This video contains spoilers for the Netflix Original Love, Death +  Robots and also lots of violence and nudity
I didn't really feel like censoring any of it because I like how my videos look and I didn't really think that
censor bars or blurring would be that conducive to my aesthetic.
I hope you understand.
So, have you ever thought about why Top Gun feels so gay?
Well, if you're willing to sit through a short Feminist Theory 101 lecture
I can tell you. Just, hold on tight. 
If you're a random nerd who clicked on this video by happenstance,
it's pretty likely you don't know what this term means,
which means I have a pretty hefty responsibility on my back for getting this right
Well, here goes...
It's a pretty basic fact of life that art created by humans will necessarily
reflect the perspectives and biases of those humans
(If you aren't on board with this then I suggest you stop watching now and save both of us the trouble)
But furthermore, because we live in a capitalist hellscape,
the perspectives of certain people are also reflected for the purpose of selling to them.
Now, I hope I'm not being too controversial when I say that most popular artistic works
are being made and consumed by straight men and a direct result of this is
the overexposure of the masculine viewpoint otherwise known as the "male gaze"
The male gaze is basically a catch-all term for all forms in which this overexposed perspective manifests itself
(Not, as you might think, a word for sexy ladies in movies
Although that is probably the most prevalent aspect of it)
If you've ever seen a female body being treated by the camera
as if it were personally *very* interested in seeing her, you know what I'm talking about.
But that isn't all the male gaze is.
See, a man bod can also be framed through the male gaze
You might notice a few differences from the way women are framed:
Mainly that, when a sexy shirtless man is on screen the camera tends to "fall back" slightly.
It's rare that a male body is fragmented in the ways that women are on screen.
If it was, then the straight male audience that most people are trying to sell to
would run out of reasons to explain why they are being asked to stare longingly at Chris Hemsworth's abs,
and begin to feel a bit alienated.
This is also why you commonly see a side female character on the sidelines, admiring the man in question.
Because it provides that excuse.
"I'm not looking at that hot guy,
she is."
Now, Top Gun has no explicit gay themes in it.
So why does it *feel* so gay?
Well, the gay relationship is between the men on screen and the straight man inside of our own heads.
Grown, slowly but surely, through a lifetime of indoctrination.
Everyone who's immersed themselves in western film has a similar imaginary straight man within them.
A second viewpoint that gives his own opinions.
He doesn't like that Top Gun occasionally shows male skin without any deflection
Even sometimes without any female woo-er to place the perspective on.
And this anger is felt no matter what your background is.
He thinks this shit is gay
Love Death + Robots is the new animated science fiction oriented anthology available on Netflix.
These are the good episodes and the rest ranged from decent to garbage
You can watch those if you'd like, since it's an anthology,
but the entire season isn't really that much of a commitment, since each episode is so short.
The gimmick here is the frankly unprecedented amount of stylistic variance on display.
There's gritty realistic action, abstracted comedy, introspective ambient experiences and intense psychological thrillers.
The other gimmick is that it's extremely horny-
Now this is undeniably impressive, but if every episode is so different,
all that does is bring into focus what's still all the same.
Mainly, every episode of Love Death + Robots
is directed by a man (and it shows).
To see how, let's first take a quick look at one of my favorite episodes in the series:
"Good hunting"
Good hunting opens in China with a father and protagonist son named Liang
waiting to ambush and kill a spirit monster seductress Huli Jing
"The piss, toss it on her!"
First they need to throw piss on her to keep her from transforming into a fox, but the kid is a little too late
so she gets trapped as a sexy half-fox before fleeing the premises,
as the camera shows off her body.
(like, it zooms in on her butt)
Eventually they catch up but Liang bumps into the Huli Jing's daughter named Yan,
and after a short conversation ends up taking sympathy on her.
The sexy fox lady gets beheaded but Liang shows mercy on the pup and tells his father that the job was done.
Time-skip a few years into the future.
Liang has taken Yan into his care,
probably out of regret for her mother being killed.
