Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alyssa Rosenberg, criticism, culture, gender, violence
Alyssa has an interesting pair of posts up about violence against women on TV:
Is it disturbing that some directors and writers treat violence against women as a joke, or as a form of glamor? Absolutely. But I’m not necessarily against all portrayals of women as under attack. If those portrayals illustrate and make clearer to people the hideousness of rape, of murder, of intimate partner violence, I’m hard-pressed to say they shouldn’t exist.
For me, the distinction here is really between exposure and endorsement. I think generally we liberals are more likely to criticize media for what they endorse (“that scene is a sympathetic portrayal or rape”), whereas conservatives are more likely to criticize media for what they expose us to (“that scene shows graphic sex”). I wrote more about this here. I’ll be the first to admit though that the distinction often becomes hazy in practice. Take Lars von Trier’s movie Antichrist: defenders claim its long graphic portrayal of extreme emotional and physical abuse of a woman really is sympathetic to her (or even that she is a stand-in for the male director); critics accuse the director of reveling in the misogyny and lacking irony when he has the victim say that maybe women deserve all their suffering because they are fundamentally evil. Personally I’ve found the criticisms more compelling, but I won’t come down strongly without seeing the movie. And I don’t want to see it.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: comedy, culture, George Bush, humor, media, Stephen Metcalf
Lest it be said that I only transcribe Slate’s Culturefest for the sake of criticism, I wanted to highlight this insight from Stephen Metcalf from last week:
…The real function of satire right now in American life, which is sort of two-pronged. One is it’s a psychic compensation for those of us who look at American public life and regard it as insane, ridiculous, and completely unsatisfying. By way of compensation, we tune into Colbert and the Daily Show, and maybe whatever other sources, Saturday Night Live. And we laugh. I don’t want to minimize that at all, but as an agent of change, or a place to place one’s political hopes, I think one is going to walk away extremely amused and very disappointed.
And then secondly it’s an avenue of forgiveness for everybody in American life almost regardless of what they’ve done. I mean one half expects to turn on Saturday Night Live and discover that Charles Manson is hosting and doing funny skits about Sharon Tate and we’re all expected to forgive him. The ability to poke fun at yourself has become now a universal absolution really in American life. And the best example being George Bush, who takes us on a hopeless war that kills thousands of Americans and god knows how many Iraqis, and somehow he’s still likable because he can make fun of himself because he makes a short film skitting about how he can’t find the weapons of mass destruction…There is a way – Dana am I completely wrong about this, am I just being a total grouch – there is a way in which satire has become politically neutralizing, which is exactly the opposite of what it’s supposed to be.
No, Stephen, you are not just being a total grouch. Beyond that, I’ll just say for now that I’m ambivalent about prong #1, and I totally agree about prong #2.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 30 Rock, Alyssa Rosenberg, criticism, culture, gender, media, race
Somewhere in between catching up on Alyssa’s great (relatively) new blog and hearing that 30 Rock just got more Emmy nominations than anything ever, it occurred to me that among the proto-posts I’ve meant to write here is one disagreeing with Alyssa’s take that 30 Rock “has done a terrific job with ethnic humor”:
Ethnic humor is, I think, generally effective under a couple of fixed circumstances: a) when it comes from within the minority group being parodied, as with the best of Woody Allen and the Jews, b) it expresses something true that is difficult to say under polite or serious circumstances by carrying something far beyond its logical conclusion or realistic bounds, c) it subverts our expectations or understanding of the group in question, or of the teller. I think 30 Rock in particular has done a terrific job with ethnic humor, whether it’s Irish…or African-American (the running feud between Tracy and Twofer fulfills all three categories at once), especially in Tracy’s plans for a Thomas Jefferson movie, which refer to the former president as a “jungle-fever haver,” while also mocking African-American actors like Eddie Murphy
I’ll take Alyssa’s word for it that the racial humor about Blacks comes from Tracy Morgan, but I don’t think it tends to get at hard truths or subvert expectations. I watched all of 30 Rock in a short stretch a couple months ago, after having pretty much avoided it because I disliked the pilot so much when it first came out – largely because of the Tracy Jordan character. My boyfriend et al were right that it’s a great show and was worth a second chance. But I still think the racial humor is the weakest point – the most common trope seems to be “Black guy [Tracy] that gets away with stuff too much.”
