punlich:

Media representation definitely isn’t the Worst Thing Ever when it comes to ways you can really hurt an entire group of people but it does kind of matter.

It’s a sociopsychological thing. Basically if you depict certain groups in certain ways over and over, in large amounts of media, the repetition will drill that impression into the heads of people both outside and inside that group.

We learn from everything around us, not just school or textbooks or parental lessons. The media we consume, tv shows, literature, video games, all of it subtly influences viewpoints. And many media things do have moral slants to them, subtle ideological bits that are meant to get an idea across to you. So it’s not like media creators don’t realize the sort of power they wield with the spoken and written word and the visuals of cinema.

Depict trans woman as scary predatory monsters enough and people will start to believe that it’s the reality. Depict lesbians as always dying and people will believe that being a lesbian always ends in tragedy or even worse, that lesbians deserve that tragedy (because people hate the idea of an unjust world, it burrows deep into some of our worst fears). Depict black people as uncaring criminal monsters and that will influence people as well.

Propaganda works on the same principles. So I mean that’s something you have to take into account. 

You can’t ignore it and you’re not immune to it. It’s one of many things we have to work against if we’re going to stop all these systems of violence.