This topic came up when I was talking to my brother recently. He has three girls and they just finished watching the Obi-Wan show and my brother said that show was such a blatant example of pushing girl power where it made no sense and it clearly showed the writers didn't know or didn't care about Star Wars. Now my brother likes Andor and Mandalorian so he isn't at my level where I cancelled Disney plus and truly despise disney Star Wars, but around his girls I remain positive since I don't want to ruin their fun because the sequels were the first Star Wars they were exposed to and then they watched the rest. I am thinking for Christmas I may buy some EU books for his daughters to get them into that timeline.
But he was just frustrated at the endless push to get women into things that generally appeal to men and he said men and women generally like different things. It's just that simple.
I would love to be at one of the panels at a Con where someone like Anita Sarkessian or the Star Wars, RIngs of Power, Wheel of Time writers give their usual speech about not seeing many women, people of color, etc. and simply ask them why they don't understand that certain thing appeal to more guys than women or that there were always women/minorities that were into these hobbies but they think something is wrong if a large number of white guys enjoy something.
Anyway, do you see this trend waning? I'd like to think so but even with constant flops nothing changes. I really miss the days of being laughed at for reading comic books or a sci-fi novel because the worthless activists in charge of the shows or the ones winning the Hugos or Nebulas were most likely the very people who mocked nerds or thought gamers were losers until they saw those things being trendy and jumped on board.
I gave it some more thought and I came up with a different answer. The grift we know about is women in gaming, but how much of the mid 00's was a grift? There was a public push against games that seemed weird and all the games being promoted were pretty dang violent and promoted that violence. Remember the Manslaughter 2 getting an AO rating tempest in a teacup? That was what got majorly promoted to gamers and it was hard to talk about games that didn't have the edgy vient streak.
How much of that was two grifts being used to gain power? Gamergate showed that this was all possible, so there is no doubt it happened earlier. We just never registered how big it was until then. It wouldn't be a shock to realize the hyper violence was one grift to make money and keep the audience smaller than expected.
The same thing with women in men's spaces. It's all very corporate weirdness that seems to push an idea over any other factor. It has tons of journalists in on it. Large companies seem to want this controversy over their own sales. If this is a grift, then I expect a new grift to come in. Metaverse didn't work out, NFTs had some power, but whatever it is will be just as stupid and big until you look at it more thoroughly. As people catch on to what it is, we see a new grift take over. Sort of like all those protests against Trump that were originally parties to celebrate Hilary Clinton winning. Once we catch on, then the new grift kicks in and we have to watch out for it.
Good point. Well said