Guaporense and Zotis Review Animation

Miles above? I'd say the level of Fry or close. Bender is not even "immature" in the classic sense, he is just amoral. And no, I wouldn't say that 80-90% of the plots are mainly about the male characters when Leela is a member of the main trio. Probably 70% and that would be much. We should do the math or something xD

You are talking here like Japan doesn't have this problem. It may have more alternatives in the form of different genres and demographics, but depending on the show this can also be an issue. The most popular currently running manga, One Piece, has always kind of had this problem when it comes to portraying girls as victims of violence. There is but not as brutal as in the case of male characters; not to mention that in the structure of combat women tend to fight against women and men against men.

That's what I mean when I say "the current trend". Inside Out, Finding Dory, Brave... have female characters in main roles. They are all among the latest Pixars, meaning that the studio is more focused now on this. And the characters of either of these movies (except perhaps Brave in some way, but definitely not at all) do not follow the patterns of damsels in distress or flawless girls. Inside Out in special.

And I also said Disney. Think Wreck-it-Ralph, Frozen or Zootopia. The female main characters of these films are far from being perfect role models, they have flaws, and some very serious ones, like in the latter where the main girl is called out for covert racism and turning things worse due to her own prejudgements.

Seriously, Guap? Gravity Falls an obscure example? And you bring that parallelism? It's a Disney series for God's sake. It is critically acclaimed, it got quite decent TV ratings overall and its internet presence is big. For an animated series, that's fair enough. Of course it doesn't compare to the likes of Breaking Bad or The Sopranos or to the cultural impact The Simpsons signified (nothing will ever come close to this show in these terms, probably) but it's not something obscure and unknown. It's very easy to know about it.

Whatever, though, it was just an example. You'd probably like it, by the way, at least on the bit of female representation.

That is all true. And it is a big issue, and I assume the main reason why the narrations fall under some kind of overcompensation and we end up having equally flat, but flawless portrayals as a result. Kind of like going from extreme to extreme. Still:

Can you NOT compare movies from the 70s to stuff that came out a few months ago? If you are going to establish a comparison do it properly.

It is a problem, but it is not "always", and the West is not a single entity. Like tons of media don't have this problem of representation, and take into account that you are not only talking about US productions with this term but the entirety of Europe for instance. As said by Velvet, you don't treat Korean and Chinese culture as an equivalent of Japanese and you shouldn't do the same for the entirety of the territory that is included as part of this "West". As said, you go way overboard with generalizations, to the point the debate gets absurd. Then again, if you talk about trends that's okay. But current Disney and Pixar is also a trend which doesn't fall under your reduction precisely because they have a demand for narrative complexity and female roles need to fulfill this.

Which problem? Japan doesn't have the US problem of putting women in pedestals. Japan is male dominated culture but it is not PC dominated.

The US culture is a very sensitive culture where there are invisible rules everywhere. And putting your feet outside those invisible rules means severe punishment. One of those rules is the rule that women should be put in pedestals, always. That marvel movie poster for instance, violated that rule and hence had to be put down.

Anime is accused by US people in particular and Western people in general of being "misogynous" because it violates the "pedestal rule" of US culture that women should be put into pedestals and hence not treated like men, that is, like human beings.

The differences between Japanese animation and Western animation are enormous. The main difference though can be summed up in their different cultural attitudes: Western animation is a cartoon, restricted to the expression of very simple comedic narratives, mainly for small children, and not taken as a serious medium for artistic expression in general while in Japanese animation, animation is a general medium for artistic expression, like literature or film. For me "having more alternatives" is a very strong euphemism for these enormous differences between Western and Japanese animation.

I think that should be already very obvious to you. Anyway, I am not talking about Western animation but Western fiction in general.

You talking about male-dominated or the more restrictive issue of putting women into pedestals? Both are related but different. The US media industry is beginning to move away from strict male-domination in fictional narratives to fictional narratives that include women but the women are put into pedestals. They are still far away from being able to depict women in a fully humanistic way.

But, talking about these movies you mentioned, they are not certainly not portrayed as remotely as undignified as Peter of Family Guy is portrayed. Or Aqua. Or even like the characters in K-On!

