Their war has to stop.
In our current culture saying that a group or industry is waging war on a disadvantaged subset of the population is all the rage, because war is one of those words that we recognize on a near instinctual level. It isn’t meant in the literal fashion and has been abused and degraded in seriousness. But despite this truth Hollywood is waging a real war on the women and girls of our country. The idea of body shaming is often derided by men on my side of the aisle but, because I see the very real abuses taking place, I have something of a different opinion. Many women in my life mean a great deal to me and there are two young girls growing up in my house exposed to such nonsense — what sort of a parent would I be to stand idly by while they were attacked?
The topic of body shaming gets an instant reaction from many people on the internet, whether it be positive or negative. Some feel body shaming is a serious issue and others feel it is just a bunch of hogwash. We’re going to set that aside, and many other hyperbolic tendencies, to discuss the actual real damage a bunch of elite rich people — many of whom are women! — are waging on the real, every-day women in this country. Reader, are you a woman under the age of 200 living in the United States of America and not in the top 10% income wise? Then this article is for and about you. If you’re a man who cares about any woman that describes it’s for you, too.
Divide and Conquer
As mentioned, the initial thought many people will have is that of body shaming. But my first instinct is to discuss the way the media treats women on a subconscious level and on a different topic because this harm is much less focused on by those in the media that notice the body-shaming narrative. The wedge the Hollywood elite push between women, and women and men, is the first part of their strategy. It is a tried and true method of grooming: single the victim out and make her feel as if she needs to put up with you and your crap. This is something abusive significant others and pedophiles do, and have done since the beginning of humanity. (Coincidentally there are a high number of abusive people and pedophiles in the Hollywood elite.)
Pointing out the way these Hollywood elites (simply Hollywood from this point forward for brevity) attempt to wedge men and women apart is so simple even a child can see it: The narrative women are presented with by Hollywood is that they must do it all themselves, that men are either dangerous to them or stupid, and that they are constantly undervalued. This wedge magnifies any tension a woman feels toward men by negatively reinforcing stereotypes about both genders. They’re not so much attacking men as they are attempting to play on many very real concerns of women to lure the attention of women.
Detractors will instantly jump on that last paragraph and infer that I’m calling women stupid. I’m not. Stupid women don’t connect results with experiences — that’s what makes people stupid. The same goes for stupid men. They don’t learn cause and effect. In a way, stupid people are immune to clever tricks, but fall for other tactics. Being tricked doesn’t make someone stupid. Think about this: Have you noticed how often sitcom wives are bitchy? Think about it, removing any anger she feels because her dopey husband is a fool. Are you stupid for not thinking about that? It’s a stereotype that women are “bossy.”
I don’t do that when I write women — even assertive ones — because I know smart women can tell the difference between a woman that asserts herself and a bossy bitch. Just like I know they can tell when a male character is genuinely interested in the female and not being a grunting horndog. Why do highly paid Hollywood writers do it? Because that’s their trope, their go-to archetype.
Back on topic, Hollywood loves to play up mistakes men often make and attempt to bring those mistakes home for women. At the same time they push a specific, perfect male character as what women should strive for and build up their expectations. I don’t want to get ahead of myself with body image, but they also push a certain type of woman for men to admire — and build up their expectations of a woman. Only a fool would say this doesn’t negatively impact women.
But they don’t just push women to resent men, they also push for women to resent one another. It has become something of a meme that women can’t be friends, they can’t get along, that they will always be secretly catty to one another. Maybe this is common today but I do not believe it is the default behavior of the human female. Going back just a few decades it’s easy to see a lot of women getting along. Even today, women get along. But the Hollywood elite are interested in isolating women from one another, even while giving them all the same message, because that helps sell their narrative: “buy our stuff about unique special girls like you, not those catty bitches you don’t like. Look at all these catty unlikable characters! How many of them have you known?”
