Ha! Yeah, for some reason I'm stuck on the the flying carpet. Such casual racism that no one bothered to differentiate the flying carpet (Arabian) with the Taj Mahal (Indian), sure there was a massive amount of cultural exchange in real life, but they couldn't even be bothered to get their racist tropes straight. But then again, maybe this is just another "I don't give a fuck" element that was intentionally (and ironically) inserted? I don't know, tbh.
Absolutely a guilty pleasure. I was dying to drop it in the Covers thread, but felt like I couldn't in good conscience. So when I saw the opportunity to drop it in this thread I jumped on it.
To bring the discussion back around to the topic of this thread, I do think it's staggering how many proto-toxic masculinity tropes are all packed into this one video. I think the producer of the video (I assume Ice-T) identified the cultural emergence of some of these topics early on and wanted to do a piece that was thought provoking and mildly subversive (against a problematic status quo) which I think is fine in isolation.
But nothing ever stays "in isolation". To me this is a great example of the irony poisoning topic that I've raised before. I don't think it has to always be an intentional tactic from the start. An argument can be made that this type of content can, down the road, metastasize into something ugly by people who strip away the nuance (i.e. irony) and, unintentionally or intentionally, decide to take the content at face value.
That puts us all in an awkward position. The last thing in the world I want to be is a stick in the mud killjoy. But at the same time, I do think we need to be careful, in the times we find ourselves in, about how content is going to land once it is (intentionally or unintentionally) stripped of it's irony and nuance.
Which was kind of my point in saying that this video could be taught in a seminar on the origins of toxic masculinity. I wasn't holding it up as an example of toxic masculinity specifically (though it does have it's problematic aspects as have been discussed), more that I think it offers a lot of insight into how the stripping of nuance, and the swapping of an ironic/subversive frame with an adamantly literal frame is a huge part of the problem.
1. I didn't even notice anything in the window until you pointed it out.
2. Your point about irony is well taken. I would liken it to a radioactive decay. You start with a sarcastic rendition of something terrible. It's great. But with each passing day, a little bit of the sarcasm vanishes, every time someone sees it and thinks it's not sarcastic. Over time, we can safely assume I think, that the sarcasm will fade away almost entirely. The key variable is the half-life.
I remember, when I was in college, a lot of students were really big into "camp," ironically you know. They watched cheesy movies because OMG they're so cheesy! and listened to cheesy music because OMG it's so bad it's good, and so on. It's not hard to see where this is going. In the end, the people who made the Brady Bunch movie or the Scooby Doo movie or any other nostalgia kitsch don't really give a fuck if you watch it ironically or not. You're just spending your time watching the Brady Bunch movie.
3. There's another danger that you hint at, and that's expectation setting. If the cultural landscape is divided between 1) cultural artifacts that are sexist in nature; and 2) cultural artifacts that mock that sexism by grossly distorting it -- well, then you have a cultural landscape that is entirely devoted to sexist depictions of women. In a way, it doesn't really matter whether group #2 is criticizing #1 or not.
I mentioned in another thread that I'm working on a novel. I'm half done. Probably a little more. And since it has never been the case in human history that half-finished novels fail to be finished, I'm on the fast track. But anyway, one vow I've made to myself is that I will never, ever depict violence against women in my work. An easy way to make a villain villainous is to show him raping or beating a woman, especially the heroine. Character development often occurs by showing the characters struggling to cope with something terrible that happened to them, and a rape or sexual assault is a really easy plot device to that end. But then we are left with a whole lot of books and movies that show women getting preyed upon, and the message that gets imparted is that violence against women is just a fact of life, it's just something that happens, so on and so forth.
I grant that there is value in consciousness-raising. If rape was never shown on screen, then perhaps people might come to believe that it's very rare, not really a social problem, etc. But if it is common, then people get numbed to what really happens. It becomes a plot point. It becomes part of the emotional response to the film/book and thus loses its value as social criticism (yes, I am Brechtian on this point). Well, anyway, since I don't have to worry about rape depictions vanishing, I will be going with "none from me" and do my small part.
