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mysticalchild_isis) wrote2012-03-15 12:03 pm
mysticalchild_isis) wrote2012-03-15 12:03 pm
Strong Women
At my book club last night, we got off topic a bit (as we so often do), and one of the librarians who works in a high school was mentioning that she's been reading The Odyssey with a class. She was rather disturbed to find that all the girls disliked Penelope, and thought that she was useless, weak, and did nothing.
This led to a discussion about how it's unfortunate that a lot of girls only see Strong Female CharactersTM as having their own agency, and how very problematic that is.
Don't get me wrong; I love BAMFy women who kick ass (Buffy and Xena being two of my favorites), especially if the actress playing them is even halfway decent at martial arts. I savor a well-executed roundhouse kick like a glass of fine wine. However, too often, Xenafication stands in for actual character development... and makes it so that people like the girls mentioned above think that the only defining characteristic of a strong woman is her ability to kick ass. With a corollary of the fact that many people then think that if a woman is bad-ass, she must be strong, and don't see the problems (and sexism) that so often pop up in these types of characters.
I'm reminded of the version of Irene Adler that popped up in this season of Sherlock. I found her extremely problematic for a number of reasons. But because she was smart, beautiful, and had a certain amount of power (largely sexual) and control, the underlying issues were slightly masked. I'm not trying to dictate which characters one should or should not like, or identify with. We like who we like, and we see characters in different ways. But when there is a widespread epidemic of characters who on the surface seem strong, but underneath are teeming with poisonous ideas (you know, like "oh look, this woman's backstory is rape and torture porn, but since she is a BAMF, it is totally fine that her only character development is rape-as-backstory"), I feel like it is an issue that needs to be addressed and discussed.
Especially because characters who might not be able to swing a sword or shoot a gun are no longer seen as "strong", no matter how well-rounded they are or how much agency they have.
This led to a discussion about how it's unfortunate that a lot of girls only see Strong Female CharactersTM as having their own agency, and how very problematic that is.
Don't get me wrong; I love BAMFy women who kick ass (Buffy and Xena being two of my favorites), especially if the actress playing them is even halfway decent at martial arts. I savor a well-executed roundhouse kick like a glass of fine wine. However, too often, Xenafication stands in for actual character development... and makes it so that people like the girls mentioned above think that the only defining characteristic of a strong woman is her ability to kick ass. With a corollary of the fact that many people then think that if a woman is bad-ass, she must be strong, and don't see the problems (and sexism) that so often pop up in these types of characters.
I'm reminded of the version of Irene Adler that popped up in this season of Sherlock. I found her extremely problematic for a number of reasons. But because she was smart, beautiful, and had a certain amount of power (largely sexual) and control, the underlying issues were slightly masked. I'm not trying to dictate which characters one should or should not like, or identify with. We like who we like, and we see characters in different ways. But when there is a widespread epidemic of characters who on the surface seem strong, but underneath are teeming with poisonous ideas (you know, like "oh look, this woman's backstory is rape and torture porn, but since she is a BAMF, it is totally fine that her only character development is rape-as-backstory"), I feel like it is an issue that needs to be addressed and discussed.
Especially because characters who might not be able to swing a sword or shoot a gun are no longer seen as "strong", no matter how well-rounded they are or how much agency they have.
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And being a feminist and a comic book fan is such a very hard tightrope to walk...
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I picked up the Dresden Files once, ages ago, and was like, "Man, this is not very good!" and only got into it again through fandom. Found some fics, liked 'em a bunch, thought, "Okay fine I'll read more canon so I understand them better" and.... ended up writing an epic of my own. >_<
The thing is though, I never write fic of stuff that I'm actually a fan of -- I write fic when a story has a kernel of potential but piss-poor execution. And when I got to talking with other readers of Dresden Files slashfic (won't go so far as to call them "fans" either), it turned out I wasn't alone. A lot of people said that they'd been seriously turned off by the sexism in that series, that they'd read the first couple books so they could follow the fics, and then never touched canon again.
And being a feminist and a comic book fan is such a very hard tightrope to walk...
Ugh, I can imagine. I'm sure you've seen the fridged-female list that Gail Simone put together -- it's like watching a genocide on the news, the atrocities just go on, and on, and on. I believe someone put together a similar list of what happens to gay male characters in comic books, and it was largely the same, except that one hits closer to home for me. Treatment of gays in fantasy has been driving me up a fucking wall lately -- if I read about ONE MORE sadistic gay villain, I will not be responsible for my actions.
And it's funny how that failtastic stereotyping of gays so often comes hand-in-hand with equally awful stereotyping of women. Brings me to a theory I'm still chewing on: that when we say an author isn't good at writing women, I'm coming to suspect that they're not good at writing men either -- they just have a wider palette of archetypes to choose from.
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And it's funny how that failtastic stereotyping of gays so often comes hand-in-hand with equally awful stereotyping of women.
Absolutely. Two great books immediately come to mind: Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism, and Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Our society privileges constructions of hyper-masculinity over any sort of perceived femininity hugely, and it is so damaging to everyone.
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Whipping Girl looks fascinating, and I think I remember seeing a copy at Half Price Books near my house; I'll check that out next time I'm there. Transwomen get so much shit from all quarters...
But now I'm curious -- if Jim Butcher's not that bad, then who IS that bad? :O
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Frank Miller comes to mind...
Butcher isn't great, but he isn't maliciously misogynistic. And there are a lot of sci-fi/fantasy/comic writers that are (like the above Frank Miller).
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What I think is the most interesting about the Totally Appropriate Covers post is how she obviously did it by colorizing gay porn pinups -- and what do gay porn and straight comics have in common? Male gaze. It's not about the sex of the model, it's about how they've been -- as the OP put it -- distilled to their sexual attributes, and the only place to go to see the male gaze applied to men is gay porn.
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Indeed. Indeed.