Thing is that Pixar and Disney's movies (and you mentioned only Disney movies here) are "children's movies" and "children's movies" are also a US cultural construction of a type of movie that is severely restricted in it's range of artistic expression. This type of movie cannot portray women as human characters but it also cannot portray men as human either since it is restricted to the articulation of narratives that are fully consistent with US expectations of what a family friendly narrative should be, hence, this type of movie cannot express a large fraction of the range of expressions and emotions that humans have.

A character like Peter of Family Guy, for instance, can be portrayed in such undignified manner only because it is an "adult" show.

So? Everything Disney does is universally known? I don't think so. They are a massive corporation that produces massive amounts of media, most of consists of mediocre children's entertainment products that are forgotten as soon as they are produced.

Gravity Falls is common knowledge only if one is a US animation otaku or under the age of 13. While I am into animation I actually perceive this obsession with US animation among Western animation fans as mainly a product of Western ethnocentrism, since US animation is just a poorly developed as a medium and hence not worth of my time. Why should I watch a children's TV show like Gravity Falls when I can watch a complex adult psychological narrative like Space Brothers? Or a edgy comedy like A Centaur's Life?

My point just is that the feminists themselves do not realize that they are being sexist when they complain that some Japanese animation is depicting women without any dignity (like the Aqua video I posted). Undignified depictions are part of a well rounded portrayal of people.

I already compared Breaking Bad and Simpsons which are recent Western stuff.

Want to look at older anime? Galaxy Express 999 from 1979 has very strong female characters, Nausicaa from 1984, specially more so. The manga Ashita no Joe from 1967 has strong female character although that manga was still extremely male centric (it's a boxing manga). Manga also tends to be mainly male centric, at least the most famous mainstream titles.

Both Western and Japanese societies are male dominated societies. So it's natural for their fictional narratives to be male centric. Only Japanese animation is not male dominated because it is a subversive underground medium that is not constrained by mainstream social pressures. Also, anime is a recent medium while Hollywood is an older one that is pretty much dead artistically right now, that's why I think I should compare 2017 anime with 1970's Hollywood.

The West is about as heterogeneous as different parts of Japan are. The Western Civilization is comparable entity to the Japanese civilization. The Chinese civilization is very different from the Japanese civilization, in fact, as different as the Western civilization stands relative to Japanese civilization. That's why I compare Japan with the West.

Anyway, it's true that Brazilian soup operas tend to be more liberal in regards to female representation than US media. So I guess the "putting women in pedestals" is more of a US problem than a general Western problem. Hence you are right in that sense. Although I am not sure if Western media outside of US still can portray women like anime does, that is, devoid of any pretensions of dignity.

Japan has its own standards of what is considered PC. Should I remind you of what happened with the Koe no Katachi one shot manga, or the controversies regarding Gintama and The wind rises? Putting women in pedestals is not one, however not having equal representation for female characters in battle shonen is an issue, as shown with the example.

Severe punishment? What? What kind of /pol/ sh*thole are you taking this from? Criiticism and media backlash =/= severe punishment. There's still a lot of toxic stuff being made with zero consequences.

These people might be a minority much more irrelevant than the actual amount of media that are "severely punished". Your generalizations are priceless.

And for exploitation, and for merch. Anime is huge, there's a LOT of interpretations and benefits the industry looks for, don't try to sell me the idea that anime as a whole is built under an aim for artistic expression because for every genuinely artistic piece I can name you a shameless cash cow, and you know better than I do that the authorial integrity of most anime shows is either non-existent or depending on the original source.

Animation not being taken seriously in the West is a long known issue. Western animation not being a source for artistic expression due to this, however, is blatantly false, much more at this point of diversification.

The general gist is, your generalizations not.

What kind of US media industry do you mean? Marvel and DC? Like... ok? Is this the entirety of the media industry now?

Sure, Joy (Inside Out) is not undignified, she is just the ultimate jerk of the movie due to being too selfish and inconsiderate to her mate. Sure, Riley is the epitome of perfection and not just the most normal 10-year-old ever.

