I’m old enough to remember the days when culture-war controversy about a movie or a TV show usually involved some transgressive, taboo-busting scene or plot or character — a bare buttock! a gay kiss! — provoking boycotts or protests from family-values conservatives. Maybe that still happens: The Reverend Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association is still technically in business, after all. But the world has changed, the old taboos are all gone, nobody pays attention to religious moralists, and we have a new kind of controversy now.
In the new-model culture war, shows and movies and singers don’t get in trouble for transgressing the bounds of Judeo-Christian decency. They get in trouble for sins against political correctness: for cultural insensitivity and inappropriate appropriation, for inadequate representation of various minorities, for promoting “rape culture” and ratifying traditional gender roles, and so on through the social-justice catechism. Hit productions can make their nudity and violence as graphic as they want, but an awkward is-it-rape? scene on Game of Thrones or the absence of a major black character from Lena Dunham’s Girls will launch outrage, think pieces, tweetstorms.
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