The episode that epitomizes this for me (spoilers ahead, but they’re from memory so could be inaccurate) is the one in which Liz gets fed up with Tracy for never showing up to rehearsal on time and never learning his lines. Liz announces she’ll start holding everyone to the same standard, with the implication that she’s been letting him slide because he’s Black. She gets her comeuppance when Tracy starts being super-disciplined but announces Liz will no longer get special treatment because she’s a woman. That means she has to refill the water cooler and come to a strip club, which is enough to break her by the end of the episode and make her abandon her equal-standards project. In other words, women will get to keep abstaining from strip clubs and manual labor and Blacks will get to keep abstaining from punctuality and discipline.
What’s clever about this? It seems to me it’s hard get something good out of this without taking some kind of double-double negative/ “stereotype of a stereotype” position. What are they sending up in this episode? This is not a rhetorical question. Who or what is being satirized here? Is it satirizing people who believe that African-Americans are undisciplined? If so, why contrast that with the belief that hetero women object to being forced to strip clubs? Is it satirizing ostensible liberals who are willing to believe uncomplimentary things about Black people? Satirizing people who push for equal standards for everyone? People who push for special treatment for some people? Black people who “play the race card” to get out of showing up the work? Women who say they want to be treated equally but expect men to do the heavy lifting?
It’s provocative to joke that making a Black guy come to work on time is like making a woman come to a strip club, but I don’t see how it’s illuminating or even ironic.
I mention that episode because it’s the most flagrant example, but also because a lot of 30 Rock’s humor about race (Irish jokes excepted) seem to fall into that category. Edgy, but not really subversive. Based in stereotypes without really upending them. I agree with Alyssa that some of the jokes revolve around Tracy Morgan’s character (Tracy Jordan) trying to maintain a certain Black male image that’s not really him (pretending to be adulterous, or illiterate). But a lot of the jokes just come down to him being stupid or clowning around, him getting away with what others can’t, and more sympathetic characters having to put up with it.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: culture, Dana Stevens, Disney, film, gender, Julia Turner, media, Pixar, race, Slate, Stephen Metcalf
I was listening to the Slate’s latest (very enjoyable) Culture Gabfest today and was disappointed to see (well, hear) their discussion of the absence of women in Pixar movies (it’s roughly 33:00 to 37:00). First they establish that, indeed, the heroes in Pixar movies are always men, never heroines. But then Julia Turner interjects that, merits of the criticism aside, “I just resist the sort of close political reading of children’s entertainment,” offering as an example the “flap” over Disney and race – first, Disney was criticized for offering its multi-ethnic audience only Caucasian protagonists (I remember when I was in the Disney demographic that the bad guys in Aladdin had Middle Eastern accents, but not the good guys), and now that Disney is making a movie with a Black heroine, people are criticizing the portrayal. Turner and her fellow gabfesters don’t like this criticism. What makes their criticism of the criticism especially annoying is that they’re not even arguing Disney’s critics are totally off-base. Turner concedes that:
this one actually did seem sort of objectionable: part of the twist of this movie is that when she kisses the frog, she turns into a frog instead of him turning into a prince, so we don’t even get to see the Black princess on screen for half the film because she’s going to be a frog, so all of these points are incredibly legitimate, but there’s something pedantic about incredibly close reading.
This strikes me as a particularly weird kind of triangulation that tends to crop up when some liberals approach race: I wish this institution could do a better job in terms of racial equality, and I wish people would stop calling so much attention to it. Turner doesn’t suggest that activists are calling for boycotts of Disney or kidnapping children of Disney executives or otherwise acting out of proportion. She just takes issue with finding fault – even if the fault is there – in the racial undertones of well-intentioned entertainment, especially children’s entertainment. I know not everyone relishes rooting out political meaning in kids’ movies as much as I do. But shouldn’t we be more concerned, rather than less, about how movies portray race or gender when the people consuming the product are children? If, say, obscene language would bother us more (or only) in a kids’ movie, why should these movies be immune from criticism for only showing Caucasians or men or Caucasian men as heroic?
