Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MGibster" data-source="post: 8323594" data-attributes="member: 4534">As my graduate school advisor would have asked me, "Maybe.  But where is your evidence that the majority of the population isn't adequately reflected in the records?"  I can tell you that I've never met a woman who saw Revenge of the Nerds in the 1980s and remembers it with any particular fondness. It was a stupid raunchy comedy aimed at young men, lambasted by critics, and I don't quite understand why it's remained at all in the public conscience. I think the only reason I remember it at all is because it had a lot of nudity for an eight year old to see on screen. (My parents really should have more closely monitored what I watched.) Well, okay, the concert the nerds put on at the climax of the movie was pretty good.Sixteen Candles is a different story, there are many women who have fond memories of the movie, it received generally favorable reviews from critics, and it stands out as one of the best teen comedies of the era.  But if you read contemporary reviews, you'll find criticism of Sixteen Candles for it's portrayal of an Asian foreign exchange student by the name of  Long Duk Dong.  And if you've never seen the movie, oh, boy, that portrayal is wildly offensive even by 1980s standards though you'll find some people who defended the character.  What I'm getting at is that public opinion shifts.  Back in 1984 Americans as a whole had very different attitudes regarding consent than we have today.  I'm certainly not arguing that nobody found those scenes offensive or had problems with the implications.  But those opinions were not part of the mainstream dialogue because overall the attitudes were different.  The past is a foreign country and they do things differently there.And it's weird as you grow older and you watch or read something you haven't seen in years.  You find things that you forgot about and sometimes you're pleasantly surprised.  But you'll also run into things you didn't find offensive 30 years ago but you find offensive now because your perspective has changed.  As Muhammad Ali said, or at least it's attributed to him, "If you're the same man at 50 that you were at 20 then you've wasted 30 years of your life."  I don't take it personally that WotC puts disclaimers on some of the old TSR products.  Yeah, I was perfectly fine with it in 1988 but I'm not the same person today that I was then.  I think a lot of us are still trying to reconcile the problematic nature of the what we loved in the past, or influenced what we love now, and our modern attitudes.  It's not always easy.</blockquote>

Verification