This is also one of the big reasons why I'm so tetchy about people trying to ignore Mary Shelley as the creator of science fiction. Sorry boys, she did create the genre you're so hot after. What's more, she was a radical feminist raised by radical feminists, she lived in 'sin' with Lord Byron who was an atheist, and so many other tidbits that make the spoiled man-children rankle.
Being ignorant of something is not the same as trying to ignore it. I doubt most people who have read Frankenstein even regard it as science fiction.
To my fellow straight white guys, let me say this: You have been pandered to for your entire life. Nearly every piece of media you have ever consumed, from comics books to TV to cartoons, has been tailored made with you in mind as its primary audience.
That's true of nerd pop culture, but not pop culture as a whole. And this may stun a lot of digital native Millennials, but nerd culture is not the whole of pop culture.
Television skews heavily female in viewership. Most of the most popular shows on TV, such as Modern Family, Scandal, and Grey's Anatomy (which in its second decade still pulls in more viewers than the Walking Dead) are aimed at largely female audiences. As are the NCIS series, and most reality TV shows, including staples of TV like cooking and home improvement shows.
Novels are a predominately female medium, with novel purchases by women outstripping those by men 2:1. Membership in book clubs is 95 per cent female. Romance, the single most popular genre, has over 95 per cent female readership. Mystery is heavily female in readership. Historical fiction readers are mostly women. YA is dominated by female readers. SF & F are the only predominantly male genres left, and I suspect Fantasy won't be that way much longer. No doubt the identity politics movement will then turn its attention to Romance, Mystery, and YA in an effort to address those genres' egregious and shameful gender imbalances
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Pop music is far from a straight white guy medium either. Bros hardly make up the core audience of Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Maroon 5, or Pink. The Beatles didn't become the biggest act in pop culture history because of the music nerds who listened to Sgt. Pepper over and over again, but because of tens of millions of teenaged girls buying their records.
Movies in the last 10 years: Yes, in the era of superhero blockbusters young men are the core audience. And yes, comics too. But it's a reach to call comics themselves 'pop culture' when it's such a tiny industry. It's also worth noting those two mediums are aimed mostly at the under 35 crowd. I anxiously await the passionate online geek movement to make pop culture more representative of the wider public in terms of age. Will we see a day when a third of superheroes are depicted as over 50, or when videogames feature protagonists who are putting two kids through university while dealing with menopause?
It is curious that the identity wars are being fought in genres and mediums that are largely male - the geek genres. I understand a lot of geeks don't know much about the world outside geekdom, and the internet echo-chamber effect only make things worse. Millennials (the ones leading the charges on the barricades) tend to be pretty myopic as a group because of this. So I see why nerdy white progressives are obsessed with nerdy white pop culture, and might mistake it as representative of pop culture as a whole. But as I've said, until I see evidence of the same attention being paid to the sprawling districts of pop culture cultivated for women, I'm going to remain skeptical of the arguments presented in the article.
Ultimately, the market decides what gets made. If good-looking country-music stars with stubble are what the audience for country music wants, that's what they'll get. If there's an untapped market for superhero movies with protagonists who appear different from traditional protagonists, someone will cater to that market and make a bunch of money. Neither the moaning of the people who say there it too much diversity nor the moaning of the people who say there isn't enough will make any difference in the face of financial considerations to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Businesses that ignore the bottom line don't survive long.