If it’s good for millions of children who consume these movies (including the White ones) to see heroes who aren’t all White, how is it bad to call attention to it when they don’t? Does the perceived bad of talking “pedantically” about race, or “politicizing” kids’ movies, outweigh the bad of kids seeing only White heroes, or only seeing a Black heroine when she spends half her screen time as a green frog? As this article (in Slate!) on the paucity of Black college football coaches reminds us, for decades business people who think themselves race-blind have still seen White as the safe choice to avoid alienating racists. If Disney worries about losing the business of some White people by offering non-White protagonists, shouldn’t they be made to worry at a minimum that only having White heroes will subject them to “close political reading?”
As the podcast closes, Dana Stevens worries about Disney executives holding “focus groups” about race, rather than having the freedom of Pixar to “just come up with a story and do it” in a way that isn’t “sanitized” (must we choose between sanitized and whitewashed?). Stephen Metcalf agrees, as does Turner:
I wonder if it will be depressing when Pixar eventually does have a female protagonist, because it will feel like the boys of Pixar capitulating to criticism instead of following their whimsy.
Stevens responds that “it’s just going to take someone coming along with a great story that’s about a girl.”
Saying that none of Pixar’s ten movies so far feature a female heroine just because they happen to keep coming up with great stories about boys strikes me as about as exculpatory as saying your friends – or your country club, or your Senate – are all White because you’re just waiting for a great worthy person of color to come along and join the group. If the “whimsy” of Pixar’s boys guides them exclusively to stories about other boys, and critics get together to challenge that, why should we root for the boys’ club to win out? Does whimsy trump equality?
Why did the Battlestar Galactica finale feel like a letdown? A big part of it was the reductionism of the pat ending, in which all the remaining narrative and character threads either lead to the colonization of Earth or are rendered irrelevant by it. Faiths that long conflicted – generating some of the tension and mystery of the show – are squeezed unconvincingly into harmony: Roslin’s faith in her destiny and her gods of sacrifice, Baltar’s faith in himself and his god of narcissism, Starbuck’s sense of dark and unavoidable purpose. Everything, we’re left to infer, was leading them to the same place. That conclusion rounds off the edges that made these beliefs interesting – the uncertainty of whether Roslin was prophetic or delusional, the outrageousness of Baltar’s spirituality of selfishness, the dread that Starbuck is trapped as an agent of collective doom. In the end, all of it was a way to get from A to B. They all meant the same thing, which leaves you with the sense that it didn’t mean that much.
Starbuck may have been dead, but she didn’t doom anybody after all. Baltar’s cult of self-love without consequences turns out not to have had any bad consequences. Not that a good ending would have required Baltar or anyone else to suffer for bad decisions – I just wanted the sense that somebody somewhere down the line is affected. Instead we’re left with an optimistic fatalism. It was an ending that reminded me of the movie Signs – no need to angst anymore about faith or the consequences of your choices, because it was all a plan and it worked out.
The difference is that Battlestar Galactica, unlike Signs, was often terrific, which is what makes the ending frustrating. It echoes a frustration I felt at a lot of points in the show: Battlestar Galactica is rightly praised as a dark show where textured characters face hard choices and make bad decisions with bad consequences. But too often, consequential decisions and revelations register a shock but then turn out not to have much consequence. These are the final four Cylons! But they didn’t know it themselves, so their friends can only hold it against them for so long, and they mostly still get to do what they were doing before. Gaius Baltar is still being manipulated by the Cylon that deceived him so they could conquer Earth! But they’re both angels (literally?) We are all descended from half-Cylon Hera (!) and we are now reenacting the history of our human ancestors (!). But don’t those two revelations sort of cancel each other out? If we’re are doing what the humans did an epoch ago, why did they need to save a hybrid baby to be our progenitor? Some of the relationships on the show, like between the two Adamas, also suffer from a sort of cataclysm fatigue – every half-season another betrayal or near-death experience sends the father-son relationship spinning off in another direction, partially negating the last one, to the point that their relationship, though compelling, feels like less rather than more than the sum of what’s happened to them.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Barack Obama, culture, John McCain, Marc Ambinder, media, music, TV
Reviewing Entertainment Weekly interviews with the candidates, Marc Ambinder expresses surprise that
In some ways, Obama has the tastes of a 72 year old man; McCain has the tastes of a 47 year old whippersnapper. Who knew?
