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i've yet to see a non-white person anywhere, the gay references seem to be all 'look at the freaks' and it's fatphobic to boot.
Oh, that's all very true, but it's also true of a great majority of American tv. It seems a bit unfair to single out that one show, bearing that in mind.
Last night I saw the new
Nerve.com tv show on HBO, and it bothered me for some very similar ways ... For those of you not familiar with Nerve and too lazy to check up the link, it's a website/magazine which is created for the yuppie demographic, it sells itself as 'smut for intellectuals', which obviously is a laughable concept in and of itself.
So, in all the versions of the magazine, it's meant to be for sexy sensualist young people who are smart and openminded. But if you look closely, it's really about skinny, sexy, trendy urban hipsters, and how THEY are sexy, and what THEIR sexual desires are. The magazine plays a lot of lip service to homosexuality and bisexuality, but so long as they are sexy, skinny, trendy urban hipsters. Same goes for blacks, latinos, asians...you name it.
The tv version exaggerates all of the problems....the only time you ever see black people is when they are at a party in full yuppie gear, or when a muscular black man is fucking a small white woman, with a lingering shot of his grinding ass. The only time you see asians is at an office meeting (they show the entire Nerve staff -- all of them skinny attractive yuppie types) and a hot writhing asian girl.
You only see overweight people on random street shots, mostly looking incredulously at the antics of Nerve-approved exhibitionists. The only lesbians that you see are 20 year old lipstick lesbians.
On and on... it just irks me so much. I just hate the way it sells itself in theory as a celebration of sexuality, but then goes on to eliminate such a huge number of different people from the equation...in a way it feels like it seeks to deny other people sexuality if they don't meet their qualifications for what hot sex should look, act, feel, and think like...
It's not too much different from a lot of things in pop culture, but in this, it seems like its being honest with *itself*, like they actually think they are something more than just smut designed specifically for pretentious yuppies...
ah, anyway, sorry to throw in this tangent. I guess we're both coming from similar places in terms of why these things bother us... |
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