Sure, Elsa (Frozen) is not undignified, she is just a selfish prick who needs to be rescued from her own shell while the world around her is decaying.

Sure, Judy (Zootopia) is not undignified, she is just bigoted and hypocritical, and hurts people and creates a huge social fracture because of this.

Sure, Dory (Finding Dory) is not undignified, she is just a dumb, generally useless girl who creates more problems than she manages to solve due to her flaws.

See you, going to jump off a cliff or something.

And that's why I talk about the current trend. When was the last time Disney brought a "classic princess" character model like it did in the past? Then again, if you are going to ignore my examples just because you don't place merit in "children's movies" for starters then don't quote them trying to make a point because you are only speaking to yourself here.

I see that this point is true, the same I see that it is completely uncalled for. Please stick to the examples and the reason why I bring them in the first place, don't switch the topic of the conversation at random to fit your agenda.

Okay, okay, I can play this as well. The girls of K-On! (a seinen, "adult" show then) are not portrayed even the slightest bit as undignified as Peter is portrayed.

Yeah, that's why I mention the term "critically acclaimed" here. I'm not telling you to remember every show from Disney, but don't try to give me this absurd counterexample and then go like the series is super-obscure because it is not.

The funny thing is that you try to convince me that Kobayashi and LWA are very popular instead. Do you want to compare how numbers go for these?

Or just somebody whose interests in media go a little beyond what is immediately spoonfed by the single most accessible media. GF is still very easy to notice by the mainstream audience.

Also: I will never step out of my confirmation bias. Okay, thank you, we can move on and maybe I'll try to discuss with somebody who has an actual will to discuss.

It's your loss, Guap, don't act like I'm the one who is missing out here. GF is critically acclaimed for more than a few reasons, whether you want to explore them or stick to your world of edginess and adult complexities is your choice.

And there's plenty of undignified depictions of women in Western media.

True. The Simpsons however is long, long, long, long past its prime. The characters became flat stereotypes of what they were before and the show has lost a lot of its appeal and acclaim, as a result its TV ratings have been dropping through the seasons. It's still big, but it was much bigger before.

Okay then.

We should compare contemporary media with one another because that's the only way to trace a proper parallelism, seeing that media move through trends and it's kind of useless to compare two cultural standards and their differing trends if they are not even the same age.

The West is US, South America, France, Poland, Scandinavia, Australia and so many different places with noticeably different cultural backgrounds. Don't give me that, please. Specially when you talk about media and ignore the very different approaches to film and animation brought from each of these environments to keep this generalization floating.

The thing is, I don't even disagree about a lot of these things you talk about, Guap. I disagree with your generalizations and with your complete disregard for the diversity that Western media as a whole, and even US media in the specifics, has attained.

Haven't read all of this but Gravity Falls is very well known. You don't have to be a US Animation Otaku to have heard of it. It's critically acclaimed, won a bunch of awards and is well supported online. It's not massive by all tv standards but not many animated shows are in the west atm.

Also Peter Griffin is the absolute nadir of television, no character is as undignified as him. The female characters Lois especially aren't that far off now, she hasn't been the voice of reason on that show from around Season 3 which was 15 years ago.

Pictures of my nausicca manga which I haven’t read yet

__________________

Lack of equal representation is not a problem. Don't want women in the manga you are writing? To me that's ok. It is this obsession with having females everywhere that is the part of the problem. Why?

Because complaining about lack of female representation in Ashita no Joe is like complaining about lack of male representation in Yuru Yuri: It is a type of artistic censorship.

In Japan you can have fictional narratives where there exists only females or only males and where everybody in the world is lesbian or gay. That is true artistic freedom and genuine lack of sexism.

Western fictional narratives tend to have very rigid roles for men and women and now they artificially become more feministic that didn't solve the actual problem which is the rigid adherence to expected gender roles. They just changed the expected gender roles and the problem is still there. The problem is the rigidity in social roles itself, what some people call "gender expression". Which is much more flexible in anime, as one can easily tell.

