Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2011-04-28 07:47 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2011-04-28 07:47 pm
[ SECRET POST #1577 ]
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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TRIGGER WARNING FOR RAPE
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 044 secrets from Secret Submission Post #225.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 2 - repeats ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments and concerns should go here.
no subject
In all seriousness, anon, this issue, as I see it, is three-fold:
1) There is an impossibly high standard for what makes a female character a good female character, and even when a female character is largely considered to meet that standard in her own fandom (for example, Buffy Summers in the first half of the series), it reeeeeally doesn't take much to get her fandom to turn on her (see: Buffy Summers in the latter half of the series). This is most definitely a problem, not only because it's annoying as hell, but because it's depressing as hell. I'm not sure there's anything really feminist about tearing every female character to shreds for not being good enough- and make no mistake, people absolutely do that, as sure as eggs as is eggs.
2) I don't think a girly girl or a tomboy (both classifications, BTW, annoy me because they're damn arbitrary and I don't see why people feel the need to gender superficial behaviors like color preferences and hobbies- there is nothing inherently masculine about climbing a tree and nothing inherently feminine about liking pink, for fuck's sake) are either, in and of themselves, bad ways to present women. It has to do with the context you're looking at them in.
The thing is that a disproportionate percentage of female characters are the only female character in the work in which they appear. When you've got a core cast of ten men and there's one woman in there (especially in works like, say, the "Fellowship of the Ring" movie adaptation, where the girl who was not in the book was brought into the movie well ahead of schedule), that woman is what the writers thought their female audience would relate to. And when patterns start to arise about what women you see where, it's worth questioning "What are they trying to tell me here?" (Arwen in the "LOTR" films is something I could go on about for a while; they set her up as a badass in the first movie and by the third movie, she's literally dying from missing her boyfriend and her entirely hypothetical son. And since she's sort of absent from the books for the most part, again: she was brought into the movie this way specifically because this is what women are supposed to relate to. ...and also because, y'know, if you have nine guys who hang out, carry each other around, and sleep in the same bed sometimes without at least one of them having a girlfriend somewhere, that's so gay OMG NO. ::eyeroll:: )
3) The difference between criticizing a work for not portraying women well and criticizing a female character for not being good enough is a surprisingly subtle one, and a lot of people miss the mark. It's the difference, I think, between "Buffy Summers is a SLUT!!!!111" and "Er, hey, Joss- just out of curiosity, why is my Feminist Icon™ that you specifically branded that way being punished for her sexuality at...pretty much every turn? 'Cause you've kinda metaphorically punched this woman in the face for having sex one too many times for it to be a coincidence. ...you've also kind of been doing it with, um. All of her female friends, too. So...you know, just wanted to mention that, in case it passed you by."
Actual critique that isn't just woman-bashing with a feminist mask on is valuable. When you can question your fiction, you can question your real life, too. And that is definitely a feminist issue.