There's also subtle technological development and colonialism in the background and Yan notices that it's becoming more difficult to transform because of it
"-How is hunting?
-Worse this year than last.
It's getting harder and harder for me to return to my true form.
Some nights I can't do it at all."
After a while Liang parts ways with Yan and moves to Hong Kong in order to find new work
in the factories that have been propping up due to british colonialism.
The way the science fiction elements continue to just, creep into this world, like a pox,
is one of the most compelling things about the episode, honestly. It just kind of... happens without warning.
Liang meets Yan once more who can no longer transform and is now working in Hong Kong as a prostitute.
They have a conversation on a boat where Yan tells Liang that she longs to run through this new city in her true form.
"I dream of hunting in this jungle of metal and asphalt
I Imagine my true form leaping from beam, to ledge, to terrace roof until I am at the top of this island.
Until I can growl in the faces of all the men who believe they can own me"
Liang and Yan part ways again and time begins marching once more.
The world makes its final transition into full steam punk.
(Which, fine, We have 18 sci-fi shorts here so it's only fair to throw the browngoths a bone.)
While this is going on, Liang gains a fascination with robotics
and begins learning to create lifelike steam-powered automata.
Now, pay attention to this next part because, this is where it goes very bad.
One night, Liang gets another visit from Yan.
She says she needs his help,
and holy shit, her legs are metal.
How did this happen?
Well, we get a flashback.
Yan talks, in detail, about one of her clients putting something in her drink to put her to sleep so she can be
strapped naked to a surgery table as the camera lovingly tracks across her body before she gets fucking dismembered and
transformed into a sex robot.
"He could only get hard for machines"
Okay.
Using the rape of a female character as a central plot point is already pretty sketch.
But this is the explicit exploitative sexualized brutalization of a female body
I know one of the big draws of this show is how horny it is
but if I was directing this
I think I would try to avoid titillating the audience during the part where one of the main characters has her limbs sawed off.
Again, the camera pans across her naked body.
You see her vag.
The real kicker here is that implying torture without exploiting the on-screen injury is like
one of the main things that people have figured out how to do in Film.
Like, have you seen Reservoir Dogs?
But okay maybe just panning the camera away doesn't feel like a satisfying solution.
You might argue that animation shouldn't pass up an opportunity to fully communicate the horror of the situation.
Well, my mind goes to the teeth pulling scene from Old Boy (2003)
it's pretty similar in content to Yan's dismemberment,
except for the fact that the director didn't feel the need
to have the camera do a sweeping tour of this man's naked body
before "Tom Oldboy" wrenched his teeth out.
And the effectiveness of the scene doesn't suffer at all.
I'm sorry
There's no justification for presenting the dismemberment of Yan in this way,
beyond just providing the straight male audience a cheap thrill.
But along with all this, looking at the rest of the story this scene has basically no justification for being here.
Like Yan needs Liang's help because he's a robotics master and he can upgrade her machinery
as to let her transform into a robot Fox and get revenge on the city.
And, yeah, when she finally eats that gunpowder and becomes her true form once more,
it's a pretty badass moment.
But, like, wouldn't it have been simpler and more direct if Yan had undergone the transformation into a machine of her own volition?
Just think about it.
Instead of being thrust into this arc by an unrelated guy who just happens to have a machine fetish
and having Liang just finish the job,
Yan could take it upon herself to have Liang give her the roboticizing procedure from the very beginning.
We'd have a simple tale about victims of colonialism finding their strengths and fighting back.
Old magic transferring into new innovation.
Instead the plot is made actively clumsier for the sake of this one bit of cheap thrill
at the expense of the lone female character's humanity.
And then at the very end they have the gall to throw in, like, this fucking useless tag scene where
we see Yan do the rape-avenging that was already implied in the previous scene anyway.
And we have to see another unnamed woman just get fucking disrobed and abu-
Across all 18 episodes of Love, Death + Robots, sexualized violence against women
is used as a plot point three times.
I just described one of them.
Love, Death + Robots is one sixth rape.