You firm's product will be boycotted if you violate these invisible social norms and you can get bankrupt. Some director at Harvard was fired for instance from even suggesting that there exists biological differences between the brains of men and women (and there are).

If you look at Pixar's movies for instance they are extremely restricted in their range of expression as each movie is very, very similar to the other movies and that's because Pixar has to follow these strict socially acceptable standards.

While all societies have certain rules of accepted expression I think that the US culture in particular is very restrictive.

I was just explaining where this Western idea that anime is misogynous comes from. Why are you upset about it?

Art is human expression. Hence all human expression is artistic expression whether made for profit or not.

The difference between anime and Western Animation is that in anime there are not restrictions in the range of expression that is socially allowed. Wanna have an anime about a 10 year old boy that looks like a girl and kills people? Go for it.

While Western animation is extremely restricted in the range of expression it is allowed to portray.

I never claimed western animation was not artistic. It is artistic since it is human expression but it is very limited in it's range of expression, that is, it is not a general medium for artistic expression.

It is because western society does not allow animation the degree of artistic freedom that literature and film enjoy, for instance.

Even in Japan manga and anime are also stigmatized to a certain degree which is why anime is still dominated by titles aimed at teenagers and young adults. In Japan if you are a 40 year old you will face a certain social sigma regarding manga and animation, specially. Hence why it is still a field dominated by entertainment for young people. Although it lacks the strict binds that do not allow for any expression outside narrow socially constructed confines in western animation.

I don't think you understand that there is a very clear difference in terms of dignity between Peter from Family Guy and any character from any Disney or Pixar animated movie.

You are upset because people do not agree with you? People should be able to live with disagreement and not get angry at one another.

Indeed, but Aqua from Konosuba is. It is easy to find anime female characters portrayed like Peter from Family Guy. It's virtually impossible to find female characters in Western fiction portrayed like Peter.

They are very popular among anime fans hence comparable to titles like The Godfather and Breaking Bad that are popular among movie or TV show fans. Of course, the first group is much smaller.

My time is limited. I don't have time to watch everything that is critically acclaimed and I don't generally like children's shows. I know your tastes are different but you should be aware that not everybody in the world has the same tastes as you do.

Not really. Western media is in general very careful in it's depiction of women.

I noticed that because there is no western media that can make women angry as Hidamari Sketch made my mother angry, since she is sensitive to undignified portrayals of female characters. The reason is that Western media puts women in pedestals.

I don't think so. Because I am not looking for "parallelism" but for differences between US fiction and anime fiction.

So I compared popular Hollywood and US TV titles with popular anime titles. Since US fiction is much older than anime fiction it is natural that the average age of US titles would be much higher.

Yet the Western Civilization still has a strong cultural matrix that possess certain properties that are near universal across all countries of European origin. Why do you think Japan was the first country to develop comics and animation into general artistic mediums? Because Japan lacks a Jewish-Christian cultural background and it's associated aesthetic prejudices.

Western aesthetics come from the Ancient Greeks who placed primary value on the approximation between the real and the artistic creation. Which is why it is socially regarded as wrong for people to be into pornographic comics and animation in the west. Because animation is stylized while "real art" has to be "real". The same reason explains why animation cannot be serious, it always has to be "light" in some way since seriousness must be photorealistic (hence why photorealistic animation is considered ok for serious narratives).

When you talk about cultural standards you are talking using some degree of generalization. If you do not want to generalize you cannot say anything about cultural standards of any civilization.

Okay, I'll try to answer tomorrow but it seems the bit about generalizations is now clear and therefore the main point I was holding against your stance. There are still some things I said that seem to have been misinterpreted or probably I didn't word them right so I'll try to clarify.

This also explains why the West is in general allergic to Japanese visual culture: since it goes against the Greek aesthetic principles, based on the close correspondence between art and physical reality, most Westerners are repulsed by Japan's visual culture. While western visual culture is a photographic culture, the inverse of Japan's.

By the way I am not the person who first made this association. I got this idea from a book by the Japanese psychiatrist, Tamaki Saito.

You didn't understand my point here, which is proof that I really need to explain myself better.

