So said one of my students about the depiction of gender roles and sexuality in advertising.
To which my response was, “We don’t have to think about anything, but is there any reason we shouldn’t? Do you think people should have fewer critical reading skills when it comes to media?” I put it in slightly different words, so I’d sound less, er, irate that I do there. But really, it was a strange moment. I know that, “I think we don’t need to think about it,” isn’t probably intended in the way it comes across — this was a comment in the writer’s foreign language, after all — but I do find it baffling, this urgency to not think about things.
Or maybe she was trying to say, “It’s boring and pointless.” Which it may well become, after a certain point. But one needs to have thought about it for a while before I think it’s sensible to chuck it aside. Especially when one has signed up for a course on Media.
Or, well, when one has signed up for my course on Media, anyway.