rambling about how much sexism sucks

[rusty_halo]

So I've been catching up with what's been going on in fandom lately, and it's kind of turned into another rant....

Here's Joss Whedon complaining about misogyny on Whedonesque. I have plenty of issues with the way Joss writes women, and I'm annoyed at the implication of some of the comments that this issue is suddenly worth talking about because a man brought it up. That said, I very much appreciate that Joss is upset by the utter ubiquitousness of misogyny in our culture, and that he feels compelled to post about it.

I was reading Fandom Wank yesterday, and I got so sick reading the discussions surrounding the repulsive Mary Jane statue from Sideshow Collectibles (I'm never buying anything from them again). Specifically I was disgusted by the men popping up and complaining about how it's not a big deal, about how the "feminazis" need to shut up and leave them alone, about how oppressed the poor men are by the evil women, blah blah blah *TEARING MY HAIR OUT* BULLSHIT. And then someone reverses the genders and portrays a male character in the over-the-top sexual way that women are used to, and suddenly the men are throwing hissy fits. (Also amusing: this reversal of Spiderman and Mary Jane's positions--scroll to the end of the entry.)

So many men like to complain about how feminism has succeeded, and now it's the men being oppressed, or okay maybe there's an issue, but they're sick of hearing about it and it's really not a big deal, and women only suffer in "less enlightened" countries, and it's just an inevitable fact of human nature, and why can't those whiny women just get over it...? And meanwhile women face so much violence and inequality every day that we've just gotten used to shrugging it off in order to survive... and it's NOT FAIR.

I live in (in my less than humble opinion) the greatest city in the world, and yet I have to face men yelling nasty things to me every day on my walk to work, and I take circuitous routes to get home late at night because some places are scary for a woman to walk alone, and every time I get introduced to a new client they assume I'm the designer and that a man is the programmer (because, y'know, the president of Harvard said that women suck at math), and when I get a good spot at a concert I have to put up with being pawed by the drunken men around me, and don't even get me STARTED on what I see when I turn on my television or go to the movies. And I know that I live an incredibly privileged life compared to most women in the world.

And then these men have the gall to come in and inform us silly women from their privileged male positions that there's not a problem. Like, they just have NO IDEA. I've lived my entire life, from my earliest memories, with the knowledge that I could be raped or molested, that I had to *always be on alert*, that it was my responsibility to be careful. And then as I got older, the knowledge that I would be blamed, that if something happened to me it would be my own fault, for being in the wrong place or wearing the wrong thing (oh, but also, that I had to always look pretty, because the only woman worth anything is a pretty one). Oh yeah, and that if I ended up pregnant, however it happened, that the *potential* of the thing growing inside me was more important than my own established life. Women live with this kind of knowledge every day of their lives, it's just part of the landscape of the world, and men have no possible way of understanding, and the vast majority of them could not care less.

Anyway. I did follow this crap to a link to Anti-Comics-Feminist Bingo, which is brilliant. (I'm not really a comics reader, but these arguments pop up everywhere.) It's got more detailed explanations here.

jaydk, drujan, and I went to see Spiderman III together, and afterward jaydk told us about this rule, which I forget the name of, that asks whether a movie passes the following test: does it have 1) at least two women, who 2) talk to each other 3) about something besides a man.

We started going through our favorite movies and TV shows and realized that almost none of them even come close to passing this test. (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Spiderman, Pirates... I could go on.) Buffy, at least, passes it. But it's so incredibly depressing to realize how much doesn't.

In large part this is because so many writers, when creating an ensemble, treat male as the default, with a variety of personality types within it, and then throw in one token "girl" as if "the girl" is the only personality type a woman could have. Girl-Wonder.org actually has a really great article about how to write female characters well. I know so many well-meaning but clueless male writers who could benefit from this.

Perhaps I'm feeling overly sensitive to this stuff due to recent experiences...

Oh yeah, and then there's this FanLib thing (which is also all over metafandom), in which a bunch of male venture capitalist creeps are trying to profiteer off of fandom. I can't even begin to say how repulsive this is, on so very many levels, but luckily practically everyone in fandom already been posting about how much it sucks. It... just... see, I get inarticulate with rage.