The first one occurs in the episode "Sonnie's Edge"
Where the main character Sonnie is implied to have been a victim of gang-rape,
which is why she's now a bad girl™ who wins futuristic biomech dogfights with
【﻿ｃｏｕｎｔｅｒ　－　ｐｅｎｅｔｒａｔｉｏｎ】
And possibly the worst example comes in the last episode of the show, like a punchline.
"The Secret War" is about lovingly rendered Russian soldiers fighting against an army of demons in the forest
the origin of these demons is explained in a flashback and as it turns out they were brought here by the
Ritual sacrifice of a voluptuous woman
You don't- you don't even see her face.
Just her ass and intestines.
This is the only fucking female character in the--
Hey! 
Anyone want to talk about the titty-spider-GF episode?
Hell yeah!
So the mid season episode beyond the aquila rift is a pretty interesting example
to look into if you want to examine male gaze in this series.
Mainly because, on face value, 
it appears to be a subversive critique of it.
Set in a distant future, wherein deep space travel is a regular part of life,
It tells the story of Tom, a captain who winds up lost than a far-off Space Station
Following an accidental rift jump far from their plotted course.
There, he unexpectedly meets his ex girlfriend, Greta,
apparently working at the very station they accidentally stumble upon.
And things only get more suspicious from there...
See, the grand joke of the episode is that from the outside it's really, really obvious
that something is fishy from very early on.
Like, why would this dude's hot ex just happen to be running the station he just happens to arrive at?
Why is there this strange omnipresent foreboding atmosphere?
Why is his ex suddenly dressed up in a ball gown with nothing on her mind but jumping his bone?
Tom essentially serves as a personification of the male gaze in this episode.
Any attention to what's really going on here blinded by his desire for titillation,
which of course he gets within about 5 minutes of the episode.
This is even lamp shaded when Susie, a fellow crew mate, almost immediately starts freaking out when she's woken up.
Straight away noticing the unsettling level of coincidence, the strange artificiality of this circumstance.
He very well could have been that, had Suzie not highlighted Tom's blinded mindset,
he never would have actually realized he was being played, as we soon discover.
So once again the episode begins as a kind of critique of the male gaze
Which is actually pretty sad since it's sort of adolescent need to show hot sex and titties
seemingly for its own sake, wouldn't really feel out of place for most episodes of the show
But there is a point behind this as it turns out Tom is deliberately being tricked.
This is all a simulation run by a disgusting and decidedly unsexy and untittilating spider abomination,
housing lost ships in her fleshy space web.
Tom's vessel did run off course,
but far farther than he believed.
But here's the thing this shocking horror twist kind of relies on the male gaze.
(at least the Normie male gaze that isn't into insectoid monstrosities.
Sorry to whatever the furry community subset that's into bugs has called themselves.
I don't mean to kinkshame.)
At least as far as were informed, the spider monster is more of a benevolent caregiver than anything else.
Genuinely wanting to provide a sort of ease and comfort to the wayward travelers who wind up on her course.
"Understand this, I do care for you"
She tells Tom with tears in her eyes mere moments before exposing her true form to him.
And after putting him back to sleep as he goes into mindless hysterics on seeing her,
she arrives once again, clearly upset,
informing Tom that it's good to see him again.
The weird spider girlfriend is not actually that bad, in line of her depiction in the short story the episode's based on.
She still loves Tom
She still wants to care for him,
and, hell, she can even continue to provide him crazy dream sex if he so desires.
So what's the problem of the spider GF?
Why is she, as the episodes main musical track declares, "the enemy"?
Well, she's really unappealing to look at.
If we accept that the Greta's here and here are still basically the same consciousness,
the great crime here is only one is a sexy lady.
Only one appeals to the male gaze.
I'm obviously not saying I'd expect any person to see a giant Lovecraftian monster approach them from a dark corridor
and *not* start freaking out.
But I think there's an interesting dynamic here.
The episode at once says:
"haha You stupid men guided by your dicks, unable to appreciate what's around you
because you're too invested in pretty faces and tig ol' bitties"
but also the horror of Tom's fate is very much coded in his inability to accept a reality
that, may still provide him comfort, but disagrees strongly with his dick.