It’s not even subtle, the way female friendship is handled in a surprising number of Hollywood productions. If there are even two women to start with; many shows or movies will take a Walking Dead Black Man approach. For those not aware, the Walking Dead has been roundly made fun of for only having one black man at a time. Hollywood often does this with leading women, though sometimes they’ll just limit it to one of a certain set of ethnicities (but that’s a different topic).
We Like You! You’re Special!
After spending years telling women they’re all alone and nobody likes them, or at least nobody really has their back, Hollywood also swoops in with the special-chick-just-like-you material. They make the attacks on people other than their victim out to be because they have the best interest of the victim at heart. “I hit you because I love you, baby,” they say. Only in this case there’s no police officer or stained white shirt involved.
There is also a great deal of this entertainment produced for men — but if you look closely there are signs everywhere that it isn’t delivered the same way. Male “role model” characters are often divine and perfect, or at least the very best at what they do. They’re characters to be revered, but female fiction is presented as it being just an every day, ordinary girl. Jennifer Lawrence plays up her “I’m just a regular, tee hee” for a damned good reason (even though she was apparently modeling in her teens).
This serves to further wedge people apart. In addition to giving men and women a different view of the “role models” because of how they’re presented, it changes the way women feel about themselves. If the central character has it all and she’s just a normal woman, why don’t I? Men see that the central character isn’t normal — he’s Thor! Nobody can become Thor. That anxiety just doesn’t exist. But damned if someone can’t try to have a career, and a family, and all that. (You can, of course, but it is extraordinarily difficult to manage each additional plate you start spinning. They never show the hard times unless it’s a montage.)
The Body Image Thing
A thought experiment: Take every nude scene from The Tudors and Game of Thrones (picked for being period pieces with lots of nudity). Just show someone that has not seen the shows the breasts and butts of the women, and ask them to accurately count how many different women appear nude in total. It’ll be nearly impossible to do because Hollywood has started to push out a very cookie-cutter vision of what women are supposed to look like. Dangerously skinny, small to medium breasts (which, when you’re underfed…), uniform skin.
When a person’s arms look like extras from a movie about the Holocaust something is not right.
The image we see most often is that of women who resemble twelve year-old boys. This is not the default state of female beauty, this is not something men have wanted for centuries — it is a very new phenomenon. We have art going back for centuries, millenia even, and in most of it the women more resemble those from the 1950s Hollywood than today. Why the change?
A lot of it, I think, is that being skinny is much easier than being pretty. A very pretty face is a lot harder to find than someone willing to starve. It is extremely hard for me to think of more than a handful of actresses currently working that are even a little pretty. But I can think of quite a few bony ones. Of course, detractors will say, “But what about actress X? She’s regular/fat!” Yes, and you can think of her off the top of your head because she stands out of the norm.
Everything is sculpted to perfection, too — using the surgeon’s scalpel. Yikes, the number of actresses with bad facial work done is scary, and most fake breasts are completely, painfully obvious — they stand out as false more than Lara Croft’s in the first Tomb Raider game.
The push toward androgyny is the secondary reason for the cookie-cutter starved look. So many actresses have boyish features on top of their bodies. You could probably pass most of them off in a junior high if you wanted. They pushed men toward this for a time but women (who buy most Hollywood stuff) resisted that and it has mostly went away in favor of the sculpted Greek god type (or Norse, if you prefer). Compare Wolverine in the first movie to the last; same actor, twice the muscle mass.
If you look at women even as recently as the early 90s, the women in movies and television might have been thin but they weren’t all emaciated or androgynous. Something has definitely changed.
Finally, this plays into the wedge mentioned earlier: they tell men to want this look, then they tell women that men want this look. They tell them this in magazines for women, by women. Then they object out of the other side of their mouth and talk about shaming and body image. But the magazines are made by and for women. Yet, men are still blamed — not to say men are the victims, but to point out that Hollywood and the media created a “look” for men to want, and now they are attacking men for wanting that “look.” That’s a false flag operation if ever there was one.
(As an aside, I would not recommend listening to rich women or homosexual men about what straight men want: I’ve seen enough magazine covers in checkout lines to know that these people do not know many straight men.)