lyssie | *mutters*

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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.

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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.

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*

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.

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::

*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.

Sing it to the SKIES!!!

That is all.

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

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.

*sends you chocolate,omg*

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.

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.

*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.

Okay, forget the last post, I'll try to keep my mind on track. ^^ So by that logic, female characters in s/f are also held to a higher standard than female characters in other genres.

I do think it has to do with the concepts of heroes and role models. Speculative fiction is about either strange people in normal situations, or normal people in strange situations. Fans want characters who think about non-mundane things. (This isn't something you'd get as much in modern drama or romance, for instance, because those are more about regular people doing regular things. The fans are supposed to relate to them, rather than see them as heroes.)

At least, I find it boring when a science-fiction character's biggest problem is whether their spouse is still in love with them. I may not be a representative sample.

A male s/f hero usually faces his greatest challenges in the adventure aspects of the stories; he does great deeds and saves planets and stuff. His personal life is usually not something that changes much; he's got loyal friends that he can count on, and if one of them is not a girlfriend, he's always looking for one. But his emotional problems never get in the way of the adventure, which is the main focus of his story. He can put them out of his head when it's time to be a hero.

Female science fiction heroes have some pretty mundane emotional issues, I think. No matter how many demons there are to fight or how many interplanetary wars are about to bust out, the writers keep going back to her love triangles, the conflict between her goals and her relationships, her ticking biological clock. Maybe writers think that female viewers all want this kind of stuff, but it automatically puts the character on the level of 'someone-to-relate-to' as opposed to 'hero'.

This is not to say that it's completely out of place in s/f to write that kind of story. I don't want my s/f to be straight-up adventure with no human interest whatsoever, but I'd like to see more balance; either male characters should get some more of it, or female characters should get less. That was one of the things I liked about Buffy; the female and male characters could both alternate between being real people with mundane problems, and being heroes.

So... double standard, I guess. When personal-emotional-relationship stuff is written as being so all-fired important to the character, it's harder to separate it out and 'fix' her in fanfic because it's so integral to her personality and dominant in her stories.

And this is what I hate. Canon says the woman must be about her emotions. So that's all people ever see! Instead of taking the character and making her about more than that.

Gah. I want to kill most of my sex.

Just don't kill me, omg!

That would be pointless. You are one of the people who gets that canon can be bended. And also that canon is good, and women should be allowed to be emotional as well as strong.

and, and, *flails* what the hell would I do without you, woman?

...dooo iiiit.

C'mon, you know you want to.

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

*sobs& clings and yet is A STRONG WOMAN by being emotional and bonding with a fellow female*

Oooh. I have such a rant for later. Hrm.

I'm lazy when it comes to fic, then. If a character's good points really speak to me, I'll go to the effort of writing something to emphasis them and downplay the stuff I don't like. But if I don't find the good stuff compelling enough, I just won't bother. That goes for male as well as female characters. If I write about male characters more often, it's because the female characters annoy me more often.

Am I slacking off in my duties as a feminist by not reshaping the female characters in ways I'd like? Possibly. Although I think a lot of what female fic writers do with male characters is also subversive in its reshaping-of-roles-and-stereotypes.

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?

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.

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

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*

It ain't that at all. Especially not for the past ten years, people.

I think I'd argue that writing men is never subversive, but I don't have the energy or language to do so. sigh. Hrm.

Coffee?

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