The Harmful Media

After the Second World War, in America, there arose a kind of anti-feminist backlash. Among affluent, educated, white women there was a strong trend of a return to the home, to the production of babies and of housewifery. Women, having recently won so much, seemed anxious to return to a kind of parody of "traditional" roles. In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in which she identified the trend and its causes. She uncovered first a kind of crisis, then some junk science supporting traditional roles, and finally a consciously directed media engine aimed at selling products to housewives, which in turn drove an entire media industry devoted to exalting the housewife.

The vast engine which produced this shift in culture, in a lot of ways, resembles the machine that brought us the Nazis: a crisis, some junk science, based on that a carefully managed media campaign and some unconscious media/ideological camp-following. The result was another cultural and behavioral shift.

The point here is that we have a fairly good idea of how media can shape culture, thought, and behavior. It's not a trivial thing at all.

At the same time, obviously, media reflects culture. Any trivial painting, photograph, song. Any mook who makes a thing, as a participant in a culture, is by definition making a thing that reflects that culture. It might be an outlier, but the sum total of all the media made by all the mooks is, by definition, that culture's media. There need be no vast engine of destruction to reveal culture. Culture is revealed in every gesture.

So you find some thing, some picture or song or whatever that bugs you. You say "this is racist" or "this is sexist" or "this is anti-trans hate speech." It occurs to you that this thing ought not to exist, because it is odious to you. You're not alone, it's probably odious to a lot of people. It's probably odious to me. It occurs to all of us that maybe the world would be a better place if this thing didn't exist.

The question is why? Is it harmful?

Well, if it is, or could become, part of one of these vast machines identified above, sure. These machines are not always obvious, so it's not necessarily obvious when you're looking at the thing. It could be steering thought in toxic directions. That is a toxic role for the picture, the song, the essay to be playing.

At the same time, it reveals culture for what it is. That's a positive role.

You might argue, and people do, that cultural harm is not the point. The point is that, essentially, the object makes me (or her, or them) feel bad, and that it enough to justify its destruction. While I sympathize here, I don't buy it, and mostly neither do the people making this argument. Invariably the argument spins off into systems of whatever-ism, and dark mutterings that hint at the "media alters culture, thought, behavior." And so, we come back around to the lack of any engine of change here.

Yes, these objects indicate systemic/structural whatever-isms. Those structures are real.

In general, though, these racist objects, these anti-trans objects, reveal the structure, they do not create it.

It is tempting to suppose anyway that if we but stamp out all media around these odious ideas that the ideas themselves will die out by some sort of alchemy, or through lack of support, somehow. I am pretty sure the Soviet Union tried this pretty hard, and it didn't work at all. Not even a little bit. But that's just one experiment, and maybe there's something in it.

I am not necessarily opposed to all destruction of media (I avoid the word "censorship" here because that leads to a really boring and irrelevant discussion.) If it makes you feel really super bad, well, that's a thing, right? I am not going to deny you your feelings, and I would be a monster to not wish for you to feel better.

At the same time, these things serve a real function in revealing culture, in holding it up to examination, mockery, and all the tools we have for changing our culture for the better. To suppress all mention of that we despise seems unlikely to encourage such positive change.

And at the same time further, we do need to keep our ears to the ground for those engines of change which appear to obvious in the rear-view mirror and yet invisible on the road ahead.

The answers are not obvious here. Any glib recital is practically guaranteed to be poorly thought out, likely wrong, and almost certainly ideologically motivated.