At risk of sounding cynical, why should we be surprised when Obama associates himself with Dick Van Dyke and McCain associates himself with Usher? Isn’t this what candidates often do in interviews – try to address potential vulnerabilities and convince more people that they’re more like them than they realized (that is, when they’re not focused on doubling-down on their perceived strengths)? That the guy smeared as a secretly foreign terrorist fist jabber touts an old white guy and the really old white guy who can’t use a computer touts a young R & B artist seems to make a lot of sense. Same reason around election time we often hear more from Democrats about their love of guns and Jesus and from Republicans about their love of Black people and the environment.
Updated (8/25/08) to correctly identify Usher’s musical genre, though not in time to avoid looking to Alek like an elderly white guy.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: culture, Maya Angelou, media, NYT, Oprah Winfrey
I am not being cute when I say that I have no idea how this article made it into the paper of record. It’s like someone set out to write a not very relevant or interesting article, lost interest halfway through, and accidentally posted it on the website of the New York Times. Oops.
That’s the American Dream: Someday you too can become famous enough that when you and someone else famous you’re friends with support different primary candidates, that’s news – even (maybe especially) if you have no comment on it.
What’s the story here: That Oprah and Maya Angelou could prefer different politicians? That being friends hasn’t swayed one of them to change her endorsement? That making clashing endorsements hasn’t ended their friendship?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: culture, David Brooks, family, media, NYT, youth
I’m no fan of hipsterdom (it says a lot that it takes preppy-ism to make hipsterdom look goood, sort of like it takes feudalism to make laissez-faire capitalism look good). But this David Brooks column railing against hipster parents who dress their kids in hipster outfits is just silly (makes John Tierney look good – almost). To read Brooks, you’d think that the hipsters were the first and only parents to impose their particular culture on their children. Everybody else must just dress their kids in what they’d be wearing in the state of nature, right? What with all the sneering about the counterculture’s dupes, he never quite gets around to specifying what that should be – just that it has something to do with “the dignity of youth.”
I’ll take a baby T-shirt that says “My Mom’s Blog Is Better Than Your Mom’s Blog” over one with a big Nike swoosh any day.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Aaron Sorkin, Alek Felstiner, culture, TV
Alek puts together a semi-authoritative list of Aaron Sorkin’s latest pilot’s borrowing from his earlier work and his recent life, and a check-list of the borrowings yet to be:
So, what’s missing? We need a character whose parents split up after a long time, preferably because the father had a prolonged secret affair. We need something to be, sarcastically, a “barn burner,” and we need someone to ask if you’ve fallen on your head. We need a season one finale that will actually answer the question “What Kind of Day Has it Been?” We need a character whose younger sibling died, and who blames him/herself for it in a repressed way. We need legs that go all the way to the floor, and Shakespeare the way it was meant to be played. We need to make someone happy by coming home at the end of the day. We need someone writing a letter because something that was supposed to have ended (tennis match, filibuster), is going on way too long. We need someone “raising the level of debate.” We need smart people who disagree with you. We need a fight over the supposed significance of an anniversary. We need, when the fall is all that’s left, for it to matter a great deal, and we need to know that the fact that we want to please you, pleases you. We need underwear in an inappropriate place. We need you not to talk to us like we’re “other people.” We need someone complaining about the lack of admonishment from the clergy over religious violence. We need people accidentally saying the wrong word to someone important, then obsessing over it. We need Josh Malina.
Of course, when you’re as good as Aaron Sorkin, we let you get away with it.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: culture, George Bush, intelligence, language, media, Mel Gibson, Mitt Romney, Usher
Guest Istapundit Brannon Denning makes what might be a clever point based on a reasonable comparison – if it weren’t a tortured point based on an absurd comparison:
Mitt Romney apologized for using the term “tar baby” to describe the Big Dig debacle. Can we save the public shaming for public officials who actually intend their comments to be offensive? Like, say, Mel Gibson?
