Is this a concept exclusive to film/art criticism or can it be applied to real life too? And if so, is it fundamentally different from the normal worrying about what people think of you/worrying about how you’re being perceived? Or is it sorta the same thing but from the angle of patriarchy? Or maybe something entirely different I’m not understanding?
I wanna throw my hat into it.
It’s an idea or explanation of media (not exclusively, but showcases it best) demonstrating the values and perspectives of men in an audience over women, alongside racial and sexual minorities. It characterizes the “straight while male” as default in the assumptions of the work.
Observations made through media have the unfortunate tendency to be adopted as default observations when there exists or assumed not to any depictions to disprove it. Common examples are depictions of racism and sexism you see in media, which reinforces itself as the assumed default by others.
Real heads around here know i once tried to use the trope of “anime titties” as “ideas reinforced by media being reinforced by media” which i’ve since dropped for the 4 stages of the simulacra.
So you can sort of see that there is connection to how things are perceived IRL. Media is powerful because for many, it’s the only exposure a person may have to something i.e. anime titties. If not addressed or corrected, this leads to a feedback loop where bad observations inform new bad observations. Eventually we’ve unmoored ourselves from reality completely where there may never be a chance to correct these mistakes again. Of course for this to be really bad you’ll have to have a powerfully harmful incubation space for bad ideas to fester and build on top of one another so much that not even sunlight can kill it. Thankfully no such spaces like that exist offline or on. Now if you’ll excuse me I am getting a phone call from the rhetorical hotline, but let me take a BIIIG sip of coffee first…