I guess that what sickens me most is that it takes away literally EVERYTHING THAT IS GOOD about fandom: that it's done for love of writing, not potential profit; that it builds social networks and friendships; that everything--writing, editing, hosting--is entirely do-it-yourself; that it's uncensored; basically that it's FREEDOM--we do it by ourselves and for ourselves, so we don't owe responsibility to anyone but ourselves. And then this company comes in, and it wants to profit from us, to treat us like a marketing segment, to SELL US TO ADVERTISERS, and of course, it wants to censor us, to make sure we "color within the lines," to hide or remove the potential controversies of our work.

HELLO? That's what makes fanfic great--that we can explore everything that the mainstream storytellers are afraid of or disinterested by. Whether that's a focus on characters over plots, or alternate sexualities, or controversial relationships, or WHATEVER, the point is that fanfic can explore anything, precisely *because* it's under the radar, it's not centralized, it's built by individuals, it can't possibly be regulated.

And yeah, you also can't ignore the fact that this is a company of men attempting to profit off of the work of a community that is mostly women, to reign us in and make us "acceptable" according to their standards.

Oh, and while their responses to concerned female fans are rude and condescending, Henry Jenkins posts about it and suddenly they're willing to engage with him. No offense to Henry Jenkins--his post is great and I'm a fan of his academic work--but it's just like the Joss thing above. Suddenly a man starts talking about a women's issue and only then is it worth paying attention to.

I guess the good thing is that FanLib is so utterly inept (seriously, look at these ads) that they're bound to fail sooner rather than later. But the whole thing still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I know I'm way behind the times in posting about all this, but I'm trying to catch up and I couldn't help ranting after reading all this crap...


On the plus side, I'm off to see Pirates 3 tonight. At least there's still some good stuff in the world. :P

Comments

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

My favorite WTF?! quote in the Mary Jane one was that the world needed Mary Jane in pearls and thong but that objectification of men was just gross and wrong.

Uh, dude, all you did was change the genders under discussion. The world doesn't need either!

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

GAAAH. And by "the world" he means "him."

[kita0610.livejournal.com]

The other day Fod and I were mentioning how it is clear the world WANTS all of us to be lesbians.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

Very good point.

[minim_calibre]

No offense to Henry Jenkins--his post is great and I'm a fan of his academic work--but it's just like the Joss thing above. Suddenly a man starts talking about a women's issue and only then is it worth paying attention to.

It's so, so frustrating. And I wish to hell it wasn't true.

[chase820.livejournal.com]

So much word on the FanLib opinions. I've had many friends--well-meaning friends--ask me why I waste my time on something that can't make me any money. They don't get that this is the whole freaking POINT. The non-marketed, non-focus grouped, non-corporate appeal of fanfictional narratives is what makes them so incredibly cool.

FanLib was started by people who don't get fandom even a little bit. I'll be interested to see if astolat's proposed archive gets off the ground.

[harmonyfb.livejournal.com]

And then someone reverses the genders and portrays a male character in the over-the-top sexual way that women are used to, and suddenly the men are throwing hissy fits.

Ahahahahahahaa. I love doing that. I used to drive fundamentalists into terrible frenzies by doing that with their remarks about other religions. ::chuckles:: Good times, good times.

[bookishwench.livejournal.com]

I hadn't read that particular rule before, and I'm finding it almost insanely interesting, and I'm stretching to see how many fandoms actually do fit it. Besides Buffy, there's Angel. I think Harry Potter would fit it in book form, but maybe not in the films. I'm actually not sure if Firefly/Serenity would (loads of females, but in retrospect when they talk to each other they usually are talking about a man, but there's probably examples I'm missing).

What's sad is that it's marketing, really, and the marketing is actually correct. Women will go to see a movie with loads of male characters as long as they throw us the bone of one girl, but guys start to get itchy if there are more than one or two females in the film unless their characters are centered entirely around the guys. Heck, in Japanese class this week, one kid (she's still in junior high) voted down seeing a movie because the main character was a woman (it was a story about a young widow who moves to the Sea of Japan where she's haunted by the ghost of her mother-in-law) on the grounds it was a chick flick... and the kid was a girl. Odd, really.

And for the record, Mary Jane is atrocious.

