fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3455 ]

[ SECRET POST #3455 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3455 ⌋

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I've noticed in media, particularly shows and movies, female buddies, if you will, are far rarer than female/male friends or male/male friends. In the same show the female characters will be close with a male character, the male characters will be close, but the female characters hardly interact on a deeper level. It passes the Bechdel Test, but on a technicality.

Why is that? Is it harder to write female friendships?

What shows are you watching? I've seen tons of media with great friendships between women.

AYRT - Not watching a lot currently, but the show I had in mind was Brooklyn Nine-Nine, where the male characters are close but the female characters seem to have a sort of frenemy thing going on. (Although Rosa did ask Amy and Gina to be her Maids of Honor.) I also recently watched 30 Rock, and for a feminist show, not to mention a show based around a show called "The Girly Show", the only female friend Liz has is Jenna, and Jenna is too narcissistic to be an actual friend. Among other shows where the female friendships are either there but very shallow, or just not there at all.

I will say Buffy and Parks and Rec are two exceptions.

NAYRT - to be fair, with regards to 30 Rock, it's a show that (a) focuses pretty closely on Liz as the emotional center of the show and (b) hardly takes any of its relationships seriously in emotional terms.

Like, pretty much the only relationships on the show that are really taken seriously at all are Liz's friendship with Jack and her friendship with Jenna. That's a case, I would argue, where it's just that emotional friendship is not central to the show's arc generally.

AYRT - Yeah, you have a point, and in fairness, the show also features a doctor ("Dr. Spaceman") who is so incompetent IRL he'd probably drown in malpractice lawsuits, so... maybe I shouldn't have used that as an example, since really, it's not focusing on realistic relationships.

In Brooklyn 99 it is less a frenemy thing and more the female characters just have very different personalities. Rosa and Amy mostly get on fine, but Amy is an over-sharing over-achiever, and Rosa is private person who wants to advance but in a more realistic way and has specific goals in mind rather than Amy's do-everything. Gina is an asshole, but she is pretty much the female comic relief character who gets to act unrealistically sociopathically for laughs.

Rosa and Amy mostly get on fine, but Amy is an over-sharing over-achiever, and Rosa is private person who wants to advance but in a more realistic way and has specific goals in mind rather than Amy's do-everything.

And also, they're in love.

Uh, don't Rosa and Gina kind of have frenemy relationships with everyone, though?

I think it's just an artifact of the demographics of TV shows. Like, there are a lot more male characters than female on TV, and male characters are a lot more likely to be main characters than female characters, and so you have a lot of shows that just don't have that many female characters to where they're going to have friendships, and when you do a lot of the time they're mostly relating to the main male character.

I think when you have shows that have multiple female characters, and that are willing to give them plot agency and centrality - those shows generally tend to be willing to have female friendships or at least meaningful female relationships. It's just there's not enough shows that do that.

Male writers.

There it is.

Shockingly, though, Females™ are human beings, and their friendships function like regular human ones.

Edited 2016-06-19 19:55 (UTC)

I haven't seen many shows or films that really reflect that, and the only thing I can think of is that the writers are male and don't really understand female friendships. Obviously there are exceptions.

What's funny to me is that people will use both male and female writers and audiences as excuses for a mostly male cast. On the male side: men can relate more to other men. On the female side: most women are straight and attracted to men and so want to see more of them. There's always some reason for why it's only logical that most characters be male.

Re: Is writing female friendships hard?

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-19 20:17 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Is writing female friendships hard?

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-19 20:20 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Is writing female friendships hard?

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-19 21:21 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Is writing female friendships hard?

(Anonymous) - 2016-06-19 21:25 (UTC) - Expand

It's not. Watch any female-centric show (i.e. Orange is the New Black, Sailor Moon) and female friendships will abound.

It's the dearth of female characters in most media, their relative lack of prominence even when they do appear, and how often they are defined chiefly (or even solely) by their relationships with a male character.

Exactly this, very well stated.

Yup. I've made the same argument about femslash in the past.

Parks and Rec is one of my favorites at showing female friendships. I love Ann and Leslie.

Nah, it's just sexism.

Really? Huh.

Maybe that's why I liked Cougar Town so much. Some of the most central relationships are between women, and they're deeply messed up as individuals, but their relationships are good and functional.

I think there's this belief that female friendships are somehow inherently different from male friendships that ...just isn't fucking true at all. Sure, there are some gender-coded activities that certain (heteronormative) people like to engage in, and media likes to harp on about bro codes or whatever, but at the end of the day my friendships with men have been exactly the same as my friendships with women.

Everyone has the same concerns, the same problems, and the same needs in a friendship. A lot of that is pretty genderless, all things considered. If there's a problem with writing female friendships, it seems to me that it's probably a problem with the author never having had a close friendship. ...Or not understanding that men and women honestly aren't that different when you take away all the gender role stuff and just focus on the person.

It is harder for male writers to write simply because men in general (yes, I know hashtag "not all men") seem to think there is something different in female friendships than male friendships. There isn't. Any conversation between two dudes could easily be transferred to two women with very little change. Male writers seem to think they have to sprinkle some sort of weird specific girl-cooties over female-to-female dialogue and they have no idea what that it is, except they think it must be special and different, so we either get stilted and unnatural dialogue or they just skip it entirely.

This.

It is a self perpetuating cycle. Male writers think there must be something different about writing female characters, so they don't even try because they don't know what it is.

This. I think it relates to this idea a lot of people (not just men though it's probably more conspicuous with men) have that women are basically aliens with thoughts and motivations that are't comparable to those of men. That's absurd, but it's a very deeply entrenched belief for a lot of people.

It doesn't help that a lot of men simply don't have platonic relationships with women like they do with other men. Some men can't even conceive that such a thing is possible. Women are either girlfriends and wives, or potential girlfriends and wives. If they could get past that and see that friendship is possible and hey, even fun... well, then they'd gain some insight into how "female friendships" work, i.e. that they're not that far removed from friendships between men.

I don't think it is. I just think male writers might be less likely to write them.

I don't think it is, but I wonder if part of the issue here is that many female characters in shows and movies aren't always very well fleshed out in their own right. They're there as a prop to a main character, who is usually a man, i.e. girlfriend, love interest, wife, mother, etc. So their main role in the show/movie is to interact with the main character and we don't see much of their lives outside of that narrow scope.

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