Forum - View topic

INTEREST: Online Petition Demands Content Warnings for Sexual Violence in Weekly Shonen Jump

CrowLia wrote:

see what really needs to change so men don't grow up thinking molesting teenage girls from your bicycle is a funny hobby you can coyly brag about.

I know it is unfashionable in these days, but men don't become rapists and sexual assault children because of what they read, watch, or listen too. They do so because they are evil.

[snipped whataboutism]

TarsTarkas wrote:

CrowLia wrote: see what really needs to change so men don't grow up thinking molesting teenage girls from your bicycle is a funny hobby you can coyly brag about. I know it is unfashionable in these days, but men don't become rapists and sexual assault children because of what they read, watch, or listen too. They do so because they are evil. [snipped whataboutism]

It's not "unfashionable" it's an incorrect and dangerous misconception. The idea that rapists and sexual abusers are "evil" or "monsters" not only inadvertently excuses them and the society that raised them of responsibility and criminalizes neurodivergent people, it creates the false sense of "evil men lurking in dark allies" overlooking the fact that most sexual assault is committed by someone in the victim's family. This idea mythologizes rapists as cartoonish Disney villains cackling in their dark basement, deranged social outcasts constantly planning their next attack, when in fact a lot of rapists don't even believe that what they're doing is wrong. And why would they, when the society around them keeps telling them that groping women is funny, that getting a flash of a teenage girl's panties is "lucky", that "no means yes", that a woman being upset and uncomfortable when her body gets violated is "sexy", when rapists and pedophiles routinely go unpunished?

You are right, manga, anime, videogames, books or movies don't make rapists become rapists, but they are part of the structural problem, the system that continues to make women and girls into sexual objects with no agency or power.

This is hugely important. I see the argument a lot, "nobody reads a manga/watches an anime and decides to do X" and that is true. 100%. But behavior doesn't just spontaneously manifest either. It is learned. It develops. There a numerous studies that show that immersion in a certain environment for long enough can change the way a person thinks, even if they begin with completely opposing views. This is similar to how group-think becomes a problem in the workplace. It's never something as simple as "they're just evil" or "they just don't know any better". Believing the problem to be so simple is the same as denying the problem even exists. And if a problem isn't even able to be recognized as a problem, there is no way it can be addressed, let alone solved.

It's not "unfashionable" it's an incorrect and dangerous misconception.

Nobody's saying media can make you believe things that are obviously impossible are suddenly possible. What they're saying is that the framing of an action can influence how people perceive similar actions in the real world. Teens reading Dragonball probably won't go out and flip skirts to emulate Master Roshi, but when somebody else does flip a skirt or grope a girl, it can offer a frame of reference where they see it as just a harmless prank instead of sexual harassment or assault. Or it can influence them to dismiss the girl being upset as her overreacting. THAT is where media routinely and consistently portraying nonconsensual sexual acts as funny or harmless or attractive becomes a problem, especially when standardized sex ed so rarely covers the topic of consent.

You are right, manga, anime, videogames, books or movies don't make rapists become rapists, but they are part of the structural problem, the system that continues to make women and girls into sexual objects with no agency or power.

I think you take a too wide of a shot here, if they don't make people behave badly, then how exactly are they a structural problem, or even a part of a structural problem?

I think you're thinking a bit too black-and-white, too all-or-nothing here.

Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:

I think you're thinking a bit too black-and-white, too all-or-nothing here.

Am I? Unlike fiction, there's tangible physical consequences/effects of smoking, for smokers and non-smokers alike, and consequently on society too in the form of raised healthcare costs, and no way to mitigate them without proper regulation.

Let’s focus on 2 things—
1-Most Shonen Jump readers are under 15

And that’s what everyone is saying. There are tangible effects on society through fiction, but it takes caring about them to realize what they are.

If you want to keep using the smoking metaphor consider this the period in time where we’re seeing a large increase in cancer in the population, but no one has fully admitted that it’s because everyone started heavily smoking for the last 20 years.

Fiction is not a magical thing that exists outside of our reality. Every work of fiction is drawn from real life, and they carry varying amounts of cultural weight for good or ill.

If you want to see more extreme examples of how fiction impacts the world then look into works like Siege or the The Turner Dairies and how they help radicalize and breed a slew of white supremacist terrorists.

At the very least we can all learn to admit things can cause harm so we can start to better understand exactly what that harm is.

Peebs wrote:

All of you who missed the point of the petition, should ask a woman how she feels about this.

A lot of women write and like ecchi series. Woman aren't a single unit, with the same view and thoughts. They're a diverse group of people, with different views and perceptions of the world and the works they consume