One Piece has female characters. I am not talking about 50-50 ratio, I wouldn't care if it was 10-90 or 30-70 or vice versa, I am talking about doing with the females what the series does with the males. In this series, women fight and are pirates, but they rarely get hurt, and their fights are rarely as brutal as those of men, not to mention that the fights always tend to be set through gender, that is, male vs male or female vs female, but not male vs female. While this is not necessarily a problem in terms of premise -each can decide according to ideology- it is a problem when it affects the narrative in ways that are unnatural, when characters with certain expectations aren't able to fulfill them, and in the end, when it becomes so apparent that there is an ideological reason behind and that it is rooted on stereotypes and a form of discrimination.

Upset? No. I just don't think that most people even have enough access to anime beyond very basic knowledge to hold such advanced claims as it being misogynistic.

The same could be said about Western Animation then which is why I don't know why you worded it that way. Either way, it's clarified.

This was covered already by Camo much better than I could so no need to further go into it. Each member of the FG cast, and that includes females, is brutally undignified as well. It's something we can certainly hold as a merit of the show.

No ¿?¿?¿?¿?

I mean, how?

I was providing a dramatized reaction to the phrase I quoted. Whatever you are reading here, it's too much and it comes from nowhere.

Virtually as "not at all"? You can always find something.

Precisely because the first group is much smaller your statement regarding Gravity Falls doesn't hold water. Even if you want to be relative GF is still popular and well-known to Western audiences, probably even more than LWA and Kobayashi are to people who watch anime. Either way, I don't know why did you even bring its supposed (far from true) obscurity to the debate. It has no reason of being.

No, this is not about tastes. You were the one making the assumption, based on nothing because you claim to not even know about the show, that GF doesn't have elements you can like. You didn't even know that it was critically acclaimed and you probably don't know or can't figure out why without doing some research. I don't care if you are not interested, it's just a recommendation, so take it or leave it, but your conclusion is intellectually dishonest and I think you are capable enough to avoid that.

That's kind of... a terrible argument but I'll let it slide since this is not about keeping the discussion on and our points are clear.

And in order to search differences you first need to establish options that are remotely comparable. The world in the 70s wasn't the same as it is in the current decade, if you add a fundamentally different cultural background you are only complicating the comparison, and unnecessarily, I'd say.

Ok. But notice that One Piece is a manga. It's not an "anime" in the sense that the animation is not the main vehicle for it. Hence, it's not representative of anime.

People from internet forums tend to say those things. It is easy to understand why: it's because Western society does not allow for women to be put outside of the pedestal and they view removing women from pedestals as an attack on women. I noticed that several times over the past few years.

It's easy to find this argument on google searches. Like I did right now. Look:

https://www.themarysue.com/moe-misog...d-masculinity/
Moé, Misogyny and Masculinity: Anime’s Cuteness Problem–and How to Fix It

See? A western feminist sees it as a "problem". Why? Because it depicts women in a way that Western culture finds unacceptable.

The fact is that Western culture is just blocked from certain forms of artistic expression. Such as serious comics and animation and freedom in portrayal of female characters.

What way?

I severely doubt it is on the same level as Peter considering it's a children's show.

I never saw a female being depicted with Peter's level of undignification in any western fictional work I ever consumed.

I am a western that watches way more animation than the average westerner and I have never heard of Gravity Falls, therefore I regard it as obscure.

So no, Kobayashi and LWA are very well known among anime fans, the comparable Western cultural product among mainstream Western audiences would be something like Big Bang Theory or How I Meet Your Mother.

I know it is an US animation, a children's show and a Disney show and I know from a google image search that it's art style is extremely simplistic (as typical of US animation, which I don't like). Those facts alone makes it extremely unlikely that I will find it worthy of my time.

Critically acclaimed by whom? American TV critics? They know nothing as much about animation as I know about poetry (or the average American knows about Argentinean geography). Last American animation show I watched was Rick and Morty and it was a rather mediocre experience even though it is adult and extremely acclaimed by those same TV critics.

Also, another reason I am not watching English language TV is that I am busy so I don't have time to consume English language media anymore.

