*mutters*

[lyssie]

One of the common complaints I keep hearing (especially from SG fandom) is that women in SciFi are portrayed unrealistically, one-dimensionally, flat, boring, have no character, too bitchily, wimpy, blah insert your own derogatory term here.

And as such, this means that the men are portrayed better, and so, writing men is so much better, omg, because they are well-rounded and have flaws and shit.

To which I reply: what the fuck are you smoking?

This reminds me of the common rant about comicbooks (especially of the superhero type) that women are drawn out of proportion and unrealistically, and it's all so they're exploited, omg. Which is true. They're half the T&A factor. However, on the flip side of that coin, the MEN are drawn just as badly out of proportion. They have huge muscles, and they're all tall, with nice asses and legs and shit.

(I think one of my favorite Ruse panels is from the horrible Chuck Dixon run. Emma's wearing Simon's shirt, and Simon is wearing only his pants. Be still my beating heart.)

The men in SciFi are no more realistically portrayed and written than the women, people.

It's just that the men are allowed to be one-dimensional, shallow, Hero, Manly-Men, insert derogatory term here.

Because women hold women to a higher standard.

Which is really FUCKING SAD.

Seriously. It's fucking irritating to continually hear how boring/unrealistic a female character is, when I *know* the male characters are just as boring/unrealistic, but because they are men, no one will say that.

Also?

If they are boring and not well-rounded?

Fix. It.

You fix the men, you give them character and purpose, and change little things so you can play-act that they have depth. Why can't you fix the women?

But then, I don't actually think female characters in SciFi are boring.

I'm strange like that.

Comments

[bethos.livejournal.com]

It depends on the sci-fi for me. Although men who are boring and protagonisty get just as much guff from me as the annoying women do ...

But it's not just women in sci-fi for me either. Female characters in *anything* get held to a higher standard. It's because there have been so many female characters in the past that have driven me bonkers that there's this series of mental "do you annoy me, ma'am?" hurdles that they have to jump through before I trust them enough to like them.

But the list of cool girls gets longer every day.

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, no. Men will be all back-slappy about their male characters. Or they just don't care.

Women... are much more critical.

[liminalliz.livejournal.com]

I love my scifi girlfriends, omg. It never occured to me that vast numbers of women would dislike any of them - for what is to dislike when there are women playing lead roles in a genre dominated by men?! Some of the scifi ladies out there, yeah, I dislike as I think the creators are going about the feminist angle all wrong. But I'm generally a whore for a chick with a gun who can stand up to authority and question it, while doing her job and making a world for herself.

OMG! *rolls eyes and growls*

[jacksrubberduck.livejournal.com]

But I'm generally a whore for a chick with a gun who can stand up to authority and question it, while doing her job and making a world for herself.

::drools over mental image::

[splash-the-cat.livejournal.com]

Because women hold women to a higher standard.

Yes. This is something I've wanted to rant on for a while. The ratio of women to men in SF isn't great, and I think that drives some of the idea that there are no good women in scifi. There's more men, so people seem more comfortable with having strong men and weak men and men with issues and men who are assholes and men who can't make decisions etc. and so forth. Men are allowed to be human beings with flaws because there's enough of them to fill all those niches.

But the women, because there are fewer of them, do get stuck with holding up the ideal of The Strong Idependent Woman, without the luxury of being viewed as human beings. And I've really started to look at the ideal of the Strong Independent Woman as a ridiculous and unreachable standard by which we judge other women. Because too much of the time it seems to be a charicature of stereotypes of masculinity, and the rest of the time it's a ruler that used less to measure a woman's strength of character than it is to smack her for not living up to standard.

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

Yes! Exactly! *has no energy to rant more*

[suaine.livejournal.com]

*thinks* Maybe men are perceived to be more boring and one-dimensional in real life too? That would explain a lot ;)

Then again, I always felt that the whole "no good women" in sci-fi was overshadowed by the "OMG get away from the cute children" deal I keep hearing from otherwise intelligent writers. Like, just because they are younger and obviously cause natural protective reactions in some people doesn't mean they can't be interesting characters. But so far the really good writers just won't do it because they think they can't pull it off to make believable pre-pubescent characters and the really bad writers? Really make the "cute child"-phenomenon a problem.

And this was kind of OT so I'll hide in my corner now and keep trying to write.

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

Sing it to the SKIES!!!

That is all.

[jacksrubberduck.livejournal.com]

Any way a character is written they just can't win.
Someone will always put them down for showing certain traits cos it doesn't fit the neat little box they've put them in from their first impression.

Same goes in RL.

It all seems to be about drawing conclusions and not liking it when those conclusions are proved wrong.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Are we talking about female story characters in general, or female 'hero' characters designed for the female audience to relate to? In my mind they're two separate things.

There are plenty of characters that I like to watch and who aren't annoying, but I don't think of them as my heroes. Because I don't think this only applies to s/f, I'll mention CSI. I like Catherine and Sara because they're interesting and likeable enough to watch. They're written well enough that their imperfections make them realistic rather than melodramatic and soapy; I can sympathise with them without thinking 'oh, if they were smarter this wouldn't have happened'. They're realistic enough that I don't feel like getting judgemental on them. They also aren't my 'heroes' or even role models. They're just people.

As for heroes... I'll get back to you on this. I'm supposed to be working and it's taking me way too long to think about this stuff.

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

I'm simply talking about female characters in S/F, and the fact that they're held to a higher standard than their male counterparts.

[kkglinka.livejournal.com]

*gives you hugs and kisses* Thank you. Hell, I wrote Rogue because I saw one too many "rogue as an appendange to-the much cooler angstier dreamier gambit" fics. I snapped. Before too long, the slash-filled DC fandom will snap me and I'll write some Catwoman saga involving lots of lesbian sex, mafia families and, oh yeah, some piece on the side who dresses up as a bat.

