With little left to do for the week, and since I can't keep taking days off forever, I'm going to take the time to answer a question I get every now and then.
Today's question is: "Hey, ArcRoyale, how do I know you're doing the right thing? That is, what makes you so certain your cause is just and not just for your own benefit?"
Good question! I'll try and answer as best I can, and my answer will draw upon the last few times I answered a question or did an editorial.
The media has been recently called out for enculturating negative ideas into us, and one of the ways we see this is in how we've questioned older media. Of course, a lot of the criticism we've seen has been of the most ridiculous of things, like criticizing Mrs. Doubtfire as "transphobic" when that was never the intent. It's not like they were making something like Birth of a Nation, after all!
And yet, while we criticize older ideas as inappropriate, our audiences tend to look the other way for newer stereotypes. Both Darkton and I have criticized Straight Outta Compton for being yet another story of how black people in the ghetto have to rise up into white society, and how frequently black people have been portrayed in media as gangstas who are prone to saying a phrase I can't repeat in this blog but I'm sure you've heard before. Fifty Shades of Black provides a perfect example of how casually we do this sort of thing thinking these cartoon caricatures are acceptable ways of reaching out to the community.
The sad fact is, these days, even boys are used less and less for humorous nudity in animation. Nick doesn't use them much and Disney never did; all that leaves is CN to do the job. And so far, some of their scenes are being censored overseas, like a scene in the Steven Universe episode "Frybo" that would've flown perfectly years ago but is verbotem now. There's also the fact that FOX is cracking down on acceptable levels of nudity in their cartoons, meaning the only people who get to use them are people trying to intentionally offend.
That's not going to have a healthy effect on children. It's going to teach different things to different genders, and the result of both of those is going to be negative. For boys, it's going to teach them that a girl is only as good as her body, and that their body is a joke nobody wants to see, lowering confidence. For girls, it's going to teach them to diminish boys' suffering and see it as funny, and that their body is to be kept covered at all costs, lowering confidence. If it sounds like it diminishes the other sex and teaches them their bodies are worthless, it's only because it does.
My evidence that this kind of deprivation is having a negative effect on children growing up comes from DeviantArt. Of the many people whose mental growth has been stunted, a lot of their crayon drawing-like nude pictures include girls, because they've been continually denied them for so long. And whenever a picture of humorous nude boys shows up in their sights, they're sure to ask for a version with girls, because they absolutely need them having seen none. Their curiosity is leading them to ask the question, and so far they're not getting it.
This has more than one negative consequence, too. At some point, not being able to find it and asking what it looks like, some confused kid is gonna type into a search engine a look for what the girl looks like naked. However, that's gonna bring up a bunch of pornographic websites, possibly doing damage to them. I may have said pedophiles are born, not made, but child abuse is the sole way to make them, and seeing pornography at a young age is most certainly child abuse.
So if we don't start loosening standards, things are going to keep being stagnant. And if they haven't worked for the past several years, why are we doing nothing to change it?