on snowflakes and snowdrifts

[tielan]

Snowflakes are quite cute individually - little specks of ice on the breeze that melt when they touch your skin. They're also individual - every one just a little different from the next. But when you put lots of flakes together and they form a snowdrift, it's cold, damp, and unpleasant to shovel off the sidewalk. Fluff them into a frenzy and you've got a blizzard - also not in the shiny happy people category.

What's my point? You can make choices for perfectly good, utterly rational, and totally unique reasons, and still be part of a bigger problem.

The decisions of fans to choose male characters over female characters has plenty of reasons and rationalisations; but it's still part of the big picture of misogyny in fandom.

Comments

[copracat]

ROFL! You mean every blizzard is made of up of hundreds and thousands of unique snowflakes?

[tielan]

Absolutely!

[the_future_modernes]

DED!!!!

[thothmes]

Oh, I absolutely and whole-heartedly agree with you. You are sooo right.

But here's the problem from where I stand. I'll be 52 in April. I grew up in a world where the opportunities for women actually were significantly limited. And although now that I am grown I am a mother and a wife and do not work outside the home (although I do volunteer), as a child I was not cut out to fit society's view of what a little girl is/ought to be. And although I am straight, and have never questioned that, it is simply how I came, I have never been very feminine. Everything in my childhood (except society's preferences) urged me towards living a life where I always (from the earliest I can remember) identified more closely with the male point of view, and thought in more stereotypically "male" ways. I "get" guys in a way that I find most women don't, and in whatever media I am watching/reading, I always identify more strongly with the males. Is this right? No. Am I the victim of internalized self-hatred? No. I have always been this way (my earliest memories are from before I was two, and my family has always supported me and loved me as I am) and I like me. I'm not perfect, but my issues are with self-control and time management, not with who I am. I just kind of puzzled my mother when I chose King Arthur for Boys, Man With a Sword, and Five Boys in a Cave over Nancy Drew, Jane Eyre and Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. I'm not all tomboy though. I can get into Pride and Prejudice as well as the next woman, although I've always suspected that Mr. Darcy as written would be hard to live with unless he had more of a sense of humor and the ridiculous than came across on the page.

But I digress. I agree that I am part of the problem. I try to compensate, and write more female POV, and provide strong, original, yet still feminine original characters. But if the classic advice to writers is "Write what you know" then for me, this is disregarding it. I try. But I am afraid that I may continue to be part of the problem for a while yet.

Yours Truly,
yet another Special Snowflake

Edited for one sentence where I incompletely removed a part, which kind of sent the remainder off the rails.

[tielan]

I don't believe too much in 'write what you know'. If I kept to that, I would never have written a lick of porn in the last ten years, let alone about characters firing P-90s, walking through Stargates, or having alien DNA that help them control other aliens.

So, yeah, "write what you know" is bupkiss in my books, since I doubt that too many people really know about terrorism, the military, guns, weapons, SOP, demon hunting, vampire slaying, or the bazillion other universes that are out there.

To me, the decision to support female characters isn't solely one of personality and preferences. There's also the individual's personal choice to support female characters by including them, by looking at the rationalisations and saying, "okay, I find it easier to like the male characters but I don't want to erase women from the landscape; so I'm going to make an effort to focus on female characters for a while".

Some people will choose to remain where they are; others will choose to change their behaviours. But whether they're willing to ask questions of themselves or not is, to me, a mark of good character.

here via metafandom

[dharma_slut]

yes, this.

I started writing boysex back when it wasn't available to be read, even though I knew it existed in real life. and that is why I wrote it. The year was 1973, by the way.

Now, I can read more boysex than I even want to-- as gay male fiction, or as slash-- and I want to read something else, as well, that isn't so available. I want to read the same kind of sex in female bodies, because I know it exists in real life.

So I write it myself.

[esorlehcar]

Thank you for this. The level of aggressive (and pretty obviously purposeful, in that many of people claiming there's no problem are nowhere near as clueless as they keep pretending to be) not getting it in these kinds of discussions is both exhausting and infuriating, and it's nice to see it laid out so simply and clearly.

[tielan]

Thank you for your defence of my intentions on the other post.

I appreciate that, whatever your thoughts on my post, you took a step back and looked at what I was trying to say instead of taking a knee-jerk rebuttal of the specific instances of my examples given.

[astridv]

I like your metaphor. And it's so season-appropriate, too (I just had it with shovelling snow for the next long while...)

[tielan]

Thank you!

And it's so season-appropriate, too

Well, maybe for the northern hemisphere types. I'm presently sitting in a short-sleeved t-shirt in front of an open door for the breeze. It's still summer down here in Australia. :)

[tree]

ha! thank you. and thank you for this and your other post, as well.

--fellow antipodean

[digitalghost]

Waaah, I'm being misogynistic for writing about male characters most of the time. Let me go cry in a corner.

[eggcrack]

Such a simple and clear way to sum up the issue. I wish people didn't resist the idea of questioning and analyzing their tastes so much; exploring things makes the fandom experience much richer in my opinion.

[spiralsheep]

This post = awesome!

[linkspam_mod]

Your post has been included in a Linkspam Roundup.

[swordygardener.livejournal.com]

The decisions of fans to choose male characters over female characters has plenty of reasons and rationalisations; but it's still part of the big picture of misogyny in fandom.

Interestingly, telling these fans that their fantasies are somehow Very Very Bad (TM) has plenty of reasons and rationalisations; but it's still part of the big picture of telling women what they ought to want.

[legionseagle]

Well said. Once one accepts (genuinely accepts, rather than as a rhetorical device) that a choice has been made for "perfectly good, utterly rational, and totally unique reasons" then vaguely handwaving "a bigger picture" makes as much sense as telling someone, "Yes, I realise you need to drive a car in order to carry out your job, feed your family, take the kids to school and go to pick up necessary medical supplies from the local clinic to keep you functioning, but its still part of the big picture of creating global warming." Its only function is to make someone feel guilty about their "perfectly good, utterly rational, and totally unique reasons" for their actions.

[tielan]

Its only function is to make someone feel guilty about their "perfectly good, utterly rational, and totally unique reasons" for their actions.

Or to speak the truth, unwelcome as it may be.