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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29423 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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To add complications, the 30 something millennial woman is the target audience Mattel was missing when selling Barbies, because they might refuse to buy Barbies for their daughter.

Turning Barbie into a vaguely feminist hobby horse, and neutralizing the old knocks on her, helps sell the dolls to parents who want to buy them for their kids. Barbie was in danger of becoming low status.

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I worry there won't be common values shared by men and women in the future and so marriage will become, in a large sense, contracts for reproduction among cultural aliens

Ah, black culture continues taking over America.

Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

Also known as the "hot take" rule.

If you're saying something that's deeply out of the ordinary or difficult-to-defend, the next person is going to ask you to explain what you mean. You can head this off by explaining what you mean before hitting submit. The alternative is that the first half-dozen responses will all be "can you explain in more detail", which increases clutter and makes it much harder to follow the conversation.

Please choose either avoiding dropping hot takes, or backing them up in some way.

Some truth in that but Mattel's strategy is to be an IP company like Marvel, they obviously want to sell toys but the movie itself is part of a bigger strategy to make more movies and such.

It's interesting that whenever I've seen this issue brought up, I've never seen anyone propose a solution beyond "... And thus you can see why my political opponents' positions are so destructive, and must be stamped out permanently by re-education of !"

Do you know of any analysis that breaks that pattern in good faith?

Increasingly I feel like the left-right culture wars are becoming men-women culture wars.

Slightly different take on where exactly the line is... is this recent drop via MR.

Are women liberal because they’re unmarried, or are they unmarried because they’re liberal?

I would expect a “traditional” “family-oriented” woman to be both more conservative and more willing to settle.

Having participated in the modern dating market, it's pretty staggering how different your reception is 'on the apps' with moderate in your bio versus left-wing. Changing that one detail literally 4x'd my response rate.

moderate in your bio versus left-wing

Which one did better?

Left wing by far

This is something I'm having a hard time with.

Up until about, say, the time of the pandemic, I was a fairly apolitical person. As a result I could, and did, date all kinds of girls. Since then, I've become honestly, genuinely conservative. But I still have a blue tribe-y background. I feel like I'm caught in an uncanny valley, where left-wing girls won't like me because I don't agree with them about virtually anything; but conservative girls don't like me because I came to it relatively late in life and am not a genuine, lifelong red-triber. Feels like all I can do is simply continue trying to become more attractive.

Atleast you're aware of the situation.

I find that the majority of blue-tribe girls are actually a lot more conservative than they self-identify, it's just you've got to report fealty to the big topline shibboleths and the power level will reveal itself in a few months.

Much of that gap disappears when age is included in the analysis.

I don't really care what happens at the senior center speed dating session.

I'm interested. This would, I think, imply that old single women, whether never married or no longer married due to either divorce or death, are even more in favor of dems. Like, what's happening there? Why is that the case? What's driving it, and is it just a historical phenomenon that is likely to disappear as that generation of old ladies disappears, or is there something more fundamental happening?

Iirc divorcees are more liberal than single women as a whole, and you’d probably expect them to skew mostly middle-aged and older.

I worry there won't be common values shared by men and women in the future and so marriage will become, in a large sense, contracts for reproduction among cultural aliens.

I think that's a reasonable concern, and at times it does seem to me to be concentrating that way, but overall I'm reminded of the quote that "no one will win the battle of the sexes: there's too much fraternization with the enemy."

This is what I thought hydro meant when he called it a 2 hour toy commercial.

In my description the feminism is integral to the advertising strategy, where Hydro describes it as ancillary or unnecessary, just tacked on because it's a thing you do these days.

There's a big difference between "Let's make a toy ad... What's popular... Feminism!" Implying that, idk, a Barbie movie from 2002 would use patriotic themes the same way.

Versus "Let's use a long form film to reposition our branding from a lower-prestige to a higher-prestige tier by using feminist branding to rework how parents view our product."

I'm honestly shocked how much play the film is getting, and how many Ivy-League feminists I know are dressing up in pink to attend the film, many multiple times! It's getting significant cultural space, for an IP adaptation that probably deserves to be closer to the Battleship movie.

Compare Bud Light. They just threw some branding at the wall.

I think, to be clear, a Barbie movie from 2002 would have patriotic themes. Possibly feminist-patriotic themes, because it’s a girl movie, but patriotic themes- maybe Islam references and the American way freeing women to walk around without a burka or something.

Hollywood in 2002 was extremely careful about being Islam critical.

Even prior to 9/11 they changed the villains in The Sum of all Fears to be Neo Nazis instead of Islamists.

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