that they both have central characters who have an intimacy with their audience. They are not trying to play power with us (either Miranda or Fleabag); they are communicating with us. Similar male stuff that plays with the POV conventions like Peep Show doesn't have intimacy with the viewer; rather it is an insight into a terribly lonely, solipsistic POV in which part of the humour is in the knowledge that the character would hate to be so terribly exposed; lives so terribly privately and enclosedly partly for fear of the vulnerabilities; lives constantly in thrall to continual private analyses of power dynamics.

I too find it in incredibly hard to watch most mainstream = male TV and film. Before I reached full clarity about this, I had lots of arguments in the 90s with boys / men who were telling me that Film was Serious and if I thought it wasn't up to much in one way or another it was because I Didn't Understand

I walked out of a comedy night on a rare childfree night out with my ex once because the "joke" involved the man randomly repeatedly saying "vagina" and the mostly male audience finding this funnier every time. "Why is this funny?" I asked my ex. "It just is! "Vagina"!" he said and gave me his usual "oh you are so stupid" look. I can't believe men get away with convincing themselves they have any brains, let alone anyone else.