A video adaptation of my old article.

Are you familiar with the concept of object permanence? Object permanence is a major milestone in the cognitive development of a baby. It’s when an infant is capable of understanding that an object still exists even when it cannot see the object. Before that time, a baby will be playing with an object, but will instantly forget that the object exists the second that somebody hides it from his vision.

Upon reading that first paragraph, you’re probably asking “Why the fuck is Larsen talking about early childhood mental development?” To be honest, this post isn’t specifically about infancy—far from it, it’s actually about the dismal state of pop culture. But I want you to keep the idea of object permanence in your mind, because I think that a form of it, or rather the lack of it, explains a certain phenomenon we see embodied time and time again with woke Hollywood writers and other purveyors of mass media.

What phenomenon am I referring to? The phenomenon that Youtuber The Critical Drinker refers to in this video, the idea that any work of fiction starring a woman has to have the woman as an unbeatable uberfrau from the start of the story (with a male villain being, correspondingly, a pathetic, incompetent putz) whose victory at the end of the story is never in the slightest doubt. Anybody who has ever written a story or directed a film or done any kind of narrative creation will immediately recognize that this situation instantly robs the story of any drama or tension—why bother watching if there’s no doubt the hero will win?

One would think that this would be blindingly obvious, but the arbiters of our culture don’t seem to understand this.

These people are under the impression that showing a woman as being weaker than a man is an assault on womanhood, even if the woman only *starts* as being weaker and becomes stronger over the course of the narrative (y’know, Joseph Campbell hero’s journey 101). The fact that she was weaker at any point means that, in their eyes, she will always be seen as weak.