[ SECRET POST #4559 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4559 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 37 secrets from Secret Submission Post #653.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm... this is a paraphrase from tumblr.

https://whetstonefires.tumblr.com/post/185793877230/i-know-i-know-i-knooowww-i-knowww-that-women-in

Here was the reply I reblogged by whetstonefires:

The thing is–and I’m speaking here as someone who does do the later a fair amount–that it really is a different kind of work.

Building up the shallow side man into someone relatable is like applying layers of paint, and usually you’re working with a good set of stencils when you do so. It’s walking over to a receptive-looking smooth blank surface and doing something you’ve been trained to do and have all kinds of models for. You can just start. People do it automatically.

It doesn’t usually even feel like work; it’s like…rolling downhill.

Rethinking the female characters designed as objects, or intended as actual characters but with all kinds of misogyny baked in, is a vastly more complicated process.

First of all, and this is a huge barrier, you generally have to get past your own feelings of repulsion. They might be strong ones about how dehumanized her whole canon design makes you feel by association, or subtle ones about how viciously passive-aggressive all her dialogue is, or a sense of personal anxiety or shame about being judged for wanting to spotlight her and preparing to defend this choice, or anything, but it tends to be there. That turns the project into walking uphill right from the get-go.

The surface you’re decorating here is much less smooth and firm. The mortar is flaking, or it’s already painted with a hydrophobic texture that makes liquid paints tend to run and drip rather than adhering, and of course it’s covered in inconvenient holes and protrusions that draw the eye and will intrude themselves into whatever art you put on top.

And then you have to think about it, the art you’re composing, because you aren’t being handed the scripts you need for this, most of the time. You do not have a robust stencil set to address this need, and when you try to apply ones from the other set it often turns out awkward and blurred, because the wall you’re painting has all those bumps and dips so you can’t press the stencil flat.

There are stencil sets shaped for this, though they may only be usable if you do some masonry work first in some cases, but anyway they usually don’t match the project goals, and if you do give in and use them even though they’re not really what you were going for you’re liable to wind up feeling almost as alienated from your own art as you did from what you were seeking to amend, so it was all for nothing.

So to get the same level of comfortable ownership and sense of depth and desired themes out of a majority of the shallow caricature women that people do out of the bland background men, it generally requires two to ten times the mental effort, much of it spent in a negative emotional state as one confronts the factors causing this woman to be difficult to empathize with, digs under what’s there, and brings out what could be.

And after all of that, you know perfectly well the whole time, a minority of the fandom will even be willing to care, and the odds of drawing hostility specifically for presenting this person in a good light are generally much higher. (This also means you’re more likely to have spent the whole work process in isolation, incidentally, rather than in the cheerful glow of group-brainstorming.)

And because this is a hobby people do in their free time, often specifically for self-soothing purposes, of course the easy version with more community and positive feedback waiting at the end is what most of us go for.

It’s like, when you get home from work and you can either have a microwave burrito or start chopping the whole vegetables in your crisper, some of which are kind of old, to make a salad. Most people don’t have it in them to go for the salad most days, and I can’t really blame them.

[(Anonymous)]

I think describing thinking about a female character as "overcoming disgust" and an endless uphill battle says more about your personal issues with women then everyone else's struggle with women.

[(Anonymous)]

+1

like jfc how is that considered a GOOD rebuttal? they sound like they've got fucking issues...

[rosehiptea]

+2

(Also what kind of fandoms is this person in where everybody hates female characters so much they'll be hostile to you for writing them? In my experience even people who only want to read m/m just skip stories they don't want to read.)

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT - When a character is written in a sexist way that relies on incredibly common gender-stereotyping tropes, then it's perfectly reasonable for one to struggle with a measure of disgust when one sits down and attempts to strip away some of the sexism.

[wannabe_influential]

Yeah, that's how I read it, too

[(Anonymous)]

There was a great comment in this community a few years ago that said if we can accept that sexism is a huge problem and many men are extremely sexist, why is it so hard to accept that many women written by men are unlikably sexist characters? Why is it our fault for hating them and not the men's fault for writing them so badly? And how does this correlate to having issues with women if you can accept that the problem is that these characters aren't anything like real women?

[(Anonymous)]

why is it so hard to accept that many women written by men are unlikably sexist characters? Why is it our fault for hating them and not the men's fault for writing them so badly? And how does this correlate to having issues with women if you can accept that the problem is that these characters aren't anything like real women?

The thing is that this is a perfectly reasonable response to the specific characters who are written by men as sexist caricatures. It's not generalizable beyond those characters.

[(Anonymous)]

The thing is that it's a widespread occurrence, just like sexism itself, and not confined to a few specific characters. It doesn't mean all female characters written by men are bad, but it's the same reason #notallmen is used in mockery. #notallfemalecharacters, no, but enough that it's okay to generalize in certain contexts.

[nightscale]

+3

Yeah this argument... isn't it.

[(Anonymous)]

Like seriously, what the actual fuck is your problem with female characters because what you're claiming sure as hell isn't the way 95% of female characters actually are in canon.

[meredith44]

Agreed. Yes, some female characters are written poorly, in a stereotypical and/or sexist way. But it is far from the majority. And there are sexist and/or poorly written male characters that don't get this "disgust". I hate that male characters are seen as the default and female characters are held to a higher standard and seen as work. (The default part starts young. I taught preschool for 20 years and went to grad school for a school library degree, and girls are absolutely expected to want to consume and relate to media with male protagonists, while boys are not expected to do the same with female protagonists (just look at Disney princess movies vs the Pixar movies centered on boys), and it sucks.)

[(Anonymous)]

This.

[(Anonymous)]

Sexist male characters get 100 times the disgust that sexist female characters get from the side of fandom we're talking about, try again

[meredith44]

Then obviously we are not in the same corners of fandom. Tony DiNozzo was arguably the most popular character on NCIS (part of two major slash ships and two het ships) and was sexist as hell. How about you try again.

[(Anonymous)]

lmao no they don't, so long as the fandom likes them sexist men will have their bad traits filled off by fandom to make them better to work with.

[(Anonymous)]

Oooh, great comment! I agree with a lot of this.