[ SECRET POST #1978 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #1978 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Friending Meme if people want to add each other on DW!

Secrets Left to Post: 06 pages, 138 secrets from Secret Submission Post #283.
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

[loki]

I got so frustrated with the lack of really rounded female characters when I was a kid, that I started writing my own stuff as a teenager, as an experiment, about a woman who is written as much like male-only tropes as possible. Because she's a woman, it reads SO differently, even though she is deliberately based on male characters. This exercise taught me a lot about my own internalised sexism, as well as society's. (I may come back to developing this story as an adult, not sure, it was a truckload of teenage idfic.)

[(Anonymous)]

This is the person who made this secret. I've sort of been doing the opposite of what you did, because it's not something I do on purpose. It was more like "I like Captain America! I'm going to make up a character who is similar to Captain America, except it'll be a woman!" Then I did that over and over, until I realized that very few of my female characters were inspired by other female characters. It made me worry that I might have some internalized misogyny, or something like that.

Anyway, if you ever got around to finishing that story I would totally want to read it. I love it when writers mess around with gendered tropes.

[ariakas]

I know I've mentioned it on this comm before, but one of the things my 12th grade English teach did to teach us about gender stereotypes in media sticks with me to this day.

She had us create a cast of characters. Backstories, personality traits, motivations, everything. She didn't tell us why she was doing this. Then, when we were done, she had us switch all of their genders. Those characters whose perception of them drastically changed after the swap were gender stereotypes. Those that didn't were closer to a human universal.

What we noticed was that our perceptions of those characters that were the most realistic, nuanced, and well-developed changed the least. Those that were the shallowest and most one-dimensional changed the most. Gender-swapping a pampered beauty queen to a spoiled male supermodel? Sure, that's different, right? But what about a beauty queen with a drug addicted sister who wants use her money and fame to speak out against addiction, but whose terrible secret - one she can't reveal lest she lose her crown - is that she used to be an addict herself? And has to fight the temptation to relapse daily, which gets harder and harder as she struggles to adapt to her new-found fame and the demands of her schedule? The male model whose career would be on the line suddenly doesn't seem so different. One can blather on about "norms" and "averages" and "biology" endlessly, but at the end of the day, there are women killers-for-hire and male homemakers. A male-/female-anything is "realistic". They exist. It's not those one-note traits, though, that make us human.