All these things...

National Baby Trials 😄

Gaston: "Everyone knows her father's a lunatic. He was in there tonight, raving-"

Fast placed music plays as the scene changes.

I AM A GLORIOUS EMPEROR, I CAN EARN THE LOVE OF MY CITIZENS!

I AM A GLORIOUS EMPEROR, I CAN ADEQUATELY PREPARE MY SUCCESSOR!

One story from that which I'll never forget was an incident the researcher observed where some lady let her dog piss on the garbage bags that one worker was collecting, the dog was basically just pissing on him. He arced up about that and called it out, and she defended herself. She genuinely didn't think it was an issue to let her dog piss on the garbage man, and was offended by the idea that this could be a fucked up thing to do. She submitted a complaint about it too. Sanitation workers are treated as if they are invisible, and also often punished when they make themselves visible through doing something like blocking traffic for any reason or taking issue with people treating them like shit.

The complaint didn't go anywhere, the people those complaints go to also work sanitation (or did in the past) and so they actually have a level of solidarity with the other workers, often claiming that they'll do something about it on the phone to the complainer, only to proceed to not do anything. But the fact that a call was made shows that this was an issue, even though there was no disciplinary action, it still showed that by making himself visible and not simply copping that mistreatment from the public, that worker had created a problem.

male audiences will happily watch a dozen superhero shows, but then something like Agent Carter or Supergirl turn up and they’re panned from the first trailer and have to struggle for ratings. male audiences will watch countless installments of a franchise as long as it’s about men doing man things but the second a character like Rey or Furiosa or god forbid four entire female Ghostbusters steps up and takes a position of prominence it’s “pandering sjw bullshit”.

this isn’t like… an opinion I’m pulling out of my ass here? this starts where earlier than tv shows and hollywood blockbusters, when all the kids in a class are reading Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or Eragon o Lord of the Rings or Maze Runner or whatever the hip book is right now. the books like that, the ones that become popular reading, are overwhelmingly about male leads, because male is still considered the default. 

there’s a split in YA literature, between books that are “for everyone” and “for girls”, and that’s honestly the entire issue in a tiny little box right there. stories about men are supposed to be accessible for everyone, but stories about girls are seen as 1.) inherently for women and 2.) something that only women will care about.

men grow up in a society that doesn’t make them go out of their way to get into the heads of women and empathize with then. historically it’s been very easy for men to not engage with female-led media if they don’t want to, whereas (like someone else commented on this post) girls and women have had very little choice in the past because everything was about men. we didn’t even question it.

and now the women are arriving in mainstream media in ways that say they’re important and they matter and

small (or sometimes not so small) but loud-enough-to-be-acknowledged groups of men lose. their. shit.

because they think there’s something inherently Not For Them about a woman’s story, and they never learned how to deal with it.