How short-sighted of critics to focus on the offensive comments of a prominent governor and presidential aspirant rather than those of a celebrity crank, right? I mean, these are probably the same critics who think that George Bush lying about intelligence to sell a war was more important than Usher implying to his fans that he had cheated on his girlfriend in order to sell an album.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: agenda, Ann Coulter, art, backlash, Bill O'Reilly, Brokeback Mountain, Bryan Collingsworth, culture, Democrats, faith, GOP, LGBT, media, movies, PC, Thomas Frank, Tucker Carlson, V for Vendetta
Last week’s Oscar ceremonies brought a crescendo – at least for now – to the animus heaped upon Brokeback Mountain, and upon Hollywood, by the right. Judging by watching Tucker Carlson tonight, professionally outraged conservative cultural critics have moved on to V for Vendetta.
But it’s worth reflecting on the clever packaging of that supposed backlash by the main organs of the conservative movement. Tucker Carlson offered an emblematic shtick: He hasn’t seen the movie, he has nothing against gay people, but “at some point, Hollywood should give up its mission as a kind of, you know, evangelist for a political persuasion and just shut up and make the movie.” Such an argument ignores the ways in which politics shape and are shaped by any art that engages with power, identity, morality, desire – that is, pretty much any art out there (this is a position that’s gotten me in trouble before). But more importantly, it’s fundamentally mendacious, as Bryan Collingsworth noted for people who refuse to see a movie because of content they oppose (or, as some would protest too much, they simply “aren’t that interested in”) to claim that their objection is to the politicization of film. Conservative critics who boast that they won’t patronize a “gay movie” suggest the logical implication that they go to other movies because they’re heterosexual movies. In a context of sexual inequality, there’s nothing apolitical about that. Just a political position that dare not speak its name.
What we get instead is a perfunctory faux backlash whose dimensions are effectively presaged by Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? One is the sight of blue-state urban media elites rising to defend the ostensible sensibilities of imagined heartland Americans. Needless to say, Bill O’Reilly and company aren’t doing them any favors by projecting their antipathy towards their imagined “gay cowboy movie” onto the imagined faceless cornfield-dwelling masses. But speaking for an imagined heartland, like speaking against an imagined “political correctness” regime (for extra credit, do both at once), provides conservatives an excuse to fulminate against unpopular minorities while touting their own tolerance. It’s not that their intolerant, it’s just that they take offense at the hated liberals’ supposed intolerance of other people’s supposed intolerance.
Such targeting, too, is laid out well in Frank’s book: The enemy isn’t people who are gay. It’s the liberal elites who think they know better than everyone else. Such anti-elite animus has a much broader constituency than naked anti-gay animus (even gay conservatives can – and do – sign on). The people who made Brokeback Mountain are the same ones, Coulter and company insist, who want to reach down and take away all the guns, who want to reach up and pull down the Ten Commandments, and who make an annual tradition of warring against Christmas. Despite its own contradictions (as Frank ably argues, the elite theory requires suspending the media from the principles of the free market in which good conservatives believe so fervently), the anti-elite animus serves to tap into the real class resentment of working Americans while giving those in the real elite a way to decry what the hated liberals produce without admitting to actual prejudice. It’s a colossal cop-out. But it’s also a brilliant way to broaden the supposed backlash and deepen its political cache.
So what do we do about it? Broaden the class depictions of gay men and women in politics and popular media. And build a progressive movement that can push the Democratic party to offer an agenda that speaks to this country’s real class divisions as compellingly as the Republican party speaks to imagined class aesthetics. For a start.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bill O'Reilly, culture, faith, freedom, Jesus, Jon Stewart, minority, Samantha Bee, youth
A few days ago, I watched Bill O’Reilly assure viewers of his TV show that Christians had won the War on Christmas (TM). “Christians have the right to defend their traditions,” he said triumphantly.
It’s easy to laugh at the excesses of the War on Christmas crusaders (Dan chronicled them well here). But it’s a campaign that’s worth paying attention to. It serves as a sobering reminder of how many of the standard-bearers of the right believe themselves to be spokesmen for a righteous majority besieged by hostile religious, sexual, and racial minorities.
Behind the rhetoric about religious freedom, the demand of the War on Christmas crusaders, as articulated by their most earnest advocates, is that both public and private employees greet people of all religions as if they were Christians. They want schools encouraging teachers to say “Merry Christmas” to their students and department stores encouraging check-out clerks to say it to customers. Having them say the “Happy Holidays” instead, which merely acknowledges the possibility of a multiplicity of religious observances, is to be seen as religious persecution of Christians.
