Media Misogyny?

The following trailer has a lot of my Facebook friends buzzing today:

Upon watching it, my first reaction was moral support for the overarching message and purpose of the film, mixed with an apprehension about some of its more conspiratorial overtones which prevent me from giving my full-fledged endorsement. As a gay man- a group that I would argue is targeted and stereotyped as badly as any by the mass media- I have first-hand knowledge of the harmful psychological effects that negative media imagery about a group can have on a person, especially a person trying to come to terms with their own membership in said group. Without getting too mired in stereotypes myself, I've always considered myself a pretty ordinary guy in most respects- almost all of my friends from preschool to high school were straight guys who I'd do typical "guy things" with- play sports, play video games, watch superhero movies, etc. I knew that I felt a certain way about men that they seemed to feel about women, but I convinced myself that this fact didn't make me gay. How could it? I didn't act like the guys on "Will and Grace," and had no desire to. I have absolutely nothing against real-life flamboyant gay guys- they're just being themselves the same way I am and God bless them for it- I'm just not one of them, and the fact that the only portrayal of gay men I ever found in the media for most of my childhood and adolescence was a hyper-feminine caricature made my self-acceptance as a masculine gay man a much longer, more difficult process than it had to be. But is the media targeting gays and, as the above trailer demonstrates, women, out of a personal vendetta, or because it sells? This is where I break with the message of the video.

Conspiracy theories get people riled up and motivated to take hasty action, but they are very rarely (I mean close to 0% of the time) true. It disappoints me that people with a good, powerful message so often resort to such a cheap propaganda technique to gain followers. As anyone who's ever had any interaction with corporate big-wig, Gordon Gekko-types knows, such people have little principles outside of their desire for money and, sometimes, fame. Such is the nature of capitalism- a system which comes with both great benefits and terrible consequences. The culture in which the new technology that allowed mass media was born was one which had been dominated for thousands of years prior by straight white men, who thought a certain way about women, gays, and other groups, and rewarded those media programs that projected a vision consistent with their ignorant prejudices with their viewership and money. The problem lies not with the mass media, an unthinking actor that merely gives its audience whatever it wants, but with the cultural attitudes held by a people who reward such dreadful imagery and ask for more.

But there is hope- for the racist, sexist, and homophobic culture that capitalism and mass media came out of contained the seed for its own destruction. My main beef with the trailer for this film was that it got so carried away in its completely justified outrage at the media's portrayal of women, that it almost argues that the existence of mass media itself is a bad thing. On the contrary, the only reason we are conscious of the problem of sexism, homophobia, etc., in our culture, and at last have hope that we can combat and defeat those last traces of barbarism, are because we have a mass media at our disposal which has created a much more open and honest world. Dirty little secrets are an endangered species, my friends. Some of Western civilization's dirtiest were the very issues raised in this trailer and blog posting: racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. We are self-aware of them and can confront them only because it is now acceptable and possible to talk about them in the open. That could have never happened in the absence of mass media, which is precisely why underdeveloped societies in the third world still often have big time problems with those same issues. The way to eradicate these problems is not to destroy the only effective weapon we have at fighting them, but to use it to change the hearts and minds of the people who it markets to- a mission that I hope this film and its trailer continues to succeed at.