So, I'm not sure how to take this episode exactly.
I think if there is an awareness of this coded messaging, it may actually be one of the more sophisticated
takes on the perception of sex and gender seen in the show.
A commentary on how men create their own fates by living life at the behest of their own carnal whims
"Haha, take that, now you have to live with a creepy spider that loves you.
Take that, male gazers!"
Or, it's just a hollow kind of critique that sort of *wants* to poke fun at the male gaze,
but mostly still indulges in it, so they can animate a hot sex scene and design a freaky monster.
Who knows?
I could also see a reading that this is all a parable for the horrors of male sexual assault,
which, I don't know how the rest of the episode would relate to that exactly,
but I welcome anyone to give that analysis a shot.
Until then, I think these are the two readings of the short that make the most sense.
Both predicated on the male gaze.
Either the episode is a firm critique of it that establishes Tom's fate is kind of a self-made one
through his inability to see beyond the gaze and appreciate those who care for him,
or it's sort of a half critique that ultimately indulges in the male audience's fear of
being in a relationship with something that isn't a sex object.
So, there you go
Ideas, may or may not exist. I don't know
I'm Jack Saint.
I have a YouTube channel called Jack Saint.
Goodbye.
Moving swiftly on, let's look at the worst episode in the series.
It's called "Shapeshifters".
It's not particularly sexist. It's just... crap
"Shapeshifters' follows the plight of a soldier of the US military in some nondescript middle-eastern setting.
This soldier is also a werewolf.
That's the gimmick.
There's also his buuuuuuddy who is also a werewolf.
They hang out.
They banter at work,
They work out together being like...
really aggressively bro-ey
"I had a dream about your sister last night.
*groans sexually*
I don't even have a sister.
Then why do you get so mad when i dream about fucking her?"
That is until the really bearish one needs to go off on a mission and they...
they...
They touch foreheads.
So if you're me by this point, you're like, okay, these dudes are gay. They love each other.
The opening clip is, like, straight acting at work, but one of them is like being way too aggressive about it
And it makes the main boy uncomfortable
They're also, like, discriminated against for being werewolves which is an analogy for the treatment of gays in the military.
And that's pretty blunt.
But, despite being a pretentious art-house kid who made a 30-minute video
about a movie that's purposefully boring to watch because the director thinks
watching Halloween makes you a serial killer,
I can vibe with a good blunt-ass political message too.
So, where does this go?
Uh, the main guy's friend just dies.
He gets mauled when an enemy werewolf attacks the base he's at.
oops.
Well,  now the story has basically just been bludgeoned into a boring-ass revenge plot.
See, Wolf boy is angry.
So angry that even when he spots the culprit on a search using his "wolfy sense"
he says nothing because they were ordered to take him alive and we can't have that, sir.
Wolf Boy is an independent spirit.
He goes against his orders so he can go out at night later
and kill the evil brown person of his own accord.
Nice.
And here you might see why I chose this episode, along with "Good Hunting" to take a closer look at.
These are the two lone shorts in which someone changes into a half-human half-animal creature.
The only difference is that one of the subjects is a woman and one is a man.
Let's think back for a second to how the Huli Jing was framed.
We got many shots of her titties and you might remember the camera even zoomed in on her ass at one point.
This. is. a. frame. from the episode ladies and gentlemen.
So already with shapeshifters we can see a few differences.
Like this guy is completely naked and, yet, it's almost as if the camera wishes he wasn't.
Like, I think that's a penis but the jury's still out on that one.
Anyways, this is where we finally get to see the werewolf transformation and...
it's deliberately made to be as gross as possible.
Like his skin molts off.
Furthermore his dick just fucking disappears
Where'd it go?
Yes, Love, Death + Robots nohomos the werewolves
That pair of dudes that banter at work, spend all their time together and touch foreheads when they part ways
are actually just Bros being bros and then one of them dies.