Bill O’Reilly showed a Wal-Mart commercial in which “Merry Christmas” appeared on screen, but declared it only to be a step in the right direction from Wal-Mart because it appeared with the hated “Happy Holidays” and neither was mentioned in the voice-over. This is a few weeks after he showed a (year-old) clip of Samantha Bee on the Daily Show joking about separation of church and state and then sneered “Merry Christmas, Jon Stewart.”
So what we’re facing is self-appointed spokespeople for a majority insisting that everyone, be they members of the majority or not, speak as if that majority encompassed everyone in the country.
As for the real desecration of the values of Christ this holiday season, not a creature on the “religious right” is stirring, not even a mouse.
A generation ago, my Dad got kicked out of his first grade classroom for refusing to write a letter to Santa Claus. Unfortunately, that’s still what some people have in mind when they say “family values.”
Happy holidays to all our readers.
As if MSNBC’s “Are you spending more or less than last holiday season?” survey wasn’t bad enough, they just read an e-mail from a woman named Kathy who plans to spend “over $1,000″ on a new XBox for her child on EBay. The correspondent’s response: “You’re a nice Mom, Kathy.”
I guess any low-income women hoping to be nice mothers are out of luck.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, Bernard Goldberg, Catherine McKinnon, conservatism, culture, feminism, Kos, language, law, left, liberalism, Rick Santorum, right, sex, speech, violence, Zell Miller
A series of dust-ups in the media about the media this summer – from the flap on Kos about an ad with women mudwrestling to Jon Stewart’s arguments with Bernard Goldberg, Zell Miller, and Rick Santorum about whether the culture has coarsened – has gotten me thinking about the different ways liberals and conservatives consider and critique what’s in the movies and on TV.
One clear but too-often-obscured distinction is between criticism and calls for censorship. Rick Santorum gets at this in his book when he insists in his book that “If it’s legal, it must be right…it must be moral.” If one accepts Santorum’s frame – which is also Catherine McKinnon’s – then the question of what should be in the media and the question of what should be censored from the media are – at least in particularly agregious cases – mapped onto each other. Too often, progressives answer other progressives’ media criticism as if it were an implicit call for censorship, rather than as the “more speech” which the left has traditionally and rightly seen as the answer to bad speech.
Liberal and conservative approaches to media criticism are also distinguished by choice – or at least prioritization – of boogeymen from amongst sex, violence, bigotry, et al. And, arguably, by the question of how much we should care at all.
But related, and – I think – more interesting – is a distinction I haven’t seen discussed: Is the problem what kind of behaviors and images are shown on TV, or what kind of ideology is advanced there? Do we care what the media exposes or what it endorses? By asking the question and making the distinction, I guess, I’ve already pegged myself in the liberal camp that says that the distinction is a meaningful one and that what’s endorsed is a more worthwhile ground for consideration or condemnation than what’s exposed. That’s not to say that it’s possible to present images or actions with neutrality – only that it’s possible to present the same ones with a whole range of meanings and judgments.
If we’re concerned about sex, we can worry about whether sex happens on TV or we can worry about whether the sex on TV is portrayed as a good or bad (or healthy or unhealthy, or cool or uncool) thing. If we’re concerned about sexism, we can worry about whether people are portrayed being or acting sexist on TV or we can worry about whether that sexism is presented in a favorable light. In each case, I’d say that if you see the thing as an evil (my take: sexism is, sex isn’t), your time and energy is better spent worrying about how good or bad that evil is portrayed to be than about how often it appears on the screen.
That’s why the fixation on nudity on TV is doubly conservative – conservative for the contention that human sexuality is what media consumers should be guarded against and conservative for the concern over the naked image itself rather than the social meaning with which it appears. Sure it’s easier to keep a tally of naked breasts than of positive portrayals of behaviors you think are negative, but the tendency of right-wing critics to go for the former approach seems to be about more than convenience. And that approach – grouping together breasts shown breast-feeding, breasts shown in an intimate moment between spouses, and breasts shown on a child being molested – leaves them looking that much more like middle-schoolers.
Among the problems with an approach to media criticism which fixates on what viewers are exposed to rather than what they see endorsed is that it lets pass all kinds of social meanings which are problematic but not explicit. Whatever your values, your chances of seeing them spread in society are affected more by G-rated movies than Playboy.
