Kit10Phish Explains It All: RomComs- Power Dynamics and Age [7]

There was a lot of information packed into this post:

https://kit10phish.wordpress.com/?s=Problematic+RomCom&submit=Search

So I'm going to do a series to split it up into smaller chunks.

Power Structures

So what’s the side effect of a lack of role models? If an entire generation grew up with chick flicks featuring white women who rarely aspired to greater heights than their male counterparts, how has this affected our perception of race and gender dynamics? If we each watched dozens of movies featuring an archetype of a “successful woman” equating to a big-city magazine writer job, how has that impacted our own career aspirations?

In the tech industry, when integrating machine learning into our algorithms to make smarter recommendations for users, there is a risk of using a “flawed” training set of data. If you only study photos of cats, your algorithm will be biased about what animals it can properly identify. Any animal with four legs (including a dog) will incorrectly be labeled as a cat. This is a technological bias. We talk less about the “training data sets” in our own heads. If we watch dozens of movies featuring straight, cis women who are white and thin, only pursue liberal arts careers that carry less prominence than men, and *insert any stereotypical characteristic here* what bias are we teaching ourselves? And more importantly, how can we change this?

Yes, of course, romantic comedies are fictional. They are designed to be funny, far-fetched versions of real life. But, given enough exposure to this type of mass-media depiction of women’s roles, it seems likely that we’ve ingrained some of these biases deep inside.