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First, women are just 20% of all AIDS victims. Mind not blown, Mr. Un-PC Dude. Second, that shows a fair degree of missing the point of fiction. Sure, in real life, where everything happens according to cold statistics, promiscuous women will tend to get more AIDS than non-promiscuous women and non-promiscuous heterosexual men. Granted. But this is fiction, a work of art which has an audience and a message, where everything happens because the author wants to. Even if you don't want to, even if you're scared shitless of communicating a Message, you are in fact, as an author, putting a point across. It might not be a message that you as an author subscribe to, but the work is there, and the point is made; and you're just a bad author. And people are naturally adept at finding the core message of works of fiction; we as a species seem to like narrative a lot. We look at those Nazis melting at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie, and we instinctively get it: they were punished because of their arrogance and evilness (in this case Naziness). Even one Nazi got stigmata, as a symbolical punishment and marker of his inherent badness, that is, Naziness. It's all narrative, and a message gets made, namely that being Nazi is kind of a bad deal. Take Elon Musk, he's the hero in a narrative that pits the Startupy Original Innovators (good) against Sclerotic Big Corporations like Boeing (bad); and it's hinted that badness will be punished at the end and good will prevail, as it is defined in the (narrow, a bit unfair) context of that narrative. A very common and crude narrative structure; and very powerful, by the way. So, this guy watches Forrest Gump in a culture that tends to shame women that have casual sex, and sees that it just so happens a woman that has casual sex then has (is punished with, the mind readily answers, since it's just too much of a coincidence...) AIDS, because this author just decided for it to happen. And this guy then infers the writer has made a moralizing tale where sluts get AIDS. Now, maybe this author was just clueless and didn't think through the implications of his, or her, decisions; but I wouldn't blame the GP for looking at Forrest Gump that way. |
It is funny that after my two sentence post I am accused of being PC (whatever that even means these days) and wanting to deny that some risky behavior and drugs could lead to problems and that I think all anti-war people were angels.
In Forest Gump everyone who is anti-Vietnam war is presented as bad and the woman who choose not to stay in her home town and make house and goes to protests get aids. It does seem like a message.
Some pointed out LT Dan does get his legs blown off. True but it is from no fault of his own, its a random event not him being punished. His gets on prostitutes (who of course are shown an horrible people) drinks a ton, but yet in the end, his life turns out good and he marries an Asian women (you know 'cause he was fighting against them, so this some how is fitting). No punishment for his reckless behavior unlike that slut Jenny.