#critical think
I came across this painting and couldn’t look away from it. Rene Magritte’s Not to Be Reproduced encourages us to look longer for a very important reason. It shows a man with his back to the viewer, standing in front of a mirror. On the ledge we see a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s(my inspiration for Poetry) only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordan Pimm of Nantucket. We cant help ourselves but to see a rather odd visual. Instead of man’s face being reflected as we would expect, the mirror shows the back of his head, while the book is reflected back in the mirror correctly. This obscurity strikes on the main theme of our ever changing perception. We assume what the mirror will reflect but we are denied the answer we expect. This theme becomes more prominent in today’s world where misinformation mends our perception by appealing to emotions and other storytelling measures. We take things at their face value(first impression is not the last impression for f**k sake) without ever questioning and interrogating things in the first place. The significance of Edgar’s book is that most of his work also deals with the perception of reality. Without getting too philosophical about nature of truth and falsehood, we like to think that our viewpoints about the world are backed up by the facts which we acquire through our timelines and newsfeed. Another major theme present in the painting maybe that of our own identity. The man looks with care into the mirror and wonders who he really might be. We lose our identity in this world where regulation of behaviour and pseudo interaction has become quite the norm. We are always hungry for praise, attention and worried about opposition and in this way lose much of our originality in thinking. We don’t have a secure hold on our values and judgements. This technique of hiding faces, is used by Magritte in many of his paintings like The Lovers, Son of Man and the Great War. This technique evokes confusion, unease and curiosity. Therefor i think, we should use these ordinary moments in our ordinary lives by cleaning up our conflicting inner selves.
“Let teenage girls get excited about things without shame.”
but also
“Teach teenage girls to think critically about the media they consume, lest they internalize and replicate harmful messages.”
#i feel like the first applies to pumpkin spice lattes#the second to make up culture and fashion and fatphobia etc
In which “teach teenage girls to think critically about the media they consume, lest they internalize and replicate harmful messages” ACTUALLY means “I think shippers and writers should be held morally responsible for “incestuous,” “pedophilic” and “abusive” ships because I am actually the one who has a hard time separating fiction from reality, and even though I’m a writer I see NO PROBLEM in advocating for censorship based on material I personally find distasteful. And I’m going to dress this all up as moral concern for young women so that I look morally superior, but I also look vaguely misogynistic because I want to control the porn women consume and don’t believe they have the morals or the intelligence to consume fiction responsibly.”
No seriously. This person believes it’s irresponsible to… ship fictional characters. And I placed the terms “abuse, incest and pedophilia” in quotes, because I have seen everything up to and including to unrelated, adult characters with a height difference who had an argument one a pedophilic, incestuous, abusive relationship.
But sure. Shippers are the irresponsible ones
I’ve already addressed your entire misappropriated argument in several posts before, and I have nothing more to say except “once again, you completely miss my point.”
So here we go.
Hey, you know how you take issue with use of the word “Pedophilia”?
Cool. I take issue with the word “censorship” because what most anti-antis (What a godawful name) consider to be an attack on their precious personal freedom (which is really mostly just an unchecked sense of entitlement) is not censorship.
It is actually very, very hard for someone in a fandom space to censor you, because regular users of the internet simply don’t have that far-reaching power. Censorship must be public, it must be done by those in power, and it must prevent the person being censored from communicating their ideas to the public such to the extent that the average user cannot find your content.
- Privately blocking someone on social media is not censorship
- Sending reports to tumblr or Ao3 of material the goes against ToU is not censorship
- Telling someone “Your ship is bad and you shouldn’t ship it” is not censorship
So when someone posts a comment saying “Dear god, why are you portraying two brothers having sex with each other, you fucking weirdo” they are not censoring you. They are judging you.
When a group of people get together and say, “Yeah, it’s morally wrong to portray incest as romantic or ok, and we won’t support creators who do this” they are not censoring you. They are boycotting you.
When someone reports untagged, unflagged NSFW content involving minors to tumblr for breaking TOU, they are not censoring you, they are enforcing the guidelines that tumblr has set out that you agreed to follow in the first place by signing up to their service. If tumblr deletes your content, TUMBLR is censoring you, not the person who reported you.
No one is stopping you from creating your content. You are still free to create and post as much objectionable content as you desire, but you are not free from social scrutiny of those who don’t want to have you or your content in their communities.
And once again, from the bottom of my weary consciousness
I, and others like me, ARE NOT AGAINST PORTRAYALS OF OBJECTIONABLE CONTENT including, but not limited to: murder, pedophilia, abuse, incest, horror themes, villainy, rape, racism, sexism, homophobia, genocide, etc
WE ARE AGAINST CONTENT THAT PORTRAYS THESE SUBJECTS AS GOOD
If you cannot tell the difference between these things, the problem is you.
