Snowflakes in action...

Snowflakes in action...  A group of Cambridge University students has created a database listing over 1,000 movies that contain scenes of rape, abuse, and sexual harassment.  Their objective was to allow sexual assault survivors to vet what they watch.  A laudable enough goal, though I do wonder whether it's actually a good idea for assault victims to avoid exposure to fictional depictions of things which actually do occur in the real world.  The whole notion of “triggering” strikes me as questionable.

But that's not what caught my eye about the story above.  This did: in that database is the Christmas classic It's A Wonderful Life.  It's cited for a scene of a man chasing a housekeeper while insisting he's in love with her, and another where a woman is being ogled on the street.  Really!  If someone needs to be protected from scenes like that, how could they possibly function in the actual world?

I once read a science fiction story about a human society so uncomfortable with personal interactions that everyone lived alone, isolated, communicating with others only by means they found comfortable.  In the story, a person from a different society came along and basically conquered the world simply because he was willing to knock on doors and confront people face-to-face.  At the time I read this, perhaps 50 years ago, I thought the underlying notion quite far-fetched.  Maybe not...