And now, they censor the goddamn werewolf cock.
Gabriele, sir,
werewolves are an integral part of gay culture,
there is absolutely nothing straight about being a werewolf,
this is cuLTURAL APPROPRIATION AND I AM CALLING MY LAWYER--
This pattern permeates through the entirety of the show.
It would seem that the visual vocabulary of Love, Death + Robots
just, doesn't include male nudity being presented as erotic.
Male nudity is incidental, comedic, grotesque, but literally never, at any point sexy, or at least intentionally
(I'm sure some people are into the vampire thing from sucker of souls, but the camera doesn't know that.)
The sex scene from Aquila's Rift is... debatable
But, like, the camera is entirely focused on the woman and you never see his dick.
Show me his dick
On the flipside, female nudity can never be incidental, comedic or grotesque.
There's smatterings, a few stylized representations of boobage that are supposed to be funny,
but at most times female skin is there to titillate the audience,
oftentimes in ways that don't really make all that much sense when it comes to a storytelling perspective.
"The Witness" is an incredibly stylish and impressive action thriller essentially consisting of one long chase scene,
but there's a part in the middle where the main character does a strip show
and the action just... stops.
For, like, two minutes.
"Beyond the Aquila Rift" has that never ending awful sex scene, but then,
like, the female lead just gives a PowerPoint presentation while still topless.
Female nudity is just straight-up not allowed to not be exploitative,
even when it's a literal actual disemboweled corpse
WHY--
I would be remiss if I weren't to look at any of the positive examples because this show isn't entirely sexist.
For example, the episode "Suits" is a sugary sweet action sequence about cowboys in mechs
fighting an alien horde, and among the cast are three well-rounded female characters,
all of which have a distinct personality, appearance, and their own role in the plot.
There's the episodes "Helping Hand" and "Lucky 13" both of which feature charismatic women protagonists
with which we are expected to empathize.
And, of course, within any discussion of this show, there must be at least *some* mention of the beautiful,
thought-provoking and positively moving "Zima Blue", hich features a female narrator/ point-of-view character
It's also worth noting that Zima himself, the robot painter,
is, in my opinion, the closest that this show comes to sexualizing a male character.
Like, that dive into the swimming pool.
Mmm.
And that's in framing, not in design.
Like, I want to fuck the dad from suits, but the camera doesn't seem to think I do.
There's also a few episodes that aren't sexist just by virtue of having nothing to talk about within them,
but I guess those count too.
Yes, when focusing on some singular parts of this work, it can appear very much not sexist,
however, when we zoom out a clearer picture begins to form.
Love, Death + Robots depicts a colorful and creative cartoon universe,
where many adventures can be had.
But this universe is also one where slender naked women exist exclusively to treat the camera,
and only slender women are allowed to be perceived as desirable.
Love, Death + Robots wants to push the boundaries of both animation and our tastes,
purporting itself in the trailer to be for "messed-up audiences".
But it only pushes boundaries in one direction.
Like a skewer.
Its scope is limited by the lack of diversity in its creative team.
I don't want anyone to tell me that I just don't like seeing slender naked women on screen.
I made this video because too many of the criticisms leveled at the show seemed to revolve around the belief that presenting sexualized women is a net bad.
No.
I love slender naked women.
But I also love fat naked women.
Naked women of all shapes and sizes.
Naked men too
Naked monsters and naked robots.
As it turns out horny garbage can be good
It's just that when you have 18 episodes with radical stylistic variance and yet only one flavor of horny.
I start to feel a bit cheated.
18 episodes.
18 entire episodes of frankly unprecedented stylistic variance and yet
every single one of them wants me to be straight.
If Love, Death + Robots wants to be as boundary-pushing as it seems to think it is,
well...
Get some women in there to direct next season
Get a few gays too, a couple lesbians some aces to keep us on our toes, and at least one furry.
You can keep at least some cis, hetero guy directors as long as they aren't white.
You might call this forced diversity, but,
there's 18 goddamn slots and we already had a season full of male directors
How about you give us a shot?