What makes you think it's terrible?

It is the reaction of a feminist western woman that she found Japanese visual culture insulting because it portrayed women in a way she found unacceptable ("infantilized"). She never had a remotely similar reaction to any Western fictional narrative she ever consumed. Why? Because western fictional narratives are very careful in their portrayal of women.

I don't think you actually understood what I am talking about in here. Don't you perceive an enormous difference in dignity between the portrayal of women in Frozen and the portrayal of women in K-On!,?

Ok. Let's do a comparison of recent stuff, the top 10 most popular US movies by box office revenue and the top 10 most popular anime in Japan according to this site (https://www.anikore.jp/pop_ranking/).

Top 10 highest grossing US movies:

1. Avatar
2. Titanic
3. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
4. Jurassic World
5. The Avengers
6. Furious 7
7. Avengers: 2
8. Harry Potter 7
9. Frozen
10. Beauty and the Beast

I watched 7 of these. Of the 7 I watched, 6 features male main character and only Frozen didn't. Frozen is very, very, very conservative in all it's elements, which include the portrayal of women, which is natural since it's a Disney movie. Avatar might be the most feminist of these movies

Let's look at the top 10 most popular anime according to the Japanese fans (note, anime not manga, the difference is key, that's why I didn't look at a list of top selling manga, manga is much more male dominated than anime and it is closer to US movies in that regard):

https://www.anikore.jp/pop_ranking/

1. Steins Gate
2. Code Geass 2
3. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
4. Code Geass 1
5. Bakemonogatari
6. Clannad Afterstory
7. the Haruhi movie
8. Anohaha
9. Fate/Zero
10. K-On! 2

I watched 8 out of these 10.

The difference is striking. And note the average year of US movies in that list is perhaps higher than the average year in this anime list.

This list features stuff like K-On! that lacks any substantial male characters! And stuff like Stein's Gate is in first place and it even has a transsexual. Bakemonogatari has female characters that behave like a dominatrix, Fate/Zero has extremely strong fighting female character in Saber same with Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, all are full of strong female characters among those I watched. While Clannad: Afterstory would be cancelled if produced in the US because popular opinion would probably force production to shut down because they would find it offensive for women.

The way that Family Guy treats Meg is much more degrading than Peter. Peter is portrayed as a misogynistic, sexist, and racist pig. I don't think it's so much trying to portray men in that light as just making a lot of jabs with its extremely offensive humor. It could even be a jab at how feminism views men. The way Meg is treated is different. She's constantly shamed and ridiculed, not just by other characters, but also by the events in her life. At one point they show her in the future having a sex change and being a complete mess. They humiliate her constantly.

I don't really get the feeling that it's about a male vs female comparison so much as the archetypes of the kind of people those characters represent. The show just makes fun of everything.

I also don't really feel that it's fair to compare Japan to the West in this way. There are a lot of things you can say about America that you can't say about the rest of the West. In that way Guap I think you overgeneralise too much. You also tend to jump around in your comparisons. So you'll compare one show to another, but then represent it as Japan vs The West. Comparisons between individual works of art don't necessarily represent their cultures in general senses.

While I think there is some validity to your argument Guap, I do find that it's muddled with some things that don't add up. I don't get the sense that you have the same grasp on European art and culture that you have on American and Japanese art and culture. And I get the feeling you know practically nothing about Canada. Since it's also part of North America, what about Mexico?

I haven't finished reading through the whole discussion yet, but those were some thoughts I had thus far.

No Peter is way less dignified than Meg. It's not even remotely comparable. Peter is depicted as worthless trash while Meg just happens to be constantly bullied. In fact, the show is saying that it is ok to depict males like Peter, as pigs, but that it is not ok to bully women.

Thing is that Meg is female so you think her portrayal is more degrading because of that: in the West degrading a female character is regarded as much. more offensive than a male character. That's because Western culture puts females on a pedestal. Also why sex change is humiliating?

Western culture shares a lot of similarities with Muslim culture since both are derived from Abrahamic religions. In Muslim culture women are also put into pedestals and in even more explicit ways.

