So my brother does this thing where he occasionally, about once a month, comes into my room, rifles through my DVDs, and upon picking out some particularly "girly" ones like my Forever Marilyn 7-Disc Blu-Ray box set of Marilyn Monroe films, or the egregiously pink amaray case that Can't Stop The Music (The Village People Movie, for those not in the know) and the pink and glitter bedecked cover of my Clueless Blu-Ray copy, I've noticed he cherry picks these, ignoring the far darker subject matter of Cannibal Holocaust, Salo, and my entire grindhouse DVD section including Zombie Flesh Eaters and the like, just so that he can make cheap jokes about how "gaaaayyyy!" my DVD and Blu Ray collection is. I have long suffered under my film studies graduate brother's regressive agenda when it comes to the gendering of DVDs without them needing to be. Case in point, the fact that I have an anime DVD and Blu Ray collection from the get go is a big fat target for him to just shout "GAAAAAAY" at me without any real insight into how Ouran High School Host Club is somehow for a female or homosexual man audience only. I really hate how my brother outright dismisses entire subsections of media because they either look too girly or too "gay" for him. I should remind you, reader, that out of me and him I'm the only one who was willing to put his lips to the test to find out if he was gay for certain, whilst he seems to be very overtly of the "trolling makes homophobia funny!" camp. Oh how he justifies his regressive ideals through the guise of trolling. I've seen this argument many times and in the real world of the internet (bear with me here) such an argument usually gets laughed at or results in somebody cracking out the banhammer.
In any case, the mere suggestion that DVDs are gendered objects is something worth looking into since I've seen commentary from both my brother and his friends that there even exist "Manly DVD Shelves" as opposed to girly of "GAAAAY" ones. Allow me to elaborate on this. What comes to mind for most men when they engender a film with overtly masculine qualities? 300, the oeuvre of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and Charles Bronson, that MMA movie Warrior, things like The Raid: Redemption and Dredd, Drive despite Ryan Gosling having a sex symbol status with women, these are fairly testosterone filled works of cinema, you start to think. Surely no hint of oestrogen could even touch these digital video disks and remain un-impregnated by their sheer virility? This is the kind of mentality my brother and some of his friends have when it comes to their DVDs. But the thing is... I own a lot of DVDs of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Charles Bronson, Jean Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone movies. I probably own more of these than my brother or his friends do. But due to the particularly pink packaging of certain films like Can't Stop The Music and Clueless, one can cherry pick these out of a shelf of otherwise gritty and muscle heavy audiovisual material and assert that the masculinity of the DVD shelf owner is somehow lacking in some weird imaginary way that guys who haven't really experienced the Tumblr Social Justice flame wars for themselves tend to do because they either don't know any better or are legitimately homophobic.
Now the supposed "Chick Flick" or "Romantic Comedy" has been stigmatised as a genre "men don't watch". This... kinda needs to die. Along with the idea that all of these kinds of films are terrible. When Harry Met Sally, gold standard romantic comedy right there. (500) Days Of Summer, one of the best romantic comedies of the last ten years by far. Yet somehow these films irritate men in some way (and often irritate women in completely unrelated ways which I'm not quite as qualified to comment on) and are regarded as the dross of cinema where nothing with testicles can enter without being emasculated. As I mentioned earlier, anime, particularly anime made in the last ten years, has a very, very stigmatised reputation as being "less than it was" in the 1990s where gore-fests like Ninja Scroll and Berserk were the order of the day. Worse still, I feel really uncomfortable about suggestions that something like Free! which is intended for a fujoshi audience of women who like to watch hot dudes splash around in water are somehow an affront to the standards of anime's halcyon days when manly men were men and women were... still as badly written a lot of the time as they used to be in the more fanservicey shows.
It's this really weird mentality of manly media that I don't understand when it comes to complaints about how anime's turned into an all out girly man mode. A lot of the anime that gets made now definitely draws in a female audience, which is a good thing, I assure you. You realise what happens when there's only dudes in a fandom, right? You get stagnation. Also you get a sausage festival. Just sayin'.
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