Maybe it's just everything around me being so deadly serious in a way I don't have the energy to get into nor the power to do anything about online but I feel like swinging a bat at a more local and immediately actionable hornet's nest so here we go-
There are two things in leftist/feminist media critique we NEED to get better about tackling without letting it take us in horrible counterproductive directions.
One: The way breast size is used as visual shorthand for maturity/attitude/sexual openness, and how that plays into the male gaze (which - 101 level reminder to reject what radfems have told you, this is a film critique term that has to do primarily with framing conventions, NOT some kind of mystical Objectification Beam that emanates from men's eyes, okay? okay). Namely, we need to learn to acknowledge that this visual shorthand is a thing and criticize it WITHOUT implying that it's fair or based in reality.
What do I mean by "implying that it's fair or based in reality?" I mean the way that the first thing many people do to humanize a canonically badly objectified female character is not to change up the art style to give her room for her organs, not to put her in a more natural pose in a less idealized setting, not even to frame her in a way that's more inclined to draw the eye to her face rather than her breasts, but to reduce her bust size. To call large breasts "unrealistic". As someone who had...multiple friends who were pretty well-endowed by middle school, I need to tell you - this attitude did NOT help them, it just got them called sluts and "distractions".
We need to be able to criticize it when male characters are allowed to have multiple body types (however idealized they still may be), but women's bodies are only differentiated by bust size, and yes, that IS treated as shorthand for something. We need to be able to discuss how large breasts have long been visual shorthand for maturity and sexuality, and small breasts have long been visual shorthand for innocence. We...may need to tell some non-tit-having character designers that no, breast growth is not inherently linked to sexual activity, nor fertility, nor is it something that just goes on forever like noses and ears. We may even, yes, want to vary up the bust sizes on some existing characters in fanart to ask people to question the way it's treated. We DEFINITELY need to bring back Free The Nipple. But we can't STOP at shrinking characters' breasts and calling it "less objectified", and we also very much cannot, as I've seen asked for, replace that with making the characters fatter and more muscular to say the same - again, please consider what you're implying to real human women with the body types you're calling "objectified" or "not objectified". When you stop there, you're telling the large-breasted woman that she IS just a sexual object. You're telling the fat girl that she CAN'T be a sexual being. You're telling the small-chested woman that she's too much of a baby for anyone to ACTUALLY be attracted to her. That's not what we need to be doing with these critiques! That's the opposite of what we need to be doing with these critiques!
Speaking of "telling the small-chested woman she's too much of a baby for anyone to ACTUALLY be attracted to, that brings me to point two: we need to figure out how to talk about how young aggressive sexual objectification starts WITHOUT implying or getting sucked into some Pizzagate-tier bullshit about the media managing to "normalize pedophilia", like - that's some gateway blood libel shit right there. "Everyone knows that molesting kids is bad and evil, but there's a secret shadowy group of people who not only do it systematically, ritualistically, lurking around every corner, looking to snatch your kids up for their wicked deeds, but they've so infected the media that they're going to manage to convince you that the horrible abuses they want to enact on YOUR poor innocent children are normal, they're so influential that even just LOOKING at their propaganda can turn a well-meaning person into a monster" - I'm not sorry, if your media critique can be paraphrased to that, you're going down a DANGEROUS path and need to go back to square one, especially if you're already starting to get suspicious of certain last names in western media, or aiming it first and foremost at a foreign culture (looking at you, anime critics).
The problem is the stereotype of men as ruthless sex-seekers and women as prizes. The problem is the idea that youth is about training for those roles. The biggest problem is the idea that women are no longer dateable once they hit 26 or so - they should either be married by then and dedicate their lives to being good wives and mothers, or simply disappear from public life as laughable failures, because ultimately that's what women are for in society.
The idea that your only years of value, especially if you're a woman, are from 18-25 is definitely some chud shit, but it's NOT pedophilia, because...get this: 20-somethings aren't children.
This standard is pervasive. It's everywhere. And because it's treated as such a default, such a constant, such a universal truth, it starts young - look how many book bans are targeting anything that DARES to state or even imply there are other options. We need to criticize that! We need to criticize how much gender standards end up having overly sexual implications even when applied to kids! We need to have serious discussions of how to disentangle the decades of social coding that make it hard to really tell who we need to be criticizing when it comes to things such as, say, prematurely "sexualized" clothing for little girls - i.e., that we have to pause and ask "...but wait, is it really that sexualized, or is it just feminine?"
We need to also have discussions of how this and the Leonardo Dicaprio standard intersect with fatphobia - i.e., is that animated girl "minor-coded", or is she just in the age range that Leo would date and super skinny because even breasts would make her look ~faaaat ewwwww~?
And we need, BADLY, to stop getting distracted from that conversation and letting it drag us to some really ugly and dangerous places instead.