Then you fall back to my previous argument that you cannot say anything about any culture if you do not generalize.

Ok. It's pretty obvious that people feel offended if their culture is described.

Western culture is something that exists and has certain properties. One cannot pretend that it doesn't just because one has been raised inside that culture and so is unable to look at it from an objective perspective.

One can just pretend western culture doesn't exist and that every Western individual is different and every western cultural product is different. Thing is, it is not. Western cultural standards exist.

Also, the US culture IS European. It's a country that exists as an European colony and whose population and cultural background are European. Western and European culture are synonymous.

Because I get the idea that people here think that Western culture doesn't exist and that millions of different people are different and so they do not share the same cultural background as well as stressing the "enormous" differences between two countries as similar as Canada and the US while feeling insulted that their culture is lumped together. Well, Canada is pretty much the same as the US. They share the same general Anglo Saxon variant of Western culture and are in the same language cultural bubble.

meg is way worse trust me

Meg and Peter are undignified in different ways. Meg is portrayed as a more sensible person, but within the show's setting she is overlooked, put down, ridiculed, and shamed. Peter is actually honored within the setting. He triumphs over circumstances, and he makes fun of and belittles others. I can't recall Peter ever being humiliated in a defeated way. If someone humiliates him he gets them back worse.

There is nothing wrong with generalizing about culture, and I don't think I said that Western culture isn't a thing. You can generalize about Western culture, but it is in contrast to Eastern culture. You run into problems when you make the culture of one country comparable to over a dozen other countries combined. When you talk about Family Guy and The Simpsons you can't extend that to Canada, Mexico, and Europe. The way that Americans depict women is not representative of the way Europeans do. If it is, where are your European examples?

I really hope you aren't feeling ganged up on Guap. I don't want to oppose you, and a lot of what you say is really insightful. But I do think this is a big recurring issue, and I just hope we can all grow through discussion and debate.

Think Guap has some points here even though i don't totally agree but Family Guy is an awful example for several reasons. One being the show isn't consistent in any way, characters take up different roles when the writes want that role played; one episode Peter can be seen as a loving father the next he is an irresponsible meth dealer. No doubt Peter is the most consistently undignified but Lois and Meg often take up this role in a big way too, Lois' backstory is that she is a crack whore and that often comes out in episodes, and it's not just the characters that bully Meg it's basically the writers they don't just write her being bullied they often make her gross and undignified and everything she is supposed to be getting bullied for.

There's also the fact that as far as i'm aware of at least there's no one comparable to Peter in any major western show. Charlie Kelly in It's Always Sunny is probably the closest i can come up with but i wouldn't call that a major show by Guaps definitions itt and then you have both Dee and Artemis in that show who are extremely undignified as well. You have picked the absolute extreme as an example and i don't think that works for this argument.

zotis makes a great point. Megs character is looked down upon while peter is celebrated to the point where he is being gloried more than made fun of

also family guy is definitely an outlier so i dont believe its the best example


edit: also if you care i saw ep 3 of dragon maid, great show so far!

There is a difference between portrayal and what happens to the character. Meg is portrayed as a more or less reasonable person that happens to be bullied a lot, Peter is portrayed as absolute trash and he doesn't get to be bullied systematically. Peter is undignified to the extreme in the sense that the impression he leaves to the audience is that he is a complete idiot and devoid of any morals, Meg gives the impression to the audience that bullying her is unfair, that she is being mistreated by others just because she is an ugly looking girl.

What Family Guy is saying is that it's wrong to mistreat women that do not fit western beauty standards and also that is not wrong to depict white men in a completely undignified manner. Family Guy is essentially a democratic party propaganda vessel as well given the ideology it actually advocates is actually the inverse of what is explicitly shown on screen.

Well I haven't run into European fictional narratives that are not male centric and that do not put women in pedestals, very much like American narratives. Harry Potter for instance, being a British novel series, even though it's written by a women is male centric (and note Hermione, the female friend of Harry, is portrayed as the smartest one) and the author also choose to hide her gender by publishing under her initials.

