Are people hypocritical when it comes to older movies...?

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Oh I don't think Forrest Gump is racist or sexist at all. I'm just saying the future generation will likely see it as such because they see things that we won't. Kind of like how back in the day, old movies were not considered racist or sexist, but the new generation sees it as such.

But I don't think Forest Gump is racist or sexist at all. Even a movie like Toy Story, could be seen as racist and sexist by the future generation because they will see things we don't. That is where I thought the hypocrisy layed, because we're just as blinded in our generation with our entertainment, as the older generations were in theres.

Yeah we are but we can only do best with what we know today and it's best to see everyone as an individual with their own choices to make in life.

Also in the past, a lot of that stuff was considered ok. Depending on how far back you go. It was 'chivalric' to be benevolently sexist as a man of the 1950s. The 1940s and extremities of the Holocaust caused people to rethink racism in some ways but it wasn't til the civil rights movement that things were fully brought to the conscious minds of a lot of white people. 'Race science' was a popular mode of thinking in the 1920s and the idea of the 'white man's burden'.

Apolitical people these days know that being racist and sexist is a bad thing. So there's little point trying to make things deliberately racist and sexist.

All you can do is make your own moral choices. Doesn't make you a hypocrite. Makes you a person of your time and culture. And makes you yourself - after all, what one person finds offensive, another person might not even within the exact same demographic.

A lot of this new outrage is just people with demographics which wouldn't have been heard in the past, like for eg black women, speaking out about things they find offensive and that their mothers probably found offensive too but had to put up with. In the past, the media was a lot more of a monolith than today in terms of whose voices got heard.

Out of curiosity, how was the cigarette suppose to symbolise that, are how did people infer that from cigarettes? When one doesn't have anything do with the other?

Man and lady meet at a dance. Lady doesn't have a light for a cigarette. Man offers her one, meaning they get close up to each other for a chance to flirt etc. Implication 'something might happen'.

Man and lady go to hotel room after a period of flirtation. Fade to black. First shot afterwards, the lady smoking a cigarette in her nightie. Bedroom, skimpy clothing etc = sexy with an implication 'something happened'. Especially if the man is still in the room, especially if he is 'mirroring' her.

Lady smoking cigarette = woman smoking something long & thin in her mouth. Depending how early on you're talking, they might actually use cigarette holders which in my view of things makes things more feminine looking than a regular cigarette.
Man smoking cigarette = man doing something casual but powerful. Depending how late you're talking, he might be on the back of a motorcycle in a leather jacket: a man of danger & fire.
These two don't directly = sex, more = coded as sexy to the opposite sex.

This is all very hetero because in those days, characters weren't allowed to be openly gay & only comedy/villain characters were allowed to be implied to be gay, through the use of stereotypes so for eg the 'sissy villain'.

Oh okay, but I thought it was clothing such as a nightie that was the suggestion of sex, not the cigarette though.