"I'm not writing the more boring female character" is about the weakest, flimsiest excuse ever. I don't care what the fandom excuse is. I mean, be honest. You're not writing her because you want to focus on the male sexual fantasy. Fine, but to hell with the bullshit pc-reasons. Really. I don't hate you.

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

...dooo iiiit.

C'mon, you know you want to.

*waits to read, even though she avoids DC like the plague*

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I would totally read that.

Just because I haven't been driven to write it doesn't mean I'm against it. May I try again to say that as a budding slash writer, I am not anti-woman or anti-feminist?

[theta-g.livejournal.com]

Such folks are missing fun, I'm guessing. If you get hold of an underserved character you've got soil that you can grow all sorts of things in. Anyone can take Claudia Black into a new series and have her kick yet more arse, but the writer of the audio "Vigil" sat down and said, "I'm going to take Perpugilliam brown -very- seriously." It's on the first Tales from the TARDIS CD. Wow.

[redstarrobot.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time, there truly were token women in a show, where they existed, but barely had any lines or any plot focus, and just did things like answer the phone or make coffee or be nurses, and say "Yes, Sir" as most of their lines. It wasn't that they weren't as well-rounded, it's simply that they barely existed on screen except visually, so using them would be too much like writing an OC, and there couldn't be a consistent shared voice across the fandom. Some sort of statement like that was probably true from the '60s until, oh, 1985, and fandom hasn't forgotten it, and still trots it out at every opportunity.

Now, it is true that from the '70s to the mid '90s, there were a lot of token women, where there was one woman among the main characters, so if you didn't like her, or one of the writers couldn't write her and instroduced silly canon, or if she occasionally did numbingly damsel-in-distress things, tough. She, and her gender, got saddled with far too much importance, because she was The Only One, the representative of her gender. This is often still the case; much as I like SG-1, I'd still consider it one of the "token woman" and "token black guy" genre, because Janet gets a lot more emphasis in fandom than I've seen onscreen.

(On a separate note, not relevant to this, since it doesn't affect the quality of the characters, there still are very few shows that will equalize the gender balance or tip it to women. Buffy is one, and Farscape occasionally, and only if you don't count Muppets. Obviously, this is all fuzzy counting anyway, since I'm letting people exclude villains from main characters, which is most problematic in Farscape, but fuzzy counting lets us claim any of these shows have an equal gender balance.) :)

It is true that by writing women, you'll rarely write the lead. However, there are a lot of ensemble shows, and for many people, the interest is in not writing the lead. But a lot of slash actually does slash the perceived leads (Kirk/Spock, Blake/Avon, Bodie/Doyle), and it's less common to deviate from that. Even when people write fic, most people write Avon, not Vila or Gan, or, equally, Cally or Jenna, and most people write Crichton, not D'Argo or Pilot, or, equally, Zhaan or Noranti, so I'm not sure that it's so much the characters, as people claim, as it is the pedestal. The majority of people write whoever's perceived to be on the pedestal, and that's rarely women (when it is women, it's paired with the man who's undisputedly the lead - how many people would write Aeryn or Sam without a romantic relationship with the lead? some, but far less). That's nothing to do with the women not being rounded characters, that's simply because it's not the roundedness of the character that most people respond to, it's the strength of the spotlight put on them. It's status-driven - fans, on average, write whoever in the show has the highest status.

[liminalliz.livejournal.com]

I very much like your icon choice for this comment. And - well said.

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

It might be partially that. But I also keep hearing over and over and over, "Oh, I write the guys because there aren't any strong female characters."

Which, I'm sorry, but it ain't true.

*goes off to sulk in a corner with her coffee*

[surreallis.livejournal.com]

Oh, you are so right. It's irritating in that sometimes these people of whom you speak of are all about adding to the male characters' personalities and interpreting more depth into them. Yet they completely take the female characters at face value and then turn up their nose.

I suppose everybody has a different opinion on what makes a 'strong woman' which makes it a can't-win situation for the sci fi female.

I really like your demand for writers who have a complaint about uninteresting women in sci fi to 'fix them'. It's ideal in a way because I've always wanted to ask those who don't care for Sam (sorry, I'm all about SG in this thread) just exactly how *they* would write Sam if they could. I'd be VERY interested in the answers they'd give. If any.

I suppose anything is possible, but somehow I don't think I'd like what they suggest. Just a suspicion.

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

Dude. They fix the men. Why can't they fix the women? *is tired and worn out from prolonged ranting*

[flarnloop.livejournal.com]

Since everybody's posted anything I could possibly have to say I'll just go.. Fascinating, good points, and I will never look at Superman the same again. :P

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

*snicker* Superman has socks in his crotch, y'know...

[alryssa.livejournal.com]

I think a big part of the *problem* with 2-dimensional women characters is that 98% of the time they're being written by MEN.

Check the credits for the shows in question and you'll undoubtedly see a higher proportion of men writers than women. If we're not represented well at the creation stage, then what hope do we have on the screen?

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

I think it's a huge fallacy that women are better at writing women than men are.

90% of the Sam/Jack fic is written by women who horribly mangle Sam so that she is them, and, thus, they can sleep with Jack.

Scratch'n'Sniff, the one Farscape episode I can think of written by a woman was a piece of shit.

Farscape. Written by men. You gonna tell me that they didn't have some of the best written, well-rounded female characters?

[livilla.livejournal.com]

*rolls eyes*

I would comment but it will only come out as incoherent swearing.

[bantha-fodder.livejournal.com]

i thought it was high time i friended you, so i did.

please continue to be interesting!

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

*g* Er... I'll try?