Quote:
Originally Posted by Ficfactor
The problem is that a feminist will argue that your depiction, despite being obvious fantasy, promotes harmful misogyny in real life. If you ask them how, you're a misogynist.
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Feminist here, and I do think that his depictions ARE sexist, but they are also fantasies. Fantasies I enjoy as well.
The short of it is that fetishizing a person being a bimbo makes a person, on some level, have real world desire to have real people act or be that way, and it becomes a problem when a person only proceeds to value a person of the other gender when they are that way, or they don't respect it when other people OR other portrayals don't go that way.
Let me be clear about something, forceful transformation ESPECIALLY of an enslaving type is not something I would ever wish or want or condone in real life. What's more, people have a right to find it disturbing, disgusting, or distasteful. However, so long as no people are hurt, forcibly involved, or persuaded in bad faith to participate, a private fantasy is just that: private.
What we do, on our scale, is private. We willingly join or view the products of our fantasies and can just as easily look away.
However, I do think that there lies a problem when things start becoming mainstream or highly present in the day to day. Representation on a large scale is something we should be aware of and women (or for that matter men) should not feel pressured into harsh gender roles. A woman should have the right to be a stripper or a scientist and not face social or professional backlash or stereotyping. A woman should not have to fulfill a particular body type to be respected or taken seriously as a person. On that note, a man should be able to be a businessman or a stay at home dad to take care of the kids without facing any stigma, and that (believe it or not) is another aspect of feminism, at least as every feminist I know defines it.
The problem is that when we have portrayals in popular media that are extremely one sided about how only tall thin pretty women are portrayed in the media as a whole, all the while women in the professional world face much higher scrutiny when trying to fulfill what was classically considered "masculine" roles such as breadwinning and leadership, it is understandable that a fantasy that involves a person trying to buck stereotypes being forcibly driven into the stereotypical bimbo role is something that could be disturbing or at the very least disgusting to someone who has faced and fought against that exact thing.
Bimboization is not normal, and it shouldn't BE normal, it's a fetish. If you can respect the idea of it being a video game character so you shouldn't go around murdering people with a sword, you can respect the idea of bimboization being okay only on written pages or images.
I hold pornography (which is entirely what this really is) to a different sort of standard than I do mass media. In Mass media, representation and presentation of different groups and people matter, and we need to be conscience of what we are doing and who it might affect since it very specifically is for public consumption. Private fantasy however, should not be held to that same expectation. We understand the difference as adults, and should be taught that as a young age what one might get off to in fantasy does NOT necessarily have any right to go in the real world, especially when a person's consent is involved.
There are grey areas of course, where it's hard to define what is private fantasy and publicly sold and normalized, but in my feminist (or at least trying to be feminist) views, this is private fantasy and meant to be consumed as such.
tl:dr Jerk off to what you want, so long as it doesn't put expectations on others or change how you treat people.