there’s this interesting tendency that especially young ppl have when it comes to art where they want to “consume” art by women, lgbt ppl, poc, to make themselves more feminist, anti-racist, etc, and then when they discover these artists have flaws too, that they aren’t perfect representatives of the social movement that’s being projected onto them, they don’t know what to do with that so instead of engaging with these new perspectives they return to art by straight white men who avoid saying something wrong on these topics by simply not speaking of them at all
Most targets of “cancel culture” are women and people of color for this reason.
There’s also something very paternalistic about judging art from anyone who isn’t a white man by how flawless and “non-problematic” the representation is in their art while we judge (mostly white, mostly western) men by the metric of good prose, good characterisation, themes and narrative for example, when it comes to books. It feels as if the “universal” work is reserved for them, while everyone else gets to sit at the kids table and get an award for stuff like “book with most likeable bisexual character”.
