There’s a narrative (primarily in second-wave feminist discourse, but still extant) that the media indoctrinates men into a kind of violent objectification of women. This is true to some degree, and was probably more true in the 60s and 70s when these arguments were first being put forth — media having reacted to this by dramatically changing the way violence was depicted and how women were depicted in relation to it. However, growing up in the 90s, my own media indoctrination had a much less violent but much more objectifying flavor.
I watched a lot of sitcoms, romantic comedies, and teen comedies — in other words, I watched a lot of media where awful people (mostly men) tried to get laid, and where character growth (or even just successful scheming) was rewarded with romantic success. Being autistic, I didn’t catch onto some indicators of characters’ internal states, but I would venture that these characters were often very flat and in many cases were having ‘arcs’ only because of the demands of the genre (rather than having their changes in behavior reflect actual underlying changes in belief or character). Ultimately, this media diet promoted the idea that being seen as attractive was a sign from the writers (in other words, God, or the universe) that you were doing the “right thing” (and, in rom coms and teen sex comedies, that you were a “good person”) — in other words, that women’s preferences were an augur for general success.
Violence presumes a subject: cutting up a piece of paper is not violent, because a…