I don't find an European novels like Harry Potter (or George Orwell's novels) to be very different from American fictional narratives. Or popular European movies like The Intouchables (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Intouchables) are very, very similar to hollywood movies. Also, Watchmen the comic was written by Alan Moore who is British, hence it is also European culture and not technically American culture. Even though it is a superhero comic.

Well, American and European cultures are so closely intertwined that people do not even notice that popular Hollywood movies like Psycho, Sunset Boulevard, Independence Day and all the new Batman movies were directed by European film directors (respectively, British, Austrian, German and British directors). All very male centric as well.

Movies like 2001, The God, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in America are actually European movies despite being often though as American culture. They are all extremely male centric as well.

It's also very hard to separate American from European music: artists and bands like Beatles, Rolling Stones, Scorpion, ABBA, Iron Maiden etc are all European while artists like Michael Jackson, Metallica and Nirvana are American. Overall, it's hard to distinguish then but if you show some Japanese pop music artist like this:



This is alien to Western culture of music videos. Also, notice that in Japan female musical artists are relatively bigger than in the West on average which is mainly dominated by male-fronted bands (with some small exceptions like Madonna).

Ok. I think I should be more careful in my wording to not equate American = Western. But I think I should point out that the US is not really considered a separate culture from Europe in the same sense as Chinese or Japanese cultures are.

This map here is a good overview of the cultural spheres in the world today:


Western civilization is all countries in dark blue, so Poland to Canada is all the same civilization. Japan is it's own little civilization in green, while Chinese civilization is larger than China itself covering multiple Asian countries.

I noticed that in general, Western fictional narratives are very male centric and they are getting more feminist in recent decades but at the same time they are very careful in their portrayal of women. In Japan they have much fewer restrictions to the portrayal of women in fiction and hence they can write female characters with much more flexibility than in Western narratives.

Some people say Japan is more sexist than the West, well, that depends. Japan is a male dominated in the sense that almost all positions of authority are headed by males, it's top political and economic posts are headed by men to an even higher degree than Western countries (in Germany and UK now we have female heads of government for instance).

However, Japan is also much more sexually flexible in cultural terms. Gender expression is much more fluid in Japan as well as consumption of fictional narratives vary much more. In Japan it's common for young women to read gay romance manga between males (yaoi), in a way, it's women that imagine themselves as looking from the male perspective, while stuff like K-On! is the inverse: it's men looking through a heavily feminized perspective. They are not afraid of doing many things that Western culture views unacceptable of degrading to women. That's because Western culture puts women in pedestals and considers it unacceptable to remove them from the pedestals, as a result you are 200 times more likely to see men killed in a Western movie than a woman (the figure comes from Van Creveld (2013)), I don't have the corresponding Japanese figures but it is certain that those figures are much more even than 200 to 1. I believe Japanese popular culture in it's most radically progressive medium (anime) has already transcended sexism.

I also think that feminists by denouncing any undignified portrayal of women are actually objectifying women and contributing to sexism. Western feminists even criticize Japanese narratives that are mainly produced by women like those Moe shows western feminists call misogynous usually have 70% of female staff and often female directors.

One thing about the West's rule that females cannot be portrayed as undignified as males can is also a consequence of compensation for male privilege. Same with racial minorities: Peter from Family or Cartman from South Park can be so undignified because they are white males. Blacks cannot be portrayed in that manner in US popular culture as well, specially when interacting with whites (imagine the popular backlash if a black character among white friends was depicted as an idiot like Peter). The degree of flexibility in portrayal in US fiction is inversely related to the degree of social oppression that they suffer from.

I believe alot of the highest viewed music videos on youtube are female so i wouldnt say that music is male dominated

It is certainly less than it used to be. But if you list the most influential bands:

Beatles - all men
Rolling Stones - all men
Led Zeppelin - all men
Deep Purple - all men
Black Sabbath - all men
Nirvana - all men

Or the big rappers and folk musicians. All men.

Females are common in pop music videos and that's mainly because pretty girls are popular among music video viewers (often teenagers) but most female pop music artists are just dancers/singers who perform music that is written by anonymous studio employees who are mainly male.