The pop cultural landscape is always shifting and currently it seems stuck in some sort of bland identitarian rut that prioritizes being non offensive and as politically diverse as possible – at the cost of realistic characters, sensible motivations, and well… plot.
Kat Rosenfield describes this phenomena in her essay -‘How Culture Got Stupid’:
“The tenets of the new cultural criticism were as follows:
- All art was political, and always had been;
- Art with the wrong politics caused harm, especially to women and people of color;
- And all art must be analyzed through the lens of power, privilege, and progressive pieties.
The whole thing had a frantically performative vibe that bordered on the evangelical—with journalists in the role of the youth pastor palpably desperate to keep you going to church.”
The tenets Kat describes sounds a lot like the what the activist Left does for fun in their daily activities. Ruthless criticism of actual diversity and the demand that (‘x’) be held to their double standards. The result is that the medium in question becomes timid, bland, and painfully inoffensive.
“Critics used to agree that the purpose of art is to explore what is true, not to model what is proper. But around the time Flynn’s breakout novel was breathing new life into the domestic thriller genre, a new breed of cultural commentator was gestating—one for whom art was understood less as a truth-seeking enterprise than as a vehicle for moral instruction.”
Many Western societies have just finished removing the yoke of fundamentalist religious influence from society. It now seems we are moving toward a culture based on the whims of the new puritanical (read Social Justice) class.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
2 comments
July 17, 2024 at 4:17 am
silverapplequeen
I went to the link & read “How Culture Got Stupid”. This is happening all across the board ~ TV, movies, visual art, music. Everyday, it seems, you hear about some artist, musician, actor, writer, etc., who is no longer “allowed” because he has done something (usually) sexually transgressive or she is a transphobe for insisting on women-only spaces. Or the work in general isn’t up to snuff because it’s not “inclusive” enough.
The whole “inclusive” bit is really annoying. Almost every new show or remake of a show has to have every ethnic/race represented, even if these groups had nothing to do with the original story at all; every story has to have at least one LGBTQ+ person, whether their sexuality (or anyone else’s) has any bearing on the story at all. The new Perry Mason is a good example of this. But I could name a dozen others, which after trying to watch, I switched to some old movie or TV show, which STUCK TO THE STORY.
I think it’s funny when I hear that America is abandoning religion & becoming more secular. No ~ America is simply finding other religions with which to oppress the masses. “Political correctness” or being “Woke” or whatever they want to call it is simply a new religion, a new puritanism, a new curse.
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July 17, 2024 at 3:14 pm
Widdershins
Response to silverapplequeen – Yep, inclusivity for inclusivity’s sake is just another form of wankery.
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