[rusty_halo.livejournal.com]

It's true--I was never able to get any of the men in my life to give "Buffy" a chance. Didn't matter that I'd watched all kinds of crap that they liked; they had not the tiniest bit of respect for my judgment that the show was worth watching. It was named after a woman, the female characters outnumbered the male; there was no way they would be caught dead even in the same room where "Buffy" was playing.

I also think part of the reason a lot of people (men and women) tend to look down on stories dominated by female characters is that they often do suck. At least, from the perspective of someone who is into action, sci-fi, fantasy--when I look at "women's movies" they're always about, I don't know, quilting, or children, or whining, or terminal illnesses, stuff that I would never watch. I feel like they buy into sexism because they pander to this stereotype that women are whiny and emotional and boring. I'd pick SpikeTV over Lifetime any day of the week.

Which is why, I think, stuff like Girl-Wonder exists. There are plenty of women who like genre stories, who don't want to go off into the "women's stories" ghetto because those aren't the kinds of stories they're drawn to. We'd rather infiltrate the genres we DO like, just, y'know, with three-dimensional female characters and no more sexism. (This is why the premise of "Buffy" was so revolutionary--it's horror and fantasy, but the traditional female victim fights back, and is surrounded by a variety of other three-dimensional female characters.)

I remember being surprised when I saw "Pan's Labyrinth," because everything I'd read indicated that it was a good fantasy movie, but nothing had mentioned that it's almost entirely centered around several well-written, three-dimensional female characters. It was really cool to see that--that a movie could be a good fantasy movie, that it didn't have to be about "women's issues," that it could appeal to both a male and female audience, and oh yeah, happen to center around three-dimensional, non-exploited female characters. As if that's perfectly normal. Which it should be, but we're still depressingly far away from that now....

[missmurchison.livejournal.com]

I've been following all this, with pretty much the same reactions. Seeing Jenkins' post being taken seriously was the last straw for me. If they wanted to talk to someone with academic credentials (why now and not when they were creating their business plan?), it's not as if they couldn't have found women on LJ to educate them. There are several on my FL who qualify. I'm not blaming Jenkins, but it's obvious he got the honor because he's a man. But, bless him, the questions making up his "interview" were provided by those who commented on the post, most of them women that the FanLib owners ignored. I'm waiting to see what responses he gets, if any.

I'm sure FanLib will fail, but I'm not sure the people who created and backed it will learn anything from the experience.

[jwaneeta.livejournal.com]

Well said. This week has been a misogyny trifecta, hasn't it? FanLib, Mary Jane, the misogyny essay. I finally lost my shit with rage and had to down tools and go to the zoo to cool off.

I don't just want FanLib to fail... I want the owners to hang. God, but I'm feeling murderous.

[lost-angelwings.livejournal.com]

I rly hate when ppl who honestly have prolly never given a particular issue a second thought, go and tell ppl "hey you're not oppressed, there's no problem, stop complaining" >.>;;

It'd be like white slave owners back in the slave owning days saying "hey life is great, I dunno what those black folks are complaining about" >.>;;;

[snakey.livejournal.com]

The film test is from Alison Bechdel's "Dykes To Watch Out For". :)

I've lived my entire life, from my earliest memories, with the knowledge that I could be raped or molested, that I had to *always be on alert*, that it was my responsibility to be careful. And then as I got older, the knowledge that I would be blamed, that if something happened to me it would be my own fault, for being in the wrong place or wearing the wrong thing (oh, but also, that I had to always look pretty, because the only woman worth anything is a pretty one). Oh yeah, and that if I ended up pregnant, however it happened, that the *potential* of the thing growing inside me was more important than my own established life. Women live with this kind of knowledge every day of their lives, it's just part of the landscape of the world, and men have no possible way of understanding.

*Raises hand* As a trans man, I *do* have a way of understanding - that's been my life, living with that kind of knowledge every day, plus dealing with transphobic violence on top of that.

Overall, though, I agree completely. That whole discussion you linked to made me queasy. :S

[jerrymcl89.livejournal.com]

I thought the Mary Jane image was debatable. It certainly was a sexualized portrayal, but she's also supposed to be a supermodel, and I did think the spirit of the statue was pretty playful. I don't think it's nearly as a bad as this upcoming Marvel cover