I won't speculate the way tomreedtom did above, but here's an opinion on your remarks:

Women and men keep getting programmed by the MSM and our peculiar cultures to be less suitable for each other.

That's precisely what the radfems say, and I tend to disagree more and more with that. The MSM isn't that powerful, inasmuch as it is really happening (I have my doubts) we're doing this ourselves, it's our own damn (cultural) fault.

Real people are untrustworthy, mean, shallow and they can hurt you, steal from you and make you feel bad about yourself. [...] A cartoon that smiles at you is far less threatening and unlike people, you can count on them.

Why? Can't they be programmed to be as bad as any real person? I'll bet that if marriages with videogame cartoons become a fad, we'll soon hear about bad characters exploiting their meatspace partners and destroying their self-respect also. After all, these characters are programmed by people just like us...

How many really are in a relationship with their romance novels, video games and porno rather than people?

Probably a lot more than you want to think about.

But probably not more and not less than have always been. So, don't announce the end of mankind just yet, will you?

actually, I think you're probably right in your observations about the choice of certain topics at Broadsheet. I will say, to their defense, that they've treated a number of other, more deserving topics as well -- it wasn't all Lady Gaga or photoshopped celebrities.

But since I'm actually quite interested in the relationship between 'media-based images' and people's self-image -- the standard assumption apparently being that the media are out there to get us -- I actually welcome the possibility of reading some commenters' opinions on the topic. So, not all is lost, then.

I very much agree with what you said. The standard assumption that the media are out there to get us, and that most of our problems come from them (rather than from our interactions with others throughout our lives -- family, friends, etc.), does seem quite overblown.

To social planners in general, I always proposed the example of the ex-Soviet Union. There, they had everything in their hands: all the media, the schools, the arts ('Socialist Realism'), even the (Orthodox) church. So whatever message they wanted to send out was sent out in many ways and by many sources. This did have consequences -- but often not the ones intended. Homo sovieticus never emerged out of the crazy mess that real people are, and Russians and their vassal peoples never became what state propaganda wanted them to be.

If under such near-ideal situations the media could not fashion people to be as they wanted -- and when that was precisely their stated purpose ('to build a New Soviet Man') -- still the attempt failed, what can one deduce about "the influence of the media" and how they shape our perception of reality?

But then again, I only work with women who have internalized unrealistic standards of attractiveness and engagin in binging and purging or starvation to achieve it at the risk of their health.

I'd have two questions about this viewpoint, lucretiuas:

• Is this because of the media, or is the media reflecting this because of other social mechanisms that create too many people who are uncomfortable with their bodies? (It's not clear to me that 'bad evil industry' is the source of all this.)

• Is the best way to react against this really look for evidence of photoshopping and/or substitution in every new photo that comes out? It would seem porsadgai may have a point when he suggests that simply criticizing photos and other women's appearance -- an activity that is millenia-old already -- isn't the way out of it.

The point is that, if the straight men who find this terrible aren't the majority, then more people will be alienated by the blurring (a smaller part of the male audience + 100-X% of the female audience) then will be alienated by a man-on-man kissing.

So it boils down to a question of numbers, and who should or should not be alienated.

As you said: why alienate your viewers needlessly? Indeed, it's not wrong to find something gross, but it's wrong (business) to alienate those who don't. Especially when they may already be the majority.

However, I will offer my own, more expansive vision. Feminism, in my view, concerns not only women, gay and straight, but men, gay and straight. Its goals, like the goals of the civil rights movement or the movement for marriage equality, go to the root of basic human rights and truths shared by everyone.

I wished your vision of feminism were more widespread in the feminist communities, online and elsewhere. But it apparently isn't (Hotspur's and sudari's version of feminism seems to be more frequent, or at least more visible). Apparently because perceived and/or real wrongs against women (and gay men inasmuch as they are supposed to be oppressed because of an anti-woman narrative) were considered to be the only problems that need to be considered in a 'gender equality' movement.

Gay rights and women's rights are inextricably linked. Both are about the suppression of women. When you support homophobia or the censorship of gay images, one of the underlying reasons is to bolster the man-controls-reproduction model that homosexuality undermines.

I've heard this a few times, and other than the it-upholds-traditional-values-therefore-it-must-be-against-women, I don't really see the logic behind this claim. Would you care to elaborate?